Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
Survivor’s Guilt and the Problem of Evil.
A Plea for Caring, Caretaking, and Commitment.
Burton Weltman
“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste…
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men’
Paradise Lost. John Milton.
The Problem of Evil: A theological question of whence comes evil in the world, and why it exists if the universe is supposedly the product of a God who is good.
Survivor’s Guilt: A mental condition in which one feels guilty for having survived a traumatic situation that others did not survive.
Questioning the Questions in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
“What is the answer? …. Well then, what is the question?”
Gertrude Stein on her deathbed.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Thornton Wilder. First published in 1927, it deals with the circumstances and consequences of a fictional disaster in which five people were ostensibly killed in Lima, Peru during the early 1700’s. Their deaths were the result of the collapse of a fictional bridge, the Bridge of San Luis Rey, that they were crossing. The book is a philosophical/theological novel. Wilder imagined a fictional disaster and fictional characters to raise questions about God and good in the universe, the existence and persistence of evil, and the meaning of life and death.
Using his disaster as an example of the sort of evil that happens in the real world, Wilder asked why in a universe supposedly created by a benevolent God could an accident such as this occur? And why, he pondered, do evils such as this fall on some people – such as the five people in the novel – but not on others? Why, in turn, do they happen at a particular time and place and not at another? Most poignantly, how can evils such as this fit in with the plans of an almighty God who is supposedly good? Finally, what should we think and do about evils that befall other people but from which we are spared? In sum, Wilder asks us to think about the problem of evil in the universe and how to live with feelings of survivor’s guilt? These questions are the focus of the book.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey reflects social and intellectual issues particular to the 1920’s when it was written, but it poses questions that are timely at any time and it is still widely read today. It has long been a mainstay of high school literature curriculums. There are many reasons for its popularity. One reason is that the book is short, barely one hundred pages. It is also an easy read. And on its face, the book seems to be a simple story about the lives of the five victims of the accident. It is the sort of thing you can read in a night and teachers can assign it to high school sophomores without getting too many complaints from students. But there is more to it than that.
The book has an effect on readers that belies its surface simplicity, and that seems a better reason for its continuing popularity. There is a profundity to the questions it poses and to the ways it treats them that is haunting. I think that very few readers forget the book or the situation it describes. It sticks with you. And its underlying messages are complex. Interpretations of the book differ significantly. Is it optimistic or pessimistic, hopeful or cynical, theistic or atheistic?
Difficulty and disagreement among readers seem to be what Wilder intended. “The book is supposed to be puzzling and distressing,” he cautioned. That is, he explained, because “The book is in the form of a question” and does not give “a clear answer.”[1] In fact, he warned, “a little over half the situation seems to prove something and the rest escapes or even contradicts it.”[2]
Finding a Meaning and a Message in The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Multi-Storied Story.
So, how does one sort through the thing? I think one aspect of the book that is generally overlooked by interpreters, and that can be a source of puzzlement and distress as a result, is that it consists of a story within a story within a story. There are three levels of story and these three levels are intertwined in ways that are not easy to untangle. As such, the book is not as simple as it might seem on first reading. And it’s easier to read than to understand. A consideration of this aspect of the book’s structure is important, I think, toward finding meaning and a message in it.
The first level of the book is a framework story about a Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper, who is said to have lived in the early 1700’s in Peru. Brother Juniper did research on the lives of the five victims of the accident trying to discover the reasons why they died when they did. The second level of story, which is the bulk of the novel, consists of biographies of the five victims, biographies that are ostensibly based on Brother Juniper’s research. The third level is the editing of Brother Juniper’s research and the commentary on it by an ironic narrator who supposedly discovered Brother Juniper’s long-lost work and decided to edit and publish it.
Most interpreters of the book concentrate on the melodramatic biographies of the victims, give a puzzled short-shrift to Brother Juniper’s strange story (he is burned at the stake for heresy after finishing his research), and take for granted the nature and effect of the narrator’s editing and commentary. Most interpret the book’s primary concern as being the problem of evil in the world as represented by the deaths of the five victims, which was Brother Juniper’s main concern in his researches. I don’t agree with this focus.
I think that the main concern of the book is with survivor’s guilt, which is the main focus of the narrator’s commentary. I think, in turn, that the main message of the book is contained in the words and actions of the victims’ surviving friends and relatives who gather together to comfort each other at the end of the narrator’s story which closes the book. Although Brother Juniper provided the source material for the book, and he focused on the problem of evil, it is still the narrator’s book. The narrator has the last words and they are words of solace for survivor’s guilt.
