Bridge of San Luis Rey: Chat the Third, on lyricism, meaning, and Pulitzer beatdowns
Dreadful Penny: I think that the Franciscan friar’s opinion only really enters into the beginning and the end of the book, and the sections that are told about the individual characters that they focus on are not really at all colored by the perceptions of the Franciscan friar. Because they’re not particularly occupied with divinity at all. To me, those bits are really sort of essentially about the unknowability of the human heart. How you can feel you know a person’s desires but they’re essentially inscrutable and you can’t really predict a person’s actions based on that.
Diablevert: That’s interesting, I’m not sure that that’s what I took from it.
Dreadful Penny: I really think that this is about that idea that there is a mystery that lives in every person, and that mystery…while you can describe the actions of their life, you can’t essentially know their motivations. And you can’t, essentially, know how they would react in a situation. You wouldn’t expect such a doting mother to give up at the last moment and turn her affections towards a servant girl.
Diablevert: Yeah.
Dreadful Penny: So on and so forth. And that all of that is cut out before they actually have a chance to change. At the moment of change in their lives they’re cut short of that. So she’s going to change and not love her daughter and instead transfer her love to the servant girl but they’re both killed in a bridge accident. You know, the son is going to move out with – what is his name?
Diablevert: Uncle Pio.
Dreadful Penny: Uncle Pio. But in that moment of change, they die. All of this is like — the twin is going to finally have a separate life from his brother. But at that moment they’re cut out from it. You can’t essentially predict the actions of the human heart, because there are all these unforeseen circumstances, and nexuses of intersection between different people — one of the things I really like about the book is how intertwined it is. I find it very pleasing when plots are neatly tied up. And I find it that way in my own writing, that I like it when things line up, and are circular, and recursive, and I like that about the book a lot. Every character is involved in each person’s life. It’s like a Where’s Waldo book.
Diablevert: Mmmm. Yeah, that’s interesting. Now I’m just sitting here thinking about that, because I’m not sure if that’s what I thought about it. I can definitely see that side to the argument, but I’m not sure if that’s what I took from the book overall.
Dreadful Penny: I guess it doesn’t have to have an over-driving theme, a message.
Diablevert: No, it doesn’t have to. But it’s interesting thing to talk about, because we both think it’s an interesting book and it has some interesting stuff in it, so it’s interesting to think about what he might be driving at or what you can take from it.
If that’s the case though, if the whole point is that people are unknowable and it’s surprising that they would make an abrupt change in this way, what does it mean they they’re killed?
Dreadful Penny: Yeah.
Diablevert: Because I mean, he does bring in that whole element of discussion…that there’s a moral to their lives. That’s the whole thing that the Fransciscan friar is searching for, that there’s a reason that these people died, at this time and in this place, and it was to provide some kind of example.
Dreadful Penny: Was to be demonstrative of something.
Diablevert: Yes. And so if the idea is, you can make an abrupt change in all that you feel and react and act in response to the world, and then all the people who are trying to do that are killed, what does that say?
Dreadful Penny: It makes it sound like it’s advocating stasis. That people should essentially stay the same. Because change will kill you.
Diablevert: Yeah, kind of. I don’t know.
Dreadful Penny: Well, also the bridge itself is this kind of unchanging thing — I picture this rickety, sort of rope bridge, a la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, this thing that’s so ephemeral but has lasted so long as to be past the point of even thinking it would collapse, and then it suddenly does.
Diablevert: Mmmm-hmmm.
Dreadful Penny: I like the end of the book where he says how it enters into their parlance, how they’d say, “oh, you live near the bridge,” like, the Sword of Damocles comparison. I like that book makes its own mythology in that way. But that’s beside the point.
Diablevert: That’s interesting.
Dreadful Penny: I mean, the bridge itself is an over-arching metaphor. This book is very metaphorically rich. I enjoy that. Because, Booth Tarkington? Not so much. With the metaphors. I liked that — to me, this is almost like a poet’s book. I mean, Wilder isn’t a poet, but it has that compression, that allusion, and it’s lovely to read. I finished the book and I wanted to re-read it. I finished the book and I wanted to re-read it again. I felt that it would be rewarding to re-read, that there were bits of it that I wanted to like, copy out, essentially, I liked it so much in that way. And I’m glad that the Pulitzers decided to reward something that has so much poetry in it in a sense, in its prose. Because the prose — I mean, Edith Wharton writes very good prose. But [other than her] we haven’t seen that style has been awarded any points in the Pulitzer, except for maybe some slight comic style. Satire has, I guess. You could say that parts of Arrowsmith are satrirical.
