The Spell Cast By Remains: The Myth of Wilderness in Modern American Literature (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

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Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor An Ethics of Becoming Configurations of Feminine Subjectivity in Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot Sonjeong Cho Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie Tim S. Gauthier Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from Romanticism to Postmodernism Will Slocombe Depression Glass Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams Monique Claire Vescia Fatal News Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature Katherine E. Ellison Negotiating Copyright Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America Martin T. Buinicki “Foreign Bodies” Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture Laura Di Prete Overheard Voices Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry Ann Keniston Museum Mediations Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry Barbara K. Fischer

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The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton Adam H. Kitzes Urban Revelations Images of Ruin in the American City, 1790–1860 Donald J. McNutt Postmodernism and Its Others The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo Jeffrey Ebbesen Different Dispatches Journalism in American Modernist Prose David T. Humphries Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces The Early United States through the Lens of Travel Jeffrey Hotz “Like Parchment in the Fire” Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War Prasanta Chakravarty Between the Angle and the Curve Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison Danielle Russell Rhizosphere Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American Writings of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner Mary F. Zamberlin The Spell Cast By Remains The Myth of Wilderness in Modern American Literature Patricia A. Ross

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The Spell Cast By Remains The Myth of Wilderness in Modern American Literature

Patricia A. Ross

Routledge New York & London

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RT76472_Discl Page 1 Friday, April 14, 2006 11:43 AM

Published in 2006 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97647-2 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97647-3 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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For W. D. Springsteel

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Wilderness Semantics Defined

1

Part One: The Death of “Wilderness” Chapter One Lamenting the Last Good Country: The Hemingway Script of the American Wilderness

23

Chapter Two The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses: William Faulkner’s Cautionary Tale of “That Doomed Wilderness”

47

Part Two: Recreating “Wilderness” Introduction

71

Chapter Three The Pattern That Is Not Supposed to Count: Creating “Wilderness” in My Ántonia

75

Chapter Four The Boundaries of Wilderness: Gardens, Monuments, Artifacts, and National Parks in The Professor’s House

91

vii

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viii

Contents

Chapter Five French Onion Soup and Other Mythmaking Lessons in Death Comes for the Archbishop

113

Notes

141

Works Cited

161

Index

171

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Acknowledgments

I would like to first thank Professor Josephine Hendin for her guidance and patience as I worked through the drafts of this project. Her insight into my argument translated into clear direction for revision. It helped keep me on track and on purpose. I would also like to thank Professors Perry Meisel and Chris Collins for their wonderful and very helpful comments on the final draft. Thank you, also, to Professor Pat Hoy who taught me how to teach writing and thus helped to teach me how to write more clearly. I am always grateful to my parents, Don and Joyce Ross, for all their encouragement and prayers as I have struggled to keep this project viable. My good friend and colleague, Dr. Leah Garland, gets a special thank you. We suffered together through the highs and lows of creating our first manuscript, and her kindness and good spirit helped keep me going through the dark times. Most of all, I am forever indebted to my husband, William Dean Springsteel. He helped me refine my arguments and made sure that I didn’t ever compromise. He refused to ever believe that this was too difficult to complete. His love and encouragement as well as his intelligence and insight are everywhere present in this project.

ix

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Permissions

Excerpts from “Myth Today” from Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers. Translation copyright © 1972 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. Reprinted with permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from My Antonia by Willa Cather. Copyright 1918 and renewed 1946 by Willa Sibert Cather. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Excerpts from The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, copyright 1925 by Willa Cather and renewed 1953 by Edith Lewis and the City Bank Farmers Trust Co. Reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, copyright 1927, 1929 by Willa Cather and renewed 1955, 1957 by The Executors of the Estate of Willa Cather. Reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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Introduction

Wilderness Semantics Defined

Wilderness can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. Wallace Stegner

Charles Dean Walker, watching the remains of the American wilderness pass by his window as he traveled in 1879 on the new transcontinental railroad, wrote that “the agencies of civilization now in action are such as will serve a complete victory over wilderness.”1 It was the end of an era. By 1879, the Oregon Trail was an official part of American history, and the wilderness seemed on the brink of extinction. Eleven years later, the census report, made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal “Frontier Thesis,” told us that by 1890 there was no appreciable frontier left in the continental United States. The westward expansion with the consequent demise of the American wilderness took about 60 years total, according to that census report. And even though there were still wild parts left in 1890 and even into the first parts of the 20th century, the material wilderness that was at once a bitter enemy and a paradise promising new beginnings seemed to be gone. But Charles Dean Walker was a bit too hasty in his proclamation. There can never be a “complete victory” over the American wilderness because it remains too much a part of the American imagination, too present in the continual formation of the American character. The idea of wilderness is too much a part of the American mythos to ever be fully conquered. The wilderness myth as we know it today isn’t much different than how it was first presented when the first explorers arrived in the “New World.” Painted in its broadest strokes, wilderness in its usual guise represents a pastoral escape from the ugly ills of our overly industrialized, technologically advanced cities. As a pastoral escape, it is also constructed as a wild garden that allows us to forget that it was we who created all the nasty technology 

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that we’re running away from.2 This is the wilderness that must be preserved at all costs, according to American environmentalists and nature writers who like to “find themselves.” Paradoxically wilderness also represents a proving ground, a place where we can continually play out our rugged individualist American roots by proving ourselves against a wildness that cares not if we flourish or perish. What the American wilderness myth represents—self-reliance, rugged (if sometimes misguided) individualism, a pastoral escape from the ills of the very civilization that Mr. Walker praises—permeates our everyday lives. Really, how could an SUV sell otherwise? It is no mistake that the above description of the wilderness mythos bears some relation to the construction of the frontier myth. “Wilderness” is a designation that currently resides in the realm of environmentalists, nature writers, “eco-critics,” “eco-feminists,” and everyone else who has aligned themselves with the “literature and the environment” movement. To this group, “wilderness” is separate from “frontier” because the former myth has come to exist solely as a pastoral escape. The frontier myth, on the other hand, belongs primarily to American and Cultural Studies and American literature departments because it is the myth that underlies the “can-do” spirit of American individualism. The two myths remain distinct in most critical literature because wilderness as a pastoral escape cannot contain the main tenet of the frontier myth, the urge to conquer nature. 3 The frontier, however, is usually viewed as a distinct entity from wilderness. It is marked by a dividing line, Frederick Jackson Turner tells us, between “savagery and civilization”(3). The frontier is the place waiting to be conquered and settled, a space waiting to be civilized. Wilderness in the frontier myth is a place designated to be always wild, no matter how many times it has been “conquered.” Wilderness here is simply that land on the “other” side of civilization which is constructed to remain wild.4 But a frontier, mythic or real, cannot exist without a corresponding wilderness, mythic or real. The two myths are inextricable from one another, and what connects the two is simply this: the modern wilderness myth seeks to preserve so as to recreate the energy of the mythic frontier. I grew up in the West, playing cowboys and Indians, a story that is about frontier times, and I have spent hundreds of hours in large tracts of somewhat wild land that has been designated “wilderness” by the National Forest Service. My childhood games and my adult pastimes all hinge on the idea that there is a “wild” land that is set apart from my everyday living, one that is divided by a frontier line whose mythic energy depends on a wilderness to feed it. “Wilderness,” as the above critical list hints, has been the hot property of various academic factions of late. The New West historians want to find

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the “real” wilderness, the one full of tin cans by the doors of shacks and western heroines who in real life made most of their money by prostitution.5 In 1998, eco-historians William Cronin and Donald M. Waller had a verbal show-down over what is the “right” nature to “get back to.” Cronin’s basic assertion is that wilderness is a constructed entity, and because of this, he argues that “the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject”(484). Our modern myth of “wilderness,” he continues, represents a “flight from history” that is an “escape from responsibility”(484–485). In other words, because this particular formation of wilderness is set up as the panacea for the ills of our overmodernized society, it allows those ills to continue unchecked. To Cronin, the “devotees” of wilderness seek nothing more than a worn-out pastoralism, and so their wilderness continually recreates the corrupt society that they are escaping precisely because they are escaping it.6 Cronin, however, contradicts his constructivist argument when he further notes that a “true” idea of wilderness is one that encompasses the wild nature not only reserved in wilderness spaces but is also evident in our own back yards (492–495). Waller on the other hand uses the science of ecology to prove his point that there is always a necessary gap between the artificial from the wild and that wilderness has an intrinsic value that must be preserved on its own terms.7 So, do we construct “wilderness” out of whatever form of nature, lofty or lowly, we would like to call by that hallowed name, as Cronin suggests? Or, as Waller argues, is there something inherently bold, brave, necessary, and good in wilderness? What it seems always to boil down to is what Diana Fuss recognizes in Essentially Speaking. While the terms of the debate seem to be polar opposites, i.e. constructivism versus essentialism, in the end, even the most radical constructionist viewpoint is going to have some grain of essentialism lurking somewhere and vice-versa. (3).8 The thread that connects each of these arguments is the essentialist idea that there is a “true” wilderness lurking somewhere. Thus the debates go on and on, never to be resolved because in the end, there is no such thing as a “true” wilderness, anymore than there is a “true” frontier. Both are myths constructed in stories, legends, newspaper articles, advertisements, films, documentaries, paintings, photographs. The list of vehicles that can textually construct a myth, especially the myth of the wilderness in America, is endless. Frontier studies on the other hand have been around since Lucy Lockwood Hazard published The Frontier in American Literature in 1927. These studies tend to make the same basic critical move that Richard Slotkin does in his trilogy of the American frontier. Slotkin, one of the foremost historians of the mythic west, sees “wilderness” in frontier but, as a devotee of fron-

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tier, he gives more privilege to “frontier” than to “wilderness.” He points out that the terms of the myth of the frontier are so much a part of our common cultural language that it doesn’t need elaborate explanation (“Myth and Production” 72), but he does not recognize those terms as part of the wilderness myth as well. He sees that our most cherished American hero, the Daniel Boone frontiersman, is “the lover of the spirit of the wilderness”(22).9 He recognizes the wilderness as important, but it becomes merely a trope for the more encompassing frontier myth.10 However, the idea of the frontier grew out of the colonial experience of the wilderness. The wilderness myth is in fact the older version of the myth that Slotkin says does not need elaboration (Regeneration 4). What is intriguing to note is that in all the current studies on wilderness, only a handful of eco-historians and feminist eco-critics, most notably William Cronin, Marvin Henberg, Roderick Nash (in his early work), and Annette Kolodny, have yoked the wilderness myth to the myth of the frontier.11 These critics recognize the wilderness energy inherent in the frontier myth. What does remain uncontested is the simple fact that both these myths are rhetorical constructs, rich and complex, but formalized constructions of nature nonetheless. For example, Slotkin carefully denotes the difference between a “mythopoeic mode of consciousness,” a “myth-artifact” and a “myth-narrative”(8). We create myths to “reconcile and unite” different individualities “to a collective identity”(8), and the “myth-narrative” is the legends and stories that culminate into the myth artifact, the sacred vessels that bespeak the myth. We have at our disposal the artifact which seeks to hide the fact that it is constructed. But myth-artifacts are nothing more than myth-narratives, because any expression of the myth is a pure construct of semantics and rhetoric. While there was at one point in our illustrious history a large land mass on the continental U.S. that was wild and untrammeled by Europeans—a material wilderness—it was a land mass that, once sighted, was immediately constructed to be a “myth narrative” in the writings of the first European explorers. Christopher Columbus, on first sighting the West Indian islands, says that these islands are fertile “to a limitless degree,” a paradise of plenty of which he has taken “possession” (2–4). Arriving north on the American coast of the Atlantic 128 years later, Jonathan Winthrop writes of the hellish wilderness his fellow Puritans must overcome in order to create their “New Jerusalem.”12 The Puritans continued to conduct their errand into the wilderness for many years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and continued writing about it with much gusto in the 17th century. Marjorie Hope Nicolson argues that in the 18th century wilderness is still an

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evil place where sin is more feasible and thus rampant. (Take Hawthorn’s forests, for example). It is constructed to be evil so that God’s goodness can triumph; in other words it is a pastoral structure made to serve sacred and imperialist ends.13 A paradigm shift happens, however, because these literally unknown places become literarily known. At the end of the 18th century, a few hardy travelers could begin to physically explore unforgiving places, and at this point, the wilderness takes on the guise of the sublime. It is still horrid in its unforgiving evil nature, but the unforgiving is now seen as awe inspiring. Wilderness is becoming less frightening. It is now more of an extravagantly beautiful garden of plenty. By the 19th century, the two disparate forms of wilderness have coalesced.14 Lewis and Clark mapped the Northwest passage of the North American continent, and their journals opened up possibilities of space both physical and figurative. In 1869, John Wesley Powell, who according to the newspapers died several times in his inaugural 100 days journey through the Grand Canyon, became a huge celebrity when he finally did emerge victorious from his harrowing experience in the wilderness.15 Buffalo Bill was scripting his wilderness experience through his Wild West Show as he was experiencing it, and John Muir taught us how to worship at the altar of the sublime as he wrote about the awful grandeur of the Yosemite Valley or the Dantian hell of the Alaskan wilderness.16 Once the land has been claimed, both materially and rhetorically,17 that “howling” frightening, sinful wilderness becomes Edenic.18 If a country is unknown, it is going to be constructed as frightening and possibly evil. Susan Rosowski notes that the antidote to this “fatality of space” is to simply order it (Geography 25). To order it is to tell a story about it. And what makes wilderness as an idea that is endlessly fascinating is that, as Turner notes, its construction is like the terminal moraines that result from successive glaciations that leave their traces behind. The idea of wilderness, like any other long-standing myth, is a rhetorical palimpsest (4). In other words, the successive fabrications of wilderness: from the trope of garden of plenty through a hell that must be conquered and finally to the idea of the sublime, each conception of wilderness leaves its trace in its successor. As wilderness becomes increasingly domesticated, wilderness is reduced to more of a “pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat”(Cronon 478). But no matter if it is evil incarnate or a parish church, wilderness looms large in the American imagination and has been an integral part of American literature and letters before even the idea of “America” as the grand experiment in democracy was created.19 It fuels our collective imaginations in our present time. And what remains is

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the paradox inherent in the “myth-artifact.” The artifact of “wilderness” is at once a “wilderness” and a “frontier.” Wilderness is both a garden of plenty and a foe that must be vanquished. This paradox has fueled all subsequent fabrications of the myth, and while there are reams of paper dedicated to finding a resolution to that paradox, it is precisely the energy of the paradox that continually fuels the myth.20 The purpose of this study is not to resolve the paradox or to hash over the tired out terms of the debate hoping that something new will surface. Wilderness, because it is a myth, is a constructed textual entity. It is no more “real” than the myth of the man on the moon. The veracity of that claim no longer needs arguing. But because the wilderness myth still holds so much cultural sway, the more intriguing proposition is to see how the myth of wilderness is constructed (or deconstructed) at the level of semantics in a particular group of literary texts and for what purposes. I will be looking at narratives written at the height of the American Modernist movement, from the early 1920’s to the late 1930’s. This is a crucial period in the formation of the wilderness myth because it was at this historical moment when Americans were beginning to realize that the land that had formed their character was quickly disappearing. In the midst of the cultural disenchantment and literary experimentation that characterizes the aftermath of WWI, where American ideals seem to be on the outs, there are also cultural movements to preserve our “great heritage.” They seek to museumize the ideals as a way to hold them sacred, and the swing in public consciousness from exploitation of wild land to its preservation marks a fundamental shift in the way the general public viewed the wild spaces left in America. The burgeoning National Parks movement is primary among these large campaigns to “save America.” In large part, the National Parks is the popular cultural entity that mirrors what is happening in the “high” culture of literature. Slotkin notes that “the function of imaginative fiction is to develop, elaborate, and bring to conscious expression the implicit logic of the culture’s world view and sense of history, to play out more fully than life usually permits the consequences of the value system on which our mythic fantasies are based”(“Myth” 75). In the 1920s, the Parks were pretty much presented to the general public as they are today. According to the fantasy that America has constructed around them, our National Parks are both monuments to the physical hardships we had to overcome to be Americans, as well as the sacred place where the general public could come and view the grandeur and beauty that once dominated the landscape.21 The National Parks movement and the ideas it embodied was also helped along by popular culture. Fed in part by such advertising schemes as

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Wilderness Semantics Defined  the “See America First” campaign, the idea of the importance of large tracts of still wild land started to gain public momentum because the public was beginning to realize that the distinctly American frontier energy must be preserved in some form (Runte 2–5).22 The American public believed, or was guided into believing, that there was an idea of “truth” in these great lands, especially those of the West, and when these same lands are threatened with extinction, there is a corresponding demise of “truth.” In the cultural historical moment that we call “Modernism,” when the aftermath of WWI made us as a nation question what was still “true,” moral, and good, the general trend was to preserve the ideal of great truth in the remaining wild lands in the continental United States. The National Parks, in other words, become a form of this lost “Truth,” and as such, the argument goes, we must save these wild spaces so as to save some vestige of our great American selves. It began with the designation of Yellowstone, March 1, 1872, and by 1916, there were too many parks for the Department of the Interior to manage, so the National Parks Service was born. With the National Parks Service and the National Parks, the idea of preserving the remaining wilderness for the mass public radically changed the public’s notion of wilderness (Nash 143–149). The parks do contain some wild nature in them, and it is a place in which to view the grandeur of the land out of which our country is constructed. But it also places a very definite boundary around wild nature that belies the very nature of wilderness. By the 1920’s, wilderness is a governmental entity that appears to be unbounded, untrammeled, and wild precisely because is now very boundaried and mapped. The material wilderness is a controlled space; like gardens, it is above all protected. As a mythic space, it conveniently and very willfully forgets its history, the genocide that had to occur to bring it into existence.23 But unlike the wholesale mythologizing of wilderness in the National Parks movement, the writers of imaginative fiction of that particular moment are able to express the complicated relationship between the public and the public lands. So it is not the political apparatus of the National Parks but the bearers of culture, the writers of imaginative fiction in this case, who tell us how to “read” this new form of mythic wilderness.24 Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis: the making of the modern wilderness myth. Wilderness, with ever increasing urgency, is scripted as an entity to be preserved at all costs, for it is the very thing on which “our character as a people was formed”(Stegner, “Wilderness” 97). As history progresses, then, not only

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do the successive renditions of wilderness stack up on each other, a simple but important equation is clarified: the less physical space that remains, the more imaginative and critical writing there is about that space. In other words, wilderness becomes less of a material reality and more of mythic entity. While the textual refashioning of the wilderness myth reached a fulcrum point in the 1920’s, the actual re-scripting of the myth began 30 years prior. It was Frederick Jackson Turner who on July 12, 1893 first put this modern idea of wilderness into verbal motion. In his address to the American Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893, and with the help of the Superintendent of the Census, he proclaimed the American frontier closed. With no more wild spaces to be settled, the idea of wild spaces must be pickled and preserved in the only space available, a text.25 Turner bookends his “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” with two irrevocable speech acts. Referring to the 1890 census, he states at the beginning: “This brief official statement marks the closing of the great historic movement .  .  . the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development”(1). At the end of his lengthy address, he boldly proclaims: “the frontier has gone”(38). Thus, on July 12, 1893, the frontier is declared officially closed in a rhetorical act. For only a rhetorical act can herald what can only now be a rhetorical construction. With one simple speech act, Turner bears forth the modern myth of the American wilderness. This particular address not only births the myth of wilderness but also scripts in no uncertain terms what this modern myth involves. It is a blending of previous frontier and wilderness ideologies, and it already contains all the necessary signifiers of “wilderness.” First, it marks the difference between the known—civilization—and the “other”—the wilderness. In this space that is not civilization, there is the colonist, stripped of his European dress, the “garments of civilization,” and arrayed in “the hunting shirt and the moccasin”(4). This new frontiersman must first learn to “accept the conditions which [the wilderness] furnishes—or perish”(4). In other words, our greenhorn must first return to a primitive condition. His position is tenuous until “little by little, he transforms the wilderness”(4). But, Turner is careful to point out, in the process the frontiersman himself is transformed. This colonist of the frontier is distinctly American, and it is the wilderness that has formed him.26 One of the distinctive marks of Turner’s brand of American is that he must always have the ability to return to the innocence of the wilderness so that he may be conquering it while he is being transformed by it. This American “emigrate[s] to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge [his]

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Wilderness Semantics Defined  dominion over inanimate nature”(7), but Turner also recognizes that there is a “perennial rebirth” that occurred on the “continually advancing frontier line.” The forces of this frontier dominated the American character with “its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society”(2–3).27 The trope of rebirth is too prevalent to ignore in the first pages of Turner’s address, and the repetition fuels the mythic force of his rhetoric. Turner, in fact, fashions what R.W.B. Lewis 60 years later would call the “American Adam,” a figure “of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history”(1). Turner writes: “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier”(2). It is only in this continual return to the “primitive” that this new product called an American can be born. But while I suspect that Turner imagined a breathing human being to fill this role he so carefully scripted, this “American Adam” has a bit of a different feel than what Turner imagined. For this newly made American is born no longer in the material space we call wilderness but in the pages of Turner’s text.28 Turner doesn’t necessarily recognize that with one swipe of his pen he propelled wilderness into its textualized form with which we are familiar. But it is not lost on critics that Turner’s statements mark a change in the way we view the grand open spaces that formed our character. Marvin Henberg writes that even while it was a material entity, few people had actually experienced the frontier, but it undoubtedly looms large in our collective American imagination. He echoes Turner as he writes of him: “the frontier, whose ‘closing’ Turner turned into a powerful metaphor for America’s first inward glance” becomes “our first hint that we might have to reinvent ourselves by .  .  . protecting wild lands and wildlife”(503). Eric Heyne understands that no matter how historians have received Turner’s thesis, “the general reception of Turner’s frontier thesis has always been much the same because “the boundary whose passing he lamented has always been more psychic than physical”(15). In other words, what we think of as wilderness is a purely mental construct borne out in a script. Henry Nash Smith recognized that Turner writes poetically because he is able to “imagine an ideal so vividly that it comes to seem actual”(“Symbol” 297). And Wilbur R. Jacobs writes perhaps the most definitive statement on Turner and his influence: It set forth a popular, patriotic self-image that generation of Americans (particularly middle-class Americans) have liked. When Turner described our traits of individualism, inventiveness, and our exuberance for freedom that grew from the “conditions of frontier life,” he rang a historical freedom bell that has not stopped pealing. (11)

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Jacobs’ “freedom bell” repeats the refrain over and over that Turner first sang. Wilderness is born out of the American desire to preserve the ideas that the frontier embodied of testing self and social conventions against the standards nature sets. But because it was the testing ground, nature—the wild spaces of our corner of the earth—came to be seen as sacrosanct. Nature contained the sense of independence the great American rebel frontiersman felt as he tested himself against that nature. In one way or another, the old refrain of “wilderness” sounds something akin to what Harold P. Simonson, one of its historians, says about “The West”: “To conquer nature or, in a mystical sense, to fuse with it; to appropriate it for the progress of civilization, or, instead, to conform to its ineffable laws for the sake of realizing selfhood”(2). Whether it be called “The West,” “The Closed Frontier,” “the Lasting Frontier” or “Wilderness,” the rhetoric that fleshes out the idea, whether it is found in imaginative writing or critical discourse, is virtually identical because the myth that fuels it is so rich and tenacious, so lasting, and so much a part of how we think of ourselves as “American.” One could argue that the modern myth of wilderness has such superstrength staying power because it is such a good story. Slotkin views myth anthropologically and very usefully as a body of tales, fables, and fantasies, “[concentrated] in a single dramatized experience,” that help a people make sense of their history”(7). The story of surviving in some way in the wilderness is one of the most frequently told tales in American culture. It is also frequently told because this particular myth is based on events that happened in a land that was rather wild and unforgiving. Wright Morris captures this sentiment in Territory Ahead, one of the many books about the American wilderness/frontier. Myth, he says, “is the process of imagination of real facts”(5–6). Whether it is the latest rendition of the Western, the latest cultural study or the latest revisionist historians, they all speak of the American West in some way. And all the tales told, whether they are fictive or theoretical, basically argue that underneath the myth of the frontier and all the tall tales and dime store novels that perpetuated that myth, the idea of the “wilderness” is predicated upon very real stories (Hine ix). As Buffalo Bill, himself a figure both at once real and mythic, was fond of stating emphatically about his own mythologized story: “Every word true!” indicating that the frontier stories “always promised authenticity”(Hine 474). Robert Hine suggests that while we should always be skeptical of this promised authenticity, some of the legends were probably accurate in most of their detail (474).29 This is all by way of suggesting that myths, while not altogether real, have a cultural currency because we agree that they are true in some way. It’s the agreement that fuels the myth’s existence. The actual details might or

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might not have happened, and certain tales were presented in ways to either uphold the status quo or to be used subversively (Hine 477). As Roland Barthes reminds us: “Myth transforms history into nature”(129). The initial intentions of the story are hidden and then forgotten. Myth takes the historically contingent story and makes it appear timeless and natural (129). While definitions and descriptions of America are many and varied, “one aspect of the national imagry remains constant if contentious”: that America, as Frederick Jackson Turner recognized, is at heart “a frontier nation, newly born, created out of the wilderness”(Carden 275). This “wilderness” is found in the west, in the southern forests and swamps, and in the dense northeastern forests. Indeed, Mary Carden’s assertion, which echoes Turner that we Americans are “created out of the wilderness,” cleverly twists the ideological “errand into the wilderness,” the battle cry of the first Puritan settlers as they claimed that northeastern forest for God’s purposes.30 That “errand,” Sacvan Bercovitch has compellingly argued, undergirds the ideology of the “ritual” or “rhetoric” of consensus by which Americans still define themselves.31 This ritual of declaring ourselves to be American encompasses within it many if not all of the contradictions that are inherent in the idea of the frontier and of wilderness, because it is “America” itself. It is a ritual that is mythic in that it allows individualism without promoting anarchy in a society that endorses free enterprise. It is a rhetoric that envelopes the violence and greed associated with the spectacular rise in America’s economic status into the “demands for freedom” encompassed in that cult of individualism (Rites 45–47, 369). Myths are important to our national consciousness. Clifford Gertz reminds us of Max Weber’s exhortation that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” and myths are part of those webs (5). And whether the forms and tenets of this particular myth, what Slotkin attributes to the frontier and what I attribute to wilderness, blind us to the ills of urbanization and industrialization, or make us look at these things anew, the myth isn’t going anywhere, no matter how hard we try to demythologize it. Myths, in a postmodern age, are commonly thought of as devices used to entrap us, to mold us into blind sheep mechanically following its ideology.32 We use myth as a way to order our existence, to explain who we are and why we do the things we do, but those myths do not have to be denigrated and made out to be cultural villains. As Bercovitch persuades us, the “myth of America,” is used, for good or for bad, by the “classic” American writers of the 19th century to uphold the ideals of democracy: self-reliance, individualism, initiative, and the freedom promised by the large open spaces

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still so abundant in the middle 19th century.33 It is still being used, for good or for bad, by all the purveyors of culture today. Myths, like ideology, can either work to “deceive and entrap,” or “open new vistas of thought and action in history”(356). Rather than being “sinister,” the wilderness myth deserves a sensitive study of the complex play of “cultural symbology” which play in and around frontier and wilderness. It is good to confront ideology as a problem, but not to demystify it in order to destroy it. We need to confront our American myths in order to understand their limits and to “assess the nature and meaning of our involvement” with these myths (356). We can never get beyond particular ideological stances, I think. We can, however, deconstruct the complex semantics of the wilderness myth, not to destroy the myth but to understand that semantics offer a way to get at the nature of our involvement in that myth. With semantics, we are better able to discern how we are either at the effect of the modern American myth of wilderness or cause over it. The Semantics of “Wilderness” Myths, according the Roland Barthes, are constructed to appear natural and necessary to the culture that creates them. They appear this way, he argues, to hide all of the ugly “isms”—racism, elitism, nativism—that are part of a bourgeoisie capitalistic culture. Put more simply, myth is a reality that we all agree to be true so that we can order our chaotic world. However, one cannot ever forget that myths are an agreed upon reality. There is no truth with a “T,” no universality anywhere in myth, and no one recognized this more clearly than Barthes. His seminal work “Myth Today,” while it was written 45 years ago, offers a methodology of reading that carefully delineates how myths are constructed rhetorically. He taught us how to read text as myth and myth as text. Through Barthes’ work, we can apprehend the “cultural symbology” as a rhetorical construct without entirely denigrating its power. The Barthian system of mythic speech, because it is so precise, needs to be defined carefully. Barthes argues first and foremost that “myth is a system of communication,” and anything can be co-opted into this special form of speech (109). It is not an object. It certainly is never “sacred” no matter how hard its speaker would like it to be that way. It is a “mode of signification, a form,” and this form can be anything ranging from a literary figure to an advertisement (109). As a form, myth is “not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message”(109); the actual semantics are far more informative than the object itself because it is at the level of the actual text that myth shows itself to be an act of language.

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Language, of course, is a mode of signification. Barthes, with the help of Ferdinand Sausseure, taught us that language contains signifiers and signifieds, and the two, being always in play together, form signs. Myth, however, is not exactly like spoken language; it is what Barthes calls a “second order semilogical system”(114). Myth is a kind of spider’s web in that it entraps the first order of signification. It is a “peculiar system,” Barthes says, because it comes out of the prior semiological chain of language. (114). Whereas the first chain of signifier/signified/sign is completely arbitrary in the meaning that is formed, the second order system of myth is not. It is motivated and appropriative, and by that Barthes means that mythic speech appropriates the contingent meaning of the first order sign but then immediately hides this fact so that meaning is made to appear “natural” or universal. To use Barthes’ example: there is a French soldier who happens to be black who appears on the front of Paris-Match. He is saluting; eye’s uplifted, possibly toward the French Flag. The “natural” meaning of this black soldier, according to the rules of mythic signification, is that the France has all her sons faithfully serving the “Great Empire.” But the black soldier also illustrates how myth is motivated because it is clearly set up as a way to show those opposed to colonialism that the zeal of this one black soldier in serving his “so-called oppressors” proves them wrong. Forms are appropriated by myth; in this case the form of the black French soldier is co-opted by the myth of French imperialist superiority to make that superiority seem completely natural. Translating this to the wilderness myth, a Toyota SUV is parked on top of a mesa that it could not have possibly climbed. The message is motivated by the myth’s insistence that wilderness is meant to be both a place of escape and a space to be conquered, and so the ridiculously perched SUV seems completely in its element. It has a right to be there, naturally. Or, to use an even more insidious form, take the seemingly endless documentaries on Yellowstone and Yosemite. Inevitably, the National Parks are made to seem glorious, endless, wild, magnificent, sublime. They are the garden of plenty, the rugged frightening wilderness on which our great country is founded. The mythic formation of the National Parks is also highly motivated to hide the bloodshed and cultural destruction that took place in order to maintain that grandness. And when the Native Americans to whom I refer are actually spoken of, they become co-opted by the wilderness myth. Instead of their own entity with their own specific histories, all Native Americans become the ‘noble savage’ who are noble because they have a sacred relationship to the land that we can then emulate in our own mythic formulations of wilderness.

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Barthes describes the way in which myth does this in what he calls the “spatialization of the pattern”(115). For clarity, I will reproduce his diagram:

As the diagram indicates, the sign in the first (language) system becomes the signifier in the second. The mythic signifiers are the language itself, advertisements, photography, rituals, anything that is a sign in the first system that can be taken over by the second (114–115). For clarity, Barthes then renames the terms of the second order system to illustrate primarily the important ambiguity of which the mythic signifier partakes. The sign, the final term in the first system, he renames meaning so that it can be differentiated from the mythic form. In the second order system, the sign becomes the form. Once meaning and form are clarified, the other terms are rather easily renamed. The signified in the second system, because it lacks any ambiguity, is renamed the concept. He then designates the third term, the mythic sign, signification because to keep it as sign, the third term of the linguistic system, enters in the ambiguity of the linguistic sign and the mythic signifier. Barthes further notes that signification is the apt term since “myth has a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us”(117). In other words, it signifies. To revisit the above example: National Parks contain the concept of the American wilderness, filled with the artifacts, or forms, of wilderness, (nature devoid of the marks of civilization—houses, lawns, mailboxes) and all the forms, filled with the concept of wilderness, are then made to signify “wilderness” which is not the material but the myth of wilderness.34 Barthes also carefully defines the way in which these terms work together. The two terms that comprise the mythic signifier, meaning and form are first and foremost ambiguous because it is “full on one side and empty on the other”(117). As meaning, the “sign” of the linguistic system, is “full” because it has a “richness in it,” it has retained its own value. It “belongs to a history,” the black soldier for example, which contains all the messy contingencies of lived history. Barthes explains that the “meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a

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comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions”(117). As form, the mythic signifier is a parasitic entity that has put meaning at a distance; the history that is present in all its fullness in meaning has been drained out of the form (118). So when meaning leaves all the contingencies of its own specific and rich history behind, it becomes a mythic form. As such, all the specificity of the one image, trope, etc., present in the meaning is not attendant in the form. By emptying the mythic sign of its meaning, myth succeeds in making itself appear to be universal. In order to free the picture of the black soldier so that he can partake in a mythic idea of French imperialism, one has to make the biography of the individual who is posing for that picture unimportant. In order to make the SUV partake of the universality of modern American “wilderness,” the manufacturing details or the specific purpose of that particular vehicle is forgotten. The form empties itself of all contingencies and histories for a specific reason: “this history which drains out of the form will be wholly absorbed by the concept”(118). The form, void of specificity, is now impoverished, waiting to be filled with a mythic kind of history that meaning is no longer able to provide. The mythic signified, the concept, absorbs all the history, the meaning, that drained from the form. In terms of the black French soldier, the image as form is isolated and impoverished. The image as concept, however, is full of French imperialism, or even, as Barthes says, full of the whole of French history: its general history, to the colonial adventures, to the present difficulties. Barthes clarifies the concept this way: “what is invested in the concept is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality” meaning we have a knowingness that this construction is “true,” even though we often forget that it is we who, by consensus, make it “true.” But the mythic concept does not contain the rich exigencies of history. Barthes explains that the mythical concept is in fact confused knowledge, a perplexed kind of history. For it is not the history contained in the meaning; rather, it is made of yielding, shapeless associations so that it can be “appropriated” by any given audience to form the “truth” that audience wants to create in that particular moment. As Barthes explains: “French imperiality must appeal to such and such group of readers and not another”(119). The sacredness of wilderness exemplified by the National Parks appeals to environmentally minded Americans and not to those whose livelihood depends on cutting down its trees. But conversely, wilderness as a mythic concept can also be co-opted by those same lumber companies by intoning a different association of wilderness, the one that conjures images of gardens of plenty that are there for the taking. Of course, a signified has an unlimited supply of signifiers, both in linguistics and in myth. A mythical concept, because it is not a specific history,

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has an endless mass of forms with which to use. Barthes states the equation this way: while the form is qualitatively empty, the concept is qualitatively full; conversely, while the form is quantitatively full, the concept is quantitatively empty. In other words, the form, while it can supply endless numbers to the signification, it is a “repository of rarefied meaning”(120) which makes it empty. In terms of the concept, there is only a small number of them but these concepts are “open to the whole of History”(120), meaning that the concept can take any form, anywhere and at anytime, and imbue that form with the idea the concept is imparting. Because mythic concepts are so pervasive, Barthes insists that only a neologism can adequately name a mythic concept. In this case, the signification of our myth in question is “wilderness,” but to use Barthes’ construction, the concept is more aptly named something like “wildernessity” which, literally translated, is the conception of wilderness.35 There is a myriad of forms associated with “wilderness”: the garden of plenty, wild open spaces, the frontiersman, the pioneer, its feel of wild wickedness and evil, its sacredness. Without the concept to fill them, each of these forms does not necessarily constitute the mythic wilderness. But, when the form is taken over and filled by “wildernessity,” the two together form the signification “wilderness.” It is the way in which the form plays against the concept in a narrative that allows a text to reveal its semantic secrets. Barthes’ methodology opens up the various ways in which the American writer of the 1920’s and 1930’s looks at the wilderness. It allows us to unlock the complexities of “wilderness” that arise as these writers grapple with this long standing and favorite myth as their culture is looking both to the past for solace and to the frightening and unknown future of technology. Barthes makes it very clear that while we have these tools to unlock the mysteries of myth, not all purveyors of myth look on the function of myth in the same way. Some writers simply refuse to be forward looking; they look at myth as a panacea for the ills facing the 20th century. Some writers see the future with technology as rather bleak, but instead of finding solace in myths, as does the first writer, this second type sees myth as an impostor. To these writers, myth is the exact opposite of a cure-all; myth is rather a part of the poison that has helped create the bleak state in which they find themselves. Thus these second type of writers code into their texts the way to deconstruct the difference between the form and the meaning, a way to decode the cultural insistence on the concept. Finally, there are those who rather than destroy myth by making it too literal or by deconstructing it utterly, understand the complex relationship myth holds in our culture and seek to find a compromise. These writers understand that the myths are not real, but they find a way to use myth productively.

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Barthes gives clear directions in “Myth Today” on what is occurring with these different types of writers, what he calls focusing. He tells us that when reading and deciphering myth, there are three different types of reading produced by the way in which one focuses on the duplicity of the mythic signifier. The first type of focusing insists that the mythic signifier exist only as form; it refuses to acknowledge any of the “hide and seek” that Barthes says plays between meaning and form (118). Those who focus on myth this way, because they so steadfastly insist that “wilderness” is not mythic but real, fill the various forms of wilderness with the concept “wildernessity” without ambiguity, and thus the signification of “wilderness” is literal to them. Ernest Hemingway is chief among the American Modernists to focus on wilderness as a literal signification. He writes all the forms of wilderness as statics; he believes utterly in the sacredness of “wilderness.” To him, all that is encompassed by “wildernessity” is beyond question, is universal. As Barthes explains, in this first type of focusing, any of the mythic forms of wilderness becomes a symbol for wilderness. In Hemingway, his code hero is the form of the mythic signifier that is empty. This code hero is nothing more than a rendition of the frontier/wilderness man; it symbolizes wilderness without any ambiguity. In other words, Hemingway totally buys into the idea that “wilderness” is real. This is no where better seen in the Nick Adams’ character of In Our Time. But this insistence on the veracity of “wilderness” comes at a cost. As Hemingway continually insists that what he writes is “true,” either emotionally in the narratives or factually in the non-fiction, he finds it necessary to use more and more the very thing he abhors, rhetoric, to uphold his beliefs. The price Hemingway pays for always upholding the sacredness of “wildernessity” is to become increasingly more cynical at the fact that it can never hold up to his expectations of it. It is not real, and so in the end, he is stuck recreating “wilderness” not in any real space, but continually in stories, in text, in words. But because the stories are merely the same ones told and retold, the story doesn’t safeguard the ideal; it condemns it to a slow death. Barthes defines the second type of focus as exactly opposite to the first type. Where the latter focuses on the empty signifier, the former focuses on the full signifier. This second type of focusing understands that there is a distortion created between meaning and the form. This distortion is the fatal chink in myth’s armor, and through it, this type of reader is able to undo the signification of myth. This second type of focusing is what Barthes calls a “mythologist,” because one who focuses on the signifier’s distortion is able to demystify the ‘voodoo’ of universality in the empty form. William Faulkner

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represents this second type of Barthian focus in this study. That Faulkner understand the distortion between the specificities of meaning and the universality of form is a given. Faulkner’s entire Yoknapatawpha County is a knowingly created rhetorical construction, and he uses that fictive space to comment on many of the ills of modern times. He has looked to the future through the past; he sees what technology has already wrought on the land on which we built our nation. But Faulkner uses the mythic space of wilderness not merely to deconstruct the myth, but to do so with a purpose. He undoes the signification of “wilderness” because he recognizes the havoc and decay that it has brought to the material entity on which the myth is based.36 He comprehends that while humankind has a responsibility for the land on which we reside, the very myth that we have created about that land, the “wilderness,” actually allows us to deny our responsibility for it. While Faulkner teaches us the many ways in which “wilderness” is an impostor, he also wants his reader to understand that the land itself still holds value. Thus, his demystification of the wilderness myth becomes a dark cautionary tale, for while he sees the importance land has for the continuation of the American idea of liberty, he does not have much faith that the downward spiral of destruction can be turned around. Barthes tells us that these first two types of focusing are both static and analytical. They both destroy myth because they either make a myth’s intentions obvious or because they unmask it (128). Hemingway and Faulkner comprise Part One of this study. It is titled “The Death of Wilderness” because while both authors apprehend myth in polar opposite ways, they both in the end destroy “wilderness.” They both become the effect of the wilderness myth by either buying into the misguided idea that myth is real or by looking at myth as the cause of the demise of freedom. But “wilderness” still holds currency in our culture, and these two types of focusing are in the end reductive. They may teach us what not to do, but that is a lesson in negativity. It is up to Barthes third type of focusing to constructively look at the complexities of “wilderness” and teach us how to make myth productive, not reductive, to our culture. Barthes says that if the mythical signifier is understood as an “inextricable whole made of meaning and form”(128), a signifier that is at once empty and full, then myth becomes dynamic. This type of focusing understands something that the other two fail to see, that myth has an ambiguous signification which allows the writer to respond to the “constituting mechanism of myth”(128). This type of focusing Barthes calls a “reader of myths,” and this reader, because of her understanding of the ambiguities, lives the myth as a story “at once true and unreal”(128). Myth to this “good reader” becomes

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both dynamic, consuming the myth “according to the very ends built into its structure,” and ambiguous in terms of its signification (128). This grants the myth continued life, but not with a blind adherence to the myth’s tenets. This “reader of myths,” knowingly uses myths in her work because she understands the semantic structure of how myths are made. This allows her to be causative over the continual re-creation of myth rather than at the effect of an already created myth. Part Two of this study comprises an in-depth study of Willa Cather. At the height of her career in the late 1920s, she becomes very adept at playing with the ambiguous signification of a myth. By Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather becomes the consummate Barthian “reader of myths.” She is able to look at the dynamics between meaning and form and so is able to use the myth of wilderness in its most constructive way. Her section is the longest in this study, for this understanding happens as an evolution. It takes her many years and a number of tries to figure out how to handle the myth of wilderness in a productive way. In My Ántonia, Cather offers her first exposition into the nature of myth and how we create it. In Professor’s House, she tips the scales a bit too far, is more dark and Faulkneresque in her rendering of “wilderness.” Finally, she comes to an understanding of how the constituting mechanisms of myth, the play between form and meaning, allow the myth to stay vital without it consuming the very thing that keeps it alive. Myth, Barthes says, “hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion (sic)”(129). An inflection is the action of bending, oftentimes of the object into itself. It is what one does with the voice to show emotion. It is what Cather, the reader of myth, seeks to inscribe into her text enabling that text to keep alive the ambiguity that is inherent in the idea that a myth, while rhetorically constructed, could still be a cultural necessity. Mythic concepts survive as a culture sees fit to infuse and re-infuse them with energy. Myths are never fully formed, are always in the state of being created. Barthes tells us that this poverty of concepts and plethora of forms is precious to the mythologist because it allows him, or her, to decipher the myth in question. The concept has in it the “insistence of a kind of behavior which reveals its intention”(120), but because any concept is ultimately unstable, it can “come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely.” Slotkin also recognizes that there is something transient about myths. As he so eloquently puts it, myths “retain their mythic powers only so long as they can continue to evoke in the minds of succeeding generations a vision analogous in its compelling power to that of the mythopoeic perception”(8). Once a myth as lost its cultural currency, it no longer holds its mythic sway over

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that culture’s imagination. The only way that one can judge if a myth still holds its imaginative power is to look at how its being used by those who write and re-write the myths in their imaginative work. In the 1920s and 1930s, “wilderness” is contentious and provocative, and it set the stage for the way in which we create “wilderness” in our own modern time.

