Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse?

Before this project, I had never read any Virginia Woolf, save for the short excerpted passages included in my Norton 5th Edition. I've always liked the idea of Virginia Woolf that formed somewhere along the line, but now I can say I love the real thing. She is a poet who prefers paragraphs to stanzas.

I had the same initial trouble penetrating this novel as I had with Mrs. Dalloway. There were so many characters and so many relationships to keep track of. My difficulty was compounded by Woolf's habit of so thoroughly stepping into the minds of her characters. I did not know who I was supposed to be critical of and who I was supposed to be rooting for. I don't think I ever realized how I look for these signals from an author when I read, but apparently, I do.

The difficulties of course worked themselves out as continual exposure let me trace out who was who and let me understand where everyone was coming from without the need to cheer for one character and boo down another. Everything evened up for me just in time to enjoy the amazing dinner scene in the first section. I wanted that scene to go on forever, jumping from head to head and thought to thought as the characters swim in the social waters. I found it mesmerizing and difficult to put down.

Part two, Time Passes, blew my mind. When has an author set up so many characters, especially what appears to me a main character, in the first part of a novel and then slaughtered them parenthetically in the second part without drama or incident. Mrs. Ramsey is simply not there one night to hold Mr. Ramsey. CRAZY! The second section was the most poetic. Had I a pen in hand (and was not reading from a library's copy of the book), I would have underlined the entire section for its beautiful insights and phrasings.

Politcally, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to suss out this book. It tackles the same difficulties of community and communication between people that Mrs. Dalloway does, but now it tackles gender issues and issues of art very aggressively. Mr. Ramsey the tyrant, the man for whom women are fonts of sympathy to coddle his gentle ego, who seems to take a sadistic glee in shattering dreams . . . what am I to do with him. Regardless of what and who he is, his children crave his approval, and Cam finds herself in love with his very form and dignity. How do we move beyond these social and constructed roles, if at all? So much lies with Lily Briscoe and her comparison with Mrs. Ramsey, but I'm not the guy to tease that out. Much smarter scholars than I have deciphered this text and I shall be happy enough for now to swim in the deep end of Woolf's work, unable to touch bottom, floating, just enjoying the waters.

Come on in; the water's fine!

Crossing The Bridges of San Luis Rey

If what I wanted while reading Cather was for an incident to be mined fully and to be laden with meaning, Wilder here has given me my wish. On the one hand, the book is the polar opposite of Cather's, for every incident is rife with meaning. On the other hand, the books are very similar, attempting to arrive at a truth about life through the tableau's of different life stories laid next to one another.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Wilder writes beautifully and directly, blending details and meanings in straightforward sentences that all work together to build to something grand. Moreover, the topic is epic while the subject is small and local; my favorite kind of story.

This is a novel about our efforts to find meaning in what seems like a random and meaningless world. Set in 1714 Peru, this novel seems worlds away from America and Europe after The Great War. But how many mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers must have been asking themselves "why?" in the wake of the war? Why did their loved ones die? Why did others survive? How could God let this all happen? I imagine the questions raised by the breaking of the bridge are the same as those asked by Wilder's contemporaries.

We are set up brilliantly by Wilder in the introductory section to read the lives of those fallen with great care, looking for some pattern or meaning, as Brother Juniper did. We are told that a great treatise was written on this subject, so we cannot help but think in those terms. Are we looking for irony? A cruel God? A just one? Should it make sense? We follow the narrator's retelling of these lives as a chain of cause and effect. We watch the lives interweave know that someone will be taking the spill down the chasm soon. Who? Why? We are encouraged to make connections and try to make sense as Juniper does. The frame of the novel plays an important role in our reading of the stories, which is just great writing on Wilder's part.

