Marilynne Robinson

The Ease of Criticism

It’s good to see Robert Minto getting back into blogging. Here he is on the ease of critical writing, the simplicity of noticing the features of a text:

The great thing about critical writing is that it should be very easy. All you need is patient, honest noticing, and imaginative thinking about what you’ve noticed. Yet people find a remarkable number of ways to fuck it up. For instance, if we just restrict ourselves to book reviews of narrative fiction, most of what we find is either (1) pure summary, or (2) summary plus thumbs up or down judgments about whether the book is good or not, or (3) reductions of plot to moral theses and judgments about whether the moral point of view is correct (and therefore worth reading) or incorrect (and therefore not worth reading and possibly deserving of suppression). None of these strike me as critical writing. The first two are consumer guidance and the last is applied ethics or, at its worst, an inquisitorial show trial. Maybe there’s a place for them all. Personally, I crave critical writing and much prefer it to any of these modes. …

There’s a ubiquitous genre of contemporary journalism which appears to use the basic unit of all criticism but actually perverts it. I mean the “take,” or, when it’s particularly reactive or contrary, the “hot take.” The hot take is a very simple form: it starts by recounting some notable event from the consensus reality of the daily news cycle. It moves from this event to make an assertion about how this event should be considered evidence in favor of a generality which usually expresses an ideological commitment. This appears to be a movement from description to reflection, right? But in fact neither noticing nor reflecting is involved. The take’s starting point is given by the news cycle — and this is why takes always come in herds — and its conclusion is predetermined by the take-haver’s political positioning. The only creativity involved in having a take is figuring out how to get from a predetermined starting point to a predetermined end point. I would even argue that takes are anti-critical because they promote a kind of unthinking automaticity in both their writers and readers, and ultimately they displace interest in the world into a mini-game, the daily prize fight among takes, where the primary terms of assessment are either “good take” or “bad take,” attention diverted from the object or idea to the technique exhibited in moving from one to the other.

These comments very much remind me of Marilynne Robinson, of course, in her remarks on nuance and the damnation of “the take,” which I think about regularly. Here’s Robinson in The Givenness of Things:

Critics and historians have followed this precedent, often eager to identify the sympathies of any figure who did not, himself or herself, make them absolutely clear, as if a leaning were an identity, and might not change from year to year, depending on whom one had spoken with lately, or what one had read, or how an argument settled into individual thought or experience. In answer to the question: Which side are you on? “I’m still deciding” or “I see merit in a number of positions” would not have been more pleasing to the enforcers of any orthodoxy than outright heresy would be. High-order thinking is not so readily forced into pre-existing categories.

Robinson Redux

New on Splice today, I have a long, ruminative essay on the humanist politics of Marilynne Robinson (and the work of Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, and J.M. Coetzee) with a particular focus on Robinson’s most recent collection of essays, What Are We Doing Here?:

Humanism is, for Robinson, the greatest good, the ultimate end of a life whose necessary foundation is productive labour, and it is also absolutely inseparable from serious theology. Robinson’s religious view of humanism thus lends itself to at least a defence, if not a practice, of the liberal arts: the arts and humanities, after all, are an expression of human potential, of the plenitude of the human imagination, and are thereby an implicit indication of the nature and values of a superior being. Insofar as theology aims to understand the divine through the observable world, the arts and humanities are evidence of the capabilities of the creatures at the pinnacle of everything created by divine power: “a powerful testimony to human capacities, human grandeur, the divine in the human”.

This is actually the second long essay I’ve written about Robinson’s essays; the last, written upon the publication of The Givenness of Things, is available at Medium.

The Heft of a Novel

Marilynne Robinson, So, yes, Winter Fugue is underway. How has it taken its first few steps into being? I don’t mean “being” as a concept; I mean “being” as a synonym for pixels and ink. Beyond the emergence of the work of fiction as a flickering response to the raw and burning imperative to write, how does it — how has it — come to assume a definite form on the page?

For me, the first words of a fiction never issue from an idea or an image, or a narrative dilemma, but always — strange to say — from a feeling in the body, a mood that circulates through blood and breath, an incarnate sensation in no way tethered to events in the outside world. They come on top of the murmur that drives the act of writing and they take shape in response to, or in mimicry of, an inner disturbance that feels physically like the growth of some alien thing, some subcutaneous burr, lodged in the fibres of muscle and flesh. Marilynne Robinson gives voice to an experience of much the same sensation in her most recent collection of essays, The Givenness of Things: Continue reading →

Thinking About Thinking About Thinking

Marilynne Robinson’s Lila is a beautiful novel for a number of reasons, although as I read it I often found myself wondering how much of its lustre would be lost on readers unfamiliar with Gilead. Unlike readers of Home, its immediate predecessor in Robinson’s trilogy of novels set in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, readers of Lila will find much to appreciate even if they are not familiar with the other two titles. In part this is the case because Home replays many of the events already depicted by the narrator of Gilead, albeit from the perspective of a different character and therefore in a way that imbues them with new meanings, while Lila covers events that occur many years before the action of Gilead and that have been, until now, almost entirely unexplored. If a novel that requires its readers to possess knowledge of another novel thereby places a burden on their shoulders, Lila arguably leaves its readers at greater liberty than Home, and yet, while reading it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that that liberty comes with its own sort of price. Continue reading →

The Wick Within the Flame

After recently re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Richard Crary found his appreciation of the novel undimmed a decade on from its first publication. “It is, in many ways, what used to be called ‘wisdom literature,’” he writes, “yet it is also a marvelous, and subtle, literary performance. And, it seems to me, a wholly appropriate literary response to our current situation, in the sense in which I have here attempted to channel or expand on Josipovici and others.”

I agree with both judgments and especially the last. Perhaps due to the vividness of its pastoral setting or the sophisticated and convincing ventriloquism through which Robinson breathes life into her narrator, the Reverend John Ames, Gilead tends to be read as a work of regional realism, a skilful observation of life in small-town Iowa in the 1950s. But there’s a conceit to both the narrative and the act of narration that imbues every word with extra complexity. “What is afflicting Mallarmé, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, and Beckett,” Josipovici writes in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, “is the sense that they feel impelled to write, this being the only way they know to be true to their own natures, yet at the same time they find that in doing so they are being false to the world — imposing a shape on it and giving it a meaning which it doesn’t have — and thus, ultimately, being false to themselves.” In Gilead, Ames is similarly impelled to write and similarly suffers a sense that he is being false to himself, although his suffering comes with a twist on that of the writers named above. Continue reading →

Two Trees, Through Their Own Eyes

The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as [the girl] went up, and to reach farther and farther upwards. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit creeping and climbing from higher branch to branch.

Sarah Orne Jewett
‘A White Heron’

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There was the oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to [the children]. Their father said that if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa.

Marilynne Robinson
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