Willa Cather brings the Muse to her country - her use of Classical myth

Several years ago I wrote something about Willa Cather’s use of mythology, about how incidents in her novel made specific but subtle references to classical stories.  What is going on in those comments?  Cather loved Classical literature and mythology and somehow figured out how to mix it into the regional fiction that she was at first reluctant to write.  She discovered she could Write What She Knew in more than one way, and include the things she knew and loved (Ovid, Virgil) and the things about which she was more ambivalent (Nebraska).

It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those [the Danish and Bohemian servants] and the poetry of Virgil.  If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.  I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious.  I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.  (My Ántonia, III.ii)

Jim Burden is now a college student at the University of Nebraska, escaping Red Cloud – sorry, Black Hawk – for good.  Like the actual Willa Cather, he has become a diligent student of Greek and Latin literature.  As Cather does with his fiction, I suspect he packs his memoir with references to myths.

In I.vii., young Jim, in the presence of the admiring Ántonia, slays a dragon, or Nebraska’s equivalent, a huge rattlesnake.  Is this a generic dragon-slaying adventure, mythical enough, or something more specific?  Apollo slaying Python?  And if so, which version?  Or is this one of the snakes in Virgil’s Georgics, his long poem about farming.  Where Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a guiding poem of O Pioneers!, the Georgics may (or may not) diffuse through My Ántonia:

…[Virgil’s] mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, “I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.” (III.ii)

That could be Cather’s own manifesto.  At some point I had the suspicion, or fear, that Cather was working her way through Georgics, episode by episode, but now I don’t think that is true.  But I do not know Georgics that well.

A Lost Lady is governed by Ovid rather than Virgil.  “He read the Heroides over and over, and felt that they were the most glowing love stories ever told” (I.vii).  Cather specifically tells me what I ought to be reading!  I am pretty sure that I need the Phaedra letter (the young man is Hippolytus, the lost lady Phaedra, the retired railroad man Theseus), but I will bet that there is even more to it.

This, gesturing vaguely, is there, but how much and exactly where, good question.  Most readers, I think, do not care at all.  I think they are – I am – missing something.  Maybe someday I will do the requisite work.

Meredith's storm scene - speculating on how the butterflies and moths saved their coloured wings from washing

The artificiality of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is most obvious in the chapters where he suddenly switches rhetorical modes, when his writing no longer looks like it belongs in a novel of 1859, or any time.  A chapter title like “Ferdinand and Miranda” (I.18), for example, is a signal.  To portray the hero and heroine falling in love, he drops them into The Tempest.  This is the opposite of allegory.  Objects outside of the novel are made to refer to things inside it.

I want to skip to another example, another tempest, my favorite part of the novel, right at the end, Chapter III.11, “Nature Speaks.”  Richard Feverel has gone to Germany for flimsy reasons – it is part of his ordeal – and upon hearing bad, or actually, good, news he plunges into the moonlit Rhineland woods, accompanied only by a little dog, previously unmentioned.  “Something of a religious joy – a strange sacred pleasure – was in him.”  So this is why the scene has shifted to Germany, to plunge into Romantic Nature at its source.

Here where the brook tinkled it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and without the spirit of water.  Yonder in a space of moonlight on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to sight and feeling…  Now and then a large white night-moth flitted through the dusk of the forest…  On a barren corner of the wooded highland looking inland stood grey topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass-blades.  Richard mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest, and listened to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet were emerald lights: hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark dry ground.

Of course, a ruin, what else.  Perhaps Romanticism is not the right reference.  Richard seems to have wandered in to a Poussin painting, or a Giorgione.  Perhaps I need to drag in Edmund Burke again.  So far, so Picturesque.  It is time for some Sublime.

All at once the thunder spoke. The mountain he had marked was bursting over him.

Up startled the whole forest in violet fire.  He saw the country at the foot of the hills to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished.  Then there were pauses; and the lightning seemed as the eye of heaven, and the thunder as the tongue of heaven, each alternately addressing him; filling him with awful rapture.

Yet the experience of the storm is also an “awful pleasure.”  Soon, “groping about” in the dark, Richard discovers and picks up a living creature, “a tiny leveret” (to the footnotes: “A young hare”).

Now things get really strange:

The rain was now steady; from every tree a fountain poured. So cool and easy had his mind become that he was speculating on what kind of shelter the birds could find, and how the butterflies and moths saved their coloured wings from washing. Folded close they might hang under a leaf, he thought. Lovingly he looked into the dripping darkness of the coverts on each side, as one of their children. He was next musing on a strange sensation he experienced. It ran up one arm with an indescribable thrill, but communicated nothing to his heart. It was purely physical, ceased for a time, and recommenced, till he had it all through his blood, wonderfully thrilling.