The purpose of this essay is to look at all three levels of story so as try to glean a message from the book’s concerns with evil and guilt. Spoiler alert: I think that the book’s underlying message is a plea for commitment, caring, and caretaking, and I think that this underlying message is what haunts readers and accounts for its continuing relevance and popularity.
The Roaring Twenties and the Lost Generation: Surviving Survivor’s Guilt.
“I don’t know why we are here, but I am pretty sure that it is not to enjoy ourselves.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein. 1929.
It is a commonplace that you can describe almost any historical era in bipolar terms. That is, it is almost always the best of times and the worst of times, depending on your social class and other circumstances. Such was the case in the United States during the 1920’s.
To the wealthy few in America, and according to the mass media that they controlled, the 1920’s were the Roaring Twenties. In sanitized histories and sensationalized movies about the period, it was the Jazz Age of stylish flappers, sexual liberation, and a perpetually rising Stock Market. Great fortunes were made by a fortunate few and to listen to the rich, it was the best of times.
To listen to the working-classes, however, whose concerns were with falling wages and who were struggling to recover from World War I and its aftermath, it was the worst of times. In the midst of a growing GNP and a garish display of conspicuous consumption by the rich, a majority of Americans lived below the poverty level during the 1920’s. Most Americans experienced the 1920’s very differently than the rich, and quite differently than the popular portrait of the era as a perpetual party. For most people, the 1920’s was a period of economic and psychological depression as they tried to recover from the horrific death and destruction of the previous decade.
The period from 1914 to 1921 had, in fact, been one of the most deadly eras in history. Beginning in 1914 with the start of World War I, the rest of the decade had been a slaughter of the innocents that was almost incomprehensible and that defied explanation. The war produced a world-wide death toll of some twenty million people from 1914 to 1918, a majority of them civilians. This was followed by a world-wide death toll of some forty million in the flu pandemic of 1918-1919. That was followed by the economic depression of 1919-1921 in which tens of millions suffered without work or sufficient food and often died.
In the aftermath of this horror, most people experienced the 1920’s, in the words of Gertrude Stein, the patron saint of the literati of the era, as a Lost Generation. It was a generation that had been decimated and traumatized by the war and its aftermath, a generation of victims lost to violence, disease and poverty, and a generation of survivors, the walking wounded who were physically, emotionally and economically distressed. Having lost faith in society and hope for the future, it felt for many people like living through the collapse of civilization.
Things weren’t supposed to be that way. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, politicians and pundits had proclaimed that with the rise of capitalist industry and free trade, there would be peace and prosperity for all and for all time. Industry would produce a surfeit of goods so that poverty would be abolished as a cause of civil strife and war. Free trade would connect the countries of the world in binding ties of economic cooperation that would make war impractical and even unthinkable. Medical science and public health measures would forestall plagues like those of the past. Perpetual peace and prosperity were guaranteed.
And it seemed to be working. From 1815, which marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars, until 1914, the world had experienced an era of seemingly declining conflict. There was also long-term economic growth produced by the Industrial Revolution. Capitalists during the era claimed that business needed peace and could not tolerate the disruption and uncertainty of war, so capitalist businessmen everywhere condemned war. Workers during the era complained that they ended up being cannon fodder in war, so workers worldwide condemned war. All the major labor unions and progressive political parties in every nation opposed war, and almost all swore at the beginning of the twentieth century that they would not cooperate with any new wars.
But then war came in 1914 and almost all of the businessmen, workers, and progressive parties supported their home countries in what became a world war, everyone on each side claiming that their country had not started the war but had been attacked by the other side. What became World War I marked the end of what has been called The Long Peace between 1815 and 1914. It also marked the end of the faith that many people had felt in the economic and political system to keep the peace and sustain economic growth. It was the end of trusting with others to keep the faith that kept the peace. It was an era in which possessing things and controlling others became the norm. The bridge of politics, economics and culture that had linked people and the various nations, and that had connected the past with the present and the future, had collapsed.
Although members of Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation were diverse in many ways, survivor’s guilt and despair at the evil in the world was a common denominator among them. Those who had survived the war, the plague, and the depression wandered and wondered why they had made it and what it meant. Ernest Hemingway, a protégé of Stein, portrayed the tragedy of this generation in The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel about an ex-soldier who has been sexually crippled during World War I and who is pursuing and being pursued by a promiscuous playgirl. In The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway’s buddy and another of Stein’s proteges, portrayed the dazzle, the extravagant desires, and the underlying emptiness of the era.
