The Bridge of San Luis Rey April CC Book Club Selection

Mary13 · April 2, 2012, 9:53pm

Yes, I think Brother Juniper was a fool; nonetheless, there is a sweet simplicity about him. He is a Holy Fool: “Fools for Christ often employ shocking, unconventional behavior to challenge accepted norms, deliver prophecies or to mask their piety.” [Foolishness</a> for Christ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness_for_Christ]Foolishness”>Foolishness for Christ - Wikipedia)

Interestingly, you’ll see in the article quoted above that one of the most famous Holy Fools was Saint Juniper!

NJTheatreMOM, I think you are right on target about Santa Mar

Mary13 · April 2, 2012, 11:18pm

Add me to the sylvan8798 and PATheatreMom crowd. I just re-read the chapters “Esteban” and “Uncle Pio” and the timeline is driving me crazy:

1) When Manuel dies, Camila is still an actress. We know this because Esteban, in his grief, goes to see her in her dressing-room at the theatre.

2) Esteban’s erratic, grief-stricken behavior lasts for a few months. We know this because of the reference to the Abbess: “For months she had been asking herself what strategy could reconcile this half-demented boy to living among them again” (p. 58). She hits on the brilliant idea of contacting Captain Alvarado.

3) Captain Alvarado seeks out Esteban promptly. We know this because Esteban tells him that Manuel died “just a few weeks ago.” (It was actually a few months ago per the Abbess quote above, but Manuel’s grief is still so fresh that the mistake is understandable.) They leave for Lima the next day and Esteban crosses the bridge and dies.

4) The Perichole: Now it gets screwy. Don Jaime is at least seven years old when he crosses the bridge with Esteban. (“Don Jaime, at seven years, was a rachitic little body…”) By the time her son is that old, Camila has retired from acting, has learned to read and write a little, and is doing some serious social climbing. She and Don Jaime walk about the town together in fancy clothes, “Camila wondering when the felicity would begin that she had always associated with social position.”

5) And then Camila gets smallpox –- and Don Jaime still hasn’t crossed the bridge with Esteban! This means that Wilder’s timeline is off by years.

Think about it: Esteban visits Camila the alluring Actress and then he crosses the bridge and dies a few months later. He dies alongside the son of Camila the stout, scarred NON-Actress, who has spent the previous five years in retirement, bettering her social station, learning to read and write, and contracting and recovering from smallpox. (“Camilla was about thirty when she left the stage and it required five years for her to achieve her place in society,” p. 85).

Am I missing something? If I’m not, then why is this acceptable? Does the beauty of the writing and the depth of the themes excuse a botched plot structure? There has been so much written about The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but I’ve perused article after article and I can’t find this addressed. If there were an error of this sort in a modern novel, we would be merciless critics, wouldn’t we?

NJTheatreMOM · April 2, 2012, 11:34pm

Another thing I remembered about Brother Juniper is that somewhere near the end of the book Wilder refers to him as the “little friar.”

When I first saw that, I thought something along the lines of, "Huh? Wilder never said Brother Juniper was physically small, and he had never described him elsewhere in the fond sense that the word “little’ might also imply.”

Now I realize that Wilder almost certainly meant something else. He was probably using “little” in the sense of a mild slur…something that was so subtle that it wasn’t clear unless you were looking for it.

I am thinking now that one reason I didn’t like the book as much as I hoped is that I was picking up, subconsciously, on its slight taint of cynicism and disdain.

I do think it was a worthwhile book to have read. The fact that I could not work certain things out until we started having this discussion points to its depth.

My son, a theatre major, is a great believer in works of art shaking you up and making you uncomfortable…sometimes for reasons you can barely understand.

I originally read all of Bridge of San Luis Rey, except for the afterword, pretty quickly after we chose it as the book club selection, with the intention of rereading it again and taking notes before the discussion began. But I found myself procrastinating mightily over picking it up the second time (!)…finally doing a silly late night marathon the night before the discussion started.

