At the point on the Nebraska prairie where the land is subsumed into the sky, the setting sun throws into relief an indiscernible object. In this iconic scene from Willa Cather's My Ántonia, Tony Shimerda and Jim Burden jump to their feet and seek to know what it is: “On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun” (245).My Ántonia is one of those novels that are not what they seem and more than we credit. Often hailed as a realistic representation of the European immigrants' experience in settling the western plains, Cather's greatest achievement should be understood as also questioning that distinctive characteristic of the western novel, historical authenticity, by invoking the challenge laid down by Nietzsche and Foucault to history's privileged position with respect to knowing the past. My Ántonia may, in fact, be seen as offering a creditable account of Nebraska during the late nineteenth century, not because it is historically accurate, or authentic, but because such a consideration is irrelevant. This does not mean that we fail to take this or any work of fiction seriously but that we understand fiction to have a suspended, or deferred, relation to its referent—in this instance, the past. In her essay “‘Fiction’ and the Experience of the Other,” Peggy Kamuf argues that the issue concerning fiction is not what it is, but what it does: “A fiction refers to nothing that exists. It refers, but to nothing in existence. Thus, the fictional act or operation consists in making reference but also in suspending the referent. It is a referential operation that does something with or to reference” (159). To what extent Cather's text participates in this grand displacement of history (by fiction) may be judged by examining the discontinuous structure of the novel. To assess My Ántonia's problematizing of authenticity, this article begins with Foucault's appropriation of Nietzsche's bold interrogation of origin and then considers Foucault's reading of Surrealist painter René Magritte, whose project of assertion and disavowal in such paintings as Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1926) Foucault found intriguingly similar to his own work on representation.The conceit of authenticity in novels of the American West has received considerable attention of late. In The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination, Robert Thacker argues that novels of the Great Plains are circumscribed by “‘the great fact [of] the land itself,’” a phrase he borrows from Cather's O Pioneers! (9). He notes that Cather pursued authenticity by defining her characters in relation to their place (149). Both Nathaniel Lewis's monograph, Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship, and William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis's collection of essays, True West: Authenticity and the American West, explore the topic.1 “There are few terms at play in the history of this vast region that have as wide a reach and relevance, and there is no other region in America that is as haunted by the elusive appeal, legitimating power, and nostalgic pull of authenticity,” assert Handley and Lewis (1). “We need to recognize,” writes Lewis in tracing the legacy of authenticity in Unsettling the West, “that western literature is frequently, perhaps fundamentally, about authenticity. The history of western literature (authors, texts, and readers) is the history of the ‘production of the real,’ to borrow a phrase from Jean Baudrillard. And no feature of western writing is more prominent, celebrated, or misleading than its realism” (7). Examining authenticity in its wider context, he demonstrates the degree to which authenticity in western literature is a symptom of a “culture of authenticity” and asserts that the term is ubiquitous in “contemporary cultural discourse—in everything from advertising to self-help manuals to classical music circles to academic journals” (3). Of particular interest to this discussion is Lewis's observation that for two hundred years western writing has been “constructed and legitimized primarily in relation to ‘authentic history,’” rather than being evaluated for its creativity or individuality (2). Questioning the legitimacy of western literature's being judged by the false binary of “mythic” or “real,” Lewis notes that the theoretical approach of his study proposes that “authors influence their canonical reputations through their own self-inventions and strategies; authors are not mere functions or reflections of culture but are active agents” (2–3). Further, he argues, “these strategies … depend consistently on the claim of authenticity. Western writers present themselves as accurate and reliable recorders of real places, histories, and cultures—but not as stylists or inventors” (3). In fact, “readers have accepted the claim of authenticity and read western literature primarily in relation to the historical record” (3). Significantly, Lewis proposes, authenticity is bound up with the concept of originality: “The authentic is … defined by its originality, as distinguished from the imitation or the phony” (4).In their introduction to True West, Handley and Lewis acknowledge the centrality of the representation of history to the study of the American West (3). They reference New West historian Patrick Nelson Limerick's The Real West and note that “historians have traditionally served as proprietors of the authentic, examining history's influence on the West's literary and artistic cultures. Yet to literary critics, as Forrest G. Robinson and others have demonstrated, the relationship between history and representation in the American West