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"No vague believers": postsecular sensibilities in
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Steiner, Makayla C.
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Steiner, M. C. (2023). “No vague believers”: postsecular sensibilities in contemporary American fiction
[University of Iowa]. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.005904
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“No Vague Believers”: Postsecular Sensibilities in
Contemporary American Fiction
by
Makayla C. Steiner
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the
Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
August 2021
Thesis Committee: Lori Branch, Thesis Supervisor
Claire Fox
Kristy Nabhan-Warren
John Durham Peters
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
Tara Bynum
Copyright by
Makayla Camille Steiner
2021
All Rights Reserved
ii
In Memory of my Grandmothers
Alice Blanche Callister
Nov. 3, 1928 – Feb. 2, 2016
Jane Walker Steiner
Dec. 13, 1928 – Jul. 25, 2018
iii
The trouble with the moderns is that they gave up on God.
—Gloria L. Cronin
iv
Acknowledgements
At the close of this project, my genuine gratitude belongs to those whose influence
motivated my efforts. First, to my director, Lori Branch, for her guidance and enthusiastic
encouragement. To my committee, Claire Fox, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, John Durham Peters,
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, and Tara Bynum, for their thoughtful consideration and feedback.
To Cherie Hansen-Rieskamp, for cheerfully helping me navigate the graduate program. To Linda
Bolton, for her wisdom, compassion, and rigorous commitment to ethics. To my kind and
generous friends in the Iowa City 2nd ward and the YSA branch for the many adventures, dinners,
treats, activities, and good conversations they have shared with me. To my Dad, Jeff Steiner, for
the annual road trips from Utah to Iowa, and to my stepmom, Carmen, for her steady support. To
my siblings, Karen & Mike, Dakota, Scott & Rachael, Alexis & Kelby, Jessalie, Christopher &
Lexi, and Spencer, for keeping me grounded in “real” life. To my gorgeous, brilliant nieces and
nephews—Isabel, Mia, Ian, Edynn, Rowynn, Alic, Gracie, and Blaikley—for the astonishing fact
of your existence. To my marvelous teachers: Donald Lee (DL) Smith, whose passion for
literature inspired mine; Gloria Cronin, for seeing my potential and encouraging my efforts to do
better; and Dan Muhlestein, for his deep generosity and total devotion to my success.
But, most of all, to my Mother, Camille Callister, for her fabulous sense of humor, her
daily calls and regular pep talks, and for giving me, as the primary song says, “my life, my mind,
my heart.” Thanks, Mom. Friends forever, buddies to the end.
v
Abstract
This dissertation presents new readings of select novels written by Louise Erdrich,
Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson. In contrast to early critical
responses from John McClure and Amy Hungerford that that respectively define the postsecular
American novel as “weak and hybridized” and argue that its authors accept belief in
meaninglessnes as “a hedge against the inescapable fact of pluralism,” I maintain that these
authors explore and employ religious and spiritual experience in order to demonstrate its
strength, value, and meaning—not simply in spite of but precisely because of their acceptance of
pluralism. Furthermore, in each of the texts this dissertation considers these authors articulate a
specific ethical and moral vision as they seek to reinscribe non-rational concepts that have been
marginalized by narratives of secularization that presume the decline of religion into the
principles modernity values. That vision is not an atavistic return to pre-modern religious
paradigms, but rather a uniquely postsecular sensibility developed in light of both the scientific
advancements and the tumultuous cultural upheavals of the past eighty years.
Although Erdrich, McCarthy, Morrison, and Robinson are frequently classified as
postmodern writers, my dissertation demonstrates that it is more accurate to place their fiction
within a version of the postsecular tradition quite different from the one described by McClure
and Hungerford—one that develops alongside, but remains distinct from, literary
postmodernism. While such postsecular fiction may respond to similar cultural moods and
anxieties and exhibit some of the stylistic elements of postmodernism proper, its response to
pluralism does not bend toward belief in meaninglessness. Instead, it embraces complexity,
linguistic instability, and the advanced of modern science and technology without giving up the
perspectives and guidance made available through diverse religious traditions.
