‘Trying to Say What Was True’: Language, Divinity, Difference in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Abstract

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is the journal of elderly minister John Ames, written to the seven-year-old son that he knows he will never live to see grow up. Though quite traditional in his conception of God, Ames nevertheless embraces progressive and even atheistic ideas regarding the divine. This article contends that Gilead resists being read strictly as an exploration of language's failure to express the transcendence of divinity, or, conversely, solely as an articulation of language's cryptic capacity to enact such inability. Instead, it seeks to be read as the confluence of these two approaches. In other words, Robinson's novel troubles the distinction between language's ability and inability to express by formulating it as in/expressibility, as the paradoxical simultaneity of the two that makes divinity discernible as difference. This article thus investigates the markedly unorthodox notion of divinity offered in Gilead and its broader implications for theological discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Marilynne Robinson
• Gilead
• language
• divinity
• difference

Notes

1 Thomas Schaub, ‘An Interview with Marilynne Robinson,’ Contemporary Literature 35:2 (1994): 235.

2 Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 19.

3 Rebecca M. Painter, ‘Further Thoughts on A Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, On Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson,’ Christianity and Literature 58:3 (2009): 488.

4 Michael Vander Weele, ‘Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the Difficult Gift of Human Exchange,’ Christianity and Literature 59:2 (2010): 234.

5 Thomas Meaney, ‘In God's Creation,’ review of Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Commentary, ‘Books in Review’ (June 2005): 83.

6 Jennifer L. Holberg, ‘“The Courage to See It”: Toward an Understanding of Glory,’ Christianity and Literature 59:2 (2010): 283.

7 Though Robinson has written many essays addressing a variety of theological issues, Amy Hungerford asserts that the author ‘presents her most nuanced considerations […] of religious life in fiction’ (Hungerford loc. 2406–407).

8 R. Scott LaMascus, ‘Toward a Dialogue on Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home,’ Christianity and Literature 59:2 (2010): 199.

9 Rebecca M. Painter, ‘Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson's Fiction,’ Christianity and Literature 59:2 (2010): 325.

10 Andrew Brower Latz, ‘Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson,’ Literature & Theology 25:3 (2011): 285.

11 Christopher Douglas, ‘Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44:3 (2011): 345.

12 Kristin King maintains that, for Robinson, language necessarily bears with, or within, it ‘the specter of […] unfaithfulness to the re-presentation of origins,’ contending that words are haunted by their own inability to fully express or to faithfully re-present (King 567).

13 Amy Hungerford contends that Robinson ‘espouse[s], and write[s] about, belief that is anything but contentless' (Hungerford loc. 1986–90), arguing that her belief is not a ‘faith in faith’ (Hungerford loc. 514–17), like that which she argues constitutes ‘postmodern theology,’ but a faith in a positive, ontotheological God. She is, in this sense, ‘an avowed and outspoken proponent of mainline liberal Protestantism’ (Hungerford loc. 2052–53). While such a description is to some extent accurate, I argue that Robinson's unique articulation of faith itself in her fiction nevertheless makes apparent a notion of divine difference.

14 Betty Mensch, ‘Jonathan Edwards, Gilead, and the Problem of “Tradition”,’ review of Jonathan Edwards: A Life, by George M. Marsden, and Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, Journal of Law & Religion 31:2 (2005–2006): 239.

15 Lisa M. Siefker Bailey, ‘Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,’ Christianity and Literature 59:2 (2010): 266.

16 Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Kindle edition. Loc. 2107.

17 In the epigraph to her article on grace in Robinson's fiction, Painter quotes the author concerning religious certainty: ‘There is something about certainty that makes Christianity unchristian … I have cultivated uncertainty, which I consider a form of reverence’ (Painter 321).

18 Robinson herself articulates a clear conception of language's failure to represent, not only in Gilead and her other novels, but in her diverse scholarly works as well. For example, in an interview with Schaub, she states that her interest in transcendentalist writers, such as Emerson, is born in part from their attempts to draw upon ‘all the resources of language as a method of comprehension on the largest scale,’ while ‘absolutely insisting that [it] is not an appropriate tool’ (qtd. in Schaub 241). This paradoxical tension between language's inability to express and its necessity infuses Gilead and offers a notion of divinity as difference.

