This is Not a Plough: Magritte, Foucault, and Resisting Authenticity in Cather’s My Ántonia

Authenticity and the Novel of the American West

At the point on the Nebraska prairie where the land is subsumed into the sky, the setting sun throws into relief an indiscernible object. In this iconic scene from Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Tony Shimerda and Jim Burden jump to their feet and seek to know what it is: “On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun” (245).

My Ántonia is one of those novels that are not what they seem and more than we credit. Often hailed as a realistic representation of the European immigrants’ experience in settling the western plains, Cather’s greatest achievement should be understood as also questioning that distinctive characteristic of the western novel, historical authenticity, by invoking the challenge laid down by Nietzsche and Foucault to history’s privileged position with respect to knowing the past. My Ántonia may, in fact, be seen as offering a creditable account of Nebraska during the late nineteenth century, not because it is historically accurate, or authentic, but because such a consideration is irrelevant. This does not mean that we fail to take this or any work of fiction seriously but that we understand fiction to have a suspended, or deferred, relation to its referent—in this instance, the past.

In her essay “‘Fiction’ and the Experience of the Other,” Peggy Kamuf argues that the issue concerning fiction is not what it is, but what it does: “A fiction refers to nothing that exists. It refers, but to nothing in existence. Thus, the fictional act or operation consists in making reference but also in suspending the referent. It is a referential operation that does something with or to reference” (159). To what extent Cather’s text participates in this grand displacement of history (by fiction) may be judged by examining the discontinuous structure of the novel. To assess My Ántonia’s problematizing of authenticity, this article begins with Foucault’s appropriation of Nietzsche’s bold interrogation of origin and then considers Foucault’s reading of Surrealist painter René Magritte, whose project of assertion and disavowal in such paintings as Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1926) Foucault found intriguingly similar to his own work on representation.

The conceit of authenticity in novels of the American West has received considerable attention of late. In The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination, Robert Thacker argues that novels of the Great Plains are circumscribed by “‘the great fact [of] the land itself,’” a phrase he borrows from Cather’s O Pioneers! (9). He notes that Cather pursued authenticity by defining her characters in relation to their place (149). Both Nathaniel Lewis’s monograph, Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship, and William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis’s collection of essays, True West: Authenticity and the American West, explore the topic.¹ “There are few terms at play in the history of this vast region that have as wide a reach and relevance, and there is no other region in America that is as haunted by the elusive appeal, legitimating power, and nostalgic pull of authenticity,” assert Handley and Lewis (1). “We need to recognize,” writes Lewis in tracing the legacy of authenticity in Unsettling the West, “that western literature is frequently, perhaps fundamentally, about authenticity. The history of western literature (authors, texts, and readers) is the history of the ‘production of the real,’ to borrow a phrase from Jean Baudrillard. And no feature of western writing is more prominent, celebrated, or misleading than its realism” (7). Examining authenticity in its wider context, he demonstrates the degree to which authenticity in western literature is a symptom of a “culture of authenticity” and asserts that the term is ubiquitous in “contemporary cultural discourse...