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Part One

The Death of “Wilderness”

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Chapter One

Lamenting the Last Good Country: The Hemingway Script of the American Wilderness

“Every word true!” Buffalo Bill

By the time Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time in 1925, the material entity of the American wilderness was long gone. That fact, however, does not stop him from seeing the myth of wilderness as literal, something real and unquestioningly true. In Our Time is a collection of stories primarily about the horrors of World War I, both physical and psychological, but it represents Hemingway’s first expression of how important the idea of wilderness is. For Hemingway, “wilderness” is a perfect signification, a universalized, ahistorical idea through which his disillusioned war heroes are able to find some solace, make some sense of the chaos they have just experienced. It is a perfect signification because “wilderness” in Hemingway never simply represents a pastoral escape from the massive amounts of death at the hands of dehumanized killing machines. Part of the escape that nature offers is the ability to overcome it. It is the perfect signification because the “tragic” impulse to master nature is always working against the pastoral impulse to merge with it (Putnam 99). It is a timeless scenario that Hemingway uses again and again with an almost blind faith in the veracity of its claims. By surmounting the wild part of wilderness, Hemingway’s heroes are able to put some order back into chaos, and “wilderness” thus enables man to reassert the proper order of the universe. That Hemingway is a huge proponent of “wilderness” is nowhere better expressed than in his infamous “code hero.”1 Through this figure, Hemingway is able to imbue all the virtues inherent in the myth of wilderness. Hemingway’s heroes need wilderness, or something approximating it, in order to attempt the pinnacle of the Hemingway hero, the “grace under pressure” dictum when facing death. Hemingway unquestioningly orders his 23

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fiction through the myth of wilderness. Any and all mythic signifiers and forms which could be imbued with “wildernessity” in a Hemingway text are co-opted by the mythic concept. There are fishermen, matadors, and hunters who display a reverential love of wildness even as they seek to conquer it. No matter if it is a fiction of war or the true account of the Spanish bullfight, the idea of wilderness is present everywhere in Hemingway’s fiction, and it is an ideal that Hemingway clings to at all costs. The ideal cracks, however, under the strain, for it cannot maintain itself. No matter how hard Hemingway tries to construct something that is somehow true and thus real in the physical universe, he remains blind to the otherwise obvious fact that what he is creating is not physically real. In his two great treatises on the subject, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa, he seeks to write something “true.” But what these texts betray is that while he upholds the myth as “true,” he can only produce and reproduce the rhetorical entity that is the myth’s only ‘true’ existence. Myths, while they may offer a sort of checklist through which we can order our world, are at best fictive renderings of once real stories. Myths are nothing more than elaborately constructed webs of rhetoric that are made to appear as “true,” but their meaning is dependent upon the reader to construct it that way. There are no universals here, but the more Hemingway insists that it is true, that the myth of wilderness is universal, the more tortured he becomes. “Wilderness,” throughout Hemingway, is upheld as an ideal that is nonetheless physically and materially attainable. But that ideal becomes harder and harder to maintain because the façade of “pure” and “true” becomes more of a strain to maintain. By Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway writes the narrative to appear perfectly natural and “true” until the Hemingway-as-narrator figure starts pontificating about writing. At that point, we’re faced with the cynicism of someone who senses but never fully realizes—because it is necessary that he never does—the fact that the only “truth” he seeks is a mythic truth constructed in the very web of rhetoric that he so contentiously disparages. Hemingway’s problem, what he so steadfastly refuses to acknowledge, is that the mythic forms of wilderness on which he relies—his code heroes, his wild untamed land—are all, in Barthian terms, parasitically empty. There is no specificity inherent in any of these forms, and so there are no ambiguities with which Hemingway can play. According to Barthes, when the form has emptied itself out of any meaning, there is no contingency, no distinct history to these forms; they are made to appear universal because “history evaporates” in an empty form (117). Once the form is voided of its history, it is able to appear “impoverished” and hungry. It is open to complete

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 25 absorption by the mythic concept of “wildernessity.” According to Barthes, once a mythic form is emptied of its historical contingencies, “Its newly acquired penury calls for a signification to fill it”(118). But this is not without penalty. When a writer focuses on the empty signifier, as Hemingway does with more and more vehemence the longer he writes, the signification of the myth becomes increasingly literal. When the mythic signifier of whatever myth in question is “already complete”(117), as Hemingway presents his mythic forms, the myth has already postulated a “kind of knowledge” in which meaning has left its “contingency behind”(117). The more literal the mythic wilderness becomes, the more the mythic energy on which Hemingway so relies dies a slow, suffocating death. These impoverished forms of the wilderness myth are no where better displayed than with Hemingway’s most enduring creation, Nick Adams.2 “The Big Two-Hearted River,” the last two stories of In Our Time, has Nick Adams coming home from the war and ascribing to the form of wilderness that says wild open spaces will rejuvenate, make one new again, in a world that is burned down by negligence and bombed out by war. It is Hemingway’s first clear expression of “wilderness,” and just as the National Parks physically enclose the wide-open spaces of the remaining American wilderness, “Big Two-Hearted River” are stories that enclose the idea of wilderness in a very specific and very safe boundary. Nick Adams, the “rugged individual” type, embarks on his formulaic journey of pastoral healing in the fictive rendering of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, one of the more wild places left in the continental U.S. at that time. We first encounter Nick in the train station at Seney, or the place on the map that says a town was there. This marker of civilization, the town, has burned down, and the signification of this is somewhat ambiguous. It could be read as the devastation of the modern world.3 The town is gone except for the foundation of the hotel, and we’re told in the next sentence: “Even the surface had been burned off the ground”(133). This burned off land could also signify a new beginning, the earth reclaiming its own. From the opening paragraph, there is the paradoxical loss and regeneration that will haunt these two stories about fishing and forgetting. What is certain is that while the fire that burned Seney has effaced the landscape of its known markers, Nick doesn’t really need these markers of civilization to indicate his point in space. Frank Svoboda argues that by making the land where Seney was now a wide open space, Nick, or rather the rhetoric of the text, is able to link his character to the frontier: “to a rougher yet purer American past”(18). Without any markers of civilization, Nick is clearly kin to the mountain-man guide of old. He uses nature’s map to find

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his way. The river and the sun, not a map, give him direction (136). In his journey to the river, through the burn line and the lush fauna to that marker, his wilderness nirvana, Nick knows what he is as well as where he is in this mythic space. It is in marked contrast to the outside “real” world that is full of contingency and never fixed in time or space. According to the dictates of the myth, that river must be fixed in space and time so that its meaning comes already prescribed. The river as well as Nick’s journey to get there has often been read as archetypal, the journey to the Garden of Eden that is transcendent of both space and time.4 The markings of mankind are all but erased, and subsequently Nick allows himself to feel that “he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs”( 134). All of civilization is out of the picture and with the space cleansed through fire, we are in a “true” textual wilderness and Nick can now begin his “wilderness” rituals. Ritual imbues the two stories that comprise “Big Two-Hearted River,” from his first hike to the river, to making camp, eating canned food, and, most ritualistic of all, fishing the river expertly (Civello 5).5 All is done deliberately and reverently, for Nick is in the church of nature, there to receive his absolution from whatever unnamed sin haunts him. Nick is the Hemingway hero who has faced death, cheated death, and now must find some way to order the chaos of the world. For the entire world on the outside of this pastoral paradise of the river is chaos. The entire story is concerned with Nick ordering the space of wilderness, and the only “truth” he knows, the only order he can manage, is dictated by the wilderness myth. “Wilderness” is safe because it is a very known and certain entity. Nature in Hemingway is undoubtedly made to be “unchanging and eternally nourishing” (Gurko 236). For Hemingway, “wilderness” comes ready made with order built in, so Nick’s every move, his every thought, is merely another performance of the wilderness myth.6 Once he gets to the river and finds the perfect camp, he quickly and expertly sets up his tent. He knows that his pack is too heavy when he starts because it is filled with canned goods, but he can eat this food the first night because he’s “got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if [he’s] willing to carry it”(139). Nick’s journey adheres to all the dictums of the myth. He is alone as he faces his demons, and nature, the river, is the “good place,” the Garden of Eden (139). Nick’s strict adherence to the unambiguous forms of “wilderness” is remarkable in that he never waivers. The text disallows even the fact that the river might not remain pristine forever because it calls on another more archetypal myth that says nothing in nature ever does. Like the grasshoppers that have turned black because they’ve eaten the ashes from the Seney fire, nature does change. Nature is

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 27 cyclical, and in this very carefully arranged rendering of Nick’s rejuvenation, that fact is de facto co-opted by “wilderness.” In this carefully crafted mythic space, Nature endures all trauma, is able to adapt and heal itself, and that is why Nick is able to find his solace in the rites of “wilderness,” no matter how mundane they appear. Nick, it is interesting to note, is actually the next generation of the Turnerian frontiersman. Turner, in his thesis, describes his form of frontiersman as a gentleman from the east who is irrevocably changed by his wilderness experience. Turner’s frontiersmen are the proverbial greenhorns, men who in the course of proving their manhood against nature are transformed by that experience. In “Big Two-Hearted River, “ Nick is never more true to form. He is the seasoned wilderness man; he has long ago proved that he is nature’s worthy opponent. He takes pride in his knowledge that he knows how to do such things.7 In “Big Two-Hearted River” he’s not seeking to prove his manhood as is Turner’s form. Instead, Nick is looking for nature to revitalize that very thing that was somehow lost in the war. Nick knows how to shape the wilderness to fit his needs, and thus he is the experienced woodsman, as are all Hemingway’s characters experienced at their craft. Here is it easy to see how the Hemingway “code hero” is one of the main forms of “wilderness.” Nick, Philip Young observed, is “the outdoor man who revels in the life of the senses” who loves to hunt and fish. (54). As Robert Penn Warren notes, these code heroes in Hemingway all represent “some notion of honor, that makes a man a man” and if they are to be defeated, “they are defeated upon their own terms”(35). Not only does this describe the infamous “code hero,” this is as good as description as any of the archetypal frontiersman or western hero; no matter what the name, he is still only the form waiting to be filled with “wildernessity” to make the mythic construction complete. Because it has so often been co-opted by the wilderness myth, this code hero is also one of the most easily recognized figures in American mythology. Delmore Schwartz calls it the toughness and reticence that “derives from the American masculine ideal” with a long history that goes back to the pioneer on the frontier (64).8 As James Plath astutely points out, “there’s nothing uniquely Hemingwayesque about [this code hero] if one considers it alongside the archetypal Western hero (72). And of course, “wilderness” demands nothing more than a figure that is so familiar that he seems absolutely, unquestioningly natural. For this code and those who seek to live up to its standards is so pervasive that it, of course, offers a way to give meaning to the “confusion of living”(Penn Warren 37). Or so our myth would have us believe.

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So we have Nick happily being revived by both the rhetoric of the pastoral and the conquering hero, living as close as he can to the ideal of the code. Like all good Hemingway heroes, he imagines himself alone (Fielder, “Men” 91). He has escaped from the horrors of the outside world to a world that he knows how to control. But living up to the code can only happen in a fictive world. “Wilderness” is an ideal and it can only be defined and maintained in a Hemingway text through an adherence to this code that is outlined, fleshed out, and maintained only in text. This is no-where better illustrated when Nick finally commences to fish, his one major action of the novel.9 Fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River” is the penultimate “dramatic ritualized event”(Lindsay 471). It is where the wilderness myth reaches its fullest expression in this text, for fishing, as Frank Scafella notes, is “sacred time” a time that is “neither changing nor exhaustible”(83). Fishing is the most important ritual in a text where even mundane tasks are imbued with significance. “Part Two” of the story begins, as all good fables begin, with the new day, a shiny symbol of rebirth after the vulgarities of death that precede it. There is no violent death in these two stories because that would violate the sanctity of this particular rendition of “wilderness.” But violent death surrounds the two stories that comprise “Big Two-Hearted River” In the vignette that precedes Part I, a matador dies a bloody death from a horn wound. The vignette that separates Part I and II, a man dies an ugly, literally shitty death, by hanging. We don’t know why he must die, which is symbolic of the chaos that Nick is so determined to keep from his pristine space. With the new day, Nick is ready to find and accept the “good feeling”(147) that this holiest of rituals can impart in the most elevated space of “wilderness.” Moreover, Nick, as he dresses himself in his gear, becomes a high priest of “wilderness.” The narrator tells us that Nick felt “professionally happy” with all of his gear hanging off of him, and the first catch of the day is a small fish which he releases. Like a high priest of the ancient temples, the “professional” upholds the idea that in Hemingway’s wilderness, it is only the initiated who are able to correctly perform the rites of “wilderness.” Nick is also, like the ancient priests, the great teacher. In a wonderfully instructive ecological moment, Nick very carefully wets his hands to not damage the fish and in so doing remembers past fishing experiences in crowded streams with inexperienced fishermen ruining the experience. When a fish is improperly handled, we’re told, it grows a white fungus that eventually kills it. In these crowded and improperly fished streams, these abhorrent fishermen surround Nick, and the stream seems almost choked with white, furry, and very dead trout (149). Nick doesn’t like fishing with other men, and “unless they

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 29 were of your party, they spoiled it”(149). The rhetoric is explicitly clear here. The wilderness experience should only be open to those who are capable and competent. Cool streams, clean air, the fresh smell of woodlands, and the hunger bred in the open air, is potentially ruined by the tens of thousands seeking the primal tug of the American wilderness, even though those tens of thousands annually seek it anyway (Moloney 181). This is undeniably a snotty elitism, but that is part of the carefully laid out plan of the “wilderness” manual that works very hard to conceal the fact that it is nothing more than carefully constructed rhetoric. But it is just semantics. In Hemingway’s rendering of “wilderness,” with its literal signification, there are no costs to nature when nature is treated properly. Charles Lindsay, however, points out that “Nick’s pastoral renewal comes at some cost to nature”(472). This reminds Hemingway’s readers that Nick’s carefully fashioned Arcadia is exactly that, fashioned. There is always a cost to nature with pastoral renewal because in order to manufacture a pristine space, it has to be cleansed of its undesirable elements—whole towns, bad fishermen, other unmentionables. It is a fact that Hemingway consistently elides as he works to maintain the purity of place so that even the death that is suggested by the mishandled fish is co-opted by “wildernessity.” So there is Death in our pastoral haven, Hemingway seems to scoff. Like the pastoral painters of old, Hemingway paints his rendition of the skull that reminds us that even in Arcadia, there is death.10 Death does not necessarily stand outside of the myth, and Hemingway seems to snare death into his mythic web. Heroes are measured by their ability to face death with grace, and thus death becomes part of the ritual, part of the code.11 As ritual, death, whether it be of fish or bulls, kudu or whole tribes of people, doesn’t have any material cost. But Hemingway insists a little too much. “Big TwoHearted River” is a text that vehemently insists that there is no “real” cost to nature because if there were, Hemingway would have to admit to the ravages of time and place, of history. But history is never so easily ignored. Because he blindly adheres to the mythology of wilderness, the ordered signification of wilderness slips ever so slightly and gives a faint outline of an unmentionable behemoth that Hemingway steadfastly refuses to even mention let alone acknowledge. For you see, there’s a big elephant that sits in the middle of most Hemingway texts that most of the characters who people his stories refuse to see. Those who create the American “wilderness” and those who carry on its tradition must never remember that the very land on which they enact their attempt at wilderness, their recreation of the wilderness myth, comes with a prodigious price tag. It is an indisputable fact of history that vile

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overt acts of butchery were committed against a large number of people— all in the name of progress, of course—in order to clear the land for the wilderness of the now dominant and predominantly white American. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway makes the analogy that writing is like an iceberg. One-eighth of an iceberg appears above water, and the writer’s job is to make sure that he knows the seven-eighths that isn’t showing (192). Seven-eighths is a lot of space to know about but not openly express, and like the ever present war that is not named, the unmentionable decimation of thousands of people called Native Americans is always present but not named. The way in which Hemingway constructs his version of the American wilderness seeks to deny what Philip Fisher calls the “hard fact” of American literature and culture. It is a large part of the lower unseen and unmentioned region of the iceberg.12 This is not to say that Hemingway does not put Natives into his texts. They appear in a number of short stories, but not with their full history intact as the displaced people of the material wilderness. And it is interesting to note that Hemingway does not cast the Natives into that very convenient and overdone form of “wilderness,” the Noble Savage. When they do appear, they are made to be liars, cheats, and cowards.13 It is a telling move. The Native Americans that people Hemingway’s texts, because of their fallen state, seem to suggest that while their once great spirit is lost, it is not lamented. It can’t be, for to lament that great spirit would acknowledge the damage done. So, by conveniently sidestepping history, the American Wilderness according to Hemingway can retain its sense of the always new. The literal signification of “wilderness” is that wilderness is pristine so that one can regenerate the self and the spirit, create oneself as “new,” primal, and in control. In a Hemingway text, the spirit of the savage (the all too common way in which we romantically think about the Native Americans) is co-opted by the Americanized form of the “wilderness man.” It’s a figure that extends back to Cooper’s Natty Bumpo. Nick Adams, through the rhetoric of the myth, glorifies the idea that it’s the white man’s wilderness now because a white man has mastered it. He can hunt and fish as well as the Natives, and in his wide-open spaces, he can fully take on the unambiguous form of the mythic Native. The damage that this individual professional fisherman causes is more insidious than it first appears, for the professional fisherman playing out his wilderness experience alone, is the consummate individual. Individuality is one of the hallmarks of the “wilderness man” code hero. Heroism is a lonely act acted out by lonely men who are on a plain by themselves. It is this very quality that Leo Gurko argues makes these heroes exceptional that inevitably

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 31 produces their separation (229). But this begs the question—separation from what? According to the tenets of the myth, it’s separation from society, but it is also a separation from responsibility that Nick cannot confront because if he did, it would inevitably upset the delicate balance that he so desperately needs to enact his healing wilderness rituals. It is a radical subjectivity, what D.H. Lawrence recognized as an “attitude of negation to everything outside himself ”(93) and what Fredrik Chr. Brøgger explained as Nick’s looking at nature as object, as something to be controlled. Nature is defined “not in terms of itself but in terms of Nick’s needs”(21). Individualism is a form that is prevalent in all forms of the myth of America, but even the sacrosanct notion of individuality has a vested interest in keeping the elephant hidden. In order for Nick to have his quiet and very individual moment of transcendent fishing, a large number of people who used to live along that same river were massacred. But the trope of the individual has a two-fold importance to the subsequent amnesia. First, Nick as an individual doesn’t have to take responsibility for the genocide. The Native Americans died at the hand of “them,” the group, the government troops responsible for that genocide. Individuals keep the myth of wilderness alive by adhering to the concept that the land is uninhabited and pristine. Nick’s professionalism allows him to become the stand in for the Natives in the text precisely because he is competent. So, Hemingway seems to have the thing nicely sewn up. Through Nick, Hemingway has completely co-opted the form of the Native into the white man. The white man is the penultimate form of “wilderness,” and through him, Hemingway hopes, “wilderness” can be a literal entity. This tightly woven signification, however, does have its flaws. What Hemingway fails to notice the reader cannot help but observe: the twentieth century type who is eminently competent in the wilderness and disgusted by its misuse causes the same kind of damage culturally as the incompetent boobs who insist on fishing incorrectly and hunting wastefully. Through Nick, Hemingway holds the myth of wilderness intact, and he has little room for error.14 For if he errs, he will expose the whole charade the text has so carefully put in place, and that is a fate that must not befall “wilderness.” Because flaws exist, because Hemingway was not completely unaware that underneath the surface lurks the huge behemoth of history, he scripts into even his rendition of the wilderness myth his solution: in order to keep the myth alive, the story must continue to be told. At the end of the story, Nick fishes his way toward a swamp. It is difficult. The expert fisherman know that while there might be trophy sized trout lurking in the shadows, he would have to wade to his armpits and it

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would be too difficult to land them. It is ominous: “In the swamp, fishing was a tragic adventure”(155), an adventure that Nick does not want because it threatens the fragile stability, the willful forgetting on which the whole myth rests. To acknowledge the full force of the tragedy would signal that he is incompetent, which would then blow the whole elaborate cover-up. So, the story stays intact because while he does not fish the swamp that day, that is not the end of the story. In “Narrative Men,” Tzvetan Todorov details the importance stories play in our lives. Using the Arabian Nights, he illustrates the power of stories. If Scheherazade stops telling stories that amuse the king, she will be dead. In order for myths and the characters that people them to survive, “they must narrate”(76). The swamp that Nick does not want to fish becomes another form of “wilderness” in that it presents a foe that is too strong—for the moment. There’s an excess of wilderness that Nick is not ready to tackle, but that is not the end of the story because in “Big Two-Hearted River” there is no definable end. The last line reads: “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp”(156 italics mine). Without the story of “wilderness” continually being told, without the mythic concept continually being filled by the various forms of “wilderness,” the story is done. Without this ability to continue the story, Nick and his precious “wilderness” would be dead. But “wilderness” has done its job. Because of the literalness with which the mythic forms are presented, the story has the ability to go on. Nick is definitely not dead but revitalized. I suspect that Hemingway would attribute it to the fact that he can still fish, a real world action, but it is really because the great fishing story points to the mythic future, the Arabian Nights of the wilderness myth. Through Nick Adams, Hemingway constructs almost a perfect signification of “wilderness.” In “Big Two-Hearted River” wilderness is the safe and secure refuge from the nasties of modernity. Nick is the perfect form of wilderness, almost. While Nick is competent, he also recognizes at the end of the story that the swamp is a bit more than he can handle. With its violent currents and too deep waters, it presents a shortcoming that Hemingway puts off for another story. The one flaw that Hemingway cannot neatly sew into the package is that Nick’s pastoral retreat, wonderful as it is, disallows a raw confrontation of the physicality of nature. This is one of the major forms of “wilderness” and without it, the myth is incomplete. So how to script the violence and—more important—the courage to confront that violence, that is inherent in a wilderness? What better way than that most ritualized confrontation with death, the bullfight. This tragic, violent, boundaried, and very controlled configuration of the wild is scripted over and over in The Sun Also Rises, in

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 33 vignettes throughout the In Our Time short stories and the entire bullfighting treatise of Death in the Afternoon. At first glance, the bullfight doesn’t have any of the messy history of the material wilderness of America and so the bullfight appears as the best and safest expression of “wilderness.” In the ring, the matador is pitted against the wildness of the bull; thus the energy, the form, the whole feeling that “wildernessity” gives can be savored over and over because it allows the wilderness game to be played over and over. For Hemingway, the bullfight strives to be universal truth because it is the perfectly constructed space to showcase all that is “true” in “wilderness.” It is a brilliant act of rhetorical camouflage. The bullfight is obviously not wilderness, but it is a space that can re-enact “wilderness” again and again. The bullfight also has an advantage over the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. It has the same strict rules of conduct that govern “wilderness,” but it is removed from the contingencies and problems that imbue the American wilderness. The bullfight is conveniently located not here but in Spain, a place in a Hemingway text that stands in nicely for what Hemingway views as lost in the American wilderness. Ronald Weber notes that for Hemingway Spain had become “the last good country”(43), a place that is constructed to have a sort of unshakable “truth.”15 Terry Tempest Williams sees not Spain but the wilderness in the bullfight she witnessed (13). Once removed from American soil, Hemingway can use the bullfight to address the issue that with wilderness, the very thing on which it is based—the actual material entity—is long gone. On American soil, “wilderness” is messy. If it can be constructed safely away from America, then that nasty elephant of American history that haunts “Big Two-Hearted River” can stay safely concealed. With the bullfight, the bloodshed that enabled the idea of American “wilderness” to exist is simply not an issue, but the blood sport aspect of “wilderness” can be safely ritualized. Through the bullfight, Hemingway is able to address the fact that there is always loss in “wilderness” but in a way that does not debunk his precious myth. He does it by charting the demise of the classic form of the bullfight in Death in the Afternoon by explicating at length what he call the “decadence” of the matadors who cheat in the ring and thus are no longer able to aesthetically cheat death. Cheating death of course lies at the very heart of the American notion of “wilderness,” and from the ideal form of the matador to the decadence of the whole art form that reenacts the loss of the material wilderness, the bullfight seems to be the perfect solution to the problem of how to recreate the sacred space of “wilderness.” The first published encounter with the bulls is in In Our Time’s vignettes. These first illustrations are of blood and death, the brutality inflicted on

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matadors who have failed in their job. The matador in a Hemingway text on bullfighting, or at least the ideal of a matador, is emblematic of “grace under pressure.”16 It is no great revelation that the matador is, even more than Nick, the perfect example of the Hemingway code hero. But, as Philip Young often notes, there is always a discrepancy between the ideal and the real in Hemingway (56–78). The ideal is the mythic signification of all the various forms of wilderness filled with “wildernessity.” The “real” in terms of what actually occurs with one of these heroes is that it threatens to expose the myth. So in Death in the Afternoon, the Hemingway narrator concentrates at length on the ideal matador and derides, degrades, and kills off the real flesh and blood bullfighters. Like Nick, the ideal matador must be a master at his craft, for “in the measure in which this combination is accomplished with grace will it be beautiful to watch”(21). One’s life is spared in the bullring because one is competent, but mere competence is not enough. One can be “very good with the bulls”(Sun 217) but the crowd demands perfection. The matador’s handling of the bull must be done with grace; it must reach the heights of art (10). The ideal matador will learn, through experience, that in his pursuit of excellence of execution, that what the crowd seeks is “honesty and true, not tricked, emotion”(12). Nothing can be faked, and above all, the matador dominates the bull “by knowledge and science”(Death 21). Infusing aesthetics with “science and knowledge” cements the literal signification of the matador as the supreme illustration of a “wilderness man.” He is a poster boy, a symbol as Barthes would say, for wilderness. But the illustration of the ideal is an illusion because as the narrator continues his treatise on what makes good bullfighting, we find that the “true” matadors are all dead. These stand-ins for the Western Hero/frontiersman/wilderness man do not exist in the real world, and just like the material wilderness that is gone, the idealized matador can now only exist in text. He is described in great detail in Death in the Afternoon, and then takes on fictive life in The Sun Also Rises in the form of Pedro Romero. Pedro is the young matador, 19 years old, with whom Lady Brett falls in love. In the novel, he is a child in matters of the flesh but a master in controlling the ring. He is perfect with the bulls, executing veronicas with his rival, Belmonte’s, bulls. Belmonte is an old, cynical matador who counts on the decadence of the current breed of fighter to set off his own “expertise” with the bulls. Playing Belmonte against Pedro is a brilliant textual move for it sets up a hierarchy of excellence in which Pedro is the clear winner. He has the strongest, biggest bulls, unlike Belmonte, and while the two are both capable of getting close to the bull, the mark of a truly courageous bullfighter, Belmonte’s bulls are

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 35 too small and not as dangerous as Pedro’s. Belmonte thinks he exposes the “false aesthetics” of the decadent bullfighters, but he is guilty of the same crime. Belmonte still falls short. It is Pedro who, as the epitome of the “code hero,” is so good with his last bull that “it was like a course in bull-fighting”(223). All his passes are slow, tempered and smooth (223) executed with the arrogance only great artists are allowed.17 Pedro is the “it” boy of bullfighting: “There were no tricks and no mystifications”(223), and just for an added touch of bravado, he executes this all with his body badly beaten in a fight with Robert Cohn, one of Brett’s jealous lovers. Pedro is the epitome of the “wilderness” hero— strong , young, brave, beat-up but able to face death with two feet firmly planted—and he can execute it all with perfect style and grace. Once the matador is understood as the allegorical form of the frontiersman/wilderness man, the other component parts of the bullfight are easily read in that same vein. Just as the material wilderness is now a boundaried and (relatively) safe place where humans can re-enact the wilderness rituals as often as they desire, the bullring has definite boundaries in which the drama plays itself out over and over. The bull, the “tragic hero”(Death 6) of our drama, equals the wildness in wilderness. The bull adds the crucial element of threatened death that should be always present in a wilderness experience. As Ed Abbey wryly notes, “a wild place without danger is an absurdity”(38). According to Abbey, wilderness is “a place and only a place where one enjoys the opportunity of being attacked by a dangerous wild animal”(38). Hemingway takes the point one step further, however: “Bullfighting is based on the fact that it is the first meeting between the wild animal and a dismounted man”(Death 21). For Abbey, wilderness is a place where the wild animal is well aware of what a man will do to him. The animal is thus tainted. In Hemingway, the meeting between man and bull must be pure. The first meeting between bull and matador is the most pristine of meetings, and the premise is laid out in no uncertain terms: the perfect bull must never have been in the ring before. He represents the virgin newness of “wilderness,” the space that is aching to be overtaken, dominated, but at the same time has just enough uncertainty to appear, if not be, dangerous. Good bulls, even though they are wild, are supposed to act according to some unwritten rule. If is it a good bull, it will predictably be titillated by the color of the cape, charge straight, and above all be “brave” rather than “vicious”(12). If the bull has any knowledge of human beings, the “wilderness” signifier of “wild” will be debased. It will commit the unpardonable sin of charging the man and not the cape. This violates the rules of the myth, and so it makes for an unsightly fight that is often fatal to the matador.

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The bull not only represents the wild, he performs the all-important task of expressing the most intriguing paradox of the American wilderness myth. The death of the bull, Hemingway continually points out, is tragic (6), just as the death of the material wilderness is tragic. By constructing the bull in this way, Hemingway makes a mistake. He unwittingly exposes that the myth knowingly functions as a myth because it contains the knowledge that the material fact on which it is based is gone. The wilderness myth plays out that tragedy in a continuous loop. Wirt Williams illustrates the connection well. The bull is “born both for the catastrophe of violent death and for the transcendent triumph of meeting it bravely”(13). The wildness that beckons us and taunts us is vanquished over and over in the bullring. Like the material wilderness that is preserved in protected spaces, the bullfight will always play out through the hot Spanish summer. The tragedy of the dead bull is the tragedy of the wilderness. But Hemingway is now in an untenable position. If the material wilderness is acknowledged to be a non-existent entity, the myth, in effect, has proclaimed itself a discursive creation instead of a “true” and living entity. For example, in Death in the Afternoon, we find that there was a living Pedro Romero, a classical perfectionist as is his fictive counterpart in Sun Also Rises but who had died years before (43). Just like the wilderness that is now gone, the Pedro Romero who steals Lady Brett’s affections (for the moment at least) is nothing more than a fictive creation of words. And here, as in “Big TwoHearted River” the myth comes dangerously close to debunking itself in the text. The fictive entities of the pure matador and the good bull have become degraded by actual bullfighters who are decadent. Like the experience of the material wilderness in its protected spaces, the pristine experience is in the process of being corrupted. There will always be more bulls to fight and more matadors to fight them, but the quality of the contest is disintegrating with bullfighters who are more concerned with protecting their own hide than giving a good classical performance of man against beast. It’s simply the bad fishermen from “Big Two-Hearted River” all over again, wasting trout by not knowing the proper handling. It denigrates the integrity of “wilderness.” Hemingway, who wants his “wilderness” literal, recognizes the decadence of his own mythologizing but simply can’t have that. He remains true to his intentions, even while those intentions betray him. He still thinks that he has produced a book that has “permanent value,” that is solid and true.18 It’s a weak band-aid. Hemingway remains stubbornly blind to the very truth that leaks into the very structure of the book, the fact that myths are only semantic entities, constructions of fiction and not real. He constantly demythologizes the

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 37 whole bullfight in his discussion of the matadors and, more importantly, of the novilladas that take place simultaneously with the ritualized professional fights. It’s actually quite fascinating to watch the textual contortions that are placed to keep the amateur fights from exposing the whole set-up. Barthes describes a similar demythologizing motion in “Striptease” an essay that exposes the desexulization of the professional stripper through the motions of the amateur. The professional stripper and the professional matador have much in common. The former hides her sex in the exoticism and the “alibi of Art” that succeeds in clothing her nakedness and ultimately makes the striptease safe for public consumption. The professional matador is skilled at deceiving the audience so that what looks dangerous is an optical illusion. The very real danger that is present—the bulls will kill if given the chance—is lessened. The description of the novilladas and the amateur bullfights effect the most damage the rhetorical perfection of the mythic bullfight. The novilladas are the fights that use immature bulls or very dangerous bulls with novilleros, bullfighters who are not good enough for the professional ranks or who are trying to make their name in those ranks. Hemingway explicitly states that watching the novillada is the best way to learn about technique since “the employment of knowledge that we call by that bastard name is always most visible in its imperfection”(Death 17). The imperfections are telling because the novillero mimics the amateur stripper in Barthes text. The latter amateur has no exotic disguises; she dances ungracefully and disrobes awkwardly her ordinary dress (briefs, dress, or bra). As Barthes explains, she is denied the “alibi of art and the refuge of being an object”(86–7). She becomes the sexualized object that her professional counterpart avoids thereby exposing the “bourgeois” and safe non-sexuality of the professional dancer. The novillero is a coward, unskilled with the cape, unknowledgable with bulls that are often far more dangerous than the professional matador faces. This imperfect matador exposes the brutality of the sport of bullfighting and by doing so comes dangerously close to debunking the whole mythic ritual—a bourgeois wilderness in Barthian terms—for which the bullfight is made to stand. Hemingway, however, stops short from the dreadful fate of demythologizing this monument that he holds so sacred in a most interesting twist of rhetoric. While the decadence of the tragedy is rampant in the professional bullfight and everywhere threatens his rhetorical house of cards, Hemingway uses the amateur bullfight to resurrect the importance of “wilderness” to his audience. The amateur bullfighters, like the legions of mountain climbers and outdoorsmen, put their lives in peril for “the inner satisfaction of having been in the ring with a bull”(24). It is the ‘because it’s there’ mentality that

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drives an amateur bull fighter to pit himself against a bull just as thousands of Americans are driven from their desks and cubicles to be reinvigorated by a life threatening situation in the wilds the government provides for their entertainment. “It is a strange feeling to have an animal come toward you consciously seeking to kill you”(24) Hemingway writes, and by doing so plants the bullfight firmly back into its mythic wilderness space. Whether you are the matador, skilled in the art of dominating wild nature or the amateur flexing your muscles against that same wildness, Hemingway has reinstated the mythic signifiers of “wilderness” and upholds them not as mythic but as true experiences. He ends his discussion of the amateur fight with “All amateur or group killing is a very barbarous, messy, though exciting business and is a long way from the ritual of the formal bullfight”(24). No matter how real the danger is to the matador, making the bullfight into a ritual is mythologizing it, making it something bigger, more profound and more significant than it might be to someone less invested in keeping “wilderness” and all it stands for alive. “Wilderness” cannot die in Hemingway for he sees it as the very fabric out of which the American character is cut, sewed, and sold. Without “wilderness” to order his world, all would be chaos. The arena of the bullfight, while a perfect microcosm of wilderness, is too constricting in the end. It is a rhetorical stand-in for the real place, and so it comes too close to the truth— that it’s all utterly, absolutely and devastatingly constructed. So the author in search of his “true” book much search elsewhere. The allegory of the bullfight must give way to larger spaces, back to the open world, but our author is a bit stuck. Hemingway “can’t go home again,” but he desperately longs to return to his great love, the natural world. 19 Since the space and soil that comprise the American wilderness is too ideologically messy, so he moves even farther afield. He finds his answer in the one of the last great wilderness spaces of the earth, the African Savannah. He goes on safari and writes an account of his month long adventures in Green Hills of Africa. There, the narrator can play out his “wilderness” to his heart’s content. He can continually hunt for his rendition of the holy grail—the biggest and best trophy of Africa Kudu and Sable on a land that is not stalked by shadowy elephants of American history. But even in Africa, Hemingway will fail because all the violence of the hunt is reduced to a controlled, restrained, gentlemanly sort where the hunter can return to his comfortable tent at the end of the day. At the end of the story, these green hills barely hide the bald truth: that the safari re-enacts the violence through which cultures were and are still decimated. No matter how hard Hemingway tries to tie his “wilderness” package tight, it always unravels under his too careful watch. The adumbrated

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 39 elephant that haunted Nick Adams is always present, always there in some formation, ready to expose all.20 Green Hills of Africa was not well received critically when it was first released and recent critics still tend to evaluate it as a decline in Hemingway’s commitment to writing the “real thing” as his own personality begins to take center stage (Strychacz “Plums” 23). The problem is that the economy of prose that is so suggestive in the fiction is absent in the non-fiction. Edmund Wilson derides Green Hills for its “floundering excess” of style (Weber 44), and Bernard DeVoto, also critiquing Hemingway’s style, notes that Hemingway “plunges into the rhetoric he has monotonously denounced”(211). What these early reviewers scorn is an excess of rhetoric, what Hemingway himself calls “verbal dysentery”(Green 29). Hemingway desperately attempts to keep true to his dictum: “The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book”(iii), but there is a surplus of mythic signifiers; there are too many trophies and discussions about them, too many overdone diatribes on prowess, and too much discourse on what is “true” writing.21 Barthes warns that when one focuses on myth in the way that Hemingway does, where the myth producer takes the mythic signification to be literal, the myth becomes static and cynicism results. He does not explain why this is the result, but it is easy to see why through Hemingway. The “truth” and purity that Hemmingway seeks throughout is purely a rhetorical construction. It is an inescapable fact, but because Hemingway is not able to fully acknowledge this truth, even though it is everywhere apparent, he is left no recourse but cynicism. Green Hills of Africa devolves into a joust with words. Its tone is often derisive and mocking; the narrator continually ridicules himself, his fellow hunters, and his native trackers. It is part of the rhetorical excess, the “verbal dysentery” that permeates this text and serves to unravel the whole mythic package where the pretense of the myth as transcendent is fully denuded in spite of itself. Hemingway finds himself more and more in a textual wilderness, becomes more and more bitter about that fact, and so “wilderness” slowly consumes itself like the hyena of the savanna who eats its own entrails. While Hemingway is never cynical towards the wilderness of Africa, he becomes more and more cynical towards the mythic signifiers, the forms of “wilderness” in which he as the narrator arrays himself. The signifiers are everywhere apparent and used unabashedly in Green Hills of Africa, just as they are in “Big Two-Hearted River” and allegorically in Death in the Afternoon. In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway himself is the great hunter, competent as Nick Adams, seeking to explain the lure of the hunt as he pits his skill against the wildness of the “new-old” country of Africa (145). He is, appropriately, the reluctant hunter. He does not indulge

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in “ornamental killing.” Nor does he hunt for pure blood sport: “killing to kill” (16). He hunts to kill “only when you wanted it more than you wanted not to kill it”(16), and his reluctant but overwhelming desire is necessary in order to continue to have an adversary against which to prove over and over that the hunter can triumph over nature. Hemingway wants to hunt into eternity, or for at least as long as the game lasts (12). But the form of the great (white) hunter is overdetermined. Its excess serves not to cement wilderness as “truth” as Hemingway wishes it to do, but to unsettle the pat boundaries of “wilderness” that he has so carefully constructed. This unsettling is no-where more apparent than in one of Hemingway’s bouts of verbal dysentery. It begins in the first sentence when Hemingway and his guides are trying to outsmart the prized African kudus who by long experience are wise to the hunter’s ways. The hunters are thwarted by the sound of a truck, the ‘machine in the garden’ that heralds the demise not only of the immediate gratification of the completion of the hunt but of the whole continent as well. Kandisky, the lorry’s owner, is a German who is interested in the natives and not the native fauna. Kandisky acts as the foil for Hemingway’s obsession with the hunt as well as his long, pompous digressions on writing, and we are able to see how Hemingway gets himself stuck in contradictions about the way in which he is using “wilderness” to order his safari experience. When Kandisky tries to involve Hemingway’s group in a discussion of the natives, he is interrupted by a discussion between the white guide and the narrator on the problems of hunting in the salt licks. Kandisky is in essence spotting our adumbrated elephant who takes its forms this time in the natives who starve because the game that feeds them is used for nothing more than sport by the white hunters. Pop, the white guide who heads the whole operation, is perhaps even more unwilling than his guests to face that truth since it is his job to help tourists like the Hemingways. Pop’s whole career is hunting big game which in essence means that he makes money, probably lots of it, on people who seek the “wilderness” experience in a place that still retains some of its native wildness. But as always this wildness is threatened at every turn by Pop and those like him. In changing the subject to the inadequacies of hunting on the salt licks, Pop actually serves to cut the ribbon that ties the “wilderness” package together. Salt licks are the preferred place to hunt because that is where the game congregates in the open. But this actually puts the hunter as form at a disadvantage because the lick taints the complex rules of “wilderness.” It is not a “true” contest between man and the wild. The wild game has been made smart on the salt because “They’ve been shot at there ever since there’s been salt”(15). The implication here is that the hunter must stack the deck

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 41 in his favor so that he can dominate the scene at any cost. Unlike the bulls in the ring who are innocent of knowledge of man and are thus a worthier opponent, the game of the hunt is contaminated by the animal’s foreknowledge of man’s capabilities. Furthermore, the cynical comment that the narrator rejoinders to Pop’s assertion further adds to the unwrapping. Hemingway, the narrator-hunter, likes to sit in a blind on the salt lick because he likes to hunt “sitting on [his] tail. No sweat. No nothing”(16). The hunter, here, is definitely violating the rules of “wilderness.” Good hunters don’t “sit on their tail” waiting for the game to come to them. Part of proving one’s worth in the hunt is the ability to track, to persevere through physical hardship. Hemingway proves himself capable of doing this a number of times in the narrative, but he is never satisfied with his performance. The hunter wants to triumph over nature, but unlike Nick who finds his solace in correctly playing the rules of the “wilderness” game, Hemingway is made cynical because the myth, as a static, makes him static too. Our narrator, throughout the text, consistently prefers to remain motionless in his protected space, pretending to put himself in danger so that he can continue to pretend that he is performing the codes of “wilderness.” Throughout Green Hills, in all his posturing about the joys of hunting, Hemingway’s narrator remains blithely unaware that he has trackers to take him through the bush and then skin and slay the dead animals. He never comments on the sham that, at the end of the day, he has his entourage waiting with a hot meal replete with wine, whiskey, and beer. All is required of our brave hunter is that he shoot, preferably straight through the lungs instead of an unheroic gut-shot, so that he can sleep well in his pajamas that follow him so faithfully through the African bush. Kandisky, however, continually threatens this carefully constructed valence. He, seemingly innocent, asks: “You have arrested a plan of campaign? You have decided on how to outwit the poor animals?” to which our reckless narrator relies “Yes” and again changes the subject (17). The animals don’t seem to have a chance. Nina Baym points out in her discussion of the fictive rendering of this safari, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” that the animals in the wild are not true adversaries or antagonists, because they are so massively overpowered by men’s technology”(114). 22 Prior to Green Hills of Africa, this component of the wilderness myth was actually scripted so that the wilderness actually had a chance of winning. The wild spaces were dangerous, with animals that would hunt you as soon as be hunted and natives definitely did not race your car happily through their territory, as do the Masi natives in Green Hills. But Kandisky’s deceptively simple rhetorical question illustrates to what extent the myth had been degraded. Barthes says that when mythic

