Willa Cather’s Paul’s Case by Jonathan McCormack

Socrates once famously said that the goal of education is to learn to love what is

beautiful. It is not therefore insignificant that Willa Cather’s brilliant short story ‘Paul’s

Case’ opens up in the school room. Teachers surround the main character, the student

Paul, as judges might an especially unrepentant criminal. From there we get an

education of what exactly is at stake in ignoring Socrates insight.

In the descriptions of Paul one is reminded of another masterwork, Huysmans’

Against the Grain. It is also often translated as ‘Against Nature,’ and both exhibit main

characters struggle against who they are, trying to build, through sheer will, lies, and

fantasy, a new invulnerable self, as false as it is shallow. Huysmans’ main

character,Jean Des Esseintes,is painted with similar sickly hues as Paul. Both share an

affection for the artificial over the natural. As Cather puts it,“in Paul's world, the natural

nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to

him necessary in beauty” and “Violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley--somehow

vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow.” In

both works man made environments are savored as higher more venerable things then

the inferior works of creation, “The Park itself was a wonderful stage winterpiece.”

Indeed Paul is even described as a “dandy,” the old rogues closely related to the type of

decadents like Huysmans’ Jean Des Esseintes. In other words, Paul too, is against

nature.

What further connects the two is a deep fault within themselves - a thing rotting in

what Russell Kirk calls the moral imagination. Kirk says, “The moral imagination aspires

to the apprehending of right order in the soul.” Without rigorous exercise of this ignored

divine faculty (Cather tellingly shows Paul’s disdain for the Church) we can no longer

discern the beautiful and our eye is hooked upon the glittering evils of this world. It’s

stated “Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted

by garish fiction.” Not fiction, but music. Not good or true or beautiful music, but we are

told “any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ.”

Kirk also remarks “It is the moral imagination which informs us concerning the dignity

of human nature.”Indeed dignity is a thing Paul yearns for yet he is in no way willing to

work toward. Instead he lies, dresses up in fancy cloths, and revels in artifice without

concern for depth or discernment. He is not an artist, which requires a soul, instead “He

had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt

no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the

atmosphere” It is not the art itself but it’s escapist effects that Paul values.

Also what it symbolizes for him : prestige, power, importance.At the sight of the city

Paul reflects on the “thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on

every side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.”

Pleasure because art of course requires slow sacrifice, suffering, maturity ; Paul is more

interested in dress-up in the cocoon of secure narcissistic unflappability one attains

when one cuts oneself off from human community, floating serene and inhuman above

the common people with their petty concerns. In truth he is desperate to be liked, to be

loved; and so he seeks to cut this chunk of humanity out of his heart so he can strut

through the world unmolested by community, “a man of the world, walking up and down

in it” as the bible describes Satan. The text even reveals : “He was not in the least

abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these people;

all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant.”

The heart must choose between love or power. If it take power then must refuse

what makes us human : others. Paul will kill his need for others. “To have joy in another

is love” the great theologian Barth tells us. Where does Paul find his pleasures ?

“His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting room; his quiet

enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette, and his sense of

power.”

Cather, in a short space, unravels the mysteries of the ugly deformities birthed when

an unfinished self aborts it’s holy duty to love. We witness the gradual decomposition of

a soul turned away from God, away from community and authenticity to embrace garish

artifice,egoism, image above substance, and pride glorying in conspicuous selfishness.

Like Huymans’ Jean Des Esseintes, this is a more modern case of the gruesome soul in

rebellion to nature and grace.