Rough draft due Wednesday

This is an open assignment: your only responsibility is to say something interesting, persuasive, and coherent about the book.  You have come up with lots of promising avenues into the text; you can read through the comments on the last few posts for ideas that might pique your interest.

Nevertheless, some of you might like to have a little more guidance, so I'm going to provide a possible way to structure your paper: 

In ¶ 1, raise an interesting question.  There are lots of uncertainties, tensions, and apparent contradictions (paradoxes, I suppose) in the book; use the first paragraph to show one of these to the reader in a way that brings the question alive.  You could do this by highlighting the contradictions inherent in a specific passage, or by showing how two different elements in the book are in tension, or by pointing out that something in the book is left out.


In each succeeding ¶, consider one way to answer that question.  Use specifics from the text to guide your way and provoke your thinking.  It would be best if the different ways of seeing the question followed one from the other!

Conclude with a way of seeing the question that has learned from what you've said in the body paragraphs.


Any questions?

Getting ready to write a paper about My Antonia

Next week you will write a paper about My Antonia. What are you going to write about?  What questions interest you?  Many of you were interested in the relationship between Cather's life and her novel; I could imagine lots of interesting paper possibilities that tried to tease out the anxieties in the book's complex depictions of gender, sexuality, culture (rural vs. urban; American vs. European; natural vs. sophisticated; etc.), memory, or the past.

So let me ask the question that way: what are some of the contradictions you see?  What are some of the complexities you see?  Is Jim Burden a reliable narrator?  Where does the book stand?  Where did Cather stand? What might you write about?  Have at it!

Thread for Friday's C block class

Explore some of the resources about Cather that you can find online--the ones I linked to on the sidebar or others you find on your own, and take notes on things you find interesting.  Comment below, noting where you got your ideas from.  Also, read what other people have noted.  Let's have a conversation; if a topic seems really interesting, I can start a new thread about that...

A thread for Thursday's A block class

Explore some of the resources about Cather that you can find online--the ones I linked to on the sidebar or others you find on your own, and take notes on things you find interesting.  Comment below, noting where you got your ideas from.  Also, read what other people have noted.  Let's have a conversation; if a topic seems really interesting, I can start a new thread about that...

Thoughts?

What are you thinking as you read on, now that Jim has left Black Hawk and seems to be moving on in his life...?

Weekend thoughts?

You have to read to page 161 for Monday.  What reaction are you having?  Comment below or on a relevant previous post.

Matt Gifford's thoughts

Matt Gifford says:
The book so far, in my opinion, has been completely weird. The book itself starts off as an interesting novel, but then throughout the book you are told these short weird stories instead of directly furthering the topic. It went from a Virginian boy who clearly has no emotions about his parents death, to finding this girl, who we find out later is like Jimmy and hides her emotions. The book itself barley gives the time frame of the characters and randomly kills of people without going into inner emotions and direct causes. It seems that all the emotions and events are taking place off of the books topic while the author is just focusing in on taking those emotions and events and smashing them all together. The book itself, in certain parts, seems to be just the aftermath of events. The way I see it, the author gives us a general beginning to the events, example like meeting the Russians. Gives us a brief bio about them, how they fit into the story and what importance they are. Then maybe the author will give us maybe one or two ideas of foreshadowing, and then poof a couple days later one gets killed off. I think the author here is trying to either let us come up with our own interpretations and thoughts on why this happened, or wants us to keep re-reading the book to see if we missed something. This sort of thing also happened in the beginning of the book. The author opens us up to this boy whose being shipped off to the middle of no where on a train, oh and his parents just died! I mean you can’t just say that and then not go into it deeper. Sure the author says that the kids lonely and he feels cut off, but come on the kids a kid he has to show those emotions just not think them. It’s a traumatic event that happens in his life and yet we don’t see it being continued, the author just sets us up for the next big event and continues the pattern.

Jonny's thoughts

Jonny writes:
After reading pages 68 through 96 I thought it would take a miracle in order for Jim and Antonia to reconnect.  I guess that miracle happened in book two.  After the party and dancing the chapter ends with Jim and Antonia walking home together.  Prior to the death of Antonia’s father, her and Jim never really had a relationship more than a friendship.  Does this reconnection mean more than just a friendship? If it isn’t I am still glad the story that was getting rather depressing swung back into being the relaxing story it was in the first few chapters.

