What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  Beauty is grandly present in the architecture of the cosmos, minutely present in the structure of the atom, and yet we humans can seem capable of utter indifference to it. But I have begun to feel that our ability to do wrong is the basis of our moral nature, that our bias toward error gives meaning and urgency to our seeking after truth, that our blindnesses make the beautiful, pervasive as it is, always an object of discovery, a thing to be yearned for. Just as the norms of our experience of existence are radically untypical of the universe of Being we can reasonably infer, with its entanglements and indeterminacies, its dark matter and antigravity, so we are singular among creatures precisely in our capacity to refine and elaborate our understanding in the awareness of its shortfall. It is this in us that has made tiny blue earth a singular, seraphic presence in the great cosmos, watching and pondering, rapt with wonder. We can feel deficiency in what we know or do, we can hear inadequacy in our most painfully considered phrases. And gracious and chimerical beauty will bless us with the certainty that there is more to be hoped for, more to be tried. The theologian can say all this implies divine intention and also continuous, loving engagement. Because God has created the universe, humankind is at the center of it all.

  Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself

  The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia: February 22–26, 2016

  Recently I read a brief overview of myself and my work, an article on the Internet. It said that if someone were bioengineered to personify unhipness, the result would be Marilynne Robinson. The writer listed the qualities that have earned me this distinction—I am in my seventies, I was born in Idaho, I live in Iowa, I teach in a public university, and I am a self-professed Calvinist. Ah, well. I will only grow older, I am happy in Iowa, my religion is my religion. That I was born in Idaho will be true forever. So I can put aside any slightest, unacknowledged thought of satisfying the standards of hipness. The review was cautiously positive despite all this, warning and alluring and also flattering its readers with the assurance that in me they will find thinking that is very unlike their own. Fair enough. The article did make me think, though, how inclined Americans are to find their way to some sheltering consensus that will tell them what to wear, what to eat, what to read, how to vote, what to think. There is nothing new in this observation of mine, though perhaps I am unusual in considering these aggregations in terms of the mass of things they leave unconsidered, neglected, and unknown.

  Looking back I realize that I have spent a great part of my adult life working to rescue wounded or discounted reputations. I’ve always known that there are risks. To say that Jonathan Edwards is not hip is to test the limits of understatement. As much might be said of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, John Calvin, Puritanism. At this point in my life there can be no doubt about the tropisms of my mind and soul, even though for a long time I thought I was just tidying up a few misunderstandings for my own sake, before I went on to other work. I somehow thought I was devoting the time to people and things that lacked poetry, were utterly unpoetical—believing what was always told me, implicitly and explicitly. These stereotypes are hard to eradicate, however unwelcome they might be. Distinguished names associated with Puritanism in England include Edmund Spenser, Mary and Philip Sidney, Arthur Golding, Thomas Middleton, Fulke Greville, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, John Bunyan. In Britain, social and legal disabilities as well as outright persecution discouraged nonconformist loyalties, especially before and after the parliamentary revolution and the Commonwealth. So the style of thought, the worldview, associated with Puritanism naturalized itself to the environment of the dominant culture. But about these figures I have named there is no ambiguity. It is true that their writing does not satisfy the polemical sense of the word Puritan, which is so overwhelmingly its modern sense that the most careful efforts at historical precision in the use of the word are always compromised by its associations with priggishness, acquisitiveness, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and fanaticism. Still, for years I accepted, or did not know how to reject, the bleak stereotype, when it is precisely the poetry of Puritanism, and more generally the use and celebration of the English language always associated with it, that has enlisted my devoted attention.

  I am fascinated by history, and I don’t know what it is. I believe that, whatever it is, it is profoundly important, and I don’t know why. I am especially fascinated by erasures and omissions, which seem to me to be strongly present in their apparent absence, like black holes, pulling the fabric of collective narrative out of shape. Europeans often say our culture is Puritan—Lollard, according to Freud—and we don’t know enough history to understand what they might mean by this. We have made a project of freeing ourselves of even minimal standards of taste or discretion, and still the word clings. Ethical rigor, aversion to display, the ideal of vocation are all diminished things among us, and still we are Puritan. Most recently I heard us denounced in these terms at a dinner table in London. How horrifying our rules against sexual harassment! It is the most natural thing in the world for students to fall in love with their professors, subordinates with their superiors! And so on. My suggestion that this might all seem very different from the perspective of the student or the subordinate, and my thoughts about fairness, merit, and so on, were not of interest. They were merely one more Puritanical pretext for denying the pleasures of life. I think in many cases Puritanical may simply mean “reformist,” tending to assume that even very settled cultural patterns and practices can be called into question, that they are not presumptively endorsed by culture, that what is traditional cannot claim therefore to be rooted in human nature. We tend to forget that our revolution was one in a series—Geneva expelled its Savoyard rulers and was governed by elected councils. The Dutch expelled the Hapsburg emperor and in the process trained sympathetic British volunteers who took the experience home with them. Then with the Puritan Revolution England tried and executed its king and attempted a decade of parliamentary government. More than a century later the American colonies rejected monarchy as a system on the basis of the abuses of the king then in power. This is not logical, strictly speaking, but it affiliated the Americans with the great precedent of the English revolution, the revolution of Milton and Marvell. The most revolutionary idea contained in all this is that society as a whole can be and should be reformed. This Puritan energy does indeed continue to animate American life.

