“The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” written in 1927 by Thornton Wilder (who wrote “The Matchmaker” for all of you “Hello Dolly!” fans out there), took the reading public of the early Depression era by storm. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and was the best selling fiction novel in that same year. Today, if you ask just about anyone you meet, even those at the very highest levels of literary study (for I haven’t yet found a professor who has even heard of it), they will not have read it. This is the fate of many books who are written for their time, and never else (Samuel Baker’s “The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon” has not stuck around, after all). My particular point of contention is that “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” still has things to say to us; its cultural moment has not yet passed.
The novel is constructed as an academic retrospective of the writings of one Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk who chronicled the lives of five poor souls, who were dropped into the raging river below when the revered bridge of San Luis Rey collapsed. The academician forms a kind of narrator, and he is very present in the work, popping in to provide contextual knowledge about the letters of the Marquesa de Montmayor, providing information about the life and work of Brother Juniper, and is felt elsewhere in the novel as a guide. The effect is pronounced, and contributes greatly to the ease of its reading.
The prose itself is effortless, and you could easily read the novel from beginning to end in one sitting. Brother Juniper’s core mission is to quantitatively discern the will of God in the tragic collapse of the bridge, and this mission forms an engraving of theological language and perspective; it creates something of an early magical realism in the text, with the intention of a divine will always being a matter of serious and legitimate question. Though the element of religion is prominent, the way in which the book is written presents it as merely one of many possibilities that would explain the ordering of the world around us, it just so happens to be the answer that Brother Juniper is sure of and is pursuing. In this, the aspect of these religious questions become existential questions about why we live and die, about the value one life has and the difficulty in quantifying something like that, and about what we leave behind us.
Ultimately, a central answer to the many questions of meaning, in both life and death, is love. Wilder presents us with many different kinds of love in the many characters we come to know. The Marquesa’s tyrannic and poetical love for her daughter, Pepita’s love for the Marquesa and for the Abbess of Lima, Esteban and Manuel’s love for each other as twin orphans, Uncle Pio’s love for his adopted daughter figure, the Perichole (a strikingly talented singer and actress who performs in Lima) and her son, all of these characters love in an uncontrollable way which rules their hearts and spreads to those around them.
These characters, along with the son of the Perichole, are the ones who die in the bridge collapse and it is chiefly with their life stories that we are concerned. However, Wilder constructs a masterful social web of secondary characters who know each other, interact, and form major parts of the work. Indeed, I would be hard pressed to say that Clara, the Abbess, Brother Juniper, or the Viceroy are truly “secondary” characters. The world Wilder creates feels real and fantastical, developed but not obtusely complex, and profoundly interconnected in a way that gives me the same feeling when I consider the interconnectedness of our real world. While our lives are arranged by coincidence (or perhaps by intention…), the stories of the characters that we meet in the novel have long been told, and it is by the fact that their lives are complete, that they each form a “perfect whole” as Brother Juniper was trying to prove, that we can analyze them in the way that we do.
What comes of that attempt to reveal the workings of the divine in the narrative then? Well, it isn’t decisive. The narrative would not work if it was and it is hard to say which would be more compelling. To me, whether we live and die by plan, or we are self-aware and self-sustaining micro-systems of the inanimate world observing itself for a time, there is meaning. To the Brother, of course their lives had meaning; they were constructed and arranged by the ineffable divine. To us, we are free to make our own meaning, but so are the characters. The final chapter serves as the so-called secondary characters’ opportunity to come to grips with and make sense of the collapse. Death is the ultimate perspective, after all, and we get the opportunity to follow them in this and try to make sense of it ourselves, and ask ourselves these same questions.
Ultimately, the novel poses questions about our place in an interconnected world, the nature of purpose and meaning, and never answers them, leaving us free to find it for and within ourselves. Even the final line, which reads as a definite answer at first, does so with a vague enough concept that the truth is still something that we can only discover in our own hearts.
The world has never been more connected than it is now, and we have never had more opportunity to connect with the people around us and make meaningful impacts on each other. In a novel that presents a world that is so intertwined that a divine intention is a serious explanation for it, what does that say about today? The Bridge of San Luis Rey presents a small, but full, world, where everything is happening at once and it is up to us to make sense of it in retrospect, and that is the understanding of our social existence that I think that everyone could benefit from. Every interaction is an opportunity to make a connection, to make an impact on the people around you, to love them for being human, and to build a bridge.