Cather essay

Copyright © 2000, Frank Edler

Language and Being in Cather’sThe Professor’s House:
A Look Back and Forth from Thoreau to Nietzsche and Heidegger.

An Essay by Frank H. W. Edler

"...the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age
could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking
may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking."
Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit

Willa Cather and Cather scholarship are, for me, new horizons coming as I do from philosophy. Although I have had a life-long interest in literature, it was only last summer that I was baptized into Cather’s world when I read The Professor’s House for the first time.

Needless to say, the novel stunned me. The deceptive simplicity of the surface of Cather’s language makes it an easy read and thus makes it all too easy to miss the language because it is so well crafted. Bernice Slote comments on Cather’s ability to handle "a kaleidoscope of reference" and to integrate it so smoothly that "The Waste Land, by comparison, is indeed rough terrain" [1]. In addition to the ease and simplicity of the language, there is the brevity and compression of the last book of the novel entitled, "The Professor". My experience of the novel’s end was something akin to walking off of a cliff’s edge and suddenly realizing that there was no ground under my feet.

We as readers experience this shock not just because of the brevity and compression of the third book, but because the central experience of the main character, Godfrey St. Peter, is the experience of the loss of ground; that is, the loss of the very foundations of his way of being, of his world. In engaging this question of the ground of existence and thus the question of the ground of being, Cather confronts one of the most fundamental questions of modernism and postmodernism. Both modernism and postmodernism perceive the question of the ground of being as central to their respective views on what it means to be. Grossly put, modernism experiences the loss of ground as a process of change and transformation, but in the end affirms the claim that being does have some ultimate ground or meaning, whereas postmodernism experiences the loss of ground as a release from the tyranny of any and all forms of ultimate meaning and thus denies the claim that being has any ultimate ground.

Published in 1925, The Professor’s House [2] appeared roughly midpoint in Cather’s career. Susan Rosowski calls the novel "a watershed book" [3] because it moves away from the assumption of a subject-object dualism operative in the earlier novels and moves toward "presenting a unity antecedent to dualism" [4]. In a more recent conference paper entitled "The Greening of The Professor’s House," Rosowski approaches Cather’s novel as a response to D.H. Lawrence’s claim in Studies in Classic American Literature that a truly American literature had not yet emerged (Rosowski, Greening, 1). As Rosowski says,

Cather responded with a literary tour de force. In The Professor’s House she wrote a comic meta-novel – a novel about the novel and a comedy by which the "greening" concerns renewed vitality (or life) of language, from which the novel springs. Once old and worn-out habits are discarded, language is fully capable of renewing itself: that is the new world to which The Professor’s House moves. And for Cather, language is renewed by a return to the first principle of nature (Greening, 1-2).

Rosowski has made a remarkable breakthrough here in her claim that The Professor’s House is a meta-novel concerned with the renewal of language. I am in basic agreement with her position. What I wish to examine more closely is the relationship between language and the ground of being as a process or movement in the three books of the novel. Moreover, I think the movement of language and being as Cather presents it in the novel can be illuminated by references to Henry David Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In my view, we cannot fully understand the novel without coming to terms with what Cather is saying about the philosophy of language.

Let me start by going back to Lawrence’s statements about American literature in Studies in Classic American Literature. For Lawrence, American literature was still caught up in the negative freedom of "breaking away from all dominion" [6]. As long as it was still preoccupied with this movement away from the old masters, Lawrence thought American literature would never discover IT, "IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness" (Lawrence, 302). Lawrence’s challenge to American literature can be summarized in two statements: (1) there was as yet no authentic American literature and (2) America had not yet begun to discover its own authenticity. Toward the end of his essay, "The Spirit of Place," Lawrence offers a solution: "You have to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body underneath" (Lawrence, 303). Here, Lawrence is stating the necessary conditions for discovering the American self in its wholeness by stripping the language of its democratic and idealistic traps. In other words, an authentic American sense of being is hidden in the recesses of language and can be discovered there.

Cather, in "The Novel Demeuble" [7], is saying something very close to Lawrence in terms of the relationship between language and being. Cather is stating the necessary conditions for recovering the novel by stripping the novel of a particular conception of language. In other words, I think that Cather’s philosophy of language is imbedded in "The Novel Demeuble," among others, and needs to be brought into the foreground more clearly.

At this point, I would like to introduce briefly two conceptions of language and how they relate to the notion of the being of language. I think Cather’s essay, "The Novel Demeuble," has everything to do with the being of language. Since the phrase "the being of language" is something of a monstrous abstraction, let me clarify. What I mean by the phrase is really something simple: What sort of being does language have? Is language a mineral? A vegetable? An animal? A tool? Or does it have a mode of being more compatible with humans?

The two conceptions of language I wish to introduce are the instrumentalist view and the constitutive view. The former view sees language as a tool or an instrument, what the Greeks called pragmata. On this view, human beings invent language as a tool in order to make sense of, communicate, and organize the understanding of reality that already exists prior to and independent of language. The being of language thus exists in its usefulness in relation to a non-linguistic reality. Language as a tool is used as a means to describe, catalog, explain, communicate, and rearrange this reality that exists independently of language. Charles Guignon puts it in the following way:

From the instrumentalist’s standpoint, our ability to use language is grounded in some prior grasp of the nonsemantic significance of the contexts in which we find ourselves. It is only because we have first understood the nature of the reality that we can then come to comprehend the meaning of words. Language is seen as a tool for communicating and ordering this prior grasp of reality. Although language may play an important role in making the world intelligible, it is itself possible only against the background of an understanding that is nonlinguistic [8].

The constitutive view of language, on the other hand, does not begin with the assumption of a distinction between language as a tool on one side and a reality independent of language on the other. In fact, the constitutive view says that it is impossible to have an understanding of reality apart from and independent of language because any understanding of reality already includes some sense of language. In other words, language in the broadest sense is that which makes intelligibility possible in the first place; hence, the name ‘constitutive’. Language is thus the very medium in which human beings dwell and that which shapes the dwelling (Guignon, 118).

