Willa Cather’s impressionistic technique and narrative criticism

Two critics are discussing Willa Cather. They might agree, disagree, or simply focus on different features of her work. Let's establish each one's point before deciding how the discussions fit together.

A begins with Cather's admiration for Turgenev and Tolstoy, then develops the connection with Turgenev. The key similarity is how they reveal their characters. Instead of announcing that a character is angry, a writer could show him slamming his fist on a desk. The reader supplies the emotional explanation. That's the practical difference between telling us the emotion and letting it emerge through behavior.

So why must the writer be a psychologist, but a secret one? The writer needs to understand the character's inner life in order to choose revealing details. But that knowledge guides the writing without being spelled out for the reader. Knowing what drives the character and directly explaining it are different things.

The next sentence adds selection. Complete knowledge of a character doesn't mean putting every known detail on the page. Quite the opposite: knowing the character well should help the writer choose what matters and leave unnecessary detail out. A room could be described in a few revealing sentences or exhaustively catalogued. More description isn't automatically better at revealing the person who lives there.

Cather's “thing not named” develops the same idea. Something can be felt without being explicitly stated. If the action makes us recognize anger, the writer has created that impression without naming the emotion. This isn't a technique for avoiding psychology. It's a way of conveying psychology indirectly.

The ending brings setting, action, and emotional reality together. Selected physical details combine with the characters' feelings to establish a prevailing mood. We don't need to invent a technical definition of mood; think of the overall feeling created by those details working together.

A's main point: Cather and Turgenev share an impressionistic technique that uses selected details of appearance, setting, and action to convey characters' emotional lives indirectly.

B opens with a disagreement over whether Death Comes for the Archbishop counts as a novel. Cather herself prefers narrative. What difference is that distinction supposed to make? We shouldn't import our own rule about a book's length. The next sentences explain the relevant critical approach.

Narratology asks simply whether something tells a story. That broadens what can be considered while simplifying the requirements. The realistic novel comes with more specific expectations: direct psychological characterization, realistic treatment of time, causal plotting, and logical closure. A narrative-focused approach needn't judge every story by those conventions.

Now we get B's position: that approach is particularly suitable for Cather. Her harshest critics fault her structure or call a work inconclusive. But what if they're treating deliberate features of her technique as failures? Unusual time, unexpected focus, ambiguous endings, and simplified, stylized characters needn't be failed attempts at conventional realism. B says those structures indirectly express conflicting desires.

My initial reaction is that the criticism has used the wrong measuring stick. That leads to a broader recommendation about how to read her fiction. B isn't merely saying the critics were unfair, and it isn't claiming Cather never wrote novels. It's arguing for a critical framework that can appreciate what her narratives actually do.

B's main point: Cather's fiction is better understood through a narrative-focused approach than by judging it against the formal conventions of the realistic novel.

A explains her indirect technique by comparing it with Turgenev's. B explains why conventional expectations can obscure the value of that technique. Both help us see how her writing works, though only B recommends this particular critical approach.