True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  There is still a shadowy sense that freedom’s rivals are lurking nearby, requiring vigilance to be fended off. Indeed, it is part of the culture’s mythology of itself, its sense of having a moral purpose, that the enemies of LGBT rights and women’s rights remain potent, and are often located in convenient symbolic form in the churches. But for practical purposes, most of the culture’s alarms and disquiets are generated by its own success rather than by a real vulnerability to reversal by antique scolds. There is a widespread uneasiness – but a dim one, not organised into axiom or mythology – over the consequences of the morally atomised society. Unresponsive the culture may be to traditional authority figures, but it is becoming clear that it is extremely susceptible to manipulation by expert marketing, guided by the new insights of neuroscience into the predictable bases of our behaviour, and ever more finely grained data. People are starting to wonder how individual our individualism actually is, given that the consensual way to express it is through shopping choices. In the same way, the rather Rousseau-ish picture of inherent human goodness on which the hedonic culture rests, with its brittle insistence that our desires must be harmless unless corrupted by outside agencies, generates anxiety in all the very frequent circumstances of human life where that isn’t quite clear. Some of the tools of moral self-knowledge have gone missing, and the absence makes itself felt. Not to know that finding yourself in the wrong is compatible with self-respect is very tiring. Panic is never far away, as demonstrated whenever a particularly barbaric news story brings to the surface the suspicion that all this me-for-myself-alone-and-don’t-you-dare-to-judge-me stuff may not be enough to maintain a social fabric. It’s not that people crave the return of cultural authority, at all; it’s much more that they are agitated by the vacuum where larger-than-individual meaning used to be. They mourn the disappearance of, they worry about the absence of, the social, the collective, the shared. They miss shared causes, shared hopes, grand narratives providing maps on which the individual could locate their particular life. At the same time, they are nervously afraid that to share might mean to be coerced.

  Not much is to be hoped for from politics, the culture’s conventional wisdom declares. The withdrawal of ideology from British politics rid it, for twenty years, of momentous choices, clear divisions between seriously dissimilar visions of the good, and replaced them with a technocratic centrism. It became a cynical commonplace to hold that all politicians are corrupt, and are only pursuing their own self-interest in the public domain, just as the rest of us do in the private one. This may be changing. One of the notable developments of the last two years has been the startlingly instant waves of support for causes that do seem to offer significant choices, and new grand narratives: the election of Jeremy Corbyn, Scottish independence, Brexit. There is certainly fuel available for a renewed politics, not least in the deep, deep generational divide of contemporary Britain. Older people who were carried to prosperity by rising property prices can therefore sign up to the hedonic project of a happiness only one social atom wide without too much overt cognitive friction. The young, stranded in bad jobs, renting forever, on the sharp end of inequality, live the hedonic project too, because that’s the inherited condition of the culture, but without much ease or optimism; resentfully.

  But these are disputes between generations that at least share a set of cultural reference points. Further back in time, beyond the great behavioural shifts of the 1960s–80s, the past begins to grow unintelligible to contemporary Britain, or at least very much harder to understand. And yet it is frequently to this further past that the culture reaches, in a frantic variety of ways, in the search for shared meaning.

  Take the newly revivified rituals surrounding the commemoration of the British war dead. As someone who was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was an undramatic commonplace that most of the older men you passed in the street were veterans of the Second World War, I remember Remembrance Day being scarcely celebrated. There were far fewer poppies, the two minutes’ silence was something you could read about in school history books, and there was a general sense of the world wars receding, in time with the receding of private memories of them. Now (not coincidentally) that the First World War has entirely passed out of living memory, and the Second World War nearly has, we memorialise the wars like crazy, in a profusion of public forms. Larger crowds gather round war memorials to people we don’t (individually) remember than did in the decades when the British Legion stood there in their berets, mourning remembered, specific friends and comrades. The new wars of New Labour provide part of the cause, giving us new dead to mourn, and new Heroes to be Helped, with a corresponding need to find ways to honour sacrifice irrespective of the new wars’ justifications. For this, the First World War can provide a useful context. But most people these days standing serious-faced on 11 November wearing their poppies don’t know any currently serving soldiers either. They’re there to do some imaginative business on their own account. They’re there to participate in a symbolic performance of national continuity, centred round the armed forces as the institution in some ways least corroded by our scepticism. They’re there to assert that they are joined to previous generations’ story of collective sacrifice: despite the fact – because of the fact – that little in their daily experience bears it out.