If we read Cather’s work on art and fiction against the background of these two broad ways of conceiving language, then aspects of her philosophy of language do begin to stand out more clearly. Moreover, the basic principles of Cather’s aesthetic are fairly consistent, as Bernice Slote has shown. Let me begin with one of her later essays on art, entitled "Escapism" (1936), where she presents one of her broadest statements on art:

Anyone who looks over a collection of pre-historic Indian pottery dug up from old burial-mounds knows at once that the potters experimented with form and color to gratify something that had no concern with food and shelter. The major arts (poetry, painting, architecture, sculpture, music) have a pedigree all their own. They did not come into being as a means of increasing the game supply or promoting tribal security (Stories, 968).

This is one of Cather’s clearest statements on the ontological status of art; that is, on what sort of being art possesses. What she makes clear here in no uncertain terms is that the being of an artwork is not to be understood as a means toward any sort of practical-purposive end. Thus, the being of art is not that of a tool, an instrument, or a piece of equipment. The being of art does not consist in its usefulness. Cather does make concessions to this idea of the being of art in the same essay. It is clear, however, from the following quotation that Cather did not like using the word "useful" even as an exception:

He [Shelley] was "useful" if you like that word, only as all true poets are, because they refresh and recharge the spirit of those who can read their language (Stories, 969).

In earlier essays on art and fiction, especially the companion pieces "On the Art of Fiction" (1920) and "The Novel Demeuble" (1922), it is clear Cather held the same view, even then, on writing. As she says in "On the Art of Fiction":

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values (Stories, 939-940).

Cather continues her discussion in "The Novel Demeuble":

In any discussion of the novel, one must make it clear whether he is talking about the novel as a form of amusement or as a form of art; since they serve very different purposes and in very different ways…Fine quality is a distinct disadvantage in articles made for great numbers of people who do not want quality but quantity, who do not want a thing that "wears", but who want change, -- a succession of new things that are quickly threadbare and be lightly thrown away (Stories, 834).

In the first quotation, Cather implies that language for the artist cannot be understood simply as a tool or as an instrument of utility not only because art brings into existence something that did not exist before and thus, something for which there is no market demand but also because art deals with intrinsic values, not instrumental values. Language in art in not one of those things that gets effaced, used up and thrown away. The dogma of realism is precisely its belief that language is nothing but the sum of its nuts and bolts. In opposition to this, Cather believed in the constitutive sense of language, a belief she shared with Thoreau.

If Cather believed in the constitutive view of language, how did she respond to the Lawrentian challenge that no authentic American literature existed and that America had not yet begun to discover its own deep, authentic, unified self? Did she agree with Lawrence that one had to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off of American utterance to see the body of the dusky American self underneath?

The answer that Cather gives in The Professor’s House is the enactment in writing of what she "preached" critically in "The Novel Demeuble". I think we sometimes fail to appreciate the revolutionary aspect of what she says in that essay. "The Novel Demeuble", written prior to Cather’s meeting with Lawrence and prior to Lawrence’s Studies in Classical American Literature, asks us to "throw all the furniture out the window", that is, throw the instrumental view of language out of art; throw out "the meaningless reiterations", "all the tiresome old patterns" and begin again with the "room as bare as the stage of a Greek theater" (Stories, 837). She is asking this not just of the American tradition, although it is certainly included in that statement. Her statement is revolutionary because she’s addressing the whole Western tradition of the novel, including Lawrence. The only American novelist she refers to in the essay is Hawthorne; the other writers are Merimee, Balzac, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, and the elder Dumas, all European writers.

In The Professor’s House, Cather turns the table on Lawrence by addressing the necessary condition for the renewal of the novel in the Western tradition as a whole. The novel can be renewed only if "language is fully capable of renewing itself" (Greening, 1). For Cather, there can be no Lawrentian quest for a deep, unified self unless there is a new, more original language in which that deep unified self can be articulated. The quest for that language, a language stripped of its instrumental, practical-purposive function, is the deep, unstated theme of The Professor’s House. Godfrey St. Peter’s experience of the loss of ground is the experience the loss of the Western concept of being as desire in both its phases of realism and idealism. St. Peter lets go of both realism and idealism insofar as the desire that animates both is premised on the instrumental view of language—that is, language as an instrument of acquisition. As Cather says in "Escapism", "Economics and art are strangers" (Stories, 972).

Rosowski has already indicated the direction Cather takes for renewing the language: "language is renewed by a return to the first principles of nature" (Greening, 1-2). I’d like to call this the Thoreauvian turn in the novel. Why Thoreau? I cannot prove that Cather was thinking explicitly of Thoreau while she was writing the crucial third part of the novel. I think I can show, however, that St. Peter’s experience of the loss of ground and the transformation that follows it, especially the linguistic transformation, is steeped if not in the letter, then at least in the spirit of Thoreau.

Actually, this spirit can already be detected in "The Novel Demeuble". The metaphor of a house of fiction that needs to be uncluttered of its linguistic furniture is fairly unique. Thoreau, however, used this metaphor of throwing out furniture as a way to simplify one’s life. And he uses it several times in Walden:

"But what shall I do with my furniture?"... I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox and bundle. Throw away the first three at least [9].

Thoreau at one point suggests we imitate the Maclasse Indians who perform an annual busk where:

"they collect all their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and clean their house, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together in one common heap, and consume it with fire." (Walden, 55-56).

At other times, Thoreau uses the metaphor of a house cluttered with furniture in relation to the nation as a whole:

The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. (Walden, 75)

And finally,

At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it [furniture] and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone. (Walden, 28)

Thus, when Cather says, "The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification" (Demeuble, 836), is this not said in the spirit of Thoreau, who also said, "Simplify, simplify"? (Walden, 25)

And isn’t the first line of the novel ("The moving was over and done") not just a reference simply to the moving of belongings from one house to another, but a reference to St. Peter’s own existence, that the movement of his life in terms of loving was over and done? Isn’t this the life of quiet desperation that he awakens to in the first part of the novel? In the latter part of the first book, he becomes fully conscious of it for the first time:

The park was deserted. The arc lights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light of the clear stars. The world was sad to St. Peter as he looked about him; the lake-shore country flat and heavy, Hamilton small and tight and airless. The University, his new home, his old home, everything around him, seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to be a sea-sick man. Yes, it was possible that the little world, on its voyage among all the stars, might become like that: a boat on which one could travel no longer, from which one could no longer look up and confront those bright rings of revolution (PH, 150).