is dramatically complicated and the distinction between them far less easy to maintain” (1–2). In his essay on Cather in True West, Handley includes Cather's early novels as examples of “narratives of origin,” along with works by Owen Wister and Theodore Roosevelt. “By metaphorizing artistic production with pastoral and arguably frontier images, Cather succeeded in getting the western landscape to authenticate her writing, given that the West was so often imagined as the source of authentic American character even by urban readers who had never lived there” (77). One could say that the novel of the American West has been held hostage to the tyranny of a rhetorical device called authenticity.There is a strain of Cather criticism that revels in discovering the “original” of every character, place, and event in her writings. This search for the original, the “historical” referent, is not unique, of course, to Cather studies, to literature, and certainly not to history. It is endemic in western thought, but in the modern age can be traced to Giambattista Vico's The New Science (1725), where the author argues that knowledge, even truth, is found at the source, the origin. The closer one approaches the original, the closer one gets to the truth, asserted Vico. The original is the authentic. “He called his narrative a ‘New Science’ and is credited with the principle verum et factum convertuntur, an apparently epistemological claim that only the maker of a thing can know it. In this way he justified knowledge of the social world humans had made and, therefore, the science of history Nietzsche disdained,” writes Sandra Rudnick Luft (135). Although published in the eighteenth century, his work remained generally unknown outside Italy until the following century, when the pursuit of origin took on a scholarly earnestness in the German universities, especially. Countering an emphasis on knowing the past through original documents characteristic of the work of Leopold von Ranke, for example, Nietzsche attempted to throw off what he called the “excess” of history. Nietzsche was suspicious that one could locate the point of origin and doubtful that truth would be found there. In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1873), he writes, “We need [history] … for the sake of life and action…. We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life: for it is possible to value the study of history to such a degree that life becomes stunted and degenerate” (59). Nietzsche famously draws a distinction between humans and cattle grazing on the hillside, living “unhistorically,” that is, wholly in the present, “like a number without any awkward fractions left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is” (61). “Man, on the other hand,” Nietzsche continues, “braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past; it pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden” (61).Acknowledging Nietzsche's influence on his own thought in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault argues that Nietzsche challenges the pursuit of the origin “because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession” (142). “What is found at the historical beginning of things,” writes Foucault, “is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (142). In other words, what is found at the point of origin is difference, incongruity, the opposite of the same (142n14). Further, origin is not the site of truth, but truth is “undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history” (144). The purpose of history, then, according to Foucault, is “not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation” (162). History seeks, rather, “to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us,” as opposed to knitting together a happy but nevertheless incomplete, and even false, narrative of the past (162).In their assessment of Nietzsche's influence on Foucault, Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow assert that, for Nietzsche, “the story of history is one of accidents, dispersion, chance events, lies—not the lofty development of Truth…. The history of truth is the history of error and arbitrariness” (108). In challenging conventional historical methodology through the practice he called “genealogy,” Foucault questioned the necessity and even the possibility of finding the origin. Unlike Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, however, Foucault “makes no attempt at a totalizing history of morals and altogether ignores the question of the initial emergence of morality. He concerns himself, instead, with specific historical moments and seeks to show how they shaped our view of ourselves” (Sluga 230). “According to Foucault, the task of the genealogist,” Dreyfus and Rabinow note, “is to destroy the primacy of origins, of unchanging truths. He seeks to destroy the doctrines of development and progress” (108–9). Like Foucault, Cather finds the past to be discontinuous and unknowable—even “incommunicable” (My Ántonia 372).Man, writes Foucault in his critique of representation, “can be revealed only when bound to a previously existing historicity; he is never contemporaneous with that origin which is outlined through the time of things even as it eludes the gaze” (The Order of Things 330). Since man is already in history, he cannot discover a point of origin outside history; that is, his origin is without beginning: “he can uncover his own beginning only against the background of a life which itself began long before him” (330). Both Magritte and Foucault rejected conventional notions of correspondence between language and reality and were skeptical