• History and Bakhtin's Chronotopes in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
• Molly Metherd (bio)

Willa Cather's 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop is, like much of her writing, a novel about place. It is set in New Mexico and Arizona, a region that captured her imagination on her first visit in 1912 and where she set a number of her novels and stories. Cather, like many US modernist writers of her time, including William Carlos Williams and Zora Neal Hurston, was seeking fresh ideas, language, and modes of expression to articulate the American experience beyond European models. In the Southwest, Cather found a setting unlike anything in European literature, with its stark beauty, distinct cultures, languages, and stories. Cather made three more visits to the region in a little over a decade where she did extensive research for her work: meeting with people and listening to their stories, visiting museums and archeological sites, and reading any available histories.¹ In Death Comes for the Archbishop she draws from this research and experience in the Southwest as well as from new definitions of culture and methodologies from the emerging discipline of anthropology to create a work with a distinctly modernist form. Cather weaves together three narrative strains, each with distinct portrayals of space in time, or what Mikhail Bakhtin calls chronotopes, that diverge from the typical adventure plot of the Western frontier novel and instead narrate a plural region with a long history of cultural encounter.

In the novel two French priests, Jean Marie Latour and his vicar Joseph Vaillant, based on the historical figures of Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph P. Machebeuf, arrive in Santa Fe, New Mexico, soon after the end of the US–Mexican War.² The Treaty of [End Page 301] Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war in 1848, required Mexico to cede over 500,000 square miles to the United States (Davis), and the priests' task is to oversee the transition from the diocese of Durango, Mexico, to the newly created US diocese. Latour becomes the first bishop and then archbishop of that new diocese centered in Santa Fe. At the outset the work seems to be an account of the American colonization of the new territory, and a number of critics have read it this way (Urgo; Tellefsen; Haas). Indeed, the novel's prologue feels like a familiar novel of settler colonialism. It opens in the lavish country estate of Spanish Cardinal Garcia Maria de Allande overlooking Rome. The Cardinal hosts a dinner for two fellow cardinals and a missionary from the United States, and the men drink champagne on the veranda and discuss the creation of the new diocese in New Mexico. This "new territory was vague to all of them" (4), and Cardinal Allande admits that his knowledge of the country "is chiefly drawn from the romances of Fenimore Cooper" (12). This certainly sounds like a prologue to a novel of empire where institutional powers in cultural centers carve up the unknowable peripheries, sending in missionaries to subdue and to civilize Indigenous peoples and wild landscapes.

However, the tone of the novel quickly shifts in the first chapter, which opens with Bishop Latour lost in the desert of the New Mexico territory. As the work progresses it becomes clear that this is not a Western adventure tale or a dramatic story of conquest. There is no violent encounter, heightened drama, or really even a narrative climax. In fact, since its publication readers have wondered about its meandering structure. Some finish the novel feeling like nothing happened, for it does not conform to their expectations about novel and plot (Stout 206). Cather herself recognized readers' confusion, explaining in an open letter to Commonweal that she wanted to a write a work that lacks dramatic moments and a clear narrative arc but that instead touches on events and then passes on. Her goal was to write "something without accent" (On Writing 9), less a novel and more a narrative.

Scholars have offered varying interpretations of how the meandering narrative structure shapes the meaning of the text. As Deborah Lindsay Williams notes, Cather "deliberately does not [End Page 302] provide us...

• 威拉·凯瑟逝世中的历史和巴赫金的计时表带来了大主教
• 莫莉·梅瑟德（生物）

威拉·凯瑟（Willa Cather）1927年的小说《死亡来了大主教》就像她的许多作品一样，是一本关于地点的小说。它设在新墨西哥州和亚利桑那州，该地区在1912年首次访问时就吸引了她的想像力，在那里她创作了许多小说和故事。凯瑟（Cather）与当时的许多美国现代主义作家一样，包括威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯（William Carlos Williams）和佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿（Zora Neal Hurston），都在寻求新鲜的观念，语言和表达方式，以表达欧洲模式之外的美国经验。凯瑟（Cather）在西南地区发现了一种与欧洲文学中任何事物都不一样的环境，它有着鲜明的美丽，独特的文化，语言和故事。凯瑟（Cather）在短短十年多的时间里对该地区进行了三次访问，在那里她对其工作进行了广泛的研究：与人们会面并听取他们的故事，参观博物馆和考古遗址，并阅读所有可用的历史记录。^1个在《大主教的死来》中，她借鉴了西南地区的研究和经验，以及新兴的人类学学科对文化和方法论的新定义，创作出具有鲜明现代主义形式的作品。凯瑟（Cather）将三种叙事方式编织在一起，每种叙事方式在时间上都有独特的刻画，或者说米哈伊尔·巴赫金（Mikhail Bakhtin）所说的年代记，与西方边境小说的典型冒险情节有所不同，而是叙述了一个有着悠久文化遭遇历史的多元地区。

在小说中，两位法国牧师让·玛丽·拉图尔（Jean Marie Latour）和他的牧师约瑟夫·瓦兰特（Joseph Vaillant），根据让·巴蒂斯特·拉米（Joe-Baptiste Lamy）和约瑟夫·马切夫（Joseph P. Machebeuf）的历史人物，在美墨战争结束后不久抵达新墨西哥州圣达菲。² [结束页301]的条约瓜达卢佩·伊达尔戈（Guadalupe Hidalgo）于1848年结束了战争，要求墨西哥向美国（Davis）割让超过500,000平方英里，而祭司的任务是监督从墨西哥杜兰戈教区到新成立的美国教区的过渡。拉图尔（Latour）成为以圣达菲为中心的新教区的第一任主教，然后是大主教。从一开始，这项工作似乎是对美国对新领土的殖民化的解释，许多批评家都以这种方式进行了解读（Urgo; Tellefsen; Haas）。的确，这部小说的序言像是一本关于定居者殖民主义的熟悉小说。它在西班牙红衣主教加西亚·玛丽亚·德·阿兰德（Garcia Maria de Allande）俯瞰罗马的豪华乡村庄园中开放。红衣主教为来自美国的两位红衣主教和一位宣教士举办晚宴，他们在阳台上喝香槟，并讨论在新墨西哥州建立新教区的问题。这个“新领土对他们所有人来说都是模糊的”（4），红衣主教阿兰德承认他对这个国家的了解“主要来自费尼莫尔·库珀的恋情”（12）。这无疑听起来像是一部帝国小说的序幕，在该小说中，文化中心的机构权力加剧了不为人知的外围，派遣传教士制服和文明了土著人民和野外景观。

然而，小说的语气在第一章中迅速改变，这在主教拉图尔（Bishop Latour）迷失于新墨西哥州沙漠的情况下拉开了序幕。随着工作的进行，很明显这不是西方的冒险故事，也不是征服的戏剧性故事。没有暴力的相遇，没有戏剧性的提高，甚至没有叙事的高潮。实际上，自从其出版以来，读者就对它的曲折结构感到好奇。有些人完成小说的感觉就像什么都没有发生，因为它不符合他们对小说和情节的期望（Stout 206）。凯瑟（Cather）自己认识到读者的困惑，在致英联邦公开信中解释她想写一部缺少戏剧性瞬间和清晰叙事弧度的作品，但要涉及事件然后继续下去。她的目标是写“没有口音的东西”（写作9），少写小说，多讲故事。

学者们对曲折的叙事结构如何塑造文本的含义提出了不同的解释。正如黛博拉·林赛·威廉姆斯（Deborah Lindsay Williams）所指出的那样，凯瑟（Cather）“故意不[End Page 302]向我们提供...