Willa Cather’s Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique by Jo Ann Middleton (review)

146 Western American Literature Dorris, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and James Welch. There is a strong sense of the graciousness and gentle willingness, even enthusiasm, of these writers to be collected, interviewed, and presented yet again in conversational format. In the interest of scholarship it ought to be made immediately apparent in the introduction how Winged Words makes a significant contribution beyond already existing collections of interviews such as, for instance, Joseph Bruchac’s Survival This Way or Brian Swann/Arnold Krupat’s I Tell You Now. Coltelli seems oblivious to these works, to the history of Native American tribes, and to the current debates over defining “tribal identity” or “ethnic voice and author­ ity.” From such oversights come assertions such as only “Southwest, Northwest, Plains, and Midwest [tribes] stand for the history of the Indian in the United States” and “Indian novelists [have] no parallel in world literature” without her stating her criteria. Coltelli does tell us that the “aim ofmost of the questions was ... to elicit from [the writers] their sense of displacement.” To conduct ten interviews armed with such questions could only structure a different project than that, say, of Bruchac, who found his authors’ strategies to be “primarily those of celebration” and “affirmation,” had Coltelli’swriters not quickly by-passed her aim and presented themselves as complex and vigorous literary voices directed to the mainstream American reading public. Finally Coltelli tells us she had two sets of questions: one set specific for each writer, the other on “issues of interest to the whole group. With the latter set [she] hoped to form a sort of writers’panel.” Even though she is not totally consistent in asking all of these questions of each author, these parts of the interviews are valuable idiosyncratic contributions to the more theoretical, political side of reading literature presented under the rubric of “Native American.” There is a tendency in Coltelli to see these authors ethnically and narrowly; there is a refreshing boldness in the authors to present themselves “widely”— eclectic and international, which perhaps makes the book worth buying after all. GRETCHEN RONNOW Northern Arizona University Willa Cather’s Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique. By Jo Ann Middleton. (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990. 178 pages, $32.50.) Jo Ann Middleton argues that Willa Cather’s fictional methods are inno­ vative and modern, and she attempts to identify and describe the “techniques” that create Cather’s deceptively simple style and allow the writer to manipu­ late the reader’s emotional responses to her fiction. Of some importance are Reviews 147 Cather’s modernist experiments with point of view and her uses of “cinemagraphic techniques,” but Middleton’s chief concern is with Gather’s reliance on juxtaposition and the “unnamed” vacancy between things juxtaposed. Middleton gives this suggestive vacancy a name borrowed from science, where it refers to the cavity within a cell. The term she uses is “vacuole,” and she claims it to be the essence of Gather’smethod in writing the pared-down novel demeuble. Roughly half of the book is given to theoretical discussion and half to discussion of the three novels which are said to best illustrate Cather’s method, particularly her use of vacuoles to suggest more than is said and thus to determine reader response. The three novels discussed are A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, and My Mortal Enemy. While critics for years have been discussing Gather’s use of juxtaposition, point of view, and pictorial imagery, and her ability to evoke feeling through the thing not said, perhaps no one has verbalized the concept so thoroughly before. On the other hand, Willa Cather’s Modernism resists its own focus on this concept and keeps venturing into unrelated territory. The book does con­ tain a goodly number of fresh insights into Cather’s fiction, but some are only loosely and somewhat artificially connected to the book’s central concerns. Then, too, the book uses as its springboard for discussion mainly older pieces of Cather criticism, and, with a few exceptions, ignores more recent criticism that makes many of the points argued...