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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2016
This article examines Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead in dialogue with her speculative reflection upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology to read the novel as a radically ambivalent text which exposes an aporia at the core of the Reverend Ames's Christian ethics. This ambivalence appears in the way that Ames's version of his own family history works assiduously to expiate the perceived violence done to ethics by his grandfather's support for abolitionist violence while remaining haunted by the thought that in the unforgiving context of Bleeding Kansas simply to insist upon an absolute distinction between violence on the one hand and ethics and law on the other may be irreconcilable with the workings of good faith and the ends of justice. Reinterpreting Ames's narrative in the light of Jacques Derrida's reflection on the paradoxical structure of ethical responsibility, the article argues that the violence done to Ames's ethical reflection by the memory of the grandfather, John Brown, and the excluded black body reveals the agonistic location of the ethics of abolitionist history between two kinds of violence on the uncertain border between justice and law which defines the ground of every genuinely ethical decision.
1 Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (London: Picador, 2005; first published 1998), 251.
2 Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 209. Further references to this edition are incorporated in the main text.
3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans Neville Horton-Smith, ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: SCM Press, 1955), 83.
4 Ibid., 194.
5 Ibid., 92–93.
6 As Robinson, The Death of Adam, 114–15, observes, Bonhoeffer's decision to leave Germany may be partly explained by internal church opposition to the Bethel Confession, which he wrote with Martin Niemöller, and which declared, “It is the task of Christians who come from the Gentile world to expose themselves to persecution rather than to surrender, willingly or unwillingly, even in one single respect, their kinship with Jewish Christians in the Church, founded on Word and Sacrament.”
7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume I, No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1928–1936 (London: Collins, 1977), 235.
8 Bonhoeffer, Ethics 202.
9 Ibid., 190.
10 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 110.
11 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 204.
12 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 115–16.
13 Upon its publication Gilead was awarded both the 2005 National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
14 An example of this second style of reading appears in Douglas, Christopher, “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 44, 3 (2011), 333–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Throughout his article Douglas rebukes Robinson for eliding the “historical Christian support for slavery,” dwelling at considerable length on the perceived contradiction between this act of historical occlusion and her repeated stress in her nonfiction upon the importance of “trying to get ‘the past’ right.” Douglas's trenchant conclusion is that the “reason for Gilead's evasion of history – its will to not learn historical lessons – is that Robinson conceives of history as the source of what we have come to call ‘identity’ in contemporary American multiculturalism,” a process of identity formation which, in treating history as a kind of memory, permits “the formation of a liberal white Christian identity that ‘forgets’ about the complexity of actual Christian history.” The crucial weakness of this reading of the novel, however, is its dependence upon a structural confusion between author and protagonist. Thus while it is certainly true that Ames treats history as a kind of memory which enables him to repress the ethical demand central to his grandfather's radical abolitionism, his encounters with Jack Boughton are expressly designed by Robinson to enact a type of “rememory” of the past which compels him to confront the continuing trauma of African American disenfranchisement from Bleeding Kansas to the emerging civil rights movement of his own time. See Douglas, “Christian Multiculturalism,” 337, 338, 343.
15 To speak in this way of Brown's “legacy” is to suggest that no sincere attempt to grasp the ethical complexity of abolitionist involvement in the anti-slavery struggle in 1850s Kansas, least of all one informed like Ames's own by the Christian principle that we participate in spiritual being without difference or distinction, can properly evade the need to come to some kind of reckoning with Brown's insistence upon the universal dimension of moral responsibility, the necessary connection between our unconditional obligation to the victims of social persecution and the requirement of practical action, and his demand for a new republican dispensation cleansed of racial discrimination and oppression. To say this is neither to seek to exculpate Brown from the atrocities associated with the name of “Pottawatomie John Brown” nor to succumb to the “lure of transcendence” by following him in deriving justification for political violence in an antinomian conception of moral authority. See Andrew Taylor, “Consenting to Violence: Henry David Thoreau, John Brown and the Transcendent Intellectual,” in Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington, eds., The Afterlife of John Brown (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 89–106, 96. It is, however, to recall to memory that the catalyst for Brown's martial insurgency into Kansas was to revive the encompassing vision of a universal brotherhood of man proclaimed in the New Testament and denied by those unwilling to resist the murderous abrogation of this universal principle by “proslavery terrorists” during the Kansas war. See Louis A Decaro Jr., “Black People's Ally, White People's Bogeyman: A John Brown Story,” in ibid., 11–26, 12. Against the unsparing historical backdrop of 1850s Kansas, in which what passed for political legitimacy was the unstable and highly contingent effect of an internal economy of violence and where institutional support for the pro-slavery campaign of terror against abolitionist groupings extended to the presidency itself, pacifistic and pietistic appeals to an ethics of nonviolence necessarily ran the risk of structural complicity with forces implacably opposed to that opening to the other which constitutes the basis of every ethical relation. In circumstances like these, I want to suggest, part of the violence done to ethical reflection by the memory of John Brown is to remind us of the agonistic location of the ethics of abolitionist history between two kinds of violence on the uncertain border between justice and law which defines the unstable ground of every genuinely ethical decision.
