Sunday, October 26, 2014

Gilead

I first became a bit curious about Marilynne Robinson when Maclin Horton's wife posted a couple of quotes from Robinson's books on Facebook. Then a couple of other people mentioned her, so I went to the library and checked out Gilead, her second novel. I was immediately drawn in by the first page, but as I read further I was thinking, "Well, this is a nice book, a good book, an enjoyable book, but not much more than that"--and then I would come across something really lovely or something amazing.

The novel is written in the form of a long letter or journal being written by an old, dying man, John Ames, to his seven year old son. His intention is that the letter is to be read when the son is grown. Set in a small Iowa town, the narrative drifts back and forth in time, now describing physical realities in minute detail, now pondering metaphysical mysteries, now remembering the loves and friendships of the past, each informing and illuminating the other, all interwoven into a panorama of Ames's life.

I'm sure that most if not all of the readers of this post when seeing its title immediately thought of the hymn, There is a Balm in Gilead. It's a beautiful, peaceful, hopeful hymn, There is a balm in Gilead that makes the wounded whole/There is a balm in Gilead that heals the sin-sick soul. It doesn't, however, reflect the text from which it is taken. In a lament that sounds much like a description of our own day, Jeremiah (8:22) has been bemoaning the evil that has overtaken his people, and ends with,
Is there no balm in Gilead, no healer here? Why does not new flesh grow over the wound of the daughter of my people?
While John Ames's life is filled with beauty and consolation, it is far from being free from wounds, both in the past and the present. Ames often mentions his regret that not having ever imagined having an heir, he won't leave much for the boy and his mother; his family's past has its share of tragedy and unresolved relationships; and there is one long, difficult relationship that comes to the forefront of the novel.

When I was briefly discussing Gilead with Maclin, he sent me a link to this post so that I could see the discussion in the combox. He sent it mostly because I had said something about a comment that Robinson had made about Flannery O'Connor (negative) and there is a discussion of this in the combox. However, what really struck me about the comments was the varying opinions of what the novel was about: American slavery and the reactions of the churches, Calvinism and various other theological issues (Ames, his grandfather, father and best friend are preachers), liberal theology, and I get the idea that some people thought it was basically about nothing much. No one mentioned, at least I didn't see where anyone mentioned, what I thought was a strong and recurrent theme in the novel, and that is the relationships between fathers and sons.

As we read through the story of the Ames family, we encounter almost every sort of relationship between a father and son. We meet John's grandfather, father, brother, his best friend Boughton, and Boughton's son Jack, who is John's godson and namesake. Love runs through all these combinations of father and son, yes, but also anger, unforgiveness, and disappointment. And in some sense the culmination of this story of fathers and sons lies, I think, in the relationship, ongoing in the narrative, between the two who are related only by their name and sacrament.

One of the factors that contributes to the success of these stories of fathers and sons, and the novel in general is Robinson's ability to capture a male voice. I have found that it is very unusual for authors to write convincingly in the voice of the opposite sex. Thus with a few exceptions, it's Dickens's men that stand out for me, and Austen's women. Robinson, though, was really able to get into the male character.

Another strength of Gilead is the beautiful images she draws, and this is one of my favorites:
That mention of...joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl weeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to  believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a Protestant novel and so readers will not always agree with the theology found in it, but this was not much of a problem for me. It's a quiet, beautiful novel of time and place, and thought, and familial love. I recommended it to, (read, forced down the throats of) my Catholic women's book club for next month, which is a departure for me because I never recommend anything that isn't Catholic unless it was written by C. S. Lewis, and I would recommended it to everyone.

Well, I have mentioned Maclin a couple of times and that is because I knew I wanted to write something about Gilead and I knew that he would too, and I didn't want to read what he had to say, or any discussion of it on Light on Dark Water before I wrote, so I thought maybe it would be fun to post on the same day, and that's what we decided. So if you are interested in reading what he wrote (He says it will be short.) You can click here. I suspect if there is any discussion, it is far more likely to be there, but if you do want to comment here, remember that before you click on the button to post your comment, you ought to save it first, so that if the comment disappears, you can paste it in another comment box. It usually works the second time around.  Blogger is very annoying nowadays.

AMDG

16 comments:

  1. I had only skimmed that discussion that I sent you the link to, and didn't even think about the absence of mention of the father-son motif. I suppose you shouldn't expect a random combox discussion to focus on anything crucial, but it is a little surprising that it wasn't even mentioned. As far as narrative is concerned, father-son relationships are basically the substance of the book.

    Anyway, excellent reflection. Better than mine--I just described it and quoted a long passage.

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    1. I don't see a whole lot of difference. I almost chose that quote. I just didn't want to use one that long, and I couldn't see any way to make it shorter.

