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imclaugh 's review for:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
This is a death story. On the plot level, it’s the story of five Peruvians who fall to their deaths when a once-sturdy titular bridge—the titular bridge—collapses. But more than that, it’s a story about the death of God. Written in the twentieth-century United States, the tale is set in eighteenth-century Peru. The timing, I suspect, is deliberate. For it was in the eighteenth century that intellectuals famously began to interrogate the moral meaning of— well, what we now call “freak accidents”; what used to be called, and in an antiquated legal context still are called, “acts of God.” In Candide (1759), Voltaire mocked his society’s moralizing response to the Great Lisbon Earthquake. Through Pangloss’ relentless optimism in the face suffering and injustice, we are meant to conclude that it is both absurd and offensive to imagine that the quake was a punishment from God. Wilder, who wrote this novel as “a friendly argument with his Calvinist father,” shares Voltaire’s skepticism of traditional theodicy.
The main narrative, a recounting of the lives of the deceased, is framed by two attempts to make meaning of the bridge’s collapse. The first is undertaken by a Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper. Juniper, an ersatz philosophe, wishes to prove, “scientifically,” that the five deserved to die. So he goes about interviewing everyone who knew them, painstakingly filling in a ledger of deeds good and bad, filling out a character sheet composed of traits Goodness, Piety, and Usefulness. Years of effort are ultimately wasted. The Church hierarchy disapproves his final product and he is burned at the stake. As the flames lick his body, he hastily fills in his own ledger, wondering what he has done deserve death.
I read Juniper’s project as a bitter — if wickedly funny — caricature of Christianity, dipped in the anti-Catholic Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition, more than a genuine argument, friendly or otherwise, with it. The thing about theodicy is that it does not rest on moral philosophy so much as on a belief in the Theos. It is infinitely supple. Few Christians believe that only the bad die young. (In fact, the aphorism goes in the opposite direction.) There are reasons beyond punishment for God to take a person “early.” To a Christian, it is always “His timing,” entrusted to the mystery of the universe. Brother Juniper has the logic chain backwards. It is the assumption of a purposeful universe that makes the timing of life and death meaningful; there are no objective data to prove a death was meaningful or just, from which we might then deduce the existence of cosmic purpose.
Unable to accept either the Christian’s willingness to defer these questions to the next life or nihilism, one character—an Abbess, ironically—alights on a humanistic reconciliation with finitude, with which Wilder ends the novel. “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
I frequently heard Wilder’s play Our Town referenced in Latter-day Saint sermons growing up. So I was surprised to encounter an anguished atheist when I actually read him. (Perhaps he was carried away by the rhythm of his luminous phrase-making, but “the only survival, the only meaning” is so declarative I think my interpretation is correct.)
The older I get, and the further along in my own faith journey, the more I see this theme everywhere in literature. Perhaps those Latter-day Saint sermons were right and we are all wondering all the time, “Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where do I go after I die?” I hope we can begin to put religious and non-religious explorations of this topic in dialogue. They feel altogether bifurcated in American/Western culture. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is “literature” and as such “secular,” or safe for secular spaces, regardless of its metaphysical themes. It can be discussed in state schools, where students would hesitate to offer an overtly religious response. Meanwhile, private spaces denominated “Christian” are full of fear, loathing, and straw-manning of secular and humanist ways of reasoning about life. And so we Christians muddle on in a kind of double-consciousness, fluent in both traditions, unsure which one to own.
--
While the frame narrative is delightful and interesting, the meat of the novel lies betwixt. In telling the stories of these five people, Wilder tosses off countless pearls of wisdom. Wilder is simply American, and he wrote before the flowering of magical realism, yet his aphoristic, mellifluous style dovetails perfectly with that of Latin American fabulists like Borges and Garcia Marquez. His sentences are often precariously long, but always end up perfectly balanced.
The main narrative, a recounting of the lives of the deceased, is framed by two attempts to make meaning of the bridge’s collapse. The first is undertaken by a Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper. Juniper, an ersatz philosophe, wishes to prove, “scientifically,” that the five deserved to die. So he goes about interviewing everyone who knew them, painstakingly filling in a ledger of deeds good and bad, filling out a character sheet composed of traits Goodness, Piety, and Usefulness. Years of effort are ultimately wasted. The Church hierarchy disapproves his final product and he is burned at the stake. As the flames lick his body, he hastily fills in his own ledger, wondering what he has done deserve death.
I read Juniper’s project as a bitter — if wickedly funny — caricature of Christianity, dipped in the anti-Catholic Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition, more than a genuine argument, friendly or otherwise, with it. The thing about theodicy is that it does not rest on moral philosophy so much as on a belief in the Theos. It is infinitely supple. Few Christians believe that only the bad die young. (In fact, the aphorism goes in the opposite direction.) There are reasons beyond punishment for God to take a person “early.” To a Christian, it is always “His timing,” entrusted to the mystery of the universe. Brother Juniper has the logic chain backwards. It is the assumption of a purposeful universe that makes the timing of life and death meaningful; there are no objective data to prove a death was meaningful or just, from which we might then deduce the existence of cosmic purpose.
Unable to accept either the Christian’s willingness to defer these questions to the next life or nihilism, one character—an Abbess, ironically—alights on a humanistic reconciliation with finitude, with which Wilder ends the novel. “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
I frequently heard Wilder’s play Our Town referenced in Latter-day Saint sermons growing up. So I was surprised to encounter an anguished atheist when I actually read him. (Perhaps he was carried away by the rhythm of his luminous phrase-making, but “the only survival, the only meaning” is so declarative I think my interpretation is correct.)
The older I get, and the further along in my own faith journey, the more I see this theme everywhere in literature. Perhaps those Latter-day Saint sermons were right and we are all wondering all the time, “Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where do I go after I die?” I hope we can begin to put religious and non-religious explorations of this topic in dialogue. They feel altogether bifurcated in American/Western culture. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is “literature” and as such “secular,” or safe for secular spaces, regardless of its metaphysical themes. It can be discussed in state schools, where students would hesitate to offer an overtly religious response. Meanwhile, private spaces denominated “Christian” are full of fear, loathing, and straw-manning of secular and humanist ways of reasoning about life. And so we Christians muddle on in a kind of double-consciousness, fluent in both traditions, unsure which one to own.
--
While the frame narrative is delightful and interesting, the meat of the novel lies betwixt. In telling the stories of these five people, Wilder tosses off countless pearls of wisdom. Wilder is simply American, and he wrote before the flowering of magical realism, yet his aphoristic, mellifluous style dovetails perfectly with that of Latin American fabulists like Borges and Garcia Marquez. His sentences are often precariously long, but always end up perfectly balanced.