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signification is literal, it exposes the intentions of the myth (128). It is only an apparency of wild that the narrator is after, and it is a wild that looks much better in text than in actual fact. Hunting is too dangerous a topic to expound upon because in doing so the narrator might get caught in his own rhetoric, so he chooses to expound not upon hunting but writing. Kandisky is eager to hear of Hemingway’s experiences with the great writers of the day. Hemingway is loathe to give his “real” impression and thereby “destroy anything this man had”(19), but he also makes the gesture of not explaining why America is bereft of great writers. Again, Kandisky’s reply is telling: “this is what I enjoy. This is the best part of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu”(19). Why? Killing kudu doesn’t get you much except a brief moment of feeling imperial over your subject, in this case the land and the wild. The “life of the mind” is precisely what Hemingway studiously avoids because if he thought about his actions instead of reactively performing the myth, he might actually have to confront the fact that everything he does is based on a fictive entity. The fiction, however, is a crutch that he has used all along by calling it universal “truth.” Even in his discussion of American writers, however, Hemingway tips his hand. When the narrator turns to Melville, he mentions that at times Melville is able to find “actual things,” truths of mankind: “the knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric like plums in a pudding”(20). The pudding, of course, is the unnecessary rhetoric that surrounds the “plum,” and to find that unwrapped plum of truth is a rare thing in American writing, according to our narrator. 23 He intimates that he is one of the rare authors able to apprehend the unwrapped plum. The damning statement occurs, however, when he makes the famous assertion that Mark Twain is one of the few writers who are “good” and that all modern literature “comes from one book by Mark Twain”(22). He speaks of Huckleberry Finn, the book that is the quintessential expression of “wilderness.” In the end, Huck of course “lights out for the territories”—the wilderness—where he can leave all the complexities of slavery and the contingencies of civilization behind him to live a more “pure” kind of life. But the Hemingway narrator says that this end, Twain’s end, is “just cheating” and that the real end of the book should stop where “Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys”(22). So there’s a double play against Hemingway in his very own text. First, the very thing that is sacrosanct—writing the wilderness myth—is the very thing that he calls cheating in Twain’s text. Second, by wanting Huck Finn to end where Nigger Jim is stolen back into slavery keeps another version of the camouflaged elephant firmly hidden. Slavery is very close kin to the decimation of the Native tribes as both are the

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 43 atrocities necessary to wrest “wilderness” from the actual physical wilderness. So no matter how much our poor narrator tries to circumvent the problem, the plum he seeks in the end—the “true” wilderness and its experience—is nothing more than the very rhetoric that he finds so offensive. As the safari ventures from familiar territory into unexplored “virgin” land (at least unexplored by whites) and back to familiar landscapes again, the narrator basically plays sloppy poker. We get to peek at his hand too many times. He wants to have his Africa remain pristine. He wants to bring home the biggest set of horns so that he can have the biggest trophy. He wants his performance of “wilderness” to be unadulterated. He wants, he wants, he wants .  .  . and he finds his desires undeliverable because he does not recognize the very thing that he desires, a true and real wilderness, can only exist in text. On the last days of the safari, as he hunts for the elusive sable buck, he grants that the American wilderness is destroyed, but if there is any ecological guilt, he forgives himself because he builds himself up to be different from the others. He seeks only to live purely, not to make money. Like Nick, the Hemingway narrator’s competence assuages his guilt of putting into motion the beginning of the end of his new, pristine wilderness of Africa. He wants to “come back to Africa” not to make a living but “to really live” to put his life at risk in the hunt, to be rejuvenated by his wilderness experience (285). Like the matadors in Sun Also Rises, he desires to live life “all the way up,” but at whose expense? “Wilderness” is clapping its hands gleefully because this is the very signifying fuel that it needs to survive, but the intention of the myth becomes even more obvious as Hemingway continues. He recognizes that “Our people went to America because that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a bloody mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone”(285). Americans, he rightly points out here, have a bad habit of “going somewhere else” and making the same “bloody mess” literally and figuratively everywhere they go. That Hemingway does not recognize his own participation in the very thing that he so obviously denigrates leaves him wide open for a scathing eco-critical critique based in post-colonial ideology of dominant power.24 He recognizes that “our people,” his fore bearers of “wilderness” makers, had destroyed the “good country” and continue to do so solely because “we always had a right to go somewhere else and we had always gone”(285). He steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that he wants to do the very same thing in Africa. Because the American wilderness is no longer worth fighting for, because it in essence no longer exists, he will now “go somewhere else” (285) so that he may have his pure experience

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over and over. He simply plays out what is fast becoming the farce of “wilderness,” replete with its destruction and the accompanying willful forgetting. But given the way in which it is set up, one wonders if there is ever an end to the farce. So this pure, true, and real experience of wilderness is everywhere tainted. We see it not only in Hemingway’s own imperial ‘white’ blindness, but by his very actions as a ‘successful hunter.’ The Hemingway narrator is unable to “bag the big one” because no matter how pure he shoots, no matter how magnificent his trophy, he’s always upstaged in the text by another hunter who is nervous, gets excited, and then shoots badly. Hemingway has traveled through Africa but does not hunt with an American companion, Karl. Karl’s description is a striking contrast to the ideal robust wilderness man. He is thin, “his skin sallow, his eyes very tired looking and he seemed a little desperate”(61). Unlike Hemingway who hides his trophy quest in the rhetoric of “wilderness,” Karl unabashedly hunts a trophy, a big kudu bull. The first trophy taken by both men, however, is a rhino and the juxtaposition between Hemingway’s kill and Karl’s is indicative of the trophy contest that is the backside ugly reality of the “wilderness” game. Both come upon their prey unexpectedly, both successfully kill, but while Hemingway shoots once, cleanly, Karl shoots, he guesses “five or six”(84). Hemingway’s shot is in fact perfect, “high in the back, a little behind the lungs”(79). It is so perfect that the master hunter, Pop, banters with Papa about never being able to tell anyone about that shot because, it is implied, no-one would believe it as true. And just to prove his mastery, Hemingway offhandedly shoots a reedbuck on the way back to camp in another perfect, pure shot. Hemingway’s rhino, however, is only of regular size; its horn is “nothing extra” and in comparison to Karl’s, it’s absolutely puny (85). The sexual connotation is as evident here as it is in the fishing scene in The Sun Also Rises where Jake Barnes’ catch of the day pales in comparison to the robustness of his friend’s, Bill’s fish. Jake has the excuse of the accident that robbed him of his manhood to justify his poor showing, but in Green Hills of Africa, there’s only straight jealousy: “Why did he have to get one that makes mine ridiculous?”(85). Strychacz argues that the trophy in Green Hills: “becomes a complex trope for the construction of masculine identity” because both the hunting and display of trophy actually subvert the codes of masculinity that imbue Hemingway’s male characters (“Trophy” 37). The codes of masculinity are turned upside down in the trophy contest between Hemingway and Karl because that contest serves to demythologize masculinity as surely as it does “wilderness” because the former is co-opted by the latter’s signification. While Hemingway has the better shot, is the more competent

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Lamenting the Last Good Country 45 hunter, this fact can only be made real and important in the textual rendering of the hunt. The trophy is the visual representation of mastering nature, the fact of which Hemingway is all too aware as he laments: “I knew I could outshoot him and I could always outwalk him and, steadily, he got trophies that made mine dwarfs in comparison”(86). Karl, a competent shooter only in the controlled setting of the shooting range, always ends up with the biggest set of horns. So this begs the question: what is more telling, the trophy—the evidence of the performance—or the performance itself? Hemingway gets his revenge on Karl in the textual rendition, but the very writing of the revenge peels off the final layer of this farce. When “wilderness” is scripted to have no ambiguity, to be a literal signification such as it is throughout Hemingway’s texts, “wilderness” is really nothing more than a rhetorical performance.25 The fruits of the hunt, the trophies, are the “real” that Hemingway uses to measure his effectiveness, but it is only the continual performance of the various wilderness forms that matter to the continuation of the myth. All the mythic signifiers of “wilderness” in which Hemingway wallows, the competent hunter, the pristine space that revitalizes manhood, the ever-present threat of loss, are all unabashedly filled with “wildernessity.” But what Barthes only alludes to in his discussion of three types of mythic focusing, is that in making the myth’s intention’s obvious, the only recourse that a myth-maker has is to constantly perform “wildernessity” as he invokes the various forms. Performance verbiage is everywhere in Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway himself admits numerous times that he is a “damned show off ”(63) who gets the “braggies” about his various feats. Indeed, when he finds himself bereft of an English speaking audience to relive the exciting events that lead up to his shooting the kudu with the very large rack (even though it was still upstaged by Karl’s), he is disappointed and knows that it just isn’t any fun when you don’t have anyone to show off in front of. When he must track a wounded buffalo, he feels the elation of the forthcoming kill, not only because it is a certain action that he can do but because he has no responsibility “except to perform something [he] feels sure [he] can perform”(116). The performance takes precedence in this “wilderness” charade, and in the end Hemingway can no longer really hide from the very fact that “wilderness” is nothing more than a semantic performance. The very last line of the book speaks volumes. Hemingway’s wife, P.O.M. (Poor Old Mama) tells her husband that she “can’t see” Mr. J.P.’s or Pop’s face, which she longingly remembers as beautiful. While P.O.M. can’t remember her beloved face, Hemingway can, and his final words cements his fate: “I’ll write you

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a piece some time and put him in”(295). Pop is gone. Wilderness is gone. Hemingway’s only recourse to these unbearable and, in the latter’s case, unmentionable facts is to write “wilderness” over and over, again and again, ad infinitum, becoming ever more cynical because the more he writes, the more he refuses to confront what has stared him in the face all along. His beloved “wilderness” is nothing more than a fabrication of semantics. Ernest Hemingway, the man, sought to be the mythic rugged individual who loved to death the very thing that he set out to conquer. It is not the physical but the mythical wilderness that is in its death throes in Hemingway. By seeking to keep the physical entity alive by writing of its virtues, Hemingway commits the grave error of failing to see the ambiguity that plays between the mythic form and the meaning left over from the arbitrary sign of the first order of linguistic signification. By trying to take the contingencies of history out of the equation in order to save the thing he loves best, Hemingway delivers its death sentences. Barthes explains that the first type of focusing is often used by those who he calls the “producer of myths,” the journalist, for instance, who starts with a concept and seeks a form for it. Hemingway takes for his fictive fodder the wilderness forms and the concepts fully formed and ready for use. In this sense, he is not a producer of myth but a re-producer of one specific myth. He writes it over and over. By trying to cure the present with a static, however, he disallows for the future. “Wilderness” may write itself continually in a Hemingway text, but it is never fed any new fuel, never allowed to play with the ambiguities that are inherent in its form, never permitted even to question the veracity of the concept. So, the very thing he is trying to save, his beloved American wilderness, is the very thing that he has given a death sentence to by refusing to allow history in. History is both backward and forward-looking. In Hemingway, there is no future for wilderness.

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Chapter Two

The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses: William Faulkner’s Cautionary Tale of “That Doomed Wilderness”

It is a scene that anyone familiar with classic twentieth-century American literature recognizes. The novitiate to the wilderness kills his first buck and his Native American mentor takes the hot blood of the animal and smears it over the boy’s face. Isaac McCaslin as he is presented in Go Down Moses is officially baptized into the cult of wilderness by Sam Fathers, Ike’s mixed blood mentor of sacred nature, and William Faulkner’s place as an acolyte in that cult seems guaranteed.1 Faulkner certainly recognized the value that we Americans have placed on land and understood that land, to us, represents liberty and freedom, two of the most sacred tenets of our ideology. Until recently, critics frequently argued that Faulkner’s wilderness is a grandly mythic space.2 But what many fail to note is that while Faulkner does write of the Mississippi bottom lands as a mythologized place, he does so in order to show us the dangers of doing so. The three hunting stories in Go Down Moses, “Old People,” “The Bear,” and “Delta Autumn,” become the vehicle through which Faulkner plays with the discrepancy between the form and the meaning of “wilderness.” Through these stories, he is able to unmask the mechanics of mythic structure in order to caution readers to the dangers of myth and to expose what myth in its ahistoricity seeks to hide. In “Delta Autumn,” there is even a not-so-veiled threat that when the bottom land is drained and the cain breaks mowed down to be replaced with cotton, there will be no more hunting and no more wilderness myth because there will be no more wilderness on which to base it. Because we have abused our privilege of having so much wild, open, and above all pristine land, by making it transcendent, we have ignored and even abdicated the responsibility for that land. The myth of wilderness, Faulkner argues, blinds us to the responsibility we have for the material, physical land that sustains us. The first task of these stories, however, is not to question our fitness as stewards. It is to make known the fact that we are smack in the middle of a 47

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created world. Myth likes to appear real, to present itself not as a rhetorical act but a physical entity. By severing this connection that myth likes to hold on reality, Faulkner immediately sets the terms of his lesson. The wilderness, the text makes plain from the get-go, is a rhetorical entity.3 In the opening of “The Bear,” the big woods are painted as such with the best of all talking”(163). Myths are nothing more than words, passed from generation to generation through the oracular, and even though it might be “bigger and older than any recorded document” it is still only an entity created in words. Faulkner makes this textual move consistently through the three stories. The opening of the “The Old People” reads: “At first there was nothing”(163) and then it commences to tell a story, in words. The story that follows is not something new, a genesis as that first line implies. Rather, the story that follows is something straight out of the pages of classic western coming of age stories, the ten year old Ike McCaslin killing his first buck and being baptized in its blood. It is the first of the many rituals of “wilderness” that these stories play out, but unlike Hemingway, who uses the trope of hunting as a mythic form to continually reproduce the myth of wilderness, William Faulkner knowingly plays the forms of “wilderness” against their own contingencies. This ultimately serves to undo the signification of the myth. Much ink has been employed to explicate the many ways in which Faulkner layers and twists his narratives for various purposes. It is this rich play that many have recognized between the linguistic signifier and signified that continually returns us to his stories, particularly “The Bear.” However, Roland Barthes’s work on myth reminds us that myth is a “second-order semiological system” where the sign of the first system has in it both meaning, the long full history of the sign of first order, and form, the motivated entity which has put all that richness at a distance. The play between the meaning and form creates a rich ambiguity with which Faulkner is adept at handling. In Barthian terms, Faulkner is the consummate mythologist because he understands the “duplicity of the signifier,” the distortion that the mythic “form” effects on the linguistic “meaning.” He unmasks the intention of the wilderness myth because, in these hunting stories, the hunters, the game, even the larger-than-text bear, Old Ben, are all shown to take part in this duplicity of signification. Barthes cleverly illustrates how this duplicity works by way of a metaphor of an optical displacement. When you are in a car looking out the window, the window and the scenery are never in the same place. At one moment, the viewer in the car can focus on the glass; at the next, the distant landscape. The observer can view the “transparency of the glass and the depth of the landscape” with the result being “the glass is at once present and

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The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses 49 empty .  .  . and the landscape unreal and full”(123). The meaning is the landscape beyond, and the glass is the form. In order to instruct the reader how the ambiguity works and for what purposes, Faulkner writes his mythic signifiers first as form so that we can see them as present but “empty.” But the text quickly turns and refocuses our attention to the landscape beyond the glass, the meaning that is always there in the linguistic sign whether we want to acknowledge it or not. As Barthes says, the mythologist, the demythologizer of texts, clearly distinguishes the form from the meaning and thus unmasks the intentions of the wilderness myth. Generations of critics who have read Faulkner as mythologizing the land, and its penultimate expression wilderness, have basically read the wilderness as if it were the glass, present in its proximity but empty of any contingencies. However, these much analyzed hunting stories deserve further critical attention because the demystifying structure of the text has only recently been examined and never through the lens of “wilderness.”4 After Faulkner plants us in the woods made of words in the first lines of the stories, he nonetheless seems to shift gears. The hunting narratives of Go Down Moses, if one forgets the lesson in the first lines, purposely makes it seem as if “wilderness” were always mythic. Take the idea of boundaries for example. In “The Old People” wilderness is marked with a line “sharp as the demarcation of a doored wall”(177), but as the old Native Sam moves through the wall, the wilderness swallows him up as he grows “smaller and smaller against it”(177). In “The Bear,” the wilderness swallows up those who enter and once on the inside there is “no fixed path” but an ephemeral channel that the wagon follows, “non-existent ten yards ahead of it and ceasing to exist ten yards after it”(194). Once you are on the inside of the big woods of wilderness, as per the prescription of the myth, all the markings of civilization necessarily cease. This is one of the most recognizable forms of wilderness: a space devoid of human markings. Once the form is established, emptied of its contingencies, the concept of “wilderness” can insert itself and the signification of “wilderness” is able to exert its power. Another blatant example of the signification of “wilderness” without apparent opposition happens further along in “The Old People.” The last day of Ike’s first two week sojourn in the big woods, the text informs us that wilderness is never thought of as “inimical.” In a line that foreshadows the discussion of Keat’s “Ode” in Part IV of “the Bear,” the buck in this idyllic world “forever” leaps as the guns are “forever steady” and in this grand Eden of hunters, nothing is violent nor hostile. It is really the grandest of all mythic gestures. The hunter and the hunted here retain their “ancient rules and balances”(207). It is a perfect Arcadia, and the spectacle of the buck and

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the hunter is taken out of time, like Keat’s lovers, so that the things which could threaten the freedom the buck’s leap signifies—in this case shooting it—appear as “natural” as the immortal springing of the buck. When wilderness is being presented in its mythic manifestation in these hunting stories, it consistently carries a number of descriptors: “immortal” or “ancient,” always “big” and “incorruptible” and invariably there are certain “immitigatable” rules. These are all further examples of the “empty” glass of Barthes’s metaphor, and these telling adjectives are consistently applied to all the mythic forms that wilderness takes: the game, the hunt itself, the hunting party, and of course, Old Ben, the title bear of the story, “The Bear.” In the first paragraphs of that story we’re presented with a dog, Lion, Old Ben, and Sam the Indian-Quadroon mix who are all “taintless and incorruptible”(191). The hunting party is also presented to us as beyond race and class distinctions, a microcosm of an ideal world (191). The hunt itself is “pristine”(233) and made into a ritual (Utley 171). In the “ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules”(“Old People” 182), the game, even when it is doomed to die, is always to some degree otherworldly, “the best game of all”(“Bear” 192). Old Ben himself is apportioned the most mythic dimension of all. He is a “phantom” an “epitome” and an “apotheosis” of wilderness all wrapped into one (193). He is “not malevolent” but “just big .  .  . too big for the very country which was it constricting scope”(193). The old bear even out-mythologizes the mythic space that it inhabits. The superlatives stack themselves up and serve to give these stories an aura of “unity .  .  . a significance that belongs to great myth”(O’Donnell 23). It is no wonder that a generation of critics starting with Malcom Cowley see Yoknapatawpha as Faulkner’s “mythical kingdom” and never seek to question it further (34).5 But question, the text insists, we must. In other renditions of the wilderness myth, humans may be dwarfed by the immensity of the wilderness forms, whether these forms are the land itself or the creatures that inhabit them. But neither humans nor the wilderness are ever entirely “inimical” to each other, a point the narration makes sure we understand. It makes the reader pause a moment, a reader who has become almost too complacent about the proper order of the performance of the myth. Perhaps, this pause suggests, to look at the land as always mythic is a problem. “Wilderness” is predicated on the very important fact that there is a separate space outside the bounds of society where land is sacred, but because it is outside the bounds of social codes, somehow we have every right to do with it what we will. The wilderness myth, in short, elides the responsibility for the land that maintains it. This is the deleterious intention of “wilderness” that Faulkner

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The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses 51 unmasks as he demythologizes the wilderness myth. These hunting stories become something like a Mediaeval cautionary tale, where we learn how not to act by negative example. In other words, if we continue to act the way we do, we might end up like the folks who people these stories. And really, who wants to end up like Ike McCaslin, the apex of “hunter” but paradoxically alone in his “communal anonymity of brotherhood”(257)? In order to teach us our tale, these narratives in more and more overt ways put the contingencies of history, the meaning, back into the mythic form so as to finally jolt us out of our complacency. To cite some obvious examples. The buck in “Old People,” the one that has been made mythic, depends on the death of that one specific buck for the ascendance of “buck” into mythic form. Eric Sundquist observes that in order for “buck” to be mythic, all the specificity must cease, the living breathing specimens must die (161). While Sundquist is not putting his argument into Barthian terms, he recognizes that a transcendent mythos comes at the cost of all the mortal contingencies of the historical moment.6 The hunting party in its mythic form appears to be transcendent of race and class, but as the hunters go about their business, Faulkner makes it clear that the hunting camp is merely a microcosm of the social structure of civilization (Evans 187). The “true hunters,” Walter Ewell “whose rifle never missed”(“Bear” 164), old General Compson, Ike’s cousin/father, McCaslin Edmonds, and Major de Spain are the gentlemen farmers. Boon Hoggenback, Tennie’s Jim and Ash, the latter two are freed slaves, are still the humble servants to these white masters. It is a safari crew worthy of Hemingway, except these hardy hunters sleep in wet clothes and rough blankets instead of pajamas and soft cots. The McCaslin camp is also more permanent than the Hemingway’s. At least the latter has the decency to adhere to the transient clause of the myth. The hunters in Go Down Moses are “roughing it” to a point, but their camp itself is a small settlement with a house and barn for the horses (206). The wilderness myth demands impermanence of its sojourners, but because the camp is a permanent settlement, the neat boundaries of the wilderness form begin to disintegrate. One begins to question this space that these hunters have named “wilderness.” The land on which they hunt is nothing more than a private reserve, reminiscent of the hunting preserves of the aristocracy of England and Europe. Major de Spain owns the land on which they hunt, had acquired it from Thomas Sutpen who had been turning it into a thriving plantation before his sins came back to ruin him.7 There’s nothing pristine and untrammeled about this Southern wilderness of the Mississippi Delta. Faulkner, like his Southern predecessor, Edgar Allan Poe, knew that what is made to look pure and undefiled is actually full of ghosts.8

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The two most obvious ghosts of “wilderness” that deserve closer inspection in these stories are Sam Fathers and Old Ben. These two figures are often argued to be the wilderness itself, its undisputed mythic forms, “a distillation of the powers and spirit and fate of wilderness”(Gold 79). They are also close kin textually because they are inextricably linked in death. Sam dies shortly after Old Ben is killed, and when they die, the material wilderness and its myth are irrevocably changed.9 Old Ben, “dimensionless,” is consistently too big for even the text he inhabits (209). He seems to be the most incorruptible of all the “wilderness” forms, that is, until one examines the structure of his signification more closely. First, Old Ben is twice referred to as a locomotive that crashes through the bush (211, 238). The railroad is the single most destructive thing to wild land, and one wonders why the epitome of “wilderness” is made into the very thing that destroys it. Neil Polk astutely sees that “Ben is no mythological creature but a mortal creature, as Isaac is, engaged in the mutable present moment as Ike is not”(62). During Ike’s second November hunting trip, as he is still learning to be a woodsman, he goes hunting the old bear, or rather he gets lost in the woods and the bear finds him. Sam Fathers tells him that he must relinquish his gun, must abrogate “all the ancient rules and balances of hunter and hunted” so that Old Ben will allow Ike to come near (207). Ike sets out with only his watch and compass to guide him, but after a morning’s worth of searching, he realizes that the gun was “not enough”(208). He must relinquish all that signals his particular time and space, so he gives up his watch—time—and his compass—space. He is now ready to receive the transcendent experience of encountering Ben. With nothing to guide him, Ike becomes lost in the woods, circling back on his tracks to find the bush on which he left his instruments, and as he does, he sees the bear’s footprints. He follows them to a place where “wilderness coalesced”(209), and there, along with the bear, are his watch and compass. It is the bear who brings Ike back into time and place, into history (Polk 62), which turns the whole tenor of the narrative around, allows one to view Old Ben as something not quite so huge. Old Ben, mortal as he is, also dies a death that is unbecoming to the rules of “wilderness.” He dies not by the noble shooting of a gun as the rules permit, but by a crazed man knifing him in the heart. Old Ben is killed ignobly, murdered almost, by Boon Hoggenback, the lesser of the Native Americans who, unlike Sam, is never scripted as anything noble. He is a drunk and a braggart whose only virtue is his unswerving loyalty to McCaslin Edmonds, Ike’s cousin, and Major de Spain. Boon kills Old Ben not in a contest of man against the wild, but almost as a lover protecting his beloved. Old Ben has

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The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses 53 the fierce dog Lion by the throat, and Boon jumps on Ben’s back to save the dog. He knifes the tough old bear in the heart, and while this certainly takes much more courage than just actually shooting the bear, this death, instead of upholding them actually abrogates the rules of hunter and hunted, what the text told us earlier could never be nullified. Old Ben’s death heralds the end of the wilderness, and the way he dies abruptly upsets the careful balance between form and concept that “wilderness” demands. Sam Fathers’ demise comes shortly after Old Ben. For Sam, Old Ben is paradoxically his nemesis and cohort, a paradox that is also part of the sacred aura that surrounds wilderness. For Sam is as coequal to “wilderness” as Ben. It is a refrain that runs through all the hunting stories: “there was something running in Sam Father’s veins which ran in the veins of the buck too”(350). Because this “something” is otherworldly, he is also often critically portrayed as the spiritual father of Ike McCaslin. As the Noble Savage form of the Native American, Sam is an essential component of “wilderness”(Gidley 127).10 No mythic portrayal of wild land would be complete without its wild inhabitants. The Native is part of the wild that must be overcome, but simultaneously, he exhibits the “humility and pride,” that all good hunters, Ike McCaslin included, revere. He is a figure that all “wilderness” men strive to emulate because of his marked relationship to the animal world, his unity with all things. The “noble savage” exhibits the best kind of the hunter, killing only what he needs and honoring the spirit of the animal that gave its life (Dabney 120).11 Sam Fathers, as mythic form, is however undermined by his own history. The specificity of his personal history bleeds into the tightly walled fortress of his mythic form. Very early on in “Old People,” we are informed that Sam is the son of a Chicksaw and a Quadroon, so he is a mixture of ancestry; his very blood betrays his mythic purity. This seemingly pure form of wilderness is further corrupted because the “noble savage” is son of “Doom” a nickname for Ikkemotubbe, a Chicksaw Indian who rose to chiefdom by usurping his cousin, Moketubbe, after the former killed a puppy with arsenic. In short, Ikkemotubbe ruled by fear, not by honor as the myth of the Noble Savage would have him do. He is called “Doom” a bastardization of “Du Homme,” but the nickname is telling. Doom, in an act of his own repudiation, sells the Quadroon woman and their son, Sam, to the McCaslins as slaves.12 As Lewis Dabney notes: “What Sam does not admit .  .  . is that his kingdom, the great woods, is already corrupted and doomed”(132). Not only is Doom’s behavior not becoming a noble savage, he sold his own son into slavery, implicating even the Natives in the degradation of human beings that in Faulkner is coterminous with the corruption of the land. In short,

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nothing is so sacred in a Faulkner text that it is above scrutiny.13 Every form that can be interrogated is, and the neat signification of wilderness is upset at every turn. In 1952, Faulkner gave an address to the Delta Council of Mississippi. He talks to a group of cotton farmers who have appropriated the very land that the hunting stories hold so sacred. Instead of talking about writing or farming as they were probably expecting, Faulkner gives them a lecture about the responsibility that accompanies any real expression of freedom and liberty. He makes himself very clear: freedom is something that we need to work to maintain, and that particular work is being responsible citizens, using our civic voices to speak out against any transgression of freedom that we see. Responsibility is one of our inalienable rights, Faulkner argues, but it is something we have lost through misuse or neglect. Furthermore, we desperately need to regain it if we are going to retain the greatness, the promise of freedom, on which this nation was founded (128–134). Faulkner is not demythologizing “wilderness” for the sheer sake of doing it. There is a larger purpose at hand.14 Once we begin to question the sanctity of “wilderness,” this larger purpose is unmasked. Throughout these stories, we find that no matter how much anyone in Faulkner’s South tries to regain his purity—by whatever means—in some sense all his characters are “part of that South that has bought and sold land and held men as slaves.  .  . . The original sins of the southern planters bar them irrevocably from nature”(Lydenberg 85). While Hemingway refuses to acknowledge the giant elephant of cultural decimation in his living room, Faulkner faces down the other demon on which this country was built, slavery. It would do a disservice to Faulkner’s work to not mention that the themes in the hunting stories of Go Down Moses juxtapose the idea of freedom through the ritual hunt with the horrendous harvest that can only result from the despicable traffic of human beings. As Terence Martin eloquently puts it: “with immense range, Go Down Moses engages the turbulent issues of American history, alludes to the discovery of an already tainted promise in the new world”(qtd in Wagner-Martin 137). His willingness to confront this connection is what makes Faulkner’s work remarkable in 20th century writing on the American wilderness. Most important, the corruption of the land and the degradation of people go hand in hand, and any mythic rendering of that equation to make it look noble belies the devastation that this wilderness myth can cause. The key to this whole puzzle is Isaac McCaslin, son of Buck McCaslin, who in turn was sired by Carothers McCaslin, the Grandfather who began the whole sordid business of rape, incest, and Ike’s subsequent repudiation

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The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses 55 of his birthright around which Part IV of “The Bear” revolves.15 In “Delta Autumn,” late in his life, Ike thinks of himself as coeval with the wilderness (354), but he is alone in his conjecture. Ike can never be a form of “wilderness” because he is irrevocably tainted with his past. Unlike Old Ben or Sam Fathers where one has to dig a little to unearth their respective histories, Ike’s history is always present. He recognizes the egregious wrongs done to the land and to a whole race of people and because of these wrongs, he renounces his heritage, he repudiates his title to the McCaslin plantation as a way to atone for those sins. But while he recognizes the wrongs, the efficacy of his personal act of contrition is questionable at best. “The Bear” has often been anthologized without Part IV, at Faulkner’s request, and early critics argued over whether or not this lengthy section detracts from the unity of this otherwise splendid tale of man conquering beast in the wilderness.16 However, most critics now agree that Part IV, with its classic Faulknerian sentences that go on for pages, is vital to the rest of the story. Through it, the reader finds not only the extent to which we have abdicated our own responsibility, but the length to which we will go to justify being irresponsible.17 In Part IV, Ike gives his extensive reasons for giving up the McCaslin plantation. In so doing, he demythologizes the whole idea of land ownership, but Ike makes the grave mistake of planting another myth in its place—the “wilderness”—that in the end recreates the very ills that he seeks to avoid in the first. Isaac McCaslin, even in recent studies, has been given the distinction of carrying Faulkner’s vision because of his “pride and humility” about hunting and his call for the “communal anonymity of brotherhood” as he repudiates his grandfather’s plantation (257).18 In brief answer to these critics: it is irresponsible of any critic to brand any one character as the representative of the author’s views. Many other critics hail Ike McCaslin as a savior figure. In its simplest expression, Ike represents the figure that “demonstrate[s] the ability of human beings to master the brute forces of nature”(Lydenberg 85). R.W.B. Lewis reads Ike’s act of repudiation as “an act of atonement which may conceivably flower into a redemption”(198). Related to this Ike-as-savior argument is a pervasive critical non-connection between “wilderness” and the sins it seeks to hide. Harry Modean Campbell’s criticism is indicative of this view. He says that as Ike matures, he learns “the primitive mysticism of the wilderness and the ancient guilt which lies upon the bloodlines of his family”(52), implying that the former—the primitive mysticism—can atone and even eradicate the latter in some enigmatic and mysterious way. This line of thinking is exactly what Ike uses to justify his act, and it has larger implications. To mythologize wilderness excuses anyone from having to take responsibility

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for the mess that we’ve created. Somehow, this line of reasoning implies, the wilderness, because it is mythically primitive and thus “mystical” has an otherworldly ability to eradicate all the ills that humankind has perpetuated on itself and on the land. It is an argument that is fundamentally flawed, and it is Faulkner’s task to demythologize the myth of wilderness in order to expose the rotten fruit of that bad logic. That is the purpose of Ike’s long exegesis of his grandfather’s ledgers in Part IV of the story. Ike’s argument for giving up his land at first appears quite reasonable and is very compelling. Part IV begins with Isaac presenting his cousin Cass with the perpetual problem that our American ideas of land ownership present. He makes a cogent point: no one authorized the notion that a man can own land. It is ours to use, but to possess it so that we can sell it, as Sam Father’s father did, or by right of inheritance as Ike could do, is a dubious claim. In free indirect discourse, we discover that Ike questions his grandfather’s claim to the land on the premise that the elder McCaslin had “tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered it .  .  .”(254). The hesitation in the sentence with “believed” is significant. It takes a monumental belief in one’s own rightness to make claim to the land. But Ike makes the further and very important connection that because we believe we can possess land, we have the audacity to believe we can own another human just because he or she is “held in bondage”(254). Furthermore, the slaves are inextricable from the land because the slaves were those who had wrested the “tamed land” from the wilderness. It was on their backs and with their sweat that the land produced profit, the very profit which magnified the innate ruthlessness that allowed Carothers McCaslin to “believe the land was his to hold and bequeath”(254).19 The question Ike poses is sound: what right do we have to think that we possess anything—land or other beings—other than our own bodies and our own selves? Ike makes a critical error, however, in his argument. He finds the strength to tell Cass of his decision to disavow his birthright by his position in space. They are in the commissary, the place where generations of slaves and then freedmen, came for their weekly goods, and the place that held the ledgers, the “lived history” of the McCaslin clan (Dabney 136). Because he is in this space of history and not the mythical place of the hunting camp, Ike feels that he can juxtapose himself and Cass “not against the wilderness but the tamed land,” the “old wrong and shame itself ”(351). Only with history can Ike make his argument make any sense at all. The juxtaposition to tamed land becomes a sort of incantation, for he says it three times, twice in the beginning of Part IV “The Bear” and once in “Delta Autumn.” But what Ike steadfastly fails to connect in his mind is that the tamed land came from

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The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses 57 the wilderness. The two, in the end, are inextricable. Wilderness is owned by no man, as Ike is continually pointing out, but the land in question is owned, has been owned numerous times. The Indians laid some claim to the land, for the Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe, like many of the tribes who populated the American continent, felt that he could sell his land for money or some similar exchange. In this case the recipient of the sale is not the U.S. government but Carothers McCaslin, white slave owner, who then begets the destruction on the land and his slaves that Ike so despises. Ike blinds himself to the fact that his repudiation of land is really as juxtaposed to wilderness as it is to the “tamed land,” for both contain the history that he wants to eradicate in the latter. The idea of the land’s possession, of who has a right to “bequeath” the land to his descendants, has a long and fraught history. The white European tradition holds that whoever works the land owns the land. It was the justification that the American Congress used over and again to systematically strip the Native Americans of their hunting grounds. It began, one could argue, with Christopher Columbus’s possession of the new land of America by speech act alone. Whoever owns the land has the right to use its resources, an idea that is really nothing more than a subscript to the New Eden version of the wilderness myth. Instead of promoting man’s regeneration, the wide-open spaces of wilderness has prompted him to ruthlessly exploit its resources.20 There is no redemption in this more realistic version of the wilderness story, and it is precisely Isaac’s mistake to think otherwise. His act of repudiation is meant to protect the wilderness and the freedom, the purity, the “pride and humility” that it represents. The land is something that we must care for if for no other reason that it is the entity responsible for feeding us. Ike’s mistake, however, is that he’s made wilderness sacred, and by making it hallowed ground, Ike’s repudiation of his land, his birthright and heritage, is a failure of magnitude. It is a base, empty gesture of atonement that mirrors the rank underside of the idealism of America, the greed and stupidity that leads to abject exploitation and which American idealism is all too easily capable of engendering. Some hold that Ike’s repudiation is successful and many argue that it fails. David Evans goes so far to argue that in Part IV of “The Bear,” where Isaac McCaslin relinquishes his land and his birthright as his way of putting an abrupt halt to the degradation, has in it Ike’s sermon which is really nothing more than an America jeremiad (190). In The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch explains that the jeremiad is a form of biblical literature that states at once that while we are God’s chosen people to take his errand into the wilderness, we have also sinned irrevocably because we have failed

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in that mission. The American jeremiad, however, is unique because it saves itself from its own despair because of the unbounded optimism of American consciousness (7–9). As Evans interprets, God’s punishments are made to be a corrective instead of a punishment for punishment’s sake, which serves to solidify the rightness of that mission to tame the wilderness (190). Evans is in the critical camp that argues Ike’s act is a success because Ike offers some sort of salvation, a way out of our unpardonable sins, through his repudiation and his accompanying sermon. What Evan’s argument does bring to light is that Ike’s repudiation is classically American. Americans believe that not only is it their God-given mission to wrest a civilization from the wilderness at whatever cost is necessary, it is also our birthright to “opt out of history .  .  . start over, change things, take control”(Polk 48). Ike does renounce his patrimony, his history, and in his mind his reasoning is sound. By denying himself the tamed land as a way to atone for the sins of his grandfather’s rape of his slave and the subsequent incestuous relationship with the progeny of that previous union, Ike believes this act can somehow “restore the wilderness to the state before it was corrupted by ownership and by commerce in human beings”(Polk 57). With even a small remnant of pristine wilderness in which to re-enact the yearly ritual of the hunt, Isaac believes that what he has done is not only justified but necessary to the preservation of that wilderness. The logic of all this, however, unravels at every turn. First, the need to change one’s history, for Ike, is to do so to restore something that can’t be restored. Second, the idea that Americans are able to opt out of their history, a notion that goes back as far as that original errand into the wilderness, is only part of the game. The hardy folks on the Mayflower opted out of their history by leaving Europe, but they had a grand new scheme to replace the one they tossed out when they decided to make a New Eden for themselves out of the howling wilderness of Massachusetts. There must be something new to take the place of the old to justify even trying to give up the history one was given. Ike never replaces what he’s discarded with any new idea. Finally, our Puritan ancestors worked to carry out their dream. It takes work, hard work sometimes, to effect that change. Ike does not have any new idea to save the wilderness, so there is nothing to work toward. All he can do is lament, which doesn’t help anyone accomplish anything. Perhaps more fundamental even than the fact that Ike does nothing to change his future history is the more basic fact that no one can give up his history entirely. Even though we might think that we are successful, the old history that we denied is lurking in the shadows, ready to bite at unsuspecting moments. Ike vehemently believes that he is free, continually

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The Hunting Stories in Go Down Moses 59 asserts “I am free”(299), insists that by repudiating the tainted land of his ancestors he is free from the past. Cass, however, understands explicitly the folly of Ike’s statement. Cass knows that “I am what I am; I will be always what I was born and have always been”(300). He knows that no one is ever free from his history, but Ike, however, stubbornly insists on his rightness and refuses to hear any of what Cass says. Even when Cass tries to use Ike’s own line of thought, Ike cannot see his folly. Cass reiterates the idea that Ikkemotubbe gave up his rights to the land when he felt that he could sell it, but then asks the all important question that Ike can’t answer: who inherited that misfortune? Is it Sam Fathers, the grandson to Ikkemotubbe, who can only bequeath that tainted legacy to perhaps Boon or to Ike? Ike, however, misreads Cass and simply says, “Sam Fathers set me free”(300). Ike does not see Sam’s legacy as tainted even though he himself says that it is. Because in Ike’s mind, Sam is “wilderness.” He is a pure form that has been filled with “wildernessity” and is a complete, fixed signification. To Ike, Sam must be unspoiled by the corruption of bloodlines and all the dirty secrets they hold. It is interesting to note that immediately after Ike says that Sam set him free from the tainted legacy of both his own and Sam’s tainted primogeniture, the narrative downshifts into the story of another lost heritage. Ike’s maternal uncle, Hubert Beauchamp, had also left Ike a legacy. Instead of land, however, Ike was supposed to receive a silver cup filled with gold coins. It is somehow a more legitimate legacy than land as the text suggests by capitalizing the “L” in legacy and talking of it as a “Thing, possessing weight to the hand and bulk to the eye and even audible”(301). But that legacy with a capital L is as ephemeral a heritage as the land because Uncle Hubert spent not only the gold coins that he publicly left to Ike but cashed in the silver cup that held them. It is an intriguing comparison to the land because both the land and the gold coins were spent recklessly, and Ike is left only with a handful of copper coins and a tin coffee pot that he takes with him on his yearly hunting trips. What is even more notable than the comparison between land and gold is the fact that the sentence that begins the long narrative of how Uncle Hubert made a show of giving Ike his legacy and how it changed into something worthless is a fragment. The sentence begins “And Ike” but the thought is never finished. And because the fragment is juxtaposed to a short and very complete sentence “Sam Fathers set me free,” it is even more telling. Uncle Hubert’s legacy is as meaningless as Grandfather McCaslin’s because Ike abdicates even the power to elect his own freedom by making Sam Fathers responsible for that. No one is responsible for your freedom except yourself, and if you relinquish that fundamental premise,

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then the future looks bleak. The sentence fragment about Legacies can’t be finished because there is no action, literally and figuratively, to finish it with. One’s willingness to be responsible is measurable by how willing he or she is to act. Ike’s repudiation also fails because it is an act of negation that is not followed by any further forward motion. The only actual action Ike does perform is finding the recipients of his grandfather’s legacy. That legacy was a thousand dollars each to the three children of Tomisina, the girl Carothers both fathered and impregnated. Ike’s insistence that he make good on that legacy does nothing to forward the betterment of the ex-slaves or the land. In one bleak incident, he finds Fonsiba, the surviving daughter, starving, cold, crouching animal-like in the corner. She lives with her husband, a black man who has illusions of grandeur, of farming his own land because he is free. The irony of the whole façade is made appalling apparent when Ike asks Fonsiba if she is “alright” in that desolate place. She replies: “I’m free”(280), but it begs the question: free from what? This “freedom” that Fonsiba thinks she owns echoes Ike’s misguided ideas of being free from his heritage. He might be free from his inherited land, but he can never be free from all the degradation that he is trying to run away from. Freedom comes with the willingness to be responsible for what has happened and what is to come. Ike does neither, for he never does anything significant to change the future for the better. Ike’s repudiation fails because it is ultimately an act of irresponsibility. By repudiating his inherited land, he’s washed his hands of actually doing something constructive about the past sins of his ancestors. More than once in the text, Ike declares himself as the one “chosen” to expiate his grandfathers sins. Ike has a habit of speaking for God, and he tells Cass that God somehow knew that even in the corrupt McCaslin grandfather there would be an Isaac McCaslin who would at least feel guilty enough to give up the riches of the tamed land. Because Ike is not going to farm the family plantation, he opts to become a carpenter, like Jesus: “if the Nazarene had found carpentering good for the life and ends He had assumed and elected to serve, it would be all right too of Isaac McCaslin”(309). But there is a marked difference between Jesus and Ike. The Nazarene was always well aware of his goals whereas Isaac’s motivation “would be always incomprehensible to him”(309). Ike is shooting from the hip, knowing that something needs to be done to redress the twin wrongs of slavery and land acquisition, but his petulant and highly selfish statement to Cass lays bare his intention: “I have got my self to have to live with for the rest of my life and all I want is peace to do it in”(288). Instead of action, he falls back on a tired idea to “[glorify] his inaction and isolation”(Stein 79).

