Marilynne Robinson interviewed

About her new book which is out soon.

Marilynne Robinson article

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’.

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[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.

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[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.

 

Robinson on the Radio

An excellent radio show on Robinson here, that you can listen to or read. The more you know the better her novels become. While I’m on the subject I may as well add that one of my hopes in life is that Robinson writes at least one more novel before either she or I die, though the more the better. I also think someone should collect all her occasional pieces and sermons into one volume.

Oh. My. Word.

Marilynne Robinson is going to teach people how to write theology for a wider audience. Oh to be a tenured lecturer.

Gilead 2

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOLIERS

 Early on in Gilead we discover that Jack Boughton was named John Ames Boughton in honour of John Ames, Boughton’s best friend. Ames didn’t know this until the moment he was about to baptise the boy (he’d be told a different name) and so the shock distracted him from feeling the blessing he normally does feel when baptising and which is one of the most important parts of the ministry to him. Boughton seems to be offering his son as son to Ames, a kind of surrogate son, since Ames has no wife (or rather, did, and had a daughter, but they both died shortly after childbirth). Ames does not really want this gesture, and Jack is more of the prodigal son, always in mischief, often alone, and especially playing tricks on Ames, often with a streak of meanness. It is that meanness that renders him a mystery to Ames, who realises he cannot understand Jack, and so tries not to judge him, but finds this difficult, knowing all the bad he’s gotten up to.

Chief among these bad deeds is fathering a child with a poor and uneducated young woman and then abandoning them both to a terrible home. He leaves his car (how can he afford it? His father can’t afford one) with his father and tells him about the child. Ames even wonders if that’s because he knew his family would take care of the child somewhat and thereby prevent him from some of the trouble he might have encountered from the family of the aggrieved young woman.

Yet Jack is his families most beloved, especially his father’s. If Boughton consistently acts as the father figure in the prodigal son – prodigious in love and forgiveness – Jack is Ames’ occasion to struggles at the limits of his ability to love, to refrain from judgement. He does not take the figure of the elder brother, or at least, most of the time. There are feelings of resentment and condemnation, but never given free reign.

Imagine then Ames’ fear as he witnesses the way in which his normally taciturn wife speaks freely with Jack and the way they seem at ease with each other when they seldom are with others. This is part of their shared background in vice about which we are never directly told. She has changed, he, it seems, has not. Only very gradually does Ames realise that he fears Jack will take his place as husband and father when he dies. And at this point Boughton comes over to his house (to underline the point since he can barely walk to his porch) to indirectly warn him that he thinks Jack may have precisely that in mind.

What follows as Ames wrestles with himself is the most phenomenal, almost immoral, act of grace and renunciation. Later in the novel Ames recalls that ‘salvation’ includes the notions of health and healing and restoration, so it is with echoes of Paul’s and Moses’ willingness to renounce their salvation for the sake of the people of God that Ames decides that if his wife comes to love Jack in the way Ames loves his wife then he is happy for them both, for who knows what good may come from such an experience of grace. This is rendered all the more powerful because to explain it Ames recounts how he fell in love with his wife, the way it nearly undid him, the way in which he now sees an ineffable beauty in his wife and child though this is hidden from peoples’ ordinary eyes. In expressing just how much his wife and child mean to him, we see just how much he is renouncing in being willing to hand them over to a disreputable man if his wife is falling in love with Jack.

After this resolution Jack tells Ames he has a wife and child, but she is ‘coloured’, and this has caused them great difficulty in St. Louis where they live because marriage or co-habitation of mixed colours are prohibited and socially scorned. So Jack was not after all preying on Ames’ wife, but simply at ease with her as with so few other people, and perhaps she with him. And Jack is back in Gilead because he thinks perhaps he can get work and bring his family there. Here we see the relevance of the story of Ames’ grandfather, who fought against slavery in the civil war, and of Gilead’s history as being created as a way-station precisely for anti-slavery fighters. Jack wants to know if Boughton could know about his wife and child without dying. Ames can, but he’s not sure if Boughton could, though he suspects so. This ties in with two other themes. First, Ames is more progressive due to his knowledge of the town’s history. His brother and father leave and urge him to leave the town as being parochial and unworthy of effort, but by knowing why the town was created and what happened (for instance, that there used to be a coloured church there though no longer, though before leaving they gave their (peace?) lilies to Ames), Ames can see the value of the town and its people, as well as being less racist. Only with knowledge of the past can the future be hopefully constructed.