Diablevert: I think that much of the time, a lot of the novels have been more rewarded for having interesting or broad social ends. I guess you could say So Big had some style.
Dreadful Penny: No, it was. It was stylistically pleasing. But not that lyricism. We haven’t had a lyric novel. And I know they’re coming. I mean, I just recently — Toni Morrison was just awarded a Rooster, from the The Morning News Tournament of Books? And they were joking, saying, wow, the first writer to win a hat trick – a Nobel, a Pulitzer, and a Rooster. But I think Song of Solomon was her Pulitzer winning novel, and that I assume, will be a very poetic—
Diablevert: It’s Beloved.
Dreadful Penny: Is it? Dammit. I’ve already read Beloved. I never read Song of Solomon!
Diablevert: I’ve already read Song of Solomon. If you want we can trade off, and you can do Song and I can do Beloved.
Dreadful Penny laughs. But I know that Morrison is someone who writes with a lot of poetry, and Gilead is a book that is in our future that I know is very lyric, and I enjoy the lyric novel.
Diablevert: I know, I enjoy it too. You know, I think these books have kind of beaten me down.
Dreadful Penny: Oh no!
Diablevert: In the sense that I was very suspicious, and expecting that it was going to be mildly terrible, in some kind of way, and yet it wasn’t, so I still feel edgy about it. Like I’m still waiting to figure out the way in which it sucks.
Diablevert: And the rational part of my brain is like, “No, you liked it. It was good.” And I’m like, I did like it. It did seem good. Hmmmm.
Dreadful Penny: …..Or are they?
Diablevert: Yeah. I don’t know why I’m still suspicious of it. It’s kind of retarded.
Dreadful Penny: A prize should never have as its end result making people suspicious of the prize-winners.
Diablevert: True. But I guess you could say that the idea of going into this whole project was, are these books any good or not? I think a lot of them are kind of like….not.
Dreadful Penny: Yeah.
Diablevert: So with this I should probably just get down off my high horse and suck it up and be like, No, dammit. It was a good book. Suck it up.
Dreadful Penny: I think it’s a natural impulse to critique anything, you never just want to stand on your laurels and just say, “I enjoyed it.” You never want to give anybody total props.
Diablevert: The literary review equivalent of just flashing the devil horns and being like “It RAWKS!”
Dreadful Penny: Yeah.
April 10, 2010 at 3:07 am
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April 16, 2010 at 6:40 am
Diablevert, your suspicion of the book makes me laugh, too.
I agree, though, I went into this book feeling the same way (especially when my brain went “Wait. Isn’t this the guy who wrote OUR TOWN? Oh crap, what kind of shlock is this going to be?”).
Your comments about the poetry of the book are nice — in my review of it, I use Marianne Moore’s line “a poem should not mean, but be” to try and get at what I think Wilder does well (which is to let these people’s lives be what they are, rather than trying to wrench a moral out of them, for the most part). I certainly agree that the Pulitzer committee doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of style. Where’s Fitzgerald, or at least one of his better imitators?
Penny’s thesis about these people all being at a point of change is an interesting one. I’m not sure I buy the Marquesa’s change (is she really done with her daughter? I don’t think so), and Uncle Pio hardly seems like the kind of man who will stay away from the Perichole forever. So, I like the explanation being offered to a certain extent but not quite totally. Maybe I’m taking things too simplistically, but there’s a sort of poetry there — people dying on a bridge are, by definition, people who died on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. And maybe Wilder’s novel has simply helped us understand that their lives truly were at that stage in a larger sense — that the bridge was not just a physical bridge but a metaphysical bridge. Maybe that’s why I feel there’s a peace in even the death of young Jaime (I audibly gasped when Uncle Pio asked to take him for a year, and I realized who the fifth victim would be, but that “shock” quickly faded). Wilder tries to turn the bridge into love, etc. Maybe so. Certainly for four of the five people who die, the bridges of love they’ve tried to build have all fallen — the people they love have not returned the emotion, or have not known how to return it in a way that can be received. But in the end these deaths ironically bridge the gaps between those left behind, so that the Marquesa’s daughter and the Abbess and the Perichole stand together for a moment, unified by something approaching love, if not love itself. There’s a lot of richness to this book….it warrants a re-read, and further reflection. Thanks for sharing your conversations so freely!