n ttl d rld : th t pl nt n ll th r nt n

Keith Wilhite

Studies in the Novel, Volume 42, Numbers 3 Fall 2010, pp. 269-286(Article)

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Studies in the Novel, volume 42, number 3 (Fall 2010). Copyright © 2010 by the University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

UNSETTLED WORLDS: AESTHETIC EMPLACEMENT IN WILLA CATHER’S MY ÁNTONIA

KEITH WILHITE

Storytelling, narrative viewpoint, and regional geography form a popular and theoretically rich nexus in the critical debates surrounding Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. A number of scholars (e.g., Funda, Holmes, McElhiney, Millington, Selzer, and Woolley) have pointed out Cather’s insistent return to the oral tradition in the novel, and most read the emphasis on storytelling as Cather’s way of endorsing Ántonia Shimerda’s perspective and privileging her experiences as more authentic than those of the novel’s narrator, Jim Burden. These claims emerge most often from examinations of the competing voices in the novel: Jim, Ántonia, and the unnamed narrator of the introduction. Within this focus on narrative perspective, two common strains have emerged in the scholarship: first, readers (including Funda, McElhiney, Harris, and Tellefsen) tend to equate the narrator of the introduction with Cather herself and, second, they read the novel’s competing perspectives strictly in terms of a competition for authenticity or credibility. This debate, in turn, often extends to thematic considerations of landscape and region. That is to say, the authenticity of experience or narrative voice is often coded geographically in terms of the relationship that exists between the character and the natural world (see Rosowski, “Willa Cather and the Fatality of Place” 88-90 and Saposnik-Noire 178). In these regional considerations, Ántonia’s connection to Bohemia almost always trumps Jim’s connection to the “old South” of his early childhood (see Jones 107-08). Taking these theoretical and textual concerns into account, this essay distances itself from debates about which narrative viewpoint or regional affiliation comes across as more or less credible and, instead, focuses our

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attention on the novel’s narrative indeterminacy and regional instability. My Ántonia offers a layering of narrative perspectives that should provoke a more thoroughgoing readerly skepticism, belying the notion of a “privileged” voice in the novel. Urging critics to be more rigorous in their reading of the novel’s “disingenuous and self-deluded narrator,” Blanche Gelfant first and most famously claimed that “[o]ur persistent misreading of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia rises from a belief that Jim Burden is a reliable narrator” (60). Taking this advice to heart, I extend this lack of reliability to the narrator of the introduction. Rather than clearing a space for Cather’s authorial voice, the 1918 and 1926 introductions complicate the debate surrounding authenticity by adding yet another level of unreliability to My Ántonia. In other words, my reading suggests that the introduction’s narrator might be equally “disingenuous” and, as such, she anticipates the novel’s narrative indeterminacy: the limited and uncertain perspectives, the layering of competing voices, male and female, and the inextricable oral and written traditions that unsettle the aesthetic uniformity of the text. This consideration of narrative unreliability segues into an exploration of what I am calling the novel’s “regional instability.” There is a real androgyny to region in My Ántonia as old and new worlds collide, one that complements the novel’s gender repressions, insecurities, and ambiguities. Bohemian, Southern, Midwestern, and even quasi-mystical landscapes coexist within the narrative as shifting sites of alienation and identification for Jim and Ántonia. Amidst this instability, through Jim’s narrative, I argue that Cather offers readers alternative versions of “aesthetic emplacement”: artistic practices that center or ground the unsettling experience of displacement.1 To develop this line of thinking, I examine the often overlooked importance of the South in My Ántonia, paying particular attention to the figure of Blind d’Arnault as a source of identification for Jim and his aesthetic practices. My readings of the introduction and the South set up a theorization of how regional displacement and aesthetic emplacement highlight the symbolic connections central to the experiences of im/migration in the novel. The shorthand compound “im/migration” is not intended to elide the very real historical and political distinctions between immigration and migration. The freedom to migrate internationally or intranationally remains a fraught topic of debate across scholarly disciplines, but Cather’s focus in My Ántonia on the necessary connection between place and subjectivity suggests that both the immigrant Ántonia and the migrant Jim share a common, albeit distinct, desire to form symbolic connections to place, to create a personal sense of “at-homeness.” Alternative aesthetic practices emerge in the novel not as a way of privileging an oral over a written tradition, the feminine over the masculine, or an immigrant over a migrant experience, but as a way of presenting unique versions of aesthetic emplacement in unsettled narrative, linguistic, and regional worlds.

