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.