SOURCE: Rosowski, Susan J. “Willa Cather—A Pioneer in Art: O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.” Prairie Schooner 55, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1981): 141-54.

[In the following essay, Rosowski analyzes the role of separation and alienation in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.]

Nebraska and great literature seem, as Willa Cather once acknowledged, an unlikely combination, for “as everyone knows, Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background; its very name throws the delicately attuned critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment.”¹ Yet Cather, a writer of the very first rank, wrote of Nebraska. For over fifty years, readers have been fascinated by this fact, taking varied approaches to the question of how Cather's regionalism relates to her greatness. Scholars have used history and biography to explain the changes in Cather's attitude to the Great Plains; literary critics have interpreted these changes in her works.² Critics now agree that Cather's coming to terms with Nebraska led to the flowering of her art and that in many of her major novels—O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, and A Lost Lady—Cather presents a range of responses to this region. And critics agree also that Cather converts regional themes to universal ones in these works. The weight of criticism, however, leads to the risk of leaving the works themselves by subsuming regionalism into larger, seemingly more respectable, concerns: with recent criticism concentrating upon Jim Burden's reliability or sexuality, for example, we must not forget that My Ántonia presents human experience of a specific region—the Great Plains or, more precisely, Nebraska.³ That experience may help us to understand other experiences and values—the American dream or the modern wasteland—but it begins with an experience of Nebraska. Cather's greatness begins with this fact, with her ability to persuade us to look again at a region still generally considered flat, barren, and monotonous, and, in doing so, to see it differently. What is even more remarkable is that Cather was the first major author to treat the Midwest in this way. Edith Lewis, Cather's contemporary and biographer, notes,

Perhaps there are certain advantages for an artist in growing up in an empty country; a country where nothing is made, and everything is to be made. Except for some of the people who lived in it, I think no one ever found Nebraska beautiful until Willa Cather wrote about it. A new convention had to be created for it; a convention that had nothing to do with woods and water-falls, streams and valleys and picturesque architecture. It had not the austerity of the desert nor the majesty of the mountains and rivers. There it lay; and it was as new, as unknown to art as it was to the pioneer.⁴

I wish to address this question: how does Cather convey the previously undescribed beauty of Nebraska?

The overwhelming fact of the Great Plains is “vast and seemingly limitless space.”⁵ Any author writing of the region must present an experience, “a state of mind,”⁶ the primary stimulus for which is nonphysical. As a result, descriptions of the region tend to resort to negatives—Edith Lewis's “an empty country,” for example, or to drawing-room conventions—“pools of pale yellow light lay on the prairie like gold breastpins on a woman's green dress.”⁷ But Cather allowed herself “to lay down the barriers and limitations”⁸ to enable fresh perception and then directed her reader in doing likewise. In her novels of the open prairie—O Pioneers! and My Ántonia—Cather re-creates an experience of limitless space and then directs changes in attitude toward that space. To do so, she traces a rather precisely defined perceptual movement consisting of three basic stages: first, the subject is jolted from conventional assumptions and perspectives, experiencing separation and alienation from objects apparently lost in empty space. This stage ends with an erasure of personality or a loss of self. Second, the subject gradually moves into this space, toward an experience of empathic union. Third, he or she returns to separation, but separation without alienation, for here there remains the assurance of recollected symbolic unity.

Cather devotes the early scenes of O Pioneers! to this process. The novel opens with separation and alienation. The narration is distant; the narrator engages in only very limited identification with any character's point of view. Objects seem lost in a sea of empty space, seeking orientation and, through it, identity. They have no discernible order in their relations to one another: “The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.”⁹ Conventional human orders—a main street connecting parts of a town, a railroad connecting the town to the outside world—are absurdly inadequate: the main street is only “a deeply rutted road” along which “straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings”; the “squat red railway station” at the north end of this road seems no more significant than “the horse pond at the south end” (pp. 3-4). Out of town, where “the roads were but faint tracks in the grass” (p. 19), even this semblance of human order fades: “the homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow” (p. 15). This separation of human beings from familiar orders results in spiritual alienation, for “of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening” (p. 19). As one critic writes, Cather's Nebraska emerges “as metaphor for the infinite, and the pioneers who enter those prairies are like people undergoing denudation; they are stripped to their spiritual bones.”¹⁰