Adding on.... even though the two have reconnected Lena's entrance into the story makes me wonder if she will have any effect on the relationship between Jim and Antonia. And why were the two so excited to leave the party. There are a lot of pieces to these chapters that I believe will come back to mean more later in the story.   I am excited to see where the relationship between Jim and Antonia goes from here.

Natural Emotions (Sydney)

Sydney writes:
 In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the main character, Jim, is an exceptionally strong character.  Jim is orphaned at a very young age and moves to a new house across the country, yet he portrays very little sadness.  Instead, he is one of the most able characters and, despite his young age, he acts extremely mature.  The story, however, is told in Jim’s perspective years later, and I think that the harshness he describes the first winter with is a symbol of the actual emotions he is experiencing.

Losing anyone close is a significant, and often crushing event.  Jim lost not one, but both of his parents within the first ten years of his life.  Most kids idolize their parents until they are at least ten, so to have lost his two guiding figures so early could have been nothing but devastating to young Jim.  Not only did he lose the two people closest to him, he had to leave the part of the country he had known his whole life to move to a new home in a completely different area.  This new home was in the middle of nowhere, which left him isolated from most of society.

Jim’s young life should have been very depressing because not only was he a child without one parent, he was one without both of his parents and without a familiar place to call home.  However, in the story Jim acts as if none of these changes had disturbed him.  His writing is not all positive though, because he describes the first winter in his new home to be brutal and have negative affects on all the people around him and on their relationships with each other.  I think that the descriptions of the winter are over exaggerated and emphasized in a negative way because adult Jim, who is writing his story, is looking for a place to vent his true anger and frustration with his childhood situation.  He might appear unscathed by all the bad things that happened to him, but in reality, he is human and needs to let out his emotions in some way.  By letting them out through nature, he finds a place to show the true power of his emotions while maintaining his steady and strong composition.

Rohan responds in the comments!

Rohan's thoughts about Jim's grandmother

Rohan Lewis writes:
In My Antonia, by Willa Cather, Jim’s grandmother is an interesting character. She serves as a model and mother to both Antonia and Jim, as well as a contrast to Antonia’s own mother. She is originally from Virginia and is not an immigrant. We see that she has adapted more easily to life on the prairie than Mrs. Shimerda. The grandmother has worked several years with her husband to achieve a comfortable lifestyle and the readers can’t imagine Mrs. Shimerda ever being the same.
From the very start, we see the contrast between the grandmother and Mrs. Shimerda. One of the first things Jim notices about his grandmother is that she is youthful and “a strong woman of unusual endurance.” When his meets Mrs. Shimerda, he observes that she is “certainly not young.” The differences in their attitudes as well are apparent in the first exchange between the grandmother and Mrs. Shimerda. As soon as they meet, Mrs. Shimerda says to the grandmother, “house no good, house no good!” The grandmother is calm and compassionate and replies, “You’ll get fixed up comfortable after while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house.” The grandmother’s optimism and lack of complaint has probably been greatly responsible for her success on the prairie.

Antonia often takes refuge at the grandmother’s house, which is warm and welcoming, as opposed to her own dark cave. Grandmother enjoys rescuing Antonia from her hard life while teaching sewing, cooking, and housekeeping. According to Jim, “grandmother was in high spirits during the weeks that Antonia worked for us.” Jim and the grandmother are highly doubtful about Mrs. Shimerda’s domestic skills. Jim recalls, “I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her family to eat.” Antonia is at the Burden house whenever she can be because it is a better place for her than her own home. At this point in the story, we can predict that Antonia will be successful as a result of the efforts of the Burden family in which the grandmother is a positive model for survival and happiness as a pioneer on the isolated and lonely Nebraska prairie.

Marshall responds in the comments!

