In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Raising Eden in Death Comes for the Archbishop
  • Sarah Mahurin Mutter (bio)

Despite the realism of her descriptions and the clarity of her style, Willa Cather inhabits ambiguity comfortably: her prose contains multitudes. One of the most memorable passages in all of Death Comes for the Archbishop conjures its setting so patiently, and yet with so much energy, that the reader is propelled through it "slantingly," just like the characters whose movements it describes:

The Bishop and his Vicar were riding through the rain in the Truchas mountains. The heavy, lead-coloured drops were driven slantingly through the air by an icy wind from the peak. These raindrops, Father Latour kept thinking, were the shape of tadpoles, and they broke against his nose and cheeks, exploding with a splash, as if they were hollow and full of air. The priests were riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be green, though just now they were slate-coloured. On every side lay ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbones of mountains. The sky was very low; purplish lead-coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges. There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead—rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens. Even the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in that singular light.

(63-64)

The passage is remarkable in its sense of immediacy, its conjuring of the "just now." The reader knows that, from the vantage point of the [End Page 71] novel, the journey through the mountains has finished, that the priests have reached their destination (not in the least because Archbishop is a historical novel, whose narrative eye looks back almost a century); but the passage, with its past progressive tense ("kept thinking"), performs a sleight of hand that places the priests—and with them the reader—in a strange, "singular" moment of betweenness. Just as the priests are passing between mountain ridges, and the meadows between grayness and greenness, the narrative hovers between past and present, between action and retrospect.

Much of Archbishop has to it an air of betweenness, not in the least because, as Janis Stout has observed, the text is suffused with "a great sense of movement," one which reflects its epic underpinnings (Strategies 94).1 Jean Latour is introduced as a traveler-in-progress, who is "trying to reach" his destination:

The traveler was Jean Marie Latour, consecrated Vicar Apostolic of New Mexico and Bishop of Agathonica in partibus at Cincinnati a year ago—and ever since then he had been trying to reach his Vicarate. No one in Cincinnati could tell him how to get to New Mexico—no one had ever been there. Since young Father Latour's arrival in America, a railroad had been built through from New York to Cincinnati, but there it ended . . . . His friends advised Father Latour to go down the river to New Orleans, across Texas to San Antonio, and to wind up into New Mexico along the Rio Grande valley. This he had done, but with what misadventures!

(20-21)

These "misadventures" include a steamer wreck in Galveston; a three-month delay "in the crowded house of a poor Irish family," where Latour rehabilitates an injury acquired "jumping from an overturning wagon"; and, most astonishingly, a three-thousand mile horseback ride to Mexico and back for copies of his credentials, since the priests he meets at Santa Fe refuse to acknowledge his authority without them. Latour goes from Riom to Paris to Cincinnati to New Orleans to Texas to New Mexico to Old Mexico and back to New Mexico—all before the action of the novel has begun. Laura Winters has written that "the vital importance of place so suffuses Archbishop that it is impossible to think of the novel without considering the places Latour and Vaillant inhabit, the places to which they [End Page 72] travel, and the places they leave behind"; and readers do tend to identify the novel...

pdf

Share