St. Peter’s existence, his whole world, has become motionless, airless and insupportable. It is insupportable because the basis or ground of his existence is crumbling. The loss of ground here means the loss of the very foundations and principles that support and animate his whole way of being in the world. His boat or ground of being no longer supports him. Godfrey St. Peter is lost.

But this, too, is uttered in the spirit of Thoreau. In the section entitled, "The Village", in Walden, Thoreau could easily have been speaking of St. Peter when he says:

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not until we are completely lost, or turned around, -- for a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, -- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakens, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (Walden, 142)

St. Peter’s experience of the loss of ground is an awaking from an abstraction, an awakening to the realization that he "could no longer look up and confront those bright rings of revolution." (PH, 150)

But what are these bright rings of revolution? Since they belong to the ground that St. Peter loses, it is time to describe exactly what that ground is. At the end of the novel, St. Peter must learn "to live without delight." (PH, 282) The ground he gives up includes the two romances of his life: the romance of the heart with his wife, Lillian, and the romance of the mind with his work and Tom Outland (PH, 258). Both romances, however, are animated by the verb " to love", the verb he had been conjugating consciously or unconsciously most of his life. (PH, 264) The ground that St. Peter loses is love, desire, eros in the full metaphysical sense of the word as one of the most pervasive foundations of the Western tradition: " ‘Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love—if once one has ever fallen in.’ " (PH, 275)

Early in the novel, Cather tells us clearly the range and scope of St. Peter’s animating desire:

It was in those very years he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like Macbeth’s two spent swimmers—years when he had the courage to say t himself: "I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing!" (PH, 25).

And,

A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process (PH, 24).

For Plato, the essence of the soul is movement and eros (love) is the movement of the soul toward the beautiful. In the Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates that eros (love) is the spirit that mediates between this world and the world of the divine forms [10]. Indeed, the desire, the longing of love is the longing to procreate, to bring forth, in the presence of the beautiful. However, it is not a longing to procreate of body and of spirit simply to procreate, but, as Diotima says, "the lover longs for the good to be his forever" (Plato, 559 (206e)). Thus, love is the desire to create in order to possess the good forever.

Isn’t this an accurate description of the epiphany that St. Peter has when he conceives the design of his book? It was in the little brig, L’Espoir, French for hope, that St. Peter’s conception came together:

One day stood out among others. All day long they were skirting the south coast of Spain; from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas towered on their right, snow peak after snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and topaz. St. Peter lay looking at them from a little boat riding low in the purple water, and the design of this book unfolded in the air above him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves. And the design was sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled with it, and it had seen him through (PH, 106).

St. Peter, looking up from his little boat, sees the beauty of the snow peaks "high beyond the flight of fancy" gleaming with divinity, and it is in the air in the space between the little world and the divine beauty of the snow peaks that he creates his design as a movement in that air. Later when he realizes that it may no longer be possible to look up from his boat and "confront these bright rings of revolution", he is referring to Plato’s description in the Phaedrus of the journey of the souls as they follow the gods and goddesses in the revolution of the heavens (Plato,494-495 ( 247a-248d)): "For the souls that are called immortal, as soon as they are at the summit, come forth and stand upon the back of the world, and straightway the revolving heaven carries them round, and they look upon the regions without" (Ibid., 494)247b-c)). And also in the Timeaus where Plato’s creator, the demiourgos, "made the universe a circle moving in a circle," (Plato, 1165 (34b)) and "comprehending these is a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle" (Ibid.,1166 (36c)).

St. Peter’s Platonic sense of being, however, is not something to be understood apart from language; rather, the way of being of love is constituted by the language and grammar of love: "he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb ‘to love’—in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets" (PH, 264). Cather was fully aware of the way the grammar of love constitutes St. Peter’s mode of being: "One thing led to another and one development brought on another, and the design of his life had been the work of this secondary social man, the lover. It had been shaped by all the penalties and responsibilities of being and having been a lover" (PH, 264-265).

But what sort of language is it that constitutes love? Diotima says to Socrates that the longing of the lover is the longing to procreate in the presence of beauty in order to possess the good forever. Here we see the instrumental view of language emerge again in Platonic guise. Actually, the instrumental view begins with Plato. Names are a means, instruments, used in order to secure the possession of the good forever. Thus, the language of love in the Platonic sense necessarily falls back on an instrumental view. Language is used as an instrument of acquisition. This is the hidden connection between the Platonic instrumental view of language and St. Peter’s choice of the Spanish adventurers for his eight-volume work. Both at bottom use the language of love as an instrument of acquisition albeit in different senses: St. Peter for intellectual acquisition; the Spanish adventurers for material acquisition.

This includes Tom Outland, who represents perhaps the purest version of love. Outland can rejuvenate St. Peter precisely because they share the same mode of being constituted by this language. Their relationship, in fact, can be seen as a variation of the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus. They share an intellectual love. St. Peter makes Tom an intellectual companion (PH, 173). They spend evenings together, swim together, and eat together. When St. Peter prepares a leg of lamb saignant, he invites Tom:

Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and watched nightfall in the garden. If the evening happened to be rainy or chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius. (PH, 176)

However, it is only in the second book, "Tom Outland’s Story", that we see the full Platonic sense of Tom’s being and with it the instrumental view of language on which it is based. To begin with, the earthen water jar from the cliff dwellers that Tom gives to Lillian is "shaped like those common in Greek sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern in white and black" (PH, 118). Indeed, the first time Tom discovers Cliff City, it was "as still as sculpture" (PH, 201), and "more like sculpture than anything else". (PH, 202)