of Western philosophy's predisposition to establish hierarchies on the basis of what is “original,” as though originality could be determined and, moreover, has authority over what is not original.2 Both understood that this separation of words from things means that language is not a transparent medium of representation but is implicated in that which it represents. What Foucault found appealing in Magritte's work, as he makes clear in his study of the Belgian artist's paintings, This Is Not a Pipe, was Magritte's rejection of the mystical identification of words with things. As James Harkness, the translator of Foucault's study of Magritte, explains, “in Magritte's Surrealism the painter's images do not really ‘resemble’ anything whose sovereign presence would lend it the aspect of a model or origin. When we say one thing resembles another, after all, we imply that the latter is somehow ontologically superior to, more ‘real’ than the former” (7–8).Foucault's analysis of Magritte's paintings was not the former's first foray into the world of art criticism. The Order of Things begins, in fact, with an analysis of Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656). Veronique M. Foti notes that Foucault “understands this painting as the self-representation and self-problematization of representation, revealing both its inner law and the fatal absence at its core” (1). For Foucault, the relation of language to painting is infinite: “It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” (9). Having read The Order of Things, Magritte wrote to Foucault in 1966 about the distinction Foucault draws between the words resemblance and similitude with respect to representation: The words Resemblance and Similitude permit you forcefully to suggest the presence—utterly foreign—of the world and ourselves. Yes, I believe these two words are scarcely ever differentiated, dictionaries are hardly enlightening as to what distinguishes them.It seems to me that, for example, green peas have between them relations of similitude, at once visible (their color, form, size) and invisible (their nature, taste, weight). It is the same for the false and the real, etc. Things do not have resemblances, they do or do not have similitudes.Only thought resembles. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it. (This Is Not a Pipe 57) In the following excerpt from This Is Not a Pipe, Foucault explains, in turn, what interests him about Magritte's distinction between representation as resemblance and representation as similitude: To me it appears that Magritte dissociated similitude from resemblance, and brought the former into play against the latter. Resemblance has a “model,” an original element that orders and hierarchizes the increasingly less faithful copies that can be struck from it. Resemblance presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and classes. The similar develops in series that have neither beginning nor end, that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obey no hierarchy, but propagate themselves from small differences among small differences. Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it. (44) This passage is important to our understanding of how My Ántonia participates in the discourse on representation through its questioning of origin and problematizing of authenticity. Read through Foucault, Cather's novel acknowledges no distinction between writing history and writing fiction because no authority exists on the basis of which an original can be identified. Presuming an ideal, resemblance closes down meaning; anticipating difference, similitude opens up meaning to a multiplicity of readings. As Harkness notes, resemblance “serves and is dominated by representation. With similitude, on the other hand, the reference ‘anchor’ is gone. Things are cast adrift, more or less like one another without any of them being able to claim the privileged status of ‘model’ for the rest. Hierarchy gives way to a series of exclusively lateral relations…. Painting becomes an endless series of repetitions, variations set free from a theme” (9–10).What also appealed to Foucault was the strategy Magritte employed for banishing resemblance, “deploying largely familiar images, but images whose recognizability is immediately subverted and rendered moot by ‘impossible,’ ‘irrational,’ or ‘senseless’ conjunctions” (8). Foucault provides the following analysis of the painting Représentation (1962) to demonstrate how Magritte's approach undermines representation: An exact representation of a portion of a ball game, seen from a kind of terrace fenced by a low wall. On the left, the wall is topped by a balustrade, and in the juncture thus formed can be seen exactly the same scene, but on a smaller scale (about one-half). Must we suppose, unfolding on the left, a series of smaller and smaller other “representations,” always identical? Perhaps. But it is unnecessary. In the same painting, two images bound thus laterally by a relation of similitude are enough for exterior reference to a model—through resemblance—to be disturbed, rendered floating and uncertain. What “represents” what? (44) In other words, Magritte defamiliarizes the physical world, using “literalism” to subvert representation. Into what Foucault calls the “meticulous resemblance” (41) constructed within each painting, Magritte introduces a disorder that works to undermine the stability presumed by representation. What Foucault says of Magritte, then, we might say of Cather: “Magritte [Cather] allows the old space of representation to rule, but only on the surface, no more than a polished stone, bearing words and