A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  By the late 1990s, Robinson was completely immersed in theology and nature. Her collection of essays The Death of Adam is written in a manner and tone unmistakably reminiscent of Emerson’s own lectures and essays. Her lyrical prose combined with her polemical edge to make her work extremely provocative to academic readers. The Death of Adam essays intensified interest in Housekeeping, especially among those who analyzed it in more than seventy scholarly articles, essays in edited volumes, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and over fifteen interviews.26 Her writing from 1998 to 2003 was done while on leave from the Workshop after winning the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award, a prize giving $250,000 over five years with the express purpose to “free writers from the obligation to earn a living other than through their writing.”27 She waited until the eleventh hour before finally returning to the novel in the fellowship’s final year.

  Each of Robinson’s novels, including Gilead, which broke her long silence in the genre, took roughly eighteen months to write. Despite appearances to the contrary given the decades separating Housekeeping and Gilead, the process was quite smooth and organic.28 Gilead sounded her return to the literary scene in thunder. The novel’s glowing review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review was heralded by director Frank Conroy as a “a very big deal.” He told reporters, “people have been waiting for this book for a very long time,” an achievement marking “a big moment for contemporary literature” and affirming her status as “one of the best writers of our time.”29

  Gilead, like Housekeeping, does not strain for esoteric or postmodern modes of expression, but wields ordinary vocabulary and mythic structures drawn primarily from the Bible. A telling moment occurred when Robinson was asked in an interview in 2009 if she could find any words to describe God or the meaning of life, a question intended to elicit lengthy and subtle rumination about the strengths and limitations of language to convey spiritual meaning. She instantly replied that she “would not hesitate” to “use the basic Biblical vocabulary.”30 To her, these are not only the best linguistic and mythopoetic tools for describing God, but the most effective for writing fiction, particularly an epistolary novel like Gilead, written in apostrophe by a dying Protestant minister. Writing longhand on lined paper, she runs through each sentence several times mentally before committing it to the page, so that her first drafts contain almost no crossed out or inserted material. The holograph manuscript of Housekeeping is a fascinating document that reflects the longhand composition process she continues to use in the digital age.31 The relative ease with which she has written each of her novels is due in part to the fact that she is “not terribly interested in clever writing” and has never questioned her intuition of when she should write: “Something comes to mind and I can sense a certain heft to it—that it has the weight of a novel.” She never comes to the page without a clear sense of the narrative voice, setting, and plot mechanisms she wishes to play out. “I go into a certain self-induced trance and write it until it’s done.”32

  True to Emerson’s precepts in “Self-Reliance,” Robinson never despaired of being an author of more than one novel in the decades between Housekeeping and Gilead. Her courage and self-possession shine through her conviction during those years that “my greatest fear was that I would write a fraudulent book simply to escape the embarrassment of having written only one novel.” Her absorption in Mother Country and The Death of Adam testify to the seriousness with which she took to nonfiction as a pursuit worthy of her best thinking, rather than a method by which to somehow retrieve her voice as a novelist. Indeed, nonfiction writing functioned as Robinson’s real work during these intervening years, as the ardent activism of Mother Country and its ensuing international legal battle attest. This was a period during which she had “nothing fictional” on her mind, and thus “wrote a fair amount of nonfiction during those years” when she “was absorbed by that work.” Hardly a means to an end, her nonfiction represents a body of work whose quality rivals that of her novels. Many novelists unaware of this activity have imbued Gilead with mythic status as evidence of its author’s miraculous rebirth, “as if she had risen from the dead.”33 Mother Country stands as the greatest achievement of Robinson’s career, in her estimation. “Writing nonfiction,” she explains, “has been my most serious education, and for all those years kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.”34 Her war with British industrialists for blighting the environment ranks among the boldest of Robinson’s activist writing.

  Courage Teacher

  The ethic of courage, which set her at odds with the British government in Mother Country as well as atheist intellectuals in The Death of Adam, has been the linchpin of Robinson’s success as both an author and a creative writing instructor. Appealing to her students as well as prominent readers such as Barack Obama, that principle of courage is rooted in combating the cultural predilection toward fear in all its manifestations, from xenophobia and homophobia to anti-gun control. Robinson’s essay “Fear” examines the false equation between Christianity and patriotism made in headlines such as “Is Barack Obama a Christian?” She has staunchly opposed the tendency for Christianity to “become entangled with exactly the strain of nationalism that is militaristic, ready to spend away the lives of our young, and that can only understand dissent from its views as a threat or a defection, a heresy in the most alienating and stigmatizing sense of the word.”35 Like Emerson in his Harvard Divinity School address, she diagnosed the culture’s malaise within the ideological locus of fear, a force that has not only inhibited self-expression of “unfashionable” ideas, but has created a tyranny of conformity to accepted topics and modes of articulation. Indeed, her editor laughed when she shared her plan to follow Housekeeping, a book she initially thought was too private to publish, with one “about a minister dying in Iowa in 1956,” which was yet another story that “seems borderline incommunicable.”36 Although such subtle psychological drama is as introspective as it is devoid of external physical action, it still commands an impressive readership.37