I have been wondering whether this book, a great bestseller (and perennial “back list” item) in the US and possibly some other places, is known about and admired in very many other countries, especially Catholic countries. One of the clues I found is that there is no Spanish language wikipedia article about the book, and the Spanish version of Amazon does not offer a translation of the book, but only the film.

NJTheatreMOM · April 2, 2012, 11:43pm

I crossposted with Mary. I didn’t notice the timeline thing either of the two times I read the book. I guess I thought that more time had passed between the last letter writing session and Manuel’s injury, but actually there is no way it all adds up.

Oddly, it doesn’t really bother me that much, just as the business of the oddness of the names Pio and Cluxambuqua and Perichole didn’t bother others. When you think about it, it does seem startlingly sloppy though.

ignatius · April 3, 2012, 10:35am

Well, darn … that timeline discrepancy now bothers me. Truly did not notice it while reading and, when first pointed out, assumed that I could look at each story as a vignette or fable. However, after Mary’s walk through the time frame of the book, I have this nagging need to “fix” things. I think I’m having an OCD moment here. :)

Mary: I like your description of Brother Juniper: “I think Brother Juniper was a fool; nonetheless, there is a sweet simplicity about him.”

sylvan8798 · April 3, 2012, 11:39am

It gets worse. Remember Camila goes to apologize to Dona Maria after mocking her at the theatre? We are told Camila is “28 at this time”. Pepita is already with the Marquesa then and seems to be between 12 and 14, she’s the one who gets Dona Maria to leave the theatre early. But at Cluxambuqua (7+ years later?) she is still referred to as a child “And just as they got to the bridge he spoke to an old lady who was travelling with a little girl.”

Onward · April 3, 2012, 12:45pm

Maybe Wilder wanted to show that time was fluid :)

Mary13 · April 3, 2012, 1:58pm

J.D. McClatchy said that Thornton Wilder liked “conversation and alcohol…in quantities that tended to exhaust those around him.” Maybe he was tossing back a “fluid” when he wrote out his chronology flowchart. Seriously though, didn’t he have an editor? Where’s Maxwell Perkins when you need him?

In any case, since these flaws haven’t been an issue through the decades, it makes me think that the book was intended to be read more as parts than as a whole, i.e., each chapter stands alone as a separate short story, not necessarily in sync with the others.

ignatius · April 3, 2012, 5:58pm

<ol>
<li>How does the framing of the novela story examining an event 200 years prioraffect your reading? What does the passage of time add to our understanding of the characters? Why might Wilder choose not to tell the story from Brother Junipers point of view?</li>
</ol>

The narrator, whom we do not know, looks to Brother Juniper’s “enormous book” to tell this story.

.

Had Wilder chosen to tell the story from Brother Juniper’s point of view would the timeline have been precise? Probably not, but maybe closer than a narrator’s “voice” two hundred years after the fact.

I posit that Wilder did not screw up the timeline but instead allows Brother Juniper’s “scores of notebooks” to muddy the waters and later the narrator’s (two hundred years later) telling of the story. The narrator never claims to be a historian, after all. Perhaps some of the charm of The Bridge of San Luis Rey would be lost within a concise account of the facts. Certainly it gives additional meaning to the closing sentences:

I’ve decided the timeline is not an error but rather the author’s intention. (Told you guys it bothered me. ;))

sylvan8798 · April 3, 2012, 8:25pm

Well the timeline (or lack of one) might have been a problem…

Mary13 · April 3, 2012, 9:31pm

ignatius, I love your interpretation. It suggests a story born of complexity rather than carelessness and makes a great deal of sense. I feel better now. Thank you. :)

We have run into the unreliable narrator in some of our other novels and I wonder if the storyteller of The Bridge is not another incarnation of this. Re-reading passages (with ignatius’ eye), I see there are hints in lines like, “the discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed“ (p. 99) and “And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the spring within the spring?” (p.9)

I agree with sylvan8798 that the story would not lend itself well to the theatre–too hard to stage, plus so much of the appeal of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is in the writing. If you want to see similar themes in play form–the idea that “we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten, but the love will have been enough”–try to catch Our Town on the stage some day.

buenavista · April 4, 2012, 1:30am

I had never read this book, so like sylvan8798, I was surprised not to find war in it :-)

The timeline issues bothered me, too, but thanks to ignatius, I feel better now! It makes more sense as the author’s intention.

