The Quotidian Sublime: Cognitive Perspectives on Identity-Formation in Willa Cather's My Ántonia

DAVID HILL The Quotidian Sublime: Cognitive Perspectives on Identity-Formation in Willa Cather's M^ Antonia Traces of a PLOUGHED-ovER country road, the memory of a wagon-ride on that road, and a day riding across Iowa in a dusty railroad observation car with a hot wind blowing through the open windows . Out ofthese scenes from My Antonia and their somewhat complicated temporal relationships, Willa Cather wove a complex meditation about the class of experiences that have in aesthetic theory fallen under the label "sublime"—here, an ordinary, quotidian sublime like that toward which Wordsworth pointed in his 1814 preface to "The Excursion ," when he hoped to find "Paradise, and groves / Elysian, Fortunate Fields" to be "a simple produce of the common day" (47-48, 55).1 My Antonia is punctuated with memory-performances that bring past subjective experiences of intense sensory impressions—qualia, in the vocabulary cognitive science has adapted from philosophy—into present consciousness. Cather's narrator and idealized reader of experience, Jim Burden, remembers moments of identity formation that, in their process and outcome, suggest a functional anatomy for the sequence of dislocation and elevation that constitute the experience of the sublime . How the artist manages to project to the reader the "thrill of his own poor little nerve"—the excitation of a pattern of neural connections , in the language of neuroscience—is what Cather explores in the following passage from the brief meditation on the status of art published as "Light on Adobe Walls": Arizona Quarterly Volume 61 , Number 3, Autumn 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 161 o no David Hill Nobody can paint the sun, or sunlight. He can only paint the tricks that shadows play with it, or what it does to forms. He cannot even paint those relations of light and shade—he can only paint some emotion they give him, some man-made arrangement of them that happens to give him personal delight—a conception ofclouds over distant mesas (or over the towers of St. Sulpice) that makes one nerve in him thrill and tremble. At bottom all he can give you is the thrill of his own poor little nerve—the projection in paint of a fleeting pleasure in a certain combination of form and colour, as temporary and almost as physical as a taste on the tongue. . . . (Cather, "Light on Adobe Walls" 976) Cather's ambition is to evoke in the reader the equivalent in the verbal arts ofthe painterly effect she calls the "thrill" ofa nerve. The memories displayed in My Antonia establish, through their evocation of remembered qualia, an architecture for selfhood in which open space—associated with the often traumatic process of identity formation—alternates with enclosure in shelters—associated with recuperation and consolidation of identity. Cather's yoking of memory to identity-formation involves the reader in the present composition of complex cognitive constructions. These constructions, in the language of the brain neurologist Antonio Damasio, model the ongoing creation of momentary "core" consciousness as the self comes to know itself in relation to objects perceived as outside the immediately present self—objects which include the products of our autobiographical memories. Cather summons those experiences through intricate, overlapped, and nearly simultaneous mappings of temporal categories into spatial frames, the analysis of which gives us a window onto the so-called binding problem —the difficulties faced by those who try to account for the creation from disparate brain systems of a unified scene of consciousness.2 At the end of the book Jim Burden recounts the disappointment he felt upon seeing again the town of Black Hawk, where an important part of his life had unfolded. Strangers walked the streets, trees were cut down, and he "scarcely knew how to put in the time until the night express was due" (271). A walk in the country restores his spirits somewhat, as he thinks about the just-experienced restoration of his friendship with Antonia and anticipates future adventures with her family. When he "had the good luck to stumble upon a bit of the first The Quotidian Sublime III road that went from Black Hawk out to the north country" (271), he encountered...