Modernist Memory; or, The Being of Americans

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of having come home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is.

Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

IT IS TEMPTING to describe what Jim Burden, the narrator of Cather's novel, experiences here as memory. But in fact it seems more like repetition: he hears the wagons and is again overcome. Up to this point My Ántonia consists chiefly of Jim's memories, but his reunion with himself in this final paragraph depends on repeating, rather than representing in memory, his early experiences. "If we never arrived anywhere," Jim says of the wagon ride from Black Hawk, "it did not matter. Between the earth and the sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be." ¹ A few days after the wagon ride, while lying in his grandmother's garden, Jim also feels perfect contentment: "I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more" (MA 20). What Jim seems to experience here—if "experience" is even the right word—is Being. "Part of something entire," "dissolved into something complete and great" (MA 20), he has no concern for the past or the future. In fact, thus complete, the moment having become like eternity, he has no past or future at all, which perhaps explains why he neglected his prayers that night in the wagon—why pray to God when you have become like God? ²

To remember, however, is to represent other moments. Remembering is precisely the condition of not being completely in the moment. So when Jim comes home to himself at the end of the novel, he does so not by remembering the feelings of that night—how could he?—but by repeating them. In a sense he undertakes consciously and voluntarily behavior that Sigmund Freud describes as compulsive. For Freud, however, the patient who is "obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience" would be better off "remembering it as something belonging to the past." ³ Remembering is better because it involves an awareness of the difference between present and past and therefore—herein lies the cure—of the difference between the remembering self and the remembered self. Repetition is precisely the absence of this sort of difference. Jim's goal is repetition. He comes home to himself by overcoming the difference between past and present—coming home is this overcoming—which is why the novel's primary narrative mode of recounting the past, remembering, necessarily produces a problem for him. In memory, Jim can only observe past selves. As Freud's contemporary, the psychologist Eduoard Claparède, puts it, a past self can only be remembered

from the outside, in the same way that I represent other individuals to myself. My past self is thus, psychologically, distinct from my present self, but it is . . . an emptied and objectivized self, which I continue to feel at a distance from my true self which lives in the present. ⁴

The problem is that Jim's memories re-create through representation the very distance he wants to overcome by remembering. That is why towards the end of the novel he adopts a relation to his past that is not mediated, or not only mediated, by memory's representations. He treats his memories as objects...