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He wants to live simply and without discord, but because his choice has left him in stasis, it also leaves him impotent. In the most ironic twist in the whole story, Ike cannot father a child, and not because he cannot reproduce, but because his wife refuses him sexual intercourse. He becomes “uncle to half a county and father to none”(300) which marks his culpability bolder than any other indication in the book. In the last scene of Part IV, his wife has given him a choice: either Ike must renounce his repudiation or he will renounce any hope of continuing the McCaslin line. He has a choice: future or past. The future would be his own future progeny. The past is Grandfather and his tainted legacy. Part IV ends with his wife laughing hysterically because Ike, of course, refuses to change his decision, and thus any hope of continuing the McCaslin line. Because he refuses to take an active responsibility for his birthright, his wife refuses him sex. There will be no future McCaslins to take responsibility for the land. He can’t bring himself to face the sins of his grandfather, so he will not in turn father a new generation, a generation that he could teach to respect the land as Sam Fathers had done with him. There will be no-one to continue the good fight, as it were, no-one who will be taught to care enough about the value of the land to preserve it. In “Delta Autumn,” as Ike revisits his reasons for renouncing his land, he says again that man only had to use land “well, humbly and with pride,” because it belongs to all men (351). Ike’s argument that he continually tries to enforce is simply a form stewardship, a type of environmentalism. One recent critical study has looked at the similarity between Faulkner’s vision with that of Aldo Leopold, author of The Sand County Almanac and the first major adherent in the 20th century for this particular land ethic (Wittenberg 58). Both Leopold and Faulkner see “a law of diminishing returns of progress”(Leopold xvii) when land is thought of as a commodity to exploit. Leopold would agree with Ike’s assertion that “earth is no man’s but all men’s”(256), and that man was created “to hold the earth mutual and intact” for that well-known community of brotherhood that Ike adheres to so vehemently (257). This is the basic stewardship argument: that because we hold a position of power over the land, it is up to us to use and keep well that land. But the key difference between Leopold and Ike is that Leopold works to change, to bring new life to his depleted farm in Sand County, Wisconsin. Ike does nothing. Ike talks a big talk, but in the end his solution is anathema to stewardship because he does nothing except run away from his duty and responsibilities toward that land which he holds so dear. At the end of “The Bear,” in Part V, Ike returns to the sacred hunting grounds for one last time. The company no longer hunts on that land, for the Major never hunted on it again after Old Ben dies, and two years after

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that event, he sells it to the Memphis lumber company. Ike wants to visit his beloved wilderness before it is completely destroyed by the lumber company. Ike is sixteen; it is five years prior to his repudiation. This narrative disruption between Parts IV and V is there ostensibly to show us the reason that prompted Ike’s decision to renounce his land. Ike visits the site of the graves of the ferocious old dog Lion and his beloved Sam Fathers. But it raises an intriguing question: why disrupt narrative continuity and place the reason after the fact when it could have been placed before without harming the thematic complexity? Part V marks the demise of the Southern wilderness, a collapse that begins with the death of the terrible old bear who refused to be beaten and of the revered old Chickasaw/White/Black high priest of the forest and is finished with the jaws of the chain saw and lumber mill. Because this fact and not Ike’s repudiation ends the story, we are forced to look at the consequence of Ike’s failure. If Ike’s renunciation had any guts to it, the lumber company might not be so readily poised to decimate the forest. Ike finds the remnants of Sam’s and Lion’s grave, for the Major held that small parcel of land back from the sale. It is marked by four cornermarkers that are “blanched white .  .  . lifeless and shockingly alien” in a place that is equally as alien to Ike (317). The graves are not a parcel of land put there to remind us of the greatness of the wilderness that was once there, a miniature National Park as it were, but the grand symbol of what has been wasted. Furthermore, there is a train that now takes Ike practically to the site of the graves, a train that looks like a snake, “dragging its length .  .  . so that it resembled a small dingy harmless snake, vanishing into weeds”(318). This symbolic snake, however, is not harmless. It is the line that connects the logging camp with its two-acre sawmill to the rest of civilization that clamors for the lumber of the sacred forest. As Ike is leaving the graves, he almost steps on a rattler, another snake that looks old and dingy in its used skin. It is “the old one, the ancient and accursed about the earth, fatal and solitary”(328). Ike stands suspended with one foot in the air, and the snake glides out of sight, like the train. Ike hails the snake as it leaves in the now dead Chickasaw tongue: “Chief ” he says, and then “Grandfather.” Francis Lee Utley makes the connection that the snake “is the prototype of the logging train which devours wilderness”(172). The snake, however, could also be read as a symbol of the force prior to the decimation guaranteed with the logging operation. “Grandfather” is not Sam but Carothers McCaslin, the accursed old man who possessed the land, exploited it, without regard to the consequences, whose exploits, in part, made the railroad happen. All roads and railway lines, all symbols and narrative threads, seem to lead to the destruction of the land.

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In “Delta Autumn,” the last hunting story in Go Down Moses, the destruction of the physical wilderness is almost complete. Uncle Ike is now close to 80 years old. Again, he is embarking on the annual hunt, but instead of traveling in wagons, he and his nephews drive in cars, going “faster and faster” because the roads have become increasingly better and the cars are more advanced. Instead of a thirty-mile trip to Major de Spain’s haven, it is two hundred miles to the nearest wilderness. The loggers and the farmers have taken over the rest of the Delta, and to add insult, the wilderness that they hunt is paltry. There are no more wild turkeys on which to practice, no more abundant game. There is no more bear, and to shoot a doe is a crime. In the sixty odd years since Sam taught Ike to respect the land, to have pride in his ability to hunt but to have humility about the greatness of the wilderness spirit, Isaac has watched the wilderness draw “yearly inward” as his life does (335). Albert Devlin notes that “only the receding line of the woods begins to reveal to Isaac the illusory nature of his dreams”(197). But sadly, the receding material wilderness reveals Ike’s folly to us but not to Isaac. He is staunch in his conviction until the last, but what “Delta Autumn” proves is that there is a comeuppance that must be paid for the peace he so desired when he was twenty-one by refusing to do nothing more to assuage his guilt than run away. As Uncle Ike and his various nephews make their journey to the shred of wilderness left, the wilderness that Ike prefers is the one he remembers, the one with the ancient pathways of bear and deer. The power of memory is keen in Ike. It colors all his actions in the past and future, for his memory is owned by one overwhelming image, the wilderness signified as “wilderness.” The fields they now pass are not, in Ike’s eyes, “mile-wide parallelograms wrought by ditching the dyking machinery”(342) but those remembered ones “scooped punily .  .  . from the wilderness’ flank”(342). For Ike, “wilderness” is still more “immemorial tangle” than a puny scrap of forgotten land (342). In actuality, he has virtually no more wilderness in which to demonstrate his knowledge and no more “disciples” who are willing to learn (Pinkser 49). But in his reverie, he doesn’t see how lost he is. Uncle Ike is drowning in memory, too busy memorializing the grand old wilderness of his youth to notice otherwise. Because of all that has happened up until this moment, Ike may forget but we cannot that men waged war against wilderness with the express intent of vanquishing it, and in “Delta Autumn” wilderness clearly has lost the contest. In “The Bear” the “puny gnawing” that Ike remembers with nostalgia in “Delta Autumn” is effected by men who “feared it because it was wilderness”(193). Uncle Ike is the only one in the text who has made that struggle mythic.

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Ike, the old man, is blind to all the irony inherent in what he is mythologizing. No-matter how much he portends to speak for God and talks of how the ravages of game and the woods “will be the consequence and signature of [man’s] crime and guilt”(349), he still can’t see the forest for the trees, to use a tired but apt metaphor. The puny struggle between man and nature of early times that he remembers with fondness in “Delta” is the very same struggle that his own grandfather went through to create the plantation that Ike so despises. The struggle when it is done with “ax and saw and mule-drawn plow”(342) is somehow no real match for the large, “immemorial flank”(195) of wilderness. The plow and ax are here romanticized, made into mythic forms of wilderness because with them, Ike remembers, the wilderness still had a chance. However, Faulkner, the Barthian mythologist, has done his work well, for we can see that the progression of the ax and saw and plow are the forerunners of those same devastating logging machines that chew up large chunks of the forest. Uncle Ike’s idea of wilderness, his mythological space, might still be “impenetrable,” but it never was any match for the dyking machinery that creates the large, unnatural geometry of the modern farm. And here lies the dark crux of the problem of mythologizing wilderness. The willful blindness that myth demands is dangerous. It makes us forgetful of the things that we abhor most in our world. It allows Ike, full of nostalgia for what is lost, to gloss over the early damage done by man and machine and his own decision to forgo the fruits of that combination. But that is not all his reveries blind him to. At the end of “Delta Autumn,” because he is lost in his reverie of rituals, he actually perpetuates the sins with which he has accused his grandfather. “Delta Autumn” has a kind of double-helixed narrative that intertwines the old generation with the new. Uncle Ike’s reminiscence at the hunting camp is woven through the story of his cousin’s son, Roth Edmonds’ willful neglect of his newborn son. This latter story begins with the long car ride to the hunting camp. There is much ribbing about “doe hunting” early in the story, much play on words between “does” and women, and we find out that Roth the previous year had fallen in love with a woman in town and ran away with her to New Mexico. They had lived together for six weeks in a sort of stolen peace that is shattered when she becomes pregnant. Roth will not marry her, for that would go against his code as a Southern planter, one well taught among all the generations of McCaslins. For this woman is black and comes with a very sordid history that Ike has tried to forget throughout his life. So, like his great grandfather Carothers McCaslin, all Roth leaves his paramour is money.

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It all comes together the first morning of the hunt. Uncle Ike is alone in his cot, reveling in another fit of remembrance of the house that was their hunting camp. He remembers Sam, the buck, the baptism of blood, and the importance of humility and pride to not shame the spirit that gave its life. He remembers, again, the conversation in the commissary with his cousin Cass, Roth’s father, and while in a brief moment of clarity he recognizes that “he couldn’t cure the wrong and eradicate the shame,” he twists his logic and thinks: “but at least he could repudiate the wrong” and shame, at least in principal”(351). He sits in the middle of his own mythmaking mind, where the wilderness turns into a “dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land .  .  . would find ample room for both” the hunter and the farmer (354). Into this reverie walks Roth’s lover with the newborn son, and the whole sordid truth of Roth’s conflicting codes over love and Southern miscegenation is recounted. The girl is none-other than granddaughter to Tennie’s Jim, the slave born to the girl who was raped by her own white father, old Carothers McCaslin. The very guilt and shame that Ike has spent his entire life trying to eliminate is standing in front of him, flesh and blood real. In a quick exchange, Ike realizes who she is and thinks his most damning thought: “Maybe in a thousand or two-thousand years in American, but not now”(361). Miscegenation was not acceptable to the grandfather, and it is not acceptable to the grandson. Ike might have renounced the physical reminder of this fact in the hope that he could make the entire problem vanish. But he is too much like his grandfather. He can never disavow the ideology into which he was born. He wants this woman to go North and marry a man “in [her] own race” for she is white enough to find a black man and “forget all this, forget it ever happened”(363). Somehow, in Ike’s mind, that would make up for the past wrongs. But, again, that is disavowing responsibility. Ike’s renunciation of his own birthright is his own peculiar solution to this immense problem, his way of forgetting that “it ever happened.” But he makes one final grave mistake by forcing his misguided thinking on the girl. He does not see, he cannot see, the deep mockery he makes of his reverie about wilderness as it is juxtaposed against what he has just told this girl. Richard Adams finds as I do that Ike’s attempt to mythologize wilderness has no power; it is as impotent as Ike, wrapped in his blanket on the cot because he is unable to get up and dress himself as he faces the girl (131). Ike knowingly fails at the latter mundane task, but he is still unable to ask himself: what good is this renunciation of one’s heritage if it doesn’t help eradicate the problem? For Roth not to acknowledge his son recreates the whole cycle

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of irresponsibility that destroyed people and land in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The girl’s parting words are telling: “Old man .  .  . have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don’t remember anything you ever knew or felt or ever heard about love?” (132). She is referring to the love of man and woman, but the love it alludes to is far more condemnatory. Isaac McCaslin loved the wilderness so much that he lost his ability to reason over it. Because he cannot reason over it, he cannot even begin to redress the wrongs perpetuated on it. That is the danger of myth that Faulkner, I think, ultimately wants to expose in these stories. The beginning of the end of the story opens with one last significantly empty gesture. As the girl is about to leave, Uncle Ike gives her General Compson’s old hunting horn. It seems irrelevant, for what could this horn mean to her? But it is a gesture laden with tragic significance. The horn is the symbol of the most sacred form of “wilderness” to Ike, the hunt, something that the baby boy will never experience as Ike had. The boy will be too far removed from the land, will not have a mentor to teach him all the ritual that accompanies that horn. The wilderness myth cannot be carried forward because there is no one left to tell its tales and teach its tenets. The hunting horn is no longer any meaningful legacy because with that gesture, “wilderness” is dealt its death blow. The actual end of the story completes the job. Roth has killed a doe. The wilderness whose promise of perpetuation is inherent in that doe, is dead now too. Many have commented on Go Down Moses, specifically “The Bear” as Faulkner’s “rhapsodic hymn” to the “eternal redemptive force” of nature and the wilderness (Evans 180).21 If it is, it is one that is full of indictment against those who killed it, and there is nothing to replace it, no story left to tell. While there is a Leopoldian “wilderness ethic” inherent in this cautionary tale of how not to behave, Faulkner leaves us with no way out. Joseph Gold notes those hardy hunters and farmers “tried to possess what they could not possess and now they can no longer even share it”(90). Ike becomes a carpenter whose very work depends on the trees that are being destroyed by the logging mill. He is the ironic Christ figure who can’t save no one or no thing, wanting a simple peace but in the process exacerbates the destruction of the wilderness.22 As in Hemingway, there is nothing at the end of Go Down Moses left to fuel the wilderness myth. As “that doomed wilderness” recedes, as the does are figuratively and literally shot to cover up the trail of human degradation, the myth of wilderness and its magnification of the mundane game of survival into one that is “larger than life” is going to be swallowed up by the cotton fields and man’s greed. No more land to call wilderness. No more myth. In Faulkner, the death of “wilderness” is swift and tragic.

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Barthes’ project in “Myth Today,” is to uncover, to demystify the Bourgeoisie ideology inherent in both the political right and left. He, too, is a ‘mythologist,’ but he is a Marxist philosopher, and so “Myth Today,” like all good Marxist theories, calls for a revolution in the end. He says that “the bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth”(146). Barthes’ revolution is against the bourgeoisie, and while he wants to be rid of it, he acknowledges that whatever takes its place is out of the purview of the mythologist: “It is forbidden for him to imagine what the word will concretely be like, when the immediate object of his criticism has disappeared”(157). Faulkner is very much in favor of abolishing the myth of wilderness entirely. While he accomplishes his task with great dispatch, Faulkner differs from Barthes because Faulkner recognizes that there must be something to succeed what is lost. We have caused the destruction of our forests and plains, the physical thing that sustains us, and that is not without consequence. For Faulkner, the land itself still holds value. That we have denigrated it by making it mythic does not elide our responsibility for it. He demolishes “wilderness” in order to argue that there is something worthy that is related to the land on which we built America, our liberty and our freedom. Faulkner vehemently champions on many occasions these two tenets on which our country is built.23 In the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln, he, too, wants to see the grand experiment of democracy succeed. Faulkner’s achievement is that he proves the important ideas of liberty and freedom are destroyed in the name of pride and greed, and, furthermore, this destruction is sanctioned through myths like “wilderness.” But he writes himself into a corner, unfortunately. Faulkner, in the end, is too disillusioned with what we have done in the past to look to the future and see what we could create. He helps us to understand that making wilderness into a myth is a most dangerous and damaging act to freedom because if we continually think of wilderness as separate from the “tamed land,” a sacred space of the “other,” then we abdicate responsibility for it because it is not ours. By relinquishing responsibility for “wilderness,” we relinquish our responsibility for liberty. He certainly exposes the stasis, the inaction, the hypocrisies of our beliefs about land and wilderness. Disillusioned as he was, “wilderness” did not die with Faulkner. “Wilderness” continues to thrive in our culture, as does the ideal of liberty and freedom, and it takes another 20th century American Modern, Willa Cather, to step back from completely destroying the myth to figure out how to make the myth of wilderness productive and not reductive for America.

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Part Two

Recreating “Wilderness”

“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

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Introduction

On the surface, Willa Cather’s prose appears seamless. It is easy to “get,” sighed one of my students; it is almost always beautiful. On the surface, it is easy to read Cather as writing the most beautiful paean to the American wilderness imaginable.1 When Cather writes in A Lost Lady that Neil Herbert “had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer” and that “this was the very end of the road-making West.  .  . . nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it .  .  .”(145), along with certain acerbic public comments she made, many generations of critics, even fairly recent ones, take her at face value.2 Cather is often read as a writer of nostalgia, one who belongs not to the forward but to the backward looking, as she named herself in the prefatory note to Not Under Forty. According to many, she is a writer for whatever formal or Romantic or feminist or nationalist reason glorifies the pioneer period, and by deeply lamenting its passing, these critics seem to imply, she is closely allied to the perpetuation of both the frontier and the wilderness myth.3 Cather is very aware of the dwindling land called the wilderness. She, more intimately than Hemingway or Faulkner, experienced the demise of the wilderness as her own personal lived history.4 Her family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when she was nine, and when, according to Turner, this was still a viable frontier. She experienced first hand many of the calamities of wresting a civilization from a wilderness, and because she is so intimate with both the grandeur of the wilderness and the way in which it was tamed, she often seems to be eulogizing the pioneer period of her childhood. At times her project does seem as if she is merely perpetuating the wilderness myth without interrogation. Furthermore, as an adult, she, like many of her contemporaries, greatly abhorred the vulgar materialism and the babbitry common to the cultural/historical moment of the 1920s. Reginald Dyck speaks for generations of Cather’s critics when he argues that Cather found the present 71

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“troubling enough” that she “shaped the western past into a world as [she] wished it to be”(26). These critics have a large amount of material from which to make their argument. In O Pioneers! Alexandra Bergson, one of the many immigrants of whom Cather was fond of peopling her texts, recognizes the potential in the land, fights for it and eventually tames it. Captain Forrester’s dinner table fable in A Lost Lady is another representative sample. There, with his wife’s approval, he narrates how he came west as a young man, when all the days were glorious. Instead of relating how he subdued his land into a productive farm, however, he glorifies the land before it was tamed. He remembers not the golden harvests of his grain fields but “good hunting, boundless plains of waving grass, long fresh water lagoons .  .  . where the bison in their periodic migrations stopped to drink and bathe and wallow”(42). This is both a wilderness of pastoral perfection and the space needing to be conquered, for these are the quintessential wide-open spaces that allow one to dream big things, the “railroads across the mountain,” or productive fields as far as the eye can see (45). Captain Forrester and Alexandra Bergson are participating in nothing more profound than the myth of America, the myth that tells us that we are a people set apart with a mission from God to dream the same dreams of Captain Forrester over and over. Problematic as it is ideologically, it is still important to the cultural fabric of America. However, disgusted though she may be at the conventionality of the descendants of the same pioneers that she eulogizes in many places in her texts (Bennett 146, 148), Cather is not simply perpetuating the frontier myth or the wilderness myth. She is not merely “backward-looking.” Cather is acutely aware, even as early as O Pioneers!, that it is not the land but the stories about the land that perpetuate our ideas about ourselves. She is intensely alive to the fact that all myths are stories and it is we who continue to tell them. As Alexandra tells Carl, her childhood friend and fiancé: “it is we who write it, with the best we have”(158). In Cather’s texts, “wilderness” is never thought of as a real, material entity, as it is in Hemingway’s. She does not use the never-never land of Eden as a permanent pastoral escape nor does she write the same story over and over. Like Faulkner, she understands from the outset that “wilderness” is a construction of our culture, but she offers an antidote to his pessimism. Instead of looking at the myth as the excuse we have used as a culture to not take responsibility for the physical land that helped create our national identity, she uses the very fact that it is a constructed idea to her advantage. Because she recognizes the power of stories, she becomes increasingly cognizant of the power of the process of mythmaking, especially of making the wild land that she loves so much into a myth.

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Cather differs from Hemingway and Faulkner in that over the course of her writing life, she comes to understand that because “wilderness” is nothing more than a semantic entity, “wilderness” is something that can be productive for the culture. Instead of being the effect of a myth because it is a constructed story, Cather is able to exert a creative causality over the myth precisely because it is constructed. In other words, instead of granting myth wholesale power to control us, she learns to take control over the myth. She comes to understand that because “wilderness” and all its attendant forms are wholly constructed entities, she can indulge in a rich textual play with them that allows her to shape her reality of America as opposed to being shaped by it. In Barthian terms, she is not the producer of myths, a writer who has a concept of “wildernessity” and merely seeks a form for it. Nor is she the mythologist, like Faulkner, undoing the signification of the myth by pointing out the distortion between the meaning and form. She is rather a Barthian “reader of myth”(Barthes 128). She focuses on the mythical signifier as “an inextricable whole made of meaning and form”(128), and thus for her the signification of “wilderness” is ambiguous. The ambiguity is what allows Cather to be both backward looking and forward looking. As Barthes says, this type of focus on myth is dynamic: “it consumes the myth according to the very ends built into its structure”(128). In Cather, this manifests itself in her playing with all the received forms of “wilderness” while at the same time being perfectly cognizant that she does do. Barthes further notes that this type of focusing allows the person deciphering the myth this way to live the myth as a story at once “true and unreal”(128). Because myth is a rhetorical structure, and because she understands the complex semantics of that structure, Cather engages in the discourse of the wilderness as both the “true,” a material entity that is now lost, and the “unreal,” the mythic entity that has taken its place. Whether that myth is called “frontier” or “wilderness,” Cather’s contribution is significant in that she helped shape the material wilderness into “meaningful contemporary forms”(Love 160). The myth of wilderness has a necessary cultural currency. As Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather recognize, the important ideas of individuality and liberty are an integral part of what “wilderness” keeps alive in our culture. What Cather understands and teaches us to understand is that because myth is a story that is at once both “true and unreal,” we have the power to control how that myth defines us. Myth, Barthes says, “hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion (sic)”(129). An inflection is the action of bending, oftentimes of the object into itself. It is what one does with the voice to show emotion. It is what Cather seeks to inscribe

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into her text enabling that text to keep alive the ambiguity that is inherent in the idea that a myth, while rhetorically constructed, could still be a cultural necessity. Myths may be constructed, but they do not need to be invalidated because of that fact. My task in these next three chapters is not to judge the meaning that “wilderness” purports but to explicate how Cather constructs her texts in such a way that the mythical signifier is an “inextricable whole made of meaning and form”(124) and how she responds, semiotically, to the dynamics and ambiguities that are constructed into the “mechanism of myth”(128). It took Cather over a decade to perfect her ability to write seamlessly the dynamics between form and meaning, the “true” and “unreal.” It is a journey fraught with complications, and to fully understand the complexities of those dynamics, one must look at how it is done through an in-depth look at three of Cather’s novels. Beginning with My Ántonia, Cather begins her project of putting mythic forms in dynamic play with their corresponding meanings so she can begin to show that while “wilderness” is constructed, it is still an idea that holds importance for our culture. The text first pulls apart the idea or form of Ántonia to show how the contingent meaning of that character is able to open up the possibilities that myths are not just one universalized story, but many stories. From one character, the text is able to broaden its scope to stories in general and explore how the play between form and meaning loosens up the tight structure of myth as story so that the reader can begin to see how one is able to control what he or she creates in the name of “wilderness” as opposed to being controlled by the myth. In The Professor’s House, “wilderness” comes as close as it ever will to being completely deconstructed and suffer the same fate as it does in Faulkner. In this novel, Cather explores the dangers of a too constricting formalization, where mythic forms are coveted by their creators as a pure entity and thus are in danger of having the life squeezed out of them. While this novel suggests a way out of this dilemma through language itself, it ends on a grim note. The protagonist of the novel, Professor St. Peter, decides that the delight he has in life, the ability to create myths, has left him with nothing more than a feeling of emptiness. It takes Cather’s next and the last novel in this study, Death Comes for the Archbishop, to offer a way out of the dilemma in which the Professor is left in The Professor’s House. It is a narrative that cleverly puts history back into myth. It shows how important and necessary is the play between form and meaning in all manifestations of “wilderness.” Finally, it teaches us how myths are nothing more than an elaborate language game, and that we can be in the driver’s seat, exerting causative control over our creations of ourselves and our world.

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Chapter Three

The Pattern That Is Not Supposed to Count: Creating “Wilderness” in My Ántonia

In the opening of the novel proper of My Ántonia, Jim Burden, the narrator of the novel, tells the story of how he comes to live on the Nebraska Divide. He is a young boy, 12 or 13 years old, and has just lost his parents. He is coming west to live with his grandparents on their homestead in Blackhawk, Nebraska, and on the train there is another family who is moving west, an immigrant family with a girl about Jim’s age. Jim’s traveling companion, a ranch hand from his dad’s farm, suggests that he go and meet her. Jim is too bashful and contents himself with reading the Life of Jesse James. The significance of this notable. The young Jim would rather read “The Outlaw Jesse James” than talk with the young Ántonia. Jim would rather read tall tales than meet a little girl who will, in her own way, repeat the story of so many pioneers that had come before her, and the stories of whom Jim and many boys and girls like him prefer to read. Jim will spend the course of the novel mythologizing Ántonia because, as this first textual clue illustrates, he prefers the mythic version to the actual history of that person. However, Jim’s narrative of Ántonia is not the only narrative of the novel. Cather writes the novel in such a way to ensure that the specificities of Ántonia’s personal history will also be told. She gives us both the true and unreal stories of Ántonia, making her both human and mythic. Cather understands a fundamental aspect of myth. Mythic stories cycle over lived history, so in My Ántonia, she crafts not one but two narratives. The first narrative is that of Ántonia Shimerda as told by Jim Burden. She is a Czechoslovakian immigrant who comes to America with her family, suffers hardships, and prevails. This narrative celebrates the pioneer spirit of the immigrant, and Cather rightly has been acclaimed as one of the first major American authors to acknowledge the role that the immigrant played in shaping our nation by creating a civilization out of the wilderness.1 But, as the opening 75

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scene suggests, My Ántonia is also a narrative about Jim Burden and his great desire to mythologize not only Ántonia, but “wilderness” as well. Because of this split in the narrative focus between Jim’s story and Ántonia’s story, My Ántonia becomes the vehicle through which Cather is able to first apprehend that there is a rupture in the semantic structure of myth. In this novel, Cather makes her first exploration of what it means to be a Barthian “reader of myths.” My Ántonia has much in it that appears utterly and unarguably mythic.2 But Cather uses My Ántonia to begin her journey into how we shape our world through myth by disassembling the process of how myths are made. The first task is to show how myths, while they appear authorless, are in fact highly authored. Before the story proper begins with Jim reading Jesse James, Cather begins My Ántonia with a fictitious introduction. It begins with an unnamed narrator, a woman who lives in New York, who might be the counterpart to Cather herself. She tells us that she is traveling across the plains of Iowa and to her “good fortune” her traveling companion in none other than James Quayle Burden, the grown-up Jim who is now a lawyer for one of the “great Western railways”(3). Through the course of their journey, they keep coming back to talk of a “central figure,” Ántonia. Jim wants to know why his traveling companion has never written anything about Ántonia. This now unnamed author says that she is not as familiar with Ántonia’s story and asks Jim to write what he remembers. Jim’s response is telling: “I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and felt her .  .  .”(5). In one simple statement, Cather has set up her double narrative so that she can write a story about Jim writing a story, and there is not one, but two stories now present in the production of My Ántonia. Setting up for the double narrative is only the first of many structural moves that this text makes. The “Introduction” ends with Jim handing his story of “My Ántonia” to the narrator/author. He tells her: “don’t let it influence your own story”(6), but we find out that this other story by the unnamed narrator was never written. There is, nonetheless, now two stories with two authors. The story that comprises My Ántonia that this narrator/ author presents is both hers and Jim’s stories: “the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me”(6). “Substantially” is the key term, because it tells us that this other unnamed author did have a hand in creating the story we read, but it also serves to sever authorial responsibility for the text. Jim isn’t telling the story; the narrator isn’t telling it. Someone else seems to be telling the story, and so there are now multiple stories, and multiple authors, of this one form of a woman named Ántonia.

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What this initial move serves to illustrate is the dual nature of myth. Myth, with its stories, fables, and fairytales that compose it are produced by individuals, picked up by a group or society, and told over and over. Eventually there is a myth that seems to have no one behind it actually doing the fabricating. But, what the “Introduction” illustrates is that there is human agency behind myth. Barthes notes that “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality to things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made”(142). But the fact always remains that myths are made. Richard Slotkin notes: “myth can only have a historical foundation because it is a human creation.  .  . .”(“Myth” 80). Once the text establishes that myths are fabricated by people and are not some transcendent entity, it becomes easier to observe the dynamic play of meaning and form in the various mythic signifiers throughout the text. The first mythic signifier that Cather plays with is the land itself. Cather is very fond of the notion of a stretch of land that had yet to be made into a discernible landscape, a definable country. It is a motif that sounds from My Ántonia through A Lost Lady to Death Comes for the Archbishop. It is this kind of space Cather references in her 1923 Nation article wherein the “sunny wilderness” with its tall red grass, the buffalo, and the “Indian hunter” remained undisturbed”(qtd in “Out” Fisher-Worth 34). The opening lines of Part One of O Pioneers! repeats this notion. Titled “Wild Land,” the land had a “fierce strength” a “peculiar savage kind of beauty” and “uninterrupted mournfulness”(8) that even the houses that were erected upon it did not have “any appearance of permanence”(3). It wanted to be left alone, that land, and this is the received form of wilderness. It participates in the notion of “uninterrupted” and “undisturbed” space that is common in the language of “wilderness.” This form of “wilderness” as uninterrupted space is presented to us early in the text. As the young Jim leaves the comfort of the train that brought him west, he is confronted with the immensity of “wilderness.” It is dark in the faint starlight. Jim can see neither creek nor tree nor fence. There is nothing, manmade or natural, that orients him, tells him where he is. This was not a country, he muses; a country is something that has already been fashioned out of the wild land. Here, in the immensity of space, he feels “erased, blotted out”(12). Jim Burden’s first encounter with Nebraska is a land that, by most definitions, is wilderness. It must be so. But what the text then does, is it shows us that Jim makes it so. Jim is a myth-maker. He experiences the undulating nothingness of the prairie as the frightening, howling wilderness, but as soon as he can see it, he immediately recreates it as a pastoral paradise. At first, the land is only a feeling, an undulating movement that leads him to think that “the world

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was left behind,” and that he was “outside man’s jurisdiction”(12). Standing outside the forces of man leaves one vulnerable to the forces of nature. But, if one constructs it as a mythic space, then the space becomes manageable. For Jim, as he experiences the unknown, unseeable, and thus uncomposable landscape, he feels small and inconsequential, so much so that even saying his prayers is irrelevant because “what would be would be”(12). However, from that moment of the frighteningly unknowable initial experience, Jim can craft the vastness of the country in his imagination as a safe place. After his initial experience with this new country, he wakes the next day to find a place of uninterrupted motion, a vast nothingness between sun and sky, a space that stands somehow outside of human contingency. But instead of fear, he finds solace. In grandmother’s pumpkin patch, Jim realizes that between the vastness of earth and sky he could be “entirely happy” because there, he is swallowed up in the grandeur, there he is “part of something entire .  .  . dissolved into something complete and great”(20). The evolution of the land from howling wasteland to paradise of plenty is complete. For Jim. Jim’s epiphany about “wilderness” would remain purely in the mythic realm were it not for one important fact. Jim’s epiphany about “wilderness” happens not in the immensity of untrammeled space but in a garden. The site of domesticated nature, the garden is a safe boundaried place, and it, ironically, serves to unsettle the pat boundaries of this “wilderness” form of land as immense and uncomposed. Gardens are usually thought of as anathema to wilderness, but in Cather, they become one of the principal vehicles through which she disrupts the received ideas of “wilderness.” In the annals of American literature and letters, the garden and the wilderness have had a long and close relationship. The American wilderness, to some of its early viewers, was a vast garden of plenty. In this particular construct, according to Leo Marx, the garden stands for the “original unity, the allsufficing beauty and abundance of the creation”(“Pastoralism” 85). This is the “Garden of the World” according to Robert Beverly, native Virginian writing in 1705 (75), the “great green breast of the new world” in The Great Gatsby. It is the “Garden of the World” theorized by Henry Nash Smith, that connects wilderness to its seeming opposite, the other Eden, the agrarian paradise.3 As an agrarian paradise, wilderness always has all the potential to be a most productive (and lucrative) garden. Wilderness in this guise is mapped onto the symbol of the hardy yeoman farmer, immortalized by Thomas Jefferson in Query XIX in the Notes on the State of Virginia, and it is loaded with cultural and political importance. Like their Puritan forerunners, the yeoman farmers are the “chosen people of God”(165) who are more indus-

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trious and more virtuous because they work the land and they do not work for someone else, what Jefferson believed to be a huge societal ill. Thus, the garden as yeoman paradise is an ideal that speaks to an earlier, simpler, and happier state of society (Nash Smith, Virgin 124). These Gardens of the World are not without their theoretical problems, however.4 Both constructs, the garden and the yeoman paradise, weave into their myth the land as productive in terms of human use. This is something of which “wilderness” tries hard to steer clear. Wilderness, because it is a transient space, seeks to exist in spite of human use. But the fact remains that once the frontier becomes “closed,” the wide-open spaces that we think of as wilderness are now boundaried. The garden as yeoman paradise is not the opposite of wilderness but an extension of it. The garden and the wilderness in this way participate in the same structure, the same kind of space, and gardens thus serve to question the universality of which mythic forms partake. Gardens are highly constructed, intensely boundaried things, as are stories. And no matter how much the land and its inhabitants are writ larger than their material selves, no matter how much a myth would prefer its forms to be suspended in time and space, in Cather all forms are juxtaposed to something textually—a comment, another image—that will limit it, put history back into it, in short bring it back down to manageable size. Because gardens upset the neatness of what Jim is constructing, his other construction, Ántonia, can be interrogated. In his narrative of Ántonia, Jim arranges his idea to suit his mythic tastes. She becomes a mythic form through his memory. It must be so because real life, the meaning, has a nasty habit of intervening. In the “Introduction,” Jim has not found Ántonia at her farm; he does not yet know what she looks like. He plans for any unpleasant surprises, however, by retreating behind the screen of memory: “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again”(241). Myth, it has been often argued, is the process of collective memory processed or “painted” through the imagination.5 Memory seems to be the method of choice for mythic production, for myth, many have theorized, is “memory, transformed by imagination”(Smith “Symbol” 29). Memory plays a significant role, for it is the memory of past perceptions that “modifies the record of original experience”(Slotkin, “Myth,” 74). It is Jim’s act of remembering Ántonia and their first years on the prairie that allow the older Jim to recollect these moments and make them into a story of mythic proportions. The memory of her face, for example, configures the ideal face of Woman for Jim. Ántonia’s was the “closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces”(238). It is one face that is literally re-membered through his imagination, and

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through the imaginative process it becomes a mythic face against which all other faces are judged. Jim relies on memory to create his myths, but the narrative questions the veracity of his creation by actually overdetermining Ántonia as mythic form. Not only is she the face of Woman, she is the perpetual innocent. She has a resilience and buoyancy that belies her rather difficult life. It is the kind of resilience that leads Robert Scholes to read Ántonia as a “young, innocent creature in a raw country”(19) who embodies the idea of the “American Adam” myth put forth by R.W.B. Lewis.6 Scholes sees in Ántonia a figure that is authentically American, who is a “figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history”(qtd in Bloom 18). Like Alexandra in O Pioneers! poised at the edge of the divide and seeing in the shaggy unyielding ridges a promise of new, prosperous land, Ántonia represents the spirit of the new land: raw, fresh, strong, and good. Indeed Lewis names innocence as the key term in the moral vocabulary of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and in My Ántonia it is this strong yet innocent, moral yet socially outcast figure that represents best the form of the “wilderness” man (7). Not only is Ántonia the innocent American Adam, she is also a Gaea or earth mother figure. She is the “representative of matriarchal order that protects civilization and ensures its order”(Ryder 144), an empowered progenitor of early, and thus better, races (Carden 295). She is an earth goddess-woman who can encompass Blanche Gelfant’s odd claim that Ántonia becomes an “ultimately strange bisexual” because she possesses both a “masculine awesomeness” and a “feminine nurturance”(qtd in Ryder 148). This last image actually imbricates the form of “wilderness” man and Earth Mother. Mary Anne Ferguson notes that “Cather created a myth of a heroic woman”(95) in Ántonia. To a Feminist critic, this revises or distances Cather from the “American Patriarchal pastoral” but still serves to make Ántonia a mythic figure (Fryer 55) 7 However, because Cather delights in putting into play these various manifestations of Ántonia, she is not making her character more mythic but more human. There are some who are not blinded by Ántonia’s mythic status and are quick to note that there is a “realistic human being”(Ferguson 96) behind that “mythic process of metaphorical and personal transfiguration”(Blair 104). Because of this fact, the difference between the two narratives are exposed as Jim works to incorporate all of Ántonia’s infallibilities. As the myth-maker, he cannot handle any of the contingencies of Ántonia’s life. When the particulars do intervene into the early process of mythmaking, Jim’s solution is to disconnect from the problem at hand. He actually has a

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bad habit of eschewing Ántonia when she does something by which he cannot abide, such as conceive a child out of wedlock and become “an object of pity”(221) or become the victim of an attempted rape by her employer, the evil if grotesquely comic Wick Cutter.8 These things make Ántonia too real, but while Jim avoids the particulars, they are glaringly there in the text and the reader cannot help but notice that the Ántonia Jim mythologizes is now a toothless, flat-chested, grizzled old woman. Jim returns to visit Ántonia Cuzak twenty years after the “disgrace” of her illegitimate child, afraid of what he might find. Once there, he is relieved because he sees the “full vigor of her personality” battered but not diminished. While he notes the present particulars of all the lost physicality—teeth, hair, and breasts—he sees her “inner fire of life” whose “sap is still running strong”(247). For Jim, Ántonia is still her mythic self; the myth has supplanted the physical. But Ántonia as a human being, subject to the ravages of history, is also very present. This dynamic between Jim’s mythic “unreal” Ántonia and the “true” picture of the old woman, plays through to the end of the narrative. As Jim beds down in the hayloft with Ántonia’s boys, he remembers and remarks: “Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade”(258). He catalogs the images of Ántonia that that he holds in memory and concludes: “She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true.  .  . . She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination .  .  .”(258). While he sees the “true,” the contingent person for a moment, he immediately steps back into mythmaking mode: “She was a rich mine of life,” Jim says here of his mythic figure, “like the founders of early races.”(259). Mary Carden wittily notes that only Cather could make an earth-goddess out of a flat chested woman, but it is not Cather that does this, but Jim. For Jim, the process of mythologizing is now complete. Ántonia is written as large as the sunset and is as heroic and hieroglyphic as the infamous image of the plow on the horizon that overshadows the text at the end.9 However, for the reader, Ántonia is the conglomeration of both the transcendent and the contingent. She is both the “rich mine of life,” and the toothless old woman. She belongs both to myth and to history. She is the representative example of the dynamic between the “unreal” and the “true” in this narrative. Ántonia, both mythic and human, however, is only part of the project to dismantle the construction of “wilderness.” While she is the altered form of the “wilderness” man, which allows the boundaries around that form to be questioned, she is, after all, only a character in the larger story of “wilderness.”