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“My Ántonia” and My Ántonia The introduction to My Ántonia presents the reader with two complementary conundrums: first, should we read the unnamed narrator as Willa Cather and, if so, how should that inflect the reading of the narrative that follows; and second, to what extent, if at all, does the novel My Ántonia differ from Jim’s manuscript “My Ántonia.” The revisions that Cather made to the introduction between 1918 and 1926 only compound the sense of uncertainty inherent in the novel’s prefatory text. For scholars who read the unnamed narrator as Cather, the introduction confirms Jim’s romantic unreliability, compromises his credibility as a narrator, prefigures the more authentic aestheticism of Ántonia’s storytelling and, perhaps, reflects Cather’s own psychological transformations between 1918 and 1926 as well as editorial pressure from Ferris Greenslet (see Lindemann 117; see also Harris 33-34 and Schwind 53). For example, in her discussion of masculine and feminine narrative strategies in My Ántonia, Evelyn Funda links the narrator of the introduction with “Cather herself” (195), joining Ántonia and Cather/narrator as partners in an enterprise to critique the self-centered, alienating, and objectifying qualities of Jim’s narrative. Blythe Tellefsen makes the important observation that the introduction layers “a fiction within a fiction” (230), but then undercuts the fascinating metafictional quality of the claim by insisting that the introduction’s narrator “can be convincingly read as Willa Cather herself” (242). Much of Annette Bennington McElhiney’s study of narrative viewpoint in the novel also depends upon our willingness to equate Cather with the “I/editor” of the introduction. Regarding W. T. Benda’s illustrations for My Ántonia, she writes, “And if Cather the author is synonymous with the I/editor, these illustrations become key as another political/artistic technique to undercut Jim’s mythmaking story and support Ántonia’s voice as more credible, even if it appears as a subtextual voice” (72). McElhiney invites us to read Ántonia’s speech acts within Jim’s narrative as the work of the I/editor/Cather who allows her to speak freely (72). I would suggest that we gain a richer understanding of the role the introduction plays within the novel as a whole if we read the unnamed narrator not as “Cather herself,” but as yet another narrative voice within the text whose credibility should be questioned. This reading underscores the introduction’s other dilemma, namely to what extent “My Ántonia” remains My Ántonia, though as I will show, any actual discrepancy between the two documents is far less important than the introduction’s suggestion that such a distinction exists. In other words, what is important about the potential discrepancy between Jim’s manuscript and the published My Ántonia is that it anticipates what Marilee Lindemann calls the “discursive uncertainties” (112) of the narrative that follows. In the 1918 and 1926 introductions, the unnamed narrator instills this sense of ambiguity through what she implies and in what she omits. True, every narrator’s perspective is limited to some extent, and every reader knows

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to be wary of (even implied) claims to omniscience. But if the question of reliability should remain central to our reading of Cather’s novel—as Gelfant suggests—it certainly should not be limited to Jim’s narrative. Rather than providing the reader with Cather’s own, authentic voice, or a rubric for reading the text that follows, the introduction anticipates the novel’s narrative indeterminacy by making it impossible for us to establish to what extent Cather is the narrator any more than we can extricate “My Ántonia” from My Ántonia. The introduction merely redoubles our doubts, casting the narrator as a suspect and potentially disingenuous figure, at least on par with Jim. Two omissions and one significant change in the 1926 version will help clarify this line of thinking. In the original introduction, after the narrator and Jim have agreed to “set down on paper all that [they] remembered of Ántonia” (243), and after Jim apologetically notes that he “should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about [him]self” (244), the narrator includes the following observation: “He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not” (244). Cather omits this comment from the 1926 introduction, as well as the narrator’s closing confession: “My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me” (244). In many ways, the former comment is the more curious because it asks the reader to imagine which, if any, of the young girls in the novel this narrator might be, or which margin of the social structure in and around Black Hawk this unnamed woman had occupied. With the obvious overtones of gender and privilege in relation to storytelling, the comment is intrusive enough to disrupt our reading of the text, especially since the narrator draws attention to the observation, making it the last comment before the page break that marks the passing of months before Jim presents his manuscript. In its original form, this deliberate and, I believe, insincere self-effacement by the unnamed narrator should place the reader on guard. No other aspect of the 1918 introduction appears to raise doubts about her perceptive qualities or ability to write, for gendered reasons or otherwise, and the narrator clearly represents the voice of a writer throughout the introduction, as implied by Jim’s comment: “I can’t see…why you have never written anything about Ántonia” (243). The tone of the exchange here suggests that Jim is talking to an established writer. At the very least, the narrator’s self-effacing deferral to Jim’s privileged, masculine perspective seems suspect—damning with faint praise the privileged perspective of the amateur writer and, in the process, transforming herself into a more enigmatic figure. The closing statement of the 1918 introduction and the obvious sleight of hand suggested by the qualifying term “substantially” intensify this sense of the narrator’s playful insincerity. Jim’s confession that he “did n’t arrange or rearrange” the manuscript and that “it has n’t any form” (244), coupled with the fact that what follows the introduction is a highly ordered, literary novel, arranged not only into chapters

