The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder

Dedication

To My Mother

Contents

Dedication

 

Foreword

Part One - Perhaps an Accident

Part Two - The Marquesa de Montemayor

Part Three - Esteban

Part Four - Uncle Pio

Part Five - Perhaps an Intention

Afterword

Acknowledgments

 

About the Author

Books by Thornton Wilder

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

Thornton Wilder's
Bridge of San Luis Rey
is as close to perfect a
moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature. Written near the end of the Roaring Twenties by a man barely out of his own twenties, it nonetheless feels, in its exquisite universality and ease of timeless application, ancient, classical, almost biblical. When we read the novel today, seventy-five years after its first publication, we nod in admiration, and we wonder at its uncanny ability to describe ourselves to ourselves in terms that are both essential to our species and particular to our times. One merely has to consider the central question raised by the novel, which, according to Wilder himself, was simply: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?” It is perhaps the largest and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. It is the question that defines us as human beings.

The novel begins precisely at noon on July 20, 1714, when a bridge on the Royal Road between Lima and Cuzco, “the finest bridge in all Peru,” inexplicably collapses, and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing the bridge plummet to their deaths. “The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break.” A devout, metaphysically anxious Franciscan missionary to the natives, a man named Brother Juniper, witnesses the collapse of the bridge and almost at once asks of the event, “Why did this happen to
those
five?” He is convinced that the accident cannot be other than “a sheer Act of God,” and believes, therefore, that a scrupulously scientific examination of those five lives will reveal why they, and no one else among the thousands who might just as easily have been crossing to or from Lima at that moment, were killed. He decides to ferret out the facts of those lives: “He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven. He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city.” Brother Juniper's pursuit of “the facts of those lives” will be a devout Christian's scientific investigation into the will of God undertaken for the strict purpose of proving to his converts (“poor, obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their own lives for their own good”) that our destinies are controlled by God and that, therefore, regardless of how skewed toward randomness and chaos and suffering all things seem, everything—even the apparently accidental collapse of a bridge—has a divine purpose.

As his investigation proceeds, we eventually learn, of course, that those five lives were not at all what they at first seemed to have been. They are a complex, engaging, all-too-human mix of characters who, by virtue of there being five, imply an entire community, perhaps even a species—one of the many reasons we can read the novel today and believe that it's about us. We're told first of the aged crone, the Marquesa de Montemayor, a widowed, lonely woman permanently alienated from her beloved daughter, Clara, who has fled her mother's suffocating love to far-off Spain and married a count. The Marquesa compulsively courts her daughter's favor with a series of voluminous, high-style, literary letters that portray the writer as a manipulative, self-pitying narcissist, although in time we learn that there is more, much more, to her character than that. As, one hopes, would be the case for any of us: if our secret lives were sufficiently examined and known, we would not seem better or worse than first thought; only more complex and mysterious.

Falling to her death with the Marquesa is the old woman's maid and faithful companion, a convent-raised orphan girl named Pepita; she dies alongside a young man, Esteban, who, in despair over the death of his twin brother, has recently botched a suicide attempt and has reluctantly decided to begin his life anew by running off to sea. Also crossing the bridge that fateful noon was Uncle Pio, an “aged Harlequin,” a literary man of the theater and retired adventurer who has devoted long years of his life to the tutelage and sponsorship of the great Peruvian actress Camila Perichole, now retired and living in rural seclusion. Accompanying Uncle Pio is a child, Jaime, the son of the famed actress, who has been given over to the old man to be taken back to Lima, there to be educated and protected by him just as she herself was years earlier. There are many memorable, gorgeously drawn, minor characters as well: the roustabout sea captain who saves Esteban from suicide; the sybaritic Viceroy of Peru, who makes Camila Perichole his mistress; the Abbess Madre María del Pilar, who rescues the orphans of Lima, including Pepita and Esteban and his twin brother, Manuel. But in the aftermath of the accident, it is the lives of the five who are killed that we, and Brother Juniper, come to know most intimately. Brother Juniper is our naïve, somewhat unreliable stand-in, and theirs are the fates that he and we must closely examine and contemplate. His investigation is ours. His conclusions, however, will not be ours. They will be judged heretical, and he will suffer terribly for having come to them.