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Through Jim’s story, Cather is ultimately able to demonstrate how the actual stories of the wilderness myth are constructed by deconstructing different aspects of the story. The first instance of this happens in the first fall that Jim and Ántonia spend on the prairie. Jim is teaching Ántonia to speak English and Ántonia is teaching Jim to appreciate diverse cultures. Out on the prairie one day, they come upon a rattlesnake. Snakes are the most wild and dangerous thing that people encounter in this wilderness of the Nebraska prairie. Like Old Ben in “The Bear,” this snake is larger almost than the narrative can bear. It is a “circus monstrosity” whose “abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion”(39) make Jim sick, and immediately we are presented with two important forms of “wilderness”: the hero and his wild, even evil, foe. As thick as the boy’s leg, there is a masculine virility about this snake that Jim must beat out of it. In a David versus Goliath moment, Jim kills the big fat rattler with a spade. After the kill, Jim the mythmaker, makes the snake mythic. He begins to have a “kind of respect” for something so old and so huge: “he seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil”(41). Even in death, the snake is “larger than life.” Power is the vague outline that adumbrates anything gigantic and unwieldy: an army, a giant, the wilderness, and the enemy must be virile, strong and powerful if it is to adhere to the mythic convention of the hero. The adversary must be overwhelming—as “wilderness” always is scripted to be—in order for it to be vanquished. Jim the snake-killer, however, is ultimately not constructed to be the conquering hero of the text. He is rather the storyteller about heroics, and it is his recounting the story of the snake, not the adventure itself, that the myth reveals itself textually. Jim relates to us that he would later learn, through “subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes” that the snake he kills is old and lazy, rendering his adventure a “mock” one (42). He gives the exact formula required for mock heroics: “the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake was old and lazy; and I had Ántonia beside me, to appreciate and admire”(42). It almost makes a mockery of the “wilderness” myth in this guise. In the mythic version of his story, Jim is an armed knight replete with the lady in distress who can later treasure and even exaggerate the deeds done in her name. But even Jim cannot deny the actual happenstance of the story. Like the revelation in the pumpkin patch, the adventure of the snake happens within very safe boundaries, and the myth is downgraded into a mere story. The snake incident teaches one other important lesson about reading myth. Myth wants its experiences to appear always original, not one that has happened hundreds of thousands of times. The snake adventure serves

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to remind us that the general nature of the wilderness myth is not an original experience even though it is often read precisely that way. Mary Paniccia Carden clarifies well this distinction, but for different purposes. Jim first sees the snake as the “monstrous remnant of the presettlement wilderness”(288). It is the wilderness as howling, evil, unforgiving and uncompromising. Once the snake is dead, he exults that the land had “never looked so big and so free”(My Ántonia 41). Carden rightly argues that this construct “reflects American imaginings of the frontier as a space of ‘wide-open’ possibilities” and once that frontier is vanquished, a man can create himself anew (288). She reads Jim’s interaction the wilderness as “belated and secondary” because he is too young and has arrived too late “to act as a conqueror of wild spaces”(288) that comprise the American West. Cather, she argues, is making room for a revision of the old masculinist frontier myth, recasting the “starring role in the national romance” to women like Ántonia whom she argues is “self-created” like any good American but “subject to history”(288). Carden, however, makes a notable error. For her, even though Ántonia is “subject to history,” Ántonia’s experience of the open prairie is sovereign.10 For Carden, Jim’s experience is “belated,” but somehow Ántonia has an original experience to the land. The problem is, Carden sees Ántonia’s ability to create her own way as original, but fails to note that Ántonia’s ability is the same as Jim’s. Their adventures are nothing more than the same old “original” experience of the first white “settlers” of this land experienced. It is these same settlers who started telling the stories that created what Levi Strauss called “bundles of meaning” that became the “national romance” of creating a new identity, a new nation, out of the wilderness.11 The point here is that our relationship to myth is always belated and secondary because we never experience the material reality of a myth; rather we experience it through storytelling. Because myths are stories, storytelling is the vehicle through which it seems the paradoxes of the wilderness—a howling wilderness and a pastoral haven—can coexist.12 But it is the juxtaposition of these two ideas in the most memorable image from My Ántonia that serves to expose the construction of the myth. Jim, now out of high school and at the height of his storytelling power, tells the now grown up Ántonia and her friends, Lena Lingrad and Tiny Soderball, a story about a farmer finding a metal stirrup and a Spanish sword. They are on a picnic, and the girls want to know more about the conquistadors and about Coronado. Jim tells them Coronado dies from a broken heart in the wilderness. Just as Jim is ending his story, the narrative slows to a quiet stillness. The sun is going down, and there is a “great black figure” standing in relief (183). They all strain their eyes to decipher what

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it is and quickly discern that it is a plow left on one of the upland fields. It is a magnified image and stands perfect within the circle of the sun, but the image of the plow quickly turns in on itself. It is first a “picture writing on the sun,” heroic in size, but then it sinks back into the earth “to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie”(183). The image of the plow against the sun could be interpreted as the signature representation of the pastoral.13 It represents in its grandeur the return to nature as an escape from the ills of industrialized, mechanized civilization. It is the peaceful shepherd tending his flock; it is the essential escape that “wilderness” is always scripted to offer. Cather often uses the pastoral idea as well as the pastoral form in many of her works, and she consistently uses references from Virgil’s Aenid and Georgics. The epigraph to My Ántonia reads “Optima dies .  .  . prima fugit,” the best days are the first to flee. It is the typical refrain for anyone seeking to stay static and frozen in time. Cather is not by any means alone. Invoking the pastoral is a particularly American trait, as Leo Marx reminds us. In The Machine in the Garden and again in “Pastoralism in America,” Marx posits that the pastoral idea underlies much of America’s ideas about itself and its landscape. He reminds us that the “New World” with all of its untrammeled and (almost) uninhabited land, might actually be the place wherein its inhabitants “might realize the ancient pastoral dream of harmony”(“Pastoralism” 38). But, again, this is an inversion, an “inflexion” of the myth. The plow is the symbol of the farmer, which is usually thought of as anathema to “wilderness,” but when it is viewed through the lens of the American version of the pastoral, it takes on the hue of “wilderness.” For in the American version, the shepherd turns to yeoman farmer, and the yeoman farmer is a direct descendant of the “wilderness” man, as both seek to begin a “new life” from the wild.14 The plow as pastoral emblem, however, cannot be sustained because of the simple fact that the narrative makes sure to point out that the plow becomes “little” again. The thing itself, no matter how large it is writ on the sunset, the plow, the prairie, even Ántonia, fade too soon and too fast. They all sink back into their “own littleness”(183), their own insignificance, because mythic forms, no matter how immense they may seem in their mythic space, become small when compared to the immensity of the contingencies of history. To myth, the proper order of events would be that after the material object has faded with the sunset, the idea of the plow (like the prairie, or like Ántonia) stands in the wings, waiting to be transformed through imagination and cued onto the stage of myth. But the fact remains that the plow disappears; it is transient, not eternal. Because of its heroic size, the plow partakes of the pastoral ideal briefly, but because of its quick

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evanescence, the image questions the pastoral as a form of “wilderness.” The plow is the very thing that destroys the part of wilderness that is full of “breathtaking sunsets and living folklore”(Athearn 65). It was farmers and not frontiersmen who wrested civilization from the howling desolate waste of wild land and in the process destroyed the very land on which they manufactured their dreams.15 Cather does not stop with that irony, however. She juxtaposes the image of the plow to the story of the conquistadors, and that is very provocative. The plow is usually thought of as an image of peace, but by placing it next to the Spanish sword, the emblem of peace is juxtaposed to the weapons of war, and so the plow is now doubly indicted. The plow subtly becomes not an instrument of peace but a weapon the farmer uses to wage war against the wild land. This is the one place in My Ántonia where Cather comes too close to deconstructing the myth with no way out. John Murphy, for example, argues that by returning to obscurity, the plow represents the “truth of the American experience,” an experience like any human experience that runs in cycles. It is not a “self-sustaining eternity” and recedes back into insignificance (“Catholic” 219). But what is interesting about Cather’s text is that she never fully relegates the plow to a position of irrelevance. The heroically large plow against the sunset remains in our imagination as one of the defining images of the novel even while we understand that it is heroic only for a moment. It is both insignificant in its own little history and significant as a mythic image, “unreal” in its mythic grandness but “true” in its contradictions. By making it obviously both, Cather is responding textually to the “constituting mechanisms of myth,” the dynamics the play between the contingent meaning of the signifier and the mythic grandeur of form (Barthes 128). While Cather saves the plow from complete obscurity, she does ultimately bring the wilderness back to size as it were, not to deconstruct it for the sake of deconstructing it, but to remind us of the actual sweat and hard labor that went into the creation of our country. It happens in another story that Jim tells, one that is not about Ántonia or his beloved pastoral wilderness. Rather, it is another rendition of the story, in one sense of America itself. It is also one of the most tragic stories in the novel. Ántonia’s father, affectionately called Papa Shimerda, commits suicide the first winter the Shimerdas and Jim spend on the divide. Like many of the immigrant farmers who came to the America’s “great American desert” of the prairie, he is unable to eke a living out of the barren prairie of Nebraska. His family lives in a sod house. The land is unwilling to bear its fruit. He is desperately unhappy in this new land of America.

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The Shimerdas, being immigrants, allow Cather to richly complicate the myth of the wilderness as a story about America. By showing how the immigrants through hard work and sheer determination were some of the first to have successful farms, she proves that “wilderness” is not a myth that belongs solely to the white Anglo population. Werner Sollors argues that the immigrants play a vital role in reinvigorating the American pioneer spirit, the ability to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps and make something of oneself.16 But there is also a high price to pay for this ability. Cather explores this price and its connection to “wilderness” not by Shimerda’s death, but through the plot of land under which he is buried. In My Ántonia, this grave becomes the last remnant of those wide-open spaces eulogized throughout the text Like Coronado, Shimerda died of a broken heart in the wilderness. That Cather invokes wilderness in respect to this suicide is crucial. It is the textual clue that ties the plow to the larger issue of wilderness and allows for a retrospective reading not of the suicide but of the grave-site where Shimerda is buried. Whether wilderness is brutal and savage or an idyllic, pastoral escape—or paradoxically both—its mythic structure makes it always a lonely place. It must give the sense of being void of human contact so that it can offer a pristine, uncontaminated refuge from all the ugly and crass materialism that human contact brings. However, it is the site of the grave and the description written around it that takes us out of the realm of the content of the myth and back into the physical world. It clues us into how constructed the actual space of wilderness is, and why it is important to keep a remnant of that physical space. Like the site where Sam Fathers and Lion are buried in “The Bear,” the site of Shimerda’s grave is not “wilderness” per se, but it very ingeniously invokes it. Ambrosh, the eldest son, and Mrs. Shimerda wanted the old man to be buried under the stake that marked the corner over which two roads would cross when the open range would be fenced and the roads would eventually be built (87). However, this crossroads would never materialize. Jim relates in retrospect that the road from the east “curved a little just there” and the road from the west arched to the south so that “the grave, with its tall red grass .  .  . was like a little island”(91). We learn at that point that when the country was finally yoked in surveyed section lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there (90). That little island of tough prairie grass becomes the symbol of “wilderness” because like the plot, wilderness is the remains of the wild land that once was so much in abundance. Surrounded on all sides by civilization, it is a remnant that will always remind those who pass by it or through it of what

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once covered vast tracks of the continent. But unlike the grave in Faulkner’s story, which is there solely to remind us of all that we’ve lost, Shimerda’s grave is a little monument, a place where one visits to remember the greatness on which our country was founded. Here that greatness is both the prairie and the spirit of Papa Shimerda, the little man who represents all the backs on which this great land was created. Wilderness is a necessarily boundaried space. Like the garden, it needs fences and walls to protect it. It is interesting that this grave is enclosed by roads, as definite a mark of man changing the land into landscape as railroads and fences. Here, Cather writes yet another “inflexion” but this time instead of bending the form into meaning, she twists the meaning to allow for the form. The roads, Jim relates, are not harsh realities, but in a certain light “at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star,” the dusty roads “look like soft gray rivers flowing past it”(91). The roads, the very thing that leads to the destruction of wilderness, metamorphose to soft gray rivers in light that is slanted, shaded. It is like the slant of light of “Winter afternoons” in Emily Dickenson’s poem “There’s a certain Slant of light”; the light is death’s agent, but it also makes truth bearable (#258). Cather codes into her text all the ingredients necessary to destroy the magic of a myth, but she is also responding to the dynamics of that myth. Dickenson explains it best: it is the “internal difference/Where the Meanings, are.” Cather understands that the “internal difference” gives the dynamics between meaning and form. Her project is not to destroy the myth but to show the necessity of myth’s existence. There are many ambiguities that exist, always, in myth. “Wilderness” is a construct that has long been read as devoid of human beings. This, of course, belies the large native population that existed in this “untrammeled” land that white Europeans felt so compelled to conquer. Many have derided Cather for her supposed blindness to this fact.17 While she is somewhat guilty of Hemingway’s blindness by never addressing the problem openly, in My Ántonia, there is one significant mention of the Native American. Shimerda’s grave sits on top of an Indian ceremonial ground. Mike Fisher argues that while Cather acknowledges the “Indian’s erstwhile presence,” her short history of Nebraska in My Ántonia does not account for their removal (34). However, Cather, clever writer that she is, also crafts into Shimerda’s little island of untrammeled prairie a hint, albeit a very veiled one, that the scraps of land that are now set aside and designated as “wilderness” have always been inhabited and were supplanted in the march for westward expansion. Whether it be the ghosts of the natives or a tragic immigrant suicide, those who sleep in this sacred ground serve to remind us of all who were sacrificed

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to create that shining city on the hill, the destiny, manifested by God, of “America.” Cather also places within that little island a thinly veiled warning. Cather belonged to an historical age that was very concerned with preserving land and cultures for which extinction was a very real possibility. By creating her wilderness structure as a grave, Cather could, in a Faulknerian vein, be admonishing her audience to be careful, otherwise America might wake up and discover that it is all gone. But Willa Cather is not William Faulkner. She steps back from the chasm of nothingness that total deconstruction forms, and plants us firmly back in the play between the meanings and forms of wilderness. The text leaves us not at a grave but at the site of fecundity. When Jim returns to his beloved Ántonia, she is now a woman who has successfully overcome the wilderness. She and her husband run a successful farm, and she is mother to 12 very lively children. In Book Five, the last section of the novel, Jim Burden travels back to his childhood home after 20 years and finds in Ántonia’s farm a perfect rendition of an American pastoral landscape. Her farm is “up on the hill,” and while it is not a city, it is a verbal construction which announces that at least one lowly immigrant has achieved her “New Jerusalem.” The scene is replete with wide farm-house, red barn and ash grove, and, because this is an American pastoral, cattle yards. There is also the requisite death. Jim comes upon two boys mourning a dead dog, but life is in far more abundance than death in this paradise, and images of life are carried through to the end. As Jim is introduced to all of Ántonia’s children and is shown around the farm, he watches all of children bursting out of Ántonia’s newly made fruit cellar. To him, it is “a veritable explosion of life”(249) and besides the plow is the image most mentioned in the critical discourse.18 It is an image that is usually used to clinch the reading of Ántonia as the form of mythic earth-goddess. But again, the narrative makes clear that it is Jim who mytholgizes Ántonia to the point of vulgar romanticization. To him, she becomes the “rich mine of life, the founder of early races”(259). But Cather has other designs for Ántonia. In the end, Ántonia, the object and effect of mythmaking throughout the text is no longer the object of myth but, like Jim, a maker of myths. Once the “wild” land is made safe, Ántonia also becomes a myth-maker, but she tells her stories from her perspective, and in a wonderfully ironic moment, she tells Jim that she has even mythologized him.19 He has become one of the gang of neighborhood children that she had to raise as she raises her own children now. Every event, even the murder/suicide of Mrs. Cutter and her evil husband Wick, become part of the fabric of Ántonia’s stories, and her stories are notably different

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from Jim’s because that is the nature of myth. The “untamed” land, howling, savage, and deadly, is formed differently in Ántonia’s versions of the same stories that Jim tells, and thus begins the cycle of “wilderness” not as a universal myth but as a story infused with new energy every time someone new tells it. My Ántonia ends, finally, with both the myth and the reality of the wilderness story intact. Jim has left Ántonia’s farm and is in Black Hawk waiting for the train to take him back to New York. To kill time, he walks along a barely perceptible wagon track on the remnant of the open prairie. The experience is humbling, for he finds not any mythic grandeur but discovers “what a little circle man’s experience is”(272). Man’s experience is often transformed into something great, as Ántonia’s experience has been transformed by Jim, but this ending reminds us that the other side, the “true” contingent, human side that tempers any mythic reading is also present. The storyteller’s task is to find a space where those two conflicting ideas can be in concert with one another. In My Ántonia, this happens in the road Jim follows out of town. It is the road of “destiny” for both Ántonia and Jim, for it is the destiny of the nation. The image Cather leaves us with is one of movement, for this road signifies the living paradoxes of “wilderness.” It is both the road in the wilderness—wild, untamed, and free—and the possibilities that are endlessly inherent in that freedom. For the road that goes back to the wilderness is always also the road of progress. By 1918, the publication date of My Ántonia, one did not have to “fight” the wilderness to survive. Wilderness is not a fleeting experience, but as one passes through it, there is tucked away in the imagination one way that it should be experienced. The wilderness tests your wits and your strength, and by doing so it invokes our national heritage. Papa Shimerda’s grave, the plow, even Jim’s snake adventure are all carefully scripted reminders of the kind of spirit that gave birth to our country. Wilderness is a space that allows for a respite from civilization, but like Thoreau’s Walden pond, it is only a respite in order for the sojourner to discover, however briefly, for what purposes he or she lives. The bits and pieces of “wild” land that remain, that we have saved from the ravages of progress, remain vitally important to our national consciousness. In My Ántonia, Cather reminds us that our country was built by men and women who worked, suffered, and lost in order to dream a country into existence that cherishes the ideas of freedom and liberty. These pioneers worked in a land that was brutal and unforgiving, that often times took more than it gave. But this hard work fostered a sense of the individual, and while there are certainly theoretical and practical problems with the form of the

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rugged individual—feminist, colonialist, and otherwise—it still is a construct that many Americans, including Cather, hold dear. “Wilderness” helps reminds us of the importance of our freedom, that we are not subject to the constraints of any tyrannical person or organization. Barthes says that if one wishes to connect a mythical schema to a general history, to explain how it corresponds to the interests of a definite society, in short, to pass from semiology to ideology, it is obviously at the level of the third type of focusing .  .  . it is the reader of myths himself who must reveal their essential function. (129)

Cather, through My Ántonia, finds a way for “wilderness” to correspond to the interests of her society and to ours as well. Instead of being disillusioned by what we have created as Americans through the wilderness myth, she uses the textual space of a story to make her point that if we can consciously control the dynamics between the form and meaning in a mythic signifier, we are well on our way to being able to control what we create in the name of “wilderness.” My Ántonia falls short, however, of fully exploring the implications of the particulars of the wilderness myth. While she has rescued “wilderness” from complete negation as an important cultural idea, she has not confronted the problem of possession. Because wilderness is boundaried, physically by political and geographic borders and mythically by the constrictions of signification through the form and concept, it becomes too easy to possess it, and once one thinks he possesses a thing, whether it be physical or metaphysical, he thinks that it is his to sell. So, the very thing that haunted Ike McCaslin is the very thing that Cather explores in her next expression of “wilderness,” The Professor’s House. There, even though she will come dangerously close to destroying “wilderness” through the story of Tom Outland, she steps back and ultimately comes to terms with the problem that boundaries create.

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Chapter Four

The Boundaries of Wilderness: Gardens, Monuments, Artifacts, and National Parks in The Professor’s House

Journey now easy, and spell cast by remains of forgotten race is potent. Epigraph to Willa Cather’s “Mesa Verde Essay”

My Ántonia ends on a note of bright optimism. The reader, armed with the knowledge of how to manipulate the historical contingencies of a linguistic sign’s contingent meaning with its corresponding mythic forms, is ready to take creative and causative control over “wilderness.” It turns out not to be that easy. Mythic forms are powerful and seductive entities precisely because they appear to be a solution to all that ails us as a culture. In Cather’s next novel that deals with “wilderness,” The Professor’s House, Cather explores the limits of form, for it is a novel about the boundaries we artificially place around forms and the dangers of thinking we can possess them once they are confined by our desires. It is a novel that moves from walled-in Midwestern gardens to the airy desert wasteland of the Southwest that is the fictive counterpart to Mesa Verde. It is peopled with characters who are nothing more than “glittering ideas” but are too restricted by the mythic forms that seek to contain them. The Professor’s House more so than any other Cather text admonishes Hemingway by exploring the dark side of formalization. It offers a corrective to Faulkner by inquiring into not only the dangers of trying to possess something that is nothing more than an ethereal rhetorical entity but using that very fact as a way out of the dilemma of possession. The Professor’s House was published in 1925, seven years after My Ántonia. The National Parks were no longer obscure ideas but cultural icons in the making because the physical space of wilderness was fast diminishing. With the railroads and that new invention, the automobile, the Parks were becoming more and more available to the general public, and the idea that the National Parks were places for the public to enjoy their national heritage was becoming more mainstream. It was also the height of the Jazz Age 91

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with American prosperity and its attendant consumerism reaching dizzying heights. Thematically, this text can be read as Cather’s most straightforward treatise against the gross materialism or ‘babbitry’ produced by a mass population able to consume seemingly at will.1 The novel’s protagonist, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, is disgusted with his family’s envy and greed and his only bright spot is his memory of the novel’s central figure, Tom Outland. For the Professor, Tom is the quintessential American Hero, a “glittering idea” who can save us all from the fate of overt materialism by reasserting the glories of American idealism.2 Cather stated outright that The Professor’s House was her only ironic work.3 It is a text full of ambiguities because while she comes closer than she ever will to deconstructing all the mythic forms of “wilderness,” she stops short from total destruction because that is not a productive use of myth.4 To keep the idea of “wilderness” and all it stands for alive, Cather does not relegate her forms of “wilderness” to the graveyard of myth where all the mythic forms are reified, where history has no place. History always has a place in Cather’s texts because it along with memory is the conduit of myth. So, the abiding problem that keeps the gray area of ambiguity alive in The Professor’s House is how to manipulate the power of the forms of “wilderness” without succumbing to the force of that historically evacuated ideal. The novel is first a story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter who, having finished his life’s work on the early Spanish explorers, becomes disenchanted with life, withdraws from his family, and may or may not attempt suicide. At the end of the novel, the narrator relates how, in his favorite attic study with its old kerosene heater, he falls asleep one evening. The pilot light is blown out, as it always is, by the wind, but the window is also blown shut. He is saved from asphyxiation by the family’s sewing woman, Augusta. After this close brush with death, St. Peter decides that he can live, but because he is utterly disenchanted with his world, he is resigned to carry on, but without “delight”(257). His disenchantment stems not only from his disgust at his crass money grabbing family but at his realization that there will never be another hero of Tom Outland’s caliber. The irony of this is the problem that begets the family’s envy and greed comes from St. Peter’s hero. Tom is not only a mythic western hero but apparently a brilliant engineer, for his “Outland engine,” the text suggests, is the early prototype of the modern day jet engine (31). The engine is the source of all of St. Peter’s problems because Tom is killed in World War I, and there is no clear heir to the potential fortune of that engine. Since Tom is dead, the engine’s design is developed and made commercially available by Louis Marsallus, husband of the professor’s oldest daughter,

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Rosamond. Marsallus’ claim to the engine is through his wife. She had been engaged to Tom before he was killed in World War I, and Tom made her the benefactor of his will, which contained the patent to the engine. This patent has turned into a very lucrative venture and literally fuels the jealousy and envy emblematic of the materialism that the professor abhors and against which he flees. St. Peter is further hounded by his colleague, Dr. Crane, who insists that Professor St. Peter demand from Rosamond a share of the profit of the Outland engine because Crane helped Tom in his experiments. The Professor’s only escape from this mess is to make Tom into an Old West type hero, a perfect form of “wilderness.” The boy the Professor desires to remember is not the complicated person who caused all his trouble but the rough green-horn who is an exceptional student, is curiously well versed in Latin, and who “discovers” the Blue Mesa, the literary representation of Mesa Verde (30). Professor St. Peter remains disenchanted at the end of the novel, however, because he makes the mistake of thinking of Tom as he thinks of his garden. Both are highly constructed forms, and through the garden, Cather illustrates the dangers of a too constricting formalization. The Professor’s garden is the site of ‘first contact’ between the Professor and Tom. It plays a much more central role than Jim Burdens’ in My Ántonia. St. Peter’s garden is a pastoral, sacred space to which St. Peter flees as a respite from all his troubles. But the pastoral is denigrated because it is “an escape in terms of a restrictive confinement”(Strychacz “Ambiguities” 58). As I discussed in My Ántonia, gardens are typically read as the anathema to wilderness. The wilderness is scripted to be untouched and untrammeled, everything the garden is not. Garden’s are “man-made, cultivated pieces of ground”(Marx 85), a form of nature forced to conform to certain aesthetic or pragmatic ideals. In its simplest terms, a garden contains “nature,” but nature that is “domesticated and controlled”(Burt 182). Gardens, Cather suggests, are the best expression of what wilderness has become. Gardens are made to look “natural,” just as myths are, and what Cather shows through St. Peter’s garden is that gardens are utterly formalized representations of nature. It could be perceived as the metaphor of garden as wilderness extended to its most annihilistic end. First, the professor’s garden is made to accomplish essentially the same things as wilderness, for it is a space that partakes of the “male idyll” form of the wilderness myth.5 For St. Peter, his garden “evokes an exclusively masculine paradise” and is an escape to the “natural” that allows him to “remain young in a place without women”(Strychacz “Ambiguities” 52). St. Peter uses his garden as a refuge from the cares of home and work. It is often referred to as his bachelor escape and is his preferred dining area when his family is away.6

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The garden as the male-idyll, however, pales in comparison as a wilderness form when set against the garden’s actual physical description in the text. The professor’s garden is a “tidy half-acre” devoid of grass (6). Its “glistening” gravel and shrubs are “barren,” a fact of which the professor’s landlord Appelhoff does not approve (40). The latter’s garden is a loaded reminder of what a good wilderness is supposed to bear: fruit trees and medicinal plants. Appelhoff ’s garden is the kind of superabundance that is a valued part of wilderness but which St. Peter’s garden is definitely not. The Professor it seems has put too many boundaries on his garden, worked hard to make his garden behave, so it is unproductive. This is a noticeable reversal of the mythic garden of plenty, which is yet another rendition of a “wilderness” form. In this way, Strychacz notes, “[St. Peter’s] garden subverts the idealized American vision”(51).7 St. Peter’s garden might be an aesthetic masterpiece, but it is a space that is strictly controlled. The imposition of order that is traditionally read as productive is sterile (51). Like the tales and myths that are spun in St. Peter’s garden, the garden itself is literally a work of art, nature completely shaped by the master’s hand. The trees are precisely placed, the shrubs coaxed and clipped until they are perfect bushes. The professor had “tended this bit of ground for over twenty years, and had to the upper hand of it”(6). In other words, the Professor’s garden is a form of nature that is utterly controlled, suggesting that an overt formalized rendition of nature is a covert act of violence enacted upon nature. In short, the Professor, by controlling the garden to the degree that he does, seeks to possess it. Possession, however, renders the garden lifeless, and by rendering it as a lifeless, possessed formalization, the text verges on deconstructing gardens and wilderness. If the wilderness is a garden, and gardens are lifeless because they are too hemmed in by the boundaries of form, then Cather seems to have written herself into a corner. But there is a purpose behind the deconstruction of the garden. The garden instructs us how not to employ a mythic form, and the text resurrects “wilderness” through the very thing that seems to order its demise. In order to keep the wilderness myth productive, Cather steps away from specific forms of wilderness and looks at the idea of forms in general.8 Cather does not hide that she is an artist particularly concerned with forms and what they can do. Throughout her collection of essays, On Writing, there are numerous quotations concerning the subject. For example, she tells us that “the higher processes of art are all processes of simplification” which suggest that formalization is the highest of all aesthetic aspirations (40). 9 In another essay, however, she says something even more intriguing. In her art, she wants to find “what conventions of form and what detail one

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can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole .  .  .”(102). She is well aware of the dangers of formal purity and how it can take the life out of something. The Professor’s House, John Hilgert convincingly argues, is a critique of a “too-abstracted rendering of ‘the thing not named’—of the dangers of dehistoricizing what one values in the pursuit of formal purity”(383).10 But that takes us down the path of destruction noted above. Formal purity produces nothing more than a space that is closed and lifeless (Freyer 302). So what does one do? In order to re-infuse life back into pure forms, Cather presents us with an unusual solution. She uses the very thing that is lifeless to show how to put life back into form. She uses the most blatant textual example of the limits of form, the sewing-woman Augusta’s dusty forms that cohabitate with the professor’s notes in his attic study.11 Structurally, these old sewing forms encapsulate the whole problematic of form. The first form we encounter in the novel is a representation of the extreme end of formal purity. It is an entire female figure. It is dressed in a “smart wire skirt” but has no legs, “no viscera behind its glistening ribs, and its bosom resembled a strong wire bird cage”(Professor’s 10). Obviously, it is a perfect form, but there is no life behind this form, nothing that would suggest movement and breath (Schwind 79–80). It is the sterility of formal purity. There is no life, literally, under these skirts. However, there is another form that stands next to this full-length empty form. It is a woman’s torso, and this “bust,” as it is affectionately called by St. Peter and Augusta, represents something else: Though this figure looked so ample and billowy (as if you might lay your head upon its deep-breathing softness and rest safe forever), if you touched it you suffered a severe shock, no matter how many times you had touched it before. It presented the most unsympathetic surface imaginable. Its hardness was not that of wood, which responds to concussion with living vibration, nor that of felt, which drinks something from the fingers. Its was a dead, opaque, lumpy solidity, like chunks of putty, or tightly packed sawdust—very disappointing to the tactile sense, yet somehow always fooling you again. (9 emphasis mine)

What is striking about the bust is that this sewing form gives the appearance of life. It is the subject of much risqué banter between Augusta and St. Peter which further suggests that it furnishes the appearance of something both nurturing and sensual—even sexual—promising so much but offering nothing but a shock to those very senses it seduces. What this sewing form

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suggests is that a form must not only have in it the promise of life, but that promise is a continual process. For the hard shell of a breast is something that is touched repeatedly, promising the delights of flesh, repeatedly, and always those seeking the pleasures are duped, repeatedly. Like the “bust,” a mythic form must have enough suggestion of what it represents in the material world in order for it to seduce again and again. Like the women that the sewing forms represent, if the garden is beautiful but lifeless, if it exists purely as a form, then it does not do not have any way in which to continue to exist. It may look like it is a viable entity, but as pure form it will fool you every time. If there was only the first form, the wire caged figure, this would be the end of the line. But the trick the text delights in here is that the bust is never reduced entirely to a form. The risqué banter, the verbal act of flirtation, what promises sex and which connotes reproduction, fertility, and life, disallows the possession that threatens the distinction of a form. The play in language keeps the idea of the bust alive even while the actual fact of it is hard, stark, and dead. The lesson is this: the very thing that can destroy a mythic form—the fact that it is produced with ideas and words—is the very thing that can keep it alive. It is the risqué banter, the suggestion through language, that gives the form of the bust life. It is through language, the very thing that constructs it, that a mythic form can be reanimated, made into something productive. The other form that St. Peter seeks to possess is, of course, Tom Outland. He wants to control the idea of Tom in stories. But Tom is a conglomeration of many stories. He might be a “glittering idea” to many, but the very boundaries of Tom Outland as mythic signifier of “wilderness” hero is unsettled by the sheer number of perspectives that bleed through the Professor’s construction of him. Tom’s main story, the inset story of the novel titled simply “Tom Outland’s Story,” is the place to begin, for it sets up how St. Peter desires possession of Tom. 12 The story is actually set-up by St. Peter as he tries to edit Tom’s diary. Joseph Urgo notes the contents of the diary are not divulged; in fact they become unimportant next to the story that is supposed to be told.13 Much like the style Hemingway will make famous a few short years later, the diary only records the factual aspects of the Tom’s excavation of the Blue Mesa and is devoid of “the young explorer’s emotions”(238).14 We are lead to believe that the Professor’s inability to annotate the diary stems from his disenchantment with the ever-increasing materialism of his family. Remembering Tom is too painful because it would remind St. Peter of what he has lost. The story that follows, however, is told in first person, in what appears to be Tom’s voice. Tom appears to be the author of his own story, but because we know that the Professor is annotating his diary,

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we can surmise that it is the professor who is telling this story. Tom might be the narrative voice as well as the focal character of his story, but it is very pointedly not his rendition of his own story.15 It is a voice remembered by a storyteller, the Professor, and thus subject to the contingencies of the older man’s memory. Through memory and language, the Professor is able to construct a beautiful abstraction of his idea of Tom. As a mythic “wilderness” hero, Tom is comfortable both in the wide out-doors of the range and in the confined spaces of Latin texts. He is self-taught and forthright. Tom Outland is a quintessential Emersonian cowboy hero without a past and without encumbrances of tradition and conventions, the unified, self-reliant “man thinking” who “sees through the surface of things to the essential meaning” underneath (Dillman 376–381). As the pioneer researcher and amateur anthropologist, Outland seems to represent the antithesis of materialism; he is good, honest, generous and above all the “rugged individual.” Guy Reynolds notes that the “Tom Outland Story” is an adventure tale of discovery: “an exploration narrative which might remind us of other classic American wilderness tales”(143). And of course that is exactly the construction that appeases the Professor. For St. Peter, Tom represents “wilderness.” Tom is made to be a perfect form of that myth. Other characters in the text help to solidify Tom as mythic form. The professor’s other son-in-law and Tom’s classmate, Scott McGregor, tells the professor that “Tom isn’t very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a—a glittering idea”(94). McGregor is basically professing that Tom is now more myth than real human being. The Professor does not protest this; rather it serves to further cast Tom into myth. McGregor’s confession jolts the professor into remembering “as clearly and definitely as he could” every incident he could of the day he first saw Tom Outland (94). He remembers a young “tramp boy” with an ill-fitting suit, ill-suited to the weather, who approaches him, carrying a telescope case that is filled with relics from the Blue Mesa. Tom would like to attend the university, the professor remembers, but St. Peter, weary of this intruder, asks him to recite Latin. Tom does, and recite the first lines from the second book of the Aenid very well. Impressed, St. Peter discovers that the boy had never attended high school but had learned his Latin from one Father Duchene, a priest who had helped him excavate the Blue Mesa. When Mrs. St. Peter invites him in for lunch, he is initially panicked, but once he “warms up in the defense of Indian-housewifery”(100), he forgets his embarrassment and table manners and eats his potatoes and pork chop on the blade of his knife. After lunch, he gives Mrs. St. Peter a pot from his collection and insists that he would much rather that

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she have it than the museums. The Professor remembers that Tom abhorred the idea of what a museum would do to his precious relics, and the irony of this is notable. By editing the diary and telling Tom’s story, that is exactly what the Professor is doing. The Professor museumizes Tom. However, to read Tom as a straightforward representation of the mythic cowboy hero—he literally is working the range when he discovers the Mesa—is to miss the point. Tom is both a source for myth, like Ántonia, but he is also constructed in such a way to instruct us as to how to read a “mythic hero” in such a way so that we do not worship it or him as the answer to all our collective troubles. Joseph Urgo sees, as I do, that Cather does not complacently accept the myths as they have been handed to her because they are simply no longer sufficient guides to the ever changing and ever threatening world of the early twentieth century. Instead, she seeks to create pictures, stories, and images that instruct us how to see the world and recast our role in it (21). Urgo, in fact, offers a useful way to understand how Cather uses Tom to instruct us how to read myths. He notes that Cather creates pictures in her readers’ minds, not by what she places on the page, but by the process Cather describes in her treatise on art, “The Novel Démeublé.” The most often quoted passage reads: “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named .  .  .”(Not Under Forty 40). Urgo finds that the pictures the reader is left with, the “thing not named” is “suggested or communicated to the reader without description”(22). Thus, the reader completes the text, just as the reader must complete a myth in order for the myth to have cultural efficacy. Myths by definition are “unreal,” made to seem transcendent, to stand outside of history, but the “true” aspect of their construction always holds. They are dependent upon the contingencies of time and place in order for their existence to continue. But at the same time myth makes it seem like those contingencies are non-existent. Tom Outland is both the transcendent mythic hero, the form of “wilderness” and the contingent fallible character, the meaning. Joseph Wood Krutch writes in a 1926 review of The Professor’s House that Tom “has no business to dwarf as he does the professor, for he is not made one-tenth so interesting nor is he by any means so richly conceived”(56). For Krutch, Tom is “merely a hero, almost an abstraction”(56) and while this seems to detract from the novel in Krutch’s view, I think that it is precisely the point.16 Tom is very much like his literary precursors, Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill. Like Ántonia, he is fabricated through memory and imagination (Urgo 32–33).17

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What differentiates Tom from Ántonia, however, is that while Tom appears as the “glittering idea,” he is in fact many ideas. The contingent meaning of Tom is apprehended in this case not by the living character in the text, as is the case with Ántonia, but by the many different ways he is remembered and presented in the text by other characters. As the text indicates numerous times, he is no longer the living, breathing Tom, but like Buffalo Bill, is a created literary form. To St. Peter’s wife, Tom is not altogether straightforward because, the text intimates, he was courting both St. Peters’ daughters. But what Tom has become for Lillian is “chemicals and dollars and cents”(Professor’s House 112), and a name Rosamond and Louis have appropriate for their new country home. But to Kathleen, the Professor’s second daughter, Tom is more than a manifestation of materialism. She emphatically states: “Our Tom is much nicer than theirs”(113). Her Tom is the Tom who discovers the Mesa, who is unsullied by the dollars and the useless letters and false excuses those dollars would eventually bring (236, 237). But Kathleen’s Tom is no more real than the man behind Rosamond’s “Outland,” no more than the Professor’s Tom who had been the catalyst of his “second romance of the mind” who had “made something new in the world” and left the “meaningless conventional gestures” to others (234–237). Tom Outland, like the “wilderness” for which he stands, is an abstraction and “many-sided.” He is a “real” character in that he did discover the Blue Mesa and the “Outland engine.” He is “scientist and artist, ‘savage’ and technologist”( Reynolds 125). But he is also “unreal” in that he is also all those chemicals, dollars, and cents that Kathleen abhors and the model hero that the Professor desires to possess. Tom’s various stories, with all their history, makes our hero both an ideal form of wilderness and a fallible human character. He is the representative of the “constituting dynamics of myth”(Barthes 128). There are definite inconsistencies in his character that are very deliberately placed in the text, and while the Professor chooses to ignore them, we cannot. The Professor believes that Tom’s story about his exploits on the Mesa is “nothing very incriminating .  .  . a story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about—until he grows older”(155). It is in fact all very incriminating—for the mythic construct of Tom. For all of Tom’s stories do not neatly converge into one magnificent form. The Professor’s version of Tom as the symbol of the self-less western spirit is always tempered by the other versions of Tom which have caused much chaos. He has played sister against sister; he nullifies his friendship with Roddy Blake, his father figure and cohort in the Mesa exploits. It all denigrates the sheen on his character. Because of the fact that Tom as a mythic form is now a messy conglomeration of ideas, he

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is not a unified “glittering idea” that the Professor can hold sacred. Forms are a composite of even sometimes conflicting ideas which helps to unsettle the very neat and boundaried constructs of the other forms of “wilderness.” It helps keep the forms of “wilderness” from the fate of the Professor’s garden.18 Tom as an amalgamation of different stories, of conflicting ideas, becomes the model that the text uses to measure all other forms of “wilderness.” Jean Schwind notes that the Professor sees the Southwest with its Blue Mesa as a mythic landscape that partakes of the “rugged untamed frontier” that is “dear to the American Heart”(Professor’s 270). Like his garden, it is the important escape from civilization that “wilderness” always offers (Schwind 83). Part of the structure or form of this escape has been described, theorized, and criticized as the “male idyll”(Gilbert and Gubar 208). This is a well-known masculine “retreat to nature” that Leslie Fielder famously points out is an “escape” from civilization. To Fielder, this escape has far reaching consequences for it is “the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall of sex, marriage, and responsibility”(xx-xxi).19 Because women are not allowed in this place of natural refuge, it becomes another “safe” space for the male acting out the myth to enjoy his epiphany and self-discovery in peace (Dollar 98). Much has been made of this “male idyll” as a form of “wilderness,” but it has an important twist in The Professor’s House.20 In “Tom Outland’s Story,” Tom and the companion in his exploits, Roddy Blake, are the lone males on the range. They work together on the open range and decide together to explore the Blue Mesa. From Leatherstocking and Chigakchook to Huck and Jim, Tom and Roddy participate in the “Eden with two males”(Dollar 98) construct that is classic in American Literature. However, this ‘sacred’ American construct is altered in a significant way. The excavation party contains one more member, the cook and ‘housekeeper,’ Henry. Henry becomes a sort of mother figure which creates what Susan Rosowski calls an “American Surrogate Family,” with parenting “displaced into male friendship”(“Chosen Family” 74). This little family is out of balance on two counts. First, there is not supposed to be a mother-figure in the “male idyll.” That destroys the sanctity of the male domain and upsets the idea that the men can enact their myth in peace. Second, and in direct contrast to the first problem, the mother figure is not a woman. The two conflicting problems pull the narrative right back into civilization, exactly what the “male idyll” is designed not to do. But because the men think that they are participating in a “male idyll” construct, history and myth come crashing in together. Climbing onto another mesa shelf one day, Henry, the ‘mother-figure’ is bit in the forehead by a rattler

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and soon dies a grotesque death.21 This is both the specific story of Henry’s demise and the mythic story of Eden set in the same textual space together to show that there will always be something lacking in any construct that one desires to keep pigeonholed into a mythic form. And once one aspect of the primacy of form is questioned, the whole construct falls apart. Roddy Blake, Tom’s counterpart and cohort in his excavations, is excommunicated from the Eden of the mesa because he sold the precious relics that they found on the mesa. He does it so that Tom can go to college, but instead of reading it as a selfless act, Tom punishes Roddy by questioning the basis of their friendship. Roddy will not be treated as such and leaves. The “male idyll” is demolished, shown to be no more a self-contained and controllable form of “wilderness” than a garden is.22 Once the “male idyll” is disassembled, the mesa can then participate in the other more well known wilderness form, the “wilderness” as an escape from all the ills of human contact. After Blake leaves, the mesa is emptied of all its human reminders. Friends, father figures, surrogate mothers, any trace of the contingencies that other humans bring to the table are gone. Alone on the mesa, Tom has drawn inward, contemplating what has just occurred. He is saddened because he has literally lost his best friend, but he also feels righteously vindicated in what he has just done. As he comes out of his reverie, he finds the mesa bathed in “glittering” moonlight. In a landscape bathed in the obscuring light of the moon, all previous tragedies are purposefully forgotten; the land is as empty, as “virgin,” as devoid of all human companionship and their ensuing predicaments as one can get. There and then, shrouded in shadow and slanted light, Tom realizes that “the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion.” Devoid of any of the reminders of the problems that humans can create, Tom has an epiphany. He understands that what he feels for this place is a “filial piety” so pure that he can have his “happiness unalloyed”(226–227). This rhetoric is not much different than that of Jim Burden’s epiphany in the pumpkin patch where happiness is to be “dissolved into something complete and great” and accomplishes the same mythic task. This is the ultimate mythic escape. This epiphany is Tom’s version of how the Professor feels about his garden. The desire for complete formalization, for order, for control, for being able to manipulate one’s environment, is present in all its grandeur in that one sentiment: “happiness unalloyed.” But Tom’s epiphany is very much alloyed, for there was a great loss that precedes it and precipitates it. Whenever there is too much formalization, there is loss. This piety for “family” that Tom so clearly feels in his epiphany is to a place and not to human beings. In “wilderness,” one can feel “one with nature,” what Tom is obviously experiencing

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on the mesa. Part of the classic “wilderness” experience is to go it alone so as to have this transcendent experience, but the enormity of what one needs to give up in order to experience that ‘oneness’ is now questioned throughout the remainder of the text.23 Thomas Strychacz points out that all escapes in The Professor’s House are deeply ironized. He convincingly argues that when Tom Outland’s idyllic flight from human companionship is read against the Professor’s continual need for solitude in both his garden and attic study, the escape that the mesa seemingly presents becomes a prison: “the occasion of freedom is simultaneously the occasion of confinement”( 53). However, as Strychacz notes, the Cliff City can only embody the ideal qualities noted above if it is a lost civilization (54). It cannot have any living beings bringing any contingencies into it.24 Tom and St. Peter might gain a temporary solitude from humanity, but their escapes come at the cost of the “part and parts of human life”(58) that give life its contingent meaning. This includes human companionship, family, and community.25 For the Professor, it is to live with his family but “without delight.” For Tom, it means throwing over his friendship with Roddy Blake. Roddy, however, is never completely absent from the text. He becomes a sort of gadfly, weighing on everyone’s conscience, reminding everyone of obligations not fulfilled, friendships deleted for better, grander things. Because he is the character that most tangibly embodies the loss inherent in a too strict formalization, he fulfills a much larger purpose in this text than simply acting as a corrective to Tom. He is the figure through whom the interrogation of forms is expanded beyond the particulars—the male idyll, the mythic hero—to an interrogation of the very thing that fuels the wilderness myth, the land itself and the possessions contained therein. Through Roddy, the text connects in two very distinct ways the problem of formalization to the National Parks, the most grandiose expression of “wilderness.” Tom’s Blue Mesa is the fictive counterpart to Mesa Verde, the latter which was made a National Park in 1906. Cather made a well-documented trip to Mesa Verde in 1915, and there is general agreement that Mesa Verde is an important source for the composition of The Professor’s House.26 National Parks, like the Professor’s garden, are the perfect way in which to contain something as vast and unwieldy as wilderness. National Parks, because they are made to represent America’s national heritage, are not just tracts of land, but monuments to that heritage. The Blue Mesa is constructed to be the representative monument of America in this text. In chapter one of “Tom Outland’s Story,” the Blue Mesa is first a landmark that tantalizes Tom and Roddy as they “ride the range” in the Southwest desert during the summer. Tom

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understands that “landmarks mean so much in a flat country”(165) because landmarks position you in space. Landmarks, however, are not grand enough to be given national importance, so the landmark is quickly transformed textually into a monument. The scene in which this takes place seems innocent enough. Tom, the honest, hard-working cowboy, is determined to find the wayward cattle that had wandered across the “uncrossable” river to the greener pastures on the mesa. The base of the mesa, Tom is informed by his boss, Rapp, is “like the base of a monument, all the way round”(169). Monuments, according to Michel Foucault, represent a totality of history, a “monumental history” that is “the high points of historical development and their maintenance in a perpetual presence, given to the recovery of works, actions, and creations through the monogram of their personal essence”(94). Monuments are history with a capital “H” and traditionally, they are constructed to appear as sacred cultural texts. The are visual reminders of the value a culture holds for itself. Americans do not question the importance of the Washington memorial or Monticello, for example, for that would question the very basis on which American is founded. Monuments appear invulnerable, synthesizing history nicely into one neat package and demanding complete veneration. A monument is the ultimate representation of form. As a mythic form, the Blue Mesa seems even more impenetrable than St. Peters’ walled-in garden. The mesa is protected by a dangerous river, and supposedly, the only way into the Mesa is through a deep canyon that opens onto the river. It is not a safe crossing. Right at the opening of the Mesa, the river bends, deepening it and increasing its current. It is too deep to cross on human volition alone (169). A horse could do it if cattle could, but it is perilous; it is a job fit only for a hero. Rapp, a rugged cowboy himself, won’t do it, but Tom, cowboy hero, is the man for the job. His curiosity is also piqued by remnants of an ancient culture that he finds strewn on the flatlands around the mesa: an irrigation main, plowed furrows, pottery, and arrowheads. Ignoring Rapp’s “dangerous crossing” warning, Tom proceeds to ford the river with little trouble. Monuments are not the fortresses that they make themselves out to be. Monuments, while they are made to appear invulnerable fortresses, are in fact very easily breached. The ease with which Tom does breach the mesa makes it clear that while the form of the monument wants to look impenetrable, it is not. The monument of the mesa is vulnerable to humans who bring with them their very messy histories. The Mesa, representative of the National Parks and thus a form or “wilderness,” has been quickly exposed. Formalizing the idea of the National Park as a monument of “wilderness” could mark the

