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Christianity and LiteratureVol. 61, No. 1 (Autumn 2011)
Native Speakers:Identity, Grace, and Homecoming
Rowan Williams
An address delivered on the occasion of the Archbishop
receivingthe Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on
Christianity and Literature.
Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that
wry distance,as if there were injury for him in the fact that all
of them were native totheir life as he never could be. (Marilynne
Robinson, Home, 249)
Marilynne Robinson's much-praised and much-discussed pair of
novels,Gilead and Home, deal, as she has herself said, with the
unfinished businessof the parable of the Prodigal Son (see the
interview in Christianity andLiterature 58:3, 2009, 487-88). After
homecoming, what? And what doeshomecoming actually mean? As the
quotation with which I began suggests,the notion of homecoming is a
very ambivalent one when there is no"home" to start with. The words
represent what the prodigal's sister. Glory,is thinking as she
picks up the pieces after her brother Jack returns from anepisode
of desperate alcoholic escape. She has had to become "resigned"
toforgiveness; as she reflects on why she cannot help but
forgiveeven as shecontemplates withholding her mercy "for an hour
or two"she recognizesthat it is partly because of the (lifelong?)
sense of alienness that Jack carrieswith him, as if he has always
been at a distance from their ethos and speech,even perhaps
parodying these, unconsciously or not. He cannot but be anironist.
And being an ironist means, in this context, never having a
nativetongue. His father and his father's friend, his own
godfather, John Ames,cannot speak with him without suspecting that
he is somehow subvertingtheir own habitual discourse; and he is
cripplingly conscious of this andfrequently silenced by it.
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CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
Jack covered his face with his hands and laughed. "The Lord," he
said, "isveryinteresting.""I know you don't mean any disrespect,"
his father said."I really don't know what I mean. I really
don't.""Well," the old man said, "I wish I could help you with
that." {Home 157)
But of course he cannot. "I always seem to give offense," Jack
says toAmes at one point, and Ames, denying any offense, responds,
"I do wish wecould speak moredirectly" (Gilead 169). Even when, in
their last heavilycharged conversation, John Ames gives him his
blessing as "beloved son andbrother and husband and father" {Gilead
241), Jack's reaction makes Amesthink he has "named everything I
thought he no longer was," although thisis "the exact opposite" of
what Ames means. Ames has been trying to namewhat cannot be taken
away from Jack's identity; but Jack cannot hear thesewords in a
native tongue. He cannot help receiving them as an ironist, andthus
receiving them as ironical, whether the irony is or is not
intended. Atone point in Home, when Jack reads to his father, we
are told that "therewas a kind of grace to anything [he] did with
his whole attention, or whenhe forgot irony for a while"; and this
can still surprise his father {Gilead146). Jack's irony is, we
might say, the wrong kind of attention, an attentionto himself in
the eyes of others rather than to the act or the word or
therelational reality itself. But his virtual paralysis in
relationship reminds ushow very difficult attention is, and how
little it is a matteras his fatherthinksof being "wonderful when he
wants to be" (ibid.).
In the great set-piece conversation about grace and
predestinationrecorded in both novels. Jack's serious theological
enquiryare some people,so to speak, born to sorrow and to
foreignness and ultimately to hellisheard uncomfortably by both
Ames and his father, and their response is, ashe says, "cagey"
{Gilead 151). They suspect him of quiet mockery, but thetruth is
that he has no language for the question that will sound
sincereexcept to Ames' unconventional young wife, who is the only
one able to givehim a reply that actually addresses him: "A person
can change. Everythingcan change" {Gilead 153). Afterwards,
affectionately and reproachfully, shesays to her husband that
"Maybe some people aren't so comfortable withthemselves" {Gilead
154)almost a paraphrase of Glory's thought that Jacksees his family
as "native to their life" in a way he is not and carinot be.
Yet Ames' wife. Lila, is capable herself of an impact not unlike
thatwhich Jack has. When her husband first encounters her as a
member of hiscongregation, he feels "there was a seriousness about
her that seemed almost
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IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING
like a kind of anger. As though she might say, T came here from
whateverunspeakable distance and whatever unimaginable otherness
just to obligeyour prayers. Now say something with a little meaning
in it'" {Gilead 21).She is no more a native than Jack is; yet,
despite the strong sense she conveysto Ames that his words from the
pulpit are judged and found wanting, shecomes to inhabit her
identity as Jack never does. Later in the same book,as they sit
together in desultory conversation, with Ames half-asleep.
