The Fare Forward Interview with Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is a novelist and essayist. She is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2005), the National Humanities Medal (2012), and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2016). She taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1991 until 2016. She has published collections of essays on topics ranging from nuclear pollution to American democracy to the human mind. Jack, her fifth novel and the fourth concerning the people of Gilead, Iowa, was published in September of this year. Robinson spoke to Fare Forward about evil, heroes, and the future of the American project. This is an edited version of that conversation.
By the Fare Forward Editors
Fare Forward: As you apply your prophetic gifts to surveying the intellectual and cultural landscape over the next decades, what advice do you give to young Christian thinkers in their 20s and 30s about where to spend their intellectual energies now, in order to have the training and formation to address those future issues?
Marilynne Robinson: I am a great believer in reading primary texts. The distortions that enter historiography, whether academic or popular, amount to a kind of censorship which is not necessarily ideological or political or even quite intentional, but is simply a tailoring of the subject to suit contemporary tastes or to shock contemporary assumptions, to garner peer approval in any case. We have been building on many strata of sand. Rigorous history is the best evidence we have of what we are and where we are, and we have extraordinary resources for recovering evidence to support it. There is a vast qualitative difference between false and true. It has been sophisticated for a while to deny the distinction, in academia as well as politics. To seek the truth, wherever the question of truth presents itself, is a discipline that would have profound consequences for all our thinking.
FF: What kind of reader are you? What are some of the quirks or turns of mind that keep you from being the neutral, naïve, ideal reader? Are there ways that you’re especially hard on an author?
MR: When I read fiction that does not sustain credibility within the terms of the world it creates, I put the book down.
FF: How do you understand evil? You write about characters that sin overtly and others that are implicated in systems of injustice, and almost all your characters experience profound suffering. Yet you seem to treat them all sympathetically, to confer on them an attention that amounts to a blessing. Is that blessing a pardon—to understand is to forgive? Where does evil come from and where does it go?
MR: I can’t claim to understand evil. But the word is clearly necessary. I am not sure that evil and sin should be thought of as equivalent things. The idea of sin implies a standard against which thoughts and actions are judged. We are told that whatever is done against conscience is sin. Evil is a terrible human bent toward destruction of lives and wellbeing, a pathology that often becomes pandemic. In my novels there is such a pathology, so entrenched that it has disabled conscience. It seems we are not well yet.
I try to be faithful to complexity, and I try to create characters who could look me in the eye and tell me not to presume I know so much.
FF: Lila seems particularly vexed and fascinated by the book of Ezekiel. What book of the Bible has been particularly vexing to you, and why?
MR: Revelation, I guess. I’ve read that Calvin didn’t write about it because he didn’t understand it. So I am in good company.
FF: How would you respond to someone who reads your novels through a psychological lens? With the DSM open, as it were? Does Lila suffer from PTSD? Is Jack a kleptomaniac? Was John Ames Sr. schizophrenic?
MR: Yes, I find this kind of reading extremely reductive. I see that these categories are necessary for therapeutic purposes, but I assume that even then they are shorthand, never adequate to the complexity of any patient. I try to be faithful to complexity, and I try to create characters who could look me in the eye and tell me not to presume I know so much.
FF: One constant theme throughout your non-fiction writing is the existence, coherence, and brilliance of the American intellectual and cultural tradition. Yet on both Left and Right today, we see movements that suggest a just society can only come into existence by rejecting altogether the American project as irredeemably compromised. What makes you continue to be confident in this American tradition? Do we have heroes worth believing in? If so, is there any sense in which their heroism has Americanism as part of it?
MR: We have ideas worth believing in. Heroes, poor souls, are vulnerable and defenseless. In Adam’s Fall they fell, right along with the rest of us. I am no great believer in elevating particular figures in a way that suggests that other lives are not also heroically generous or patient or creative. On the other hand it seems childish to me to take the idea of heroism so literally that we should all sit down and weep because we learn that heroes were not so unlike everybody else. It really is ridiculous to grow cynical because an impossible standard was not met. The ideas that have come down to us are beautiful, worthy of veneration, not least because they provide the standard by which they themselves must be judged. What is equality? What is happiness? The core of the Constitution is the so-called Bill of Rights, those five amendments, afterthoughts, clarifications, that legitimize amendment itself. There are many definitions of the “American project,” some of which are intended to be viewed as irredeemable. I’ve done enough research in the world from which it emerged to have learned a great respect for it, as it was conceived and dedicated. If we have made a failure of it, that’s on us.
When that trumpet sounds, I will throw in my lot with those who do justice and love mercy, who want to get the hungry fed and the naked clothed, whether or not they lay claim to the word Christian.
FF: You possess a combination of deep Christian belief and aesthetic sensibilities, alongside politics that are rather leftist by American standards. But much of the Left in America is uninterested in Christian belief, and many Christians in America believe that their Christianity does not align with Leftist politics. What would have to happen for a vibrant and viable Christian Left to come into existence in America? And how can the established Left be more hospitable to Christians?
MR: Are only White people of the left? Do we have a special category for all those great preachers of social justice who emerge from the Black church? Are they not of the left because they are Christian, a distinction that is necessary to the notion that the left is hostile to Christianity? They’re certainly not of the right, are they? Which leads to a larger point—What do these terms mean? When I hear people worrying over the heap of stuff they’ve collected to the point of being ready to use lethal force against some image of God who they think might be about to threaten it, people who buy guns and resent social welfare on the same motives, I am offended on religious grounds, though I know that the same traits that mean they are of the right also predispose them to say they are Christian, and others to believe them. When that trumpet sounds, I will throw in my lot with those who do justice and love mercy, who want to get the hungry fed and the naked clothed, whether or not they lay claim to the word Christian. By their works we shall know them.
FF: A question about institution-building. The economic effects of the coronavirus have universities slashing budgets by enormous percentages and non-profits projecting large declines in donor giving over the years to come. These have historically been two forms of the institutions that allow artistic production to be supported. How should Christians who are concerned with the creative arts, the liberal arts, and the life of the mind more broadly think about building sustainable institutions that will continue to allow that kind of work to go forward amidst a harrowing economic forecast?
MR: I would not be surprised if the institutional culture of the country is radically challenged and transformed in coming years. I would expect people to keep teaching and learning, perhaps very informally, without the kind of credentialing that has become so important now. We tend to forget that there is a very deep wealth of knowledge and competence in this country and real devotion to the arts, which can be masked by institutional structures. If we make good use of what we have, the immediate future could be very interesting.