In Times of Trial (Andrew)

Andrew writes:
 I have constantly witnessed as an unbiased spectator on the sidelines, as I know you have too, the loss of all pre-distinguished morals and all human manner due to the immense influence that desperation brings upon our state of being. I believe it is this unbiased view that allows me to understand the justification of such unacceptable actions in terms of our societal norms as well as understand the disapproval of the individual that receives the negative half of the result produced through such actions. Being a young, still learning individual, I can give no solidified preference on my stand point of this matter, and if I did it I would not be able to explain it with satisfactory reasoning, but I believe Will Cather expressed her own view in this matter in subtle techniques and descriptions within her book “My Antonia”. Using the plot of a struggling immigrant family attempting to adapt to a new lifestyle, we are constantly given a sample of the Shimerda’s effects from struggle. These samples are those such as Mrs. Shimerda’s huge tantrum during the mid-winter visit as the Burdens find out the poor shape the Shimerdas are in as they are forced to live in caves and live off spoiled and rotten food. We get a taste of how this desperate situation has influenced Mrs. Shimerda when she immediately goes over to the Burdens to complain about such hard times by vigorously points at the rotting food and empty supply as proof of her desperation. This event is simulated less forcefully in other encounters between the two families such as when Mrs. Shimerda receives a free pot from Mrs. Burden after complaining about not having one of her own. Yet it is important to realize the different reactions we get from the characters in the book who endure the punishment of a neighbor’s desperation. Jim, being the youngest and possibly the most naïve, was probably the most offended and annoyed by the Shimerdas as he even “hope to never see them again” at one point. However, we also witness Mr. Burden, a man wise enough to even “predict the weather”, as he is more forgiving of the Shimerdas offensive actions as he seems to understand the pain they are being through. I believe it is no coincidence the difference in wisdom and opinions of this matter and that maybe Willa Cather just may be more forgiving than she is critical of such actions driven by times of trial.

Nina responds in the comments!

My Antonia: Feelings vs. Isolation (Shaquira)

 Shaquira writes:

           In the novel My Antonia the author, Willa Cather, creates an atmosphere that keeps her readers engaged by adding dramatic scenes. In these dramatic scenes she divides the ideas and actions of men and women when it comes to expressing their feelings. As the novel began the characters did not express their emotions in the way people often do but when they did men and women approached them very differently.  
  Expressing emotions in the novel was very different for both genders. Men had their ways and women had their ways also. In the novel men didn’t express how hurt or how much pain they were experiencing. They would often stay quiet and commit suicide when you would least expect it. For an example in chapter XIV (  ) Mr. Shimerda was found dead with a dent in his head. Now Mr. Shimerda’s death was a surprise to all the people in the town because he seemed perfectly fine. Because people didn’t understand how he died they considered it as a suicide. Women on the other head were different; they often showed their emotions by breaking down and crying. For an example in chapter X Ms. Shimerda broke down when Jake brought over a gift basket full of food. Ms. Shimerda explained that they were not beggars in Bohemia, but because they went through a few obstacles on their way to America it left them with very little money. From these two examples you can see that women and men had two totally different approaches to expressing their feelings. 
Mr. Colburn responds:
Yes: men and women are shown really differently.  Mr. Shimerda kills himself, Jim's grandfather is "taciturn", Jim doesn't tell Antonia how he feels, but the women are quite expressive--Antonia chatters away, her mother is constantly making nasty comments, and Jim's grandmother tells Jim all about this and that.  

This brings up, for me, a question about the relationship between the narrator and the author.  Willa Cather is female, but she is writing from a male point of view.  Insofar as women talk more, it makes sense that the author is female, since a real Jim Burden might not be so likely to put down his memories into a two-hundred-page book; insofar as men are taciturn, it makes sense that the narrator is male, since Jim is pretty reticent and understated.  


It also reminds me that Willa Cather, in her first few years of college, used to like to wear men's clothes and go by the name of William...  How does that fit with the whole male/female split in the novel?  Thoughts?

