『주교에게 죽음이 오다』: 황야와 낙원의 경계 넘기

Crossing the Wilderness and the Paradise in Death Comes for the Archbishop

This paper aims at emphasizing a mode of diverse interpretations that do not privilege Christian culture over any pagan’ culture. In order to see the full range of pagan’s ahistorical land, Cather wants to learn to read the layers of New World’s landscape such as the pagan and the Christian, experiencing an ahistorical nature, a land before landscaping. Ironically though the Bishop Latour’s journey into a cave seems to be an exile and a loss, it enables him to dwell in the realm of origins. The cave under the Christian landscape becomes a site wherein the New World of America reveals its significantly ancient roots, creating the shapes of redemption out of the vast inimical Christian world. The cave is the place where the pagan and the Christian are melded, as Latour’s vertigo is caused by hearing the underground river. Accordingly his experience in cave attests not to wilderness and exile but to paradise and redemption. As Latour nears death, more and more life seems to him mystic’s cosmic consciousness rather than an experience of the ego. His bliss derives not from a sense of the absolute indestructibility of the self but from a sense of identification with the universe. The Bishop seems to aggrandize the precisely cosmic consciousness opposed to the state of the ego on the Christian religion.