  * * *

  Sometimes on the strength of a reformist movement history is recovered—there are innumerable instances of this in the last half century, in this country often as a consequence of the civil rights movement. In Europe, perhaps as a secondary consequence of this movement, Britain, the Netherlands, and other countries have begun to acknowledge the enormous extent of their roles in the Atlantic slave trade. It says a great deal about human consciousness, collective and individual, that a phenomenon of such scale, duration, and consequence could be obscured so thoroughly. One of the many advantages of my long life is that I remember how things were before that old oblivion began to break up a little. The past really is a foreign country, even the near past, the one you have lived through. You have to have been there to have anything like a true sense of it. This does not make the past understandable, any more than living now makes the present understandable, but it does allow you to call to mind the cohesion of its elements, from which the whole strange mind-set derived its authority, as dreams and eras and cultures do, always including our own. We continue to learn how important slavery and racism have been to the construction of Western civilization, literally as well as figuratively. Without question we have vastly more to learn. Through all this it is important to remember that history that is grossly incomplete can feel coherent, sufficient, and true. The reality of history, whatever it is, is perhaps best demonstrated by the power it has when the tale it tells is false.

  Coherence means something like “stickiness, adhesion.” An assumption, if it is firmly held, and especially if it is unconsciou
s, will attract information that preserves or renews its stability, testing its credibility as information by its stickiness, rejecting anything that will not be assimilated to it—unless, and then only in certain cases, some external shock or some shift of consensus causes it to decohere, to lose the logic of its structure. If you are deep in a dream and someone knocks at the door, that giant, elusive spider you are now trying to kill with a hammer will vanish at the next knock, and the coherency that made the creature real and threatening will disintegrate. And in half a minute that logic will be wholly irrecoverable. Any model of reality tends to perpetuate itself if it can, on a principle of coherence peculiar to itself, and this is true of the narratives of history. It is somehow also true of history itself—true, that is, of whatever has actually happened, the unacknowledged history that haunts us, and perhaps also invests our societies with their distinctiveness, like that Puritanism of ours. I have read that the interaction of dark matter with itself is based not on gravity but on friction. I have no idea what this might mean, except that, dark matter being by far the preponderant form of matter in the universe, good old gravity could be only one relatively minor structuring principle of it all. In their absence from our awareness essential things are not missed, though still they are present and essential.

  I have been reading things Shakespeare and his audience might have read in order to understand both of them better. Literacy was high then, driven by tracts and pamphlets that were addressed precisely to those who, in other generations, would have had very limited access to printed or written material and little or no ability to read it. There were widely circulated newspapers that covered the wars on the Continent. There were chronicle histories, which implicitly addressed the great questions of royal succession and legitimacy. Most popular of all these during Shakespeare’s lifetime was a great tome, larger in each of its editions—The Actes and Monuments of the Martyrs, by John Foxe. The book is famous for its illustrations depicting martyrdoms, and for the care and the remarkable sophistication of its printing. But I had never seen it. I went to the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., and asked to look at it, assuming that an eminent Shakespeare library would have copies of a book he and his audience would have been very likely to have had some acquaintance with. In fact they had, they told me, only one copy that was in good enough condition to be looked at, and that one only because a scholar using the library had arranged to have it bound at his own expense. Foxe’s book of martyrs was a central text of English and American Puritanism. It is a polemic, certainly, a prerevolutionary work. But it is also an extraordinary work of historical documentation in English, Latin, and, where needed, Greek. The chronicle histories bear no comparison to it. Its importance as an extraordinary specimen of Renaissance publishing should be sufficient by itself to protect it from being left to molder away from neglect in an archive devoted to Renaissance culture. I feel I am probably fair in taking the marginalizing of Foxe’s book to be an effect of its association with Puritanism, a sort of editing of history, which I must assume is important in very many contexts but which I notice in this one instance because of my particular interests. That said, Shakespeare is hardly an interest I can claim to have to myself. There is a Toryism in Elizabethan studies that yields a model of culture that must exclude, for example, this important book, because its very importance throws many things into question about Shakespeare and the public he addressed. A comparable and related phenomenon is the history of the Bible of Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell—that is, the Geneva Bible, which was out of print from 1644 to 2007. There is a great deal of reverence accorded the King James or Authorized Version on the theory that it was the watershed for all that wonderful language, and this despite the fact that it was published in 1611, when Shakespeare’s career was at an end. The Geneva Bible was the Bible of the Puritans. It is the King James Version, just not yet shorn of the marginal commentary that instructed its readers in the Reformed understanding of the text, and not yet purged of language that might seem politically dangerous. What did Scripture look like to the generations who saw it in a form not “authorized,” that telling word? How many thousands of scholars have not wondered how Shakespeare’s work could have been influenced by a book published in 1611? Very many American scholars are royalists of the imagination, wistful onlookers, too in love with their Elizabethan world picture even to acknowledge how badly it accords with the actual brilliance and spirit, and repressiveness and violence, of the age.