Harry Ruther's thoughts

Harry Ruther writes:
Most people associate the cold, fruitless winters that we experience each year with isolation and hostility towards others due to the gray skies and brisk weather. However, in the novel, My Ántonia by Willa Cather, the winter and late fall are the seasons in which bonding occurs most, while the spring represents a time of conflict and tension.
In the time before “the heavy frosts” (25) begin, Jim and Ántonia visit the Russians, Peter and Pavel to whom Mr. Shimerda also frequently visits as well. During this visit, there is no tension and their host is “very hospitable and jolly” (26). Another example of the winter bringing people together occurs at the end of the season when Mr. Shimerda dies. Though this crushed the hearts of the Shimerda family, neighbors from around Nebraska rushed to their side thus showing their close neighborly ties. Following the passing of Mr.Shimerda and right before the start of spring, all the neighbors came together to help the Shimerdas build a new log cabin. These experiences in book one show how in the early winter or late autumn, the relationship between the neighbors is very close despite the cold that is often perceived as a hindrance.
Just as the neighbors are all coming closer together, spring arrives and the families no longer cuddle together for warmth and they become more independent. This becomes apparent in chapter eighteen, when Jake and Ambrosch get into a fight. This fight creates tension between the two families, and thus negatively affects the relationship between Ántonia and Jim.
This change in tension between the two families results from the changing seasons. This gross depiction of spring may foreshadow a bad experience in the spring later on in Jim and Ántonia’s life that causes their separation.

Mr. Colburn responds:
I like your attention to detail here--though you seem to imply that March is either early winter or late autumn--and I like your idea that the seasons are attached to emotions.  This idea is somewhat backed up in the book in a few places, like at the end of Part I when Antonia says "I wish my Papa live to see this summer.  I wish no winter ever come again," and then Jim says , "It will be summer a long while yet," and "Why aren't you always nice like this, Tony?" (90).  Antonia seems to imply that summer is much nicer than winter, almost answering Jim's question before he asks it; but when Jim asks, "Why aren't you always nice like this, Tony?" he seems to be implying that the season can't be the only reason.  It has been summer for a while, and neither Antonia nor her family have been very "nice."

While I'm there: the passage just before that one, describing the thunderstorm, recalls the great thunderstorm description in Huck Finn; it also, in an interesting phrase, raises the great modern anxiety about destruction and doom that arrives as if on schedule with the turn of the century: "the mottled part of the sky was like marble pavement, like the quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction." (89)  Wow!  We don't get passages like that in Huck Finn, nor in any nineteenth century fiction, really--and then all of a sudden, in "The Beast in the Jungle," Hemingway stories (the dead lumber town in "The End of Something," for instance), in The Great Gatsby, and in countless other works, doom and destruction are constantly poking their heads in at the oddest times...

Change (Marshall)

Marshall writes:
Life for the characters in My Antonia is nothing short of agonizingly difficult. The characters must content with the land, the economy, and most of all each other. The degree of these challenges is closely linked to the seasons. In the book, there is a noticeable change in the characters attitudes, and even their welfares with the seasons. For example the Russians, Pavel and Peter, fall upon extreme misfortunes in the winter, and the story they tell to Antonia tells of the reason for their flight to America, which also coincidently takes place during the winter. Along with that, there is a noticeable change in tone in the narration during the colder months, and the warmer ones. The summer months have a tendency to delve into exploration, emotional connections and the wonders of the pristine world around them. This is in stark contrast to the winter months which have a tendency to deal with death, hardships and the often bleak realities of frontier life. Cather does this to use the seasons as a vehicle for emotional connection between the read and the characters. By getting creating a constant, and consistent emotional cycle for both the reader and the characters Cather helps them to actively bond as time goes on. This makes the novel more interesting as a whole.

Mr. Colburn responds:
So you seem to be saying that Cather is manipulating things here, and using the seasons as stage scenery to affect the mood of the audience.  The seasons here are like T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative"--something that can be a kind of vehicle for emotion.

I wonder what else in the novel works the same way.  And I wonder what the relationship is between heightening the emotional effect in this way and not turning the reader off with a lack of realism--staying within the bounds of what we could "reasonably expect," as Daniel Meyer puts it. Where else in the novel is there a tension between heightening the emotion and remaining realistic?  I'm thinking of the stories we hear about minor characters; I'm thinking about the natural descriptions, and I'm thinking about the religious debates that pop up every do often.  Maybe others of you can think of other ways Cather seems to stack the deck?

I'm also curious about the tone of the book.  I have always thought of it as being quite calm and understated--but maybe others of you don't see it that way?  There is quite a lot of drama and violence, so why, as Dalia has asked, did I say that the book seemed calm, or even, to some readers, boring?