When Tom returns from Washington, he experiences again the unique feeling of being on top of the mesa:

Once again I had that glorious feeling that I’ve never had anywhere else, the feeling of being on the mesa, in a world above the world. (PH, 240)

This "world above the world" parallels Plato’s heaven above heaven in the Phaedrus, that is, the heaven of the absolute Ideas above the heaven of the gods. Here, it meets with St. Peter’s experience. More importantly, breathing the exhilarating air on the mesa is "like breathing the sun, breathing the color of the sky" (PH, 280). In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the sun, of course, represents the absolute Idea of the Good. Tom describes it in his own ways as follows: "Up there alone, a close neighbor to the sun, I seemed to get the solar energy in the same direct way" (PH, 251). For Plato, the purpose of the soul in following the revolutions of the heavens is to get to the summit of heaven in order to have a direct apprehension of the absolute Ideas themselves. Tom’s direct apprehension of solar energy—like breathing the sun—in Cather’s parallel to the soul’s direct apprehension of the absolute Ideas in Plato.

Further, Cather privileges Tom’s understanding and mind in relation to his epiphany or "religious emotion" of the mesa. Tom’s experience of the whole is directly related to a mental transformation:

I remember these things, because in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened to me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness (PH, 250-251).

Breathing the sun, getting the solar energy directly, includes an intellectual transformation similar to Plato’s prisoner in the cave who is freed from the darkness of illusion and mere opinion to the light of the sun’s true knowledge. In Tom’s words, "It was the first time I’d ever studied methodically, or intelligently. I got the better of the Spanish grammar and read the twelve books of the Aeneid (PH, 251).

Indeed, Cather alludes to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave when she describes Tom’s experience on his return to the mesa in the following terms: "High above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-color with the sunset, and Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern" (PH, 250). It’s as though Tom himself had climbed out of the cave into the sunlight and is looking back at the entrance to the cave.

Although Cather was certainly not willing to separate body and mind the way Plato did; nevertheless, Tom’s experience of the mesa is one of love and the possession of love through beauty. When Tom first discovers Cliff City, his experience is couched in the context of beauty. Cliff City is "as still as sculpture" and has a "kind of composition", but what gives it that composition is the "beautifully proportioned" tower: "The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something" (PH, 201). In other words, beauty gives meaning to human existence.

Furthermore, Tom is possessed by the experience he has of the mesa just as Plato talks of the possession of love as a kind of madness. In fact, Cather states it rather bluntly, "It was possession" (PH, 251). This intuitive knowledge of the whole brings Tom great happiness like the happiness of a child coming home: "I wanted to see and touch everything, like home-sick children when they come home" (PH, 240). He is somehow fulfilled by this experience of the whole:

Every morning when the sun’s rays first hit the mesa top, while the rest of the world was in shadow [Plato again!], I wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything. Nothing tired me (PH, 251).

This madness is a kind of ecstasy, that is, ek-stasis, being outside yourself, participating in a whole greater than yourself. Love, in Plato, is a mediator; it is that which makes the crossing of transcendence possible. Tom’s breathing the sun is also the experience of being carried away, of pure transcendence.

But how does language show up in Tom’s experience of the mesa? Earlier I claimed that the language of love was itself instrumental; that is, language in the Platonic sense is understood as a means of possessing the good forever. The question here is what role does language play in Tom’s experience of the mesa?

Tom’s experience, I believe, is that of walking the boundary of human language, the very edge of intelligibility. There is a clear sense in which Tom’s experience goes beyond the instrumental view of language. The intuitive intelligibility of the whole which is associated with breathing the sun outstrips the intelligibility that is constituted by gathering representations word by word or by proceeding step by step in a linear fashion.

The whole is not realized by means of the linear process of adding one part to another. For Cather, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, Tom is afraid of losing the whole if he goes back to the parts. It is here in the face of the experience of the whole, the experience of breathing the sun, that the instrumental view of language, breaks down—as it must for Plato as well. Cather herself states this distinction very clearly in the Preface to Alexander’s Bridge (1922):

...a writer contrives and connives only as regards mechanical details, and the question of effective presentation, always debatable. About the essential matter of his story, he cannot argue this way or that; he has seen it, has been enlightened about it in flashes that are as unreasoning, often as unreasonable, as life itself (Stories, 942-943).

Cather is discussing what happens when writers begin to work with their own materials as opposed to external materials. Language can be regarded and used instrumentally only insofar as the writer is working on mechanical details and presentation. But when it comes to the essential matter of the story, "he has less and less power of choice about the moulding of it. It seems to be there of itself, already moulded. If he tries to meddle with its vague outline, to twist it into some categorical shape, above all if he tries to adapt or modify its mood, he destroys its value" (Stories, 942).

The essential matter of the story has its own logos: its own order, design, and mood. This logos cannot be reduced to a mere means; it cannot be reduced to a tool, device, or concept to be moved around in order to achieve some greater effect. By ‘logos’ here, I am not referring to the logos that belongs to logic, but to a more originary logos, a pre-logical logos. As Cather says in her Preface to Alexander’s Bridge:

In working with this material [the essential matter of the story, this pre-logical logos] he finds that he needs to have little to do with literary devices; he comes to depend more and more on something else—the thing by which our feet find the road home on a dark night, accounting of themselves for roots and stones which we had never noticed by day (Stories, 942).

This, of course, is also St. Peter’s predicament; he too is trying to find his own road home on a dark night. He too begins to rely on something else, which accounts of itself for roots and stones that he had never noticed by day. For St. Peter, however, it is no longer the logos associated with those bright rings of revolution; it is no longer the language of Platonic eros with its grammar of love which moved him in the past to do "this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing!" (PH, 25). That logos and its way of being where souls fall from the heavens, become incarnated in matter, and then strive to free themselves to return to the heavens is given up.

