Regionalism Démeublé: Reflective Nostalgia in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop

Regionalism Démeublé, Modernism Nostalgic

Although Cather had enjoyed critical and popular acclaim and a firm position as a major writer throughout the 1920s, many prominent reviewers in the 1930s soured on her work, condemning her regionalist mode as “escapist” and “nostalgic.” “As Cather seemed to retreat further and further into the past in search of an orderly and harmonious world,” writes Sharon O’Brien, “travelling first to the nineteenth-century Southwest and then to seventeenth-century Quebec, the pages of left-wing journals like the New Republic and The Nation as well as those of the New York Times Book Review began to fill with criticism of Cather as a romantic, nostalgic writer who could not cope with the present” (115). Most notably, Granville Hicks’s “The Case against Willa Cather,” published in the English Journal in 1933, presented Cather as a writer who had “surrendered to the longing for the safe and romantic past” (710). On one hand, of course, Cather had turned toward the legendary past of the Southwest at just the wrong moment. As O’Brien writes, “Cather and her literary reputation were caught in the midst of a generational and ideological shift in American literary culture as a new cohort of critics began to apply different standards to determine literary merit” (116). The criteria by which works of literature were judged had shifted in the wake of the Great Depression, and critics now demanded clear social relevance. On the other hand, however, these critics’ interpretation of Cather’s work also relied on a foundational misreading not only of her most recent novels but also of her larger aesthetic project and goals. What they interpreted as an unwillingness to confront modernity or a desire to escape into the regional past was part of Cather’s subtle pursuit of “the inexplicable presence of the thing not named,” her attempt to subtly make manifest and reflect on the modern present without overt identification or explanation (Not under Forty 50).

Lionel Trilling’s “Willa Cather,” published in the New Republic in 1937, perfectly exemplifies this misinterpretation. Perhaps having recently come across Not under Forty, a collection of Cather’s essays published the previous year, Trilling thought he had discovered just what constituted “the subtle failure of her admirable talent” (283). He identified “The Novel Démeublé,” an essay originally published in 1922 and reprinted in Not under Forty, as “the rationale of a method which Miss Cather had partly anticipated in her early novels and which she fully developed a decade later” (283). In this essay, Trilling argued, Cather had “pleaded for a movement to throw the ‘furniture’ out of the novel—to get rid, that is, of all the social fact[s]” (283). For Trilling, the supposed “spirituality” of her latest novels “consists chiefly of an irritated exclusion of those elements of modern life with which she will not cope” (287).

Far from a proposal to exclude reality, “The Novel Démeublé” constitutes Cather’s rebuttal of, as she put it, “the popular superstition that ‘realism’ 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 describing physical sensations” (Not under Forty 45). Trilling’s misreading is instructive, however. In fact, he almost cuts to the heart of Cather’s modernist regionalism. “We use the word ‘escape’ too lightly,” he writes, but “we must realise that the return to a past way of thought or life may be the relevant criticism of the present” (287). Not all depictions of a previous era are “escapist,” then, says Trilling; some can mount a “relevant” challenge to the conditions of the present. Death Comes for the Archbishop constitutes Cather’s attempt to do just that, to subtly evoke and confront the conditions of the present through her depiction of a particular region’s imagined legendary past, but perhaps because she never declares this purpose outright, Trilling assumes that Cather’s turn to the past is defeatist, merely “the weary response to weariness” (287). In abandoning the “social facts,” he writes, she loses “the objectivity that can draw strength from seeking the causes of things” (287). But Cather’s démeublé method does not in fact mean abandoning material realities, only abandoning the “cataloguing” and “enumeration” practices of the novelist as “interior decorator” (47). Far from omitting material realities, Cather sought instead to omit explicit sermonizing about those realities. She sought to make modernity manifest and to provide a critical vantage point on it, yet avoid the tactless, heavy-handed lecturing that so often accompanied so-called “political” novels. Indeed, she had grown frustrated at the proliferation of writers seeking not art in their fiction but an excuse for political pontification. Hermione Lee characterizes Cather’s position in the 1930s as a struggle to “detach fiction from polemics” (328). “At this particular time few writers care much about their medium except as a means for expressing ideas,” Cather wrote in an essay on Katherine Mansfield (Not under Forty 134). By contrast, Mansfield’s gift, she wrote, was her ability “to approach the major forces of life through comparatively trivial incidents,” to create an “overtone” suggesting that which “lie[s] hidden under our everyday behavior” (135). Far from “an irritated exclusion of those elements of modern life with which she will not cope,” as Trilling put it, Cather aimed to refine and perfect the method she detected in Mansfield, to “approach the major forces of life,” yet to make those conditions “felt upon the page without being specifically named there” (50).