  The same appetite for connection despite and because of disconnection manifests itself over and over again. We are fascinated by the past, puzzled by the past, horrified by the past; we are unable to look away. The stories we tell ourselves at the moment have an avidly historical bent, and I say this as someone who has just themselves published a historical novel. The lawns of twenty-first-century British culture are littered with time machines, dramatised and filmed, broadcast and written, all offering to transport us (but with the option of instant return) out of Now and into Then. The Tardis would be hard put to find a parking space. There’s always been costume drama, but a wild multiplication has taken place. We want the wars; but we also want the Tudor past, where the origins of the state we inhabit can be seen in rudimentary, barbarous, unshielded form. We want the past of domestic service, with its deference and its hierarchies and its radically different class destinies running along side by side in single households. Explicit subordination is exotic to us; but troublingly interesting, as we come to suspect that the fluidity of contemporary manners is disguising a return to grotesquely unequal life-chances. We want the past just before we were born, when people like us (but not quite) lived in cities like ours (but not quite) and organised experiences like ours (but not quite) according to rules that seem alien now (but not quite). Ancestors are more of a challenge to British sensibilities than migrants or refugees, because they are so indissolubly linked to our intimate self-understanding. They are where we came from, and yet they cannot be assimilated, they will not conform to the expectations of the present. We have to go to them, trying our best to translate their passions into terms we can make sense of. The historian and critic Alison Light, a professional interpreter of the past’s lost social hierarchies, nevertheless came up against an indigestible difference when she discovered in her family history Common People (2014) that for a century and more her ancestors had been fervent Baptists. She did her best to view this as a form of social defiance on their part, but something remained stubbornly other in it, impossible to dissolve. Similar challenges await the hundreds of thousands of individuals who do genealogy now as a hobby, creating a private origin story for themselves; their own creation myth, if they could but read it.

  The forces making the past illegible are our irreligion, when most of our ancestors, even after the Industrial Revolution, still lived within a domain structured to some extent by the sacred, by Whitsun picnics and chapel-influenced or church-influenced politics and Christian behavioural ideals as a default; and our emotional assumption, because our culture has taken ‘the expressive turn’, that to be real feeling must be labile and vivid and performative, when our ancestors filtered th
eir equally passionate lives through more stoical codes; and our prosperity, which makes the old poverty of the past hard to enter into, either as a condition of real limit, or as a condition made survivable by resources of tradition, politics, ritual, solidarity and working-class self-organisation. The new poverty of the foodbanked present has the limits but (so far) mostly lacks the resources.

  But the past is also, and above all, wicked. It precedes the individualised social liberations on which Britain prides itself, and does so, as it were, defiantly. It is a dark other country of despised attitudes to gender, race and sexuality – many of these, again, seeming to be handily concentrated in the churches, as the past’s surviving embodiment. But immediately an ambivalence creeps in. Virtue is a strain, after all, however each generation defines it, and the past is where the reprehensible stuff is at home. It comes naturally there, and therefore in a funny way is not blameworthy. You can go to the past with a sigh of relief, of effort suspended. Or, only one step further, with indulgence; with a gratified sense of the past’s naughti­ness. Defiant wickedness (even if the defiance is only an artefact of perspective) has front, has attitude, can be seen as strutting its malevolent stuff in an expressive and exciting way. We have a whole little subgenre of visits to the unrepentant recent past – Life on Mars, Mad Men – which let the consumer play on varying terms with the forbidden. Or, if you want your wickedness refined of its historical impurities, the food technologists of fantasy will concentrate it for you in hyperpalatable form, and let you enjoy a history-ish parade of rape and torture and cruelty in Game of Thrones, which is not encumbered by the complications of the actual Wars of the Roses.

  For most people, though, except for recreational purposes, that’s an attraction of the past that exists in tension with its deepest and most powerful lure, which is that it’s real. The past is the grand narrative that hasn’t melted. There it is, with all its problems, leading up to us. The past is where you go for experience that is non-negotiable, that is not responsive to fancy or to the delicate discrimination between preferences (so long as they are preferences for entirely private tastes). The past is where contemporary Britain goes to taste in virtual form the kind of collective, even coercive, experience that trumps, that renders moot, the autonomous self-definition that is supposed to be the pride of the present. The past is where you go to imagine being conscripted, enduring unanaesthetised pain, having to stay married, being pushed through the weight and dignity and sometimes brutality of the big, shared, involuntary human experiences. The past is our sidelong indictment of the inadequate reality of the present. Till the present grows realler – please God, not by growing poorer and meaner – the past will have to do. Zombies and all.

  (2017)

  THREE WAYS OF WRITING FAITH

  The easy part of representing Christianity would seem to be the part to do with representing it as a human, social activity. Whatever else they are, churches are groups, tribes, institutions, with particular rules and habits of relating, and micro-politics. They have hierarchies both of the formal kind and of charisma and informal authority; and they have demanding ideals of behaviour that most probably will stand in temptingly ironic contrast to the actual behaviour of the people involved. All of which is rich fictional material in exactly the same way that the life of any defined group provides rich material for stories. We like hearing about villages, we humans; and maybe most of all we enjoy villages stirred up by some principle, to give a narrative tug to events, as ironic as you like. This is the recipe for Trollope’s explorations of the cathedral close at Barchester, and for Barbara Pym’s novels of spinsters at evensong. It would seem that you could enter into this fictional territory without any metaphysical commitments, equipped only with a descriptive curiosity and a broad imaginative sympathy. Representing faith this way would be only as difficult – that is, fiendishly difficult, but let’s not be downhearted – as representing any other idea-influenced piece of human activity. It wouldn’t pose a particular problem.