It was in this context and in this company that Thornton Wilder, yet another of Stein’s proteges, wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
Brother Juniper’s Quest: A Terminal Case of Survivor’s Guilt.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey pretends to be a summary of some newly rediscovered research on the lives and deaths of five accident victims in Lima, Peru by a fictional early-eighteenth century Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper.[3] Peru was at this time a Spanish colony and Spain was a Catholic country. Like the 1920’s in the United States, Peru in the early 1700’s was tumultuous. Lima, the capitol city of Peru, is described as a boomtown, having gone in one generation from a huddle of shacks to a major metropolis.[4]
It is portrayed as a time and place in which, as in America during the 1920’s, possessive relationships were the norm, and what a person owned and who the person controlled were the measures of that person. And like the United States during the 1920’s, Lima afforded a startling contrast between the elegant mansions, theatres and public buildings that served the rich, and the hovels, stark poverty and misery of the poor. It was the best of times and the worst of times, depending on your place in the social order.
Brother Juniper supposedly compiled his research while serving as a proselytizing missionary to the Peruvian natives. Although his official mission was to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism, Brother Juniper’s real interest was in trying to figure out why God chose some people to die and others to live. He was particularly troubled with why innocent people died while sinners lived on. Seeming to echo John Milton in Paradise Lost, Brother Juniper’s goal was “to justify the ways of God to man.”[5] It was an ambition that cost him his life.
Brother Juniper focused his research on accidental deaths, hoping to fathom how they were not really accidental but actually part of God’s plans for the universe. In the course of this work, he became obsessed with a particular incident, the deaths of five people who perished in the collapse of a bridge that he was minutes away from crossing himself. Why, he asked, did God choose these five people to die at this moment? How can the tragic deaths of these five people fit in with the plan of a God who is supposed to be good?
Brother Juniper spent six years trying to discover in the biographies of the five victims the reasons why God had chosen them to die. He hoped, thereby, to make a science of theology and be able to rationalize everything that happened as the will of God. But there also seemed to be a personal aspect to his research. It seemed directed not only toward justifying God’s actions but also justifying Brother Juniper’s own survival. Why did they die and he didn’t? Struggling with his own survivor’s guilt, Brother Juniper supposedly did the research of which The Bridge of San Luis Rey is ostensibly the result.
Historical Context for The Bridge of San Luis Rey: What you don’t know can hurt you.
The book is set in the early 1700’s and there is historical context to Brother Juniper’s story that is important toward understanding it. This context is not discussed in the book but I think Wilder expected the reader to know it. A difficulty that some people have in interpreting the book may stem from their lack of historical knowledge. Three things seem particularly relevant. The first thing is that Brother Juniper ostensibly lived during what is often called the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This revolution had culminated in Newton’s comprehensive scientific explanation of the laws of physics at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Newton’s explanation of God’s physical creation seems to underly Brother Juniper’s theology about God’s spiritual realm. Insisting that it was “high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences,”[6] he aspired to becoming a theological scientist himself.[7] In trying to make a science of theology, Brother Juniper seemingly expected to be able to explain all things spiritual just as Newton had ostensibly succeeded in explaining all things physical.
The second thing that I think Wilder expected readers to know is that Brother Juniper lived during what is often considered the birth of modern philosophy during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In tandem with the mechanical explanation of the material universe that was being fostered by the likes of Galileo and Newton, philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz were developing a new mechanistic and deterministic metaphysics that encompassed all things spiritual. It was a metaphysics that seemed to fit well with the new Newtonian physics, and it is seemingly reflected in Brother Juniper’s theology.
In this mechanistic metaphysics, the universe was commonly compared to a clock with God in the role of a clockmaker who, having made the clock, withdraws as the clock ticks away on its own. In this view, God was pretty much painted out of the picture of everyday life. Things just moved along in a deterministic way, according to His plan and without His interference.
In this philosophy, the evil that existed in the universe was rationalized as necessary to the well-functioning of the whole system. Without evil, there can be no good. It was in this context that Leibniz famously declared our universe to be “the best of all possible worlds.” This was essentially Brother Juniper’s view. He wanted to refute those who thought that the world was evil and that God was responsible for it. Leibniz’s conclusion was one which Brother Juniper seemingly hoped to prove with his scientific theology.[8]
Brother Juniper was a fervid proselytizer, albeit promoting his new scientific theology more fervently than the conventional Catholic catechism. In this regard, his advocacy seemed as personal as it was philosophical. A deterministic philosophy is an excellent way to relieve oneself of survivor’s guilt. If you explain everything as a result of cause-and-effect, the fact that you survived a disaster that killed others, or that you don’t suffer while others do, is not your own doing. You cannot be faulted. There was nothing you could have done. I think this moral copout was one of the attractions of a theological science for Brother Juniper.[9]
But it was a fatal attraction because the Catholic Church in the eighteenth century condemned this new mechanistic philosophy as heretical. And this is the third historical thing that I think Wilder seemed to expect readers to know. Adherents of the mechanistic philosophy were often condemned by the Church and executed as heretics. As was the fictional Brother Juniper in the book.