16 Many examples of this prevailing critical view which identifies the novel's extraordinary aesthetic reverberation with the scope and consolatory power of Ames's own ethical vision might be cited. For James Wood “Gilead is a beautiful work – demanding, grave and lucid … Robinson's words have a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction.” In Neel Mukherjee's judgement, Gilead is “a book of such meditative calm, such spiritual intensity that it seems miraculous that [Robinson's] silence was only for twenty-three years; such measure of wisdom is the fruit of a lifetime. Robinson's prose, aligned with the sublime simplicity of the language of the Bible, is nothing short of a benediction. You might not share its faith, but it is difficult not to be awed, moved, and ultimately humbled by the spiritual effulgence that lights up the novel from within.” Echoing Mukherjee's conclusion, Stevie Davies observes, “The slow pulse of Robinson's writing slows the reader's eye and mind, and creates in the reading process a literary version of the narrator's spiritual experience. Gilead reminds us that words have power to spare, to forgive, to do justice.” Donald Morrison, meanwhile, underscores the ethical foundation of this vision with exemplary concision: “Ames is that rarity in fiction, a thoroughly good man.” See James Wood, “Acts of Devotion,” New York Times, 28 Nov, 2004, 11–12; Neel Muckherjee, “Gilead,” The Times, 16 April 2005, 16; Stevie Davies, “A Revival of Faith in Fiction,” The Independent, 25 March 2005, 22; Donald Morrison, “Acts of Devotion,” Financial Times, 25 March 2005, 26.
17 Jeffrey Hart, “Now, a Masterpiece,” National Review, 11 April 2005, 46–47.
18 Liese, Christopher, “That Little Incandescence’: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,” Studies in the Novel, 41, 3 (Fall 2009), 348–67Google Scholar, 351.
19 Ibid., 349. Similarly highlighting Gilead's preoccupation with the phenomenology of perception rather than the reverberations set in train by the problem of choosing the right conduct of life in response to more general social forces of violence and exclusion, Laura E. Tanner mobilizes current scientific understandings of the neurobiology of consciousness to suggest that what she calls “the cultural force of Robinson's text” stems “not only from its lyrical rendering of quotidian experience but from its powerful unveiling of how dying shapes the sensory and psychological dynamics of human perception. Gilead localizes Ames's psychic struggle with his own death in acts of perceptual processing which it both depicts and thematizes; the novel pushes existential concerns back into the realm of lived experience to explore the way that Ames's experience of dying traps him in the collapsing space between perception and representation.” By so forcefully locating the imaginative apprehension of death at the centre of perception, Tanner concludes, the novel presents a powerful experience of the “embodied psychological dynamics of aging” while offering “one point of entry to broader cultural dialogues about these issues.” Tanner, Laura E., “Looking Back from the Grave: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,” Contemporary Literature, 48, 2 (Summer 2007), 227–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 228, 251.
20 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 68.
21 Ibid., 68.
22 Ibid., 70.
23 Marilynne, The Death of Adam, 115.
24 Nicola Anderson, Derrida: Ethics under Erasure (London: Continuum, 2012), 90.
25 Marilynne, The Death of Adam, 111.
26 Ibid., 113.
27 My reading of the fire at the black church as a historical echo of the civic conflagration over the racial question known as “Bleeding Kansas” accordingly stands at a necessary distance from Lisa M. Siefker Bailey's symbolic interpretation of fire in Gilead in spiritually renewing and redemptive terms as “a representation of the energy of being, which can become destructive like the puritanical mistakes made in Ames's grandfather's church, or transcendent, like the filling of the Holy Spirit.” Bailey, Lisa M. Siefker, “Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,” Christianity and Literature, 59, 2 (Winter 2010), 265–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 265.
28 For an insightful discussion of Robinson's use of baseball as a “cultural metonym” for both broader patterns of racial segregation and Ames's own “amnesia” concerning this troubled racial history see Petit, Susan, “Field of Deferred Dreams: Baseball and Historical Amnesia in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home,” MELUS: Multi Ethnic Literature of the US, 37, 4 (Winter 2012) 119–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Geoffrey Hill, Style and Faith (New York: Counterpoint, 2003) 3.