Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

4. Changing Trains: Metaphors of Transfer in Willa Cather

67 4 Changing Trains Metaphors of Transfer in Willa Cather M A R K A . R . FA C K N I T Z From the beginning truths of the unconscious belie circumstantial surfaces of things. —Susan Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous It seems almost silly to write that during all of Willa Cather’s life, trains were the primary mode of transport between cities. Even towns of modest size—for example, wayside Red Cloud—might have at least one eastbound and one westbound trunk-line stop each day. Yet the fact that trains are casually omnipresent , as routine as windows, walls, and doors are to rooms, does not make them non-essential. Rather, they are key elements of what Guy Reynolds characterizes as the “shifting historical matrix” of Cather’s rural Nebraska childhood, and “it would be a patronizing mistake” to assume that the elements of this matrix are “inevitably quiet or conservative or . . . insignificant” (19). Indeed, Cather’s trains “narratively” move much like Melville ’s Pequod, the Rouen diligence in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary , or Kerouac’s motorcars in On the Road. They travel the edge between the naturalist’s environmental machinery and the romantic idealist’s impulse to essentialize, however subtly, our second nature. Famously, in “The Novel Démeublé” Cather looked 68 mark a. r. facknitz to retire Balzac’s aged “property man” because for too long the novel had been “over-furnished” (5) and, as realism exhausted its momentum in romantic novels or naturalism, “the city . . . on paper [was] already crumbling” (6). For a model she instead chose Tolstoy, in whose writing “the clothes, the dishes, the haunting interiors of those old Moscow Houses, are always so much a part of the emotions of the people that they are perfectly synthesized; they seem to exist, not so much in the author’s mind” (or in physical reality) “as in the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves” (emphasis added, 6). Cather reminds her reader that “the higher processes of art are all processes of simplification” and, referring to The Scarlet Letter, she comments, “the material of the story is presented as if unconsciously ” (6). As if. The author’s challenge is not to invest the fictional world with a clutter of verisimilar accoutrements, as if there can be no reference to the world without “red meat thrown into the scale to make the beam dip” (6), nor is she obliged to brashly allegorize . Her poor “drudge, the theme-writing high school student,” cannot go to The Scarlet Letter for “information regarding the manners and dress and interiors of Puritan society” (6), and the meanings of the rattlesnake and the plow in My Ántonia, unmistakably metaphoric though they are, depend on circumstances and landscape inhabited by Jim and Ántonia. They are not there for the herpetologist and the ironmonger. They are bursts of literary light on the ordinary topography of the narrative, wholly teachable moments most of us theme-writing drudges can grasp. However, if asked to choose, Cather prefers a more discreet luster , “whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named . . . the inexplicable presence of the thing not name, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed” (6). Cather’s railroads are eloquent examples of what she means by this superbly enigmatic comment. At once they reveal her subtle attention to the emergence of Chicago as “second city” 69 Changing Trains and the broader historical transformation of the upper Midwest; they reiterate her own experience of moving out of a hostile landscape into the civilized comforts of New York and France; and, most suggestively, they consistently lay down lines of nuance and metaphoric transfer across her midwestern and southwestern landscapes. Trains, not barbed wire or property deeds, redefine Cather’s Midwest and West. The new American second nature, according to Cather, is less about the use and ownership of the land than it is about movement across the landscape. In 1893, during the Columbian Exposition, the American Historical Association heard from Frederick Jackson Turner that the essence of the American story was in the union of the ideas of wilderness and westward settlement. Chicago was the city through which the mineral, agricultural, and human wealth of the West moved in direction of the industrial, financial, and cultural centers of the East...