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.