And then we get to the final section and Brother Juniper's method is revealed. Wow. Have waded through the complex emotions and responses of this set of people, to see that Juniper made a chart assigning people numbers to create some calculus to explain God is horrendous, and horrendously funny. The method of course fails him, so he tries to amass all the facts he can from all the sources he can, hoping that some great mind will come along to discover (or "surprise" as Wilder seems to like to say) the method to divine God's meaning. By this point, we know that such things are futile, and we are left with our own attempts to connect things. You must end with the resolution that you do not know and cannot know.

Wilder does not leave us in a state of hopelessness, though. He offers us one nugget, perhaps something we ourselves noticed. This book isn't just about finding meaning; it is about 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." Love IS meaning and the meaning IS love. All of these tales are about thwarted or lost love: The marquesa for her daughter, Pepita for the Abbess, Esteban for Manuel, Manuel for Camilla, Uncle Pio for Camilla and the theater she was to create, the Captain for his daughter, the Abbess for Pepita and the twins. Long before the bridge of San Luis Ray breaks, these bridges of love between two people break and those who live by that bridge fall long before they make the physical fall that begins the novel. The Marquesa, Esteban, Uncle Pio, they have all fallen from the bridge of love. They have all "discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other." Interestingly, it is as they attempt to mend those bridges or at least to move on that they meet their final fates. The Marquesa will be brave and less selfish; Esteban will join the captain and "do what we can" and "push on . . . as best we can"; Uncle Pio will find a replacement in Don Jaime; but those things are not to be. And what of Don Jaime and Pepita. And what of the survivors who find meaning by carrying on and loving backwards across the absence to make up for the first broken bridges?

The book gives you a lot to chew on, being emotional without becoming cute or trite.

As a final thought, what do you make of Camilla as being the only character who overlaps all the narratives. I think she is central to Wilder's thinking, but she would deserve an essay all to herself.

Jason (Goodness 2, Piety 0, Usefulness 8)

Death Comes for the Archbishop - and His Era

I am told that Willa Cather characterized Death Comes for the Archbishop as a narrative, rather than a novel. Although I do hate to quarrel with an author about her own work, I would argue that Death Comes for the Archbishop is not a narrative either, or at least, not in the sense of being a story about characters. Yes, Death Comes for the Archbishop recounts selected incidents in the life of the fictional Father Jean Marie Latour, who was appointed Bishop of New Mexico at age 35, in or around 1851, and who died 38 years later, in the spring of 1889, but I would argue that Cather is not telling the single story of Latour's life so much as the many stories of the new American southwest. Focusing on Latour gives her a lens through which to view whole towns, whole tribes, and disparate cultures, with which Catholic priests have a unique relationship.

Cather's interest in stories is explicit throughout Death Comes for the Archbishop, not only in the content of the writing, but also in its structure. Cather divides the "narrative" into nine books, many of which are devoted to the story of one excursion, one event, or one person, his rise and fall. Sometimes Father Latour and his vicar, Father Vaillant, participate in the stories, as in Book Two, when they rescue the fair Magdalena from the evil, throat-slitting bandit who is her husband, and sometimes they simply hear the stories, like "The Legend of Fray Baltazar," which is recounted by one of the parish priests.

Father Latour also sees his life in terms of stories. In Book Six, as he looks about, he begins to think "how each of these men not only had a story, but seemed to have become his story." And in the final and most modern(ist) Book, when Father Latour is nearing death, he drifts ever backward and forward in time. The narrator explains: "When the occasion warranted [Father Latour] could return to the present. But there was not much present left; Father Joseph dead, the Olivares both dead, Kit Carson dead, only the minor characters of his life remained in present time." Father Latour keeps returning, then, to the past, some of which he fears will be forgotten. And that, too, is what this book is about: the passing of historical moments.

When the book opens, we are almost immediately made aware of things that have come before and faded away. "The language spoken" among the cardinals in the preface, the narrator relates, "was French - the time had already gone by when Cardinals could conveniently discuss contemporary matters in Latin." The Italian Cardinal later laments, "Beginnings . . . there have been so many." In this story, Bishop Latour must begin the whole Apostolic Vicarate, but he bears witness to many endings as well: the ending of corrupt priests, the ending of marriages, the decline of tribes. An era comes and goes in the pages of this novel, for with the start of the gold rush and the arrival of the train in Santa Fe, death comes not only for the archbishop, but for his moment in history.