JackoflFers her a cigarette, and she declines on the grounds that
"it just isn'tseemly in a preacher's wife"; and when Jack picks
this up with a touch ofmockery, she replies, "I been seemly so long
I'm almost beginning to like it"(Gilead 199). She has, though with
difficulty and over a significant period oftime, learned to pass as
a native, yet without losing her critical liberty. Her"unimaginable
otherness" has not made a native tongue impossible for her.
Lila's irony is, we might say, a reconciled irony as opposed to
Jack'sunreconciled irony. She retains the capacity to question the
attitudes of thosewho are too much at home with themselves or their
world; and we mustassume that it is she who makes Ames able, after
a painful conversation withJack, to acknowledge that the town of
Cilead's surface decencies conceal asystemic untruthfulness, a
refusal to ask what is to be learned from crisisor challenge: "we
didn't ask the question, so the question was just takenaway from
us" (Gilead 233-34). Its very existence depended on its role,
inwhat is now a remote and forgotten past, as a stopping stage on
the routeto Kansas for escaping slaves and anti-slavery radicals,
"in the heat of anold urgency" (Gilead 234); but it has lost the
capacity to ask what it is therefor. And because it has forgotten
its history, and the question of its history(a forgetfulness
reflected in the half-buried memory of the burning of a"negro"
church, in Jack's father's unthinking racism and in Jack's
knowledgethat he can never bring his African American wife to
Gilead), we have toask what it now means to be "native" to a place
like this. Lila's reconciledirony does not mean that her ability to
pass for native is a muffiing of thequestion; on the contrary, she
is able, as Jack generally is not, to give voiceto the possibility
of change. She is able to speak, where Jack's paralysingawareness
of the oflence he may give leaves him silent.
What makes the diflference? Jack and his father clearly love
each other,yet are trapped in a painful inarticulacy toward each
othermost poignantlyexpressed when the old man says that Jack has
never "had a name for me.Not one you'd call me to my face," and
Jack replies that he has never knowna name that didn't "seem
wrong": "I didn't deserve to speak to you the way
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10 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
the others did" {Home 311). Jack cannot use the "script" of
unselfconsciousfamily intimacy; but equally it is clear thatas his
sister recognizesthisscript is presented to him both as an
obligation and also as coriditional onbehaving appropriately. The
language of "natural" family relationship, inother words, is a text
that cannot accommodate Jack's self-awareness, hisconsciousness of
himself as predestined to be a stranger, morally,
culturally,religiously, an "exile from the ordinary world" {Home
201): as h says to hisbrother, "Sometimes it seems as though I'm in
one universe and you're inanother" {Home 267). Glory, his sister,
thinking of herself as '(resigned toJack's inaccessible
strangeness" {Home 249) comes closest to seeing what theproblem is
and knowing what is needed to resolve it, though her
instinctivesense of what Jack needs comes somehow too late to make
a difference tohim, or to his awareness of himself.
Being resigned to strangeness means also that Glory is
unresigned toaspects of Gilead, aspects of the native and natural
environment. Shewhohas herself been a prodigal of sortslooks at the
town and all it means andsees it as "dreaming out its curse of
sameness, somnolence" {Home 281). Hersuddenly vivid perception of
the curse of sameness is like the moment inGilead when Ames sees
the town as having forgotten the possibi ity of truth.Sameness
cannot live with the question that history poses. The
deceptivelytimeless surface of Gilead's life, the illusion of a
life in which everyone is anative in an undifferentiated present,
is a curse, is even, as Ames {Gilead233) calls it, hellish. What
Jack perceivesand hears as a kind of sentenceon himselfis the
stipulation that homecoming is necessarily a return tosameness,
something that challenges both his own acute self-consciousnessof
being a guilty outsider and his deliberate and costly alliance with
othernessby way of marrying into an African-American family (in
which he is, ofcourse, also a guilty outsider). His own personal
"doubleness," his constantperception of himself from the other's
standpoint, his acute ajwareness ofthe offence of his language and
perhaps his very existence, all this is subtlyfused in the
narrative with the doubleness of the history of racial division.the
inbuilt possibility in the society and the cultural moment that
Gileadrepresents of more than one story being told. That is the
possibility Gileadhas buried, for Jack as an individual as for the
neighbor of another race.