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but into five books, each carefully titled, should be enough to make the reader question the unnamed narrator’s credibility—or, at the very least, her definition of the term “substantially.” While these distinctions may seem rather obvious and mundane, they have remained a blind spot of sorts in most readings of the novel, and in the process we overlook the consequences of this unreliability to our reading of the narrative that follows. In other words, I am arguing that if the introduction functions at all as a guide for readers, it serves as a warning against the trap of privileging storytelling over narrative or trying to disentangle acts of feminine and masculine artistry in the novel. The omissions from the 1926 version support just such a reading. The comment concerning the unnamed narrator’s gender-restricted access to Ántonia becomes more intriguing in its absence, as if, for a brief moment, Cather decides to place gender under erasure. As Karen Hoffmann notes, “the introductory frame of the 1926 edition adds to the novel’s unsettling of gender categories by presenting a narrator whose gender is not defined” (27). Certainly, such traditional gender distinctions remain encoded throughout the novel in the communal stories Ántonia tells and in the solitary solipsism of Jim’s narrative, but we can also read this “unsettling of gender categories” in the introduction as a refusal to endorse one gender-inflected voice over another. (After all, the omission also removes, whether facetious or not, the notion that Jim’s perspective is any more or less privileged than the unnamed narrator’s.) Absent as well from the slimmed-down 1926 introduction are any overt indications that the narrator is a writer or that she speaks from a position of authorial insight. In fact, the revised introduction completely transfers the agency of writing to Jim, who is now cast as a writer of sorts: “From time to time I’ve been writing down what I remember about Ántonia” (2). This transference of authorial agency to Jim is undercut, however, not only by the omission of the final acknowledgement from 1918—“the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me”—but by what now reads as a rather snide remark at the end of the introduction: “He frowned at this moment, then prefixed another word, making it ‘My Ántonia.’ That seemed to satisfy him” (2).2 Since Jim still claims in the revised introduction not to have “take[n] time to arrange” (2) the manuscript, it is possible to read the well-ordered novel that follows as nothing less than a total transformation of the original manuscript: the self-serving act of inscribing “My Ántonia” gets displaced by the unnamed narrator’s highly sophisticated, literary novel, My Ántonia. Or not. We simply cannot know, and this doubt or invitation to skepticism is really the only thing the introduction affords the reader. Neither the 1918 nor 1926 introduction is a key for determining credibility or privilege; both versions merely introduce a sense of uncertainty into the novel, making it difficult, if not questionable, to label Ántonia’s or Jim’s aesthetic practices as more or less authentic based on the presumed authorial intent of an unnamed

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narrator. The encoded indeterminacy of the introduction should guide readers away from the debate over privilege and authenticity while foreshadowing the mutual compatibility of Jim’s and Ántonia’s aesthetic practices. If we resist reading one voice or artistic practice as “authorially endorsed,” we can read the introduction as a text that anticipates the more pervasive instability that both Ántonia’s stories and Jim’s narrative articulate.

Nebraska All Day Long The sense of uncertainty created by the introduction gets reworked throughout My Ántonia in the displacement of the im/migrant experience. As a fundamental aspect of im/migration, region warrants further attention as a site in the novel that embodies both displacement and emplacement, bridging immigrant and migrant experiences in a common struggle for identity and home. As Suzy Clarkson Holstein describes in her account of migration and Midwestern regionalism, immigration and migration share a common metaphorical lexicon. Images of “uprootedness” and “transplantation” represent the idea of “a tearing motion…the deep and sometimes unspoken pain exacted by migration” (51). Holstein highlights a language of loss based on an insistent geographic mobility that resonates across experiences of immigration and migration. As described in My Ántonia, Jim’s migration from Virginia to the Midwest most clearly and succinctly articulates the transformation from regional displacement to emplacement. Rather than framing Jim’s migration as a foil for the more authentic experience of immigration, My Ántonia enacts the confluence of an im/migrant experience predicated on the symbolic attachment to place. Here, too, the introduction prepares the reader by prefiguring the instability of regional displacement. Both Jim and the unnamed narrator seem to be regionally “unsettled”: they are in transit (Jim constantly so), both now live in New York but are kept apart by disparate business affiliations and social circles, and they appear irrevocably displaced from yet tied to the same small Nebraska town. The most striking aspect of the regional displacement hinted at in the introduction, however, concerns not the nostalgia for their Nebraska town but the fact that their reminiscence of Nebraska is inspired by their observations of Iowa. You can fill in your own joke here about the indistinguishable landscapes of the Midwest, but that would not resolve the question as to why Cather situates the train in Iowa rather than Nebraska. A closer look at the passage sheds some light on the placement of the train. The unnamed narrator observes,

The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when

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one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the colour and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests, blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and grey as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said. (1)