My Ántonia, Jim and Ántonia’s relationship (Daniel)

Dan writes:

 In the novel My Ántonia, Willa Cather introduces two main characters, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda. Cather makes some interesting decisions in how she portrays their relationship. The first is how she decides to begin the novel. The book is prefaced by a peculiar and mysterious introduction from the point of view of a third person anonymous narrator. This introduction gives us a glimpse at the final product of the relationship, but still leaves many questions unanswered. The introduction gives us clues, for instance we know Jim becomes a successful legal counsel in New York with a not so great marriage. The only clues we get about Antonia is that Jim felt affectionately towards her, and that he has or had some bond with her to spur him to title his notes “My Ántonia.” With the introduction in mind we can see the beginnings of this, yet there are still big holes to be filled. One hint at this ending we already see in Part 1 is Jim and Ántonia separating because Jim is pursuing his schooling while Ántonia reluctantly is forced into the simple farming life. Perhaps this leads to their eventual divide and Jim’s departure to the big city as a successful man of law. However this explanation does not account for one thing. Their relationship seems to span an entire childhood, but in reality lasts less than a year before they start to grow apart. Reasonably speaking Jim’s affection for Ántonia cannot be explained simply by these few months, As we read into part two we should expect some sort of twist to bring them back together. Some explanation for why Jim remembers her so fondly, some explanation for why he would compile all these notes on their time together.

Mr. Colburn responds: 
I can't exactly argue with anything Dan says--it is certainly weird that Antonia is so important to Jim, and he to her, after only one summer, and we should probably expect more interaction from them in the future--but we should also keep in mind that this is art, a heightening of life, and that in neither life nor art do things happen "reasonably."  "Reasonably speaking," Mr. Shimerda wouldn't have killed himself.  "Reasonably speaking," wolves don't gather in packs and chase down sleighs.  And no reasonable person would be moved by a fictional story--but we often are...

Olga's thoughts about My Antonia

If I had to classify the characters that we have read about so far, I would say that Mrs. Shimerda is the antagonist. Even as I say this, I understand that calling her the antagonist is not an accurate depiction of her. When I look at the motivations for her actions, I see that she’s just a woman trying to take care of her family in the hopes of a better life and doesn’t have an underlying “evil” plan. Also, even though she doesn’t directly challenge our protagonist, Jim, she is an obstacle that Jim and the others must overcome to attain something- happiness. Jim, his family, their workers and the rest of the Shimerda family don’t realize this, but I find it interesting that despite all of her good intentions, Mrs. Shimerda has done more harm than good.
Mrs. Shimerda and her family are living an impoverished and difficult life in the New World and it’s not their fault that they are unequipped to deal with the hardships of farming and the extreme weather. However, it is Mrs. Shimerda’s fault that they are even in Nebraska. She convinced her husband to move from Bohemia so that their eldest son Ambrosch could become a wealthy landowner, which was not possible for them before. This is what inspired most immigrants to come to the United States and is nothing strange, but the Shimerdas, especially Mr. Shimerda, seemed to live content lives back in Bohemia around friends, their culture, and in less poverty than in their new home. Mr. Shimerda committed suicide because of homesickness; something he would not have felt had Mrs. Shimerda not insisted that they immigrate. In turn, Mr. Shimerda’s death caused further trouble and anguish for his family, and all of this unhappiness traces back to that woman.

Even outside of her home, Mrs. Shimerda is a nuisance; she is a cunning and nagging braggart who is for the most part unappreciative of all of the things the Burdens do to help her family. Mrs. Shimerda guilts Mrs. Burden into giving her an iron pot, criticizes Mrs. Burden’s cooking and insinuates that they are not giving enough, tries to cheat Mr. Burden with the cow, and attempts to trick Jim into spilling farming secrets that she’s sure that Mr. Burden is hiding from her son. I realize that these actions and her personality are basically a result of living through hardship and poor circumstances, but whenever she is present in a scene of the book, I not only find her annoying but I think that Cather has painted a more negative picture of Mrs. Shimerda because their was intent to make her the one that everyone, both the readers and some of the characters, dislike.

I am interested to find out if she will manifest herself as a truer antagonist later on in the novel or if we will see some redeeming qualities, but so far, Mrs. Shimerda is just in the way.

Laina responds in the comments!