There is a strong preoccupation in this book - and perhaps it is Cather's - with capturing oral stories and histories in print while the people still remember them. The narrator says of the subject of Book Five, Padre Martinez, that Martinez "knew his country, a country which had no written histories. He gave the Bishop much the best account [Latour] had heard of the great Indian revolt of 1680, which added such a long chapter to the Martyrology of the New World." Obviously Martinez did not witness this revolt; he was part of the oral tradition of recounting it. Notably, however, Martinez is a dying breed. The narrator says: "Naturally [Martinez] hated the Americans. The American occupation meant the end of men like himself. He was a man of the old order, a son of Abiquiu, and his day was over." The beginning of Latour's Vicarate Apostolic is itself an ending.

As for what is ending, well, when Martinez is first introduced, the narrator says, "Father Latour judged that the day of lawless personal power was almost over, even on the frontier, and this figure [Padre Martinez] was to him already like something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past." As the institution of America begins, lawlessness and individual tyranny end, subjugated by law, order, and the dual institutions of church and country. The frontier is tamed, and Cather recounts how a bishop and his vicar help to tame it.

There is something interesting in the way that European influences work in this novel, but I think that's a topic for another discussion, along with the vaginal cave with its stone lips and strange smells.

The Style of Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather was doing something daring with the novel, or so I am told. According to A.S. Byatt's introduction to my edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather was striving to do for the novel what modern painters were doing with painting; simplifying and de-romanticizing. This move forward is also a giant move backward, according to Cather, according to Byatt. And the main inspiration for the style of Death Comes for the Archbishop were the frescoes of the life of St. Genevieve done by Puvis de Chavannes. She wanted to create a narrative "without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition." In these frescoes, scenes of martydom are given equal weight as the scenes of daily living because "all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance."

I lean on this explanation of the narrative style of Death Comes for the Archbishop because I found myself very disappointed in the book. And from my experience, books and films are disappointing to us because they do not tell the same story that we wanted told, they do not focus where we want them to focus. That is not the fault of the story or the teller; it is the fault only of the reader to keep forcing her desires on the story being told.

I wanted adventure. I wanted drama. I wanted to have any one of the many mini-narratives of the novel expanded and played out for us. I would have liked to have seen Padre Martinez resist the new order and seen the confrontation between the priests. I would have liked to spend more time with Fray Baltazar and his motives, fears, concerns. I wanted rich characters with rich motives in dynamic conflict. But Ms. Cather was not interested in my wants; she wanted to tell her own story her own way. To her, the "essence of such writing is not to hold the note - not to use an incident for all there is in it - but to touch and pass on. I felt that such writing would be a kind of discipline in these days when the 'situation' is made to count for so much in writing, when the general tendency is to force things up." Yes, I wanted the incident to stand for much more, for the situation to count for a great deal, for things to get forced up.

Instead of playing out these incidences and situations, Cather touches upon each scene and moves on, for the meaning is not in the individual moments that happen over the 40 years of the novel, but in the collective image created by all the frames of the fresco of her work. Panels cannot be separated and made more important than other panels--all the panels are equal and work in concert. We don't need to see Latour's raising the money for the cathedral or the cathedral itself; in one panel we see the stone to be built; in the next, it is already built and Latour's body is laid out.

I respect and admire Cather's desire to push the novel in a new/old direction to try to get at some truth of life as she understands it. While I was reading it, I kept thinking of what wasn't there; now that I am done, I can appreciate what is there.

I think Ann will touch upon the politics and contents of the novel when she blogs; me, I had to expend all my energy trying to see the book for what it is to also work through the meanings presented throughout the novel.