I liked the book a lot, particularly for the language, and especially the contrasting descriptions of the Archbishop and the Abbess (and the book says he “hated her with what he called a Vatinian hate”–I had to look that one up!).

I thought it was interesting that most of the book dealt with Brother Juniper’s “investigation”–was the bridge’s collapse chance or divine intervention?–but Wilder gives the last words to the Abbess, who is not concerned with that question at all. She just continues with her work. To me, what Wilder seems to be saying is that while the philosophical questions are interesting, they are beside the point, and it is people like the Abbess who make the real difference.

sylvan8798 · April 4, 2012, 2:42am

That was one of the best lines “[he] counted the cessation of her visits among the compensations for dying.”

Mary13 · April 4, 2012, 9:54am

Yes, that’s true! And it makes me re-think my earlier post about Wilder being a pessimist. If he were truly and thoroughly a pessimist, he might have given the last word to the Archbishop—something cynical and sardonic. But he ends with love, and to me it reads as if he genuinely believes in its power, without a trace of irony.

On the subject of the Abbess, I want to go back to a question that QuantMech raised in post #28:

Do you mean this passage?:

I would say that the Abbess is so far ahead of her time as to be almost anachronistic. In the early 1700s, people hardly even distinguished the deaf-and-dumb from the mentally ill, and the mentally ill were chained to walls and beaten senseless in places like Bedlam. (As an aside, when I was reading about Bedlam on Wikipedia, I had to smile at this line: “The playwright Nathaniel Lee was incarcerated there for five years, reporting that: “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.”)

Note that both the Abbess and Brother Juniper are doing research–hers is practical, his is not. But the words that the Abbess uses sound like the same ones that might be running through Brother Juniper’s mind about the reason for the seemingly random deaths: “It seems to me that there is a secret about it, just hidden from us, just around the corner.”

NJTheatreMOM · April 4, 2012, 9:55am

Buenavista, you say in post #52: “Wilder gives the last words to the Abbess, who is not concerned with that question at all. She just continues with her work. To me, what Wilder seems to be saying is that while the philosophical questions are interesting, they are beside the point, and it is people like the Abbess who make the real difference.”

And Ignatius, you said back in post #23: “…the end of the story strongly hints at hope/possible redemption for others: Madre Maria … whose life work may continue on through Camilla (the actress) … and, I believe, Clara (daughter).”

I think these are both key insights. I feel very strongly that the Abbess is the central figure in the book. Brother Juniper is almost a red herring…he provides a unifying device for the story, and he provides the author with a vehicle for the gentle mocking of theology, but I don’t think his significance goes much beyond that.

I don’t think it really makes a lot of sense for the timeline errors to be attributed to Brother Juniper’s being an unreliable narrator. The narrative voice of the book is not Juniper’s but the voice of someone who knows more about the interior lives of the characters than Juniper ever did.

To me, this book presents almost a fairytale world, like, say, maybe something along the the lines of Candide or The Pilgrim’s Progress. I don’t think it matters that the timeline is a bit screwy, because the story is more allegory than realism anyway.

Mary13 · April 4, 2012, 10:02am

Right … I wasn’t referring to Brother Juniper. I called the narrator “the storyteller” above because I didn’t know quite how else to label him. But I do think he is unreliable, partly because of ignatius’ observations, and partly because he admits it himself on p. 9, when he observes that even though he claims to know so much more than Brother Juniper, he, too, might be wrong the “central passion” of the characters’ lives.

sylvan8798 · April 4, 2012, 11:27am

Wilder also tells us in the last chapter “The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.”