The more one reads this passage, the less specific it becomes. The wheat and corn give the depiction a traditional regionalist quality, but the highly literary description of the landscape metonymically moves the reader from a specific region to “the whole country”—or at least a region that stands in for the whole country. Moreover, their specific hometown in Nebraska gives way to a generic collection of prairie towns that by birthright initiate their inhabitants into a type of esoteric fellowship. In other words, the reminiscence begins and ends with images that are both specific and general, emplaced and displaced, centered and decentered, offering the reader a regional specificity that gives way to a shifting, almost borderless collective. This moment also begins to decenter Nebraska as the novel’s primary region and introduces the regional instability that inflects Jim’s sense of identity and attachment to place. One of the first observations offered by the recently displaced Jim is that “[t]he only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska” (6). The reader soon discovers, however, that the most noticeable thing about the Nebraska of My Ántonia is that it is not, in fact, Nebraska all day long, and sometimes it is not Nebraska at all. Regional borders blur in the novel through episodic Southern encroachments that, in turn, facilitate Jim’s symbolic acclimation to the Midwestern prairie lands. These Southern intrusions occur through narrative reminiscences that seem no less authentic or compelling than Ántonia’s old-world, Bohemian stories. The introduction’s promissory offer of indeterminacy is fulfilled in these shifting regional sites of identification. In the displacement of the im/migrant experience, place and language supplement one another in necessary acts of symbolic attachment. Scholars who address the role of region in My Ántonia tend to downplay the importance of the South, both for Jim and the novel as a whole. Evelyn Funda reads Jim’s Southern past as “unstoried,…a blank, while Ántonia’s stories of her life in Bohemia show a rich personal past, full of human history and stories of struggle and triumph” (200). Catherine Holmes echoes this notion of Jim’s vacant past in her discussion of the two conditions of exile in My Ántonia: “the syncretic and the hybrid.” While the syncretic condition allows for a communion between old-world and new-world experiences, “the hybrid, like Jim, experiences only the separation of exile without any of its compensations. He is a stranger to himself, forever split between the old world and the new. Nothing for him connects with anything else, and true communion is impossible” (344). Even Anne Goodwyn Jones, who convincingly encourages

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us to read for the “‘unwritten, cancelled Virginias’ embedded in the text” (90), concludes that Jim, unlike Cather, fails to “confront…memories of the South” (107) and, as a result, “remain[s] emotionally paralyzed and permanently immature” (108). Perhaps most succinctly of all, Joseph Urgo argues, “for Jim Burden, then, home will always be in Nebraska….(Virginia is simply where he was born.)” (56). While I would agree that Jim and Ántonia entertain discrepant ideas about the past and address their “exilic” conditions differently, these distinctions between rich and vacant pasts, or to what Urgo refers to as Jim’s ability “to erase” a sense of “historical continuity” (59), do not account for the significant role the South plays as a regional touchstone for Jim during his acclimation to the Midwest. When Jim first arrives in Nebraska, his descriptions of the landscape provide a lens onto the “migratory mind” that Urgo considers central to Cather’s fiction (see Urgo 4-5). Yet, rather than embrace this migration, Jim seems initially troubled by the lack of solid ground beneath his feet, and his reactions are imbued with the disconcerting language of cosmic displacement. This Nebraska seems a land either on the verge of coming into or passing out of existence. Jim notes,

There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made…. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction…. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be. (7-8)

This description is almost a-spatial, anticipating the kind of mythic, primordial representations of region—“that dead and fabled waste”—one finds in the Appalachian novels of Cormac McCarthy (McCarthy 158).3 In Jim’s earliest memories of this unstable “new world” (5), the reader can identify what is perhaps a richer articulation of the im/migrant experience than notions of “uprooting” or “transplantation” (see Gjerde 40-41 and Holstein 47-48). Jim articulates the beginning of a cycle in which the mythic qualities of an anticipated “new world” stand in stark contrast to the familiar aspects of the “old world.” In other words, though both Jim and Ántonia mythologize their old worlds, initially the new world of the Midwest appears impalpable to Jim when measured against the tangible Southern world he has left behind. These positional poles of the mythic and the tangible will eventually shift as a result of Jim’s physical and symbolic attachments, but the movement remains cyclical in the sense that he never completely overcomes an originary displacement (see Rosowski, “Willa Cather—A Pioneer in Art” 143). Jim’s initial description of the ephemeral Midwestern landscape articulates the disconcerting absence of the yet-to-be-formed connections between the subject and the space he occupies. At the outset, the new world is always an anticipatory space, distinct from the immediate, old-world past that tags along