Lila's story is different not because she finds Gilead any
moreunproblematic than Jack does but because the "text" she has
encountered isnot simply that of sameness. Her unsettling presence
in Ames' congregation,her "unimaginable otherness" (which Jack's
"inaccessible strangeness"
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IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 11
echoes, surely deliberately), is recognized for what it is by
the preacher,an invitation to native speakers to grasp the
possibility of other narrativesand discourses. She is able to find
a "home" in Gilead, specifically in Ames'world, because the text of
Ames' preaching is able to live with the possibilityof its own
failure or lack of truthfulness. It is not that Ames simply
rejectswhat he has had to say: Lila looks on as he baptizes two
children, and hesenses himself asking a question back to her: "If
you know a better way todo this, I'd appreciate your telling me"
{Gilead 21). He challenges her angerwithout denying her
seriousness, and this, we must assume, is part of whatbuilds not
only her relationship with the Church but the possibility of
hereventual marriage to Ames.
Thus we are gently directed back to the question of what it is
aboutAmes' own preaching that makes this possible. Robinson gives
us a fewhints, particularly when Ames muses wryly about the books
he would liketo be found clutching in the event of a sudden death:
"The ones I considered,by the way, were Donne and Herbert and
Barth's Fpistle to the Romans andVolume II of Calvin's Institutes.
Which is by no means to slight VolumeI" {Gilead 115). Karl Barth
appears again at the end of the conversationwith Jack about
predestination. Ames suggests that Jack might find Barthhelpful,
and Jack's response is sardonic: does Ames recommend Barth
totormented souls on the doorstep at midnight? Ames turns the
remarkaside, but reflects to himself that "I don't recall ever
recommending him toany tormented soul except my own" {Gilead 153).
It is the other side of thecoin from what his wife's loving rebuke
about some people not being "socomfortable with themselves"
implies. Ames knows that he stands underan alien judgment, and
Barth's theology is one of his resources in learninghow to abide
its scrutiny. As his recollection of his first encounters with
Lilais filled out furtherquite late in Gileadhe describes her
presence andhis increasing obsession with her as "a foretaste of
death," an experience inwhich he is "snatched out of [his]
character" {Gilead 205). "I simply couldnot be honest with myself,
and I couldn't deceive myself, either" {Gilead203). But a Barthian
theological perspective (certainly one informedby Barth's Romans
commentary) would suggest that precisely such asimultaneous
recognition of truth and falsehood is the expected conditionof the
person who has faith. Faith is not the acknowledgement of a
simpleconsonance between what I think/believe and the truth of God,
but thetwofold acknowledgement of the incalculable gulf between the
truth of Godand my own subjectivity along with the inseparable
commitment of God
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12 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
to the self-deceiving and helpless heart. "There is no other
righteousnesssave that of the man who sets himself under judgment,
of the nian who isterrified and hopes" says Barth early in his
commentary {Romans 41); andlater, "the questionableness of our
situation becomes a source of strength"{Romans 156), and "Christ in
us is ... both the place where we are judgedand the place where we
are justified' {Romans 286).
For Ames to be found with Barth's Romans in his hand rnakes
goodsense. And, without elaborating details at this point, the same
holds of thesecond book of the Institutes, which deals broadly with
"The Knowledgeof God the Redeemer" including the whole question of
what it means tomaintain the apparently shocking and
counterintuitive claim that we are inno way "free" to collaborate
with the act of God. Redemption is to do withthe ways in which
grace brings alive the life of Christ in the human self.
Anindependent human will as source of transformation and life would
makenonsense of anything like Ames' simultaneous recognition of^
truth anddeceit: Calvin's idea of faith and the restoration of the
divine image is morelike a connection always already made,
appearing now from this angle,now from that, within the hopelessly
unstable experience of the believingsoul; never a possession, yet
always a presence because it is the presenceof an active savior.
And hence the absurdity of suggesting that grace is afusion of
divine and human initiative, as if the divine and the human
wereagencies operating on the same level, potentially in
competition] potentiallyin harmony. If Calvin's perspective is the
foundation of Ames' preaching,we can see a little of why he
isjustable to hear the question that Gileadoverall has lost. He may
be broadly "comfortable," as Lila suggests, but itis not a comfort
that defends itself by refusing what is strange. His settledfaith
is based on awareness of a strangeness at the very center of his
identity:Christ in him, in Barth's terms, is a given, a presence
not dependent onhis own self-correspondence. There is in his
identity something that is notmere sameness. And so, if his
starting position is an identity or ai:-homenessthat is aware of
the alien action of grace in the background, Lila's journeyis a
kind of reverse image as she moves away from sheer alienness
towardrecognition or integration, toward her ironic but reconciled
inhabiting of anative language shared with her husband.