To be sure, critics like Hicks and Trilling had good reason to be skeptical of the political implications of regionalist writing. After all, as Richard H. Brodhead and Amy Kaplan have shown, the nostalgic longing central to the “local color” fiction of the late nineteenth century often served as a subtle ideological tool, a way for readers unsatisfied with the industrial present to project images of their desire for a simpler time onto the past as represented in regionalist fiction. Rather than engaging with unsatisfactory social conditions, readers escaped these conditions in the nostalgic mode of regionalism, which described for them an imagined space and time removed from the concerns of industrial urban life and characterized instead by unchanging values and authentic traditions. But Cather had recognized the failings of “local color” writing’s reactionary nostalgia. In fact, Cather had by 1927 reimagined the modernist possibilities of regionalist writing. In Death Comes for the Archbishop Cather had developed a “modernist regionalism” grounded in a kind of nostalgic longing that would elicit not disengagement with modernity in favor of a prelapsarian place and time but rather a critical awareness of modernity’s potentials and pitfalls. Far from the regressive, reactionary nostalgia identified by her critics in the 1930s, the nostalgia evoked by Cather in this novel was a more decidedly “modern nostalgia.”

Modernist scholars have recently recovered nostalgia, traditionally considered antithetical to modernism, as a key feature of much modernist aesthetic production.[6] Stephen Spender, an early theorist of this notion, asserted that in some ways “nostalgia has been one of the most productive and even progressive forces in modern literature” (212). In contrast with Victorian expressions of “Golden-age nostalgia,” Spender argued, the “elaborate irony” of the modern era “put nostalgia itself into perspective, by making it appear not just as hatred of the present and yearning for the past, but as a modern state of mind, a symptom of the decline that was also modern” (213). Likewise, Tammy Clewell, in her introduction to Modernism and Nostalgia, notes that many modernist writers discovered in nostalgia “the potential for a productive dialogue where the past is brought into conversation with the present” (1). Such a dialogue, she writes, “might nurture regressive fantasies of returning to the preindustrial or prelapsarian, but it also might lead to creative visions for self-fashioning, culture, and artistic practice” (1). A decidedly modernist use of nostalgia, then, need not be understood as a mere fixation on an idealized past. Rather, modernist nostalgia might serve as a safeguard against unexamined conformity to the conditions of the present, a critical perspective on the existing order, and creative source for imagining the future.

More specifically, the modernist nostalgia Cather develops through her regionalist mode in Death Comes for the Archbishop can be understood as roughly parallel to what Svetlana Boym has labeled “reflective nostalgia.” In The Future of Nostalgia, Boym argues that nostalgia can be divided into two types, “the restorative and the reflective” (xviii). As opposed to “restorative nostalgia,” she writes, which “stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home,” reflective nostalgia “consists in the exploration of other potentialities and unfulfilled promises of modern happiness” (xviii, 342). Whereas restorative nostalgia “protects the absolute truth,” according to Boym, reflective nostalgia “calls it into doubt” (xiii). Rather than seeking to restore the past as established in a particular place, then, reflective nostalgia can provide a critical vantage point on the present, so that “the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historic development” (50). Thus, if restorative nostalgia depends on a chronological notion of corrupting progress, reflective nostalgia, by contrast, “opens up” the past not as sequential but as synchronous and alive within the present. Indeed, drawing on Henri Bergson’s notion that the past, as he put it, “will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality,” Boym argues that reflective nostalgia “tends to be prospective rather than retrospective, a kind of future perfect with a twist” (168). In this sense, she writes, reflective nostalgia “is not a nostalgia for the ideal past, but only for its many potentialities that have not been realized” (168). In Death Comes for the Archbishop Cather uses reflective nostalgia for the imagined past of a particular regional space to evoke—without moralizing upon—the shortcomings of modernity and to suggest a better way forward.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

