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Chapter II
Writing Principle and Life
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compared to many of her contemporaries. She uses very short sentences in the novels without any complicated technique such as stream of consciousness. These short and simple sentences do not mean that her works lack artistry or depth.
Rather, her descriptions are very vivid and dramatic with many symbolic and profound meanings.
Cather’s writing style on her own principle, which shapes her own way of writing and makes her novels different from other writers’ and has a great influence on the writers after her, is precisely expressed in her essays “On the Art of Fiction” (1920) and “The Novel Démeublé” (1922). Cather asserts in the former: “Art, it seems to me, should simplify” (939). She also makes it a rule to write “novels without furniture”, that is “the novel démeublé” (835). In this essay Cather compares her style to taking all the furniture out of a room, leaving it as bare as a Greek theatre. As many people would associate her to Hemingway in the simplicity of their sentences, some critics even believe it is Cather’s writing style that influences Hemingway’s writing principle. Glen Love remarks that Hemingway’s “style and manner had something to learn from Cather” and argues that her principle of “novels without furniture” affected his “iceberg principle”6:
“Cather’s central theories of style anticipate and closely resemble Hemingway’s celebrated theory of omission, or ‘iceberg principle’” (115).
For her writing style, Cather lays emphasis on two significant points: the simplification and the passion. She conveys her discontent with the fallacy of
6 The iceberg principle is the writing style of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). He believed the true meaning of a literary work is not evident from the surface, but the crux of the story lies below the surface and should shine through from inside (Plimpton 19-37).
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realism and criticizes Balzac’s7 writing in “The Novel Démeublé”: “There is a popular superstition that “realism”8 asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations”(834). Then she argues that it is vital for novelists, “following the development of modern painting, to interpret imaginatively the material and social investiture of their characters; to present their scene by suggestion rather than by enumeration”(836). For her, “[t]he higher processes of art are all processes of simplification” (836).
She also emphasizes the importance of the representation of emotion in writing, since she thinks that the purpose of the description of the setting is to present a character’s passion. A writer should select the description which embodies a character’s emotion best, rather than mechanical listing up of the surrounding objects in his novels. She approves Tolstoi’s 9 remarkable performance on this aspect as follows:
… the clothes, the dishes, the haunting interiors of those old Moscow
7 Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist and playwright. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature.
8 The term realism, in reference to art, film and literature, is applied to the movement in the late 19th century. Literary realism is the trend beginning with the mid-19th century French literature and extending to the late-19th and the early-20th century authors. The realism authors opt for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or stylized presentation.
(http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/158931?redirectedFrom=+realism&.)
9 Leo Tolstoi (1883-1945), a Russian writer, philosopher and political thinker, is a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the world’s greatest novelists.
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houses, are always so much a part of the emotions of the people that they are perfectly synthesized; they seem to exist, not so much in the author’s mind, as in the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves. When it is fused like this, literalness ceases to be literalness—it is merely part of the experience. (836)
Cather obviously shares the same idea with Tolstoi, considering art or literary work as a tool to convey a man’s emotions or thoughts and fusing the objective existence into something like a part of his emotions. The process of simplification does not mean that the length of novels should be as short as possible, or the language they use should be simple. What Cather stresses most here is the selection of objects to describe. When depicting the scene, writers should choose the ones which represent characters’ passion or emotion best. Hence, at the end of
“The Novel Démeublé”, she encourages the writers to “throw all the furniture out of the window” (837), and “leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre”
(837), or “leave the scene bare for the play of emotions” (837). She insists that the unnecessary descriptions in a novel are like the unnecessary furniture in a room, because the furniture takes up too much space, and there is less room for characters to perform there. In a word, Cather approves the idea that the writers should select the most representative and meaningful description of the setting that are expected to effectively suggest characters’ emotions and thoughts in the novels.
To interpret Cather’s novels, it is accordingly necessary to understand how the principle of “novels without furniture” is applied in them. As is discussed
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above, Cather disproves fiction which exhaustively describes physical and social realities or provides extensive details about the individual psychology of the characters. That can be one of the reasons to explain why the settings of her novels are always great plain or the Southwest desert, since these natural places are usually simple and austere. Even when the settings of novels are cities, Cather still restrains herself from the detailed and complicated descriptions, for she believes that applying the complicated language and literary techniques actually hinder the story, and may even mislead the reader.
Cather’s writing principle can be exemplified in her description and narrative structure of her novels. For example, O Pioneers!, which is made up of carefully selected incidents and details, is written in a clear yet allusive style, and centers on archetypal characters and story lines. Another good example is The Professor’s House. Cather inserts the first-person narrative of Tom Outland’s story in order to take all the furniture out of a room so that the fresh air of Blue Mesa may blow in there. Her remarks on the writing of The Professor’s House, making the contrast of two writing styles, convincingly represents her admiration fo r the unfurnished novel. She asserts that the author should eliminate everything that is not strictly necessary and leave the narrative as bare as the stage of Greek theater:
In my book, I tried to make Professor St. Peter’s house rather overcrowded and stuffy with new things; American proprieties, clothes, furs, petty ambitions, quivering jealousies—until one got rather stifled.
Then I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blow off the Blue Mesa, and the fine disregard of trivialities which was in Tom
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Outland’s face and in his behaviour. (“On The Professor’s House” 975)
We may perceive that the prolix psychological description of characters such as the stream of consciousness accounts for a small proportion of her novels and the language used is not so sophisticated. However, it does not mean that the artistic value of her novels decreases or they are less meaningful. On the contrary, it is this style that adds a unique aesthetic charm to her novels. What Cather attempts to convey is much more complicated and symbolic than what the novel itself looks to do so on the surface. For a writer who promotes simplicity as her main style, the description of nature, the landscape and even the imagery or trivial words could be seen as metaphors, symbols, or suggestions which contain profound meaning and require the reader to make full use of his imagination. As it is necessary to figure out the implication or metaphoric meaning hidden within the text, making an analysis or interpretation on Cather’s novels is a challenge for the reader. The reader is forced to gain an understanding by interpreting the things that are not said but may have more importance. The reader can fill in some of these holes, with historical information of the time, or similar experiences they may have had. In addition to focusing on the scenery or setting description, he also needs to pay attention to the tension between these descriptions and characters’
emotions. For instance, the reader may want to see how these descriptions interweave with characters’ emotions, and how they are expressed through the descriptions. The formation of this unique style of writing is also inseparable from Cather’s personal experience that helped her pursue her career and creative life.
For example, Cather worked as an editor of McClure’s Magazine during her
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middle life. Writing and editing a tremendously large number of articles and revies must have contributed so much to make her own creative writing solid and successful.