If the text of a native language is to be in some sense
hospitable.Robinson implies, it must be a text with a shadow or
margin, conscious ofa strangeness that surrounds it and is not
captured by it, a strangeness thatinterprets it or at least offers
the possibility of a meaning to be uncovered.
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IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 13
on the far side of questioning. And the paradoxical conclusion
is that theperson who "inhabits" with integrity the place where
they find themselves,in such a way as to make it possible for
others to inhabit it in peaceablecompany with them is always the
person who is aware of the possibilityof an alien yet recognizable
judgment being passed, aware of the strangeralready sensed in the
self's territory. To be, in the Augustinian phrase, aquestion to
oneself is what makes it possible to be oneself without anxietyand
so with the possibility of welcome for the other. Odd as it sounds
to saythat the awareness of judgment is the solvent of anxiety, it
makes sense inthe Barthian context of seeing judgment and
justification in the same place.Anxiety is bound to the impulse to
justify oneself: judgment assures us thatthis is out of our
hands.
Thus the tragic standoff between Jack and his father in
Robinson'sfiction reveals the constantly frustrated search for
appropriate language,language that can be "justified": Jack
believes that he can never deserve tocall his father by the names
that the other children can use, and his fatheris listening
(without ever quite knowing this is what he is doing) for alanguage
from Jack that is not challenging or offensive, a language with
nostrangeness or questioning. In the event, they silence each
other.
Jack shrugged. "I have to go now. I wanted to say goodbye." He
went to hisfather and held out his hand.The old man drew his own
hand into his lap and turned away. "Tired ofit!" he said.Jack
nodded. "Me too. Bone tired." {Home 317)
The inarticulate love finally expressed in Jack's parting kiss
cannotbridge the gulf created by exhaustion and non-communication.
At the endof Home, Glory remains, significantly, the mediator, who
welcomes Jack's(African American) wife and child, while still
knowing that they cannotyet be made welcome. Delia, Jack's wife,
has "had to come into Gilead as ifit were a foreign and a hostile
country" {Home 324); Jack's own frustratedwish that he really lived
in his father's house {Home 323) has foreshadowedthe rejection his
family will experience. Glory, recalling Jack's wish to beat home,
tries to be hospitable, fully aware that she cannot truly
welcomethe family because the discourse and imagery of where she
liveswith herfather. Jack's fathercannot receive strangers. So she
dreams of a future inwhich her entire life will be, so to speak,
justified when Jack's son returnsas an adult, recognizing the place
as familiar, as his father's house; as if
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14 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
her entire life has been oriented toward making room for the
stranger, thequestion. And the young man will never know that he
has completed thecircle of her hopes, or that "he has answered his
father's prayers" (Home325). Justification will be the gift of a
guest who arrives trustingly It cannotbe guaranteed, planned for,
scripted, but it can, it seems, be irituited as apossibility. If
Jack and Glory both know this, their narrative is not over,despite
the terribly poignant and apparently unreconciled parting
betweenJack and his father.
Ames recognizes, however stumblingly, that justification is not
to bewon, and so is able in some degree to sense it at work; Jack
is left silenced bythe impossibility of winning it; Glory dreams of
a moment in which it willbe briefly visible. For all of them,
justification depends on the abandoningof the hope of winning it.
Ames grasps this in an eflective way. Glory hasan inkling of it.