It’s probably the scientist/mathematician in me, but the timeline thing still bugs me.

As a biographical note, Wilder had a twin brother who died at birth (not sure if that has been mentioned above). Throughout his life he had a fascination with twins.

I had the idea that perhaps these were pet causes of his, although there doesn’t seem to be anything in the general bio’s to that effect. Obviously he needed something that would be relevant in 1714, but that would show the Abbess as being well ahead of her time.

ignatius · April 4, 2012, 1:28pm

Odds and ends :):

You aren’t far off.

From a letter by Thornton Wilder … included in the Afterword of my copy of the book: The bridge is invented, the name borrowed from one of Junipero Serra’s missions in California.

I guess Wilder just continued to think of Brother Juniper as the “little friar.”

From a handwritten copy of an early draft … included in the Afterword of my copy of the book: But there was one who could not forget it. Little Brother Juniper had been an eyewitness.

In addition to the unflattering description of the Archbishop, let’s not forget the tone of cynicism re the funeral mass: The day of the service was clear and warm. […] The Captain Alvarado pushed in from the sunny square for a moment. He looked across the fields of black hair and lace at the trooping of the candles and the ropes of incense. “How false, how unreal,” he said and pushed his way way out. He descended to the sea and sat on the edge of his boat, gazing down into the clear water. “Happy are the drowned, Esteban,” he said.

I agree though I think Wilder intentionally added to that effect by disregarding a straightforward timeline. He used the removed voice of the narrator to do so: Brother Juniper focusing on minutia, the narrator, not. The difference between a first version and the final version … included in the Afterword of my copy of the book … reveals: In addition to showing changes of date and other details, a comparison to to the earlier version reveals how the author labored to achieve the novel’s “removed” tone. I just don’t think Wilder was careless.

Returning to Wilder as optimist or pessimist … from a letter written by Wilder to one of his former pupils (again in the Afterword):

The book is not supposed to solve. A vague comfort is supposed to hover above the unanswered questions, but it is not a theorem with its Q.E.D. The book is supposed to be as puzzling and distressing as the news that five of your friends died in an automobile accident. I dare not claim that all sudden deaths are, in the last counting, triumphant. As you say, a little over half the situations seem to prove something and the rest escape, or even contradict. Chekhov said: “The business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly.” I claim that human affection contains a strange unanalyzable consolation and that is all. People who are full of faith claim that the book is a vindication of this optimism; disillusioned people claim that it is a barely concealed “anatomy of despair.” I am nearer the second group than the first; though some days I discover myself shouting confidentially in the first group. Where will I be thirty years from now?–with Hardy or Cardinal Newman?

NJTheatreMOM · April 4, 2012, 2:50pm

Ignatius, I would agree that Wilder was not careless. I think it’s more that he was intentionally imprecise. If you look closely at the timeline, it seems startlingly sloppy, but one would have to admit that there is a difference between intentionally and unintentionally “sloppy.”

I think that it’s interesting that Wilder chose a historical figure (though not one known to most Americans) to base Camila on, then wrote something that diverged pretty widely from her actual life. If he had been more precise, the novel would have veered away from allegory and more toward an undesirably fictionalized depiction of a real life.

As far as sylvan8798’s statement that "Wilder also tells us in the last chapter ‘The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed’ " – what is quoted is a comment that the narrator made about Brother Juniper, who was trying to assemble biographical materials. The narrator of the novel is not presenting biographies, or a history, to us; rather, he is offering a meditation.

ignatius · April 4, 2012, 3:14pm

^^^ My thoughts exactly! I particularly like your wording intentionally imprecise and one would have to admit that there is a difference between intentionally and unintentionally sloppy.

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