The underlying assumption of the novel is that any one of us could have been on that bridge when it collapsed and threw five people into the abyss. According to Wilder, the plot, such as it is, was inspired “in its external action by a one-act play by Prosper Mérimée, which takes place in Latin America and one of whose characters is a courtesan. However,” he goes on, “the central idea of the work, the justification for a number of human lives that comes up as a result of the sudden collapse of a bridge, stems from friendly arguments with my father, a strict Calvinist.” It's an argument, if not always friendly, that most of us have had at one time or another, if not with a Calvinist father or Jesuitical friend, then with ourselves. And we have learned that such an argument usually leads us to either a stubborn affirmation of belief or a rote recitation of material fact.

But as Brother Juniper notes, “The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.” The abyss that lies between the two is thickly layered with the mystery of the meaning of human existence, and if we are to penetrate those layers of mystery, which is, after all, the ultimate aim of every serious novelist, then we must, as Wilder says in an interview, “pose the question correctly and clearly.” Surely, this argues that before we can ask what is the
meaning
of human existence, we must ask what is its
nature
. As with all great moral fables, this is precisely what is asked, and answered, by
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
. And if with this novel we do not penetrate to the very bottom of the abyss, to the final, defining mystery, we descend very near to it.

For thousands of years, readers in search of answers to such ultimate questions have turned to the moral fable. Its form and structure, rhetorical tropes, and stylistic conventions combine naturally and efficiently to dramatize the questions and propose answers that, in philosophical terms, must be not merely plausible but, in terms of our personal experience in the world, verifiable as well.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
is both typical of the form and exemplary. In modern times, it's a form that more often has attracted poets than fiction writers, and among the novelists only Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jorge Luis Borges have written moral fables that come up to this novel's artistic and philosophical standards.

There is something about the antique tone and atmosphere of these works that allows one to achieve almost immediate liftoff from one's mundane, day-to-day life and travel to a world of long ago and far away, where one can more easily consider ultimate matters. It's perhaps a necessary element of fable. We begin in the real, factual world, but only in order to leave it. The first sentence of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
tells us simply the historical fact that “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” But by the time we have finished the entire paragraph, we have been transported to colonial Peru, to the Andes, to the provincial capital of Lima, where the ashes of the Inquisition and the Spanish Conquest still smolder—for his readers, an exotic, utterly unfamiliar world and one that Wilder himself would not visit until 1941.

In certain ways, the prose seems antique, although not in the least antiquated. It reads almost as if freshly translated from an eighteenth-century Spanish chronicle composed by a brilliantly lucid stylist. Wilder's sentences are elegant, but never self-admiring, exquisitely balanced, yet not overformal, and complex without being elaborate. They are closer in construction and diction to Hawthorne's sentences than to those of Wilder's famous contemporaries, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Dos Passos. Appropriate to the form, it's an aphoristic style, resembling that of wisdom-literature, as in, “Now he discovered that secret from which one never recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there can never be two that love one another equally well.” Also typical of the form, but executed here with mild irony and aplomb, Wilder indulges in old-fashioned catalogues (“He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer—a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon”), broad symbols and flattened emblems, symmetries, parallelisms, and interlocking triangular relationships, reminding one at times of certain postmodernist writers like Milan Kundera and Umberto Eco. Though Wilder is in no way a “writer's writer,”
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
can be read as a writer's manual of style.

The novel lives on, however, generation after generation, not for the excellence of its style or for the simplicity and efficiency of its construction or for the warm vividness of its characters. It lives on because it celebrates our conflicted, contradictory, eternal human nature, our essential
humanity
. We are the only species that does not know its own nature naturally and with each new generation has to be shown it anew. It is interesting, therefore, and possibly useful to consider this novel in the long and (at the time of this writing) still darkening shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001.

Our relation to those terrible events is not unlike Brother Juniper's relation to the collapse of the bridge. On that day in September and over the months that followed, we all, thanks to the miracle of modern video technology, became witnesses to an event that defies our moral understanding and tempts us to try puzzling out the mind of God, hoping thereby to justify the ways of God to man. This was Brother Juniper's obsession and his heresy. For many of us, it has become ours, too. And it was not merely appropriate, it was a necessary admonition, that, at the memorial service in New York for British victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, British Prime Minister Tony Blair chose to read the closing sentences of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for 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.”

 

—Russell Banks

Saratoga Springs, New York