  Like Emerson, for Robinson the educational imperative is driven by dissent toward “the prohibitions of an unarticulated kind,” ones “culturally felt that prevent people from saying what they actually think.” The distance of the secular humanist environment has unleashed a deluge of interest on campus in Robinson’s work. Students from faith-based backgrounds seek her out because of the inhibitions—indeed fear—they otherwise feel on campus in discussing the sacred in their studies and lives. Robinson finds her students are reticent to engage in larger questions of their place in the universe and, when they do, often avoid the difficult questions by leaning on superficial clichés. She notes that “Jewish or Catholic” students “can make all the jokes about their mother or the nun, but in terms of saying on one’s deathbed, ‘What will it mean that this is how I described myself, how does the cosmos feel as it nestles in my breast?’ they are completely inarticulate about that.”38

  Robinson herself has never feared thinking on this cosmological scale, which is a key reason why her classes leaped in enrollment threefold since 2005. Her appeal to students derives not from a charismatic physical presence—her demeanor and temperament are instead those of a soft-spoken prophet—but from the quiet force of her conviction and expansive range of vision. Books she has taught typically function on an epic scale; Moby-Dick and the Bible have never been so popular among students as in the context of her courses. She is not a proselytizer for her own Congregationalist faith so much as a “courage-teacher,” as Allen Ginsberg called Walt Whitman, actively pursuing her unique brand of mysticism.39 Religion “helps you concentrate” by shielding out distractions, she asserts through the narrator of Gilead.40 To her, those distractions are never more toxic than in popular media, particularly television. From her earliest days, she knew how to concentrate, carrying around a copy of Moby-Dick with her at the age of nine.41 The contemplative life for her is a literary pursuit that, although solitary, brings companion
ship by accessing those people and entities not physically present, a process in which “writing felt like praying,” as the protagonist in Gilead declares.42

  Her pedagogical leanings parallel her own reading, which focuses on theology and science rather than contemporary literary fiction. Emerson was no different; he read very few novels by his contemporaries, but embraced the astronomy of Alexander von Humboldt.43 Emerson viewed the stars as an extension of natural science much in the way Robinson does, particularly with an eye toward “the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.” Herein lies the miraculous in which “everything is intrinsically mysterious as a physical object, or as a phenomenon of culture, or as an artifact of the history that lies behind it.”44

  This sort of mysticism that draws from the ontological world should not be confused with that which “diminishes what we know by every means that gives us access to it.” Unmediated divine power, she urges, is always before us in “the simple spectacle—one actually quite complex—of what we are and where we are.” She locates the miraculous in the everyday present, the beauty at the end of a splashing oar, and the vaulting ecstasy of Emerson’s transparent eyeball fully suffused in nature. “One of the important things that happened to me” was her discovery as a child of “the wilderness around me” that “never felt like emptiness” but “always felt like presence.” This early discovery of the sacred in nature never left her and has, as she says, “probably done as much to form my mind as anything.” The key to such ecstatic moments of gnostic mysticism is an appetite and intensity that resolves to “never have the experience of banality,” but to approach life “as if there was something extraordinary around me.”45

  The fear of identifying the good, Robinson has proposed, is a symptom of a collective skepticism raised as a deflective shield against commercial culture. “It’s as if when you describe something good, you are being deceived or being deceptive,” she points out, a condition of fearfulness that has removed us from the ecstatic mysteries around us.46 Constantly armed with skepticism, we are unable to reach those euphoric moments, such as the one John Ames experiences at the conclusion of Gilead. “I love the prairie!” he exults, ecstatic in nature’s power to reveal its divine energies. “So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing.” The ecstasy calls to mind Emerson overwhelmed by the beauty and power of nature, reveling in “almost a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think how glad I am.”47 Like Emerson, Robinson voices through the character of Ames the insistence that the miraculous is not isolated to miracles chronicled by the prophets in the Bible, but vibrantly exists in the present moment. Orthodox Unitarians led by Norton Andrews deemed Emerson a heretic in the 1830s for claiming miracles to be omnipresent, especially in nature, rather than limited and isolated to those in the Bible described by Christ’s prophets and disciples.48 Ames saw a similar truth to the one Emerson observed, confessing that despite his training about the limitation of miracles to those witnessed by the prophets, and “for all I know to the contrary,” the morning stars “still do sing and shout” as miracles in the living present.49

  Robinson maintains that overexposure to popular culture breeds a disbelieving skepticism endemic to materialistic consumerism. At Iowa, she found the ideal location, “here on the prairie,” as she says through Ames, where “there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning,” not unlike Thoreau at Walden Pond in his quiet sanctuary isolated from the distractions of “this restless, nervous, bustling trivial Nineteenth Century.”50 According to Robinson, situating oneself spiritually demands that there must be a “prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”51