The second theme is Ames’ claim that his wild, and wildly holy, grandfather’s holiness has rubbed off on him. Again history is powerfully present, the more so for being acknowledged. And though earlier in the narrative Ames seems uncomfortable with his grandfather, near the end he begins to realise that his grandfather’s message was true. The town is perishing because it hasn’t recognised its purpose (of racial reconciliation). Or, in the theological language of his grandfather, the town is being punished for not seeing and obeying the purposes of the Lord.

The father of Jack’s wife, Della, also a minister, mistakenly thinks Jack descended from Ames’ grandfather because of the name sharing. Jack doesn’t disabuse him of this idea, thinking it will redound to his credit. So Jack in fact claims sonship to Ames, confirming his real father’s original desire and intention. Jack recounts this to Ames, as part of his ‘confession’ of his story to the old minister. In understanding Jack’s plight, Ames finally comes to love and forgive and understand Jack, and to accept him as a son. Then, shortly after, just before Jack leaves, Ames expresses his wish to bless Jack. And so Ames finally blesses him in the way he so loves, in the way that is near the core of his conception of the ministerial vocation, feeling the grace of God in the one he is touching. This has echoes of Irenaeus’ doctrine of recapitulation, as Ames utters not only the standard benediction from Numbers (standard does not mean inappropriate or unfeeling) but also adds his own personal prayer, summing up Jack’s life as ‘beloved son and brother and husband and father.’ It is as if Ames wants to heal his life so far, restore him from his weariness, strengthen him for the journey ahead. Jack leaves on the bus and we have no idea whether the blessing makes any difference to his life, as we cannot know whether his baptism did.

So at the end of the novel there is no easy resolution, no cheap grace. Jack has left his father just as he is dying and the family converging on the house. Only Ames knows that he has finally heard from his wife after waiting for months, only Ames knows how difficult it would be to be in the house full of families but not be able to share his own. So Jack, for good reasons, is committing what seems his worst act so far. Yet perhaps in doing so he can finally live with his wife and child. Gilead has forgotten its roots and cannot be the home Jack hoped for; it costs Jack a great deal to relinquish that hope. Ames has the knowledge to resolve him but not the permission to tell. Ames finally loves Jack as Boughton meant him to, but Boughton is no longer conscious and so will never know the kinship finally established between his most beloved friend and son. Such resolution as is found is a small and fragmentary grace.

‘Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?’

Gilead §1

Occasional posts on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead will appear for the next little while. Please discuss.

Gilead risks boredom in two ways.

1) There is very little change in register. Occasionally there is some dialogue, but it is all in the same dialect. Often dialogue is summarised rather than written. This leaves Robinson with only the voice of Ames in written form, it is not even as immediate as, say, The Catcher in the Rye, which uses language closer to speech (and youthful slang at that). It is the written meditations of an old man.

2) The goodness of Ames and the lack of dramatic events. This is part of Robinson’s ethos as a writer; she thinks that paying attention to everyday life is an important act and a valid topic for art; she is similarly somewhat against “slash and burn” approaches. (See her interview).

I think this risks boredom because we are used to more dramatic narratives. Think of Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth, Vernon God Little (mostly a soliloquy but with far more dialogue and ‘action’ and, as with Catcher, much depends on the dialect) or Atomised (a novel of ideas but with plenty of dialogue and graphic sex). The latter three all deploy humour too, but Robinson rarely does. Those of us who think the novel succeeds will think she has proven her point that a life well lived is a worthy topic. What is gained by this approach? Well, partly that fact, the significance of a normal, good, small town life. I think that her own exercise of attention is something the reader has to duplicate in order to stay with the novel, and that is a useful discipline to learn. Furthermore, she presents a compassionate, gracious, even merciful, attention. Although Ames occasionally offers the lessons of his experience to his son, the novel never feels didactic. Yet the whole posture of narration draws us into Robinson’s gracious attention so that reading it sympathetically is a (beneficial) morally forming experience.