Robinson: Love, Sympathy, Identification

Thursday

Few new novels in recent years have hit me as hard as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and I’ve been equally impressed with Lila and Home. Now, with a New York Review of Books Review of the recently released Jack­—perhaps the last book in what has become a tetralogy—I have a clearer sense of why. Robinson invests her characters with a deep humanity.

In an essay discussing literature’s civic virtues, philosopher Martha Nussbaum identifies this as literature’s great gift:

[T]he great contribution literature has to make to the life of the citizen is its ability to wrest from our frequently obtuse and blunted imaginations an acknowledgement of those who are other than ourselves, both in concrete circumstances and even in thought and emotion. As Ellison put it, a work of fiction may contribute “to defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience.” This contribution makes it a key element in higher education.

In her review, Hermione Lee uses Robinson’s own words to make a similar point. Creating a character is a way of getting at the “comprehensible complexity—spiritual, intellectually, and emotional—of anyone we encounter.” Lee says that Robinson draws upon Shakespeare, Puritan writings, and American authors such as Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens to capture the sacred selfhood of each individual. As Robinson puts it, with these writers she shares

a fascination with the commonest elements of life as they are mediated and entertained by perception and reflection…. Sacredness is realized in the act of attention…. The exalted mind could understand the ordinary as visionary.

Lee observes,

Clearly this is her own model for writing fiction. She says that she is exploring “intuition.” She wants to “simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting.” Fiction for her is “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.” She is trying to get as close as she can to the soul of an imagined human being, who becomes real to her, and to us, in the process. She thinks of character as having “a palette or a music,” “a kind of coherency of tone and manner…a repertory of behavior.” She works “from a sense of the experience of human presence,” without passing judgment. Hence the slow deliberation of the narratives and the minute internal details of the workings of a mind. 

Here’s a sample from Gilead. The narrator is a minister who, knowing he is dying, is writing a letter that his infant son will one day be able to read when his father is long gone. I love John Ames’s open-hearted mediation upon the world:

I really can’t tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

When they saw me coming, of course the joking stopped, but I could see they were still laughing to themselves, thinking what the old preacher almost heard them say.

I felt like telling them, I appreciate a joke as much as anybody. There have been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to say that. But it’s not a thing people are willing to accept. They want you to be a little bit apart. I felt like saying, I’m a dying man, and I won’t have so many more occasions to laugh, in this world at least. But that would just make them serious and polite, I suppose. I’m keeping my condition a secret as long as I can. For a dying man I feel pretty good, and that is a blessing. Of course your mother knows about it. She said if I feel good, maybe the doctor is wrong. But at my age there’s a limit to how wrong he can be.

That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect a find it, either.

Life seems immeasurably rich when one is in the grip of one of Robinson’s characters.