Interpretation or ‘the Thing Itself:’ the Art of Performance in Lucy Gayheart

International audienceWith Lucy Gayheart Willa Cather returned to the genre of the Künstlerroman she had first explored in The Song of the Lark. Interestingly, while there was one artist in the 1915 novel, there are two in Lucy Gayheart and both meet a tragic death, giving this coming-of-age story a markedly different resonance. Whereas The Song of the Lark depicted Thea Kronborg’s ascent to stardom, Lucy Gayheart tells the story of a moderately ambitious piano student who is cut off in her prime before she can prove her worth. In this later novel, Cather seems to display the same aesthetic ideals as in her early works. And yet, as a brief look at the synopsis of both novels quickly shows, it would be quite hasty to regard Lucy Gayheart as a mere rewriting of The Song of the Lark. Although many expressions and turns of phrase regarding music are very reminiscent of Cather’s previous novels and stories, it is hard to ignore the much gloomier atmosphere that pervades the novel, which according to Susan Rosowski even carries Gothic undertones (219-231). One other major difference between the two novels is the perspective from which art is described in each : whereas The Song of the Lark takes us to the heart of the creative process by showing us how someone becomes a great artist, in Lucy Gayheart the protagonist most of the time is not the object of study. On the contrary, she is in the position of the spectator who looks up to the great artist (Clement Sebastian but also the soprano the Gayhearts admire in a performance of The Bohemian Girl in Haverford [bk. 2, ch. 7]) and tries to understand where his or her mysterious power comes from. This change of perspective is not merely a ploy to make yet another novel about a subject that Cather had already dealt with many times in her fiction. In the twenty years that separate the two novels I would argue that Cather’s views on life and the arts have shifted from optimism to skepticism. At the beginning of her writing career, when she was still mostly a journalist, she stated that the hardest thing for an artist was to “express” his or her ideas and perceptions. However “perilous” that “voyage” from the brain to the instrument of one’s art, she did not doubt that a few managed to journey safely to “the truth.” Nineteen years later, the virtual apotheosis of Thea as Sieglinde seems to be proof that Cather still maintained a rather optimistic view of the powers of the artist. However, The Song of the Lark is probably her most teleological piece of fiction and following novels such as The Professor’s House or Death Comes for the Archbishop show much more circumspection toward the possibility of delineating any straightforward voyage, be it in life or in art. At sixty one Cather offers a much more problematic account of artistic success. Describing Lucy Gayheart as “Cather’s most fashionable text in its self-deconstruction” (260, note 5), Blanche Gelfant shows how Cather’s novel constantly betrays her anxieties regarding the power of words and her own ability to make the reader feel what is not directly there on the page. Following a similar line of argument, I will examine how she very subtly conveys her views on the art of performance, in a way that confirms how much of a master in concision she was at the end of her career, while letting a persistent skepticism creep into any statement the narrator or the characters seem to make, revealing her gnawing doubts about the meaning and purpose of any artistic endeavor. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that the musical scenes in Lucy Gayheart—and indeed the whole novel—need to be approached as original statements in their own right rather than mere rewritings of previous scenes from Cather’s fiction