Writing Isolation and the Resistance to Assimilation as "Imaginative Art": Willa Cather's Anti-Narrative in Shadows on the Rock

If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism. Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present it must select the eternal material of art. There are hopeful signs that some of the younger writers are trying to break away from mere verisimilitude, and, following the development of modern painting, to interpret imaginatively the material and social investiture of their characters; to present their scene by suggestion rather than by enumeration.

—Willa Cather, "The Novel Démeublé"

An orderly little French household that went on trying to live decently . . . interests me more than Indian raids or the wild life in the forests. . . . Those people brought a kind of French culture there and somehow kept it alive on that rock. . . . It's very hard for an American to catch that rhythm—it's so unlike us. But I made an honest try, and I got a great deal of pleasure out of it, if nobody else does!

—Willa Cather, "On Shadows on the Rock"

Though readers experience Cather's "imaginative art" in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), greater challenges arise in Shadows on the Rock (1931). Cather moved readers further back in time (1697–1698, plus an epilogue set in 1713), and sent her American readers to a Canadian province few knew much about. Beyond the when and where, Cather's continued emphasis on episodes and community storytelling forces readers to work through over thirty inset stories (see Appendix). Though challenging to a reader expecting a plot-driven observation of details, these inset stories comprise Cather's "suggestion" of French-Canadian culture and the ways such pioneers managed to "live decently" on their rock.¹

Cather's worldview concerning what created art (and what did not) developed not merely from the drama reviews she wrote for newspapers. Cather's interactions with journalism occurred on a broader scale and continued after her 1912 departure from McClure's. Cather's writing apprenticeship occurred in journalism like many other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American novelists, yet she grew to regard journalism as a genre that opposed art. In newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, letters, and particularly in essays such as "Escapism," "The Novel Démeublé," and "On the Art of Fiction," Cather openly criticized both realism and journalism. However, Cather offered her greatest critique of journalistic writing with the anti-narrative style she infused into Shadows. The compiled and shared stories in Cather's anti-narrative serve two major purposes: to allow isolated characters to form a community, and to explore how storytelling created the foundation for the Quebec community's longstanding resistance to assimilation.

From Journalism to Realism to Art: Cather's Dissention with Details upon Details

Since Shadows focuses on shared stories, Cather's lack of plot subverts the chronological narrative which both realism and journalism favored in her lifetime. Questioning realism's affinity for cataloguing material objects and physical sensations, Cather pondered in 1922: "But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer towards his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses his theme?" ("The Novel Démeublé" 37). Writing on Shadows, Millington argues Cather answered this plea of representation by "drawing our attention to the meaning—life of objects, to the way they function within the field of meanings that this particular community composes" (29). Extending the strategy to "draw" objects at the expense of documentation to the large number of inset stories, Cather "accepts" whichever themes her characters must share to maintain their French culture.

In another move from journalism, Cather's novel repudiates the separation between subject and object that developed in newspaper writing after the Civil War.² From the earliest stages of her writing career, Cather realized journalism's emphasis on objectivity hindered its ability to convey individual identity and express meaning. She noted in 1894 that "when a newspaper...