The Church complained that the new philosophy limited God’s discretion and subjected Him to the operation of cause-and-effect. The mechanistic philosophy also called miracles into question, including the miracle of transubstantiation which is a key Catholic doctrine. And the new philosophy seemed to negate people’s responsibility for wrongdoing, making it an amoral and even immoral theory in the eyes of the Church. Finally, the new metaphysics seemingly inflated human understanding to God-like levels, a profound blasphemy.
In proclaiming his intention of using scientific research to ferret out God’s plans and to “surprise His intentions in a pure state,” Brother Juniper was arguably trying to fool and make a fool of God. He was on a power-trip trying to assert his will over that of God. This was not an acceptable aspiration for a Catholic monk
Brother Juniper was, however, seemingly unaware of the Church’s attitude toward his putative philosophy as he naively conducted his meticulous researches over the course of many years. At the time the story in The Bridge of San Luis Rey opens, he had been repeatedly frustrated in his efforts and had reached no satisfactory conclusions as to how accidental deaths were actually not accidental but, instead, fit in with God’s plan for the universe. But then came the collapse of the Bridge of San Luis Rey and his own improbable survival, which spurred his researches anew.
Brother Juniper spent the next six years collecting information on the victims in an effort to find a reason God had willed them to die at that moment in an accident that he had narrowly missed. And after six years, Brother Juniper claimed that “He knew the answer.” And that he could explain for each of the victims “why God had settled upon that person and upon that day for His demonstration of wisdom” in having the person die.[10] Brother Juniper’s conclusion was that “each of the lost lives was a perfect whole.” Their destinies had been fulfilled – he doesn’t, however, explain how or why – and, therefore, death was the appropriate next step for them.[11]
Brother Juniper was himself rewarded for his efforts by being burned at the stake as a heretic, and having his research suppressed for centuries. No sooner had Brother Juniper finished his work, the narrator reports, than the book “was suddenly pronounced heretical. It was ordered to be burned in the Square with its author.” The narrator says that Brother Juniper did not understand where he had gone wrong, but blithely accepted his fate and died with a smile on his face. Had he concluded that his life had become whole and warranted ending? It’s not clear.[12]
The Five Victims: The End of the Beginning.
“Come into my parlour,” said the spider to the fly. The Spider and the Fly. Mary Howitt. 1829.
Power trips, with people trying to establish possessive relationships of control over others, are at the heart of the story of the five victims in The Bridge of the San Luis Rey. The book portrays a power trip society, full of people trying to control others, from the Viceroy and Archbishop at the top of the social ladder to the servants at the bottom. And that includes the five victims as well. Some of them trying to spin webs of power and control to catch others by surprise, even God. Others getting caught in webs of possessive relationships from which they struggle to get free.
In a possessive relationship, the controller is ostensibly acting in the interests of the other’s welfare, but is really acting in the controller’s own selfish interests. Controllers in possessive relationships can’t pass the Golden Rule litmus test: Are the controllers doing to others what they would have done to them if they were in the others’ situation? Each of the victims of the disaster was caught up in one or more possessive relationships, either as the controller or the controlled, and the raveling and unraveling of these relationships is what moves the plot in the book.
In editing Brother Juniper’s researches, the narrator focuses one by one on the backstories of each of the five victims leading up to the accident. Their lives and backstories intersect with each other, with each of them vainly attempting to dominate others and control their circumstances. The crisscrossing strands of their lives make for a tangled web of influences in which the characters are caught, and into which we are drawn and our interest caught.
The book could have had a conventional happy ending if the victims had not died. Near the end, and near their ends, each saw a way out of the power-tripping and power-traps in which they had been caught. They were just about to start new lives in which they would freely engage in sharing relationships very different from the possessive relationships in which they had been caught. Each had an epiphany or change of heart that Brother Juniper seemed to have considered an equivalent of last rites, a repentance that completed their lives and made them ready to die.[13]
But that is not how the victims saw their changes of mind and heart, nor does the narrator. They saw their awakenings as the beginnings of a new way of life, not a prelude to death. They saw themselves beginning a new course of action and interaction that they never got to complete because of the accident. Each of them was literally traveling on the road to start this new life when suddenly they died. The tragedy of their stories is that they all had finally freed themselves, but then died before they could exercise that freedom.
The Marquesa de Montemayor: Death in Life and Life in Death.