“It seems inevitable in retrospect,” writes James Woodress, “that some day [Cather] would write a novel about the Southwest” (391). The region had fascinated her since childhood and had especially provoked her imagination after a formative first visit in 1912.[7] Since then, she had continued to revisit the Southwest both in person and in her fiction, situating sections of The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House there. Not until Death Comes for the Archbishop, however, which she finished in the fall of 1926, had she attempted a novel in which the Southwest served as the central setting. After all, much of her previous fiction had drawn on her extensive memories of the people and places of the Midwest, and she had relatively little experience in the Southwest. But in the summer of 1925 Cather found her southwestern subject in an obscure book, William Howlett’s The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf (1908). Having long admired the bronze statue of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first bishop of New Mexico, in Santa Fe, Cather explained that Lamy “had become a sort of invisible personal friend,” and Machebeuf, the subject of Howlett’s biography, had been Lamy’s longtime friend and vicar-general in New Mexico. Howlett’s book thus provided the background she needed to create their tale: “At last I found out what I wanted to know about how the country and the people of New Mexico seemed to those first missionary priests from France” (Cather on Writing 8). Opening in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, Archbishop tells the story of these two priests, Father Jean Marie Latour (Lamy) and Father Joseph Vaillant (Machebeuf), sent by the Roman Catholic leadership to minister to the Indians, Mexicans, and encroaching Americans occupying the newly annexed New Mexico territory. Through nine books, the essentially episodic novel narrates the gradual organization of the new territory’s vast diocese. Although it is based on historical records and features historical persons, Cather’s novel is by no means a conventional historical novel. Woodress calls it “the most innovative of all Cather’s experiments with the novel form” (398). Reynolds has argued that Archbishop, far from historical romance, “eschews the dramatic foreground of history” in favor of “the hinterland of history ... the quotidian background, the everyday ministrations of Fathers Latour and Vaillant as they reform and strengthen their Church” (Cather in Context 150–51).[8] Even contemporary reviewers noted this reversal of the historical novel form. In 1927 Henry Longan Stuart defined Cather’s novel “not so much as an historical novel, as a superimposition of the novel upon history” (32).

In this sense, then, Archbishop not only constituted a marked change in setting and subject matter for Cather but also a distinct shift in narrative method. As she explained the genesis and method of the novel in a letter to Commonweal in late 1927, “I had all my life wanted to do something in the style of legend, which is absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment” (Cather on Writing 9). In hagiography, particularly the medieval Golden Legend and the nineteenth-century frescoes of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Cather found the model for this reversal, an episodic flatness with regard to the past that eschewed the grandly melodramatic and instead infused the everyday with deep significance. In these works,she wrote, “the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives” (9). Disdainful of the contemporary emphasis on “situation,” the “tendency to force things up” with sensationalism and suspense, Cather sought, as she put it, “something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition” (9). Through this method, downplaying the dramatic foreground and focusing on the “hinterland of history,” she could evoke modernity without invoking it. Indeed, much like her pursuit of “the inexplicable presence of the thing unnamed,” Cather explains in her commentary on Archbishop that “the essence of such writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it—but to touch and pass on” (9). Rather than “hold[ing] the note,” using a story to make a point or as an excuse to pontificate, she seeks “to touch and pass on,” allowing the complexities and contradictions of modernity to emerge spontaneously. In an analogy with New Mexico churches, she illustrates this method, her notion of simply allowing stories to signify “without accent”: “I used to wish there were some written account of the old times when those churches were built, but I soon felt that no record of them could be as real as they are themselves. They are their own story, and it is foolish convention that we must have everything interpreted for us in written language. There are other ways of telling what one feels, and the people who built and decorated those many, many little churches found their way and left their message” (5–6). Rather than relying on artificial “situation” or external explanations, these churches to Cather “seemed a direct expression of some very real and lively human feeling” (5). Likewise, she thought, her novel need not give an “account of the old time,” explaining the past in terms of the present, but only, like the little churches of New Mexico, be its “own story” (5–6).

As Edith Lewis, Cather’s domestic partner for almost forty years, wrote, “[Cather] could make the modern age almost disappear, fade away and become ghostlike, so completely was she able to invoke her vision of the past and recreate its reality” (120). Millington, too, notes this ethereal quality in his assertion that Cather’s modernism is most apparent “when it has all but disappeared from sight” (“Cather’s Two Modernisms” 56). Indeed, in Archbishop the modern age almost disappears—almost. Modernity becomes “ghostlike,” haunting the narrative like an unarticulated specter. Although the novel is “all in the direction of suggestiveness and evocation, away from propaganda and orthodoxy,” writes Lee, yet there is the presence of “something ferocious and unreconciled ... placed at arm’s length” (267, 260). Even as it pines for the imagined regional past of Fathers Latour and Vaillant, Archbishop develops a reflective nostalgia that opens up critical perspectives on the modern present. Far from advocating the restoration of nineteenth-century New Mexico, Cather’s nostalgic longing evokes the promises and pitfalls of the regional past—the promise of cultural pluralism represented by Catholicism, for instance, and the pitfall of imperialist expansion represented by Americanization. Even in its narrative method, which eschews linear time for synchronicity, the novel undermines the notion of inevitable progress so central to modernity and instead imagines the past as a series of nonteleological possibilities. In his final moments, Father Latour himself even enacts this reflective nostalgia, treating his memories not as ideals but as objects “for reflection, for recalling the past and planning the future” (229).