To create this effect of alienation, of a bewildering absence of human landmarks, Cather reverses conventional assumptions and techniques: she describes space in images of permanence and, in contrast, houses in images of transition. The houses “wandered” onto the solid prairie and remain detached from it, with “the howling wind [blowing] under them as well as over them.” Even the distinction between earth and sky is lost—“the gray prairie” is like “a gray sky.” By this reversal, Cather creates an overwhelming sense of confusion between states of being generally agreed to be distant and separate: animate and inanimate, physical and spiritual, air and land, motion and stasis. Objects cease to be inanimate, for they have living characters: buildings huddle together for protection; houses wander about; the town itself tries “not to be blown away” (p. 3). People, on the other hand, seem inanimate, for they have withdrawn beneath protective shells: the children in school, the men under overcoats and caps, and the women beneath shawls. Both objects and people disappear surrealistically and, in disappearing, they seem to cease to exist. “The girl” and “the boy,” only later identified as Alexandra and Carl, drive not onto the solid prairie but rather “toward the streak of pale, watery light that glimmered in the leaden sky”; when they do so, “the little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been” (pp. 14-15). The boy, leaving the wagon, “disappeared over a ridge”; he seems to have dropped into a void. After he calls back, a sense of empty space is captured when “the wind answered him like an echo” (p. 18).

Jolted from conventional assumptions, Cather's characters experience first a sense of alienation and then a loss of self, or, as Cather was to write of her own entry into Nebraska, an “erasure of personality.”¹¹ Cather's erasure of personality is remarkably similar to Keats's negative capability: both involve negation of the ego, which enables subsequent movement out of the self to unity with an other; and both involve transcendence of the physical self.¹² For Keats, the self imaginatively moves toward an object, reaching an absorption so intense, so complete, that one experiences the idea represented by the object: through experience of the Grecian Urn, for example, one moves to beauty and truth. For Cather, a similar movement occurs through the physical sensation of the prairie until there is unity with “the Genius” of the land. In O Pioneers! the final image of the first scene, in which Alexandra alone in her wagon rides into the dark prairie, foreshadows this movement: “The rattle of her wagon was lost in the howling of the wind, but her lantern, held firmly between her feet, made a moving point of light along the highway, going deeper and deeper into the dark country” (p. 18).

In subsequent sections, changes in point of view guide changes in attitude. First, the narrator, focusing upon Alexandra's dying father, John Bergson, is physically detached from the prairie, for he is inside his house, “looking out of the window” at the land; and the sense of alienation remains, for Bergson feels that the wild land's “Genius was unfriendly to man.” But what is important about this scene is that for the first time Cather describes the land and space from a specific, human point of view: she moves her reader inside an intelligence that seeks order and that sees disorder and endless space as enemies. The result is a somewhat incongruous oasis of order amid apparently empty space. John Bergson “knew every ridge and draw and gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowed fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond,” yet outside this oasis there remains “the same land, the same lead-colored miles” (p. 20).

Cather next moves point of view further into the empty space of the prairie with Alexandra's visit to the hermitlike character, Ivar. Ivar presents an apparently alien point of view: he is known as “Crazy Ivar,” for he prefers “the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod” to civilization (pp. 37-38). With him, Cather actually takes us inside the land. As Alexandra enters Ivar's cave, Cather aligns point of view with the life that vibrates “against that vast silence”: “If one stood in the doorway of [Ivar's] cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant” (p. 38). Here Alexandra sympathizes with another human being who in turn sympathizes with the wild country: she has not yet reached independent empathic union with the land.

When Alexandra returns to the Divide after inspecting farms in the low country, she experiences for the first time direct, immediate, empathic union. Previously separate states of being coalesce: inanimate and animate; past, present, and future. Here Cather does not describe the prairie; indeed, the point of the passage is that the land ceases to be a separate entity. Instead, Cather presents the object perceived, by which previously separate qualities now interrelate. Alexandra “felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring” (p. 71).