The Marquesa de Montemayor was a loser in life who became a big winner in death. In life, she was publicly ridiculed as an ugly, awkward, slovenly, ill-mannered, and ignorant woman, the wife of an elegant man who had died young and the mother of a beautiful and accomplished daughter, both of whom scorned her. Her husband had married her for her money and then essentially abandoned her. Her daughter had from an early age been ashamed of her repugnant mother. The Marquesa doted on her daughter and was driven into paroxysms of effort to make the girl love her. Nonetheless, when the daughter came of age, she immediately married a Spaniard and moved to Spain to get away from her mother.[14]
In death, the Marquesa came to be considered one of the most brilliant writers in Spanish history. With her daughter in Spain, the Marquesa took to writing her long descriptive letters about all that was happening in Lima. Hoping to attract and entrap her daughter with the beauty of her letters, she studied writing and forced herself to go out in public, weathering the insults that she received from almost everyone she met, in order to gather material for the letters. And they were beautiful letters, so beautiful that after the Marquesa’s death, they came to be considered Spanish national treasures and became required reading for Spanish school children.[15]
The letter-writing snare didn’t, however, work on the Marquesa’s daughter. So, she changed tactics and, having previously been an atheist, she turned to God for help, becoming fanatically and superstitiously religious. She prayed obsessively to God and tried to bribe Him with all sorts of obeisance and monetary contributions to the Church to get him to get her daughter to love her. That didn’t work either. She could control neither her daughter nor God.[16]
But in the end, the Marquesa had an epiphany. She came to realize that hers had been a selfish love. The narrator comments that “She loved her daughter not for her daughter’s sake, but for her own.” [17] She recognized that her love had been proudful, egotistical, and selfish, and that she had loved her daughter as a possession instead of a person. “She longed to throw off the burden of pride and vanity” that she carried. And she became reconciled “to permitting both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.” She would henceforth love them for their sake, not for hers. Vowing that “Tomorrow I begin a new life,” she prayed to God “Let me live now” and “Let me begin again.”[18] But she died instead.
Estaban: His Brother’s Keeper.
Estaban and Manuel were identical twin brothers who grew up in an orphanage run by the Abbess, Madre Maria del Pilar. The Abbess was a saintly person who supported and promoted most of the charitable efforts and enterprises in Lima. The brothers were inseparable. The narrator comments that love was an inadequate word to describe the feeling that the brothers had for each other. They needed, integrated and complemented each other to the depths of their being.[19] They were possessed by each other. Having been educated in the orphanage, they worked as scribes for the largely illiterate populace of Lima. They, nonetheless, rarely talked, except in an idiosyncratic code to each other.[20] They were a world of their own.
It came to pass that Manual was hired to write some secret love letters for a beautiful actress known as the Perichole, and he became completely besotted with her. Although Manual never said anything to his brother, Estaban knew about Manual’s infatuation with the actress and it pained him that Manual’s affections were directed elsewhere. In turn, although Estaban said nothing of his pain to Manual, Manual knew that Estaban was suffering. So, for the sake of his brother, Manual willed himself to stop loving the Perichole. And “All at once,” the narrator says, “in one unhesitating stroke of he will, he removed the Perichole from his heart.”[21]
Life for the brothers then returned to normal until one day Manual cut himself and, after a long period of suffering, he died of gangrene. Estaban was literally beside himself. Since no one could tell the brothers apart, he decided to take possession of his brother’s identity, and pretending that it was he who had died, he went about as Manual.[22] Suffering from what can be described as survivor’s guilt, Estaban was unable to cope with the loss of his brother and became something of a derelict. He even tried to commit suicide.
In the end, the Abbess convinced a ship captain to give Estaban a job, and Estaban developed a close relationship with the sailor, eventually even admitting to him that he was Estaban and not Manual.[23] The captain, who had suffered a terrible loss when his beloved daughter had died, convinced Estaban that the purpose of life is to live for others, and not try to possess them or be possessed by them. Under the influence of the captain, Estaban experienced a change of heart and purpose. He was walking on his way to board the ship to begin his new life when he died.[24]
Uncle Pio: A Platonic Pygmalion.
Uncle Pio was a middle-aged raconteur who moved from one thing to another, spurning success in favor of power over people. He especially sought the presence, confidence and control of beautiful women with whom his relationship was always purely Platonic. He had a “passion for overseeing the lives of others,” helping them to succeed, especially as actresses, but on his own terms. “What was there in the world more lovely,” he would say to himself, “than a beautiful woman doing justice to a Spanish masterpiece” of the stage.[25]
While working as servant and spy for the Spanish Viceroy in Peru, Uncle Pio came upon a beautiful twelve-year-old girl living in the streets. The narrator tells us that “He bought her,” apparently paying money to her guardians or captors in order to gain possession of her. And then he taught her to be a great actress, the Perichole.