For St. Peter, Tom Outland will no longer come back "through the garden door (as he had so often done in dreams!)" (PH, 263) to be "an instrument by which to measure desire" (Ibid., 29). He gives up the belief that "a man can do anything if he wishes to enough" (PH, 29), a belief which necessarily sees language as a means to an end. Indeed, what St. Peter finally gives up is the instrumental view of language itself, a view which considers words to be the masters of presence and absence. [11]

Accordingly, words are simply instruments for signifying objects, instruments which maintain the object’s identity apart from presence and absence and thus ensure the object’s availability whether it is present or not. Recall how Cather describes St. Peter’s ardor for teaching inquisitive students and his love of youth: "That ardor could command him. It hadn’t worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time" (PH, 28). Thus, St. Peter’s desire is just as indifferent to the temporality of presence and absence as the instrumental view of language is.

If both idealism and realism are inadequate because they are determined by the instrumental view, then what direction does Cather choose? What way of being is it that is more open to a language that is not understood exclusively in terms of instrumentality? First, it is important to emphasize that the language of place says more than human beings are willing to understand. Cather at times talks about the language of place not only as a pre-logical but also as a pre-linguistic, that is, a pre-verbal logos. The language of place articulates itself as a logos of pictures.

When Cather describes what Lake Michigan meant to St. Peter as a boy, she is describing how the lake functions as a logos for St. Peter, how it articulates itself to him and how he responds to it:

But for the great fact in life, the always-possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you know you would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning, across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and rose-colored reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn’t observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now, forty years, later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were merely wide open (PH, 30).

We could label the lake a symbol of freedom and possibility, but then we would miss entirely the way the lake is, the way it works or functions as a pre-logical, pre-verbal logos. Identifying the lake as a symbol abstracts the lake from Cather’s description by identifying what the lake is without understanding how it works. But then how does the lake presence as a pre-logical, pre-verbal logos? How does it work? And I don't mean work here as a process of production.

First, the lake presences as a place of origination: the sun rises out of the lake and the day begins at that place. As originating, the lake is a place of openness and possibility, a free place. It gives possibility and thus resists the tendency of the land to close in and enclose it. Thus the lake defies fixity and definition. Here we see something akin to the play of Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian forces of nature, the Dionysian being the lake as free possibility and the Apollonian being the land as enclosing boundary. For Cather, and for Heidegger as well, possibility here is higher than actuality.

As a place of origination, however, the lake does not get used up; it is not like pouring liquid out of a bottle where the liquid is used up or poured out. As originating, the lake is a giving and in its giving gathers other things into a configuration or assemblage. The lake gives itself first: it is the first thing seen in the morning, even before the sun rises. In giving itself to be seen, the lake gathers together the rugged cow pasture across which the seeing takes place and the shaggy pines that mark the cow pasture. Indeed, the lake gathers the cow pasture and the shaggy pines by being the open place where these things can arise and show themselves as the actualities they are. Presencing as an open place of possibility, the lake is that which is laid down first as a free place in which things can lay themselves out as what and how they are. The lake is not simply an object that shows itself once; but rather, it runs through the days like the weather. In other words, its presencing is sustained through the day. It is not just the sun, the clouds, the cow pasture and the shaggy pines that are laid out and gathered together in and through the lake, but all the details and variations of the seasons are gathered together into an articulated assemblage.

Memory is primordially this gathered assemblage which has its own articulation. This articulated assemblage or logos is laid away. Where? It is laid away in human experience even when human being is unwilling and unconscious of it. But how can this articulated assemblage or logos be laid away in human experience? Because Cather says it is part of consciousness.

That is, the way the lake lays itself down as an open place, the way things arise, lay themselves out and are gathered together in that open place also belongs to human apprehension. In the very act of perceiving, human beings lay down and lay out the same articulation that the lake as a logos has gathered. We may not, however, always be aware of all the details that have been gathered in that assemblage.

This is the case with St. Peter. As a boy, he did not observe the detail of how the ice chunks in the winter threw off "gold and rose-colored reflections from a copper-colored sun behind the grey clouds". But forty years later, "he could recall all its aspects perfectly" (PH, 28). This is possible because when St. Peter remembers his childhood, "he remembered blue water" (PH, 29-30). He remembers the lake as a pre-logical, pre-verbal logos, the whole assemblage of it and when he begins to unfold it, that is, lay it out again in memory, details that were unnoticed but housed and preserved in that logos, now present themselves consciously to him for the first time.

This is extremely important when we see this in relation to what Cather variously calls St. Peter’s "original ego", "original self", and "first nature" (PH, 265, 267). The transformation St. Peter undergoes is not a solitary event; it is a process that encompasses the whole novel. As the Platonic logos of eros and beauty collapses, another logos is beginning to emerge. When St. Peter early on in the novel begins to remember details of his childhood life on the shores of Lake Michigan—details he had forgotten for forty years—he is beginning to remember the logos of nature as the logos of eros and beauty is already in the process of collapsing.

This is closely tied with St. Peter’s discovery of his American identity. He is an "American" who has become an adopted European. We are told that "After his adoption into the Thierault household, he remembered that other boy [that is, his own American boyhood] very rarely, in moments of home-sickness" (Ibid., 264). He refers to the Thierault boys as his "foster-brothers" (PH, 25). Everything about his second self, the self shaped by the Platonic logos of eros and beauty is European: the French garden without a blade of grass (PH, 14), the Spanish sherry brought in via Mexico, he has the looks of a Spaniard (PH, 12), he studies for his doctorate in France where he met his wife, Lillian (PH, 49), he holds the Chair of European history at Hamilton (PH, 50), one of his favorite operas is "Mignon" (PH, 92), his fondest memories are those of his days in Paris, and the inspiration for his work on the Spanish adventurers occurs off the coast of Spain (PH, 106).

This European identity is gathered and structured by the Platonic logos of eros and beauty and as it collapses, so does St. Peter’s European identity. By the early part of the last book, we find St. Peter outside the logos of eros and beauty and outside his European identity:

But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt...that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside (PH, 264).

And

...the design of his life had been the work of this secondary social man, the lover (PH, 265).

Thus, the possibility now exists for St. Peter to discover his American identity by appropriating a more originary logos, one that emerges from the nature of place.