  But although people go on writing this kind of story of religious life all over the planet, there hasn’t been a lot of Trollope or of Barbara Pym produced locally, lately; not in Western Europe, not in England.22 And I think our position in a culture where the religious tide has gone a very long way out, by global standards – leaving us on these secular mudflats, surrounded by curious shells and rusty bicycles – shows us something that may not be apparent in other places, which is that the apparently descriptive, merely curious, village-life novel of faith, did in fact quietly depend on a metaphysical commitment. It was (is) built on a shared assumption between writer and reader that a disposition of life around religion makes sense. Makes, in fact, such basic sense that the sense it makes can be left off-stage and the author can concentrate on all the secondary human consequences of that sense, ramifying all over the place in lovely narrative patterns. But when that underlying assumption is removed, the village life of Christians stops being just another intelligibly villagey panorama, and becomes mysterious. It dwindles into anthropology, to be explained as it goes; it becomes exotic, science-fictional, a zoo for the bizarre; it becomes a mode of story, often, whose point is to criticise, to indicate a confinement from which the characters could – should – break free.

  To say this is not to buy into the legend that some kind of definitive secular disenchantment is available, after which everything will only mean what it really means, and our lives, and presumably our fictions, will stand on the plain, real ground. The Christian mythology may go away, but the mythic dimension of experience will not; any plausible human life will remythicise far faster than Richard Dawkins can keep up with, brandishing the hedge trimmer of ‘reason’. The New Atheists are trying to carve the Green Man into static topiary, and it won’t work. But particular bonds of sympathy can certainly be severed. The simplest way of putting this is that there won’t be much of a market for a book called Scenes from Clerical Life if no-one has a fucking clue what the life of the clergy is like.

  Oddly, then, the further that Christianity recedes from most people’s everyday experience, the less available becomes the apparently most straightforward way of representing it. And the more important become the other ways in which the life of faith can take on fictive life.

  There is, for example, the novel that renders, in concrete and particular imagined lives, Christianity’s central theological drama of redemption: the story of depravity and grace. I’m thinking of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic novelists here, in whose work that story can often be explicit, appearing under its own name, with clear theological labels attached. Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor: all demonstrating the specific gravity of loss, cruelty and destruction within experience, and a redemptive turn towards hope, as being intelligible – intelligibly desired, intelligibly yearned for – within that same experience. The theme was explicitly otherworldly, with the whole story resting upon a possibility for hope not to be accounted for from the usual calculus of events, but it was arrived at in a very worldly and often darkly comic way, with the story’s dive into depravity giving it the authority of pessimism, of really well-informed squalor and sleaze and darkness visible. But there is also a version of the novel of redemption that comes without this kind of explicit labelling or theological framing; with the theological motif being, as it were, digested into experience to the point of invisibility. If I was being mischievous I’d call this the Protestant version, with the apparatus of redemption absorbed with no remainder into the sufficient material of the individual life. But I’m not sure that’s a fair categorisation of, for instance, the diffused Anglo-Catholic awareness of the possibility of grace that threads through the work of Penelope Fitzgerald; or of, say, Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine, which records in frequently pornographic detail the long dark night of the soul of a Scottish businessman, as well as the joy that cometh in the morning. He certainly thought of that book as being locked in combat with his childhood Calvinism, and there’s a clue there
to the continuing viability of the implicit rather than explicit version of this kind of theologically Christian novel. It can be written without a conscious intention by the writer. Because the narrative of redemption – of the stone rolled away, and the weight of sorrow overturned – still forms one of the deep structures of the culture, hereabouts, it comes easily and, as it were, natur­­­ally to the hand of someone who may think that they are merely at work, without presuppositions, in the fields of meaning. I wouldn’t want to overstate the unconscious intention, in Alasdair Gray’s case, because 1982, Janine does feature an intervention in the margins by the voice of God, and it does say at the end that it was completed ‘on retreat, at the monastery of Santa Semplicitá’ – but this does seem to me to be a mode in which the novel in Western Europe is likely to go on writing Christian faith unwittingly, for quite some time.

  However, as awareness of the Christian nature of the culture’s materials dwindles, the third kind of fiction in my rapidly assembled and ad hoc taxonomy seems likely to become most important of all. The kind, that is, that can speak communicatively of faith to readers beyond the bounds of experienced familiarity with it, and beyond the bounds of conscious assent to it, because, rather than exploring the (social) relations of Christians with each other, or showing forth the theological patterning of experience, it takes as at least part of its subject the relationship of Christians with God. The kind that tries to realise, on the page, with the verbal tools of the novelist, the orientation to the world that results when somebody holds that, feels that, behaves as if the particular rooms they are in always have another unnumerated door or window, opening onto a different and overwhelming domain. The kind where the particular light of one morning is held to be a manifestation of a general light. The kind where part of the point of what is being carefully reported about everyday experience is that it faces onto something else. That something else, of course, not being a verbal fabric at all. Being made of the Word, that is, not of our vocabulary. As the Reverend John Ames says in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, ‘you must not judge of what I know by what I find words for’ – except of course that the readers of novels do judge, exactly, by what the writer has found words for. The task of finding expressible language for the inexpressible is inherently impossible. The effort begins in the admission of inevitable defeat.