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end of the myth. If it is made to be like St. Peters’ garden, completely boundaried and controlled, it would not last long as a signifier of “wilderness.” But National Parks as the best and most visible form of “wilderness” still holds currency in our culture. What threatens “wilderness” is not so much that it is boundaried, but the treasures it contains. National Parks are not wilderness. They are made to look that way for the American people to appreciate and enjoy their heritage. However, the early debates over the parks themselves centered not on the land itself, but what the land contained. National Parks have been from their inception tainted with a never-ending debate over land value. There was a stipulation always present when Congress considered an area for National Park status: was the land viable for commercial enterprise such as mining, grazing, or logging. In other words, the land that was to be set aside as a national park could be a monument to America if it didn’t have any other and more utilitarian purpose. This idea changed somewhat after the debate over Hetch Hetchy, a river valley in the Yosemite that was dammed to supply San Francisco with water. The public become outraged at the waste of a valley whose beauty and grandeur rivaled Yosemite. But economic interests still tend to supersede public enjoyment of the land, even if it is at the expense of a national treasure. 27 National treasures, then, come to mean not the land but what the land contains. Just at the moment when the monument is broken wide open, questioning the sacred integrity of that form, another, more intriguing form is there to take its place. Tom, now safely across the river, scrambles through a box canyon. At the top, he looks up through a veil of snow and sees a “little city of stone, asleep”(179). He has found the sacred mysteries of the monument and Tom proceeds to see in that sleeping city a sculpture, a work of art. It is the artifact and not the land that Tom desperately wants to keep pure, to formalize into an inviolate entity. Tom wants to possess the artifacts, and therein lies the most damning critique of formalization. After Tom finds the ancient Native ruins on the Mesa, he and his friend Roddy begin the work of excavating the mesa. As they work, they discuss what they should do with the ruins that they find. They decide that the government should know about this treasure, and so Roddy funds Tom’s trip with winnings from a poker game he had stashed away. Tom finds the government not interested, and so he returns to the mesa only to find that Roddy has sold the mesa’s relics to a German for $4,000. Tom is incredulous and gives Roddy a lecture berating Blake for selling something Tom says “weren’t mine to sell—nor yours!”(219). He tells Roddy that the relics belonged “to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me

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that have no other ancestors to inherit from.  .  .  .”(219).28 Tom then accuses Blake of selling his country’s secrets, “like Dreyfus”(219). The reference is noteworthy. Captain Dreyfus, a French Jew, was convicted of treason in 1894 for selling intelligence secrets to the Germans, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he had been framed. He was exonerated in 1906, the same year Mesa Verde was established as a National Park. Cather would have been well aware of the date of Mesa Verde’s inception into the Park system, for she visited it nine years after it had been established as a National Park. The actual year that the mesa was discovered by the Whetherill brothers is 1883. It is interesting that Cather makes the fictional discovery of the Blue Mesa the year Mesa Verde became a National Park. It suggests that there is something amiss in this idea of National Parks. The land itself has shown itself to be impervious to formalization, but the artifact is a different case altogether. As Tom is equating Roddy with Dreyfus, Roddy counters Tom’s accusation with “I always knew [Dreyfus] had been framed” and that he had never “sold out” America.29 Roddy’s protest begs the question: who is really “selling out” America here? We tend to want to possess only those things that hold some kind of value. For Roddy, the artifacts represent the means by which Tom will be able to go to college. In other words, they have a definable use value. Tom, however, repeatedly tells Blake that the artifacts hold no monetary value for him; rather they have a more esoteric, intangible value: “I care more about them than about anything else in the world”(216). For Tom, the value of the artifacts remains “pure” and he convinces himself that his intentions towards them are equally pure. The problem that the text will make abundantly clear is that while Roddy sells the relics for money, Tom desires to possess them. Money is means of exchange and Tom may talk a blue streak about not selling the pots and pans of his “poor grand-mothers a thousand years ago”(219). But the fact remains, he felt that he was sufficient enough proprietor of the relics, and they had enough of a particular kind of value, that he could give them away. He was in effect going to sell the secrets of the Mesa’s ancient ancestry to the U.S. government, a government who in the fictional story is not interested. The historical counterpart, however, was extremely interested in Native artifacts. Through the Antiquities Act, Theodore Roosevelt had declared ancient Native treasures property of the United States Government and fined any one selling artifacts or sneaking them out of the country $500 or 90 days in jail (Ise 148–152). But, in hindsight, we understand that the government’s intentions towards these artifacts were as sullied as Tom’s. The historical government of 1906 was concerned with saving the ruins, but it was not concerned with keeping the relics intact in their

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native home; rather, these artifacts were put in a museum. They were placed on display for public consumption. The artifact, as a microcosm of “wilderness,” becomes a vehicle through which the most the most incriminating statement against possession can be made. Artifacts are made to represent the value of a nation just as “wilderness” is. But Charles Crow asks a vital question: “in what sense can a museum own a cultural artifact in the name of a nation”(53).30 In the historical period in which Cather is writing The Professor’s House, there was a very real concern that the native cultures were going to be utterly wiped out, so there was a huge push to place in museums—“museumize”—the remains of these all but extinct cultures (Prucha 10). It is what prompted the 1906 Congress to place fines on looting artifacts. The irony is that when an artifact is museumized, it is placed into the most highly constructed environment possible. To an archeologist and a museum curator, an artifact can help reveal the story of a culture because of what it was used for, or how it might have been used. Before the artifacts were removed from the Mesa, Henry, the cook, and Father Duchene, the local priest who takes an interest in the mesa and its findings, understands the relics in terms of the former aspect. Henry at once identifies a deerskin bag full of tools as surgical instruments (190), and Father Duchene, after a careful study of the ruins and their layout, gives Tom and Roddy an in-depth explanation of the social life of the native inhabitants as well as a plausible explanation of their cosmology.31 On the Mesa, in their “natural” habitat, the ruins have a particular use value. Marjorie Akin, an anthropologist, calls this an artifact’s “techno-function”(3). The use-value of an artifact maintains some of the meaning of the object, restrains it from being reified into a form. The use-value of an artifact allows it to keep some of its specificity and therefore protects it from being completely possessed as a form. Akin, however, argues that once a thing no longer serves the purpose for which it was created, its “techno-function” or use-value is superseded by a “socio-ideological” or mythic one. This switch from “tecno” to “socio” happens quickly in the novel, for while Duchene might understand the everyday use of some of these artifacts, he quickly moves into an interpretation of the artifacts that partake of the “socio-ideological.” Duchene swiftly mythologizes the artifacts into a form of “wilderness,” and the way he does it is instructive. Duchene understands, like Tom, that these were a people who had risen from the “condition of savagery”(198) and had an eye for design. Their water jars, he says, bear a striking resemblance, if not an exact copy, of the designs on the water jars of Crete. The reference to one of the most important islands

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in ancient Greek civilization, in other words, obviously lends credence to the artistic abilities and bears on the cultural importance of the Pueblo Natives who inhabited the mesa.32 Father Duchene, in his learned opinion, believes that the cliff-dweller Indians, because they were more “cultured,” i.e. less savage and barbaric, had lost their art of war, their “brute strength and ferocity ”(Professor’s House 198). He has deftly turned the remnants of an ancient Native culture into an acceptable remnant of western ideals. The mesa culture and its products are therefore collected by Tom and company to “conserve”(Akin 103) not their material function but their cultural value, and not to the culture that made them but to the culture that annihilated them. Once museumized, socio-ideological value takes precedence over the techno-function of the piece, not for the indigenous culture that supplied the artifact but for the dominant culture that appropriates it. To Tom and Father Duchene, the relics partake of a ‘higher’ currency, a cultural reification that belies all the contingent history that makes the artifact valuable in the first place. As a “socio-ideological” icon, the artifact is now “pure,” uncontaminated by the contingent history of its technological function. The artifacts of the mesa, in short, has been elevated into the realm of the mythic; more than any other example in the text, it is, to Tom, the purest form of “wilderness.” As pure form, the artifact as mythic form can now be appropriated neatly back into text as text. As Tom sits alone on the mesa with his unalloyed happiness, he remembers that his diary is hidden away in a rock. The diary had not been sold with the relics; it remained in the place Tom had put it because Roddy says: “That’s your private property”(221). The text makes very clear that Tom owns the document that bears witness to the excavation, and it is this diary that is the final act of appropriation. The diary, above all else, is a rhetorical act of possession. As Tom excavates the mesa, he is in essence destroying the order he originally finds so precious and creates a new one in inventory and description (Schubnell 106–107). Cormac McCarthy violently dramatizes the same act 60 years after Cather in his novel on the mythic American West, Blood Meridian. The leader of the outlaw band of Indian hunters in this novel, The Judge, is huge, sovereign, and brutal. He also has a diary in which he records all the flora and fauna that he comes across in the Southwest desert into Mexico. As soon as the artifact is recorded in the book, the judge destroys it, in order to be “suzerain” of the earth. He does so because otherwise “the smallest crumb can devour us”(198). McCarthy demonstrates the extreme of what Cather is constructing through Tom Outland. If the form has any vestiges of contingency left, it is contaminated and in this construct, dangerous. Either one possesses something or is possessed by it,

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and for Tom, the former is far preferable to the latter. In order for Tom not to be devoured by the enormity of what he has done, destroying friendships and inadvertently selling the secrets of his heritage relics, he remembers that he has his diary. With it, he is able to take complete ownership, not through outwardly violent means but through a simple rhetorical act. In his dairy, he speaks possession. With words, he can utterly formalize that which threatened to move beyond his control. While Tom is perfectly content with what he has done, the dilemma the garden presents, a too sterile formalization, once again threatens to destroy “wilderness.” In order to claim something back from that seemingly indestructible fortress of rhetoric, the text leaves a very pointed reminder that no matter how hard a myth tries to co-opt all forms into it, some contingencies will still leak through the cracks. As Roddy relates the details of how the German removes the artifacts from the mesa, we also learn the fate of “Mother Eve,” a mummified woman who bears a gaping wound at her side. She stays behind. In a darkly comic moment, Roddy tells Tom that her coffin box was too wide for the narrow bend in the road. When her pack mule tried to round the bend, both the mummy and the mule fell into the canyon (221). “Mother Eve” has been left behind in the wilderness of the Mesa (Wasserman 235). One of the more important artifacts of that native culture remains behind in its native environment. Part of the “rew-ins,” as Henry calls them, must remain, just as parts of the material remnants of wilderness must be there in order for the myth to continue. By leaving “Mother Eve” in the wilderness on the side of the Mesa, the text suggests that one cannot completely appropriate, control, order, and formalize the entities that create myth. There must be some contingencies left. In a wonderful ironic twist, it is almost as if Cather is punishing Tom. One cannot help but notice that through the rest of The Professor’s House, Tom himself becomes increasingly more appropriated as a mythic hero. Because Roddy sold the ruins so Tom would have the means to go to school, Tom becomes educated. Because Tom learns physics and chemistry, he creates the Outland Vacuum, and because of that vacuum he, like his beloved mesa relics, will be bought, sold, and traded. Thus Tom himself is made into an artifact and is subject to all the dangers of formalization. But the way out is the way through, and the only way out of the dilemma is to remember that all forms still retain some of their contingent meaning, no matter how they make it appear otherwise. Like Tom and his precious relics, National Parks are appropriated and apportioned wild land that have been made into a mythic space called wilderness. Tom might be as guilty as Jim Burden when it comes to mythologizing the land, but because Tom himself is mythologized, the text

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teaches an important lesson about the nature of the wilderness myth. If we continue to exert control over the material entity of wilderness by mythologizing it, we will ultimately become the effect of that myth. The myth, in other words, will control us. That direction, however, is one that ultimately leads to the death of myth, and Cather is unwilling to travel that road. The Professor’s House makes clear to the reader the dangers of too much formalizing. Cather, however, never gives a satisfactory solution in the end of this novel because she forgets her lesson of the sewing forms—it is language that gets you into this mess, and it is language that can get you out. But she does offer an interim solution. Book Three, simply titled “The Professor,” finishes the story of Godfrey St. Peter. It relates the story of his near asphyxiation from gas and his decision to live without delight, but before he finds himself in his study, saved from certain death by Augusta, he has spent a long summer remembering his boyhood. As the Professor had done with Tom, he uses memory to create a mythic space for his boyhood in Kansas. As a boy, he does not have the worries and cares of mere mortal men. No wife or children to worry about, no salary to fetch. The Kansas boy, as St. Peter calls his earlier self, was like St. Peter’s conception of Tom, an elemental being. This boy is “a primitive,” only interested in “earth and woods and water”(241). This is the boy that the Professor remembers with the most clarity, the most fondness. Lost in his reverie, present time seems unimportant. The Professor, at the end of the novel, is profoundly indifferent to life. He has enjoyed his summer alone, without familial obligations to bother him. He feels that he is nearing the end of his life because nothing interests him, nothing sparks his imagination. With his boyhood, he has spun yet another version of the old tired form of “wilderness” hero, but the text makes clear that this time his memory has betrayed him. His tendency to mythologize, to possess to the point of death those memories he holds dear, leaves him with nothing fresh to create and no new tools to create with. So, as he lays on his couch that reminds him of a coffin, realizing that the wind had finally simultaneously blown out the pilot light shut the window shut as Augusta had always predicted, he asks himself: “how far was a man required to exert himself against accident.  .  . . He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself—was he required to lift it for himself”(248). The only thing that saves St. Peter, the narrator tells us, is chance. Augusta happens to come over, hears the Professor fall to the floor, and is thus able to pull him into the hallway and back into life. Augusta, austere and pious, was “like the taste of bitter herbs”(256), but it is through the old spinster sewing woman that St. Peter finds his will to continue. It is her “matter-of-factness and hard-handedness” as well as her kindness and loyalty that

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the Professor finds comforting(256). He has a sense of obligation toward her because she represents a side of humanity that he can only define as “real.” Augusta is not shaped through memory but is a living breathing entity which in that moment of reckoning for the Professor defines “humankind”(255). But there’s a catch. She is “real” without the “untrue.” This is the solution that the last pages of the novel presents to the dilemma presented at the end of “Tom Outland’s Story,” the problem of being the effect of myth. The Professor realizes in the last paragraph of the novel that in his moments of unconsciousness, he had let something go: “something very precious”(258). What he had relinquished was his mythmaking ability. The Professor’s ability to make myth gave him his “delight” and “joys” and “passionate griefs”(257). He is disillusioned with that ability because he thinks that myth led him down a path of nihilism. Because he sought to control and possess those whom he mythologized, he could never allow any of the chaos of contingencies, any of the meaning that is always present in mythic forms, any kind of free play, and therefore he turns away from myth completely. But this is a bleak solution, for the Professor is left with only the dreary reality of an unrelenting responsibility. He can face his family and the future with a grim fortitude but with nothing more. The Professor’s House is the closest Cather comes to Faulkner’s solution to abandon myth altogether in order to take responsibility for those things that we mythologized. But Cather differs from Faulkner in that in her novel, it is only one character who comes to this conclusion and it is not the conclusion of the novel itself. The one out that The Professor’s House leaves, the final arbiter between the “real” and “untrue” aspect of the wilderness myth is actually, and ironically, the land itself. Artifacts can be removed from their native state, and the large tracts of land can be appropriated ideologically into National Parks, but the land itself is permanent. It is the basis from which all the variations of the wilderness stories are told, all wilderness myths are spun. While the Professor faces his future with fortitude, the novel itself leaves the reader with a memorable image. Before his brush with death and as he contemplates his inertia as a sign that his life is about to end, he thinks about the trip he would like to take. He is prompted into this because Lillian and the Marselluses have been traveling in France and their letters home talk of the trip that they will all take the next summer. He thinks that the only place that would suit him, the only place that would give him some solace, would be Outland’s country, the desert country of the Southwest. There he could “watch the sunrise break on sculptured peaks and impassable mountain passes”(246). It is only the land which would give him the ability to dream: “to look off at those

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long, rugged, untamed vistas dear to the American heart”(246). It is the rugged land of America “calling to all”(246) as a place to start anew. That is the one thread of hope that “wilderness” still gives to the American culture. The Professor forfeited his mythmaking ability because he sought to possess that which he couldn’t, a mythic construct made through his own memory. The novel, itself, however, posits another way out that can still allow for the delight that the professor lost in the end. It is the delight that is endless in the play between mythic form and contingent meaning. It is understanding the importance that history plays even in an entity that would like to appear as transcendent and universal. The end, however, is only a suggestion. The Professor’s House goes too far by unsettling the boundaries of “wilderness” too much. Death Comes for the Archbishop brings back the delight that the Professor lost, the play between wilderness forms and their meanings. It puts history back into myth and remembers the lesson of the sewing forms, to never forget that it is all constructed in language. Death Comes for the Archbishop presents “wilderness” in its most radically constructed form. In this text, the various forms of “wilderness” are pulled apart in the same textual space in which they are put together. They are juxtaposed one against the other, and whether it be through history and the violent consequences of empire building, or through a myriad of western type heroes of the wilderness and the landscape that they conquer, Cather scripts them all in this text, but never to the point that they become purely myth or utterly demythologized. Death Comes for the Archbishop becomes Cather’s culminating exercise in maintaining creative control over the unwieldy giant “wilderness.”

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Chapter Five

French Onion Soup and Other Mythmaking Lessons in Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Everything looks permanent until its secret is known.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

At the end of the Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, the fictionalized first Archbishop of Santa Fe, Jean Marie Latour, is lost in his memories. As he mentally prepares to die, he hears a sound that brings him back to present time for a moment. It is the whistle of a locomotive. While the Archbishop is amused by the sound, he realizes that it marks the end of an era, a time when America still had open country with a “dry aromatic” air that symbolized, for the Bishop, all the promise of “wilderness.”1 Jean Marie Latour dies a few months after December 1888, ten years prior to the “official” close of the Frontier (Death 265). In his lifetime, he had “accomplished an historic period,” from the buffalo roaming free to the “railway trains running into Santa Fe”(Death 273). Like Frederick Jackson Turner, the Archbishop recognizes that the wide-open spaces of America, its glorious, grand wilderness had almost completely been overtaken by “labor and growth and grain-bearing”(275). The Archbishop notices that when the promise of that new land had been fulfilled, when all of the open country that was once wilderness, had been made into rich farm land, the air loses the qualities he holds so dear.2 The dying Archbishop muses that this air “would disappear from the whole earth in time”(275). What Death Comes for the Archbishop makes clear is that the myth of wilderness can be viable if it is understood to be not the thing itself but the promise of the thing. The problem that Godfrey St. Peter ran into in The Professor’s House was that he wanted to capture Tom Outland as an object as opposed to letting him be a “glittering idea.” The difficulty with Ike McCaslin’s repudiation in “The Bear,” is that he wanted to keep the wilderness as a pure object as opposed to letting wilderness be an abstract idea. 113

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What differentiates the Archbishop is that, in his final thoughts, he re-creates “wilderness” not in the dry aromatic air but in the promise that the air holds. This is what Professor St. Peter was missing, what caused him to give up his mythmaking game. Moreover, the intangibles can only be apprehended through language, and while the Bishop is unaware, like Turner in his “Frontier Thesis,” of what he has just accomplished, Cather uses Death Comes for the Archbishop to complete the lesson started in The Professor’s House with Augusta’s sewing forms. The promise of “wilderness” can only be expressed in language. In sometimes overt and oftentimes very crafty ways, Death Comes shows us the many ways in which myth can be simultaneously constructed and deconstructed. It does so by telling many tales in many different voices, and while many have tried to make this novel cohere, in the end, as Cather said of the urge to classify the book, “why bother?”(On Writing 12). For this novel of multiple voices, while it may look, as myth does, as if it is artfully composed and arranged, underneath all the surface smoothness it staunchly remains purposefully inconsistent, disrupted, and fractured.3 Death Comes for the Archbishop is, more than any other novel in the Cather canon, a complex and deeply radical construction of the wilderness myth. It is so radical that it almost reacts against itself and appears to be the most tranquil of all Cather’s narratives. It has often been argued that Death Comes is the highest and best expression of the lost pastoral of the promise held in wild and wide-open spaces. While Cather was deeply unhappy with the direction the modern world was taking, her anguish doesn’t completely wash away her keen feel for the forces of history and the power of myth. If Cather were strictly a writer of the pastoral, then history would be taken out of the game. But, from the first moments of this narrative, history is very much part of the game. Neither the structural fractures that denote history, nor the textual violence that is everywhere in the narrative, is glaringly apparent anywhere in the text. The reader has to really look to find these fractures and in the process finds that the myth of wilderness is constantly being put back into its historical context; it is constantly in the process of being made. While Death Comes for the Archbishop appears “luminously calm”(“Dispossession” Fisher-Wirth 42), it is not because Cather closed her eyes and forgot the world and all its ugliness, but because I think she finally figured out that the art of myth is a game. She realizes in this one text that only an insouciant game of language will help us make sense of the world. What Death Comes is able to accomplish with mythic signification is that it understands de facto that the concept of “wildernessity” is lurking everywhere, waiting to snare any unsuspecting form, but at the same time, the play between meaning and form is constant so that “wildernessity” is

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never fully successful. In other words, it is an intricate and beautifully played game of the mythic form never fully being appropriated and thus never fully “distorted” by the mythic concept because the contingencies of meaning are always there to frustrate the process. Guy Reynolds suggests that Cather favored narrative structures which “revealed ideological tensions but refused to work out solutions to these dilemmas”(173). This adamant refusal towards solutions, closure, or frustrated endings is one of many manifestations of this failed appropriation.4 In Death Comes, Cather utilizes many traditional and some unorthodox manifestations of the mythic form, but instead of emptying the form completely of history, she always retains some of its historic resonance. Thus the “wilderness” is never fully “naturalized,” made to be a-historical and non-contingent. Joseph Urgo argues that meaning in a Cather text is “not inherent, but is discovered or applied by acts of signification”(Myth 181). In Death Comes for the Archbishop, the wilderness myth and its meaning are never fully realized into a thing but remain in play in language, and as such the myth is able to survive without utterly consuming the reader. Many critics read Death Comes as a “serene” narrative that moves always toward unification.5 Edward and Lillian Bloom argue that the Archbishop’s vision takes precedence, and thus the text is about “spiritual timelessness rooted in the unrecorded past and extending toward an unfathomable future”(232). Other critics argue similarly that it is above all a narrative that in all ways unifies opposites, resolves temporal conflicts, offers an “integrating vision” where “spiritual and material opposites” are incorporated into “a final design .  .  . a united vision of heaven and earth”(Arnold 39).6 “Wilderness” at its most mythic has a final design, a unified vision, and as with all Cather texts, this type of reading is justified on one level. The primary narrative of the Archbishop, as well as many of the numerous inset stories, seems to be about the power of faith to reconcile disparate cultures and smooth over the wrongs that one group of people wreak upon another. It is a text that seems to blithely tell the story of American imperialism without regard to the decimation that accompanies it.7 Part of the language game that Cather plays in this text is crafting the text so that this type of reading has validity. As Latour notes early in the text: “The church can do more than the Fort to make these poor Mexicans ‘good Americans.’ And it is for the people’s good; there is no other way in which they can better their condition”(36). Much like Columbus did with the Caribbean natives, the Bishop is using Christianity as the justification to assimilate the natives.8 On one level, “wilderness” as fully signified is made possible because the very act of empire building is predicated on

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time collapsing in the narrative structure. But to read Death Comes as participating in a mythic ahistoricity belies the very structure of the text. For unlike Columbus, Latour realizes at the end of his life that “The Mexicans were always Mexicans, the Indians were always Indians”(286) indicating that his project of Empire building fails to a certain degree. History, while it would like to retain its capital “H” cannot be unified and monumentalized. This novel is about the process of mythmaking, not a paean to the final product, and the narrative’s task in uncovering this process is to first disrupt the idea of beginnings to show how the specificities of time and place are a part of myth. Death Comes for the Archbishop begins not with the beginning of the story of Latour making his way into the Southwest, but in Rome at the Papal court. There is a lavish dinner and sumptuously dressed cardinals, and one of the cardinals who is sipping happily on expensive wine wryly notes to his guests: “Beginnings .  .  . there have been so many”(6). There is a bishop at this dinner who has come from the United States seeking approval for a new bishop to run the newly acquired territory of the Southwest desert. This cardinal is a bit cross with the bishop because anytime there is a new beginning in the “New World,” it is followed by a request for money. New beginnings can be expensive, but the more pressing issue here is that the narrative has immediately constructed not one but two beginnings, the Prologue and the story proper, which immediately unsettles the idea of a clear linear progression of time. In the first beginning, we find ourselves in the most unwilderness of spaces, the garden of the Cardinal De Allande set in the Sabine Hills overlooking Rome. It is a rather over-refined, too dignified, and like the Professor St. Peter’s, an impotent garden.9 It is thoroughly cultivated and utterly constructed. We are in a landscape in the fullest definition of the word because the soft landscape that gives the terrace its luscious view undulates uninterrupted until the eye reaches the seat of civilization, “Rome itself ”(3).10 Its overdone civility is made to stand in sharp contrast to the lowly missionary priest, Father Ferrand, whose purpose it is to save souls in the New World. The Cardinals who attend this dinner find him tedious because he is so forthright in his missionary zeal, and they are more concerned with their wine, tennis, and lost El Grecos than they are with the real work of the church, saving souls. This missionary priest, however, is our first hint that the over-stuffy air is not what we will have to breathe in the rest of the book. He is our first notation of what is to come, for he sets the terms of the many dialogues about “wilderness” that happen throughout the text. This first dialogue

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happens between “wilderness” and garden. Ferrand is grizzled by long hours in the saddle; he recognizes the hardships that the new bishop of Santa Fe will endure as he navigates the southwestern wilderness. It is also no mistake that Father Ferrand, in stark contrast to the soft, aristocratic cardinals in their garden, is our first version of the hardened frontiersman or “wilderness” man. These contrasts are precisely the kind of rhetorical move that Cather uses to teach us how to be astute readers. The text constantly puts stories and mythical forms in juxtaposition, sometimes by similarities and sometimes by differences, but always in order to put two and sometimes three renditions of the mythic form in dialogic and not a dialectic relationship.11 Cardinal De Allande and his refined garden that pointedly overlooks the seat of civilization is decidedly not “wilderness.” This is contrasted to Ferrand as a form of “wilderness” man, and the scene is purposefully constructed to not only contrast wilderness and garden but to alert the reader to another dialogue about “wilderness” with the second beginning of the novel, Book One, “The Vicar Apostolic.” The difference between openings is startling. Instead of a highly refined garden, there we are smack in the middle of a wilderness of the most vicious kind, one with no definable landmarks. The nightmare of geometric sameness in the second opening is key because it is a landscape that steadfastly refuses through most of the book to be easily scripted into something definable and complete like the garden that we left in Rome. Instead of a soft undulating landscape of civilization, Book One opens with a solitary horseman lost in a maze of conical red hills. It is that nightmare sameness that refuses to be made into something completely known; however that doesn’t stop the horseman from trying. The monotony of scenery is broken only when the lone horseman finds something to differentiate the sameness of the geography around him, but what he finds is also something familiar enough to him so that he can begin to make some sense of where he is. What Bishop Jean Latour, the horseman, sees is a cruciform tree (18). As humans, we make sense of the world by finding a form that gives a definable shape to the thing we are looking at. These forms are often prescribed by a thing that is already known to us. In mythic construction, the form is always prescribed, ready to take on its concept to be fully signified into myth. The cruciform tree is a perfect example of how this system is set up. At first, there is an unscripted space. It seems to defy language because the shapes it presents to the eye are all the same. Just as myth helps us make sense of our world, Latour seeks to place himself in this wilderness of sameness by finding a concept that will help define what he sees. The endless supply of red hills he first describes as “haycocks” but rejects that marker

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for “Mexican ovens” because he decides the latter is more appropriate to the Southwest; he is not in France but in New Mexico (19). Latour has named the hills, thus completing in quick succession both linguistic and mythic semiological systems. The text first presents a completed linguistic signs: shape = red hills. This is quickly transformed, however, into the second order system: red hills = Mexican ovens. The shape of the ovens now participates in a certain mythic space having to do with a “Mexicaness,” a mythic concept of Mexico. The mechanics of imbuing the hills with a mythic concept would not be worth noting were it not for the fact that Latour first puts the hills into a French mythological order only to reject it because “Frenchity” is the wrong mythic concept. Because there is a conscious switch in mythic concepts in terms of the red hills, the text instructs us to watch for it with other forms. We’re soon gratified with the other monotonous feature of the landscape, the juniper trees. They, too, look like Mexican ovens, but just one concept would push the text toward unification, so there is another mythic concept waiting in the wings to co-opt the junipers. It happens with one juniper tree that is shaped like a cross. This is an arbitrary distinction that Latour places on this particular juniper tree. To make a tree into a cross shape is not necessarily to make it a mythic entity. But because it is a cross shape, and Latour is a priest, the form of the cruciform tree is quickly taken over by another mythical concept, one that signifies “cross on which Christ was crucified.” In very quick succession, a simple juniper tree is assigned the mythic signification of Christ’s death on the cross and thus partakes of the myth of Christ and all that means to Christians everywhere. The juniper tree is now something other than a mere tree, and the mythic significance of the juniper tree gives the dehydrated priest the courage to move on. This is the unified reading of the juniper; however, there is yet another part of this story that serves to frustrate the tree being fully formed into myth. The narrative also makes it clear that Latour is thirsty because of a very real and potentially lethal problem. The lost priest is suffering from thirst because he got lost in the desert. This contingent fact upsets the purity of Latour’s mythologizing the juniper. The “real” fact that he is lost in the desert because of bad trails is set against the mythic fact of Christ’s crucifixion. The “real” against the “untrue” puts the dynamics of form and meaning firmly in place. No matter how hard the character of Father Latour tries to unify his experience by making the juniper tree appear a naturalized cross, the very narrative in which he’s placed refuses him that comfort. By placing the situation back into its specific context, the text clearly indicates that we are in a world where both myth and material facts coexist; one does

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not take precedence over the other. It is small details like this with which Cather loads her narrative, and they all serve to indicate that in Death Comes for the Archbishop, while myth goes on its merry way of transforming specific history into naturalized History, the process is always frustrated at the last moment and thus is never complete. Cather understands the importance of myth to the fabric of a culture and that myths are perpetuated by the willingness of its readers to continually read a mythic concept into as many different forms as are available. The key with which Cather consistently presents us is that it is up to us, the reader, to read intelligently, to see the form and the process by which it is made into a form, and to apprehend the mythic concept and its ability to co-opt anything it can. By doing all this, Cather is able to show us how the myth of wilderness, no matter how sacred and reified it desires itself to be, is still a construction of language that we can control. This narrative shows us how the wilderness myth is continually being constructed, not in the actual physical space of land and people, but in the realm of language, of semiological systems that have a rich, elaborate play between mythic signifiers and signifieds. And through this rich play, this elaborate game between the land that helped us create the actual bounded space of wilderness and the ideas we cherish so vehemently about “wilderness” keep the wilderness myth alive, productive, and thriving in our own time Myth is made to look as if history is naturalized, but in order for myth to stay productive in a culture, it must be in a constant dialogue with the history that produces it. From the first lines of its doubled beginning, this text reminds us that we are in a historical moment.12 The opening lines of the Prologue and the narrative proper, in fact, are almost exact syntactic replicas of each other which makes us aware of the historicity of the moment. The Prologue begins: “One summer evening in the year 1848, three cardinals and a missionary Bishop .  .  .”(3). The opening to Book One reads: “One afternoon in the autumn of 1851, a solitary horseman.  .  . .”(17). The repetition of dates calls attention to the fact that the stories that follow are in a specific historical time which itself has a larger significance. In 1848, Mexico and America signed the Treaty of Guadaulupe, and Mexico turned over to the U.S. the large tract of land that is now the Southwestern states. The treaty simultaneously marks the inclusion of “new” wilderness to the U.S. territories, with the imperial expansion into the new territory that reaches from what is now Texas to California, and it signals the beginning of the end of the material reality of the American wilderness. Barthes says that myth is an interpellant speech, a speech that hails the reader, makes the reader look at its specificity, but that “at the moment of

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reaching [the reader], it suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent”(129). The repetition of dates hails the reader. The doubled opening with its repeated rhetoric says, “look at me, I am important.” When we do look at it, however, it appears to effect the mythic move of “turning away” to look “neutral and innocent” of the cultural decimation of both the Native Americans and the Mexicans that underlies all western expansion in the U.S. because it is about a priest lost in the desert. The repetition of sentence structure with its heavy insistence on dates serves to frustrate the moment when the myth is trying to becomes naturalized and universalized. By doing this, Cather does something very intriguing with history. She uses the idea of history as “traditional history,” as a mythic form. She does this not to mythologize history, which often happens, but in order to show how history can be put back into the mythologizing process. History, of course, has long been read as a linear progression towards telos. With this type of history, the surface seems glassy smooth. And certainly, one of the pulls of this text is to read its history as finalized and complete. Taking Cather at her word, “it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance”(9). This leveling serves to lend the sheen of unification. It is what Michel Foucault, revisiting Nietzsche, defines as history in the traditional sense. It is to “compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself.  .  .  . The tradition aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity—as a teleological movement or a natural process”(86). One can and does read the entirety of Death Comes for the Archbishop, from the prologue with its decadent cardinals to the Archbishop’s funeral, in this “traditional” way. In this reading, the New World revisions the Old World of the Cardinals. The Church has established a firm hold from the Southwest into the Rocky Mountains, and the new territory has breathed new life into the rather rotten and over-refined air of the High Church of Rome witnessed in the prologue.13 It is a narrative of ideal progress, an example of “ideal continuity,” and it is exactly the kind of move in which myth delights. This theme of ideal continuity is reiterated in the figure of Archbishop Latour in the last weeks of his life who observed that “there was no longer any perspective in his memories”(290). We are told that “he sat in the middle of his own consciousness.  .  . . the great picture of his life”(290). It is an elimination of perspective which guarantees that nothing will disrupt the prescribed, prescripted, centripetal pull of Western, Eurocentric domination.

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This critical stance has the Archbishop’s vision integrating disparate native beliefs and closing off the discontinuities of those beliefs. Guy Reynolds argues this as “the recurrent critical wish to find that either organic synthesis or the yoking together of contraries is the essence of art”(153). This is the reader yoking together contraries which in turn begets the ideal continuity that promotes the “willful erasure” or forgetting that is necessary for imperial domination to take place and continue (Goodman 61).14 The text begins the process of exposing the inadequacies of reading history in its “traditional” form, by showing the reader that there is a problem of reading and understanding history as a completed, composed document and/or monument. The monument around which this narrative revolves is the Archbishop’s cathedral that he works much of his life to erect. But the unraveling of history as mythic form starts before the cathedral is even conceived in the Bishop’s mind. Early in the book, we find Latour marveling at the unscripted landscape, and as the young priest stands on top of the 300 foot mesa, Ácoma, at sunset, he admits that his history is different than the ancient rock people and their mesa: “He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams”(103). Father Latour, title character of the book and the representative of the institution of the Church, is made to stand for the forces that too often have succeeded historically to group, make relevant, and form a totality of religion and culture. Latour always wants time to collapse, to have his history be a “glorious history of desire and dreams.” Latour has a strong presence in the narrative; his is a compelling vision. However, the history that is presented to him at Ácoma is ancient and unknowable. It unsettles the neatness of Latour’s desire for “traditional history.” A finished text of history, like landscape, like art, and like myth, is shaped, arranged, composed, and above all storied. Cather tells us, in her letter to the Commonweal November 23, 1927, that her narrative models for Death Comes are the frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes of the life of St. Genevieve, as well as the Golden Legends of the Saints’ martyrdoms. Both “models,” she says, are “the reverse of dramatic treatment,  .  .  . something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition”(On Writing 9). While this is the extra-textual evidence that critics use to argue the calm quiet exterior of the narrative, the frescos and legends are actually close kin to the French Onion Soup that Father Vaillant makes for the pioneer/missionary priests for their first Christmas dinner in the desert. Vaillant is Latour’s Sancho Panzaesque vicar who complains that he must use inferior American ingredients to make his beloved French soup. Latour mollifies

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him by saying: “A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup”(39). Like the way in which myth appears, the composition of the soup is a finished product; the masterpiece may look definitive and complete, but as Latour unwittingly points out, the soup is actually in a constant process of being created. Furthermore, this French Onion Soup is made from onions, the “leek’s lowly cousin”(39). The composition of the soup has changed with the circumstance. It is no longer a soup that is fully “French,” as it has added new “American” ingredients. Soup changes with available produce. The way in which frescos and saint’s legends are interpreted alters according to the cultural/historical moment in which they are being read. Thus, the meaning of the soup and the frescoes are constantly changing due to the influx of new influences and new ideas. Vaillant would like to see a constant, unchanged “Frenchity” in his French Onion Soup, but with that same soup, Cather is able to show us how mythic concepts are absolutely dependent upon history to keep them alive. The Bishop tells his vicar that there is a “thousand years of history” in this Americanized soup. But at the same time, because onions are substituted for leeks, the text makes it clear that history is not nicely linear. It consists of constant disruptions and dislocations in that linear progression of time. History is beginning to resemble the uncomposed landscapes of the Southwest rather than a finished product. Because there are many different histories that underlie the characters and events in this narrative, it enters into the realm of Foucault’s “effective history”(86). With this type of history, unity is “easily disintegrated.” It is a history that “deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature,” that obstinately refuses the millennial ending, or any telos, for that matter (88). If “traditional history” is mythic, “effective history” is its opposite, and it is with this type of history that Cather begins to really indulge in her language games with myth. The games begin with the pervasive use of sunsets. Whenever anything important is going to occur, from the opening line to the last three paragraphs, we are in twilight, the beginning of the close of day. Latour and his companion, Father Vaillant, first enter Santa Fe at sunset; Latour returns to Santa Fe to die at sunset. Sunsets we are told in the prologue is the Cardinal’s eccentric preference for the beginning of his dinner. It is when the light is just right, “when the vehemence of the sun suggest[s] motion,” “full of action” with “a peculiar quality of climax—of splendid finish”(4). To write, to paint, to eat, and to mythologize requires the right light. Sunsets, representing traditional history, have that peculiar quality of “splendid finish” the Cardinal likes so much. History is an act of writing from

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hindsight, always about the past, but never complete. Perhaps, as the text suggests, it can only be written at the sunset of an event. If the idea of “traditional” history partakes of twilight, but “traditional” is the exact thing that is being questioned, then perhaps the narrative is nudging us to look at the “sunset” book, Book Eight. And it does not disappoint, for there, in all its yet-to-be-assembled splendor, is the Archbishop’s Cathedral. The Cathedral is more Monument than Tom’s Blue Mesa, and it is the monument that could easily be made into a beautifully finished document of history. For it begins as a golden hill of rocks outside of Santa Fe, and by the end of the narrative it will be splendidly shaped, sculpted, and finished. As one of the main, if not central, images in this text, the Cathedral is the symbol of traditional history. It is the culmination, the finished product/ monument, perhaps “the most finished artifice”(Lost Lady 93) of the history of “ideal continuity” of the church. But traditional history has already been exposed as inadequate, and this monument does not completely hide the fraught history of the Catholic Church. Death Comes for the Archbishop never completely forgets that Church history is about colonization. Thus the Midi Romanesque Cathedral is the most telling representation of Cather’s project of teaching her readers how to read myth because it is both the privileged monument and the place from which everything unravels. The Cathedral, in short, is a set-up. The rock that is its skin is indigenous to the hills outside Santa Fe, a rock that reminds both the Archbishop and Father Vaillant, not of their new country, but of the hills outside Clermont, France, their home. The Archbishop picks a style of architecture he thinks unobtrusive, that will compliment the landscape best. He will have it built by a French architect because he does not trust an American builder. Only a French architect will realize the Archbishop’s “dearest ambition” to build the “first Romanesque church in the New World”(243). The monument to the “new beginning” of the Church in the New World is suspiciously looking somehow more French than American. Latour is convinced that an American will certainly build “one of those horrible structures they are putting up in the Ohio cities,” or “a clumsy affair of red brick, like an English coach-house”(243). While it appears to be so in the text, the Ohio brick church in the narrative is not completely anathema to the Midi-Romanesque style. Historian Bruce Ellis points out on the first page of his Preface to his study of the actual cathedral in Santa Fe that the sturdy French Midi Romanesque style was often used in churches across the nation because it was less pretentious, less costly, but nonetheless sufficiently exotic. By 1869, he writes, “it appeared in Spanish-dominated, adobe-built Santa Fe, New Mexico, like a bit of mainstream Yankee culture somehow slipped into a

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backwater eddy”(xi). This “mainstream Yankee culture” is exactly what the fictionalized Archbishop wants to avoid. Cather was a thorough researcher, and while there is no documented evidence to suggest that she knew this fact, she did travel extensively in the Southwest and was a keen observer of her surroundings. So this assertion that this Midi-Romanesque church be “first in the new world” when in fact it is anything but a “first,” makes the reader suspicious that what appears as a mythic “first,” is anything but. Cather doesn’t stop with architectural styles, either. The history of the place on which the Cathedral sits comes quickly under interrogation. The Cathedral, which is supposed to be “new” and built “for the future,” is actually a monument to the destruction of the past, the necessary destruction for that future that the Bishop envisions. The actual Cathedral sits off the plaza in Santa Fe, and it partakes of the history of the many religious icons that have been reinscripted depending on the dominant religion of the moment. The Archbishop’s new and splendid Cathedral is actually built not only on top of, but encapsulates an older church turned Cathedral—the Parroquia, a Spanish style adobe church, which itself participates in the history of destruction because it was built on top Native American sacred ground.15 The cathedral is not new; rather it is a sort of architectural palimpsest, what Derrida calls the trace.16 As John Hilgart notes, “all of an artifact’s history is equally present and legible within it”(388). Once the skin is peeled away, the monument is anything but a finalized and unified document of history. Once the form of the Cathedral-as-monument is exposed, the dialogue between myth and history is made manifest. To stay productive, the myth must actually look underneath, must penetrate the walls, the skin, the surface, the paint on the canvas. While History endangers the myth, the palimpsest of history helps keep myth productive. While myth pretends to be “neutral” and “innocent”(Barthes 125) of historical contingencies, in order for it to stay productive in the culture, it actually needs a constant infusion of those contingencies. Without the palimpsest, the erasure of the history of violence necessary in empire building is complete, but as with any trace, the writing underneath cannot be entirely erased. Empire may appear snowy-white and pristinely beautiful to those who are willing to forget, but this text reminds us that forgetting is not an option. Once we see how history as mythic form is constructed, it becomes very easy to see that there are consequences to this particular history in question. The history of American land acquisition that is necessary for the formation of the idea of wilderness is also a history of physical and psychological violence. Critics like to ignore the existence of this violence in the text. Reginald Dyck, for example, argues that Cather, “the prairie writer with the greatest