The vivid consciousness St. Peter has of an earlier state is that of his boyhood which includes his early life on the shores of Lake Michigan and his Kansas boyhood. As we have just seen, St. Peter early on in the novel is already beginning to re-appropriate the lake as a pre-logical, pre-verbal logos by remembering details gathered in that logos which he had not remembered for forty years.

The Kansas boy who returns to St. Peter is not European, but American—an American primitive:

He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water... He seemed to know, among other things, that he was solitary and must always be so; he had never married, never been a father. He was earth and would return to earth.(PH, 265)

The logos of this Kansas boy is not the Platonic one focused on sun and sky, but a pre-logical, pre-verbal logos of the earth, an extension and development of the lake-logos whose details he has been rediscovering. It is a chthonic logos, or, as Cather said in the Preface to Alexander’s Bridge, "the thing by which our feet find the road home on a dark night, accounting of themselves for roots and stones which we never noticed by day (Stories, 942). And it is "as unreasoning, often as unreasonable, as life itself" (Stories, 943).

As St. Peter mediates and learns this chthonic logos, his way of being changes dramatically. By August, he realizes he has "trifled away nearly two months" (PH, 263) of the summer. He was going to edit and annotate Tom Outland’s diary, but he finds himself loafing. In today’s vernacular, the professor has become a "slacker". He tells his physician that he "enjoys doing nothing (PH, 269). But Cather tells us, "he had been doing a great deal besides—something he had never been able to do" (PH, 263). The new ability St. Peter has acquired is the ability to day-dream during a twilight stage, the transition between an active engagement with the world and sleep. He had never had a twilight stage:

But now he enjoyed his half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth. He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility. He was cultivating a novel mental dissipation....(PH, 263).

Isn’t this Thoreau’s experience, sitting or lying rapt in reverie?

But why a mental dissipation or diffusion? Because dissipation is a counter-movement to the Platonic logos of eros and beauty. The desire of creation is the desire to possess the good forever. It is focused; it concentrates on achievement on works, on attainment. The mental dissipation St. Peter cultivates undoes the selectivity of the Platonic logos, unties it through diffusion in order to listen to the pre-logical, pre-verbal logos of the lake, the logos of the earth. It lets nature show itself from itself; it follows the play of nature in its presencing and absencing, in its coming forth and withdrawing.

St. Peter is letting-be the logos of nature in the Heideggerian sense. This letting-be is nothing passive; it is a profound form of meditation. Cather refers to it as deep recognition: "All these recognitions gave him a kind of sad pleasure" and "When he was not dumbly, deeply recognizing, he was bringing up out of himself long-forgotten, unimportant memories of his early childhood..."(PH, 266).

Given St. Peter’s "half-awake loafing with his brain"—by the way the word ‘loafing’ is a lovely reference to Whitman—given his mental diffusion or as I like to call it, his openness to the play of nature, what is it exactly that St. Peter recognizes in a deep sense? I believe it is the massive intrusion of time, of temporality into his world. It is not St. Peter’s sense of temporality that intrudes, but the temporality of nature.

St. Peter’s own sense of temporality has been governed by the Platonic logos of eros and beauty. What does this mean? It means that his desire for marriage, for children, for his own creative work, and for teaching have shaped his sense of time. The logos of desire tells him that "A man can do anything if he wishes to enough," (PH, 29) that he can do "this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing" (PH, 25). How does he do it?

Two evenings of the week he spent with his wife and daughters, and one evening he and his wife went out to dinner, or to the theatre or a concert. That left him only four. He had Saturdays and Sundays, of course, and on those two days he worked like a minder under a landslide...All the while that he was working so fiercely by night, he was earning his living during the day...(PH, 28).

St. Peter’s passion, his responsiveness to this desire, hadn’t worn out over the years. Indeed, as Cather says, "it had nothing to do with Time" (PH, 28). In other words, the logos of desire that shapes St. Peter’s own sense of time has nothing to do with Time (with a capital T). He even trains his mind to be active during those times when he writes: "He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day" (PH, 27). St Peter’s sense of time accommodates itself to and is determined by the achievement of desire. To put it another way, the logos of desire rules over St. Peter’s sense of time.

Is it any wonder, then, that when the Platonic logos of desire collapses, St. Peter experiences a massive intrusion of the temporality of nature into his life? But (1) how does this manifest itself in the novel and (2) what relation does this intrusion of temporality have to language?

Let me address the first question: how does Cather show the temporality of nature intruding into St. Peter’s way of being? In a number of ways: (a) the fact that, after forty years, St. Peter begins to remember details of the lake-logos associate with his childhood is the first indication. The details that he remembers, like the ice chunks throwing off gold and rose-colored reflections (PH, 30) are imbedded in the temporality of nature, that is, they are imbedded in a "when". Even the grammatical construction is odd: "the ice chunks came in of a winter morning..." The coming in of ice chunks belongs to the time of the winter morning. Cather wanted to show how the ice chunks belonged to the winter morning by using the possessive ‘of’ in "of a winter morning".

Another way (b) of indicating the intrusion of the temporality of nature is related to the experiences St. Peter has during the summer when he re-appropriates his Kansas boyhood:

When white clouds blew over the lake like bellying sails, when the seven pine-trees turned red in the declining sun, he felt satisfaction and said to himself: "That is right" (PH, 265).

Notice the repetition of the word "when" which announces the lake-logos’ own timing or temporality: When the clouds presence as billowing sails and when the pine trees presence as reddening in the declining sun. These "whens" mark the presencing of the clouds and the pine trees in accordance with the temporality of nature, in accordance with the timing of the logos of place. St. Peter responds by feeling satisfaction.

But why is it satisfying to him? Because his letting-be of the timing that belongs to the logos of the lake allows him to belong to the logos of that place. His deep recognition lets the presencing of the details be in accordance with their own timing. Thus, he participates in laying down and laying out what the logos of the lake lays down, lays out, and gathers together. It is a kind of midwifery; he helps the lay of the lake and the lay of the land to be how and what they are. St. Peter’s deep recognition, then, is a form of action which, by re-enacting the laying down and laying out of the lake’s logos, allows him to belong to it. By laying down the same that the logos of place lays down, St. Peter partakes of that logos and is himself knit into it.