What interests Laina about My Antonia:

Laina writes:
   The thing I find most interesting about My Antonia by Willa Cather is actually not part of the book thus far at all.  It is, in fact, the absence of Jim's parents.  Usually, when a child, or anyone for that matter, loses a loved one (especially a parent) they think of that person constantly. Jim, on the other hand, rarely seems to reflect back on his life in Virginia anymore, and never on his parents' death.
    Jim is very observing, clever, and caring, yet never refers these traits back to his parents.  He acknowledges the vast plains of Nebraska but never seems to wonder, “What would mother think if she could see such a sight?”  When Jim cleverly kills the snake, he is extremely proud of his accomplishment, but doesn't appear to think, “My dad would be so proud of me.”  Jim's feelings for Antonia are as clear at his young age as they would be of a yearning teenager.  He cares for her strongly and despite their cultural differences, wants to be with her as often as possible.  Yet, he does not have parents with whom to seek advice to guidance.  Nor does he seem to realize or acknowledge their absence.
    A second point I find interesting about the death of Jim's parents is that when Antonia's father dies, instead of growing closer due to this uncommon and horrific similarity, they in fact drift apart.  The loss of a parent, although I thankfully have not experienced it myself, is a horrible tragedy at any age, but especially for a child.  The fact that Antonia and Jim share the experience of this agony but do not seek comfort in one another is quite strange and therefore interesting to me as a reader. 
    I will not lie, My Antonia is not my favorite book, and I feel that there is much missing that would make it, to me, an excellent novel.  Therefore I suppose it would seem fitting that what most interests me about the story is what is absent, versus what is present.  The lack of recollection by Jim of his parents and the fact that the mutual experience between he and Antonia do not bring them closer together puzzles me as a reader and therefore interests me as to why Willa Cather would choose to develop the characters in this way.


Mr. Colburn responds:
Yes--we should look at what is not in the book as much as what is in the book.  This goes back, obviously, to Hemingway's iceberg, and to what Cather said about the thing unsaid.  What isn't directly there on the page may still be under the surface, and may be affecting the reader as much by its absence as it would if it were there.   Laina's right that the absence of Jim's parents in the book is strange and interesting; for me, the big question is whether Jim's parents are part of the book's iceberg, there under the surface and affecting us powerfully, or if their absence weakens the book.

For Laina the absence weakens the book.  I'm not sure it does so for me.  I thought a fair amount about Jim's absent parents in the first few chapters, but even though I haven't consciously thought about them for fifty pages or so, the fact that Jim is an orphan, and that now Antonia is too, may contribute something to the feeling of weighty import that nearly every page of the book has for me.  This is a book in which every little description feels serious!

I also think it's interesting that Antonia is so relatively articulate about her father and her feelings about him.  She says that he's still there with her, and she calls on Jim to validate her memory of her father, too.  It's important for Antonia that Jim knew her papa, and she is, again, quite articulate in talking about what her father meant to her.  Jim isn't articulate about his parents at all; in fact he never mentions them.  Perhaps this is because he is younger, and more shy.  Perhaps it's because Antonia is the "peasant" that Cather is romanticizing (just as Leo Tolstoy romanticized the Russian peasants, and today many people imagine that working-class people are more in touch with their feelings than the effete intelligentsia), while Jim is more head than heart.  Or perhaps it's because Antonia is a woman, while Jim is a man.  That would go along with what seems to be one of the messages of Hemingway's "Indian Camp"--that women are more in touch with their feelings than men, and so will end up in better shape in the long run.

This has taken me away from my starting point, which was: does the fact that Jim never mentions his parents hurt the book, or help it?  What do the rest of you think? 

To send me something:

Send it to eric underscore colburn (at) brookline dot k12 dot ma dot us.  And make sure to keep a copy yourself, since my email is not very reliable.  Thanks!

One-sentence thoughts about the weekend's reading

Compose a very thoughtful sentence and post it in the comments for the rest of us to mull over...

Last paragraph of first chapter--on the comments so far...

Lots of smart comments so far--thank you!  I find it interesting that so many of you talked about the American west and the frontier, locating the passage in an historical/cultural context as much as in the lives of the particular characters.  You're right, I'm sure--but I'm surprised that so many of you seem to frame the whole experience in a kind of positive light, as if the passage is about new opportunities, a fresh start, a chance for self-improvement.  This is no doubt true, but the paragraph seems pretty frightening and bleak to me!  But with so many of you reading it as apparently less bleak, it must have its positive side, too!  So I'd be curious to hear what others think about the tone here.