Jack, according to the author, prays for it un'knowingly.even
unhopefuUy His doubleness of vision and hearing, theawareness of
how he seems to those he speaks to, incorporates
paralyzingsomething
absolutely vital to human integrity, the knowledge that I do not
coincidewith myself, that who and what I am is significantly out of
my control. Theproblem is that this is unconnected with the
"graceful" doubleriess that wesee in Ames and Lila, the knowledge
that the stranger whose perception ofme I cannot control,
isfinallynot my enemy or my competitor but thegenerative source of
myself. What I cannot master, the perspective I cannotby definition
attain or imagine (to borrow a thought of Simone Weil's), isthe
presence that makes me alive and that also makes welcome
possiblenot only a being at home but a creation of home for the
human other. And,if we return to the question of irony, this is a
perspective that allows anironizing of the ironic selfand therefore
allows the attention that opensto grace. Instead of the great gulf
being fixed between the meanings I aloneunderstand and the
appearances that others are content with, it is betweenevery
meaning I or anyone else can master and the hidden purpose thatis
at the center of my and everyone's lifewhich enjoins on us all
theattentiveness or expectancy Ames is able to bring to his
encounters (sensing"a kind of incandescence" in those who come to
him (Gilead 44). "Whenyou encounter another person..., it is as if
a question is being put to you.So you must think. What is the Lord
asking of me in this mornent, in thissituation?" (Gilead 124). And
Robinson, in the interview already quoted,points out that, against
such a background, predestination is a liberatingdoctrine in that
it tells us that "God's view of us is essentially mysterious"
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IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 15
{Gilead 489); so far from imposing on us an unchanging
character, itdeclares that our future is radically unknowable to
usso that change isalways imaginable, the answer to the question is
always open from the sideof our awareness.
It isas Robinson does not fail to insist quietly in her
evocation ofGilead's racial defensivenessa political understanding
as much as atheological one. Identities are not sealed off from
history. Gilead's radicalorigins may decay into the defensive
complacency that forgets the burningof a black church and politely
declines to be a home for Jack's family; oldAmes may work his way
late in life toward a more painful awareness of the"question" than
his blameless ministry might have led us to expect, thanksto Lila
and Jack. The possibility of changed identity for an individual is
nomore and no less extraordinary than what David Jones called "the
turnof a civilization." But to recognize this also highlights a
deeply significantcultural question, at the centre of Robinson's
recent lectures on Absence ofMind. "Whoever controls the definition
of mind," she writes, "controls thedefinition of humankind itself,
and culture, and history" {Absence 32). Howwe think about thinking
is a profoundly political issue; and thinking, in thiscontext,
includes all that we have so far been considering about
questionsand native languages and identity. Absence of Mind
attempts a diagnosis ofthe contemporary near-obsession with
defining mind in reductive terms,"as a passive conduit of other
purposes than those the mind ascribes to itself{Absence 71). The
effect of this, she argues, is to neutralize the questionsthat the
mind puts to itself about itself: the questions we put to
ourselveshave the capacity, it seems, to change things (32 again),
and so to silencethe questions is to assume that intentional change
is literally unthinkable.
But, connecting this to earlier observations about irony, the
effect ofsilencing such questions is bound also to be a dismissal
of the possibility ofirony. Irony places two registers of meaning
in juxtaposition, two levels ofdiscourse, one apparent, the other
hidden; the irony lies in their consciousjuxtaposition and the
different senses in which they might be said to betrue. But while
the reductive theses Robinson confronts appear to
juxtaposeregisters of discoursethe appearance of consciousness or
intention andthe actual biological determination of all that is
said or donethis is not infact the case. The underlying story is
presented as unambiguously true andthe surface discourse as false.
This is not irony, the generative play betweentwo registers, but a
simple contrast between fact and error. The determiningmaterialist
narrative cannot itself be "ironised." This account thus
becomes
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16 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
one that denies any possibility of its own unsettlement;
whichserious political statement in that it cannot thus be other
than adiscourse, inimical to change. There is no tension
between
is indeed acontrollingnative and
other languages because in an important and troubling sense
there are nospeakers: language itself becomes a form of determined
behavior. It hardlyneeds saying that the theorists targeted in
Robinson's critique in Absence ofMind would make the writing of
fiction impossible, since fiction dependssubstantially on various
kinds of significant gap between what is said andwhat is shown,
between perspectives embodied in different sorts of speech.It may
be a matter of Dostoevskian "polyphony," the unresolved pluralityof
voices allowed expression in the text; or, say, of the
extraordinary doublevision of Dickens' Bleak House, with its
alternation between not only narratorsbut tenses, a "resolved"
narrative in the past tense and a wholly unresolvedand unhealed
authorial present tense; or of the unreliable narrators of
latetwentieth century fiction, the shifting lights of Ian McEwan's
Atonement, forexample; or of Robinson's careful delineation of the
diverse ironies of Lilaand Jack. But none of these is thinkable if
language is determined behavior.None of the varieties of
unpredictable narrative change work without apicture of language as
fundamentally behavior that invites and proposesquestion.