19 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 60.

20 King notes a similar paradox underlying Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, of a quest for ‘wholeness' through the inherently open or incomplete structure of language, which she terms a ‘narrative of desire’ (King 566). According to King, this ‘narrative’ leads to a ‘liberating flux,’ a liminal space or play in language that frees it and, by extension, humanity from the static nature of representational thought (King 566).

21 Hungerford proposes that ‘What one observer might see as the gap in a person's logic [between ‘the notion of freely chosen belief’ and ‘the modes of submission and mediation this version of Christianity embraces'], then, I see as a whole world of belief, belief in the nonsemantic powers of language. This is a world where religion and literature collaborate’ (Hungerford loc. 172–78). She proposes that the ambiguity implied by the apparent paradoxes of Western religions, constitute a ‘nonsemantic,’ or textual, power in which one can place one's faith. While I agree in some sense, I propose that the nonsemantic powers of language are not the objects of belief, but rather that which, by ensuring ambiguity or uncertainty, makes genuine belief, or faith, possible. To be clear, this belief is genuine not due to the verifiable authenticity of its object, but rather in the sense that it is entirely distinct from certainty.

22 James Woods proposes that, for Robinson, ‘silence is itself a quality’ and that in her novel, ‘the space around words may be full of noises,’ suggesting that the openings in and around Robinson's language are not fruitless or empty, but are instead clamouring with creativity and consequence (Woods n.p.).

23 Mensch notes that, according to the Bible, the town of Gilead itself has paradoxical connotations, as at once a ‘source of refuge’ and an ‘object of prophetic condemnation,’ (see Jeremiah 46:11–12, among others) (Mensch 237). Thus it seems that Gilead the town and Gilead the novel can both be thought to have complex and contradictory natures, pharmakonic structures, at once positive and negative, remedy and poison. Derrida employs the pharmakon to describe, amongst other notions, the double bind of language, whose inability to represent is simultaneously its capacity to express.

24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 265.

25 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life,’ in Two Regimes of Madness (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 392.

26 Christopher Liese, ‘‘That Little Incandescence’: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,’ Studies in the Novel 41:3 (2009): 362.

27 Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 76.

28 In ‘Darwinism,’ Robinson briefly describes her conception of the divine, one drawn directly from the creation narrative of Genesis, as ‘in no sense limited or local,’ implying a dynamic, rather than stable, notion of divinity (Robinson, The Death of Adam, 38). Liese observers a similarly destabilising gesture in Gilead, drawing a parallel between Mark C. Taylor's project in After God, in which he thinks religion ‘not as a stable entity at all but one that is fluid and—quite the opposite—actively destabilising,’ and Robinson's effort to read the Puritan tradition ‘against itself’ (Liese 350). He argues that, in Gilead, the author thinks religion as ‘subject to the feedback loops and modifications of all systems' (Liese 350), providing an opening in which the incomprehensible paradoxes of divinity are made legible. Robinson's innovative and complex approach to theology, texts, and language reveal all three to be, in Liese's words, ‘dynamic, not static,’ subverting our conventional notions of them and opening them to re-thinking and renewal (Liese 351).

29 Likewise, King asserts that Robinson's novel Housekeeping operates on two levels, one linguistic and one semiotic, invested as much in ‘the spaces between’ words, or the difference inherent to them, as how they are used and what they can do (King 569). These spaces between and within words simultaneously demonstrate language's inability to represent—what King terms ‘the powerlessness of language to recover presences' (King 569)—and ‘affirm multiplicity and indeterminacy’ (King 570). Thus, Robinson's interest in the spaces between words should not be read as a critique of the shortcomings of language, but rather an affirmation of its complex and indeterminate nature, of its manifold meanings and its open structure.

30 Laura E. Tanner, ‘“Looking Back From the Grave”: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,’ Contemporary Literature 48:2 (2007): 227.

31 According to Hungerford, ‘nonsemantic aspects of language’ are those aspects that remain ‘distinct from and sometimes other to meaning,’ that cannot be reduced to linguistic denotation (Hungerford loc. 131–32).

32 Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), Kindle edition, Loc. 182–85.

33 Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Kindle edition, Loc. 100–102.