Following this experience, Alexandra returns to separation but with a difference, for she “had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it” (p. 71). The previous “gray prairie” is now “that high, active, resolute stretch of country” (p. 76). Imagery is now of connection rather than of separation: “telephone wires hum”; “the gilded weather-vanes on the big red barns wink at each other”; and “the light steel windmills tremble … as they vibrate in the wind” (pp. 75-76). Qualities of previously separate entities infuse each other: the soil has come alive, yielding “itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness” (p. 76). Just as the land has assumed human qualities, so human beings have taken on qualities of the land: Alexandra “seems sunnier, and more vigorous than she did as a young girl”; her braided hair wound about her head “is so curly that fiery ends escape from the braids and make her head look like one of the double sunflowers that fringe her vegetable garden”; and her skin is white “with the freshness of the snow itself” (pp. 87-88). No longer separate, the inanimate and the animate move in and out of each other. As Ántonia will be later, Alexandra is here a central symbol of this movement:¹³ with “her skirts pinned up, her head bare, a bright tin pail in either hand, and the milky light of the early morning all about her … she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself” (p. 126).

Point of view and imagery support the sense of a symbolic whole. Cather extends perception of empathic unity beyond Alexandra: Carl, for example, perceives that “the dawn in the east looked like the light from some great fire that was burning under the edge of the world. The color was reflected in the globules of dew that sheathed the short gray pasture grass” (pp. 125-26), and Marie “felt as the pond must feel when it held the moon” (p. 250). Cather makes conventionally inanimate objects active, even animate, often through active voice and a direct subject-verb relationship. Imagery of light and shadow reinforces the sense of objects in motion: “the pale half-moon was slowly silvering” (p. 54); “the straw-stacks were throwing long shadows” (p. 306); “the pasture was flooded with light; … and the golden light seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in” (p. 127). Here as elsewhere previously separate states of existence coalesce—the solid earth becomes like light, and the light moves like water. And here as elsewhere Cather presents not a subject acting upon an object but objects in independent action seeking a natural state of unity: “On every side the brown waves of the earth rolled away to meet the sky” (p. 307).

The primary focus of O Pioneers! changes, however, following the scene on the Divide. In the first third of the novel, Cather concentrates upon the relationship between a subject and the apparently empty country of the Great Plains. The pioneer Alexandra functions as both subject and object: she is the subject perceiving the untamed land, and, by the empathic union she experiences on the Divide, she joins the object and becomes a symbol herself. But after the first of the novel, Cather turns from Alexandra as subject confronting the land and focuses instead upon character development in a more conventional sense. Although the land retains animate qualities, it functions as a background against which Alexandra's personal story unfolds. The nature of that story, especially the extended Marie-Emil subplot, restricts Cather from presenting Alexandra as a perceiving subject. Alexandra quite simply does not see the growing love between her brother and her closest friend; as a result, the reader joins the omniscient narrator in observing the effects of this illicit love on Alexandra.

In My Ántonia, the next novel in which Cather gives primary focus to the previously undescribed beauty of the Great Plains, Cather refines narrative technique: she introduces a distinct narrator, Jim Burden, and she moves the pioneer, Ántonia, to the object position. By doing so, Cather eliminates extraneous concerns: she does not need to develop characters in the conventional terms of background and motivation—Jim's personal adult history is, for example, largely irrelevant to his memories of Ántonia; Ántonia's personal difficulties—her misconceptions of her lover and his subsequent betrayal of her—are kept to a subordinate role by Jim's filtering them.

What is important about Jim Burden is his imaginative ability to perceive an object as a symbol. In the early pages of My Ántonia, Cather establishes Jim as her narrator by developing this perception in him. To do so, Cather takes Jim through a process similar to Alexandra's in her entry into Nebraska. Again, three stages are involved. Initially, Jim experiences a sense of empty space. Peering over the side of the wagon in which he is riding into the Nebraska prairie, he looks about him: “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” Jim moves from conventional order with “the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.” Finally, he experiences a loss of self when “between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out” (pp. 7-8).¹⁴

In the next scene Jim moves to the second stage of his relationship with the land—that of empathic union. Again as in O Pioneers!, customary distinctions break down as Jim seeks to transcend his physical self: “I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.” Gradually he ceases to define himself by physical terms: “The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float onf into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass” (p. 16). From “this new feeling of lightness and content,” Jim moves to an experience of unity: “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great” (p. 18).¹⁵

Finally, Jim returns to the separation characteristic of the third stage of one's relation to the land. In My Ántonia, Cather focuses on this third stage. The narrator, Jim, is an adult, far removed from his childhood experiences. His recollections of entering the open Nebraska plains are, if we might take the comparison with the Romantics one step further, like Wordsworth's recollections of the Wye valley in “Tintern Abbey.” Like the poet, Jim cannot return to the direct imaginative unity of his youth—both he and the land have changed. Instead, he recalls Ántonia, for she functions as the symbol by which he may bridge the separation between himself and the past.¹⁶ And, because Cather presents her only through Jim's perceptions, Ántonia can remain a relatively pure symbol, representing absolute acceptance of the natural world. Ántonia is literally from the earth for Jim, who meets her when she and her family are living in a hole like prairie dogs; despite superficial physical changes, she remains of the earth when the adult Jim again sees her: her children, emerging from a fruit cave after her, seem to pour from the ground itself, “a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight” (p. 339). Jim comes to recognize Ántonia as a constant in a world that is forever changing: “Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade—that grew stronger with time. … She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true” (pp. 352-53).