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as the antecedent to the unsettling experience of im/migration and against which this new world is measured. Admittedly, Jim’s degree of displacement from the South does not rise to the dissonant levels of displacement that the Shimerdas experience. Yet, to suggest that the past from which Jim finds himself displaced exists as a narrative blank or historical void when read alongside the Shimerdas’ Bohemian past overlooks the fact that this is the first and, in many ways, the most articulate depiction in My Ántonia of the almost mythic way time and space coalesce in the displacement of the subject. It is only natural that Jim would limn Nebraska in these terms and that the South would initially “crop up” in the prairie lands of the Midwest as the touchstone of memory and the lens through which he reads this unfamiliar world. The debate over how migration and immigration mirror or counterbalance one another in My Ántonia notwithstanding, Jim’s initial experiences allow Cather to establish the passing from the real into the mythic that marks the regional displacement of both immigration and migration. As the new world accumulates the history of the old, it becomes the site of both real and symbolic connections. The old world recedes into its own mythic existence, preserved symbolically in the transference of the temporal past to a spatial present (and presence), leaving the geography of the old world nebulous and inviting, shifting anticipation strangely backwards—the anticipation of return to an old world that we see at the conclusion of My Ántonia (see Dainotto 11). But this is a long time in developing for Jim, and it is only in the end that he “[feels] at home again” (237) in the Midwest. In the early books of the novel, we find indirect intrusions of the old South into the new world of the Midwest, and these encroachments speak to Jim’s desire for a sense of emplacement. Lying in the straw beneath the stars with Ántonia, Jim reflects, “though we had come from such different parts of the world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his land, too, some such belief” (36). Jim still looks to his original “part[] of the world” for a belief system that will help him to elucidate his current experiences, and significantly enough for those who read in Jim’s narrative an unmitigated solipsism, he here imagines beyond himself in order to articulate a more inclusive view of the transportation of the old world into the new. References to the South and Virginia persist in subtle ways such as this throughout the narrative, providing Jim alternately with sites of identification and contrast. Virginia returns as a region embedded in Jim’s unconscious. Dreaming himself into the story of Peter and Pavel, Jim is drawn in a sledge “through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia” (41). As Jim admires his grandmother’s culinary skills, she reminds him “that this country was not like Virginia; and that here a cook had, as she said, ‘very little to do with’” (44). At Christmastime, Jim invokes “his ‘old

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country’” through the “Sunday-School cards and advertising cards” (54) he carried with him from Virginia, and he recalls the South in the absent “signs of spring for which [he] used to watch in Virginia” (77). Even in Lincoln, now twice displaced—from Virginia and Black Hawk—Jim finds an incorrigible atavism of the South in Old Colonel Raleigh from Kentucky, Lena Lingard’s landlord, and in the suggestion that Lena herself possessed a “Southern” voice (182). Undoubtedly, the story of Blind d’Arnault offers the most extensive and intriguing Southern presence in this ostensibly Midwestern narrative. Scholars have previously portrayed Blind d’Arnault as a representative figure of an American paradox, what Blythe Tellefsen calls the “dual process of ‘remembering and forgetting’” (231) historical violence that is central to the process of nation building (see also 235). Lisa Marie Lucenti extends this line of thinking, describing Blind d’Arnault as “the principal figure for the haunting of American national and cultural memory houses” (206). As a figure who “will remember” (Lucenti 206), Blind d’Arnault threatens the national and cultural urge to erase the violent history of slavery from memory. More recently, Linda Joyce Brown suggests, “for Jim, d’Arnault functions to normatize whiteness, to establish its borders, but to leave difference within the category of whiteness unmarked” (102), and Jeffrey Swenson claims that “d’Arnault stands as an oddity in Jim’s classical world, too savage to appropriate into classical artistic approaches, and thus he is rejected as muse and guide” (26). As suggested by these various readings, Blind d’Arnault is a complex figure, one made more complicated by Cather’s overtly racialized depiction. There is no avoiding the obvious racist assumptions that lead Jim to cast d’Arnault as a “hideous little pickaninny” (120; see Krentz.) It is equally worth noting, however, that d’Arnault, despite his otherness, serves as a point of identification for Jim. Indeed, responding to “Jim’s continuing identifications with the ‘other’” (Jones 104) in the novel, Anne Goodwyn Jones claims that “the relational possibility of identification with d’Arnault…threatens to lead Jim to blur once-clear cultural boundaries between the races by seeing himself in this figure from his past” (92). This insight helps challenge those critical readings in which d’Arnault appears only as an “oddity” or as the “savage” other in a hegemonic narrative of “whiteness.” Furthermore, the very placement of Blind d’Arnault in the novel seems significant as a point of identification for Jim’s own aesthetic craft. The story follows rather fast on the heels of Ántonia’s story about the suicidal tramp and the threshing machine. Jim happily admits, “We all liked Tony’s stories” (113), and the supporting cast of characters in the novel eagerly solicits and anticipates her turns at storytelling. While there is some sense that Jim can tell a story in his own right (Ántonia does invite Jim to tell “the girls” the story of Coronado), it is clear that Jim has not acquired the storytelling presence of Ántonia. Appearing at the midpoint of the narrative, the Blind d’Arnault story serves as a subtle reminder that Jim, too, is engaged