Despite her great success – she was reputed to be the best actress in the Spanish world – Uncle Pio managed to keep her in psychological thrall. Her greatest passion was to please him with her performance as an actress, but she never did. “Only perfection would do,” she mourned, “only perfection, and that had never come.” Uncle Pio could always find some fault in her performances, something to drive her toward perfection and keep her in his power.[26]
At the peak of her success on the stage, the Perichole became the mistress of the Spanish Viceroy. At that point, she eschewed both the stage and Uncle Pio, and sought to reinvent herself as a lady. Hoping to escape her possessive relationship with Uncle Pio, she fell into a competitive relationship for power with the Viceroy. He sought to dominate her through ridicule and she took on lovers as way of dominating him.[27]
This erstwhile idyll came to an end when the Perichole came down with smallpox. She survived, but was rendered ugly. Devastated by the loss of her good looks, she retired to the countryside to live as a recluse with her beloved son, Jaime. Having escaped the control of Uncle Pio and the Viceroy, she now doted and depended on Jaime, who was completely in her thrall.[28]
Uncle Pio came to the rescue. Despite having been scorned by her, he had come to realize that he genuinely cared about the Perichole, and he sought to see her and help her. Both proud and ashamed, she rebuffed Uncle Pio’s efforts to see her until he tricked her into a meeting. At that meeting, he offered to take her son Jaime to Lima for a year or so to teach him to be a gentleman. It was an offer that came from the goodness of his heart and was solely for her and Jaime’s sake.
The Perichole, in turn, saw that Uncle Pio’s offer might be Jaime’s only chance to become something and somebody in the world. So, she agreed to give up control of Jaime and let him go with Uncle Pio. Uncle Pio and Jaime were walking into Lima to start Jaime’s new life when the bridge collapsed with them on it. The narrator reports that as they approached the bridge, Jaime was getting tired and wanted to stop for a rest. In a tone dripping with his usual irony, the narrator reports that “Uncle Pio said that when they had crossed the bridge, they would sit down and rest, but it turned out not to be necessary.”[29]
Pepita and Jaime: Victimless Victims.
“Listen, even if we assume that every adult must suffer because his suffering is necessary to pay for eternal harmony, do tell me, for God’s sake, where the children come in.”
Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Two of the five victims of the bridge collapse were children, a little girl named Pepita and the little boy Jaime. They had been the objects of possessive relationships that were in the process of changing when they died. In the case of Jaime, he was just gaining his freedom from the smothering hold of his mother and getting the opportunity of an independent life when he died.
In the case of Pepita, she was about to gain independence from the Abbess, whose ward she was. The Abbess is portrayed by the narrator as a saint with a catch. He says of her that “Her plain face had great kindliness, and more idealism than kindliness, and more generalship than idealism.”[30] This seems to be the narrator’s ironic way of saying that the Abbess was on a power-trip that included caring and caretaking, but was mainly about power. The Abbess had hoped to groom Pepita as her successor in her various charitable enterprises. Pepita was, thus, a benefactor of the Abbess’ caring and caretaking but also a victim of her power-tripping.
As part of the Abbess’ training of Pepita, she wanted Pepita to learn patience, obedience and forbearance. Toward this end, the Abbess rented Pepita to the Marquisa to serve as a handmaid. The Abbess scorned the Marquisa as a mean and heartless witch, and she envisioned that Pepita would find it unpleasant, embarrassing and difficult to be with her. The Abbess thought that being handmaid to someone as nasty and uncouth as the Marquisa would be an ideal indenture for Pepita.[31] Pepita was completely enthralled by the Abbess, and all she lived for was to try to please the Abbess.[32] The Abbess was repenting and reconsidering her relationship with Pepita, and Pepita was enroute with the Marquesa to see the Abbess when Pepita died.
To the narrator of the book, the fate of these two young victims is the ultimate test of Brother Juniper’s claim that God has made ours to be the best of all possible worlds. And, as the narrator portrays the situation, Brother Juniper’s claim fails the test. These children were innocent. Jaime was a good boy. And Pepita was saint-like in her goodness and even martyr-like in her willingness to submit to whatever the Abbess wanted her to do. Unlike the Marquesa, Uncle Pio and even Estaban, these two children had nothing to repent and their lives were clearly just beginning and developing, rather than coming to completion.
To justify their deaths, Brother Juniper had to fall back on the time-worn excuse that “pains were inserted into their lives for their own good.”[33] He had to rationalize that good is the overcoming of evil, so that if there were no evil in the world, there would be no good. If life was too easy, there would be no virtuous effort. Bad is good for us, so the best possible world includes evil. But this claim does not seem to convince the narrator and, in turn, does not seem convincing to the reader.