      AMDG

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  2. I went to that link to Dreher's post and read what Robinson said about Flannery O’Connor -- she "offered Flannery O’Connor as an example of a religious writer who fails to describe goodness ('Her prose is beautiful, her imagination appalls me'); evoked the nature of O’Connor’s failure ('There’s a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart').

    Made me wonder if Robinson herself errs on the side of what O'Connor called "tenderness":

    "One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him.... Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."

    It's been quite a while since I've read Gilead, so I need your help here -- is Robinson's "tenderness" tied to the "source of tenderness"?

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    1. I'm put in mind of that well known quotation: "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."

      What effect might this have if you're shouting and your listener has sensitive hearing?

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    2. Oh, I think it was tied. There is quite a bit of scripture, but I can't remember without looking back if any of it was about Jesus. Still, while I love Flannery O'Connor, and I believe she could write far better, and more sacramentally than Marilynne Robinson, I can't really compare their work. I think they were/are both attempting to write about grace, but while FOC does it by letting it shine in the darkness, MR just turns up the light.

      I have heard others say, and wondered myself if FOC fails in a way because as wonderful as her work is, it's only obvious to the initiated. I may be wrong, I would like to be wrong, but I've never talked to anyone or read about anyone who was converted in any way by her work. I think her letters would be more likely to move someone in that way than her fiction.

      MR on the other hand is obviously appealing to a wide audience and even though it seems to me more like an introduction than a call to a deep spirituality, that's where people are. And of course, it's not like there's no profundity there, because there is. And there is a call to faithfulness to the Gospel too.

      You know that quote about the gas chambers is interesting. Walker Percy said something that is very much the same, and I believe both of them probably got that from Hannah Arendt who was writing about the Eichmann trial. I have been wanting to look into that more, but just haven't had time.

      I hope this makes sense. It's so hard for me to write in this tiny box. I can't look back and see where I've been and figure out where I'm going.

      AMDG

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  3. Paul, That's a great observation, and maybe has a bit to do with what I just wrote.

    AMDG

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  4. I believe Arendt starting writing in the New Yorker in 1963 about the Eichmann trial. That comment by O'Connor is in the introduction she wrote for A Memoir of Mary Ann, which was published in 1961. In any case, I'm not sure Arendt's "banality of evil" is talking about the same thing.

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  5. That's interesting because I knew where the O'Connor quote was, and I was looking up the dates on all three comments (Percy, O'Connor, Arendt). I didn't really read Arendt's stuff because I didn't have time, but I found it by looking for gas chambers and compassion--don't know what she said about "banality of evil." It was a preliminary investigation. ;-)

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  6. I see the icon for Heather King's blog in the sidebar is a tiny little picture of Miss O'Connor.

    AMDG

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  7. The whole "banality of evil" thing has been quarreled over since the day she wrote it, I think. I never have been able to get a handle on what she really meant by it. Let me know if you do!

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  8. Well, with such recommendations to go by I went out and bought it today.

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  9. Well, I hope you like it. I will feel responsible for parting you from your money if you don't.

    AMDG

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    1. Only partly responsible: Mac is as much to blame.

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  10. It seems strange that I only bought the book two days ago. The times between the reading of it have been so full. Anyway, I've just finished it, and by chance the very next thing I read was a line from G.K. Chesterton's "Bernard Shaw and America", which by sheer coincidence seems a fair summary of Gilead:

    dealing with elemental and universal things; with water and fire and the watching of stars and winds, the bearing of children, the mourning of the dead, the whole naked and abstract grandeur of the death and life of men.

    The only proviso is that the novel deals more with the raising of children than the bearing of them.

    Just to be clear about the very different context of the quotation, Chesterton is actually taking issue with Shaw about his view of America (the essay is collected in Sidelights on New London and Newer York, but I think was originally written for a newspaper column during his visit to the United States):

    Mr. Shaw, in his amusing confession concerning his habit of abusing America, says with great pride that he has always denounced America as a civilization of villages or a nation of villagers. I am astounded not at the disrespect to America but at the disrespect to villages. [...] So long as the village is merely the ancient human village, it is dealing with elemental and universal things; with water and fire and the watching of stars and winds, the bearing of children, the mourning of the dead, the whole naked and abstract grandeur of the death and life of men. [...] Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw's charge of mere rustic and rudimentary ignorance does not really hit the weak point of America; though it may in a sense hit the weak point of Mr. Bernard Shaw.

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    1. That quote is certainly apropos.

      I have always wanted to live in a village. We have small towns, but I don't think that's quite the same. Come to think of it though, the town where Sally lives is pretty much like a village. It doesn't have a Catholic Church that you can walk to in the middle of it though, and that is what I would like.

      AMDG

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