Cather continues her description of how the temporality of nature intrudes into St. Peter’s way of being:

Coming upon a curly root that thrust itself across his path, he said: "That is it."
When the maple-leaves along the street began to turn yellow and waxy, and were soft to the touch,-- like the skin on old faces,--he said: "That is true; it is time." All those recognitions gave him a kind of sad pleasure. (PH, 265-266)

Here she continues to unfold St. Peter’s deep recognition. In this case, an aspect of nature—a curly root—literally thrusts itself across his path and calls for recognition as what and how it is. St. Peter does so by saying, "That is it." Cather then introduces another "when" phrase: "When the maple-leaves along the street...." She shifts subtly and extends the logos of nature into the street and to human faces.

With this shift, Cather extends the temporality of nature into the world that had been governed by the Platonic logos of eros and beauty which "had nothing to do with Time" (PH, 28). The temporality of the logos of nature now presences dramatically in terms of finitude. This is the third way (c) Cather shows how the temporality of nature intrudes into St. Peter’s world. The leaves presence as yellow and waxy; they presence as ending; the green withdraws and the yellow presences. The tough, supple character of the leaves withdraws and their softness in dying presences. This softness of the dying leaves is like the softness of the skin in old faces approaching death. Humans as well turn in the autumn of their lives. Humans too are finite and thus subject to the temporality of nature. In the fourth paragraph after the above block quotation, St. Peter realizes he is facing his own finitude – his own death: "Along with other states of mind which attended his realization of the boy Godfrey, came a conviction (he did not see it coming, it was there before he was aware of its approach) that he was nearing the end of his life. (PH,267)

However, it is not just the idea of death that intrudes into St. Peter’s life, but ultimately the reality of his own finitude. He almost dies in his gas-filled study, and he certainly would have died had not Augusta pulled him out after she heard him collapse on the floor of his study. With this near-death experience, St. Peter deeply recognizes that life ultimately is subject to the finitude of nature and its temporality. In the end, we all belong to the finitude of presencing and absencing. We all belong to the finite play of time. In the end, we will all be removed from presentness and be confined completely to absence. Even the Platonic logos of desire and beauty cannot withstand the finitude of nature. After raising a family, pursuing a teaching career, completing his eight-volume work on Spanish adventurers in North America (all governed by the Platonic logos of desire and beauty), St. Peter is claimed by the logos of nature and its finitude.

Let me now turn to the second question: What does this intrusion of finitude have to do with language? The Platonic logos of desire and beauty was atemporal. It was as fixed as the "bright rings of revolution" among fixed stars that St. Peter looks up to from his little boat, as fixed as Tom’s religious experience of the whole mesa like breathing the sun in a world above the world where there are no shadows.

Two issues are interrelated here: (1) the relationship of time and language and (2) the relationship of art and nature. The second issue about art and nature is, of course, one of the central themes in The Professor’s House. In this paper, I have been approaching it as a tension between the Platonic logos of desire and beauty and the logos of nature.

   In a revealing moment in Book I, Cather engages the issue of the relationship of art and nature as St. Peter stands outside his new home on an October afternoon admiring the view inside the house:

                         The drawing room was full of autumn flowers, dahlias and wild
                         asters and goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay in bright puddles
                         on the thick blue carpet, made lazy aureoles about the stuffed
                         blue chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the
                         window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented
                         October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured
                         Maples and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home.
                         It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into
                         a painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which
                         selected and placed – it was that which made the difference. In
                         Nature there was no selection. (PH,75)

The human logos – the hand fastidious and bold – guided by the Platonic logos of desire and beauty selects things from nature, transposes and rearranges them into a new gathering in the home. In this rearranging and re-gathering, art is able to heighten nature. Thus, the human logos of art "presented October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples…." (PH,75)

In doing so, however, art removes nature from the context of its own temporality, from the context of its own presencing and absencing. This is not to say that the flowers do not die in the house – they do. Nevertheless, the intent of the human logos of art in heightening nature is also to fix it, to establish a permanent presence of beauty as a bulwark against the finitude of nature – against the slippage from presence, the loss of presence – in short, against death.

The attempt to preserve and fix beauty also occurs in language. St. Peter’s own eight-volume work is itself such an attempt. We must remember how St. Peter describes his own project: " ‘I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing!’ " (PH,25) When this Platonic logos collapses and the finitude of nature intrudes, the recognition that follows is that language itself is finite, that language does not stand apart from, nor is it indifferent to, presence and absence. As much as the Platonic logos of desire and beauty would have it otherwise, language is not the master of presence and absence.

Robert Sokolowski, for example, is a philosopher who does believe that names are the masters of both presence and absence. For Sokolowski, a thing or object becomes nameable "when its affective spell is broken and we become indifferent to its gratification or loss, confrontation or release." (Presence, 27) An object becomes nameable when the object can be presented either as present or as absent. Thus, an object’s nameablity depends on whether the object itself is indifferent its being present or absent: "It [the object] would be the same thing whether it is presented or not. The indifference of the object to presence and absence is then reflected in an indifference on our part to its availability or loss, for we recognize that the object does remain itself whether we enjoy it or not. We can now appreciate the object "objectively,"apart from what it does for or against us." (Presence, 28)

But presence and absence are also temporal determinations. To say an object becomes nameable when it remains the same regardless of whether it is present or absent is tantamount to saying that an object is nameable when that object is indifferent to time. Here we see Sokolowski’s variation on Platonism. It is not that nameable objects exist in some absolute, atemporal world of ideas, but rather that objects, to be nameable, must be stable. And the only way for an object to attain stability is to be indifferent to time: "…the indifference to presence and absence allows us to speak of the object as remaining itself and keeping all its characteristics when it not available to us." (Presence ,28) Sokolowski’s variation on Platonism is the creation of a dimension of permanent presence where stable objects -- indifferent to presence and absence – are made available to language.

