Overtones

In her 1922 aesthetic manifesto, ‘The Novel Démeublé’, Cather argues that meaning inheres not in what's put on the page, but what's left out. The novel works by under-specification and by omission.

Fiction's spaces, though architectural, are meant to be filled by voices from elsewhere. The novel, for Cather, is a physical substrate on which individual readers can hang, must hang, a wide set of memories, dreams or speculations. In her remarkable not-quite-kunstlerroman, The Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather begins developing an account of the novel's capacity for such empty occupation. She does so by way of an implicit claim that fiction is both a supplement and a superior successor to the experience of listening to music.

In one sense, Cather's early novels are a significant site to explore the ways in which the complex modernist textual experiments of the 1910s are shaped by live opera's afterglow – a European cultural telos Cather both reveres and distrusts. However, the present volume's investigation of the materiality of sound (the column of air in a singer's throat, or in the wiggling passage of a needle along a record's grooves) prompts new attention to the word overtones, and to the implications of Cather's subtle, complex assimilation of some of music's aesthetic powers (overtones as a kind of absent presence), as well as her equally subtle differentiation of her prose from other of music's attributes (the novel's capacity to allow readers to divine meaning distinct from the overt denotative content of words on a page).