Yet Archbishop also reveals the limits of Cather’s reflective nostalgia. In her attempts to avoid the explicitly political, to “touch and pass on,” Cather leaves largely unexamined the question of Native American and Mexican exploitation, past and present. Despite her close ties to a southwestern community of modernist artists and intellectuals strongly committed to Native American rights, Cather’s interests were, as Stout has shown, “aesthetic and historical ... centering primarily on landscape” (112). Indeed, Molly H. Mullin argues that “Cather’s interest in Indians never developed much beyond their usefulness as material for her fiction; at least she never took much interest in living Indians and the political struggles to which her friend [Elizabeth] Sergeant became so committed” (44). In attempting to allow her stories to signify “without accent,” in other words, Cather’s narrative method may in fact ultimately de-accent some of the profound political injustices experienced by the marginalized communities represented in her narrative. Even as it exposes the problematics of modernity, then, Archbishop nonetheless largely occludes the “pressures” of the Mexican and Indigenous past.

Archbishop suggests Catholicism as a contrast against the homogenizing force of encroaching modernity and American empire. For Cather, Reynolds has argued, Catholicism “was not the monolithic autocracy caricatured by American nativists; it was instead a repository of European culture, endlessly adapting itself to alien environments” (Cather in Context 157). Much like the midwestern immigrant cultures of her early novels, then, the Catholicism of Cather’s Southwest represents, in Reynolds’s words, “an enriching cultural pluralism” (157). This Catholic diversity finds its clearest illustration in the moment when Father Latour first hears the Angelus bell ringing in Santa Fe. As he explains to Father Vaillant, “I am trying to account for the fact that when I heard it this morning it struck me at once as something oriental. A learned Scotch Jesuit in Montreal told me that our first bells, and the introduction of the bell in the service all over Europe, originally came from the East. He said the Templars brought the Angelus back from the Crusades, and it is really an adaptation of a Moslem custom” (48). The Angelus bell suggests a cosmopolitan mixture, a European tradition with roots in the East. Speculating further on the bell’s origin, Latour notes that “the Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors” (48). Likewise, the novel’s prologue, depicting a meeting of several Catholic leaders, stresses this diversity. In this prologue, an Italian cardinal from Venice, a French cardinal from Normandy, a Spanish cardinal with English ancestry, and an Irish bishop with French ancestry meet to appoint Latour as bishop of the New Mexico territory: “The Italian and French Cardinals spoke of it as Le Mexique, and the Spanish host referred to it as ‘New Spain’” (5). Even Catholic doctrine seems to allow for diversity and hybridization, as in the early “Hidden Water” scene. When Father Latour loses his way on a journey to Durango, he happens upon a Mexican settlement named Agua Secreto in which the inhabitants have combined elements of local Indigenous beliefs with the Catholicism brought to them generations ago by the Spanish. In this village full of “old men trying to remember their catechism to teach to their grandchildren,” the bishop is surprised to find on a mantelpiece “a little equestrian figure, a saint wearing the costume of a Mexican ranchero” (29). A local boy identifies this wooden figure as Santiago, “the saint of horses,” asking, “Isn’t he that in your country?” (29). “No,” replies the bishop, “I know nothing about that” (29). The boy explains, “He blesses the mares and makes them fruitful. Even the Indians believe that” (29). Catholicism in Archbishop thus stands for enriching diversity and cultural pluralism, while the figure of the American, by contrast, evokes a mood of encroaching modernity and imperialism.