This narrative structure of My Ántonia is ideally suited to present imaginative experience of the Great Plains. Cather establishes three basic elements early in the narration: a human subject, Jim, developed as imagination; nature, initially alien and constantly changing; and a human intermediary, Ántonia, symbolically bridging the separation between imagination and nature. These three elements enable Cather to present the intense perceptual movement demanded by the Great Plains: there is strikingly little human physical action in the novel—instead, Cather composes scenes in which subjects confront natural objects in motion.

Overall organization further supports Cather's focus on the relation of subjects to objects. On the Great Plains, “the weather was the great fact” (p. 180); in My Ántonia, Cather uses seasonal change as a major structural device. By doing so, she organizes the novel in terms of basic shifts in the relations of objects to subjects; indeed, the seasons themselves move back and forth. In winter, “the whole world was changed by the snow” (p. 63), becoming distant and unresponsive: the lowered sky becomes hard, “like a sheet of metal”; the customarily substantial cornfields “faded out into ghostliness” (p. 62); and the windmill “looked dim and grey, unsubstantial like a shadow” (p. 80). Snow deepens a sense of change when “big white flakes were whirling over everything and disappearing in the red grass” (p. 62). Perception is limited, increasing the sense of distance between subjects and objects: “The flakes came down so thickly that … I could not see beyond the windmill” (p. 80). With spring, the sense of distance is replaced by movement and interaction, and Cather turns to images of air and smell: in spring “there was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly” (p. 120). In summer, distance between subject and object is oppressively close, characterized by “that breathless, brilliant heat” (p. 137); and autumn begins a retreat for which Cather uses images of distance: “Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel” (p. 370).

Within each season, Cather uses light to guide perceptual movement. Here Cather's use of light is similar to that in painting, where it may be “a principle of unity that is not abstract but real, a thing among other things, not an idea or schema.”¹⁷ Through light, Cather emphasizes two characteristics of the relationship between subject and object: it is a relationship in which sudden transformations are possible; and it is a relationship that changes constantly.

Certain scenes in which Cather creates “a sudden transfiguration” (p. 40) with light come to mind immediately. When Jim and Ántonia, sitting atop a roof, watch a summer electric storm, the sudden flashes of light guide dramatic perceptual movement: “The lightning broke in great zigzags across the heavens, making everything stand out and come close to us for a moment” (p. 139). Subjects are stationary and objects move: previously distant, even invisible, objects actually “come close” momentarily. Cather creates a similar effect in another central scene, in which Jim and the hired girls watch the sun “going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun.” It is, Jim soon realizes, a plow on the horizon behind which the sun was sinking; but momentarily the “great black figure” seemed to actually appear on the sun. Startled by the sudden transformation of the conventional relations between themselves and others, Jim explains how light affected the distance between them and the plow. “Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun”; as they watched, that same light, by fading, again dramatically altered relationships, and “our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie” (p. 245).

These spatial changes represent only one aspect of the transformations characteristic of the Great Plains, where movement occurs characteristically among customarily separate, distinct states of being. Watching the sun go down, for example, Jim sees that “the curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them” (p. 244). Trees become like copper; the river like gold; the sandbars glass; the thickets like fire. Elsewhere, wind shapes snow into “curly waves” (p. 64); and light transforms “the plumes of goldenrod” into “sun-warmed velvet, grey with gold threads in it” (p. 370).

Finally, then, it is this imaginative transformation—this coalescence of separate parts into an organic whole—that Cather offers in her descriptions of the beauty of the Great Plains. To present such transformations, Cather directs perceptual movement of a subject to an object, guiding the subject to an experience of empathic unity; this experience of unity informs subsequent descriptions in which a subject recognizes the unity represented by objects in motion among conventionally separate states of existence. In later novels, Cather leaves human confrontation with the empty plains as her primary subject, but her characters continue to recognize and to recall the beauty of the Midwest. For in Cather's novels, the open plains, where the “mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and generosity and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range,”¹⁸ were uniquely suited for existence “on the bright edges of the world,”¹⁹ where earth and sky meet.