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commitment to a pastoral vision,” uses “various strategies to make violence safe” such as making it exotic or minimizing the evil underlying it (58–59). This view serves to neutralizes the violence that is very present in all layers of the text. Granted it isn’t presented as an in-your-face kind of horror because that would utterly demystify “wilderness” and that is not Cather’s intention. Rather, violence oftentimes lies just below the surface, and this serves to not dissolve the reality of that violence but to put it into dialogue with the pastoral that the surface presents. Once the reader looks closely, the instances of violence are varied and surprisingly numerous in a text that is supposed to be so serene. For example, throughout the novel, we are constantly reminded that the Pueblo natives are dying from small pox, a disease that the text makes clear came from Europeans. In another example, a Protestant family keeps Sada, a Catholic Mexican woman, as a slave. This displaced family from Georgia, who has no legal title to Sada, not only disallows its slave from practicing her religion, but does not dress her adequately from the winter cold (213). The Archbishop finds her at the door of the church one winter night and gives her his squirrel-lined coat because her own is threadbare. The violence here is doubled. Not only is this slave half-frozen from improper care, she dare not keep the cloak for fear of being beaten by her masters. Violence also appears overtly in relation to gardens. While the Bishop is trying, and failing, to come to terms with the antideluvian rock people at Ácoma, we are told a story about one of its first missionaries of Ácoma. Like My Ántonia and Professor’s House, Death Comes contains many stories, and in this inset story, we’re told an especially insidious episode involving a rather prideful and gluttonous priest, Fray Baltazar. He has a bountiful garden in the middle of the desert mesa, made from the toil of natives carrying the earth up the mesa on their backs. He makes the women give up their precious water from the natural cisterns that are filled with water only from rainstorms. From this garden he produces a variety of fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and “it was clear that the Friar at Ácoma lived more after the flesh than after the spirit”(106). First, it is important to note how radically constructed this garden is. In the middle of the most desolate desert country of what would become New Mexico is this lush garden. This garden, more so than any other in Cather’s novels, stands in stark contrast with the desert wilderness of the mesa. The contrast takes the idea of wilderness as “garden of plenty” and exposes it to be a profoundly human creation that comes with a rather high price tag. The natives are very clearly enslaved by the Priest, a violent act in itself, but the most overt violence happens when the boastful Friar wishes to show

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off his garden and his culinary skill. He invites the neighboring priests for a lavish dinner. The native boy who is serving table accidentally spills the priest’s very carefully prepared gravy over the Zuni priest’s head. In a fit of temper, a drunk Baltazar hurls his pewter mug at the boy and kills him. For this, the Indians unceremoniously dump the friar over the mesa. The friar, to his credit we are told, does not fight the natives because he knows he will be badly treated if he does. The natives kill the priest without any accompanying violence, and this juxtaposition between the priest’s violence and the native’s pragmatism serves to remind the reader of the myriad kinds of violence that accompanies land acquisition and empire building. Like Professor St. Peter’s garden, the garden that is formed out of the priest’s pride and gluttony is a not so subtle hint of the dangers of too much human meddling. This is but one small episode that tells the story of one small portion of “wild” country and its inhabitants that would eventually be subsumed into the American continent. But this one almost inconsequential story points to the larger history inherent in it. Death Comes for the Archbishop confronts the worst kind of violence in empire building, the decimation of cultures. It is a serious charge, and while the text seems to exonerate those involved, a closer look reveals something else. As the Archbishop lays dying, we are told that he was glad to have seen “two great wrongs righted”(275). He had seen the end of black slavery and the Navajos restored to their own country. Both stories referenced together speak to the most egregious wrongs this country committed in its inception. The reference to slavery reminds the reader not only of Sada’s plight, which is a microcosm of the African American slaves, but also of the very bloody and devastating war that was needed to free the slaves.17 The Navaho reference, however gets a more in-depth look in its own inset story. Not only is the plight of the Navahos expounded upon, but the placement of the story is important. Just as we are told that the Archbishop is retreating into the middle of his own consciousness, that history is collapsing, we get a history lesson. We learn that Kit Carson, famed Indian scout and U.S. soldier, had followed the Navaho into their secret hiding place, the Canyon de Chelley, and by doing so was able to rout them and send them on their death march to the Bosque Redondo.18 The narrator tells us that “he was a soldier under orders, and he did a soldier’s brutal work” (294). Some critics read this as the absolution of Carson’s actions, but given the complexities of textual play in all of Cather’s work and especially in this text, it is important to look at what comes after this sentence. What comes next is an indictment of Latour. The story relates that Manuelito, the Navaho chief, was not captured, and that he entreated Latour to “plead his people’s cause” to the American government (294). Latour meets

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with the outlaw chief because he is a “lover of justice,” and would like to see this great wrong rectified; however, the Archbishop refuses to help because of a political point. Latour tells Manuelito that a Roman Catholic can not interfere in matters of Government in a Protestant county. Manuelito, seeing through the Bishop’s cover, retorts that the Archbishop will not help because he is a friend of “Cristóbal.” This story ends well for the Navaho. The government, in a rare twist the story concludes, had realized its mistake: “which governments seldom do”(296), and the Navahos are allowed to return to their native and holy land in New Mexico.19 But the text leaves us with conflicting answers to the question of who is at fault in the Bosque Redondo disaster. This little game that the text sets up reminds us that “Americanizing” the slaves, the natives, and the Mexicans, is not easy. Governments and Archbishops make mistakes, and while the text does not overly chastise either for their actions, neither does it absolve them. The story of Fray Baltazar and the Navahos at Bosque Redondo are like the stories of Ántonia and Tom Outland, stories that put all the elements of myth into play. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, however, Cather digs deeper into the stories to find the dynamics of myth in the very sentence structure of these stories. Returning, again, to the second beginning, the young Father Latour, after being lost in the unconstructed Southwest desert, is ready to make another dry camp until his horse sniffs out water. Latour finds “Hidden Water,” and the natives, poor lost Mexican Catholics, are overjoyed to have a priest happen upon their settlement. After a busy day of marrying and baptizing the inhabitants of Hidden Water, Latour, in need of solitude, stumbles upon the water-head of the spring a mile outside of the oasis. As the Bishop sits in the “declining sun,” (yet another sunset), the narrator tells us that the old grandfather of Hidden Water had found “arrowheads and corroded medals, and a sword hilt, evidently Spanish, near the water head”(31). We also find out that “This spot had been a refuge for humanity long before these Mexicans had come upon it. It was older than history, like those well-heads in his own country where the Roman settlers had set up the image of a river goddess, and later the Christian priests had planted a cross”(32). Without interrogation, this small anecdote appears to be the same neat progression of the reinscription of history that happens with the Cathedral. The nice circularity in one sentence from a Mexican outpost to Spanish ancestry, which prompts a move to European history of Roman settlement and later to Christian victory, is very cleanly the linear progression of traditional history. But the controlled circle quickly degenerates into a Yeatsian spiral. History, to borrow Philip Fisher’s phrase, is a series of new beginnings that are not “inaugural,” but acts that are violent, murderous endings (24).20

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While the Cathedral needs extratextual evidence to help us discover the trace, the well-head actually supplies all the evidence at the most basic textual level of the sentence. For the arrowheads and the medals are not only found together in the same geographic space but are put together in the same sentence. It bespeaks a harmony that belies the utter devastation Coronado, the bearer of that medal, and the rest of the conquistadors wrecked upon the indigenous people, the owners of the arrowheads, of the Colorado Plateau. Furthermore, the Spanish hilt is only evidently Spanish. The adjective illustrates the ancient contamination of both bloodlines and culture that are the history of Mexico, a specific contamination that has underneath it more human agony and bloodshed. In short, this well-head, on close inspection, is far from “a refuge for humanity.” Even the European ancient history that Latour references, with the Roman river goddesses being supplanted by the Christian cross, came with great violence. Latour, who at times is the keeper of traditional history and clean mythic signification, would like to have these black marks of history swept under the guise of “older than history,” so that he does not have to confront the raw truth. However, none of the events hinted at in the water-head in this forgotten outpost in the desert, from the conquistadors to the Roman domination of Europe, came without a grave human price. This particular lesson in deconstructing the unified appearance of history continues when the French priest returns to Santa Fe after the Hidden Water episode. His first morning back, he is awakened by the sound of a bell ringing the Angelus. We learn that there is a long history of cultural exchange that went into that bell, an exchange fueled by war and its accompanying bloodshed. Like the Hidden Water well-head, one can read the bell itself as the serene, joyful progression of History, a happy exchange of culture through art that sanctions the “official” history of war. The bell was pledged to St. Joseph in 1356, in the Spanish/Moor wars, and the Spanish learned silver-work from the Moors, who in turn “hand their skill to the Mexicans” who then teach the art to the Navajo (45). But the bloodshed and violence underneath belies the surface calm of History, for yet again, we have a story of one dominant culture, the Muslim Moors, being violently ousted from Spain by the Christians.21 History has quickly lost its capitol “H.” Furthermore, the Angelus, the use of bells in prayer, was a custom that the crusading Templars—a notorious violent group of soldiers for the Catholic church— learned from the Muslims.22 The Muslims, like the Christians, are not innocent of violent acts in the name of their religion. In the midst of all this unseen but still present violence, Father Latour notes that he learns of the Muslim influence in western religious services through a “learned Scottish Jesuit in Montreal” (45). It is a humorous

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intrusion that says “beware the historian.” Guy Reynolds tells us that only in a Cather text would one find such a creature (157). He doesn’t elaborate but I will. A Scotsman seems a bit misplaced in French Montreal, and while there were Scottish fur traders taking over in Quebec in the mid 1700’s, this oddity of this particular ordained historian invites one to take a close textual look. The Jesuits might make great missionaries because of their discipline and militancy, but the transitive or slang definition of jesuit is “a dissembling person, a prevaricator.” The historian is a person who one thinks of as assembling information; however, here that assembly is a questionable act. In fact it may be an act of prevarication, which is not a lie, per se, but an act that is evasive and transgressive. The historian, like the mythmaker, must prevaricate. In order to create a document that illustrates the reconciliation of the displacements of the past, what “traditional history” and myth both seek to do, this historian can only undertake this matter falsely and deceitfully. The bald truth is too bloody, too damning. But because none of this is stated outright anywhere in the novel, it reminds us that when truth is slanted just enough, the reader is allowed to see the play between form and meaning, and the necessary play of language is kept in motion without completely destroying itself. Nothing, it seems, is sacred in this text. Once history has been thoroughly investigated as a mythic signifier, the text turns its attention to the actual forms of “wilderness.” Like the lesson it just taught us about history, the narrative is able to put these forms into play as well. What differentiates Death Comes from any other novel in this study is that is takes one form of “wilderness” and writes it onto a number of different characters to see how the form, the very thing that is supposed to be immune to change, looks in its different guises. For example, two of the most recognizable forms of wilderness are everywhere present in this text, the figures of the frontiersman or “wilderness” man and the pioneer farmer. Both figures are easily identified and both are integral forms of the wilderness myth because the actions of both made possible the creation of that “wilderness” space that we hold so dear in modern times. Like history, these forms can easily be coerced into participating in a full mythic signification, but when the specific manifestations of the frontiersmen and pioneer farmer are read carefully, their own individuality emerges which keeps them one step ahead of being enveloped into that myth. The first specimen with which we are presented is an almost quintessential frontier figure, Father Ferrand. We met him in the Prologue, and at first he seems to be an unlikely candidate because he is a priest and not an Indian fighter or a fur trapper. But this old missionary priest has lived

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amongst such “wilderness” men; he has their appearance and manner. He is rough. He has lost his taste for refined company and good wine, and because of “his long, lonely horseback rides .  .  . the sharp winds had bitten him well”(6). Furthermore, the old missionary priest stands in stark contrast to the over-refined Cardinals which very neatly sets up the prescribed dichotomy of wilderness roughness versus refined European culture on which “wilderness” thrives. But just at the moment when “wildernessity” is ready to co-opt him into its mythic snare, we are reminded that he is still a missionary priest. His mission is to save souls. This is his mark of specificity that keeps him from becoming a simple mythic form. But he is a minor player and only serves to set up the difference between civilized and wild. The importance of that difference is played out when we are presented with the next form of the “wilderness” man, Jean Marie Latour, as he is trying to find his way in that geometrical nightmare of the Southwest desert. Unlike Father Ferrand who is first a priest and then a “wilderness” man, Latour is made first to appear as a frontiersman. He is a “solitary horse-man, followed by a pack-mule”(17). John J. Murphy notes that Latour is a combination of American heroic figures, “Leatherstocking, the Virginian, and even Huckleberry Finn,” and classical figures, especially Aeneas (“Cather’s Archbishop” 161). In his opening guise, Latour is a quintessential form of “wilderness.” But the concept of “wildernessity” is frustrated from completing its task of co-opting Latour as form at the very moment when the priest is at his most “western.” He had been riding since morning and is lost in the desert. We could be reading any one of the dime-store novels of the West that were famous in Cather’s time. We learn the lesson of the conical hills and the juniper trees, but our certainty of this particular form is shaken when he speaks, “Mais, c’est fantastique!”  (18). Most western heroes don’t speak French. The language shift jars the reader out of complacency. In one quick moment, we are not longer blithely willing to participate in the mythic signification that the text was setting up for us. This lonely horseman becomes even more suspect when we are told he is a man of singular intelligence and grace: “Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth—brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished”(19). This is hardly a description of a western type hero, the kind of rugged individual who is at home battling the “wilderness,” but the contrast serves an important purpose. When talking about mythic forms, Barthes says that “in general myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images” because a fully formed or “complete” image is full of its own contingent history and “excludes myth”(127). Father Latour is a fully fleshed-out figure in the text. He has his own history, and he’s rounded

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out in exactly the opposite way that a mythic “wilderness” man would be. He cannot be fully mythologized because of this. The text adds one more layer to this game of forms, for while Latour is in many ways the “wilderness” man, spending many of his first years alone in the saddle paving the way for civilization to follow, he also becomes a rendition of the anathema to the “wilderness” man, the pioneer farmer. Latour spends many years settling the area of Santa Fe, cultivating gardens and constructing his Cathedral.23 He is also immensely proud of his accomplishments. As a pioneer, he has left his mark upon the land with his cathedral. But like the plow in Ántonia, the very efforts Latour the pioneer farmer so prizes are, ironically, the very efforts that will one day eliminate what Latour, the frontiersman, cherishes so much. The “peculiar quality in the air of new countries” vanishes under the plow, the very thing that Latour’s Cathedral helps make possible. Whatever the form of “wilderness” the text sets up, it consistently resists the efforts of full mythic signification. This holds true for the various other forms the text presents, and the movement between form and concept, or form and meaning is consistent. Take the idea of “legend,” for example. Legends abound in this text. By virtue of being the title character of the novel, Latour is something of a legend. But the form of legend gets pulled apart through the comparison between one of the priests of the region, Father Martinez, and the bona fide legend, Kit Carson, wilderness scout and Indian killer.24 First, Cather has Martinez act as a corrective to Latour. Martinez is one of the renegade Mexican priests that Latour knows must be dealt with in order to achieve his goal of bringing Catholic order to the native disorder of the Southwestern wilderness. In the text Father Martinez represents the epitome of the corrupt native Mexican Catholic church which belies the good and noble work the historical figure, Padre Antonio José Martínez conducted.25 Historian David Lavender tells us that the historical Martínez and Bishop Lamy, Latour’s historical counterpart, warred over such church matters as tithing. Before the French missionaries arrived, Martínez had successfully abolished tithing because it was a hardship on his very poor parishioners. Lamy reinstituted the custom in order to pay for his very expensive Cathedral. In the text, Latour is shown only once raising money for the Cathedral, and he never is shown begging like his vicar, Father Vaillant. The Cathedral just conveniently appears at the end of the narrative. Kit Carson, or “Cristobal” as he is sometimes called, is the other historical figure that history has made into a legend. He is the character that generations of readers have willingly made into one of the sacred forms that embodies all that we hold dear about “wilderness.” He is the great scout who

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holds the “most reliable map” of the vast new territories of between Santa Fe and the Pacific coast (77), and he holds the now dubious distinction of being a fearless Indian fighter of the unsettled west. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, he seems to uphold his place as mythic figure of the West. As is the case with any frontiersman as “wilderness” form, he shares much with his counterpart and sworn enemy, the Native as primitive man or “noble savage.” Carson is illiterate but makes up for it by being savvy about the land, the much more noble trait in this particular code. He wears buckskins, and he also has the required ethical attributes of the Native: “one felt in him standards, loyalties, codes which is not easily put into words .  .  .”(75). He is illiterate, but only because “he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing press could not follow him”(77). He is a Natty Bumpo who has a very cultivated image in this text (Reynolds 166). But when he is placed next to Martinez, we discover that not only is his image very scripted, but his status as legend status is ultimately undermined. Martinez is a local legend in his own right, and as such he is used to unsettle the otherwise firmly entrenched form of Carson as legend. And again, the very tools to put these forms into play come at the level of text, in their character descriptions. Legends, like Old Ben in Faulkner, are large, almost too large for the text. In Carson’s description, he diminishes in size; he is as tall as the Bishop, but he is smaller than the Bishop expects. Before the Archbishop had met him, Latour had an image of “a very large man, of powerful body and commanding presence”(74). “This” Carson, as the text so succinctly put it, was “not so tall as the Bishop himself, was very slight in frame, modest in manner, and spoke English with a soft Southern drawl”(75). Conversely, Father Martinez grows in physical stature before our very eyes. Martinez, like Carson, is “not much taller than the Bishop in reality,” but “he gave the impression of being an enormous man”(140). His features are memorable, not “blank areas of smooth flesh,” of an AngloSaxon face like Carson’s, but active, bestial, and not unlike the landscape of the Southwest itself. His forehead is high and narrow, like the canyons, his “brilliant yellow eyes” are “set deep in strong arches.” His cheeks are florid and full, and his mouth is “the very assertion of violent, uncurbed passions and tyrannical self-will”(141); he snores like an “enraged bull”(149). He is nature in excess, more like the “wilderness” than the frontiersman Carson who is refined and dignified, and this excess is the key. Martinez is fecund, wild, and is also one of the richest men in the district. He cultivates land, like a pioneer farmer, but he also embodies the wildness of the land. When Kit Carson is placed next to him in comparison, the latter pales to the shade of his blond mustache.

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Furthermore, as the actual narrative progresses, Martinez grows larger in stature. He is a Catholicized version of an Emersonian preacher. He could inspire his congregation because he could sing the mass more impressively than any priest Latour had known: “every phrase had its full value. At the moment of the Elevation, the dark priest seemed to give his whole force, his swarthy body and all its blood, to that lifting-up”(150). Martinez is positively in religious ecstasy here, and the fact that he’s excommunicated because he believes that the European church will be the death of his people culturally does more to enhance his legend than diminish it (157). Kit Carson, on the other hand, is stripped of his legend status because he is made human and fallible. The text literally sizes him down because while he is the “noble savage” figure in the text, he is also directly responsible for the devastation unleashed upon the Navaho in the name of the U.S. Government. As a myth, Kit Carson is above reproach, and Latour continues to read him this way. But as this text reminds us time and again, the historical reality unsettles the boundaries that prop up legends and myths. These historical realities tarnish the myth, but because Carson is still an American legend, he proves that the two disparate activities of myth-making and myth-breaking can exist side by side. Carson is barely able to maintain his status as “legend.” The idea of a soft-spoken, well mannered, but brave soldier against the wildness of the land remains the dominant image, but it is tarnished. As the Archbishop realizes at the end of his life, it is the promise of the legend that keeps it alive, not the man behind the legend. But, as the text points out time and again, one can also never forget the historical realities behind the figure. There is always something both “real” and “untrue” about the stories that comprise myth, and because the characters are so vividly portrayed as both “true” and “unreal,” the land itself can now be examined in that life. For all these characters who populate this mythic space of wilderness cannot do so unless there is a space scripted to be “wilderness.” Like the Cathedral, the bell, and the legends themselves, the idea of the land itself is presented as a form. From the opening lines of the novel proper to the end of the Archbishop’s life, the land is constructed to be both wild and sacred, treacherous and challenging. It contains many conflicting ideas which ultimately disallow even the land itself to be fully co-opted by “wilderness.” In the end, it retains its promise that so captivates the Archbishop. The land in Death Comes for the Archbishop is thoroughly scripted and tells you very candidly that it is. The land is usually presented first as unscripted or unassembled but then quickly is made knowable by an association with some significant image or idea. The unscripted sameness of the desert in the opening scene of Book One is quickly made knowable by

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Latour who finds the recognizable shapes of Mexican ovens and cruciform trees by which to name his surrounding. He continues this trend at the mesas of Acoma. The mesa is both and “waiting to be made into a landscape” and “Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals” (95). To make the Southwestern landscape into the image of cathedrals is not something that Cather invents. Curtis Hinsley writes that it was almost cliché by the time Cather was writing to relate the Southwestern landscape to Gothic cathedrals (188–197). And while the Southwest landscape, like the towering rock cliffs of Yosemite, are as grand as the European cathedrals, this constant game of unconstructed/constructed land suggests that the land itself means nothing without an accompanying idea with which to shape it (Hyde 18). The image of the Gothic cathedral is the idea of choice with the more notable images of the land. It implies that the land is sacred, a mythic space, but as the different images of land as cathedral play out, that mythic signification is continually kept from completion. The first cathedral that the text actually presents is not Latour’s golden monument but a cave called Stone Lips. The episode begins with Latour and his Pueblo guide, Jacinto, getting caught in a nasty blizzard in an unnamed mountain range in New Mexico. They are in the middle of one of the most unforgiving wilderness spaces possible, and Jacinto takes Latour to a holy place of his people for shelter. In a noticeable reversal from the mesa at Acoma, the cave does not resemble a grand cathedral on the outside, rather, it is constructed to be exactly like one on the inside. There is a “lofty cavern, shaped somewhat like a gothic chapel”(127); it is lighted only by a transom reminiscent of the clerestory windows of European Gothic cathedrals, and like those cavernous churches, this pagan cathedral is glacially cold and smells of fetid decay. The smell is hidden by a the incense of the piñon log fire, and all this serves to put us right inside any cathedral before central heating and plumbing were invented. By placing us inside a Gothic cathedral instead of having us look at one upsets the cliché of the landscape as cathedral. This is the first instance of the text jarring us out of the willingness to mythologize landscape. Because the Stone Lips cave is made to resemble an actual cathedral rather than a mythologized paean to the heavens, it reminds us to look at what we do so complacently to land as we make it into “wilderness.” The narrative, of course, offers a number of reversals, even in this one episode. For one, Latour is deeply repulsed by the cave, the very place that probably saved his life, and remembers it with “horror”(133). It remains a wilderness in its oldest form: unforgivable and wild land, and it does so in order for the next scene to have its impact. The morning after the storm,

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Latour and Jacinto crawl out of their cave into a perfect, pictured landscape, a “gleaming white world” with mountains “red in the rising sun,” and “rose-colored clouds of virgin snow”(132). It is a landscape white, new, and pristine, the most beautiful of “wilderness” forms. It is remembered later by Latour with tingling pleasure (133). But it is also a landscape that is deadly. Through this series of juxtapositions, the cave is constructed in the narrative to be both virgin and deadly. By constructing the cave as both forms of “wilderness” and then working them against each other, one mythic idea can never take precedence. The Stone Lips cave also does not stand alone in the text. It is set against another cave in another wild land, and this juxtaposition serves to unmask the whole notion of land as sacred. At one point in his missionary journeys, Father Vaillant is taken by a Pima Indian convent into a place “so wild that a man less accustomed to these things might have mistrusted and feared for his life”(207). In other words, here is another quintessentially scripted version of “wilderness.” The two fearless men descend into a terrifying cavern of black rock, and there, Vaillant is shown all the paraphernalia needed to celebrate mass. The official version of history, given by Vaillant, reads the situation as a Christian parable: “the Faith, in that wild frontier, is like a buried treasure.  .  . . .A word, a prayer, a service, is all that is needed to set free those souls in bondage”(207). This is in direct contrast to what Latour found at the bottom of his cave: an ancient river, “one of the oldest voices of the earth”(130). This river is holy to the Pueblo Natives, but to the Archbishop it is wild, untamed, and very unsettling because it is wholly unknowable in his Christian universe. At the bottom of Vaillant’s cave is the most civilizing of accouterments, but civilizing only to a Christian. The idea of what is sacred takes on many different guises depending on the culture that gives it that name. There is never any one over-riding mythic ideal of sacred, so there can never be a fully formed myth of the sacred. These two underground caves lead us back, finally, to the central monument of the text where “wilderness” is jilted, one final time, out of being fully signified. The Archbishop’s grand cathedral is constructed out of the rocks of the land. It is carefully scripted to partake of the wild land that the Archbishop loves, and so it is constructed to be the shining culmination of “wilderness.” Ironically, however, it is the land of the Southwest desert literally crafted into a Gothic cathedral.26 The earth that comprises the idea of “wilderness,” long a sacred space, is literally made into a sacred space in the form of the Archbishop’s cathedral. At first glance, the cathedral is the spiritual culmination of all that the land can give, for it fashions the land in a way that is knowable to Latour. It

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is made of the very rocks of the uncomposed land that at first repulsed Latour. But this overt construction of land, more so the other two natural “cathedrals,” disrupts the mythologizing process because it becomes an overt desecration of the very land it tries to mythologize. The final indictment against the cathedral, however, is never overt. This time, the censure of the Cathedral happens in the book prior to “Gold Under Pike’s Peak,” the book that relates the Archbishop’s conception and building of his cathedral. At the end of Book Seven, “The Great Diocese” we have a long narrative about the middle-aged Archbishop visiting his friend, the Navajo Eusabio in the Hopi country of the Painted Desert. The latter then accompanies Latour on the long 400 mile journey from Eusabio’s home on the Colorado Chiquito back to Santa Fe. The purpose of Latour’s journey is not important. What is, is the way they travel back to the Archbishop’s home. As they wend their way through the desert, the narrative questions the very foundations of the Cathedral. It is the most blatant attack on any Western form of “wilderness” as sacred: Traveling with Eusabio was like traveling with the landscape made human .  .  . the Navajo was careful to obliterate every trace of their temporary occupation .  .  . just as it was the white man’s way to assert himself in any landscape .  .  . it was the Indian’s way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace .  .  . to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. (232–33)

The Cathedral is taken from the land itself. To Latour, it is meant to accomplish what the Natives value; Latour thinks that it will vanish into the landscape. But the fact remains; it will always be a recreation of the golden rocks outside of Santa Fe. It does not “vanish” but stands glaringly against the landscape as a monument of triumph. The cathedral in this way vanquishes the wilderness. The cathedral is also a lavish decoration of the land, which is a direct contrast to the Natives who seem to have “none of the European’s desire to master nature, to arrange and re-create”(234). The cathedral very clearly recreates and thus masters nature, and this sets up the final admonishment against the cathedral: [The Natives] spent their ingenuity .  .  . in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves [out of ] an inherited caution and respect”(234). This is the one example of where the European way of mastering nature, the very thing that gives rise to “wilderness,” is subtlety but clearly chastised. Here, the Indian’s relationship to the land is privileged and stands in stark contrast to how Latour has consistently read the landscape. The European priest consistently sees a

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landscape that is uncomposed until he envisions his cathedral. The natives, the text tells us, while they never attempted to improve the land, “they never desecrated it”(234). This lecture would not carry the weight it does if it were not juxtaposed to the very thing that does desecrate the land. Turning the page, we find “Gold Under Pike’s Peak,” the twilight book, the book of the cathedral. Latour’s cathedral whose skin is to be manufactured from the gold rock of the hills, is not a Europeanized version of Indian custom, even though that is what one level of the text would have us believe. Read against the native way of respecting the land, the cathedral marks the landscape in two very distinct ways. Latour’s cathedral is the most civilizing building of all the structures one could place on the landscape and mars the wild land indelibly by the very fact of its existence. It also desecrates that very land by mining the stones as well. Very simply, if we are to read the cathedral as the culminating vessel of “wilderness,” that vessel is tainted. The final act of mythic signification of cathedral as “wilderness” is forever frustrated. In the first chapters of the narrative, the young Bishop Latour spends much of his narrative space wondering at a landscape that is at times a geometrical nightmare in its sameness and at times a blank canvas waiting for the Creator to order the confusion of the “first creation morning”(Death 99). In 1848, the land of the Southwest, “with all the material for worldmaking assembled”(98) lies “uncomposed” because it literally was largely unmapped territory. This material fact plays against the French priest, who cannot make up his mind about this great wilderness of the American Southwest. Had the “Creator” desisted, or was it a country still “waiting to be made into a landscape”(95)? This wilderness, this narrative continually asserts, had yet to find an artist to paint this landscape into something; the wild Southwest desert had yet to be made humanly knowable through myth. And while the Archbishop succeeds at the end of the novel in making the landscape knowable to human eyes with his cathedral made out of the golden rocks of the Sandia mountains, in the end, the narrative resists a definite answer to that question. Audrey Goodman argues that Cather’s desert Southwest “defies landscape convention: it cannot be comprehended in a glance”(63). Because the full signification of the myth of wilderness is always frustrated, never finished, Cather is, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, a reader of myths. She adeptly manipulates all aspects of the wilderness myth, exposing the inadequacies of any one form of “wilderness” and deftly manipulating the mythic concept so that the text never slavishly bows to “wildernessity.” “Wilderness” is a complex and living myth, and through her journey into “wilderness,”

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Cather understands the chasm of nothingness into which one can fall when one desires to possess something that is not real. In an unpublished essay, “Light on Adobe Walls,” Cather makes her most eloquent statement about the game language plays with myth. She writes about art and its relation to the artist, and says that ultimately art is “a concrete and personal and rather childish thing”(125). An artist can only paint—or write—some “man-made arrangement” of sunlight playing tricks with shadows. Furthermore, if the artist recognizes that it is all a “game of make-believe”(125), then the game is never finished. The artist errs when he or she tries to make art, and its close relative myth, a finished product. If that happens, Cather warns, then the great artist outgrows his art, throws it away as Prospero throws his “toys”, his books of magic, into the sea (125). But Cather does not throw her toys away. She came close with Godfrey St. Peter, but she ultimately recognizes in Death Comes for the Archbishop that while myth-making is magic, it is a knowable magic. That is the key. Ernest Hemingway tricked himself into believing that the myth is real and that somehow the infinite re-telling of the same myth, with the same uninterrogated forms, makes it real. William Faulkner sees the trick of myth as presenting itself as real and decides that the myth will not trick him. Either way, there is no game. Cather comes to deeply understand that, of course, the myth is a trick, but instead of succumbing, she instead says “watch how I play with it.” Moreover, and most important, she plays with the tricks in such a way that we can discern what she does so we do not have to be fooled by myth either. Myth is a “man-made arrangement,” and by being fully cognizant of that fact, she gives us her tools and teaches us how to use them so that we have the power to control how myth defines us. “Wilderness” is important to the American consciousness. It is part of the “myth of America” that, while fraught with contradictions, is a living, thriving, entity. Americans cherish many things, but what we cherish most is our freedom. The freedom not from poverty and want, but the freedom to be, do, and have. The myth of wilderness has in it the promise of that freedom. Because it is not a tangible, definable thing, we have risen to great heights and perpetuated great crimes in the name of that freedom. Faulkner is correct in his reprimand. “Wilderness” with its contradictory promises of mastering nature while providing an escape from the ills that we ourselves have created has been the excuse many have used to continue a trend of hate and prejudice. America has had some great moments. It has also done outrageously harmful things to many different peoples. That is, for good and ill, the history that stands behind the myth of wilderness. What blinds

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Hemingway, what Faulkner wills himself to forget, what Cather finally teaches, is that the writing underneath is always there to unmask the lies of History. To not confront history is as damaging as repudiating the myth entirely. It is the play between history and myth in language that allows the myth, with all its promise, to stay productive for America. We create our reality and we create the myths that story that reality. Myth might be nothing more than an elaborate game of make-believe. It might be our most important creation.

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Notes

Notes to the Part One Introduction 1. Taken from a kiosk at the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center, Casper Wyoming. August 24, 2003. 2. Leo Marx The Machine in the Garden and Henry Nash Smith Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 3. The tradition of American nature writing is long and illustrious. One of its early voices is William Byrd, History of the Dividing Line, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. The tradition continues through Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Mary Austin, Loren Eiseley and Joseph Wood Krutch. In the last 30 years, there has been an explosion of nature writing that mimics and partakes of the increasingly rhetorical mythologizing of wilderness. As our nation’s “wild land” is depleted, more and more writers feel compelled to preserve it in text. For a comprehensive listing of American nature writers, see American Nature Writers (Vol I and II. Ed. John Elder. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996). Wilderness studies are also long and varied, with many different academic factions claiming their share. There are the eco-feminists, the environmentalists, and the historians, just to name a few. See The Great New Wilderness Debate: An Expansive Collection of Writing Defining Wilderness from John Muir to Gary Snyder for a scope of the various factions and their arguments on wilderness. Frontier studies of course are too numerous to mention in any detail. One of the first major studies is Lucy Lockwood Hazard’s The Frontier in American Literature. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company., Inc. 1966/1927). Later studies include Harold P. Simonson’s Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism, and a Sense of Place. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1987); Robert V. Hine’s The American West: An Interpretive History. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973), and his later work The American West: A New Interpretive History; Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest, and what I consider to be one of the seminal works

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

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Notes to the Part One Introduction on the frontier myth, the trilogy by Richard Slotkin: Regeneration through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation. See The Wilderness Condition: Essays on Environment and Civilization for a sampling of the different schools on wilderness theory. (Ed. Max Oelschlaeger. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books: 1992.) Patricia Nelson Limerick The Legacy of Conquest 17–18. Robert V. Hine The American West: A New Interpretive History, 500–501. Richard Slotkin, in “Myth and the Production of History,” clarifies Cronon’s point. He notes that in the frontier myth, the frontiersman embodies “the progressive and order-loving values attributed to bourgeois civilization and the longing for escape from civilization and its discontents”(86). It should also be noted that the frontiersman’s signification embodies the conflicting energies of the wilderness myth. The eco-feminists are another very outspoken faction in this group. Carolyn Merchant, Annette Kolodny, and Val Plumwood argue that because “nature” is essentially feminine, it is subject to all the injustices that have been heaped upon Woman since time immemorial. I disagree with this point of view because it is so radically essentialist. For different views on eco-feminist theory see Val Plumwood, “Wilderness, Skepticism, and Dualism,” in The Great New Wilderness Debate; Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 1975); and Carolyn Merchant The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1983). Fuss’ position is compelling. She is an “anti-essentialist who wants to preserve (in both sense of the term: to maintain and to embalm) the category of essence”(xiv). She seeks to find the “essence” in constructivism, essence being defined as “a matter of pure abstractions—the very foundation of logic and mathematics”(14). By making “essence” a part of logic and mathematics, Fuss considers her position justified, and while I agree that even many constructivist theories have at heart a tinge of essentialism, I believe that the “truth” that she uses for her argument is as constructed as anything else in this universe. Slotkin further defines this figure as one who partakes of the archetypal heroic quest myth, who must conquer while at the same time love the wilderness, and “his acts of love and sacred affirmation are acts of violence against that spirit and her avatars”(22). In other words, our archetypal hero will destroy the very thing that he loves because he must conquer the very thing that feeds him. See Regeneration Through Violence, chapter one. Also, for a similar discussion by an environmentalist, see Rodrick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, chapter one. See The Great New Wilderness Debate for Cronin and Henberg. In The Lay of the Land, Annette Kolodny argues that the “unblemished land” that was

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12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

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discovered was constructed to be essentially female in order for those males engaged with it to feel that they could conquer it. Mary Carden understands Kolodny’s argument in terms of “equating nation-building with male sexual conquest”(276), and both Judith Fryer and Anne Fisher-Worth see this “male sexual conquest” as first a movement “back into the realm of the Mother, and then .  .  . out of that containment in order to experience the self as independent, assertive, and sexually active”(Fisher-Worth 53; Freyer 230). Carden, Freyer and Fisher-Worth are in essence trying to capture a space for a female version of what they see as a male narrative pattern. Unfortunately, they along with Kolodny essentialize the land and the myth and thus are simply flipping the dominant structure, a move that I consider irresponsible in the end. See Richard Slotkin’s discussion of the religious implications of the Puritan wilderness for a cogent discussion of its religious implications in Regeneration Through Violence, Chapter 2. See Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory for a well argued and documented study on wilderness as it turns from “butt ugly” (literally, Hobbs writes of a mountain: “The buttocks amply sticking out are found”) to the sublime. Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s discussion of the sublime in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory remains the clearest that I’ve found. See “The Aesthetics of the Infinite,” chapter 7. PBS American Experience documentary “Lost in the Grand Canyon,” aired August 18, 2003. Robert Hine The American West: A New Interpretive History, 501–502. John Muir, Mountaineering Essays Ed. Richard F. Fleck. (Salt Lake: U of Utah P., 1997). Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. (New York: HarperCollins, 1982, 15–33.) Eden, too, is a rhetorical construct, and to say that we claimed it belies the violence and cultural decimation that actually occurred. The land was never untrammeled and pure, and it would be an egregious error to not acknowledge that we claimed the wilderness from the Native American populations in heinous and violent ways. But, it also must be noted that in terms of the myth itself, the Natives are part and parcel of the “wildness,” and thus become part of the thing that must be conquered. See Todorov’s Conquest of America, Philip Fisher’s Hard Facts, and Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence. Sacvan Bercovitch uses “America” in quotations as the shorthand for the “myth of America” itself, the symbol for human possibility. Rites of Assent, 367–369. Many critics have noted this paradox. See Machine in the Garden, 43–44, and Harold P. Simonson Beyond the Frontier, 2–4.

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21. Marvin Henberg in “Wilderness, Myth, and American Character,” delineates how both tenets, “virility and aggressiveness” and “placidity and nurture,” play in the historical record. Conquering nature was the first viable way of viewing wilderness with its precedent set in the nation building era of the first 150 years of our country’s existence. The second tenet, that wild nature must be preserved in order to preserve our American character, forms when the material or ideological thing on which it is based, “innocence for one, wilderness for another”(503), is gone. 22. See Miriam B. Mandel, “Configuring There as Here: Hemingway’s Travels and The “See America “first” Movement” for a detailed description and appendix of “See America First” literature. 23. See Philip Fisher Hard Facts for a very cogent and concise explanation of this massive act of willful forgetting that must occur to create the American idea of wilderness. As he explains, no matter what the story, whether it be “to marry or to ram a piece of land” will register what he calls the “hard fact” of American literature. The secondary outcome: “on the way to Oregon, and on the way to the marriage, and on the way to farming 230 acres in Kansas, there was a massacre, there was a massacre, there was a massacre”(73). In other words, in every inaugural act there is a “profoundly felt murderous ending”(24). Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence is also another important study of how the violent decimation of whole cultures became part of the frontier myth. 24. Stephen Greenblatt in “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” teaches us how to “read” American culture in the trail markers of a Yosemite. In The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. (New York: Routledge, 1989). 25. Limerick notes that the “closing” of the frontier is not as cleanly marked as Turner makes it to be. See Legacy of Conquest 23–25. 26. There are a number of recent critics who discount Turner’s theory that it was the frontier that formed the American character, among them Richard White, Donald Worster, and Patricia Limerick. They rightly point out that Turner failed to account for the effect of industrialization and cities, the Rockefellers and Carnegies, of the East. However, one must remember that Turner was presenting a radical new thesis of the formation of the American character. The favored argument of the day is exactly what White, Worster and Limerick recognize as missing in Turner. That Turner’s idea took hold of the American imagination so vehemently that his contemporary critics are forgotten is a testament to Turner’s ability to tap into a deeply beloved mythic figure and make it part of the academic vocabulary. See Wilber R. Jacobs. On Turner’s Trail: 100 Years of Writing Western History. (Lawrence: U. of Kansas P., 1994). 27. See R. W. B. Lewis’s seminal work on The American Adam for a thorough discussion of this figure.

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28. Many critics have noted the rebirth trope in American frontier literature. See Harold P. Simonson’s Beyond the Frontier, 2–3; Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind chapter nine; Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence chapter ten. 29. See also Legacy of Conquest; however Hine’s project differs slightly from Limerick’s. Limerick’s text is the seminal text of the “New West” Historians who sought to uncover the hidden stories of the old west. Hine is participating in the “New Cultural” history, the next generation of historians after the “New West” who are looking at the Barthian true and unreal aspects of western myths and legends that inform Western History. 30. Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1956) 207–208. 31. Rites of Assent, chapters one, two, and three, as well as The American Jeremiad. 32. The idea of mythic entrapment is primarily Marxist because it is an idea, itself ideological, that leads to revolution. It’s proponents are many and too long to list fully here 33. Rites of Assent 354. 34. I take my cue from Bercovitch. He delineates the myth of America as America in quotes (“America”) to keep it separate from the land mass that we call America. 35. Barthes uses the following neologisms: “sinniness” as the concept of French petite-bourgeois China filled with bells, rickshaws and opium dens, and “Basquity” to give the concept of a Basque chalet in the middle of Paris to connote rusticity (121, 125). He calls them “unlovely;” I call them awkward, but they get the point across. 36. Patricia Limerick, another Barthian “mythologizer,” in Legacy of Conquest debunks the glamour of the old west, notes at one point that demythologizing the Western myth actually enhances Western history. As is the case with most “New West” historians, she seeks to destroy the myth as opposed to inquiring into its dynamics.

