The Marilynne Robinson Appreciation Society

One of the better responses we’ve seen to When I Was a Child … comes from Kristen Scharold, who uses the book as an opportunity to offer a synoptic reading of Robinson’s whole body of work, essays and fiction alike. I’ve tried to do that and it’s kinda hard, so, you know, hats off, Kristen.

Marilynne Robinson is just such a rain—warm and rare—on the literary terra of contemporary fiction and nonfiction. Even more, she has tilled a plot where deep, lyrical Christian reflection teems. Her output comes from both below and above, from the dust of humanity and the grace of divinity. She is a dream-catcher of sorts, stationing each work between the ordinary and sacred, weaving sinews of sentences that capture the lovely and true.

Robinson was published in The Guardian yesterday with a shorter, edited form of ‘Austerity as Ideology’ from the new book, which also appeared last November as ‘Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist’ in The Nation. Far be it from us to complain about any of her essays — especially this one — being printed and reprinted far and wide.

My first thought was, “But why in a British newspaper?”, forgetting that the austerity doctrine has been in vogue at least as much in UK policy as in the US, if not more so. UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg reinforced this very point yesterday, just as Robinson’s piece was going to print. Would that Mr. Clegg and his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic would take heed of Robinson’s warning:

In the strange alembic of this moment, the populace at large is thought of by a significant part of this same population as a burden, a threat to their wellbeing, to their “values.” There is at present a dearth of humane imagination for the integrity and mystery of other lives.

Though he won’t admit to it, MRAS co-curator Phil is an extraordinarily talented writer. Thus, when he published a thoughtful review of Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind a few months ago, it flew under the radar of the very Marilynne Robinson site he curates.

No more.

Phil’s review takes thorough account of the presence of John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s work, and, prefiguring a knowledge of Calvin that is either incomplete or misinformed, offers a memorable defense of the Genevan reformer:

On the one hand there is the Calvin of reputation, who invented predestination and taught that wealth is a sign of God’s favor. This Calvin enjoyed a theocratic reign of terror in Geneva, where the national pastimes were frowning and burning heretics. He is more or less an invention. To find another example of an intellectual so successfully lied about to so many people in free societies, you’d have to read up on Noam Chomsky. […]

So much for the Calvin of reputation. Robinson draws on the less-known side of Calvin: the Renaissance humanist. It is [Calvin’s] high view of humanity — this sense that grandeur and majesty, so far from being opposed to us (as in the thought-world of pagan Greece and Rome), are actually found in our silly selves — that animates Robinson’s novels.

Continuing on to Absence of Mind, Phil draws out the role that Calvin the Renaissance humanist plays in shaping the arguments Robinson makes throughout the book:

So Robinson’s fiction praises the image of God as found in people. Her nonfiction, so different in tone and content, achieves the same goal indirectly by defending a high view of human nature and possibility against fashionable denials of it.

Of the reviews of Absence of Mind I’ve read, few take greater account of Robinson’s Calvinist predilections than Phil does here.

Many thanks to our good friend Michael Buma for allowing us to distribute this article from the Christian Courier.

An essay from Guernica (her first appearance there that we’re aware of) in which Robinson again levels the deck guns at unexamined arguments of her intellectual contemporaries and the broader culture. Even David Brooks gets name-dropped.

She begins with an analytical autopsy of free-market economics — particularly the libertarian kind that seems powerfully in vogue and woefully unchallenged:

Our civilization has recently chosen to identify itself with a wildly oversimple model of human nature and behavior and then is stymied or infuriated by evidence that the models don’t fit. And the true believers in these models seem often to be hardened in their belief by this evidence, perhaps in part because of the powerfully annealing effects of rage and indignation.

Proceeding onward, Robinson implicates neo-Darwinism for its diminishing and anachronistic anthropology:

Modern theories of human nature, which are essentially Darwinist and neo-Darwinist, pare us down to our instincts for asserting relative advantage in order to survive and propagate. This dictum hangs on our essential primitivity as they understand it—assuming that our remote ancestors would have been describable in these terms, and that we, therefore, are described in them also. But it seems worthwhile to remember that this is a modern theory projected onto the deep past.

Thus arriving finally at the crux of the piece:

I have made a long and indirect approach to my subject — the human spirit and the good society. The subject was of interest to me in the first place because I have felt for a long time that our idea of what a human being is has grown oppressively small and dull.

This sentiment comes as no surprise to readers of her fiction. Fingerbone and Gilead seem impossibly expansive and resplendent despite their diminuitive population and size. This grandiose view of the ordinary world is the indispensable delight of Robinson’s canon. John Ames musing “Ah, this life, this world” is a direct contravention to the diminutive and damning narrowness of a scientism that asserts life and world to be nothing more than the rote mechanics of an impersonal cosmos.

And so she seizes upon Thomas Jefferson’s assertion from the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” to make her case:

What would a secular paraphrase of this sentence look like? In what nonreligious terms is human equality self-evident? As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was certainly in a position to know. What would be the non-religious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case?

One of Robinson’s finest efforts to date at weaving her parallel interests in religion, literature, economics, and science into a common thread — one that challenges assumptions and assertions with every loop.

This essay is yet another excerpt from When I Was a Child I Read Books — which arrives in bookstores tomorrow. As always, we encourage you to buy your copy from a local, independent bookseller.

Our thanks to David Mahaffey for the link.

A reminder: Marilynne Robinson will be a plenary speaker at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan next month.

Registration for the Festival is now open.

The Festival runs from April 19-21, and is always a wonderful event. This year is no exception: Robinson will be joined at the festival by Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, Luci Shaw (too much good poetry to list), Gary Schmidt (The Wednesday Wars and Okay for Now), Shane Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution), Craig Thompson (Blankets), and many more.

Robinson’s previous appearance at the Festival in 2006 was wonderful, and we strongly encourage you to attend if you’re interested. Registration for the entire Festival is only $195, and group and student discounts are available. The deadline for registration is April 1st.

Phil and I will be there, and we hope to see you there too.

One of the hallmarks of Robinson’s essays is her method of arriving at one topic by way of an entirely different one. She employs the technique well in this fine essay from Commonweal, which is yet another exempt from When I Was a Child I Read Books.

Robinson begins with an admission that she owns more books than she will likely ever read. Fellow bibliophiles will join my sigh of relief that we are not, in fact, crazy hoarders of books in the age of half-inch-thick Kindles (or at least that, if we are, we have entertaining company).

The thrust of the essay, however, comes from her focus on how education and writing foster imagination (and by extension: empathy) as well as her explanation for how imagination is essential to the health of humane, generous communities:

In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate. […] How is Christianity consistent with this generalized contempt that seems to lie behind so much so-called public discourse? Why the judgmentalism, among people who are supposed to believe we are, and we live among, souls precious to God? It is simply not possible to act in good faith toward people one does not respect, or to entertain hopes for them that are appropriate to their gifts.

Writers especially will savor her closing remarks about the craft of writing and the pessimism of expectation that often accompanies it.

Our thanks to Chris Liebig for the tip.