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in an artistic endeavor. He is telling a story, albeit without the benefit of any audience but the reader—Ántonia always has the benefit of the reader and, at least, Jim—and in the details of the story one recognizes an affinity between Jim and Blind d’Arnault that most critics have been hesitant to acknowledge. I want to suggest that the story of Blind d’Arnault functions symbolically both as a marker of Jim’s own displacement and a metaphor for his aesthetic practices. Despite racial difference, Jim and d’Arnault share a regional identification as Southerners, specifically as displaced Southerners who at the moment share a further connection as transient occupants of the Midwest. This regional identification, in turn, inflects the artistic practices of both Jim and d’Arnault. The latter’s piano playing is clearly coded as Southern, both in its origin and in its improvisational, unpracticed delivery, and it seems fair to say that Jim’s narrative—unpracticed and unarranged as he claims it to be, and replete as it is with allusions to his old world—takes part in this sense of Southernness. Pushing this connection a step further, Elizabeth Ammons suggests that Blind d’Arnault “fuse[s] classical and peasant traditions to generate vibrant ‘folk’ music, which, we can infer, Jim Burden must also do if he truly wishes to find an adequate way to tell Ántonia’s story” (58-59). I would argue that the aesthetic parallel between d’Arnault’s piano playing and Jim’s narrative turns this peculiar intrusion or “erupt[ion]” of race (Ammons 59) within the narrative into a meditation on aesthetic practices. His piano playing, like Mr. Shimerda’s violin, unsettles the binary tension between Jim’s written text and Ántonia’s oral storytelling, defusing any “competition” between voices in the novel through a more complicated synthesis of aesthetic forms. As an artist, Blind d’Arnault literally intervenes between Jim and Ántonia in the novel. They both attend the concert at the Opera House and, afterwards, walk home together. “We were so excited that we dreaded to go to bed,” Jim reports. “We lingered a long while at the Harlings’ gate, whispering in the cold until the restlessness was slowly chilled out of us” (123). In this scene, d’Arnault lingers as a palpable presence between Jim and Ántonia, and it seems quite obvious that the agitation Jim describes is a sexual “restlessness” inspired by d’Arnault’s playing (see also Jones 94). According to Jones, “Jim’s startling rendering of d’Arnault’s relation to the piano as a sexual body” has implications for his own narrative: “luxuriating in sensual detail, Jim’s story itself hints that he may identify with d’Arnault at some basic level” (93). This thematic continuity between sexual desire and sensuality strikes me as important, but from my perspective, this “basic level” of identification hinges on the kinship between these two characters’ aesthetic techniques and strategies. This link becomes more apparent if we consider the way the novel portrays both Blind d’Arnault’s playing and Jim’s narrative practices. Jim’s description of d’Arnault reads like a noncommittal, semi-enthusiastic review of a newcomer on the music scene: “[H]e had absolute pitch, and a remarkable

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memory….He was always a Negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully. As piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses—that not only filled his dark mind, but worried his body incessantly” (121). As someone who transcends the conventions by which one judges musical taste, Blind d’Arnault is, as Jim suggests, a prodigy of sorts, but only when the results of his artistic intent are abstracted from the instrument of their fashioning into a realm of pure aesthetics—not as “piano-playing,” but “music.” While it is tempting to read d’Arnault’s limited status as a prodigy strictly in terms of his race, we should recall how Jim describes his own writing practices in the 1926 introduction: “From time to time I’ve been writing down what I remember about Ántonia….On my long trips across the country, I amuse myself like that, in my stateroom” (2). In the original introduction, he dismisses the idea of making “[n]otes” (244), and in both versions, as previously mentioned, he confesses he has taken no time to “arrange or rearrange” or give the manuscript any “form” (2, 244). In light of the d’Arnault story, the introduction’s allusion to notes and the arrangement of Jim’s narrative, terms often ascribed to musical composition, should take on added significance. As an aesthetic project, My Ántonia—which includes both Jim’s narrative and the unnamed narrator’s introduction—sets up this moment of artistic cross-fertilization and identification. The Blind d’Arnault story reminds the reader that Jim is engaged in a private act of remembering over which he claims no mastery or expertise and that has no pretensions toward literary value. We might say that, like d’Arnault, Jim too “play[s] barbarously and wonderfully” from memory, trying to write his way back to himself and a sense of “at-homeness” in this still unfamiliar new world. Though Jim describes his writing as little more than an amusement, My Ántonia creates an aesthetic sense of wholeness in the symbolic attachment Jim’s narrative establishes between subjectivity and region, and in doing so, his writing becomes, like d’Arnault’s piano playing, “something real.” Of Blind d’Arnault’s first encounter with the piano Jim writes, “He approached this highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him” (120). In his own manner, through writing, Jim too tries to “piece him[self] out,” instinctively approaching writing as a way to commune with the past across continually unsettled, transitory spaces. The artistic and regional kinship that exists between d’Arnault and Jim adds another dimension to the racial dynamics of the scene. The story of Blind d’Arnault comprehends the relationship between aesthetics, identity, and symbolic connection to place that I have been alluding to throughout and which I will take up more fully in the final section of the essay. Aesthetic practices “emplace displacement” and, at this particular moment, they mark the South as a site for Jim’s subjective identification.

