Notes on ‘On Magnificent Apostates’
A novella rather than a short story (even complete with its own appendix), On Magnificent Apostates is the closest thing this collection has to a crown jewel—what I mean to say is that this story acted as the greatest concentration of any writing powers I may have. Its sprawling characters—including Leocadio, Obadiah, Polly, Estefina, and more—strained my imagination to create and sustain, and their interceding journeys towards destruction quickly became a structural web that I had a difficult time escaping. This was the last story in a blitz from August to late September, extending from The Stench to this, and in many ways it is a culmination of the themes from that first piece.
The Stench frequently alludes to some sort of violent events in the past. Readers generally clued in to American history will pick up on the two main events that indirectly spur Barley Montrose, a native of South Carolina, towards the far-removed New Mexico: the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. On Magnificent Apostates, conversely, elucidates the former of these events, focusing on the Taos Revolt of 1847, which took place during the American occupation of Santa Fe de Nuevo México. Whereas Montrose inhabits what is functionally the closing of the era of manifest destiny, involving the expansionist (and aforementioned) war against the Mexican Republic, the genocide of indigenous peoples throughout the North American continent, and the spread of American people westward. On Magnificent Apostates, then, is the violent birth.
This was one of two stories in the collection that I went into with an outline; that outline changed and grew considerably, mind you, but there certainly was a plan. I underwent this primarily due to On Magnificent Apostates being an epistolary novella, a decision which, in my mind, necessitated some greater degree of planning than simply, in the words of Faulkner, creating the characters and seeing where they go on their own. Though this required me to move away from the more truncated approach I took with Ysidro, it led me to appreciate the general value of outlining and methodical planning in a way that—regardless of how many outlines I was forced to do in school—I had previously not appreciated. Without even the simplest outline, the interceding letters, often involving characters that unknowingly meet each other, could have easily collapsed under its own weight. I’d like to think the resulting product was instead a captivating, if not complex, story.
My main problem with On Magnificent Apostates, outside of anything related to the writing itself, is that I myself could not quite escape it, in spite of four other stories being written after it. To me, it felt like I had already written precisely the story I was searching for in beginning this project to begin with, only a month or so in. It was originally about half the length it sits at now (ten thousand words) and after initially finishing it over about two weeks, I obsessively went back to it over several weeks and expanded it, little by little, until it ballooned in size and plot: I added an entirely new ending for both Obadiah and Leocadio, brought in Marisol from Ysidro, and Wilhelm from The Stench.
In this way, this story was the first to really enforce the connection with the whole of Shall My West Hurt Me?.
