"Fragmentary and Inconclusive" Violence: National History and Literary Form in The Professor's House

Willa Cather's relationship to the American past is discussed more often in terms of her nostalgia than her historicism. ¹ But while nostalgia is a powerful force in Cather's novels, we must now recognize that it is often parried by an equally powerful historicist skepticism. ² In what follows, I will demonstrate the formal and thematic density of Cather's commitment to historicism in The Professor's House (1925). With its historian protagonist, it deploys her historicist critique of nostalgia with particular ingenuity, and its ambivalent, incomplete incorporation of Southwestern and Native American cultures registers her wariness of their nationalistic consumption in the early twentieth century. The Professor's House has been described as "fragmentary and inconclusive," its form marked by the "violence" with which the middle section fractures the narrative. ³ It is this form, I argue, in which Cather inscribes the "fragmentary and inconclusive" violence of her nation's nostalgic conception of Native American history. This Catherian historicist critique, and its implications for our understanding of Cather's racial ideology, has yet to be adequately explored. Pursuing it also leads us to a larger recognition: The Professor's House demands that we look to its formal structure for historical understandings—that neither historical nor formal contexts be ignored in our analysis. Acceding to this demand involves recognizing the necessity that formal preoccupations take a permanent place among the considerations of literary history.

In fact, formalist approaches yield important historical analyses. In this assertion I ally myself with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, who has argued for a recognition of "form as itself culturally enacted or staged. . . . form as inseparable from history or materiality." ⁴ Indeed, because formalist analysis adds yet another dimension to the focus on particularity that is so critical to historicist modes of interpretation, it should be understood as fundamental to the historicist project. Attention to form actually dovetails with much recent thinking in literary and cultural studies. In the special issue of Modern Language Quarterly "Reading for Form," Ellen Rooney argues: "To recover the category and the work of form in literary and cultural studies is . . . not to transcend the New Historicism, poststructuralism, cultural materialism, feminism, semiotics, postcolonialism, or any of the other critical interventions marking literary studies in the late twentieth century. Rather, the renewal of form as an operation intrinsic to reading enables literary and cultural studies fully to take the pressure of those interventions." As Rooney contends, attention to form can in fact increase the range and the resilience of many current critical approaches. ⁵ Both Dillon and Rooney position themselves in response to the secondary role that formal concerns have played in recent literary and cultural studies—a phenomenon that can be traced, Dillon compellingly explains, to critiques that associate New Critical formalism with "hermeticism or quietism" and poststructuralist formalism with "implied universalism." ⁶ Remaining attentive to the form of Willa Cather's The Professor's House, I suggest, enables a reading that is both antihermetic and anti-universal. As we attune ourselves to her form's particularities, we will find that parallel particularities—of cultural context and historical method—grow increasingly importunate.

Cather's own critical writing enacts the pairing of historical and formal modes of analysis that her work requires. ⁷ In a 1938 letter about The Professor's House, Cather explains its fractured form in terms of an exhibition of Dutch paintings she had seen just before she began writing: one often sees, in Dutch paintings, depictions of crowded interiors with "a square window, open. . . . The feeling of the sea that one got through those square windows was remarkable, and gave me a sense of the fleets of Dutch ships that ply quietly on all the waters of the globe—to Java, etc." ⁸ By serving as a model for Cather's experiment with form, Dutch painting, a distinct national school of art constituted by...