Black Robe
Breslin, John R.
The savage mission BLACK BOBE Brian Moore Dutton, $15.95, 241 pp. John R. Breslln SHORTLY AFTER finishing Brian Moore's latest novel, I began rereading, for a course I teach in international...
...not before one outraged Savage tomahawks the paralyzed Jesuit...
...For all their foul language and cruelty, the Indians in the novel possess a dignity and a generosity that go far to justify their feeling of moral superiority to the greedy traders and the insensitive missionaries...
...Laforgue is left alone with the classic missionary dilemma: Is the Indians' superstition and fear of death sufficient grounds to justify a mass baptism...
...in this regard, Moore comes closer to Achebe, whose detailed picture of pre-colonial Ibo culture ironically undercuts the "civilizing" goals of the British missionaries...
...The Huron chief counters Laforgue's scruples about baptism without instruction with a catechism of his own: "I ask you now, are you our enemy...
...After capture and torture by the Iroquois, helped along by Daniel and Annuka, Laforgue finally reaches bis destination only to find the Huron village riddled with fever, one of the Jesuits dead, and the other half-paralyzed with a stroke...
...Then baptize us...
...pious and impious stereotypes can thus be retired to the lumber room of history...
...As the novel opens Laforgue nervously awaits the outcome of a parley between Champlain and the local Jesuit superior on whether to send him deep into the interior of Canada to replace another Jesuit missionary who is thought to have died...
...it is the solemn vow, the effort to cling to an absolute of conscience in the face of 17 May 1985: 313 intolerable physical pain, spiritual despair, and failure that unites Moore's Father Paul Laforgue with Endo's Father Sebastian Rodrigues...
...And does his own spiritual aridity and near despair disqualify him as a minister of God's mercy...
...Do you love us...
...Meanwhile, Daniel has determined to marry the girl at any cost, but he reckons without the Savages' abhorrence of such a match, coupled with their decidedly casual attitude toward premarital chastity...
...For Laforgue soon discovers Daniel's nightly trysts with Annuka on the journey, but his own sexual excitement in viewing their lovemaking shames him deeply, undermining his sense of moral authority over the boy...
...What the Irishman, the Nigerian, and the Japanese all have in common, in addition to being talented and successful contemporary novelists is a fascination with that particular kind of conflict that arises when two cultures with little understanding of one another come into sharp and often fatal contact...
...Laforgue baptizes to express his desire to love the "Savages" with whom he will spend his life...
...Yes...
...What these novelists have discovered, of course, is that such a world view invests human life with an extraordinary drama, for an eternal choice of heaven or hell can turn on the most private thought or action...
...Moore's conviction here, and in Catholics, coincides with Endo's: loving our neighbor is more important than converting him, a nostrum dangerously close to a bland humanitarianism unless it emerges, as it does for the characters in these novels, from the crucible of passionate commitment and intense suffering...
...More specifically, they see the nub of that conflict as essentially religious...
...Rodrigues apostasizes to save others from cruel torments...
...It is precisely here that Brian Moore begins...
...Like the renegade abbot at the end of Moore's earlier novel, Catholics, Laforgue resolves the dilemma not on the basis of theological abstraction, but in response to the Indians' plea for help...
...Spare them, 0 Lord...
...A week or so later arrived for review a collection of newly translated stories by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese novelist who has written movingly, especially in Silence, about the fortunes — mainly misfortunes — of early Christian missionaries to his country...
...No...
...He desperately wants to go, even concealing an ear infection lest he be turned down...
...It is thus no accident that all the novels are historical, set in a time when religion maintained its public and unquestioned character and when, for the Christian missionaries, the salvation of souls took precedence over every other consideration, including their own physical well-being and that of the people they came to evangelize...
...These questions sent Moore hunting through historical records and anthropological research to try to understand how "Black Robe" and "Savage" (their names for one another) became mired in a mutual misunderstanding that caused the failure of the Jesuit mission and the eventual conquest of the Hurons by their enemies the Iroquois...
...His companion is to be a young man named Daniel, a seventeenth-century "Jesuit Volunteer" with a secret of his own...
...Thus is set one of the two basic conflicts of the novel...
...Of the two novels and the two priests, I found Endo's more compelling, perhaps because the stakes seemed higher and the interior drama richer in detail...
...But even deeper for the novelist than the truth of history is the truth of fiction...
...And I grieve now for I am leaving it...
...What would lead someone to make such a vow, and what might be its consequences...
...But paradoxically Moore, unlike Endo, attempts to present sympathetically the world view of the people the missionaries have come to convert...
...If you have come here to change us, you are stupid...
...This world is a cruel place, but it is the sunlight...
...In our relativized, secularized culture, it takes a considerable act of imagination to conjure up a world in which the absolutes of faith compelled universal and unquestioning assent, if not always consonant action...
...And as he does so, Laforgue finds himself capable finally of an authentic prayer: "Spare them...
...John R. Breslln SHORTLY AFTER finishing Brian Moore's latest novel, I began rereading, for a course I teach in international fiction, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, his first and most famous novel about the arrival of British colonialism in Nigeria and the subsequent breakdown of the native culture...
...Daniel had planned to become a Jesuit himself, but has recently become sexually infatuated with Annuka, the daughter of one of the Algonquin guides who have agreed to accompany the missionaries on the most difficult part of their journey...
...The girl's father, Chomina, puts it most succinctly to Laforgue shortly before he dies: "It is because you Normans are deaf and blind that you think this world is a world of darkness and the world of the dead is a world of light...
...What intrigued him about the French missionaries to Canada was the story of one Jesuit who, in the face of his utter revulsion before the realities of life among the Hurons, "bound himself," in the historian Parkman's words, "by a solemn vow to remain in Canada to the day of his death...
...We who can hear the forest and the river's warnings, we who speak with the animals and the fish and respect their bones, we know that it is not the truth...
...A brief (and convenient) eclipse of the sun combined with the sudden (equally handy) recovery of several Christian villagers convince the Hurons to accept the "water sorcery" of baptism, but...
...But Moore's Black Robe has the merit of taking seriously the ambiguities both of the Native American culture and of the missionary impulse...
...The novel's other major tension is also cultural, but this one cuts much more deeply since it involves a conflict of world views that makes Black Robe and Savage incomprehensible to one another...
...We know the truth...
...At the end of the novel, this ideological divide threatens to swallow up Laforgue' s own soul...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 10