The novel’s Americans “are almost always unpleasant,” as Lee puts it, while “all other cultures are carefully celebrated” (279). One of the first Americans encountered in the narrative, Buck Scales, serves to establish the theme. On the road to Mora, the church fathers seek shelter in a humble house: “a man came out, bareheaded, and they saw to their surprise that he was not a Mexican, but an American of a very unprepossessing type” (70). The man, Buck Scales, speaks “in some drawling dialect they could scarcely understand” and seems “evil-looking,” as well as “not more than half human” and “malignant” (71). Luckily, the man’s Mexican wife, Magdalena, warns them of danger, and they are able to escape. Magdalena had known her husband “for a dog and a degenerate—but to Mexican girls, marriage with an American meant coming up in the world” (76). Not only are the novel’s Americans figured as rude interlopers then, but they also appear to be representative of the powerful developmental force of modernity, a way for marginalized groups to Americanize themselves in order to “come up in the world.” Likewise, the inhabitants of Agua Secreto feel this pressure: “They had no papers for their land and were afraid the Americans might take it away from them” (26). When Latour explains that Americans are not “infidels,” one young man asserts, “They destroyed our churches when they were fighting us, and stabled their horses in them. And now they will take our religion away from us. We want our own ways and our own religion” (27).

Even Kit Carson, the famous frontiersman, who at first seems to exemplify the less “unpleasant” features of the American type, is ultimately tied to encroaching modernity and American imperialism. “The great country of desert and mountain ranges between Santa Fe and the Pacific coast was not yet mapped or charted,” the Archbishop narrator explains, informing readers that “the most reliable map of it was in Kit Carson’s brain” (82). While the local Indigenous people imbue the landscape with symbolic and ritualistic meaning, taking it as essential to their identities, Carson reduces the landscape to mere political representation, the conceptual space of a map. But Carson’s “world-renowned explorations” take an even more nefarious turn by the end of the novel. Latour remembers from his deathbed “his own misguided friend, Kit Carson, who finally subdued the last unconquered remnant of [the Navajo tribe]; who followed them into the Canyon de Chelly, wither they had fled from their grazing plains and pine forests to make their last stand” (308). Serving as an agent of the U.S. government, Carson had led American troops into the canyon to destroy and take possession of the Navajo people’s ancestral lands: “Carson followed them down into the hidden world between those towering walls of red sandstone, spoiled their stores, destroyed their deep-sheltered corn-fields, cut down the terraced peach orchards so dear to them. When they saw all that was sacred to them laid waste, the Navajos lost heart” (308–9). With “subtle pressures” in moments like these between Catholic diversity and American imperialism emerging throughout the narrative, Cather conjures a sense of encroaching modernity and its devastating effects even without explicit commentary on the latter.

Yet the reflective nostalgia of Archbishop also evokes and critiques the forces of modernity in its narrative method, which destabilizes modern notions of progress and linear time. The narrative moves fitfully and episodically through the regional past, with events connected thematically rather than chronologically. Crucial events like the conquering of the Navajo people are passed over without being emphasized or rendered dramatically. Likewise, narrative suspense is spurned. When Father Vaillant leaves for Denver, for instance, anticipation is preempted with Father Latour’s thoughts: “he seemed to know, as if it had been revealed to him, that this was a final break; that their lives would part here, and that they would never work together again” (263). As Lee puts it, “‘Memorable occasions,’ such as the building of the new cathedral, are anticipated or recalled, but not enacted. Dates are withheld, and sometimes work backwards” (271). The novel’s final section, for instance, opens with the discovery of a letter from Latour dated 1888, then recalls the arrival of his assistant in 1885, shows his move into Santa Fe in 1888, then moves backward to the building of the cathedral in 1880, and finally to his journey to Navajo country in 1875. Like her hagiographic models, then, Cather presents not a continuous narrative but a series of related panels, a set of loosely related images from key moments in the lives of Fathers Latour and Vaillant. Her reflective nostalgia deliberately subverts the notion of sequential time so central to modernity in favor of a sort of synchronicity, a concurrence of timeless moments rather than a chronological development.

In rejecting sequentiality, Cather forgoes what Boym calls “restorative nostalgia,” which relies on a notion of chronological progress in its desire to restore some idealized antediluvian moment. Rather than reactionary longing for paradise, the reflective nostalgia that permeates Archbishop imagines the past as nonteleological, full of hidden potentialities, and permeating the present. In Father Latour’s attitude toward miracles Cather suggests precisely this reflective attitude toward the past, an understanding of the past as a force that “acts,” in Bergson’s words, from within the present. Hearing of the miraculous shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Father Vaillant is stirred, saying to Latour, “Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love” (53). As opposed to the discursive immateriality of “doctrine,” Vaillant seems to say, miracles are embodiments of God, idols to be held and worshipped. On the contrary, replies Latour, the miraculous is not static but surrounds us at all times. The miraculous, he says, requires only the right kind of awareness to discern: “The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always” (54). Rather than a shrine to be worshipped or a situation to be brought “near to us from afar off,” Cather suggests here, the past exists within and acts upon the present—all one needs is fine “perceptions” to see and hear “what is there about us always.”