shapes: beneath, nothing” (41).As noted earlier, the novel's discontinuous narrative structure at first troubles and then intrigues the reader. My Ántonia consists of an introduction and five collections of stories—and stories within stories—which Jim compiles from various sources, but especially from Ántonia. An examination of the novel's resistance to and simultaneous desire for authenticity in three of these stories will demonstrate how the novel resists the authentic: the mythical d'Arnault, the incongruous Marguerite, and Cather's tagline. Before turning to these specific passages, however, we will consider a few general observations. Symptomatic of the text's attempt to compensate for its resistance to authenticity, the multilayered narrative functions to distance the reader and intensify the novel's apparent authenticity. No single narrative voice is uniformly established throughout the novel. The voice we hear in the introduction is quickly replaced in book 1 by a multitude of voices, such as Ántonia's recounting of Pavel's deathbed confession of his participation in the wedding party tragedy to Mr. Shimerda (61). The narrative structure is more successfully established in book 2, where Jim provides an account of the lives of the young women in Black Hawk. The text maintains its most focused control in book 3, where Jim chronicles his relationship with Lena Lingard. In book 4, Jim interrupts his story about Ántonia to provide a detailed but digressive account of Tiny Soderball's wanderings from Black Hawk to Salt Lake City, bringing her story up to the narrative's present time—as though Jim wishes to avoid writing about Ántonia. And then, in book 5, Jim gives us Anton Cuzak's life's story, told by Anton, a character introduced late in the novel, “as though he [Jim] had a right to know it,” implying that Jim is somehow compelled to include this background (364). The novel's episodic structure and failure/refusal to achieve a single narrative voice can be read as indicative of its struggle against authenticity.Further evidence of the text's internal struggle is found in the novel's blend of sensationalism and sentimentality—producing a kind of Nebraska gothic. The most familiar of the novel's gothic elements is that of the wedding party being set upon by wolves, but there is also Mr. Shimerda's suicide and belated burial at a crossroads, the tramp's leaping into the threshing machine, and the Cutters' murder-suicide. Widow Steavens's account of the pregnant and abandoned Ántonia herding cattle and giving birth in solitude recalls Tess Durbeyfield's pregnancy and ultimate sacrifice in Thomas Hardy's gothic tale of injustice and sacrifice. Reading Cather's novel in the context of another plains writer, Debra Marquart, whose The Horizontal World (2006) is a neogothic treatment of growing up in North Dakota, we can see Ántonia as one who is ritually sacrificed to the land, “the most common story of the plains: the blood sacrifice” (16). As both Cather and Marquart know, the land exacts a price for its plenitude; it might, however, take one's life through obligation rather than death: “In my family,” Marquart writes, “we all understood from the beginning that my brother's life was claimed for the farm” (41).The novel's resistance to authenticity is rendered all the more evident by Jim's evocative descriptions of the Nebraska plains and his personal connection to the land, which underscore the narrative's contesting desire for authenticity. Jim knows, for example, that he will never be the scholar that his mentor, Gaston Cleric, was because for Jim the reality of the prairie is too strong: “I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things…. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun” (262). A literalist by inclination, Jim bears the burden of the novel's apparent representationalism. Early in the novel, he tells us that he consulted the botanical evidence and found that the sunflower is native to the plains, thereby countering Otto Fuchs's story that the sunflower trail originated with the Mormons as they fled west (28). Near the end of the novel, upon returning to find Ántonia, Jim is overcome with the physicality of the land. He is struck to discover that the remnant of the road that he and the others once used to reach the settlements—the very road that he and Ántonia had traveled that first day—now runs inside a fenced section. He pledges that he will return to the Cuzak home and hunt with Anton and the boys so that he can maintain the connection to Ántonia and “the precious, the incommunicable past”—a desire, ultimately, to return to origin (372).Jim's mildly racist account of the blind piano player Samson d'Arnault enacts the text's resistance to authenticity in the form of myth posing as biography (180–92). Jim's knowledge of d'Arnault's background is derived from Mrs. Harling, who had known him, apparently, for many years (181). This information may have been passed on to Jim through Ántonia, who worked for the Harlings, but we might ask, where did Mrs. Harling get the details of the piano player's childhood—perhaps from d'Arnault himself, through his mother's recounting of them to him? Jim gives a remarkably intimate mytho-biography of the piano player, including the latter's childhood on the d'Arnault plantation, the cause of his blindness at three weeks of age, even his mother's ambivalent affection. We learn, for example, that when he stole away to the Big House to play the piano, his mother would whip him because his appearance and actions embarrassed her. Gifted with this natural musical ability, he attracted the curiosity of both his mistress, Nellie