Although Sokolowski sees this dimension of permanent presence as a way of saving nameable things from the tyranny of passion and exploitation by creating a space in which things can be named and discussed dispassionately (RS,27), he is also aware that this space or dimension of nameable things can become a space for things simply considered as potential for human usage or "standing reserve" as Heidegger would say.[12] We then would have a space or dimension where nameable things are defined completely by their availability for use and exploitation.

Cather was certainly aware of this danger as well as the danger of regarding names as the masters of presence and absence. The novel as a linguistic entity was certainly something available for use and exploitation. As she says in her talk at the Institute of Modern Literature at Bowdoin College in 1926, "The novel has resolved into a form of human convenience to be bought and thrown away at the end of a journey." [13] I believe that Cather herself did not agree with the position that names are the masters of presence and absence. She knew that language could not be separated from and become indifferent to the logos of nature and its temporality nor could it become exclusively the instrument of a human logos imposing its will on nature. She did not look favorably on a writer " improving upon his subject-matter by using his 'imagination' upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose." [14]

   So, what do we make of the end of the novel, especially Augusta's role in saving St. Peter's life? Is Augusta's religious belief symbolic of a turn in the novel, a turn back to an absolute foundation in Christianity? I think not. If it were, it would be a deus ex machina which contradicts the whole direction of the novel. Cather is not substituting the absolutism of a religion for the absolutism of the Platonic logos. I am arguing for an interpretation in the direction of Nietzsche and Heidegger: Nietzsche insofar as it is not so much the absoluteness of Augusta's religious belief that is emphasized but rather the quality of the belief which enables Augusta not only to live with finitude and death but also to help others in that encounter. Moreover, this living and helping must be understood within the bounds of nature:

                                          He [St. Peter] used to say that he didn’t mind hearing Augusta
                               announce these deaths which seemed to happen so frequently
                               along her way, because her manner of speaking about it made
                               death seem less uncomfortable. She hadn’t any of the sentimentality
                               that comes from a fear of dying. She talked about death as she spoke
                               of a hard winter or a rainy March, or any of the sadnesses of nature. (PH, 280-281)

Cather's position here seems to me to be very close to Nietzsche's criticism of absolute beliefs: it may be necessary to have absolute beliefs in order to exist in the midst of chaos, but when those beliefs become atemporal and no longer enhance our engagement with life as a process of becoming, then those beliefs no longer connect us to the flux of nature and its finitude. Augusta's faith is one that enables her not only to talk about death as an aspect of nature but also to engage it as such. Death is part of the process of becoming for her and thus belongs to the logos of nature. And this is why St. Peter would rather have Augusta with him: "Seasoned and sound and on the solid earth [italics mine] she surely was, and, for all her matter-of-factness and hard-handedness, kind and loyal." (PH, 281) Augusta's faith is itself chthonic in her daily existence.

There are of course differences between Cather and Nietzsche. Cather does not endorse a will-to-power which imposes itself on nature. Cather is not a constructivist and thus I would not agree with a reading of Cather as a forerunner of Wallace Stevens. Rather, St. Peter's experience of nature and the new language he learns of nature is closer to Heidegger's sense of Gelassenheit or releasement, that is, a releasement of things from all metaphysical representations. Letting a thing be means granting it an open field and freeing "thinking from representations of an end." [15] Cather knew the simple truth that " Things that enter their world are other than products that enter a planning scheme." (Ibid,279) This holds true whether the "planning scheme" is materialism, realism, or idealism. When Tom Outland sacrifices his friend Roddy to the principle of absolute idealism, is this any better or worse than Rosamond's "orgy of acquisition"(PH,154) at the expense of her father? In both cases, human beings are sacrificed to a planning scheme or metaphysical representation. In both cases, language is used as an instrument in service of the principle.

In conclusion, what is impressive about Cather's novel is that she doesn't sell out to yet another 'ism' or another metaphysical representation. For all that, Cather is no postmodernist. In The Professor's House, however, she did come closest to walking the boundary between modernism and postmodernism. She tries to catch the language -- perhaps a new langauge -- as it emerges from the sense of place as a play of presence and absence. What accounts for Cather's freshness is that she is in between, that is, in between fixity and change without opting for one or the other completely. For Cather, the Lawrentian whole self or "dusky body" beneath American idealism is not so much the sexual body but rather the body of nature itself which includes the human body. The chthonic body of nature, however, must be understood first and foremost as place which has its own prelogical, prelinguistic logos. Indeed, the nature of place is laid out in and through this logos to which human being belongs.

References

1 Bernice Slote, The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1836 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), pp.92-93.

2 Willa Cather, The Professor's House (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1925), hereafter referred to as PH with page reference.

3 Susan J. Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p.142.

4 Ibid., XII.

5 Susan J. Rosowski, "The Greening of The Professor's House," ( paper given at the Willa Cather Conference ("Willa Cather on Mesa Verde: A Symposium"), October 20-24, 1999 in Mesa Verde, Colorodo), p.1, hereafter referred to as Greening with page reference. I wish to thank the author for making a copy of her paper available to me (the paper is dated October 25, 1999).

6 D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Anthony Beal (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 302, hereafter referred to as Lawrence with page reference.

7 Willa Cather, "The Novel Demeuble" in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, edited by Sharon O'Brien (New York: The Library of America, 1992), pp. 834-837, hereafter referred to as Stories with page reference.

8 Charles B. Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowlegde (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), pp. 117-118, hereafter referred to as Guignon with page reference.

9 Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, introduced by Norman Holmes Pearson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), p.54, hereafter referred to as Walden with page reference.

10 Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 555 (202e-203a); hereafter referred to as Plato with page reference.

11 Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence. A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 29; hereafter referred to as Presence with page reference.

12 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 17.

13 L. Brent Bohlke, ed., Willa Cather in Person: Interview, Speeches, Letters (University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 155.

14 Sarah Orne Jewett, The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett: Selected and Arranged with a Preface by Willa Cather (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), p.XII.

15 Reiner Schuermann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 278-279.