Butto connect this discussion with the internal issue of
howAmes' language in the novels becomes open to the challenge of
grace, oftransformation that enables someone to receive the
radically strangethereare fictions that not only work with irony
but attempt to show how whatI earlier called "reconciled irony"
enacts in its language a perception andreception of grace. To
identify Robinson's novels as examples of this is to saythat they
voice a range of imagined personal perspectives within which it
ispossible to see how a particular voice or particular "textual"
constructionof the self allows a radically unknowable element in by
both inhabitingand relativizing its own place. It does not seek to
be without place, withouthome: that is thein fact
unimaginableterminus of Jack's compulsive anddesperate ironising.
Nor does it seek to dissolve the question addressed to theself by
fabricating an identity that collapses everything into sameness,
intoformal reconciliation. The voice of grace is one in which the
unknowablejudgment of God is constantly invoked; and by those
mysterious processesthat Calvin (not least in Ames' beloved Book II
of the Institutes) describes,the freedom of God is, as it were,
introduced into the human frame ofreference and radical change
becomes imaginablenot because the human
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IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 17
self is free but because God is. We have made ourselves subject
to necessity,a necessity that is, paradoxically, "unnecessary," in
tension with our natureas God intended it (see Institutes ILiii.5);
we are not compelled to evil, buthave always already chosen not to
be free by our fantasy that we can live welleither by isolating our
will from God or by imagining that we co-operatewith God as we
might with another subject. Change occurs when we receivethe gift
of a relation with God that makes us "natural" againat home withGod
and ourselves precisely because we have given up the solitary
struggleto justify ourselves (e.g. Institutes II.v.15).
In the order of grace, the native speaker is not one who has
neverquestioned the language she or he speaks and has no awareness
of whatother possibilities exist for speech; the native speaker is
the one who caninhabit language without anxiety, without constant
defensive activity on theborders of the territory, because of a
knowledge that all truthful speech andaction is activated by what
is and always remains unsaid, the hinterland ofGod's unimaginable
judgment. By such an alignment with an unseen andunspoken judgment,
the speaker is aligned with the divine liberty: not agift of
independent human freedom but an openness to the alien marginsof
human discourse out of which comes the raw possibility of change
inthe direction of absolution and generosity. I do not coincide
with myself;this is a given, we might say, of all serious fiction,
of the modern fictionalconsciousness, preoccupied as it is with
growth, self-delusion, recognitionof self and of difference. But
for the Christian imagination, seeking wordsand pictures for grace,
that fictional consciousness has to be connectedwith not only the
mystery of change but what might be called the mysteryof
absolution, the unpredictable arrival of the liberty both to
absolve andto receive absolution, without any denial of the chains
of cause and effect.Grace, the strange gift of becoming a native
speaker of the language properto humankind, the language of being a
creature, arrives at right angles toplanning and deserving. It
rightly provokes both baffiement and gratitude;and a fiction that
is hospitable to the gospel will work out of both.
Faced with the sight of the illegitimate child of Jack's
youthful affairplaying in the riverside sunlight with her mother,
"Glory said, T do notunderstand one thing in this world. Not one'"
{Gilead 164). And Ames, atthe end of Gilead, significantly
transfers the language of "prevenient grace"to "prevenient
courage"the bravery needed "to acknowledge that there ismore beauty
than our eyes can bear," the courage which alone allows us tobe
generous, hospitable. Bafflement and gratitude both require that
courage;
Robinson's novels measure something of what such courage
entails. It is
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18 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
both the courage to be judged, as Ames is by the alienness of ^^
ila, and thecourage to inhabit, as Lila does, a speech and a style
of living that you knowto be provisional to the point of
near-absurdity because it does in spite ofeverything make space for
absolution. It is also the couragefor those whoare not quite
touched by grace to the extent that Ames and his wife aretoimagine,
as Glory does, a "justification" of all frustrated faithfulness
andendurance in terms of a homecoming that is equally personal and
political.Ultimately, that is what the Christian fiction is, an
imagined justification,achieved (artistically speaking) by trying
to voice what it "sounds" like tospeak under an unknown judgment
that is constrained by nothing but thenature of a liberty for which
"the one sufficient reason for the forgiveness ofdebt is simply the
existence of debt" {Gilead 161).
WORKS CITED
Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns.
London: OxfordUP, 1933.
Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010..
Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.. Home. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
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