Unity and Point of View in The Distant Music

R I C H A R D H. C O R N I N G Portland State University Unity and Point ofView in TheDistant Music I want to say a few words for the formal virtues of H. L. Davis’slast completed novel, The Distant Music. While this novel is regularly mentioned in discussions of Davis’s work, I am aware of only two sustained studies of it, and one of these, James Potts’s admiring article in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, is concerned mainly with the moral values the novel promotes rather than the formal means by which they are embodied in the fiction. The other is a chapter in Paul Bryant’s excellent book on Davis for Twayne’s United States Authors Series. While Bryant likes many things about The Distant Music, he concludes that “as a whole, it is not a successful novel” (132), for two reasons. One is that it is underdeveloped, too brief to cover the career of three generations of a family as the land around them changes from frontier to civilization. The other is that in this novel Davis abandons his previous “carefully controlled and consistent” handling of point of view, relies too much on the omniscient narrator’s explanations, and, most seriously, shifts the focus of attention at the end from the Mulock family to Lydia Inm an: This shift is a weakness because until the closing scenes we are not concerned with any tension in Lydia’s view of life. We have focussed on the tensions of the Mulocks who have been struggling to escape the bondage of the land, to hear again the distant music of illusion that will lure them into either physical or spiritual journeys. From this viewpoint, the novel ends in failure because Lydia’s reso­ lution to this struggle does not touch the Mulocks. The author actu­ ally provides the resolution; but he finally does not convincingly dramatize it in the novel. (132-133) Bryant merits commendation for his serious attention to the Davis oeuvre—but there are reasons to differ with his conclusions about this par­ ticular novel. Both of his criticisms follow from his characterization of the 114 Western American Literature novel’s basic intentions. For him, the principal conflict isbetween two ways of life: geographical stability, as represented by the Mulocks with their land claim, and rootlessness, as represented by the nomadic Inmans. The “dis­ tant music” of the title and the epigraph (from Marco Polo’s Travels) is, then, the charm of what is distant and the contrast between the families shows the need for “a balance between reality and illusion” (132). But the “illusion” of the epigraph has really none of these connota­ tions of aspiration. It is explicitly “the work of evil spirits, which amuse travellers to their destruction.” The central problem in the book is the Mulocks’ inveterate self-deception about what they really want, which prevents them from controlling their own lives or establishing authentic relations with others. Their attachment to their land, and their simultaneous desire to escape from it, are the most visible expressions of this problem. As the second Ranse Mulock reflects at one point, “The land was not what they had given their lives for. It was merely what had got tangled in the net they had thrown out for other things, probably better and certainly different, that had escaped it” (207). The contrast between Mulock fixedness and Inman wandering is sec­ ondary. The Inmans differ about as much among themselves as they do from the Mulocks, and Lydia Inman’s relation to the Mulocks is, from the start, of a different order from those of her sisters, brothers, or parents. When her consciousness becomes focal at the end it is because her problems have come to be like those of the Mulocks, and she is trying to understand and resolve them for the Mulocks and for herself as well. This is not a weakness; it gives Davis a chance to say things about his characters and their lives that he could not otherwise say so effectively. The novel is not a dynasty epic, nor a study of a changing frontier society. It is...