The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson

Framing Robinson’s fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson’s novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson’s novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. The signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson’s narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), and the prohibition of everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson’s novels within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson’s fiction.

“We Are Not Aliens in the Universe”

Marilynne Robinson, in her novels and essays, sets out to retrieve a foundational strain of religious experience, one that has been minimized or even repressed in most branches of the Protestant tradition. This is what, following Paul Ricœur, American theologian David Tracy calls “the manifestation orientation” in religious expression. Building on Tracy’s distinction between “manifestation and proclamation” within Christianity, I identify and analyze a shift of emphasis from the “proclamation orientation” of Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, with its presentation of human existence as radically homeless and alienated, to “manifestation” in Robinson’s later work. In the Gilead novels, while preserving the proclamation orientation of Protestantism through an indictment of social injustice, she corrects the one-sided Protestant emphasis on divine transcendence and human sin, affirming a fundamental “at-home-ness” (Tracy) in the universe. Through her fictional Protestant minister and a creative rereading of classical Protestant theologians, Robinson offers an imaginative alternative to Weberian accounts of Protestant spirituality.

Edwards’s Place and Importance in Anglo-American Literature

Long recognized as foundational contributions to British American belles lettres, the works of Jonathan Edwards influenced later writers and shaped narratives of American literary history. Edwards appears in the first descriptions of early American literature, and he continues to figure prominently in anthologies and histories of American writing today. This essay emphasizes major authors—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to Robert Lowell, to Marilynne Robinson—who have acknowledged his influence. The nature of that influence varies, for every generation creates a distinctive version of Edwards. Advancing a liberal vision of Christianity, Stowe and Holmes reacted against Edwards’s alleged theological rigidity and spiritual cruelty. Lowell wrote poems reflecting the Edwardsean revival of the mid-twentieth century and bearing the imprint of the New Criticism. And in recent years, Robinson has staked a claim as a latter-day Edwardsean, embracing his intellectual legacy as an inspiration and resource for her celebrated novels.

The Question of Justice in the Novel of Consciousness

Marilynne Robinson’s achievement in the third novel of the Iowa trilogy can be seen more clearly if measured against Erich Auerbach’s ambivalence about the novel of consciousness. Using Auerbach’s final chapter of Mimesis, on Virginia Woolf, as the horizon for Robinson’s work clarifies two points: Robinson’s work should be viewed within a novel-of-consciousness tradition that is as much European as American; and Robinson’s religious interests turn that tradition toward a more anthropological concern with the complexity of consciousness framed by the concern for justice. While Nicholas Damas’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “The New Fiction of Solitude” (April 2016), claimed that much new fiction “imagines teaching us how to be separate” and Walter Benjamin already wrote at mid-century that “the ability to exchange experiences” disappeared sometime after World War I, in Lila it is as if Marilynne Robinson set out to show both the difficulty and the possibilities of such exchange.

Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stevens, and Louis Althusser in the Post/Secular Wilderness: Generosity, Jérémiade, and the Aesthetic Effect

In Restless Secularism (2017), Matthew Mutter points out that Wallace Stevens described three related techniques that could be used to attempt to purge secular life of its religious residue: adaptation, substitution, and elimination. Marilynne Robinson pushes back against such secularizing strategies by employing three related techniques of her own: negotiation, grafting, and invitation. She does so to attempt to bridge the gap between religious and humanistic perspectives and—in the process—mounts a spirited defense of religious faith and practice. Robinson uses a fourth technique as well: jérémiade. In its usual sacred form, jérémiade is a lamentation that denounces self-righteousness, religious hypocrisy, and social injustice. Much of what Robinson says about the Christian Right is essentially jérémiade. Robinson’s critique of parascientists is jérémiade as well, although its grounding assumptions are secular rather than sacred. While Robinson’s jérémiades against the Christian Right and against parascientists are effective in isolation, in aggregate they sometimes undercut her more generous and inclusive attempts at negotiation, grafting, and invitation. This may be because Robinson’s essays do not undergo the moderating influence of what Louis Althusser called the aesthetic effect of art, which in Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) helps counterbalance the flashes of anger and tendencies toward judgement that periodically surface elsewhere in Robinson’s work. Taking into account the presence—or absence—of the aesthetic effect in Robinson’s work helps explain the sometimes startling differences between Robinson’s fiction and nonfiction and helps provides a new perspective from which to rethink two of the most influential postsecular readings of Robinson’s work to date: Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief (2010) and Christopher Douglas’s If God Meant to Interfere (2016).

Hva er det med Gilead? Det bibelske navnet Gilead i moderne romaner

Two famous contemporary novelists, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and the American writer Marilynne Robinson, both use the biblical name Gilead in their novels. Atwood names the dystopian republic in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testament (2019) Gilead, and Robinson uses Gilead both as title for her 2004 novel as well as a name for the little Midwestern town depicted there. Why Gilead? What possible meaning is gained in these modern texts by using this biblical name? To try to answer these questions the article first investigates texts associated with the toponym Gilead in the Hebrew Bible to elucidate possible meaning attached to it there, and secondly the meaning attached to Gilead in the novels. Inspirational for this investigation is the new subject curriculum for KRLE in Fagfornyelsen 2020 where learning outcome is described in very general terms. This means that for instance future Norwegian students’ biblical knowledge may be unequal throughout the country and most likely weaker than at present. Does that matter when it comes to appreciating such novels as the ones discussed here?