[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
This novel, perhaps more than any other in the history of American literature, asks “Can bad things really happen to good people?” On one day in 1714, the Bridge of San Luis Rey collapses, sending five people falling to their deaths. Brother Juniper, one of the witnesses to the tragedy, seeks to explain how and why this could have happened. The bulk of the novel, a concerted effort on the part of Juniper to justify the ways of God to man, is a carefully woven portrait of their interconnecting and overlapping lives, loves, successes and failures leading up to the day of the bridge collapsing.
The Marquesa de Montemayor, whose daughter treats her with supreme indifference, has just seen her move away to marry her husband, a Spanish Viceroy. She copes mainly by writing beautiful, elaborate letters to her daughter and son-in-law. The Marquesa becomes reclusive and introspective, and asks the local Abbess and proprietress of an orphanage for the company of one of her girls. Pepita comes to live with her and provide much-needed companionship. On learning that her daughter is pregnant, the Marquesa makes a visit to the shrine at Santa Maria de Cluxambuqua. On her return to Lima, accompanied by Pepita, we learn that they are killed on the bridge. We later learn through Brother Juniper that the letters she wrote are gems of the Spanish language and are canonized and anthologized for schoolchildren to learn ages and ages hence.
Another story revolves around two twins named Manuel and Esteban (Wilder himself was a twin whose brother died in childbirth) who, also under the protection of the same local Abbess, grow up to become scribes. Soon Manuel is taken in to compose letters for the extraordinarily talented stage talent who goes by only “the Perichole,” who is in romantic cahoots with both the Spanish Viceroy and a local bullfighter (see Offenbach’s eponymous opera, as well as the short story by Prosper Merimee). After Manuel dies of an infection, Esteban is enlisted to assist one Captain Alvarado on a long voyage, partially in order to pay for a present for the Abbess. On the way to buy the present, Esteban crosses the Bridge of San Luis Rey and his fate befalls him.
Uncle Pio, the Perichole’s assistant, maid, and general counselor, has an interesting life of his own. Growing up as a diplomat, theater impresario, and Catholic shill during the Inquisition, he finds Micaela Villegas (see the historical personage of the same name, whom Wilder has only slightly fictionalized here), whom he trains and refashions in his own image, turning her into the best-known Peruvian actress of her time. After having become thoroughly disillusioned with the theatre and her success, she wishes to enter into proper society and wishes to never talk to Uncle Pio again. After some hesitation, the Perichole allows Pio to take her son and give the curious boy the proper education that he deserves. Leaving the next morning, they are the last two victims of the bridge.
Looking for one common thread to tie all of these disparate lives together, the reader is drawn over and over again to fact that they all see confounded by their personal searches for love and meaning. As much money or success they attain, we see lives beguiled by angst and beset by circumstance. By no means, and Brother Juniper would certainly have noted this in his book, do we find people who “deserved” to die.
But the Bridge of San Luis Rey has a sixth victim, one who didn’t fall hundreds of feet into the ravine below: Brother Juniper himself. Having written his book full of the most diligent and ingenuous research in an attempt to find out why God would let this happen (was it punishment for evil? Or was God just indifferent to human suffering?), the Catholic Church finds his book heresy and they burn him for it. What was so heretical? Perhaps that he would be so presumptuous as to explain God’s plan for the world.
As far as the form and structure of the novel are concerned, the first and last chapters, the only places where Wilder allows himself philosophical divulgence, are a little too cordoned-off for my taste, rendering the deeply resounding questions of theology and meaning merely peripheral. I feel that interlarding them into the lives of the five characters would probably have better achieved what was most likely one of his goals in the first place – to meditate on questions of fate, free will, chance, and mortality. Finally, while to pen, at the age of thirty, a novel this succinct and full of impact is an accomplishment in itself, I feel that tripling or even quadrupling the size of the book would have made the characters more realistic. But if that were the case, of course, it would not have the wonderful quality of being told to you as a griot would tell it, as the scintillating moral fable it is.
The Marquesa de Montemayor, whose daughter treats her with supreme indifference, has just seen her move away to marry her husband, a Spanish Viceroy. She copes mainly by writing beautiful, elaborate letters to her daughter and son-in-law. The Marquesa becomes reclusive and introspective, and asks the local Abbess and proprietress of an orphanage for the company of one of her girls. Pepita comes to live with her and provide much-needed companionship. On learning that her daughter is pregnant, the Marquesa makes a visit to the shrine at Santa Maria de Cluxambuqua. On her return to Lima, accompanied by Pepita, we learn that they are killed on the bridge. We later learn through Brother Juniper that the letters she wrote are gems of the Spanish language and are canonized and anthologized for schoolchildren to learn ages and ages hence.
Another story revolves around two twins named Manuel and Esteban (Wilder himself was a twin whose brother died in childbirth) who, also under the protection of the same local Abbess, grow up to become scribes. Soon Manuel is taken in to compose letters for the extraordinarily talented stage talent who goes by only “the Perichole,” who is in romantic cahoots with both the Spanish Viceroy and a local bullfighter (see Offenbach’s eponymous opera, as well as the short story by Prosper Merimee). After Manuel dies of an infection, Esteban is enlisted to assist one Captain Alvarado on a long voyage, partially in order to pay for a present for the Abbess. On the way to buy the present, Esteban crosses the Bridge of San Luis Rey and his fate befalls him.
Uncle Pio, the Perichole’s assistant, maid, and general counselor, has an interesting life of his own. Growing up as a diplomat, theater impresario, and Catholic shill during the Inquisition, he finds Micaela Villegas (see the historical personage of the same name, whom Wilder has only slightly fictionalized here), whom he trains and refashions in his own image, turning her into the best-known Peruvian actress of her time. After having become thoroughly disillusioned with the theatre and her success, she wishes to enter into proper society and wishes to never talk to Uncle Pio again. After some hesitation, the Perichole allows Pio to take her son and give the curious boy the proper education that he deserves. Leaving the next morning, they are the last two victims of the bridge.
Looking for one common thread to tie all of these disparate lives together, the reader is drawn over and over again to fact that they all see confounded by their personal searches for love and meaning. As much money or success they attain, we see lives beguiled by angst and beset by circumstance. By no means, and Brother Juniper would certainly have noted this in his book, do we find people who “deserved” to die.
But the Bridge of San Luis Rey has a sixth victim, one who didn’t fall hundreds of feet into the ravine below: Brother Juniper himself. Having written his book full of the most diligent and ingenuous research in an attempt to find out why God would let this happen (was it punishment for evil? Or was God just indifferent to human suffering?), the Catholic Church finds his book heresy and they burn him for it. What was so heretical? Perhaps that he would be so presumptuous as to explain God’s plan for the world.
As far as the form and structure of the novel are concerned, the first and last chapters, the only places where Wilder allows himself philosophical divulgence, are a little too cordoned-off for my taste, rendering the deeply resounding questions of theology and meaning merely peripheral. I feel that interlarding them into the lives of the five characters would probably have better achieved what was most likely one of his goals in the first place – to meditate on questions of fate, free will, chance, and mortality. Finally, while to pen, at the age of thirty, a novel this succinct and full of impact is an accomplishment in itself, I feel that tripling or even quadrupling the size of the book would have made the characters more realistic. But if that were the case, of course, it would not have the wonderful quality of being told to you as a griot would tell it, as the scintillating moral fable it is.
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