Notes

1. Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two],” in On Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962), p. 94.

2. Howard Mumford Jones places Cather in a general historical context in The Frontier in American Fiction (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1956), pp. 75-95; John H. Randall III discusses populism as background for Cather's works in The Landscape and the Looking Glass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960); and Evelyn J. Hinz concentrates upon the influence of populism in “Willa Cather's Technique and the Ideology of Populism,” Western American Literature 7 (Spring 1972). Bruce Baker III discusses “the Nebraska regionalism in Cather's works as … not provincial but universal,” in Western American Literature 3 (Spring 1968): 19-35; and Bernice Slote, in “Willa Cather as a Regional Writer,” Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 7-15, demonstrates that Cather uses folk literature to tell a story that “included not only a familiar landscape but also a much more mysterious self.”

3. Terence Martin discusses My Ántonia in terms of its “narrator, Jim Burden, whose point of view defines the theme and structure even as it controls the tone of the novel,” in “The Drama of Memory in My Ántonia,” PMLA 84 (March 1969): 304-11; Blanche H. Gelfant, on the other hand, argues that “Jim Burden grows up with an intuitive fear of sex” that makes his narration suspect; once his “flight from sexuality” is understood, “My Ántonia begins to resonate to new and rather shocking meanings,” in “The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Ántonia,” American Literature 43 (March 1971): 60-82.

4. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record (1953; rpt. ed.; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1976), p. 17.

5. Jones, The Frontier in American Fiction, p. 76.

6. James E. Miller, Jr., “The Nebraska Encounter: Willa Cather and Wright Morris,” Prairie Schooner 41 (Summer 1967): 165.

7. Bess Streeter Aldrich, Song of Years (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939).

8. Willa Cather, “Light on Adobe Walls,” On Writing, p. 123.

9. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), p. 3. References are to the 1962 Sentry edition.

10. Stuart B. James, “Western American Space and the Human Imagination,” Western Humanities Review 24 (Spring 1970): 149.

11. “Willa Cather Talks of Work,” 9 August 1913, reprinted in The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896, edited with two essays and a commentary by Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 448.

12. See Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Willa Cather's Gift of Sympathy (1962; rpt. ed.; Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, Arcturus Edition, 1964): “Faith in an unconscious association of ideas … gives Miss Cather a decided kinship with the Romantic poets” (p. 169). Chapter 5 of this book offers an extended discussion of Cather's view of the imagination.

13. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, in “Willa Cather's Novels of the Frontier: A Study in Thematic Symbolism,” American Literature 21 (March 1949): 71-93, concentrate upon Cather's use of symbols to present “the individual in his relationship to a higher order” (p. 74).

14. Here my interpretation differs radically from that of Mary E. Rucker, who, discussing the Bildungsroman aspect of My Ántonia, interprets Jim's “annihilating merger with nature” as an early form of “his destructive union with the impersonal forces of the prairie,” in “Prospective Focus in My Ántonia,” American Quarterly 29 (Winter 1973): 303-16.

15. It is interesting to note here that an early reviewer, W. C. Brownell, concentrated upon Cather's ability to transcend the physical: “I feel somehow as if the proper epithets to characterize the book were something ‘up,’ almost physically floating above the material, as it were. … [W]ould it be too much to say it lifts the subject somehow—not, of course, by treating it idealistically, since it is one of the most notable instances I know of the contrary—but by a sort of continuous and sustained respect for the material. … I don't remember any art more essentially elusive.” Letter to Viola Roseboro', quoted in E. K. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, completed by Leon Edel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1953), pp. 204-5.

16. James E. Miller, Jr., in “My Ántonia: A Frontier Drama of Time,” American Quarterly 10 (Winter 1958): 476-84, interprets My Ántonia's unity in terms of Jim's growing awareness of separation from the past, concluding that, “My Ántonia is, then, ultimately about time, about the inexorable movement of future into present, of present into past.”

17. José Ortega y Gasset, “On Point of View of the Arts,” Partisan Review 16 (August 1949): 829.

18. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915; rpt. ed.; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1978), pp. 219-20.

19. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1927), p. 275.