The Christian World of Jack

Robinson’s latest and last addition to the quartet is Jack, which is arguably her best novel since Gilead. It’s a beautiful interracial love story and a sustained character study of Jack Boughton’s truly wretched life. It is also, much to my delight, thin on overt theological topics or discussions. Nevertheless, it is resolutely a Christian novel, built on metaphysical assumptions about human identity, equality, and language. To read Jack is to experience a world where the Christian vision is true.        

It’s Della who most clearly states Robinson’s own view of human identity as ensouled, commenting, “a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it.” Robinson spends the majority of Jack staging an encounter with his holy human soul. Every human has value and dignity, even humans as beat down as Jack Boughton, because they were created in the image of God.

Robinson’s locus of the divine image, and the mark of humanity’s mysterious exceptionalism, is self-consciousnesses. This is why Jack largely consists of a dramatization of interiority—“that endless, secret conversation that was himself.” Yale professor Amy Hungerford says Robinson’s novels assume that “ordinary people have rich and complicated interior lives, that they embody a silent discourse of thought that, if we knew its voice, would astonish us.” That’s the soul Jack illuminates, the secret realities of “everything [a person] didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over.” Robinson dramatizes the principle of imago Dei through the representation of these hidden depths, showing us their beauty. Della says, “I just think there has to be a Jesus, to say ‘beautiful’ about things no one else would ever see.” When we read Jack, we are invited to see this inner beauty, contemplate it, cherish it, as Christ does. “The world is teeming with beautiful souls,” says Robinson, paraphrasing Calvin. “If we greet them as Christ, they may well show us the face of Christ.” Her work forms us to assume that every person we ever encounter has creaturely dignity and contains mysterious depths.

This is also a source of human equality. Robinson’s essays seize on the democratic, egalitarian, anti-hierarchical implications of imago Dei. In her fiction, equality is expressed in her attention to “ordinary people”—the Jacks and Dellas—rather than the rich, powerful, or famous. It’s also expressed in her attention to sin. Jack quite emphatically assumes the traditional doctrine that though we are all equally image-bearers, we are also equally fallen.            

Robinson chooses to frame the reality of the fall with the language of “harm,” giving sin an ethical, interpersonal character. Jack longs to do no more harm, believing himself to have a “vocation of harmlessness.” And yet harm persists: “he had done harm he did not intend, which was another proof that he did harm inevitably, intentions be damned.” Jack imagines a world where to be in relation is inevitably to do harm. To be radically harmless is to be alone: “Dear Jesus, keep me harmless. He knew what that meant. Keep me alone.”

This only adds to the already long and troubling record of unintentional harm throughout the Gilead quartet. In Gilead John Ames chooses to preach on Hagar and Ishmael in an effort to console himself about leaving his wife and child behind. This sermon ends up magnifying Jack’s guilt for the abandonment of his child and drives him to a suicide attempt. In Home the Boughton family makes several attempts to help Annie Wheeler, the poor, young woman Jack abandons.  But all of these attempts at charity are an offense to Annie: “She was a hard, proud, unsmiling girl, and she may well have hated them all for their benevolent intentions, which were indeed condescending, reflecting as they did their awareness that her circumstances could be improved.”  The novels testify to the ubiquity of unintentional harm. 

It is this metaphysical vision of human identity, informed by imago Dei and sin, that may help readers resist seeing identity as either overdetermined by culture—the social constructivists—or overdetermined by nature—the biological determinists. Robinson does not dismiss these shaping forces, and she is particularly sensitive to how race, class, and gender shape our lives. Indeed, race will likely dominate the reception of Jack, as perhaps it should, given our political climate. Jack may well prove one of the wisest, subtlest meditations on the experiential realities of racism in American literature. 

Yet, unlike the social constructivists of the political left, or the biological determinists of the right (whom she takes to task in Absence of Mind), Robinson will not allow race, gender, class, genetics, or any social or natural category to fully define human beings. Humans are too complex, too singular, too mysterious for any of these categories to serve as an exhaustive explanation. Robinson associates identity with narrative voice. Perhaps this is why the novels are not written in a uniform voice; instead, each novel possesses its own musical qualities to reflect the tone of the protagonist’s self. In her choice to focus mainly on one soul in each novel, Robinson subtly argues for the singularity and irreducibility of identity. 

But she will not follow the logic that, because we are irreducibly complex and our lives are made out of uniquely lived out experiences, we can never hope to communicate our lives to others. She never accepted the solipsistic implications of the postmodern conception of language.  Language is not a prison-house of arbitrary signs. Robinson writes with implicit faith in the power of language to bear our lives to others. 

This is imaged in Jack and Della’s shared love of poetry. Their extended dialogue in the cemetery is the cement of their love. The novel often reflects on the nature of language: Della says, “If you make a sound it’s just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it’s a word.  It means something. It can’t not mean something.” Meaning between souls is possible. That this task of communicating our inwardness is granted to language, so prone to error, failure, and confusion, makes it even more lovely. There’s a tenderness toward language in Robinson, a compassion for those paltry sounds tasked with such heavy burdens. Jack is a world where readers can be confident in the reconciling potential of language, an affirmation of a faith that proclaims the Word made flesh. Language can bridge ethical gaps between souls, as well as political gaps between Black and white.          

Jack takes place in a world that imagines humans as image-bearers in a fallen world capable of divine grace. For the church, this is the true world. And if we desire to form better disciples of Christ, the church must surround herself with true imaginative worlds.     

David Bentley Hart once quipped, “Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.” These cults are a challenge for the church. The formative value of Jack (and the rest of the quartet) is found in the experience of reading, of being immersed in a world rooted in Christian assumptions that encourages recognizably Christian attitudes toward our neighbors (like charity).    

Perhaps many within the church are already doing this, thankful for Robinson’s gift and avoiding overly scrupulous attention to heretical implications. (I think it’s safe to assume most great Christian artists are at least mildly heretical; the role Dante assigns to Beatrice seems a bit heterodox, doesn’t it?) As for myself, I found Jack hard to read. Not because it was hard to understand, but because I could not summon the emotional attention it required. Perhaps this is because I’m parenting a lot during Covidtide. Perhaps it’s the Internet forming me in a way that makes novels nearly impossible to read. Jack took me weeks to finish. I found myself feeling sorry for my students, whom I force to read Gilead. But unlike many of my students, I persevered to the end. I did so because Marilynne Robinson’s writings bless me. She’s helped form my own Christian consciousness. She helps me slow down and be still. She’s helped me see the wondrous beauty latent in every soul.