The Narrator: All You Need Is Love.
“Abide in faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is charity.”
St. Paul. 1Corinthians13. King James Bible.
The ultimate storyteller in the book is the anonymous narrator. Although he has ostensibly based the book on Brother Juniper’s work, he has edited Brother Juniper’s materials and inserted his own comments. As a result, it is really his book. And, significantly, he takes a skeptical view of Brother Juniper’s project and Brother Juniper’s conclusions. He seems to think that there is more to the universe than in Brother Juniper’s theology and more to the victims’ lives than Brother Juniper, or anyone else for that matter, could sufficiently fathom to declare those lives to be whole and, therefore, worthy of ending. The book is colored with his irony and skepticism.
The narrator seems to be a man of modern times, albeit circa 1927 when the book was published. As such, he would likely be aware that Newton’s laws of physics, which were the big new thing in science during Brother Juniper’s time, had been overwritten in the early twentieth century by Einstein’s theories of relativity. Absolute space and time had given way to relative space-time. In the same year The Bridge of San Luis Rey was published, Werner Heisenberg proclaimed his Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics. The physical science upon which Brother Juniper hoped to base his theology had become obsolete.
The narrator would also know that just as physics had transitioned from Newton’s absolute laws to Einstein’s relativity theories, the main theories in philosophy in the United States had transitioned during the early twentieth century from mechanistic determinism to pragmatist instrumentalism, and from the search for absolute truth about the universe to the resolution of empirical problems with probable solutions. The predominant theory was the instrumentalism of John Dewey, which focused on concrete problem-solving rather than abstract metaphysics. As such, the philosophical underpinnings of Brother Juniper’s new theology no longer held up.
Finally, the narrator would be aware that a main theological controversy among Christians in the United States in the early twentieth century was between fundamentalists and adherents of the Social Gospel. Fundamentalists focused on the Bible as a book of mandatory beliefs and rules. The Social Gospel focused on Jesus as a social worker who preached and practiced loving one’s neighbor and charity toward all. The conflict between the two views had recently been highlighted in the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial on evolution in 1925.
The narrator’s editing of Brother Juniper’s findings and his commentary on them reflect an awareness of modern science, pragmatist philosophy and Social Gospel theology, and a sympathy with those ideas, especially the Social Gospel. He opens the book with a characteristically caustic remark that “Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”[34] The former view is that of deists, atheists, agnostics and adherents of the Social Gospel who think that the natural world runs on its own, either without the intervention of God or without any intervention of which we can be aware. The latter view is that of fundamentalists who see God everywhere and in everything.
Brother Juniper was obsessed with the question of evil – why was there evil in the world if God is good – and with survivor’s guilt – why did innocent people die while he lived on. As a result, Brother Juniper insisted on the fundamentalist view. He insisted that God had planned everything that happens to us; He has planned it for the good of all; and we can discover His plan. In this way, Brother Juniper thought that he could rationalize the evil in the world and assuage his survivor’s guilt. His was, however, a contradictory conclusion.
Brother Juniper asserted, on the one hand, that God had a possessive relationship with humans and controlled everything. But he also asserted, on the other hand, that humans could comprehend God’s plan and, in effect, take control of it. Brother Juniper was essentially trying to establish what could be deemed a possessive relationship with God in which he was the one who possessed God rather than God who possessed him. That does not seem to be a sustainable position, especially for a Catholic monk.
The narrator is inclined to the former view, that God’s ways, means and purposes are unfathomable to us. The narrator’s answer to questions about God’s plan seems to be “Don’t ask.” If there is a God, He does not answer to us. So, it is foolish to ask questions about God’s plan. And it is arrogant. It can even be dangerous, since asking such questions about God’s plan could be considered blasphemous by the religious authorities, and claiming to have the answers may be considered heresy. In any case, it is vain to try to deal this way with the problem of evil and with survivor’s guilt. Love is a better way.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a book about love, both controlling love and caring love, possessive love and liberating love, selfish love and selfless love. Each of the five victims was involved in a loving relationship, but they were possessive relationships that ultimately did not work. The Marquesa’s love for her daughter, for example, was possessive and obsessive. She wanted to control her daughter’s life and force her daughter to love her for her sake and not for her daughter’s.
The brothers’ love for each other was possessive to the point of the surviving brother pretending to be his brother when the other brother died. Each brother honored the other to the point of disappearing. Pepita was the victim of the Abbess’ desire to make the girl into her successor, which was for the sake of the Abbess and not Pepita. The Abbess loved, and sought to groom, what the Abbes saw of herself in the girl.