In the novel’s final section, as Latour’s health begins to fail, his consciousness seems almost to coalesce into the reflective nostalgic mode of Archbishop itself. As he drifts deeper and deeper into his own past, Latour imagines not a chronological development but a set of collected moments, which he calls “the great picture of his life” (305). Searching through his own past for hints of its failings and potentials, Latour begins to see his own life as Archbishop does, without “perspective,” as synchronous:

He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. (305)

When Latour compares the Santa Fe of 1851 to that of the present day, he finds the latter in need of a proper sense of “setting,” of harmony between people and their place. As he recalls, “The old town was better to look at in those days. [...] In the old days it had an individuality, a style of its own; a tawny adobe town with a few green trees, set in a half-circle of carnelian-coloured hills; that and no more” (282). The modern era had warped Santa Fe, he thinks, made it “incongruous” with its surroundings: “the year 1880 had begun a period of incongruous American building. Now, half the plaza square was still adobe, and half was flimsy wooden buildings with double porches, scroll-work and jack-straw posts and banisters painted white” (282). Rather than retreating into the past, however, Latour’s nostalgia draws into question the shortcomings of modernity symbolized by these “flimsy wooden buildings” and imagines instead a structure that would encompass the best of both worlds, past and present, Old World and New, and reflect its regional setting—namely, his cathedral. The capstone of his career, his cathedral, with its Midi Romanesque style and its gold rock, “seemed to start directly out of those rose-coloured hills—with purpose so strong that it was like action” (283). Like Archbishop itself, Latour rejects notions of teleological development for a reflective nostalgia that calls the supposedly self-evident values of the modern present into doubt and imagines the potentials of the past inherent in the present, culminating in the construction of his grand cathedral. Indeed, in one telling moment from this final section, Latour hears precisely this blending of the past and the present: “As the darkness faded into the grey of a winter morning, he listened for the church bells,—and for another sound, that always amused him here; the whistle of a locomotive. Yes, he had come with the buffalo, and he had lived to see railway trains running into Santa Fe. He had accomplished an historic period” (285). Modernity has left the world with blemishes, to be sure, but the future looks bright to Latour: “It was the Past he was leaving. The Future would take care of itself” (304).

“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” Cather famously wrote in her “prefatory note” to Not under Forty, “and the person and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years” (v). Laying the groundwork for decades of “escapist” accusations, the critics of the 1930s found in statements like these and in Cather’s fiction not only resentment for the avant-garde but also a certain “smugness.” Comparing Cather to T. S. Eliot, who in 1927 had converted to Anglicanism, Louis Kronenberger found in this prefatory note “an odd feeling of guilt, of a deep feeling of regret for the past and a self-righteous loyalty in going to the past’s defense” (qtd. in Woodress 473). Even as Cather has been recuperated since the 1990s, scholars still have generally understood this preface as expressing Cather’s “grumpily disaffected” attitude with regard for her own era (Lee 328). Such a reading is appealingly simple. But a renewed understanding of Archbishop that incorporates formalist and historicist concerns while also attending closely to the regionalism at the core of Cather’s aesthetic project helps us reframe this ostensibly exclusionary statement and her understanding of the gap between the modern present and the imagined past. Rereading the reflective nostalgia of Archbishop reveals Cather as firmly engaged with the conditions of the cosmopolitan present by way of the local past. The tale of Fathers Latour and Vaillant does not call us to recreate the world of nineteenth-century New Mexico but rather to reconsider the modern present and the bits of the regional past that might still be embedded within it—as Woodress puts it, “their lives renew faith in human possibilities” (405). Indeed, Archbishop exemplifies the ways modernism and regionalism, though they have been customarily been taken as antagonistic, ultimately coalesce around a set of shared methods and concerns. Cather suggests as much in her prefatory note to Not under Forty. “Thomas Mann,” she writes, “to be sure, belongs immensely to the forward-goers, and they are concerned only with his forwardness. But he also goes back a long way, and his backwardness is more gratifying to the backward” (v). To one of “the backward,” like Cather, modernism’s regional “backwardness” was just as crucial as its global “forwardness,” the potential of the past just as important as the need to “make it new.”