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This State of Things The Bridge of San Luis Rey |
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The book is a rescension of an
eighteenth-century original, imaginary and burned save for a single copy, by
the Franciscan Brother Juniper, also imaginary and burned. The reason is plain. Wilder understands,
as Beckett later wrote, a “rupture in the lines of
communication.” The bridge is down, and Wilder understands this as
irrecoverable, for reasons which are given at the end and are his ultimate
statement on the subject. The great reading public is dead, of course,
“and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” There are only two dramatis personæ,
the author and the reader, with various identities.
Pepita and Don Jaime are special cases, of
course. There are professional standards.
“Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They
had long since been satisfied.” Wilder goes on. “We come from a
world where we have known incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly
remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that
world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort
to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some Heaven whither
Calderón had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is
not on this earth.” The authorial portrait of the Marquesa is
prepared by Brother Juniper, “refined” nearly “out of
existence” by Esteban, rendered unconscionably practical by Uncle Pio
and apotheosized as the Abbess with a sense of the ground gained in a Ludus
Tonalis, bearing in mind what has gone before. Wilder reads his book, the one by Brother
Juniper, transmutes his notations (and translates his Spanish). The new bridge
of stone, replacing the one that broke in 1714, “woven of osier by the
Incas more than a century before... a mere ladder of thin slats swung out
over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine,” is a stylistic
pirouette. The Roaring Twenties saw this production
come to light, and there is a marked influence on South American writers,
Borges at one remove, Marquez another. The peculiar shambling light that flickers
among the fractures of the composition steadily moving towards the bounty of
its dispensation is a plain cold natural illumination of each aspect, one
after another, in a sure thing from last to first, given the structure, or
rather the position, adequately faced. The supreme act of criticism is the auto
da fe consuming Brother Juniper and his book, the simple testimony of its
truth. The “little red-haired Franciscan
from Northern Italy” wants to demonstrate providence in the five deaths
on the bridge, and we can see that he does. Tergiversation is the main point,
with many interesting and lively happenstances. His unnamed offense is not worth going
into beyond the ascription of heresy. He dies, and his book is burned, for
any number of reasons, but principally to show that there is no relation
possible between the author and the reader, the bridge is out, that is all. Apart from the technique of writing, and
the several block-pieces constructed thereby, Wilder’s cognition of the
correct stance in the interplay of the book business is what matters.
“All those impulses of love return to the love that made them.”
It is not necessary to consider a golden past. “Even memory is not
necessary for love.” It must be, for reasons which Beckett
couldn’t explain either, that the work exists. The rest is a matter of
beating a path to it. “The Archbishop knew that most of
the priests of Peru were scoundrels. It required all his delicate Epicurean
education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to
himself his favourite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the
world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the
poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all
the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their
houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated
he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they
were unhappy. On one occasion, the iniquities in his see having been called
to his notice, he almost did something about it. He had just heard that it
was becoming a rule in Peru for priests to exact two measures of meal for a
fairly good absolution, and five measures for a really effective one. He
trembled with indignation; he roared to his secretary and bidding him bring
up his writing materials, announced that he was going to dictate an
overwhelming message to his shepherds. But there was no ink left in the
inkwell; there was no ink left in the next room; there was no ink to be found
in the whole Palace. This state of things in his household so upset the good man
that he fell ill of the combined rages and learned to guard himself against
indignations.” The Archbishop joins the suppers of Don
Andrés, the Viceroy. “All night they talked, secretly comforting their
hearts that longed always for Spain and telling themselves that such a
symposium was after the manner of the high Spanish soul. They talked about
ghosts and second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and
about the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about
whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment of
death; they wondered whether at the second coming of Christ to Jerusalem,
Peru would be long in receiving the news. They talked until the sun rose,
about wars and kings, about poets and scholars, and about strange countries.
Each one poured into the conversation his store of wise sad anecdotes and his
dry regret about the race of men.” But Brother Juniper is not a martyr to the
truth he represents, seeing that he is also a littérateur with a basic
handling of contents so vociferous for us, Wilder’s readers, and silent
but for his doubts to the culling friar. “It was just possible that the
Marquesa de Montemayor was not a monster of avarice, and Uncle Pio of
self-indulgence.” And turning from a cog in Wilder’s
machine, or a flywheel, let us take advantage of the view afforded by our
author with reference to Robert Browning’s “How it Strikes a
Contemporary”, two views. “Doña Maria would have invented her
genius had she not been born with it, so necessary was it to her love that
she attract the attention, perhaps the admiration, of her distant child. She
forced herself to go out into society in order to cull its ridicules; she
taught her eye to observe; she read the masterpieces of her language to discover
its effects; she insinuated herself into the company of those who were
celebrated for their conversation. Night after night in her baroque palace
she wrote and rewrote the incredible pages, forcing from her despairing mind
those miracles of wit and grace, those distilled chronicles of the viceregal
court.” At the same time, “Left alone in Lima the
Marquesa’s life grew more and more inward. She became increasingly
negligent in her dress and like all lonely people she talked to herself
audibly. All her existence lay in the burning center of her mind. On that
stage were performed endless dialogues with her daughter, impossible
reconciliations, scenes eternally recommenced of remorse and forgiveness. On
the street you beheld an old woman, her red wig fallen a little over one ear,
her left cheek angry with a leprous affection, her right with a complementary
adjustment of rouge. Her chin was never dry; her lips were never still. Lima
was a city of eccentrics, but even there she became its jest as she drove through
the streets or shuffled up the steps of its churches. She was thought to be
continuously drunk. Worse things were said of her and petitions were afloat
that she be locked up. She had been denounced three times before the
Inquisition. It is not impossible that she might have been burned had her
son-in-law been less influential in Spain and had she not somehow collected a
few friends about the viceregal court who suffered her for her oddity and her
wide reading.” But all this by way of her cognates, and
that goes for the daughter, too. |