Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

Shadows on the Rock: Against Interpretation

165 Shadows on the Rock Against Interpretation R I C H A R D H . M I L L I N G T O N In an early scene in Shadows on the Rock, Cécile Auclair has prevailed upon Mother Juschereau to tell her a story of the exemplary piety of her predecessor, Sister Catherine de SaintAugustin . As the story comes to an end, Mother Juschereau is preparing to deliver the appropriate moral lesson when she is interrupted by a cry from her young listener: “N’expliquez pas, chère Mère, je vous en supplie!” (“Don’t explain, dear Mother, I beg you!”). The nun takes this emphatic wish for delivery from interpretation as a sign that Cécile “certainly has no vocation” (39). I hope to use this plea to get at what Shadows shows us about the way Cather practiced hers. In my view, the book shares with its main character a resistance to interpretation, and it is in that resistance, I will be arguing, that this unobtrusive novel illuminates the ambitions and values that shape Cather’s work. R E A D I N G S H A D O W S “N’expliquez pas, cher Monsieur, je vous en supplie!”: Of course, the first thing I am going to do is a little explication. But my goal will be to describe a feature of the experience of reading Shadows on the Rock, and to specify and explore the significance of what I take to be the book’s dramatized resistance to our customary habits of attention (particularly if we are in the habit of being English professors). Let me begin with some 166 r i c h a r d h . m i l l i n g to n polemical definitions, taken from Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation”: Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation . The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C? . . . The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. (5, 6–7) My point about Shadows on the Rock—and I would suggest that it is representative of a strong strain or impulse within Cather’s fiction as a whole—is that it seems to have been designed, as Cécile’s cri de coeur hints, to resist the kind of interpretive, explanatory practice that Sontag describes. To read Shadows is to be forced by the text to throw away one’s interpreter’s shovel, to stifle one’s inner Mike Wallace (ever on the lookout for the next stage-managed exposé), and to exchange that habit of mind for a form of responsiveness more descriptive and more observatory : a kind of witnessing. In the realm of character, for instance, what could be more fruitless than to psychoanalyze Cécile or Auclair? What could be more irrelevant than to posit on behalf of this novel’s inhabitants elaborate schemes of self-recognition or maturation? Characters in this text do not develop in the manner of characters from traditional novels but instead on occasion make evident or transparent their natures, or come to see their own lives in a definitive or characteristic way. My point is not that readers want to treat the book’s characters in the customary , explanatory way, but that the book, in its way of attending to its characters, pointedly disaffiliates itself from the “depth” model of character and from the interpretive procedures which that model customarily calls forth from its readers. Similarly, if we think in terms of plot, the text’s key moments or events are not revelatory transformations but quieter acts 167 Shadows on the Rock of heightened or illuminated witnessing: the observation of a particular quality of winter light, say, or the apprehension of a weight of meaning as it is gathered up by an object or a ritual. One of my favorite instances of such a...