My article on creation in Robinson’s fiction will appear in either June or September in Journal of Literature and Theology (though maybe within a month via the on-line version). Here is an extract.
The character of Jack and Ames’ response to him in terms of mystery and the penultimacy of ethics, evinces the Calvinist tendency to take sin and its effects seriously but also strikes against the abuses and caricatures of the Calvinist conception of total depravity. Robinson shows that Calvinist harmatiology need not be insensitive or judgemental. The same could be said of her handling of Calvinist versions of providence and predestination. The difference in views between Ames and his grandfather offer a fruitful tension for exploring modulations of these doctrines. The stakes involved in the forms of life shaped by these modulations become clear to Ames only towards the end of the novel as he realizes he and the town have squandered the hopes for racial justice held by his grandfather’s generation (265-8).
This realisation is occasioned for Ames by his conversation with Jack, so that Robinson suggests that Jack is a sacrament for Ames. Jack is a material means of repentance and salvation for Ames; a place where God is revealed; a demand placed on the old minister; a gift that will require Ames to be fractured and give his life for others. There may be here an inversion of the idea that the sacrament does not depend on the worthiness of the priest. Jack combines the roles of unworthy priest with worthy sacrament, he is offerer and offered, the one through whom the sacrament comes and the sacrament itself.[i] And Ames, himself a minister, struggles to become worthy of the costly gift that is his namesake. Near the end of the novel, Ames speaks to old Boughton of Jack saying, ‘I love him as much as you meant me to.’ (279) The sacraments and the sacramental are instructions in loving others.
In short, creation ex nihilo emerges in Gilead as a way of experiencing the world; a practice of attention towards the material; an addition of significance to each moment, person and thing by charging the immanent with the transcendent; a sense of the continuous possibility of God’s presence and action within creation; a sense of creation coming from and returning to God. Creation exists to be enjoyed, to draw people into love of itself, other people and God. It is a mystery that can coalesce into sacramental density in the least expected of people.[ii] In these ways, Ames lives out the doctrine’s claims about the world’s dependence on God, its goodness and God’s love. The picture in Housekeeping is rather different. A comparison of the theme of creation in Robinson’s first novel throws into relief the differences between the novels and their visions of the world, but highlights their similarity in approaching theology as a practical affair.
Housekeeping takes the Genesis narrative of creation and fall as its main sources of intertextuality in regard to creation, rather than the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Its tone is much darker than its successor’s; the biblical allusions are, if anything, even more frequent. The novel begins, ‘My name is Ruth,’[iii] establishing her as the first person narrator and her story a kind of re-telling of the biblical Ruth and Naomi. Almost immediately the Genesis creation narrative is brought in. Ruth narrates that the land of the town Fingerbone ‘having once belonged to the lake’ (4) is now susceptible to flooding. ‘Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return…The earth will brim, the soil will become mud and then silty water.’ (5) This is ‘water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees…’ (5) ‘It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.’ (9) This distinction between the two lakes, the one corresponding to the formless void (that used to cover the ground where the town now stands), the other to the visible creation (the lake presently next to the town), is crucial for the development of the metaphor in the rest of the novel.
At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains. (9)
There seem to be three main allusions here. The first is to Genesis 1.1-8, ‘In the beginning…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep’;[iv] and then God created light and ‘separated the light from the darkness’; and ‘God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ The second is to the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9 (though there are no rainbows in Housekeeping). The third is to Athanasius’ idea of fallen creation’s tendency to return to non-being.
Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they [humanity] were in the process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore, when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing.[v]
For Athanasius, this alarming tendency is the result of the fall. Robinson is able to evoke this concept by her allusions to the flooding of the town. This is both a menacing return of the dark, foundational waters, the regression to the ‘formless void’ of Genesis 1.2, and, through the Noah/flood allusion, a hint at the problematic human condition, perhaps even at divine punishment for some wrongdoing. Housekeeping can be read as an imaginative filling out of Athanasius’ conception of the fall. The human is threatened with being overwhelmed by nature, represented by the exposure of the population of Fingerbone to being swallowed up in the lake’s waters.[i] This is a feature of human life just as the lake is always present to the town’s awareness. The menace of this situation is made all the more forceful since at the beginning of the novel lake Fingerbone claims the lives of Ruth’s grandfather and mother, the latter by an unexplained suicide that adds to the atmosphere of unease, the sense that things are not quite right.
The notion of the fall is made explicit in Chapter 10, which begins, ‘Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth’, thus effecting a ‘second creation.’ (192) ‘In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves…so Cain was a creator, in the image of his Creator.’ (193) Creation is presented, if not as the work of a Gnostic, bumbling demi-urge, then at least as performed by a less than fully competent divinity. God grieves at the sorrow unleashed on the world, and so ‘let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. One cannot cup one’s hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it…’ (193) The flood, as God’s response to ‘wicked sadness’, leaves much to be desired. The first creation remains distorted by Cain’s second creation. The lake becomes a physical, ever-present reminder of Ruth’s mother’s suicide, a reminder of the kind of world Ruth inhabits, renewed every spring flood. Whereas the flood of Genesis happens only once, Fingerbone is flooded annually. The lake is a kind of metaphysical objective correlative, a physical symbol evoking and representing not only emotion but also larger claims about the precarious nature of the world and the human. The mirroring between the water of the lake and the water of the sky provides a feeling of being bounded above and below by the discomforting presence of the threatening water. There is no escape from the uncertain and damaged human situation. If one leaves Fingerbone and its lake, one cannot escape the sky and the other ‘pools and ponds and ditches’ with their taste of ‘blood and hair’.
[i] Robinson said of Sandpoint, the town where she grew up and on which Fingerbone is based, ‘There was the disproportion between nature on the one hand and human beings on the other. I think in a way that was part of what gave me the feeling of it, of a very powerful other, a very animate other.’ Emily Bobrow, ‘Meeting Marilynne Robinson’, Intelligent Life, Autumn 2008, available at http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/meeting-marilynne-robinson. Accessed 24th August 2010.
[i] This theme may bear exploration in relation to Robinson’s latest novel Home.
[ii] A similar idea emerges in Home in relation to Glory. See Jennifer L. Holberg, ‘“The Courage to See It”: Toward an Understanding of Glory’. Christianity and Literature, vol. 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010), 283-300.
[iii] Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 3. All further references to Housekeeping in this section will be to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
[iv] Biblical quotations are from the NRSV.
[v] Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God (trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. S.Th; London: The Centenary Press, 1944), §4. If this allusion is granted then Housekeeping does depend on creation ex nihilo since Athanasius does, but this is by no means to the forefront of the text.
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