Uncle Pio’s love for the Perichole was similarly possessive and controlling in a Pygmalion way. He took a street urchin and made her into a great performer, but for his sake and not for hers. Uncle Pio’s caring for the little boy Jaime was similar, but with an important difference. He intended to make a gentleman of the boy for the boy’s sake and not for his own.
The narrator, and by extension the author, chose to close the book with a speech that the Abbess made to honor the five victims of the bridge accident and to comfort the family and friends who survived them. The Marquesa’s daughter was there, having returned from Spain to do good works in her mother’s name. The Perichole was there, having come out of seclusion to do good works for the poor. And the Abbess was there, having repented of trying to use Pepita to enhance her charitable empire. The survivors were changed people.[35]
The Abbess concluded her oration with the consolation that “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”[36] These are the last words of the book and they are generally taken as the message of the book. I agree but with a different slant than the usual interpretation.
In citing the speech, most interpreters claim the moral of the story is that feelings of love constitute an eternal spiritual connection between the living and the dead. The emphasis is on feelings of love. I don’t think that what Wilder had in mind is merely feelings of love. Feelings are too facile and fragile. I suggest that the meaning of the Abbess’ speech and the moral of the book lies, instead, in acts of care, caring and commitment that constitute the core of love.
Wilder frequently said that his writings reflected his desire to promote the values of “faith, hope and charity.” The phrase “faith, hope and charity” is the translation in the King James version of the New Testament of a widely quoted phrase in a letter written by Saint Paul. The word that is translated as “charity” in the King James Bible is translated as “love” in most versions of Saint Paul’s letter, including the Catholic version. As such, it is not surprising to see the Catholic Abbess using the word “love” to describe the bond between the living and the dead. But I think Wilder meant us to think “charity.” Not charity in the sense of patronizing handouts, but charity in the form of caring, caretaking and commitment.
I think that Wilder intends us to see charity, or acts of love, is a way of dealing with the problem of evil and the curse of survivor’s guilt without denying them. It is also a way of giving meaning to life and death. Emotional love is not enough. What people feel as emotional love can pass with their passing. But acts of love can reverberate with others, multiply through the generations, and thereby live on forever.
The message seems to be that charity is the bridge between the living and the dead, the link between the past, present and future. Starting with acts of commitment, caring and caretaking toward the living, followed by acts of commitment, caring and caretaking toward the things that the dead cared about in life. The message is that we who survive do so in order to do good. For Wilder, a non-combat veteran of World War I, and other Lost Generation survivors of the war and its aftermath, there was, he was saying, a way to justify their existence.
Even if we cannot find a meaning for the universe, and cannot resolve the problem of evil, that doesn’t mean there can be no meaning to our lives. Whether or not there is a God who created the universe, and whether or not He has a plan, we are the caretakers of each other and the earth, and it is our caring that gives meaning to our lives. That is, I think, the moral of The Bridge of San Luis Rey and a main reason that it still resonates today.
The last and lasting image of the book is not of a disaster in which a disparate bunch of people fell to their deaths, but a group of the victims’ friends and relatives gathered together to do honor and service in their name. Not the deaths of the victims but the charity of their survivors is the point of the book.
BW 6/21
[1] Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Harper-Collins. New York, 2014. P. 108.
[2] Ibid. P. 106.
[3] Ibid. P. 16.
[4] Ibid. P. 59.
[5] Ibid. P. 15.
[6] Ibid. 14.
[7] Ibid. P.14-15.
[8] Ibid. P. 80.
[9] Ibid. P.15.
[11] Ibid. Pp. 15-16, 39.
[12] Ibid. P. 85.
[13] Ibid. P.38.
[14] Ibid. Pp. 17-18.
[15] Ibid. P.33.
[16] Ibid. Pp. 20, 31.
[17] Ibid. P.21.
[18] Ibid. Pp. 34, 37-38.
[19] Ibid. P. 41.
[20] Ibid. P. 40.
[21] Ibid. P.47.
[22] Ibid. P.51.
[23] Ibid. P. 55.
[24] Ibid. P. 57.
[25] Ibid. Pp. 62-63, 69.
[26] Ibid. Pp. 64, 66.
[27] Ibid. P.24.
[28] Ibid. P. 74.
[29] Ibid. P. 78.
[30] Ibid. P. 30.
[31] Ibid. P. 24, 29.
[32] Ibid. P. 30.
[33] Ibid. P.15,
[34] Ibid. P.16.
[35] Ibid. Pp.87-89.
[36] Ibid. p.91.
historyaschoice 
Charity = acts of love. That’s what life – and death – are all about. Thanks, Burt, for an enlightening take on a great story. Your writing style is the very picture of clarity. I’ve gained a new insight into a book I thought I knew all about in high school.