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Allyson Jones Professor Anne Moseley English 697.002 1 April 2010 Shaping the Rock: The Communal Creation of an Archetype in The Enchanted Bluff The Enchanted Bluff is about other worldsidealized collective memories of the past and dreams of the future located so remotely in time and space so that they exist primarily as endowment[s] of the imagination (Wasserman 17). The six adolescent boys in the story shape and define these worlds through communal imagining, conjuring up Platonic images of truth and beauty that lurk beyond the fringes of what Ferguson calls dull, prosaic life (Meyering 88). Poised on the twilight of their childhoods, the boys spend a summers night weaving legends of the past and dreams about their futures around themselves, finally fixing on the Enchanted Bluff, a rock image Cather invokes in at least four of her novels. The rock is a symbol of an ultimate other worlda fallen utopia once populated by a tribe of peaceful ancients, an unattainable destination locked in time and preserved in story. The only piece of writing Cather completed in 1909, The Enchanted Bluff, is a landmark in Cathers growth as a writer, creating in embryonic form all that her writing would become in matured form and content (Chaliff 64). The tensions presented in the story between past and present, community and isolation, and the inner world of the mind versus the immediate physical world become important themes in many subsequent novels, arguably in less perfect incarnations than the simple archetype constructed in The Enchanted Bluff. Six boys gather on a newly-formed sandbar island, a little bit of new world, (65) in the middle of the turbulent, changeable river near their homes of which they claim undisputed

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possession, to dream about distant places and hatch plans for the future before school resumes (64). The night is particularly memorable for the storys unnamed protagonist because he is about to leave the small town of Sandstone and his boyhood behind to teach at a country school. After much conversation about distant times and places, Tip Smith relates the story told to him by his Uncle Bill about the Enchanted Bluff, a mesa jutting upward dramatically from the flat New Mexico desert. A tribe of peaceful Indians once lived on top of the sheer bluff, sending its hunters down a flight of wooden steps fixed to the vertical rock walls to hunt game and collect water. One day when the hunters are at the base of the mesa, a storm tears the steps off of the rock, leaving them stranded below where they are massacred by a warring tribe. The women, children and old people trapped on top of the mesa slowly starve to death. The boys on the island become fixated on the legend of the Enchanted Bluff, each eager to beat the others in the race to scale the mesa, a hint of competitiveness infringing on their own peaceful island community. Time passes, and the boys lapse into dreamless adulthood in an unromantic prairie town (Arnold 83). None of them ever reach the bluff. Twenty years after the night on the island, the protagonist meets Tip on the street and the two men revive the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct people (73). Tip has passed the story on to his son, who he hopes to take to the Enchanted Bluff one day. The boys island in the stream is a new Eden, like the peaceful, isolated, inviolable mesa, and it is the only utopia any of them will physically inhabit (Chaliff 65). Their conversation on the island invokes a series of distant places and times; it is a collective imagining that expands the boundaries of their own small world. OBrien emphasizes the importance of human relationships in the story for stimulat[ing] self-expression (365), and Arnold sees Cather asserting the values of human ties, to ones own progenitors and to the

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human race (75). Observation of the moon and stars lead to conversations about Columbus, Napolean, Coronado, the Aztecs, and the Mound-Builders. For the small-town boys, these mystical other worlds represent elevated modes of being, not unlike Platos forms. The dramas of their daily lives are faint shadows of true existence (Plato Book VII), discrete happenings enacted against the backdrop of infinity. The stories are social creations, but individual perspectives remain unique. Otto Hassler tries to point out the Little Dipper to Percy Pound, but despite the existence of the communally created symbols of the constellations, the two boys fail to align their perspectives of the night sky. Even symbols of elevated ideals are fragile things, perpetuated only by the imagination. When Percy declares that he can see the North Star, Otto points out that even that one wont last always (67). Although precession of the earths rotational access could require the use of a different star to mark the North, the idea of the pole star will not change. Like the North Star, The Enchanted Bluff is an archetype, a superior space that guides individual conceptions of the universal order in the same way the North Star once guided ships at sea. The story of the wrecked utopia is preserved by its inaccessibility; it is unlikely that anyone will ever reach the mesas peak to decipher its ruins. On another level, the mesa is unsustainable even for the tribe who was rumored to populate it. Only the idea of the mesa remains, kindled by imagination and nurtured by conversation. Dialogues between the storys keepers generate spinoffs of the tale, fixing it in history and entrenching it in the collective consciousness. Tips Uncle Bill, thinks the mesa is a boulder the glaciers left, a detail that clarifies the mesas past (71). Tip also reveals that some hunters tried to cut steps in the rock once, but they didnt get higher than a man can reach, (71) a contemporary story that renders the mesas unattainable secrets even more intriguing. The men keep the tail circulating, passing it on to the successive

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generations, ensuring that the Enchanted Bluff will remain a mark of true existence, a product of the universal author (Plato Book VII). Chaliff sees the bluff as a symbol of the idealism, romanticism, and unfulfillable goals of youth (64). Childhood may be the creator and incubator of such romantic symbols, but the ultimate destination promising fulfillment is a universal instinct that give[s] meaning and direction across gulfs of time (Wasserman 17). The story of the bluff accompanies the boys into adulthood intact, relocated from the status of a place that one might physically enter to a created world sustained by the imagination, elaborated upon by religion and philosophy. It exists in the imaginings that pass from person to person, although, the other world itself is defined by its isolation from society, the bluffs seclusion, like the seclusion of the island, gives the microcosm the chance to develop, untroubled by outside interference (Gerber 155). Doubly removed by two pasts, that of the personal boyhood past of the narrator and that of the historical past that belongs to every human being (Arnold 83), the bluff speaks of the future, beckoning its followers toward the affirmative virtues of character, fidelity, idealism, civilization, culture, religion, ethics and order (Gerber 157). Chaliff remarks that certain themesappealed to something deep in [Cathers] subconscious, and she kept them with her for years, brooding over them and developing them, fairly obsessed by them (62). The image of the rock is repeated in The Song of the Lark, The Professors House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and finally Shadows on the Rock, in which the rock becomes the central figure of the novel (Gerber 155). The rock represents elevation above the dreary motions of everyday life. Ancient people typically populate this elevated space and enjoy a golden age of peace, art, and intellectual pursuit beyond the reach of the twentieth centurys agony of blatant commercialism and shallow artistic talents Cather so detested

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(Gerber 154). Cathers novelistic depictions of the rock subsequent to The Enchanted Bluff add to and complicate this simple story of desire juxtaposed against reality. The Enchanted Bluff is compelling because it is a self-contained parable simple and brief but infinitely expansive in its thematic scope.

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Works Cited

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. Print. Cather, Willa. The Enchanted Bluff. Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings. New York: The Library of America, 1992. 64-73. Print Chaliff, Cynthia. The Art of Willa Cathers Craft. Papers on Language & Literature. 14 Winter (1978): 61-73. Web. 31 Mar. 2010. Gerber, Philip L. Willa Cather and the Big Red Rock. College English. 19 (1958): 152-57. Web. 31 Mar. 2010. Meyering, Sheryl L. The Enchanted Bluff. A Readers Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994. Print. OBrien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Project Gutenberg. 27 Aug. 2008. Web. 31 Mar. 2019.

Wasserman, Loretta. Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Print.