  * * *

  I have arrived at the conclusion that American history is substantially false, though not exceptionally so, and that many of these falsifications go back to a source that is older than the country, earlier than the colonies. I dwell on American history because it is mine, and because it is the screen on which the national psyche is projected. I would like to think America might go on for a very long time, always recognizable in its best qualities, however it may transform itself otherwise. I assume most Americans would agree that the essence of the project did find classic expression in 1776 and 1789. It seems to me that for the survival of our experiment to be even imaginable the country must know itself much better.

  A thousand problems arise immediately, of course. I was talking to people in a library in Iowa City about the abolitionist movement and the Civil War. A woman came up to me afterward in a state of scarcely controlled irritation and asked me why any of this should interest her, when no one in her family was even here at the time of the Civil War. She had a point. The true history of the United States is rewritten day by day. Yet the fact is that we were a string of British colonies for almost as long as we have been an independent country. And during that long time the trade and industrial policies of British and other European governments established slave labor in the Americas. So far as we can know, nothing of greater consequence ever happened on this continent, except for colonization itself. The Civil War is only the most spectacular instance of its impact on our civilization, which is ongoing, as we all know. It is true and always to be remembered that the great influx of Africans was a gift to the culture that has given it a brilliance and rich distinctiveness the whole world enjoys. That they came as captives and lived as slaves is an inexpressible grief and transgression.

  In other words, it is not ethnocentricity that makes early America of such interest to me. On the contrary, ethnocentricity is what makes our history avert its gaze from our Anglo-European origins. We prefer to speak as if our society had neither source, context, nor analog, insofar as its doings are or have been in any way regrettable. We were somehow spontaneously generated, like toads from the mud of the Nile, and were instantly up to our special version of no good. To want to keep discredit to itself, to insist on the utter uniqueness of its sins and errors, might seem generous or rigorous in a country, but it is neither of these because it has nothing to do with the truth. In Adam’s Fall we sinned all, the English in Ireland, Australia, the Caribbean and here, the Belgians in Congo, the Spanish in Argentina, the Russians in Ukraine. The list is infinitely far from complete, as we all know. Its beginnings are undiscoverable. Phenomena of the kind it names are infinitely far from being ended. If we could let ourselves have anything like a real sense of history, we would not be so continuously surprised and bewildered by its latest permutations.

  It seems conventional among historians to say that the American Revolution wasn’t about much, that the liberalizations brought on by the evolution of the British parliamentary system would have yielded the same freedoms without all the uproar. This view of things is deeply uninformed, because we avert our gaze. And it has the effect of making the generations who began and sustained the Revolution of little historic interest. In the South were the plantation owners, with all the problems this involves. In the North were the Northerners, generally described as Puritans or Calvinists, with all the problems this involves. We have left ourselves nowhere to place our sympathies. Our solution is to project on England and Britain an imagined aloofness from our sins and errors
despite the fact that problems that perplex and disgrace us descend from our long colonial period and its aftermath, during which time Britain emerged as a great industrial power on the back of all that uncompensated toil in American cotton fields.

  What does it matter? Everything always matters. Years ago, during the thaw in relations between the United States and Russia, I went to an exhibition of the Romanov jewels. Off to the side, out of the way, there was a display of photos and newspaper articles about the Russian intervention in the Civil War on the side of the Union. Tsar Nicholas II sent his fleets to the harbors of New York and San Francisco, where they remained through much of the war. He did this to prevent intervention on the side of the South by England and France, which along with Russia were the great powers of the time. The British had begun a gradual emancipation in the West Indies in 1837. But they came very near attempting to enforce a “peace,” that is, a permanent division of this country that would have left American slavery intact and ensured the flow of American cotton to those nightmarish factories in Manchester and Lyon. There was much gratitude and celebration here over the arrival of these formidable Russians, to whom we might in fact be said to owe our national existence. How did we manage to forget this? The 1860s are a much-studied period in our history, needless to say, and by world standards not a very distant one. Might this intervention not have been a good thing to remember, during all those years when Russia was made to seem so intractably alien to us? But the tale does not reflect well on England or France. It does not cohere with our image of northern Europe as our always better self. I propose this as an instance of that tendency of fact, of truth to be excluded when it is not assimilable to some settled and preferred vision of things, a vision it would complicate. Truth would be a leaven in the lump, so to speak, giving the whole narrative an element of truth in the form of complexity.