It's also interesting that (I think) only Marshall talks about God--and I think I'd got further than Marshall and say that the passage does imply that, on that night at least, Jim doubts God's existence.  This goes along with my sense of the bleakness of the experience.  Jim's parents are dead, he has left the world behind, and God is dead, too...  What do you think?

Last paragraph of first chapter

Comment on a part of the last paragraph of chapter 1 (or comment on someone else's comment): How does this great paragraph set the emotional and intellectual stage for the rest of the novel?

Cather and Hemingway; things not named and icebergs

One of Cather's essays, "The Novel Demeuble´", is about how novels shouldn't have too much stuff in them.  She writes about how the most important thing in a novel or a poem is "the inexplicable presence of the thing not named".  This sounds fairly similar to Hemingway's theory that the writer can leave out of his story anything he wants to leave out, as long as he knows it, and the omission will actually strengthen the story.  Hemingway says that a story should be like an iceberg, with only a tenth of it above the surface but with the vast bulk of it that isn't showing providing the heft and the meaning.  And of course Cather and Hemingway were not alone in their thinking.  What was it about the modern period that led so many writers and artists to such radical techniques of omission and disjunction?  And how do these techniques seem to us now?  Not so radical, surely--but do they still work? And do they have any of their old emotional force?


Here is Cather (from "The Novel Demeuble´" (1922)):

"One of the very earliest American novels might well serve as a suggestion to later writers. In The Scarlet Letter how truly in the spirit of art is the mise-en-scène presented. That drudge, the theme-writing high school student, could scarcely be sent there for information regarding the manners and dress and interiors of the Puritans. The material investiture of the story is presented as if unconsciously; by the reserved, fastidious hand of an artist, not by the gaudy fingers of a showman or the mechanical industry of a department store window-dresser. As I remember it, in the twilight melancholy of that book, in its consistent mood, one can scarcely ever see the actual surroundings of the people; one feels them, rather, in the dusk.

"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

"Literalness, when applied to the presenting of mental reactions and of physical sensations seems to be no more effective than when it is applied to material things. A novel crowded with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture. A book like The Rainbow by Mr. Lawrence, sharply reminds one how vast a distance lies between emotion and mere sensory reactions. Characters can be almost de-humanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of their bodily organs under sensory stimuli—can be reduced, indeed, to mere animal pulp. Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in prose by Mr. Lawrence?

"How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little—for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude."


And here is Hemingway:

"I omitted the real end [of a 1923 short story] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything ... and the omitted part would strengthen the story." (From A Moveable Feast)

"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." (From Death in the Afternoon)

Beginning My Antonia

Looked at on its own, My Antonia is interesting in lots of ways: its narrative frame, the long arc of its story, the way that long story seems to eschew conflict, romance, climax, and indeed most of the traditional features of plot development, the calm, measured tone that strikes many readers as a kind of understatement, the extreme violence that periodically punctuates that calm tone, and so on.  But these features are particularly interesting to me in the way they relate to a lot of other writing of the same period.  Willa Cather was not exactly a modernist writer, and My Antonia is not exactly a modernist text, but her books could not have been written in an earlier period, and she shares many methods and concerns with writers we usually think of as modernists.  So while we read the novel on our own, at home, we will also read together, in class, some key works by Hemingway, Eliot, Williams, Pound and Moore.

Here are some particular things, pulled off the top of my head, to look at as we begin the novel:

• What is the effect of the narrative frame that Cather sets up at the outset?

• How does Cather set up her main character, the narrator? 

• How does the novel set up, right at the beginning, the sense that this is a new novel, a story that is about a changed world, a story that is not being told in the traditional way?

• How does Cather handle description?

• How does the landscape function in the book?

• How does understatement work in the novel?

• How does the novel evoke emotion?

• How is the novel like, and unlike, the stories by Hemingway and the poems by Eliot, Williams and Pound that we will read--like them not only in technique, but in feeling, in theme?

• Do these techniques work for you?  Do these feelings resonate with you?

As we go forward, I will post some of my thoughts, and I will post some of your thoughts, as well.  Feel free to comment on any post, but please be thoughtful and considerate when you do, and please don't comment anonymously.