The latter is the little bunny licking Richard’s hand.  “What did it say to him?”  The rain passes, Richard comes across a forest chapel , and he exits the woods.  The ordeal is over.  Whatever it was.

So I barely understand what is going on in this scene.  It is amazing but baffling.  I am convinced that it is full of referents that I have not caught.  The famous storm from Virgil’s Georgics, Book I, is in there:

Earth feels the motions of her angry god:
Her entrails tremble, and her mountains nod,
And flying beasts in forests seek abode:
Deep horror seizes every human breast;
Their  pride is humbled and their fear confessed  (tr. John Dryden)

But there must be a number of other storms and forest idylls blended in, poems, paintings, songs, ideas.  Did Meredith invent that bunny, or borrow it?  Or experience it himself, but now it is in fiction, so he converted into invention.

One of the most puzzling mixes of the familiar and the strange that I have ever come across, and thus an achievement.  That is not a bad description of the entire novel.

Rafael Landívar, neo-Latin poet - shall I not now rush with spear upon the clever beavers

Neo-Latin literature* is the realm of specialists. A couple of books - Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Erasmus's In Praise of Folly (1511) - are widely read, as they should be. What else? Harvard University Press has created a neo-Latin series to parallel their Loeb Classical Library, the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Pietro Bembo, Petrarch and Boccaccio's Latin work, Ficino's Platonic Theology in many, many volumes. I read reviews of these books with some interest, but I haven't been convinced that I should crack a spine myself. For specialists, mostly.

Andrew Laird's The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana (2007) is also for specialists, really. Landívar (1731-93) was a Jesuit priest, born in what is now Guatemala, educated in Guatemala and Mexico. He was a central figure in the small world of colonial humanism. When the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish empire in 1767, Landívar fled to Italy, where he wrote his major poetic work, the Rusticatio Mexicana (1781). Laird's book consists of a long essay** about Landívar and his work, and a reprint of the Latin poem, with a facing-page English translation.

Rusticatio Mexicana is essentially imitative. Of what, though? The base is Virgil's agricultural poem, the Georgics, itself an imitation of Hesiod's Works and Days. This explains why a poem about Mexico by a Jesuit priest is full of references to Venus, Orpheus, Phoebus, and so on. But Landívar is late in the neo-Latin tradition, so he is not just imitating Virgil, but also numerous earlier imitations of Virgil, along with many other works. Laird's introduction is very useful for sorting this out.

The poem itself is a fifteen canto practical description of Spanish Central America. "The Lakes of Mexico", "Cochineal and Purple"***, "Beavers", "Sugar", "Birds" - those are some of the canto titles. I know, it sounds thrilling, but does the poem live up to its promise?

How could it. For modern readers, the interest in Virgil's Georgics is in the digressions, images, and inset stories, not in the descriptions of Roman agriculture. The pieces of the Rusticatio Mexicana are unfortunately mostly just what they say they are. The canto on "Sugar" even includes labeled engravings of sugar mills, which does not make for dynamite poetry:

Orbita (a) tune axem (b) tignis compacta profusum etc.
[L]et a wheel (a), supported by braces, encircle the long axle (b)...

There are exceptions. The canto on the 1759 eruption of the Jurullo volcano has characters and a narrative, and imitates Old Testament prophetic books rather than classical sources. Some of the natural history and anthropology is interesting. And the section on beavers is sort of hilarious. It borrows heavily not just from the Georgics' description of bees but also from Utopia. The beavers all work together in a sort of communist society, except for the ones who have been driven from the community for their "crimes". Here's an unusually vivid metaphor:

"As a deranged step-mother prepares a cup of poison for her son’s wife and amiably offers her the cup to drink, and the latter, unaware of dire peril, takes the deceptive drink and drains the cup of black death with great relish, thus the beavers, deceived by the treacherous gifts, exchange their peaceful life for a violent death.” p. 170

The real reason to read this book, which is obviously not for everyone: it's evocation of the world of educated, humanist, 18th century Spanish America, all new to me. Laird's book, and Landívar's poem, fill in a little corner of the historical map.

I heard about this book from the Classical Bookworm. Thanks for the tip.

* Post-medieval Latin. Not Roman, not Thomas Aquinas.

** My favorite part of Laird's essay is where he says that indifference to his work is "not very far removed from the bigotry and prejudice shown towards the Americas and their peoples, which Landívar and his compatriots encountered in Europe in the 1760s." p. 7. Ha! Neo-Latinist scholars in England play rough!

** While enjoying Renaissance paintings in the Uffizi, try to forget that the canvases are smeared with ground up beetles