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In his study of exile and diaspora, Nico Israel suggests that, when “[u]nmoored (especially when alienated from the mother tongue), the self tries to fashion itself by identifying others, by presenting a coherent spatial or cultural geography in which all can be mapped, comprehended” (16). As the scene at the Opera House develops, Blind d’Arnault becomes this identifiable other for Jim. Though we would be loath to dismiss the “othering” qualities of the story, the other here also maps “a coherent spatial [and] cultural geography” within the narrative. Jim finds in d’Arnault’s piano playing an artistic and spatial coherence that mirrors his own exilic experience. Situated as it is, nearly dead-center in the novel, the Blind d’Arnault story also functions as a focal point of My Ántonia—a nexus that links together aesthetic practices, subjectivity, and the symbolic connection to place made necessary by the unsettled worlds of the im/migrant experience. This emergence of a Southern regional past reframes Jim’s own artistic practices as an attempt to emplace displacement through writing.

It Was Always “Out In the Kitchen” at Home In addition to the regional instability and the attempts to grapple with “the material out of which countries are made” (Cather 7), Jim also encounters his own, admittedly trifling, linguistic displacement upon his arrival in Nebraska. As he tries to accommodate himself to his new surroundings, he notes the “foreign” way his grandmother calls him down to the kitchen: “‘Down to the kitchen’ struck me as curious; it was always ‘out in the kitchen’ at home” (9). Obviously, Jim’s comment simply marks a discrepancy in physical location: in Virginia, the kitchen was located outside the house. Though this incidental, domestic displacement only weakly echoes the theme of regional instability, the prepositional pairing “out in” aptly articulates the novel’s aesthetic preoccupations. At the risk of reading too much into Jim’s reference to his old-world, Southern kitchen, the “out in” juxtaposition situates this passing comment within the novel’s prevailing tension between displacement and emplacement. After Jim notes the distinction between “down to” and “out in,” he proceeds downstairs to the kitchen. Bathing in the tin washtub beside the stove, Jim settles himself for the first time since his arrival, noting the details of the interior space he occupies: “It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously” (9). While Jim casts himself as an outsider of sorts, an object of curiosity, he also creates a sense of being “inside” and “at home” in the kitchen, just as the prepositional phrase “out in” implies. In short, Jim replaces the Midwestern “down to” with the at-home, Southern “out in.” The space becomes residually Southern at the level of language, suggesting an outside-in movement, articulating a symbolic connection within this new region—a feeling of emplacement in an

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unfamiliar regional geography. This first moment of Jim’s acclimation to his grandparents’ house and the prairie lands of Nebraska prefigures the continual “out-in” fluctuation of displacement and emplacement in My Ántonia. The novel emphasizes alternative symbolic connections to place at the level of language: symbolic connections that establish a sense of “at-homeness,” even while characters forever remain both out and in, displaced and emplaced. Jim and Ántonia embody alternative versions of a symbolic attachment to place and, in this way, the novel invites the reader to see Jim’s narrative as an act of aesthetic emplacement, one that complements Ántonia’s storytelling. Indeed, some recent approaches to My Ántonia have recast the relationship between Ántonia’s stories and Jim’s narrative. Though I take exception with Paula Woolley’s insistence that Cather privileges a feminine, oral artistic tradition in the novel, her claim that Ántonia “offers an alternative to Jim’s narrative” (158) also implies that we read their differing aesthetics as complementary rather than merely competitive. John Selzer notes a certain level of reflection and maturity in Jim’s narrative voice, and he usefully reminds readers of the positive role he plays as “a sympathetic witness to Ántonia’s achievement, and a trustworthy and sometimes candid critic of his own failures” (57). Richard Millington offers perhaps the most provocative alignment of Jim and Ántonia by effectively eliding the distinction between storytelling and narrative. Using Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” as his model, Millington reads My Ántonia as a “counter novel” that privileges the plenitude of storytelling over the conventions of the novelistic tradition: “Jim recognizes in Ántonia an embodiment of the authority of the story and the values that belong to it” (711). In the recognition of storytelling’s value, Jim and Ántonia together create a unified aesthetic wholeness that simultaneously confounds the reader’s desire for conventional closure. My interpretation of the novel draws on and extends these aesthetic distinctions and conflations. While continuing to resist the pitfalls of the credibility debates, I am offering a reading of Jim’s narrative as an im/migrant act of aesthetic emplacement. This claim follows the lead of Nico Israel’s theoretical conceptions of literary exile and diaspora. Israel contends, “displacement begs the question of emplacement. It demands a sense of place, including the place of language” (15). If we turn to the final book of My Ántonia, we find complementary versions of how displacement can comprehend and anticipate its own emplacement at the level of language. Jim and Ántonia both discover a sense of home that encompasses the paradoxical “out-in” fluctuation of the im/migrant experience.4 In Book V of My Ántonia, Jim, who is now married and living on the east coast, but more precisely living a peripatetic existence because of his work for the railroad, returns to Nebraska and rediscovers Ántonia in her ultimate earth-mother incarnation—matriarch to the teeming progeny of her own Midwestern, Bohemian race. Jim comments on the initial shock of their reunion: “Ántonia

