Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 8

This is my eighth post on Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. 

Part1 was on the landscape theme. 

Part 2 a photo essay of the New Mexican landscape.  

Part 3 a photo essay of the actual Cathedral referred to in the novel.  

Part 4 on the civilizing effect of Catholicism.  

Part 5 on the reform of the Church from the old order.  

Part 6 on the relationship with the indigenous people.  

Part 7 on the significance of the Cathedral.

This, my last post on Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop are some odd and ends from the conversation on the novel.

Kerstin says:

Beautiful Manny! You are teaching all of us how to pull together the different components of a novel, their connection, and how they are related to one another on a deeper level.

My Response:

Thank you Kerstin.  Of course a novel has to have those integrated components.  That’s one of the reasons I said Dante’s Divine Comedy is the greatest work of literature, the incredible degree of integration.  I found Death Comes to the Archbishop to be a fine work of art, not just because of the lovely writing but because of this integration.  Is a work of literature that is highly integrated a greater work than one that isn’t?  That’s debatable.  I would say it is, but I can see the argument against it.  For instance, Cather’s My Antonia is also a great work of literature, and I think slightly greater work (if one can create a pecking order among great works) than Death Comes for the Archbishop.  Now to my memory, I don’t think My Antonia is quite as integrated as this novel but yet I hold it higher esteem.  Why is that, I ask myself?

I think it comes down to a few minor deficiencies I’ve been attuned to in Death Comes for the Archbishop.  The one that sticks out at me is the story structure, or in a sense lack thereof.  DCFTA is a picaresque novel, that is, one that goes from episode to episode.  That doesn’t mean picaresque novels can’t be great—Don Quixote is a picaresque novel—but there is something loose about them that strikes a reader as less satisfying if the themes are not transcendent.  DCFTA rises to great themes, but they are mostly themes of a time and place, whereas Don Quixote and Divine Comedy (also picaresque) are able to reach for more universal themes.  My Antonia by the way is superbly structured.  Perhaps I’m being overly critical here of DCFTA but I’m just trying to find a shade of difference between great works.

Another deficiency is that the novel seems inappropriately titled.  Yes, Latour dies, but does death actually come for him other than it being a natural end to his life?  And is death really a theme in the novel that it would warrant being in the title?  It’s not as if death started for Latour in the opening pages and then caught up to him at the end.  There are numerous deaths throughout, but I don’t see any thematic thread that connects them.  Again, this is a minor criticism, or perhaps it’s me not seeing the thread.  It could be there.

The beauty of the DCFTA is that it’s like an impressionist painting.  It spreads out before you with color and geometric links that give you an overarching effect.  I think this is why Cather needed to be so integrated.  The novel is beautiful, and I would rank this in the top American novels of all time.  Willa Cather, in my opinion underrated, has at least two novels in such a ranking.

Kerstin says:

I've been thinking of the function of a garden. In nature, we have the raw beauty of Creation, in a garden, we take some of these components to cultivate and sustain us. It isn't only functional, we also bring the beauty of flowers and plant them in a pleasing way. We create outdoor patios and hang a hammock in a tree. We admire the beauty around us. It is a place not only of cultivation but of leisure, a place to rest and retreat, or enjoy grilling a meal for family and friends. It is a place for both solitude and community. It sustains and renews both our bodies and souls on a deep elemental level, that hint of Eden, that is hard to put into words.

My Response:

Just a thought. To the primitive, there is really only two outdoor alternatives. Either you are in wilderness or you are in a garden. The wilderness is rough, random, savage, dangerous. The garden is orderly, nourishing, both nutritionally and spiritually, peaceful, safe. Christ and St. John the Baptist go into the wilderness to overcome their passions. And Christ comes to the garden to seek solace from His heavenly Father. And so we have Eden, the Garden, as the pre-fall place of dwelling. And once they get expelled they are driven to the wilderness. From there humanity needed to cultivate to survive, to restore the Garden of Eden down to earth. So when Christ proclaims the Kingdom of God on earth, perhaps part of that is the building of a garden.

My Comment:

Here’s another interesting tidbit.  Cather published this novel in 1927.  D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist, lived in New Mexico (around Taos, which is an hour north of Santa Fe) in the first half of the 1920s.  He wrote a novel with the same sort of indigenous people called The Plumed Serpent but he set it in Mexico.  He published his novel in 1926, so the two novels amazingly overlap.  Both novels deal with the local cultures and deal with religion.  However, they are almost diametrically apart.  By this time in his life, Lawrence was a Primitivist, and therefore glorified the primitive cultures.  The dark, demonic of the indigenous cultures win out in his novel, while in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Catholicism is firmly planted.  I don’t recommend Lawrence’s novel.  It’s interesting but one of his poorer ones.  He has better novels.  I did my Master’s thesis on DH Lawrence, so I had to read far more of his work than one would have liked. 

My final review:

This is a wonderful historical novel centered on the first Catholic diocese in New Mexico, set from the middle of the 19th century toward the end of the century with the focal point of its first bishop, Bishop Jean-Marie Latour.  The novel moves in wonderfully delineated vignettes that leaves the reader with a sort of an impressionist type painting, if a novel could be described as a painting.  The themes of New Mexico’s unique landscape and the ordering effect of Catholicism to the wild and remote territories come together for a unique American experience.  We see both Latour’s iron will for order and his compassionate love for people, culminating in the building of the beautiful Sante Fè Cathedral, and ultimately we see his final days of life.  Willa Cather captures the American spirit as well as any American writer and outdoes herself in this novel.  Consider this one of the great American novels.