Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

"Get on the sled and I will pull you up. See, there's the evening star--how near it looks! Jacques, don't you love winter?" She put the sled-rope under his arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from the neighbours' houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break just for this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one's own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the sea.

I spent a day last week in Quebec City. If you've ever been there, you know it's not for the easily winded: it's built upon a huge rock called Cap Diamant, and the lower town, at the rock's bottom, and the upper town, on its peak, are linked by stairs so precipitous they have names like Escalier Casse-Cou, the break-neck stairs. It's in the middle of one of these climbs that Euclide Auclair, the apothecary at the heart of Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock lives. Symbolically, it shows something about Euclide's character. Though brought to Quebec from France in the service of the governing Count de Frontenac, Euclide serves the common people also, with steadfast prudence. And perhaps, more even than others, it demonstrates the way that the apothecary clings to the rock, like a sea bird in its nest, an isolated refuge in the midst of a large and wild place. Most of the novel takes place over the village's long winter, from the moment that the last boats leave for their treacherous journey back to France to the time they return along the St. Lawrence River. During that time, the colonists are truly cut off from France. Perhaps this is when they not only must fend for themselves but when they are most themselves.

Euclide, a widower, has a daughter named Cecile. Cecile is the light of the village; as Euclide is steadfast, she is virtuous and pure. It's Cecile who entreats the Count to provide shoes for her friend Jacques, the son of a base prostitute. Cecile, too, is a natural Canadian; though born in France, she has no memory of the place, and to her, the thought of being recalled to France is a frightening one. Cather, who was ever interested in the mythology of nation-making, is trying to pinpoint the moment, I think, that refugees from one place become the residents of another. Cecile is a real Canadian, not just a Frenchwoman clinging to the rock for fear of being swept out to sea. She boasts all the virtues of French civilization, including a devout Catholic piety, though in her they are transformed into something distinctly French Canadian. One can imagine this book might have been influential among the French Canadians, who insist politically and culturally on calling themselves a nation, if only it had avoided the original sin of being written in English.

It's difficult to read Shadows on the Rock without thinking about Death Comes for the Archbishop, which Cather had published four years earlier. Both books are about European, even French, exiles in the new world. Euclide is a humble apothecary, but he, and Cecile especially, seem hardly less the representatives of the faith than Bishop Latour. Both books suggest that the transposition to the New World enliven that faith and make it stronger; in Shadows of the Rock, we are treated to a long story about a devout Montreal anchorite whose devotion to solitude harkens back to a medieval piety no longer possible in Europe. Shadows on the Rock even provides a Bishop Latour-like figure, the Bishop Laval, a real figure whose tomb I saw in the basilica at Quebec. This figure--genial, wise, and forgotten by Europe--even gets a death scene at the end, a "good death" that mimics Latour's.

The comparison does Shadows on the Rock little favor. The mystery and ambivalence of Archbishop are largely supplanted here by a conservative devotion to the myth of missionary goodness. Euclide's steadfastness, Cecile's virtue, will not permit a scene like that in Archbishop in which Latour is brought to a secret cave where he hears the howling sound of ancient gods, nor will they permit a vision, like Latour has, of the Holy Family as part-Indigenous mestizos. The Indigenous, in fact, are kept largely off-screen, lurking as frightful threats and agents in the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries like Jean Brebeuf. (It would be interesting to compare this vision to Vollmann's Fathers and Crows, a novel that casts the Jesuit missionary work among the Hurons and Haudenosaunee in a more contemporary, and cynical, light.) I really enjoyed Cather's rich image of colonial life, and of course, the writing is as lovely as ever. (Don't you love the "paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the sea?") But I couldn't shake the feeling that the novel clings, like the colonists in Quebec, to a rock-like certitude.