  Robinson has gravitated toward popular science because it puts her in touch with the largest dimensions of thought and existence accessible to humanity. She has said that scientific writings, specifically of the cosmos, place her in the presence of thinking on such a grand scale. It takes bravery, she argues through the exalted final words of John Ames, to think on this scale. Iowa gave her that scale, a place to correspond her own life’s purpose that “seems Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded.” Her sentiments toward her own contemplative existence in Iowa are unmistakably apparent in Ames when he professes his love not only of the prairie, but for the tiny rural community where he has made a living. “I love this town,” he proclaims, believing his own death will signify the commitment of his life to it, his final gift of “going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love.”52

  In this sense, writing is not a cleverly aesthetic craft, but instead “testimony,” a process of bearing witness with the courage to speak out on behalf of what one loves. Her Bible in this sense is a liberating force that unleashes inner individual power. As such, it can circulate as radical contraband for social justice not unlike its former function on the Underground Railroad. She reminds us of another historical period when the “Wycliffe Bibles and Tyndale Bibles, which you could be killed for owning” during the Protestant Reformation, “were circulated widely” as “very subversive” documents. Wycliffe was at the center of “an amazing attempt to spread literacy and scriptural understanding into the common world.” Her eyes light up as she envisions “little Oxford students creeping out at night to take a page of Matthew to a hovel somewhere and tell someone what it actually said.”53 The role of the writer is to assume such courage to testify to one’s devotion, as in her bold affront to the British government in Mother Country, the functional equivalent of a Wycliffe Bible.

  Proudly Unfashionable

  Robinson has assailed corporate media for hijacking the notion of popular culture from its original association with grassroots folk culture. To her, what used to be an organic expression of the populace is now “an industrial product that is sold by the means that any industrial product is sold by, and the selling is very intense because the people making the product are also in a position to sell the product—the media.” She laments that too many writers are inclined “to push some extreme . . . to be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life.”54 She blames larger industrial pressures for the more conspicuous literary figures engaged in this process, who might include Chuck Palahniuk (of “Guts,” which appeared in Playboy in 2004), Bret Easton Ellis (of American Psycho), or T. C. Boyle (of “Drowning” in Descent of Man), contestants in a race, her point suggests, for the mantle of the most shocking. Yet harrowing scenes in her own novels offer shocking situations and characters, such as Doll’s brutal upbringing of the title character in Lila, as well as the arresting blaze that culminates Housekeeping.

  If “people are making culture for themselves,” rather than producing literature for a market, they would be “sitting on the back porch singing a song that they maybe thought up the words for, and 200 years later people will be singing the same song.” To engage in the type of production necessary to create works that “are truly popular” demands a unique discipline to shield out—to the extent that one can—the more virulent forces of media. This media condition is what Richard Lanham has called “the attention economy,” in which “modern materialism turns out to be an intellectualized, spiritualized affair.” Misplaced spiritual investment in mainstream media products is a result of what Marshall McLuhan predicted in 1959 would be the “chief business of the age.”55 Robinson points out that scandal on television is constantly vying for our attention, which advertisers value in the billions of dollars. “If something is supposed to be enormously scandalous, people will turn it on” to see if it really is, then “talk to each other” and gnaw on it “like chewing gum.” In this sense popular culture to Robinson is a severe and “conti
nuous distraction that carries people from day to day in no significant way,” occupying valuable time and space that could instead be used “more imaginatively, more humanely.”56 Her critique, however, risks dismissing the totality of commercial media rhetoric, which she has directly benefited from through her own television appearances—in addition to those of her protégée Ayana Mathis on Oprah’s cross-platform media empire—that operate at the intersection of entertainment and edification.

  Her artisanal novels depicting pre-digital lives untouched by urban centers lend them an anti-materialistic quality that is not without its commercial appeal. In his interview with Robinson, Barack Obama commented that her writings appeal precisely because they exist outside the Twitter-driven sensationalist news cycle. He regretted how “my poor press team [is] tweeting every two minutes because something new has happened, which then puts a premium on the sensational and the most outrageous or a conflict as a way of breaking through the noise—which then creates . . . a pessimism from all those sturdy, quiet voices.” In this sense, he takes solace in Robinson’s novels for honoring the quiet voices that do not succumb to pessimism “in some quiet place” but who strive to “do something sensible and figure out how to get along.” The resurgence of book clubs, Robinson points out, represents a way for readers to recover the literary life from the headline-driven circus of internet distractions. Gatherings to discuss “unfashionable” books like Gilead have created a critical mass—especially in the case of Robinson, who now trends on Vogue and Vice—that qualifies as popular. She has said that although “no book can sell in the way Gone with the Wind sold,” the “literature at present is full to bursting . . . with an incredible variety of contemporary voices,” including her own distinctly unfashionable one.57