Notes to Chapter One 1. Philip Young was the first to delineate the Hemingway “code hero.” He recognized that this code hero is idealized, and Hemingway’s hero characters, while they seek to live up to that ideal, always fail in some way, 56–78. While Young is recognized as the preeminent Hemingway scholar, I find that he is too biographical in his analysis for my purposes. 2. Much has been made of this fact, beginning with Philip Young’s interpretation of Nick as one who must heal both the physical and psychic wounds of his war experience, and critics are quick to point to Hemingway’s analogy of

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Notes to Chapter One the iceberg in Death in the Afternoon. Only one-eighth of an iceberg appears above water, Hemingway writes, and the writer’s job is to make sure that he knows the seven-eighths that isn’t showing, 192. The war is part of the underwater iceberg in “Big Two-Hearted River.” Suzanne Clark suggests that through the description of the burned down town and because Nick is returning to the locus amoena of the American pastoral, that the war “comes to seem part of the industrial juggernaut that has cut down the pines”(63). In “Roosevelt and Hemingway: Natural History, Manliness, and the Rhetoric of the Strenuous Life.” Hemingway and the Natural World, 55–68. Paul Civello, 2. Charles Lindsay also recognizes Nick’s fishing trip at a “catalogue of ritual, a methodical account of the deliberate, careful, and ceremonial exercises Nick goes through .  .  .”(468). Robert Penn Warren recognizes this but puts it in larger metaphysical terms: “In the God abandoned world of modernity, man can realize an ideal meaning only so far as he can define and maintain the code”(37). Philip Young. Ernest Hemingway. (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1959) 44–45. Many critics recognize the close association of the western/cowboy trope in the Hemingway hero. Leslie Fielder classes Hemingway’s works as Westerns in the tradition of “pulp stories, comic books, movies and T.V. shows.” Dean Rehberger states the “the standard definition of the Hemingway ‘code’ is a rewriting of the adventure ethos.” Who better exemplifies “grace under pressure” than a cowboy, he asks. In “I Don’t Know Buffalo Bill”: On Hemingway and the Rhetoric of the Western. Blowing the Bridge: Essays on Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ed. Rena Sanderson. (New York: Greenwood P., 1992) 161–163. The latest argument is James Plath’s “Shadow Rider: The Hemingway Hero as Western Archetype.” Hemingway and the Natural World, 69–86. A number of early critics charged that “nothing happened” in “Big TwoHearted River.” There is, in fact, much that is happening at the level of semantics in the text. Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden, 26. Marx notes that during the 17th century, some artists inserted the printed motto: Et in Arcadia Ego, meaning “I [Death] am also in Arcadia.” Thus Death, the very thing that could debunk the pastoral myth, becomes a part of it. Many critics have remarked on Hemingway’s persistent romance with death. Philip Young hints that Hemingway’s preoccupation with death has suicidal tendencies, and in the Forward to Hemingway: A Reconsideration, he sadly notes the many calls he received when Hemingway did commit suicide, 1–28. Other studies that look closely at death as a major theme in Hemingway include Wirt Williams The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway;

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Stanley Cooperman’s “Death and Cojones: Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 63.1 (1964): 85–92; and Paul Smith’s “Love and Death in Hemingway’s Spanish Novel.” Hemingway: Up in Michigan Perspectives, 213–220. See also Glen Love’s “Hemingway’s Indian Virtues: An Ecologial Reconsideration,” for an in-depth discussion of Hemingway’s use and mis-use of Native Americans in his text. Western American Literature, 22.3 (1987): 201–203. Peter L. Hays. “Hemingway’s Use of a Natural Resource: Indians” in Hemingway in the Natural World, 45–54. Leo Gurko, 202. Other critics have noted that the American wilderness in some form exists all over the globe for Hemingway. Leslie Fielder notes that “for Hemingway there are many Wests, from Switzerland to Africa, but the mountains of Spain are inextricably associated in his mind with the authentic American West .  .  .”Love and Death 90. This “authentic American West” is Fielder’s construction of the American wilderness. See also Miriam B. Mandel, 94. Ronald Weber, 60. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway expounds at length on the bullfight as art, 14–16. Letter to Max Perkins written in 1926, cited in Weber, 46. Recent “Green” scholarship is quick to note Hemingway’s love for the natural world and his wish to preserve the natural environment, but interestingly enough, these scholars almost always seek to reconcile Hemingway’s inability to acknowledge his own complicity in the destruction of that environment. See the collection of essays in Hemingway and the Natural World as well as Jackson J. Benson’s “Hemingway the hunter and Steinbeck the Farmer,” in Michigan Quarterly Review 24 (1985): 201–13. Semiology, Barthes says in “Myth Today,” teaches us that myth gives historical intentions and contingencies a “natural justification,” and by making “contingency appear eternal” the process becomes “exactly that of bourgeois ideology”(142). The imperialism implicit in the wilderness myth is, in Barthian terms, bourgeois. Thomas Strychacz also notes this surplus of signifiers, but he is using “signifier” in its linguistic configuration not its mythic. “Like Plums in a Pudding,” 24–26. Nina Baym points out that it is Margo, the wife of Francis Macomber, who recognizes that the lion is out-manned by technology. “Actually,” 114. I am indebted to Straychacz’s reading of Green Hills for pointing out the significance of this quotation in “‘Like Plums in a Pudding’: Food and Rhetorical Performance in Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa.” Strychacz’s purpose, however, differs from mine in that he is seeking a reconsideration of Hemingway’s representations of manhood in the post-colonial discourse of dominance.

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24. The most cogent ecological/post-colonial critique of Hemingway is Glen A. Love’s “Hemingway’s Indian Virtues: An Ecological Reconsideration” in Western American Literature 221.1 (1987): 204–13. 25. Strychacz discusses the performativity of manhood in both his essays on Green Hills of Africa. See “Like Plums in a Pudding” and “Trophy-Hunting as A Trope of Manhood in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa.”

Notes to Chapter Two 1. David Evans asserts that Faulkner’s image as an “acolyte in the cult of Nature has proven to be remarkably enduring”(179). He reviews the critical reception of Faulkner as an attendant and follower of Nature beginning with Malcom Cowley in his introduction to The Portable Faulkner, through Cleaneth Brooks, and recently Joel Wiliamson’s William Faulkner and Southern History (London: Oxford U.P., 1993). I agree with his contention that while these critics recognize the importance of nature in Faulkner’s work, they fundamentally misinterpret nature as Nature, a transcendent entity. 2. See also Harry Modean Cambell and Ruel E. Foster’s William Faulkner: A Critical Appraisal 140–158. Joseph Gold’s “ ‘The Bear’ as Allegory and Essay” (78–84); John Lydenberg “‘The Bear’ as a Nature Myth,” 84–95; Glen M. Johnson, “Big Woods: Faulkner’s Elegy for Wilderness, Southern Humanities Review, 14.3 (1980): 249–259; Patrick McGee, “Gender and Generation in Faulkner’s ‘The Bear.’” Faulkner Journal 1.1 (1985): 46–54. R.W.B. Lewis, “The Hero in the New World: William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear.’” Bear, Man, and God, 188–201; Arthur F. Kinney, “Faulkner and the Possibilities for Heroism.” Bear, Man, and God, 235–250; Francis Lee Utley,167–187. 3. Recent criticism has especially been keen to note that all of Faulkner’s myths are constructed, rhetorical entities. Christopher Irmscher in his review of Faulkner and the Natural World notes that throughout that collection, that nature is an invented entity. “Reading Faulkner Ecocritically.” Mississippi Quarterly 52.3 (1999): 510–523. See also Joseph Urgo. “What Was that Bird? Thinking America through Faulkner.” Faulkner in America, 98–117; and Karl F. Zender “Reading ‘The Bear.” Faulkner Studies 1 (1980): 91–99. 4. Recent critics are reexamining the use of myth in Faulkner’s text. David Evans argues that “The Bear” suggests that the sacred significance invested in wilderness partakes not of the “universal pattern of myth” but with the “myth of America” as outlined primarily by Sacvan Bercovitch and Perry Miller. Barbara L. Pittman argues in “Faulkner’s Big Woods and the Historical Necessity of Revision,” that Faulkner’s lament for the loss of a “dominating wilderness” masks a more insidious lament “for the loss of white

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domination”(477). Linda Wagner Martin recognizes Faulkner’s project of demythologizing American myths. In “Go Down Moses: Faulkner’s Interrogation of the American Dream” she argues that Faulkner in “Pantaloon on Black” is demythologizing the American Dream. Richard Adams in American Dream, American Nightmare looks most specifically at the deleterious effects of the American wilderness in Faulkner, 130–131. The list of critics who have mythologized aspects other than wilderness in Faulkner is long. For a representative sample, see Malcom Cowley, Harry Modean Campbell, and Reul Foster, as well as “Faulkner’s Mythologies,” in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Penn Warren (Prentice-Hall: 1966). R.W.B. Lewis, “The Hero in the New World: William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear.’” Bear, Man, and God, 188–201; Arthur F. Kinney. Bear, Man, and God, 235–250; Francis Lee Utley. Bear, Man, and God, 167–187. Sundquist further argues that the entire hunt is to preserve the moment it necessarily destroys. I am referring to Absolom, Absolom where Sutpen brings his Haitian slaves to clear the land. In Faulkner in the University, Faulkner says that there is a “ghost of ravishment that lingers in the land” (qtd in Wittenberg, 50). Lewis Dabney argues that “the death of the bear will mean the end of the wilderness itself, the irremediable disappearance of a race and civilization”(143). Mick Gedley argues that Sam conforms to the “contours of savagism” that is so familiar to the American imagination and credits Roy Harvey Pearce and Robert Sayre for delineating the “savagism” of the Native American portrayal. Roy Harvey Pearce Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965); Robert F. Sayer, Thoreau and the Indians. (Princeton UP, 1977). Lewis Dabny reminds us that while Sam is the epitome of the “noble savage,” he is completely made up, just as James Fenimore Cooper made up his Native Americans. John Cooley argues that Sam does not admit that the “great woods” is already corrupted: “It was his father who doomed the wilderness”(132). Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin Family: 131–136. Dabny puts it this way: “it is the tragic theme of a civilization burdened by original sin and pure primitive life, and the Indians are not exempted from this corruption”(139). Barthes, like Faulkner, has an ulterior motive at hand. Barthes uses myth to expose the pervasive attitudes of the bourgeoisie, 138. Also, like Faulkner, he ends his essay with the bleak statement that the mythologist must remain ambiguous. Because his “speech is a metalanguage, it ‘acts’ nothing. He cannot participate fully in the revolution of culture of “mythconsumers” that

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Notes to Chapter Two he himself started because he has cut himself off from that culture. The mythologist has become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth”(Barthes 157). This is as apt a description of Faulkner as any critic’s or biographer’s. Linda Wagner-Martin observes that Ike’s relinquishment of his property has “prompted as much spilled ink as any other voluntary act in Faulkner’s fiction”(136). She then gives almost a full page of notes citing various studies that look at the consequences of the repudiation, 149–150. Irving Howe states the importance of Part IV clearly: “Section IV give the story social and historical density. It provides an abrasive disruption of the idyllic nostalgia previously accumulated”(257). But Howe argues that in the end, Ike’s repudiation is successful. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. 3rd ed. (Chicago: U. of Chicago. P., 1975). Other critics who agree with Howe are R.W.B. Lewis, Malcolm Cowley, Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel Foster, and Arthur F. Kinney. Recent critical studies that still see a benefit to Ike’s action include Kiyoyuki Ono. “The McCaslins’ Grievous Legacy” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin Family; and Judith Bryant Wittenberg. “Go Down Moses and the Discourse of Environmentalism.” For critics who argue that Ike’s repudiation has at best severe consequences, see David H. Stewart, “Ike McCaslin, Cop-Out.” Bear, Man, and God, 212; Thadious M. Davis “Crying in the Wilderness: Legal, Racial, and Moral Codes in Go Down Moses; Eric Sundquist, “The True Inheritance of Ike McCaslin” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin Family; and Laura P. Caridge. “Isaac McCaslin’s Failed Bid for Adulthood.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History. 55.2 (1983): 241–251. See William E.H. Meyer, Jr, “Emerson Dines on Bear: the Eradication of Nature in Faulkner’s South,”. Southern Literary Journal. 29.2 (1997): 32–44. In Faulkner in the University, Faulkner expands on the connection between slavery and the wilderness through profit: “It’s to have compassion for the anguish that the wilderness itself may have felt by being ruthlessly destroyed by axes, by men who simply wanted to make that earth grow something they could sell for a profit, which brought into it a condition based on an evil like human bondage.” In Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner. Bear Man and God, 117. Adams American Dream: American Nightmare, 130. David Evans is actually arguing against this claim. He states that “The Bear” is “really about the invention of nature” through Ike McCaslin’s need to imbue it with special significance”(180). Paul S. Stein makes this connection in “Ike McCaslin: Traumatized in a Hawthornian Wilderness.” See Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters by William Faulkner. Ed. James B. Meriwether.

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Notes to the Part Two Introduction 1. Marilyn Arnold astutely recognizes that Cather’s writing is so open and forthright that we sometimes miss her allusions, which run the gamut from the classical Virgilian pastoral to the folklore of the Nebraskan plain. “The Allusive Cather,” 147. Cather Studies. Ed. Susan Rosowski. Vol. 3 (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P., 1996). 2. Louis Auchincloss, Pioneers & Caretakers: A Study of American Women Novelists. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985); James E. Miller, “My Ántonia: A Frontier Drama of Time American Quarterly 10 (1958): 476–484; and My Ántonia and the American Dream Prairie Schooner. 48 (1974): 112–123; Susan Rosowski The Voyage Perilous; Ronald Dyck, “Revisiting and Revising the West in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and Wright Morris’s Plains Song”; Mary Paniccia Carden, “Creative Fertility and the National Romance in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.” 3. James Woodress in Willa Cather: A Literary Life states that Cather laments the loss of the frontier and the pioneer in the best tradition of the Arcadian theme (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1987) 167. 4. James Woodress, Willa Cather, A Literary Life, 33–37.

Notes to Chapter Three 1. See Barbara Blair, My Ántonia in “American Studies: History, Landscape, and Memory,” and Mary Anne Ferguson, “My Ántonia in Women’s Studies: Pioneer Women and Men—the Myth and the Reality,” in Approaches to Teaching My Ántonia. See also Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982 (1942)) 249–250. 2. Klau Stich points out that there are many “subtle often hidden patterns of symbol and myth in her work .  .  .”(233) pointing to both Cather’s playful and frequent allusion to ancient myths and her use of mythic structures in her texts. “The Professor’s House: Prohibition, Ripe Grapes, and Euripides.” Cather Studies. Vol 4. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1999). 3. Henry Nash Smith. The Virgin Land 195–200. 4. Both Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith also understand and theorize about the paradoxes inherent in these garden myths. It is the central paradox of the American landscape; the very thing that is valorized, the use of all this abundant land, eventually uses up that very land. 5. R.W.B Lewis in The American Adam also recognizes the importance of memory in the construction of myths. 6. Percy H. Boynton in Some Contemporary Americans also argues that it is important that Ántonia be read as innocent (qtd in Bloom 8) and her

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Notes to Chapter Three innocence also participates in the pastoral structure. She is the innocent shepherd who in the American form of the pastoral becomes a farmer. See also Paula Woolley “‘Fire and Wit’: Storytelling and the American Artist in Cather’s My Ántonia.” Cather Studies vol. 3; Mary Paniccia Carden’s “Creative Fertility,” “and Susan Rosowski’s The Voyage Perilous for other representative arguments. There is a large body of critical work that deals with the problem of Jim’s sexuality and is often connected to Cather’s alleged homosexuality. Both are a problem that lies beyond the scope of my argument, but one of the more interesting treatments is Patrick Shaw’s Willa Cather and the Art of Conflict: Revisioning Her Creative Imagination. (Troy NY: Whitston Publishing 1992). Patricia Carden is the first to use the term “hieroglyphic” in relation to the image of the plow (291). Walker Percy in “The Loss of the Creature,” describes at length the near impossibility of having a “sovereign experience,” an original experience that is void of a “preformed complex” the observer has already in his consciousness placed there by myths and media. Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. 4th ed. (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996). See Slotkin, “Myth,” for an in-depth explanation of Levi-Strauss’s notion of “bundles of meaning”(81). Judith Fryer also recognizes that the plow partakes of the magic of storytelling in which “supernatural events are part of everyday life.” The story of the plow, like the story of Coronado that precedes it, “has a continuing life”(272). I am indebted to Fryer for her reading of Cather as a consummate storyteller. Her argument differs from mine in that ultimately she takes an essentialist feminist stance. Susan Rosowski sees the plow as yoking the idea of pastoral peace with the image of the plow. She maintains that Cather is a romantic at heart, uniting “subject and object in symbolic perception.” Voyage Perilous, 86. John Randall, an early critic of Cather’s, sees the plow as a representation of a flawed pastoral. Landscape and Lookinglass 77. Patricia Carden reads it as a hieroglyphic of “distant and inaccessible grandeur” that encapsulates the lost frontier experience. “Creative Fertility,” 291. Marx’s thesis in Machine and the Garden is not that pastoralism rules the day but that with the rise of industrialism in the 19th century, the machine is always present as an abrupt reminder of history, the very thing that the pastoral, like any myth, seeks to deny. Marx seeks to accommodate the contradiction of man-made power on the idyllic landscape by seeking a “middle landscape,” the place that will reconcile the “national preference for having it both ways: the ‘pursuit of rural happiness’ through the pastoral idea versus ‘progress,’ the pursuit of productivity, wealth, and power”(226). Guy Reynolds carefully points out that the pioneer theme was seen in the early part of the 20th century as having caused more harm than good. The

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pioneer was the 19th century precursor to the 20th century entrepreneur who was singularly responsible for the demise of the American social and culture character the American modernists were working so hard to rectify, 27–28. Sollors, 195–207. Walter Benn Michaels is the most outspoken of these critics in Our America Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. (Durham: Duke U.P., 1995). Joseph Urgo in his “How Context Determines Fact: Historicism in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady,” gives a much more insightful reading of this alleged willed forgetting. He argues that this particular novel portrays the way in which Cather dehistoricizes the past in order to turn it into ‘pleasant memory,’ not to lament a more glorious past but to “demonstrate with monumental subtlety the falsity of final judgment, the misleading quality of settled issues”(184). Urgo sees in Cather, like I do, subtle critiques of the very thing for which she is so often criticized. Susan Rosowski in Birthing a Nation:Gender, Creativity and the West in American Literature writes that it is the most famous birthing scene in all of American literature, 80. Many critics use it as the penultimate scene that illustrates Ántonia as earth mother. Paula Woolley in “‘Fire and Wit,’” argues that Ántonia is in fact the better, “vibrant” storyteller because she is marginalized, 151and passim.

Notes to Chapter Four 1. Walter Benn Michaels argues that Cather is, like her contemporaries, not railing against the materialism of her day but coding her text to perpetuate America’s imperialist and racist ideologies. Our America, 30–33. 2. There are numerous critics who read this novel as a treatise against materialism. David Stouck sees it as an attack against “American society and its preoccupation with material wealth,” Imagination, 100. For more recent criticism on the subject, see John Hilgart, 388; Rosowski Voyage 136; Wasserman 232–233; Sally Peltier Harvey, chapter one. 3. Cited in James Schroeter’s, “Willa Cather and The Professor’s House,” YR. 54 (1965): 499. 4. Rosowski, Voyage, 139. Thomas Strychacz argues that while many critics see the ambiguities of the novel, they reduce the novel to a “clean absolute of oppositions” which resolves the unresolvable. “Ambiguities,” 49. 5. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar use this terminology in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 6. Many have noted this “male idyll” aspect of the garden. See Michael Leddy “‘Distant and Correct’: The Double Life and The Professor’s House. Cather Studies. Vol. 3. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P, 1996) 186–187; Missy Dehn Kubitschek “St. Peter and the World All before

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Notes to Chapter Four Him.” Western American Literature. 17.1 (1982): 13–20; Schubnell, 97; Schwind, who notes that the professor is misogynistic, 79–80; and Dollar, 97–101. Schubnell parallels Strychacz’s idea. Schubnell reads the Professor and Tom Outland as representative of the last stages of a civilization gone corrupt according to Oswald Spengler’s view of history in The Decline of the West. John Hilgert sums up an entire class of Cather criticism when he points out that “Cather repeatedly stated and demonstrated the principle of rendering physical objects in the most spare and hermetic of ways, using the precision of the bare description simultaneously to represent the objet and to evoke its significance”(382). I am indebted to his insights for this portion of my argument. See Beatrice Slote’s The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principals and Critical Statements, 1893–1896. (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1967) for a good discussion of Cather’s aesthetics. Ann Moseley also sees The Professor’s House as a novel concerned with form. She argues that Cather forms the materials of cliff dwellings into a “work of art that is architectonic” by which she means the “ordering principle that determines how individual forms are ordered in space”(201). The individual forms of the cliff city serve to define and organize both their immediate space and the form or “shaping principle” of the novel which is the ordering principle of forms themselves. “Spatial Structures and Forms in The Professor’s House.” Cather Studies, Vol 3. Jean Schwind and Susan Rosowski both offer informative readings of the domestic in this cohabitation of the Professor’s and Augusta’s papers. Both see Augusta as the stark but necessary corrective to the Professor’s dilemma of whether or not he can live without delight. Schwind, 82–87. Rosowski, “Chosen Family,” 74–75. Thomas Strychacz reminds us that both David Stouck and Leon Edel see the function of the middle section as a “retreat from, or criticism of, the modern and corrupt society” of the professor’s world, 49. Strychacz, however, sees the middle section as an echo of that same corruption. He reads the novel as profoundly ironic which subverts any attempt to impose a static pattern on itself. Urgo argues that the diary, if told, would present to the reader a burden of the past, “a force threatening to imprison the present with its determination”(35) that would be literal death to a migratory culture. Urgo reads Cather as a novelist of Empire in that Cather’s body of works illustrates an intensely migratory culture, one that expands spatially instead of temporally and reverberates not only culturally but intellectually and aesthetically as well. Glen Love argues that the style of the diary “describes and predicts” Hemingway’s infamous prose style, 296. John Hilgert also briefly mentions the similarity in prose style between Cather and Hemingway.

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15. It is interesting to note that Cather does first what Faulkner will do in As I Lay Dying (published October, 1930). The dead speak. 16. Guy Reynolds writes that Tom Outland is actually “too complex for the transparencies of conventional character analysis”(126) because he exemplifies the “thickened, layered and knotted discourse” of all of Cather’s works. I see this as the other side of the proverbial same coin. Mythic discourse and character construction is at once too thick and too thin because of all that it needs to accomplish—participating in the transcendent while at the same time appearing “real” or contingent. 17. Loretta Wasserman, using Henry Bergon’s theory of time and memory, argues that personal time can be transcended in order to show us the “single flow of energy beneath apparent change”(229). The crucial difference lies in “lived time” that can move by “reciprocal interpenetration” into the present versus time as spatialized, dead units, inert, and in the past. Memory in The Professor’s House is not nostalgic yearning for the past but the thing that vitalizes the present. 18. Gilbert and Gubar recognize Tom as the “self-less Western spirit” that is gradually being eroded by the feminization of modern society, 207. 19. Val Plumwood’s “Wilderness Skepticism and Dualism” very succinctly describes and then roundly criticizes what she describes as a “masculine sphere of transcendence”(660), and sees it as a cultural phenomenon that is not distinct to American literature and letters. Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land explores the idea of the “male idyll” and its consequences in American literature. 20. Jean Schwind, 79–82; Matthew Wilson, 66–70; Thomas Strychacz, 50–51; Rosowski “Chosen Family,” 72–75. 21. Rosowski also wryly notes that this Eden ends, appropriately, with a snakebite (“Chosen” 74). 22. Matthew Wilson points out, “the novel both enacts and critiques the male idyll” because the adventure inherent in the escape has limits. “Willa Cather’s Godfrey St. Peter: Historian of Repressed Sensibility?” College Literature 21.1 (1994): 63–74. 23. Merrill Skagg’s After the World Broke in Two 67–71 (U. of Virginia P., 1990). 24. Walter Benn Michaels in “The Vanishing American” also argues this point. He claims that the land must be emptied of it prior occupants in order for American cultural imperialism to proceed. 25. Rosowski’s “Cather’s Chosen Family” asserts the primacy of community as the underlying theme in The Professor’s House. 26. Four of Cather’s most often cited biographers, Edith Lewis, E.K. Brown, Leon Edel, and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, all offer brief accounts of this trip to the Southwest. Subsequent work has been done on the subject, most thoroughly by David Harrell in From Mesa Verde to The Professor’s

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28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

Notes to Chapter Five House. However Harrell only makes a brief mention of Mesa Verde as a national park. Roderick Nash holds that the long, bitter debate over the damming the Hetch Hetchy river valley thrust into the public consciousness the debate over the inherent value of the national parks as American treasure. Wilderness and the American Mind, chapter ten Much critical work has been done on the problem of identity, family, and ancestry in this text. This passage certainly sets Tom up to be the quintessential American as it speaks to the anxiety of ancestry that Werner Sollars in Beyond Ethnicity argues underlies all of American identity. He argues that while Americans desire to cut ties with the authority figure—the father, the king—they simultaneously hold the idea of ethnicity very dear. See also Rosowski “Chosen Family”; Walter Benn Michaels, Our America; and Ian Bell “Re-Writing America: Origin and Gender in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House. Yearbook in English Studies. 24 (1994): 12–43. See http://www.georgetown.edu/guieu/libproj.htm, for an interesting discussion of the Dreyfus case and the free press. Crow argues that The Professor’s House “dramatizes museum theory”(53). Jean Schwind notes that Father Duchene’s reading of the pueblo culture through the Mother Eve figure (she was punished for sexual transgressions) is essentially incorrect. The pueblo cultures would be matrilinial not patriarchal, 89–90. Benn Michaels sees the connection to Crete as part of the imperialist energy to co-opt native cultures, construct them to seem “without culture” so that the modern American desire be “supremely American” can be realized, 229. It is a particularly noxious form of nativism that Benn Michaels argues plays out in The Professor’s House. However, I agree with John Hilgert that Benn Michaels fails to see that Cather consistently undermines this kind of reading, Hilgert, 389.

Notes to Chapter Five 1. Leo Marx argues that the whistle of the train marks the end of the pastoral. With the train comes the intrusion of the “artificial,” an “unfeeling utilitarian spirit” which bears fruit to all the ills of a “fragmented, industrial style of life”(Machine 18). 2. Audrey Goodman takes this same unsullied air and argues it is a metonym of the larger purpose of the novel. This purpose is to “construct visual and social and landscapes in order to investigate the places where meaning eludes the observer or reader”(52). Where she sees meaning as elusive, I see Cather giving the reader enough evidence to choose for him or herself the answer to the question at hand. The two readings are very closely allied.

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3. Guy Reynolds rightly sees that Death Comes is a text that “takes in competing strands of American history which it cannot finally reconcile”(153–154). 4. John Swift makes the exact opposite argument. He states that Death Comes is a text that is “inexorably impelled toward closure”(58). “Cather’s Archbishop and the ‘Backward Path.” (Cather Studies 1: 1990) 55–67. 5. Alfred Kazin, in On Native Grounds, notes that Cather is almost “too serenely good”(248). (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995 (1942)). Merrill Maguire Skaggs calls it a “masterpiece of passionately won serenity”(396). Death Comes For the Archbishop: Cather’s Mystery and Manners. American Literature 57 (1985): 395–406. Many of Cather’s biographers make this assertion, given the juxtaposition to Death Comes against the dark nature of Cather’s previous text, My Mortal Enemy. Also, James Woodress reports that she was never happier than when she wrote Death Comes For the Archbishop and there is a joyful, happy mood “sustained through the narrative” (391–397). 6. A few of these include Ann Fisher-Wirth who asserts the power of redemption in the narrative in “Dispossession and Redemption”; Judith Freyer argues that the novel gives one the feeling of deep connectedness, “a kind of synthesis between the vastness of the landscape and the intimacy of inner space that is .  .  . felicitous”(318). See also David Stouck’s Willa Cather’s Imagination and Marilyn Arnold’s “The Integrating Vision.” Post 1990 criticism has better understood that Death Comes For the Archbishop is a “dramatic site of unresolved tensions”(79), but even these critics in some degree argue in the end that Cather is able to reconcile and unify these tensions. See Janet Giltrow and David Stouck “Willa Cather and A Grammar for Things “Not Named.” Style. 26 (1992): 91–113; Deborah Lindsay Williams. “Losing Nothing, Comprehending Everything: Learning to Read both the Old World and the New in Death Comes for the Archbishop.” Cather Studies. Vol. 4, 80–95; and Tom Quirk; “The Moral Geography of Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Shallow Light of the Present.” Essays on Arts and Sciences. 24 (1995): 47–61. Guy Reynolds reads the text in much the same way as I do, arguing that while it is an “eirenic” novel, Death Comes For the Archbishop “takes in competing strands of American history which it cannot finally reconcile”(154). 7. Walter Benn Michaels is the most outspoken of these critics. He accuses Cather outright of perpetuating the nativist view in The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Audrey Goodman calls it a “late imperial romance”(54) which is defined by Frederic Jameson as “an antimodernist revolt against the evaluation of all territory according to its productive use”(52). Goodman adroitly notes that “Cather records what can be lost in the dominant narrative of development and what might be saved”(54). Joseph Urgo cogently argues that Death Comes For the Archbishop is a text

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

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Notes to Chapter Five about the “empire of migration,” and states that “Death Comes is a further projection of the idea of American empire, paying particular attention to the quality of ideas on which the empire originated”(174). Urgo right notes that this empire formation has as its “business” the transmissionof intellectual capital from culture to culture and from place to place. See Stephen Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions and Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America for brilliant discussions of Columbus’s speech act that heralded the conquest of the new world. James Dinn discusses a garden that comes later in the text. Fray Baltazar’s garden as “a gross parody of spiritual fertility” because it is only “a symbol of his power and sensuality”(45) works very well as a description of this ecclesiastical garden in Rome. From “A Novelists’ Miracle: Structure and Myth in Death Comes for the Archbishop.” Western American Literature. 7 (1972): 41–46. John Conron defines landscape as “the land’s shape as it is seen from a particular and defined perspective”(xviii), in The American Landscape. Ed. John Conron. ( New York: Oxford UP, 1974.) Carol Steinhagen notes that landscape is a very human creation, a “seen scene” because it is “nature perceived as a separate entity by human beings”(66). A dialogic in its loosest sense is a never ending dialogue. There is no synthesis with a dialogic, whereas with the dialectic, you have a thesis and its opposite, the antithesis, which is resolved in a final synthesis. See M.M. Bakhtin’s introduction to The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. (Austin: U.of Texas P., 1981). There are a number of critics who disagree with my assertion. David Stouck, for example, argues that because scenes are placed side by side, time becomes only incidental and “the vision suffusing the narrative is atemporal,” “and that because “history equals progress, it can ignore the randomness of the text such as the displacement of the natives” (Professor’s House 131–132, 203). I do not believe that this randomness is ignored, nor is this an “atemporal” narrative. Guy Reynolds and Deborah Lindsay Williams in “Losing Nothing, Comprehending Everything” both make this assertion. Cather Studies. Vol 4, 80–95. Urgo eloquently makes this act of forgetting a picture: “Between the one that wishes to leave a record and the one that does not, the record will show the clear footprints of the victor while the vanquished simply disappear”(179); however, Urgo does not see the textual traces of the vanquished footprints as I do. See chapters three through seven in Ellis’s Bishop Lamy’s Santa Fe Cathedral for an in-depth discussion of the long and complicated history of the Spanish Parroquia and the cathedral that replaces it. See Derrida’s On Grammatology for his discussion of the trace. (Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. 1976 (1974)).

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17. Urgo points out that in an earlier episode in the book, when don Antonio Olivares at his New Year’s party of 1860 announces that he will help pay for the Bishop’s cathedral, the soldiers of the American fort are being called away, one to Washington to participate in the politics that will ultimately end in the Civil War and one to the far west to fight Native Americans in Arizona. Urgo notes that while Cather does not make these historical developments explicit, both are present in the text (174–175). 18. Francis Paul Prucha notes the Navaho route is reminiscent of the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears (450), which also was a “soldier’s brutal work,” that cost thousands of lives. For an in-depth discussion of both catastrophes, see Prucha’s The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indian. Vol I and II. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P., 1984.) 19. The relevant political history of the actual rout and return of the Navaho adds another layer to the real economic factors that are often forgotten when speaking of “wilderness.” Paul Prucha notes that the reason the government “admitted” their “mistake”(Death Comes 296) is that the Bosque Redondo, a very desolate wilderness, couldn’t support the huge number of people—the Apaches as well as the Navajos were corralled there—so the government was spending too much money in subsidies. Secondly, the natives were allowed to return to their native lands because the land around the Canyon de Chelley and Shiprock is a place, as the Navajo chief Manuelito says, “hard for men to live,” 295. It is “useless,” neither farmable nor mineable. Prucha 450–451, 474. 20. What Philip Fisher sees as a reoccurring rhetorical move in works such as Cooper’s The Deerslayer, Slotkin reads as part of the mythic idea of regeneration of the American spirit through this violence. Regeneration, 5. 21. Urgo cogently notes that as a holy war and not a “simple political expansion” this war, like the one being waged against the Native Americans, had at stake “not only land and minerals but also a system of thought, a mode of consciousness”(185). 22. The Jesuits, it must be noted, are notorious for their fierceness and their militancy, and the Templars, of which the word temple is derived, are an order of the same. The Oxford English Dictionary relates that the Templars are a religious order of solders and knights who protected the Holy Sepulcher and the Holy Land Pilgrims, and were so called because of their headquarters were next to the Temple of Solomon. This temple, also called the Temple of Jerusalem, is the first structure built to house the stone tablets of the ten commandments. The original Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the pagan Babylonian king. It was rebuilt twice, then demolished in 70 A.D. by the same Romans who erected their pagan water goddesses noted in the text. Furthermore, it is built on the site of Mt. Moriah, where Solomon’s father, David, had offered sacrifice. Thus this brief reference to the Templars is yet another elaboration of the same history, the same story

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23.

24. 25.

26.

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Notes to Chapter Five of bloody conquest of empire that this novel scripts as the most basic of textual levels. D. Duane Cummins and William Gee White say this most succinctly: “The frontiersman, the Indian trader, the fur trapper, or as he preferred to be called in the West, the mountain man, was the vanguard of the advancing frontier. He was the pathfinder.” He was the man who made possible the transformation of the Indian trails into turnpikes and railroads. The American Frontier. (Encino CA: Glencoe Publishing, 1980). Joseph Urgo argues that Kit Carson signals the “intrusion of historical documentation into Cather’s fiction” and reminds us that this history is empire formation, 175. See Jerome J. Martinez y Alira. “The Apotheosis of Bishop Lamy: Local Faith Perspectives.” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 35.3 (1991): 19–22; and Lance Larsen’s “Cather’s Controversial Portrayal of Martinez,” in Willa Cather: Faith, Community, and History. Also, Evelyn Haller’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop: A Map of Intersecting Worlds,” is an interesting explanation of the actual Penitentes ceremonies. Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 34.3 (1990) 15–20. As Joseph Urgo notes: “Latour’s church does not grow out of the desert plains but is written on to the desert.” Myth of Migration, 186.

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Index

A

Abbey, Edward, 35 Adams, Richard, 149-150 Akin, Marjorie, 106 Antiquities Act, 105 Arabian Nights, 32 Arcadia, 50 Arnold, Marilyn, 115 Athern, Robert G., 85 Auchincloss, Lewis, 151 Austin, Mary, 141

B

Bakhtin, M. M., 158 Barthes, Roland, 10, 11 “Myth Today,” 12–20, 24, 25, 39, 41–49, 67, 73, 85, 90, 99, 125, 145–149 “Striptease” 37 Baym, Nina, 41 Bell, Ian, 156 Bennett, Mildred, 72 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 11, 12, 57 Bergon, Henry, 155 Beverly, Robert, 78 Blair, Barbara, 80 Bloom, Edward and Lillian, 115 Bloom, Harold, 80 Boone, Daniel, 95 Brøgger, Fredrich Chr., 31 Brown, E.K., 155 Buffalo Bill, 5, 10, 98, 99 Burt, Donald C., 182

C

Cather, Willa, 19, 67, 71, 91 Death Comes for the Archbishop, 19, 74, 77, 11, 113–139 Lost Lady, 71, 72, 77, 123 My Ántonia, 19, 74, 75–90, 91, 125 “Not Under Forty,” 71, 98 O Pioneers!, 72, 77 “On Writing,” 94, 114, 120, 121 Professor’s House, 19, 74, 91–111, 112, 113, 125 Campbell, Henry Modean, 55, 148–150 Carden, Mary Paniccia, 11, 80–83, 143, 151–152 Caridge, Laura P., 150 Carson, Kit, 126, 131 Civello, Paul, 26, 146 Clark, Suzanne, 146 Columbus, Christopher, 4, 57, 115 Conquistadore, 85, 128 Conron, John, 158 Cooley, John, 149, 150 Cooper, James Fenimore, 30, 130 Cooperman, Stanley, 147, 148 Coronado, Francisco Vasquez de, 83, 86, 128, 152 Cowley, Malcolm, 50, 148–150 Cronin, William, 3, 4–5, 142 Cummins, D. Duane, 160 Crow, Charles, 106

D

Dabney, Lewis, 53, 56, 149

171

94973-Ross 4 21.indd 171

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172 David and Goliath, 82 Davis, Thadious, M. Derrida, Jacques, 124, 158 Devlin, Arthur, 63 DeVoto, Bernard, 39 Dickenson, Emily, 87 Dillman, 97 Dinn, James, 158 Dollar, J. Gerard, 100 Dreyfus case, 105 Dyck, Ronald, 71, 124, 151

E

Edel, Leon, 154, 155 Eisley, Loren, 141 El Greco, 116 Elis, Bruce, 123, 158 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 67, 80, 113, 133 Evans, David, 51, 57, 66, 148, 150

F

Faulkner, William, 18, 71–73, 88, 91, 110, 138 “Bear, The,” 47–51, 52–62, 63, 82, 86, 132 “Delta Autumn,” 47, 55, 56, 63–66 Go Down Moses, 47, 49, 51 “Old People,” 47–52 Ferguson, Mary Anne, 80, 151 Fielder, Leslie, 28, 145, 147 Fischer, Mike, 87 Fisher, Philip, 30, 127, 144, 159 Fisher-Worth, Anne, 114, 143, 157 Foster, Ruel E., 148, 149, 150 Foucault, Michel, 103, 120, 122 Frontier, 1–4, 8–12 71, 113 Fryer, Judith, 80, 95, 143, 52, 57 Fuss, Diane, 3, 142

G

Garden of Eden, 26, 72 Garden of the World, 78, 79; see also Smith, Henry Nash Gelfant, Blanche, 80 Gertz, Clifford, 11 Gilber, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 100, 153 Giltrow, Janet, 157 Gold, Joseph, 66, 148

94973-Ross 4 21.indd 172

Index Goodman, Audrey, 121, 155, 156, 157 Grand Canyon, 5, 143 Great American Desert, 85 Great Gatsby, 78 Greenblatt, Stephen, 144, 158 Gurko, Leo, 26, 30, 147 Gwynn, Frederick, 150

H

Haller, Evelyn, 160 Harrell, David, 155 Harvey, Sally Peltier, 153 Hawthorn, Nathaniel, 5 Hays, Peter L., 147 Hazard, Lucy Lockwood, 3, 141 Hemingway, Ernest, 17, 66, 71, 72–73, 87, 91, 96 Death in the Afternoon, 24, 29, 33–38, 39 Green Hills of Africa, 24, 38–46 “Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” 41 Sun Also Rises, 32–33, 36, 43–44 Henberg, Marvin, 4, 9, 142, 144 Hetch Hetchy, 104 Heyne, Eric, 9 Hilgert, John, 124, 145, 156 Hilgert, John, 95, 153 Hine, Robert V., 10, 11, 141, 43, 145 Hinsley, Curtis, 134 Hopi, 136 Howe, Irving, 150 Hyde, Anne Farrar, 134

I

Irmscher, Chrisopher, 148 Ise, John, 105

J

Jacobs, Wilbur, 9 James, Jesse, 75 Jameson, Fredric, 157 Jefferson, Thomas, 78, 141 Johnson, Glen M., 148

K

Kazin, Alfred, 151, 157 Keats, John, 49

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Index Kinney, Arthur, 148, 149, 150 Kolodny, Annette, 4, 142, 143 Knights Templars, 159 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 98, 141 Kubitschek, Missy Dehn, 153

L

Lamy, Archbishop, 131 Larson, Lance, 160 Lawrence, D. H., 31 Leddy, Michael, 153 Leopold, Aldo, 61 Lewis and Clark, 5 Lewis, Edith, 155 Lewis, R.W.B., 9, 55, 80, 144, 148–151 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 141, 142, 144–145 Lincoln, Abraham, 67 Lindsey, Charles, 28, 29, 146 Love, Glenn, 147, 148, 154 Lyndenberg, John, 54, 55

M

Mandel, Miriam B., 144, 147 Martin, Linda Wagner, 149 Martin, Terence, 54 Martinez y Alira, Jerome J., 160 Martínez, Antonia José, 131 Marx, Leo, 78, 84, 93, 141, 143, 146, 150, 152, 156 McCarthy, Cormac, 107 McGee, Patrick, 148 Merchant, Carolyn, 142 Meriwether, James, 150 Meyer, William E.H., 150 Michaels, Walter Benn, 153, 155–157 Miller, James E., 150 Miller, Perry, 145, 148 Mississippi Delta Council, 54 Moloney, Michael F., 29 Monticello, 103 Morris, Wright, 10 Moseley, Ann, 154 Muir, John, 5, 141 Murphy, John, 85, 130

N

Nash, Roderick, 4, 145, 156

94973-Ross 4 21.indd 173

173 National Parks Service, 7 National Parks, 6, 7, 13, 15, 25, 87, 91, 102, 103 Mesa Verde, 91, 93, 102, 105 Yosemite, 104 Navaho, 126, 133, 136 Neitzche, Friedrich, 120 New Eden, 57 New Jerusalem, 4, 88 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 4, 143

O

O’Donnell, George Marion, 50 Oelschlaeger, Max, 142 Oho, Kiyoyuki, 150 Oregon Trail, 1

P

Paris Match, 13 Pastoral, 1, 23, 29, 78, 80, 84, 88 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 149 Percy, Walker, 152 Perkins, Max, 147 Pilgrims, 4, 58 Pioneer, 131 Pitman, Barbara, 148 Plath, James, 27, 146 Plumwood, Val, 142, 155 Plymouth Rock, 4 Poe, Edgar Allen, 51 Polk, Neil, 52, 58 Powell, John Wesley, 5 Prucha, Fracis Paul, 106, 159 Puritans, 11, 23, 58, 78 Putnam, Ann, 23

Q

Quirk, Tom, 157

R

Randall, John H. III, 152 Rehberger, Dean, 146 Reynolds, Guy, 97, 99, 115, 121, 152, 155, 157, 158 Roosevelt, Theodore, 105 Rosowski, Susan, 100, 151–156 Runte, Alfred, 7

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174 Ryder, Mary Ruth, 80

S

San Francisco, 104 Sayer, Robert, 148 Schubnell, Matthias, 154 Schwartz, Delmore, 27 Schwind, Jean, 95, 100, 154, 155 See America First see Mandel, Miriam Shaw, Patrick, 152 Simonson, Harold P., 10, 141, 143, 145 Skaggs, Merrill Maguire, 155, 157 Slote, Beatrice, 154 Slotkin, Richard, 3, 4, 6, 10, 79, 141–145, 152 Smith, Henry Nash, 9, 78, 79, 141, 151 Smith, Paul, 147 Soller, Werner, 10, 86, 153, 156 Spengler, Oswald, 154 Stein, Paul S., 60, 150 Steinhagen, Carol, 158 Stenger, Wallace, 1, 7 Stewart, David H., 150 Stich, Klau, 151 Stouck, David, 153, 154, 157, 158 Strychacz, Thomas about Earnest Hemingway 39, 44, 147, 158 about Willa Cather, 93, 94, 102, 153, 154 Sundquist, Eric, 51, 149, 150 Svoboda, Frank, 25 Swift, John, 157

T

Thoreau, Henry David, 69, 80, 89, 141 Todorov, Tzvetan, 32, 143, 158 Treaty of Guadeloupe, 119

94973-Ross 4 21.indd 174

Index Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1,2, 5, 7–12, 27, 113, 114, 144 Twain, Mark, 42, 100, 130

U

Urgo, Joseph, 96, 98, 148, 153–154, 157–160 Utley, Francis Lee, 148, 149

V

Virgil, 84, 130

W

Wagner-Martin, Linda, 54, 150 Waller, Donald, 3 Warren, Robert Penn, 27, 146, 149 Wassserman, Loretta, 108, 155 Weber, Max, 11 Weber, Ronald, 33, 147 White, Richard, 144 White, William Gee, 160 Whitman, Walt, 80 Williams, Deborah, Lindsay, 157, 158 Williams, Terry Tempest, 33 Williamson, Joel, 148 Wilson, Matthew, 155 Winthrop, Jonathan, 4 Williams, Wirt, 36, 146 Wittenberg, Judith Bryant, 61, 150 Woodress, James, 151, 157 Woolley, Paula, 152–153 Worster, Donald, 144

Y

Yeoman Farmer, 78, 84 Young, Philip, 27, 34, 145, 146

Z

Zender, Karl F., 148 Zuni, 126

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