Death Comes For the Archbishop by Willa Cather

a craft discussion

In a couple of weeks, starting on Thursday, August 7th, I’ll be leading an online three-week class through Writing Workshops on the ways in which writers can better craft propulsive and compelling opening moments in works of fiction.

As something of a preview of that, I wanted to post the following craft discussion regarding my interpretation of how Willa Cather fuses characterization and setting in Death Comes for the Archbishop. While the quotes below are not from the first page of that novel, the analysis of them serves as a window into how I (humbly, so humbly) go about analyzing fiction.

I did a similar craft discussion a while back with The Great Gatsby and hope to do more in the future.

xo, sam

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I mentioned in my first post on Death Comes For the Archbishop my deep, abiding love of descriptions of nature and tried to argue how clever Willa Cather is at employing these kinds of descriptions. The lines included from Death Comes in that post about a giant swath of sky aren’t there merely because Cather to describe the wonder that is the Western sky; they are there to help us gain insight into Father Latour’s character as he attempts to navigate his way through New Mexico.

(a photo I took this summer of the San Francisco de Asis Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico —to my recollection, it is not specifically mentioned in Death Comes For the Archbishop, but this would have no doubt been quite near Father Latour’s stomping ground)

Below, Father Latour travels again, this time between Acoma and Laguna pueblos:

“Taking leave of Isleta and its priest early in the morning, Father Latour and his guide rode all day through the desert plain west of Albuquerque. It was like a country of dry ashes; no juniper, no rabbit brush, nothing but thickets of withered, dead-looking cactus, and patches of wild pumpkin —the only vegetation that had any vitality. It is a vine, remarkable for its tendency, not to spread and ramble, but to mass and mount. Its long, sharp, arrowshaped leaves, frosted over with prickly silver, are thrust upward and crowded together; the whole rigid, upthrust matted clump of looks less like a plant than like a great colony of grey-green lizards, moving and suddenly arrested by fear” (100).

We have three, quite long and involved sentences about “wild pumpkin,” so there’s obviously some significance here. Yes, Cather is describing the pumpkin vine, but she is also describing Father Latour.

The imagery here is obviously great (“frosted over with prickly silver,” “upthrust matted clump”) as is the distinction between the infinitive verb forms “to spread and ramble” and “to mass and mount.” Both “spread and ramble” have a willy-nilly, arbitrary quality, whereas “mass and mount” indicate something more structural and intentional. This section is only from page 100, but already we know enough about Father Latour’s character to say that he certainly could be described as “intentional.” Of course there’s also the religious double-meaning of “mass and mount,” in noun, rather than verb form!

That last clause, though, after the semicolon, complicates things. What do we do with the phrase “suddenly arrested by fear,” and, if we’re still devoted to our metaphor, how do we apply it to Father Latour? Even just “suddenly arrested” by itself would be easier to tease out. The “by fear” phrase makes things much more opaque and adds an unexpected moment of tension.

I might have an answer, a few pages later, when the chapter ends with Father Latour and his guide, Jacinto, having arrived at Laguna.

Jacinto notes that, in “his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face. There were many kinds of false faces; Father Vaillant’s, for example, was kindly but too vehement. The Bishop [Father Latour] put on none at all. He stood straight and turned to the Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. Jacinto thought this remarkable” (107).

The chapter ends with these lines, and here I see again Father Latour as pumpkin vine. It is not that Father Latour is completely fearless and/or impenetrable. Like the pumpkin vine, he certainly has “vitality,” it’s just very structured. The meeting between Latour (a Catholic bishop from France) and the indigenous people of Laguna pueblo would have, no doubt, been marked by a certain amount of tension thus paralleling the “arrested by fear” moment at the end of the pumpkin vine section.

Throughout, the environment is harsh, perhaps strange. Few things thrive, but those that do, sprawl then form into something resolute, though some wariness rightfully remains.

In my own writing, I strive to make the setting a rich and interesting story element and to infuse it with meaning, but I’ll admit that I can get carried away. I could go on an on describing the trees, and the wind, and the smells, and the sounds, but often I have to go back and ask myself, “Do these descriptions actually add anything to the story?” Once I’ve established mood or something important about the character how often do I have to remind the reader of those elements before it just seems like I’m being self-indulgent regarding how much I like to write about dirt or fur or whatever?

This one little section about Latour does so much, and while Cather is a tough act to follow, it’s essential moments like those she captures so well that I work toward.

Thanks for reading.

xo, sam