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came in and stood before me; a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled” (213-14). Whatever shock Jim expresses is matched, however, by the fact that Ántonia does not initially recognize Jim. The reunion represents a shared moment of temporary misrecognition. At one level, this is simply the result of the twenty years that have passed since their last meeting. But this initial misrecognition also underscores the discrepancy between their separate versions of aesthetic emplacement and the realization that Ántonia’s conceptions of home would be no more acceptable to Jim than Jim’s would be to Ántonia. Yet, just as this initial misrecognition quickly dissolves into a sense of communion, so too, I think, should the inclination to read Ántonia’s and Jim’s respective lives as competing versions of an authentic existence give way to a recognition of the mutually compatible versions of displaced emplacement being offered to the reader in this reunion (see Blackburn 144-153 and Hoffmann 40-41). As My Ántonia draws to a close, images and articulations of home proliferate, but the novel faithfully maintains the “out-in” tension of displaced emplacement. Jim sits in the orchard with Ántonia, watching the Cuzak children playing and listening to Ántonia talk about her family and the trees that seem like children to her. He offers the following description of the place: “There was the deepest peace in that orchard. It was surrounded by a triple enclosure; the wire fence, then the hedge of thorny locusts, then the mulberry hedge which kept out the hot winds of summer and held fast to the protecting snows of winter” (219). While it is tempting to suggest that Cather here inverts the insider/outsider binary, playing Ántonia’s enclosed sense of family against Jim’s solitary itinerancy (see McElhiney 71), the inversion is certainly incomplete. At the same time Ántonia has crafted a “triple enclosure” for herself and her family, she and her family continue to speak a “displaced” language, and inside her home the pictures Jim has sent “from the old country” have been “framed and…hung up in the parlour” (222). Like specters overseeing this domestic sanctuary, the photographs remind the reader that Ántonia’s transformation from immigrant to insider includes the residual effects and evidence of displacement. This is not to suggest that Ántonia’s symbolic attachment to place remains unfulfilled. My Ántonia portrays acts of aesthetic emplacement as always, essentially incomplete, a work-in-progress that carries with it the baggage of displacement—the temporal and spatial markers of an old world that inflect one’s efforts to make symbolic connections in a new world. Jim articulates a similar experience. He finds his return to Black Hawk unsatisfying, and confronted with strange faces and the realization that the majority of his friends have either died or moved on, he hurries out of town. On the road into the prairie lands of Nebraska, Jim arrives at an understanding of his own displaced emplacement: “Out there I felt at home again….I had the sense of coming home to myself” (237-38). Jim shifts his sense of “at-

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homeness” from the external world, in which home seems literally displaced (“out there”), to the interior space of subjective identity, attaining his symbolic attachment through this inward turn. A certain level of displacement persists insofar as home remains somewhat foreign in the “out there” of the prairie lands of a past Nebraska where he no longer lives: “I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness” (238). In this retrospective moment, an original uncertainty and loss remain central to Jim’s conception of home. As shared acts of aesthetic emplacement, Jim’s narrative mirrors Ántonia’s storytelling. Both artistic practices maintain a symbolic attachment to place that comprehends the essential displacement of the im/migrant experience. Cather does not offer a hierarchy of aesthetic practices, but rather alternative versions of aesthetic emplacement in the storytelling that vitalizes the “triple enclosure” of Ántonia’s Midwest and the narrative that revives Jim’s sense of being “at home.” They are artistic acts of “presencing”: articulating a new world that partakes of the old, a present space that accrues the regional signifiers of the past, a displacement grounded in the language of place. Urgo may be correct in his claim that “[i]n the United States migration begins as a physical act and is transformed into a mode of consciousness” (3), but I find it difficult to reconcile myself with his assessment of migration in Cather’s fiction: “To return home is often fatal in Cather; it is, at best, a squandering of potential” (71). I do not read such fatality or futility at the end of My Ántonia. Acts of displacement and emplacement play off one another to create a more complex sense of “at-homeness.” Regions remain unsettled in the novel, becoming sites of alienation and identification by turns, and the characters’ attachments to place never fully escape a sense of “obliterating strangeness.” Yet the urge to emplace this itinerant consciousness seems as indispensible to Jim and Ántonia as the displacements that impel their aesthetic acts.

DUKE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

I gratefully acknowledge the anonymous readers at Studies in the Novel for their comments and revision suggestions. 1 The idea of “aesthetic emplacement” shares common traits with what Israel refers to as “exilic emplacement” (14). For Israel, the sense of emplacement comprehends a “double movement”: “And it is precisely this double movement of standing and unsecuring—of setting-up and up-setting—that applies to both the question of the displaced subject and to the writing of displacement” (14-15). 2 Though my reading and Lindemann’s (119) converge on this point, my analysis departs from what she sees as the unmitigated gender imperialism of Jim’s narrative (120).

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3 This excerpt from McCarthy’s Child of God is representative of passages in The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Suttree. 4 My thinking about narrative and storytelling here is also indebted to Øverland (8).

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