d'Arnault, and her piano teacher (189). His performance of a waltz in the hotel becomes an occasion for Jim to rise to mythic embellishment in praise of d'Arnault: “He looked like some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood” (191). This twelve-page tribute to the piano player is an insightful set piece, describing race relations of the period, but it does not serve to advance the plot in any appreciable manner, except to cause the reader to anticipate falsely Jim and Ántonia's union, and it reminds us that the novel cannot, or chooses not to, sustain its promise of authenticity.A second example of the text's subversion of the authentic is found in the account in book 3 of Jim and Lena's attendance of a performance of Camille. Why does the novel include this eight-page account of a popular French play of the time, replete with detailed descriptions of the performance and of Jim and Lena's reactions (271–78)? Regarding their knowledge of French theater, Jim avers that he and Lena were “[a] couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie” (272). Yet he notes that he had seen the stage version of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo earlier that year and knew it had been written by Alexandre Dumas fils, and so was expecting the son's play to bear some resemblance to the father's work. The program notes that evening indicated that the incidental music would be from La Traviata, the opera by Verdi, based on the play. The multiplicity of versions of The Lady of the Camilias—with Marguerite as the protagonist in the novel (1848) and play (1852), which Dumas had adapted from his own novel, and Violetta in the opera (1853)—problematizes any attempt to identify a source, a characteristic of Magritte's and Foucault's theories of representation. Also of note is that the selection of Camille as the play Jim and Lena attend underscores the novel's simultaneous affirmation and subversion of authenticity by exploring the relationship between two worlds—that of Varville's privileged realm and a consumptive courtesan's wretched life. In his entry in The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama, Stephen S. Stanton proposes that “realistic social drama in France, England, and America began with Camille.” He continues: “Whereas the Romantics sacrificed verisimilitude, often inventing plots with which to re-create characters taken from history, Dumas presented on the stage from firsthand experience the morals, manners, and conversation of the courtesan. His characters are realistic types, and their language and feelings and their relationship to society have been acutely observed by the author.”As the curtain rises, Jim's attention is captured first by a resplendent and, he assumes, authentic scene. But it is the language, not the stage set, that draws Jim into the play: “Decidedly, there was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theatre lines that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like those which passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter before her friends entered. This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon” (273). Through words, Jim and Lena are introduced to a world unlike Black Hawk, Nebraska: “Their talk seemed to open up to one the brilliant world in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one's horizon” (273). The performance that they saw was staged by Augustin Daly, the first of the powerful American producer-directors and known for the realism of his productions, in terms of both acting and staging (Hewitt). Jim had recognized the actress playing Marguerite Gauthier by name and was aware that the lead female role in Camille was known as “a piece in which great actresses shone” (272). Yet Jim's recollection of the actress emphasizes her unsuitability for the role of Marguerite: [She was] … even then old-fashioned, though historic…. She was a woman who could not be taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty—I think she was lame—I seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? (274) Jim is struck by the incongruity between the actress and the words she speaks: “I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him [Armand], in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure.” Caught up in the emotion of the scene, he envisions jumping onto the stage to help Armand “convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world” (274). “It all wrung my heart,” he exclaims. “But not so much as her cynicism in the long dialogue with her lover which followed. How far was I from questioning her unbelief!” (275). He marvels at the power of language to transcend the incongruity he sees before him: “I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice, and temperament from Dumas' appealing heroine than the veteran actress who first acquainted me with her…. But the lines were enough. She had only to utter them. They created the character in spite of her” (276). The actress and the lines she delivers enact the incongruity that Magritte presents in his paintings and that Foucault seized upon in his analysis—and that My Ántonia in its own way explores.By introducing into the play the “glittering and reckless” scene of Olympe's salon, the setting of act 4 of Camille, the veneer of homesteading days on the Nebraska plains is peeled back all the way to pre-Revolutionary France (276). The reference may, indeed, be to the French playwright and pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges (1745–1793), an attractive and well-placed woman whose salons were occasions for celebrating the arts and debating human rights, especi