The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although published in 1927, was still widely read in the 1950s both by the general public and by students in classrooms all over America. It's a fine novel but it's unfortunate that Thornton Wilder's philosophical premise is so naive and lame. In 1714 a rope bridge over a gorge in Peru breaks and five people perish. Brother Juniper investigates the lives of the fallen, assuming that the good lord wouldn't have allowed them to die without a reason. Eventually, the well-meaning priest learns that the five victims were no worse and no better than any other quintet of ordinary mortals. His conclusion is displeasing to officialdom and both he and his compilation of facts are burnt by the Inquisition.
By the oddest of odd coincidences, I had recently read an essay on the rope bridges of the Incas, in which I learned that, though brilliantly designed, these bridges required annual renewal. My reading of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was therefore colored by questions not of theology but of engineering. Why didn't they repair the damn bridge? Why did they think that a fiber bridge wouldn't rot? Why doesn't Brother Juniper investigate the bridge maintenance department? The conclusions to which the novel seems to come -- that a) sometimes good people die for no good reason, b) that god is either indifferent or not there at all, and c) the Spanish inquisition was unpleasant -- don't seem particularly challenging. Is it possible that the novel's theses were daring in the 50s classroom? They seem mighty tame today.
Though the frame of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is bland, the accounts of the five people who die are sharp and colorful and imaginative and rather beautifully written. There are moments, in fact, when Wilder's storytelling seemed almost post-modern. Here's part of a paragraph about the twins Manuel and Estaban. To me, it sounds like an extract from The Hundred Years of Solitude.
Because they had no family, because they were twins, and because they were brought up by women, they were silent. There was in them a curious shame in regard to their resemblance. They had to live in a world where it was the subject of continual comment and joking. It was never funny to them and they suffered the eternal pleasantries with stolid patience. From the years when they first learned to speak they invented a secret language for themselves, one that was scarcely dependent on Spanish for its vocabulary, or even for its syntax. They resorted to it only where they were alone, or at great intervals in moments of stress whispered it in the presence of others. The Archbishop of Lima was something of a philologist; he dabbled in dialects; he had even evolved quite a brilliant table for the vowel and consonant changes from Latin into Spanish and from Spanish into Indian-Spanish. He was storing up notebooks of quaint lore against an amusing old age he planned to offer himself back on his estates outside Segovia. So when he heard one day about the secret language of the twin brothers, he trimmed some quills and sent for them. The boys stood humiliated upon the rich carpets of his study while he tried to extract from them their bread and tree and I see and I saw. They did not know why the experience was so horrible to them. They bled....
I think if this extract were presented to ten literate readers, nine of them would immediately guess "Marquez." Of course, its Marquezness would be even more obvious if Manuel and Estaban would fly up to the ceiling or be transformed into a thousand glorious butterflies. I don't know whether Marquez ever read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to discover that he had done so.
Incidentally, Manuel dies and his twin Estaban wrestles with "the guilt of the survivor." Is it relevant that Thornton Wilder's own twin died at birth? And does it follow that Wilder, despite the fact that he came from a large and accomplished family, might well be thought of as some curious sort of replacement child?
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