vi
Public Abstract
The fundamental argument of this dissertation is that there is a literary tradition I call
postsecular that develops in the late twentieth century parallel to the tradition scholars call
postmodern. Whereas postmodern literature is typically characterized by irony, a sense of
meaninglessness, and a preference for the virtual over the real, literature written in the
postsecular tradition is characterized by earnestness, a belief that there is meaning even in the
aftermath of violence and destruction, and an impulse to weld together the best elements of past
and present belief systems. The chapters in my dissertation demonstrate how four important
American authors evidence a postsecular sensibility in their writing as they seek to revitalize
concepts that are important to modern, secular societies by advocating for the reintroduction of
elements that might be considered non-rational or religious into those modern values. These
authors include Louise Erdrich, whose work reconnects justice with mercy; Cormac McCarthy,
whose work reconnects knowledge with faith; Toni Morrison, whose work reconnects identity to
personhood; and Marilynne Robinson, whose work assumes an all-inclusive existence regardless
of religious affiliation or the lack thereof.
vii
Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................. viii
Chapter 1: "It's the old way": Louise Erdrich's Postsecular Justice ................................................ 1
Chapter 2: "Nothing is real save his grace": Cormac McCarthy's Postsecular Faith .................... 52
Chapter 3: "I was not a soulless animal": Toni Morrison's Postsecular Personhood .................... 93
Chapter 4: "A person can change": Marilynne Robinson's Postsecular Hope ............................ 140
References ................................................................................................................................... 205
viii
Introduction
In December of 1950, almost exactly at the middle of the twentieth century, William
Faulkner stood at the Nobel podium in Stockholm and declared that the human being is immortal
“not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul”
(“Nobel Prize,” emphasis added). In one statement, the most influential modern American writer
permanently set himself apart from his contemporaries—nearly all of whom had succumbed to
an understanding of the world as bereft of spiritual meaning. Stylistically, Faulkner remained
fundamentally modern. He was intensely interested in language, consciousness, time, and the
decay of Western traditions. Yet, much of his work critiques modern assumptions about what
human beings are and how they experience reality. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, he
maintained a resolute belief in God and an unwavering commitment to the existence of absolute
truths. In an interview published in Faulkner at Nagano, Faulkner declares, “I believe in God.
Sometimes Christianity gets pretty debased, but I do believe in God, yes. I believe that man has a
soul that aspires towards what we call God, what we mean by God (29). In another interview, he
describes truth as “what you know to be right and just, truth is that thing, the violation of which
makes you writhe at night when you try to go to sleep . . . truth is the constant thing . . . Truth is
not an impossible dream . . . Truth is a quality which one must accept or cope with” (Nagano,
101-2). Faulkner, however, does not understand truth as either fully comprehensible or easily
articulable, but rather as a form of reality that reveals itself in phases, and never in full to a single
individual. He explains this in a 1958 writer-in-residence lecture on Absalom! Absalom! at the
University of Virginia, telling the students, “I think that no one individual can look at truth. It
blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a
slightly different phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they [the characters in the
ix
novel] saw though nobody saw the truth in tact.”
1
Marilynne Robinson suggests that such
sensibilities, “might be called religious” (Foreword, xviii), and they have led some to argue that
Faulkner was actually an early postmodernist. While this makes sense if one accepts both that
religion, as Graham Ward suggests, “is a defining characteristic of postmodernity” (viii), and that
Faulkner’s work is fundamentally concerned with religious themes and histories, others find the
idea of Faulkner as postmodern completely absurd.
2
The postmodern literary theorist Ihab
Hassan, for example, emphatically rejects the argument for the postmodern Faulkner. He insists,
“. . . it cannot be that Faulkner is really a crypto-postmodernist, a sort of pre-postmodernist. That
were to cannibalize history” (5). What these differences of opinion indicate is that there is an
element of Faulkner’s work that is not reducible to our conventional understanding of the terms
“modern” or “postmodern”, but neither is it unrelated to them. That both-and-neither element is a
sensibility that I describe as postsecular, and its presence in Faulkner’s writing initiates the
development of an alternative literary tradition in the United States which parallels
postmodernism insofar as it responds to the cultural mood and values of what Charles Taylor
calls “a secular age” (1), but which frequently comes to radically different conclusions.
As evidence of this alternative, postsecular tradition, my dissertation showcases four
contemporary American novelists—Louise Erdrich, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and
Marilynne Robinson—whose work attempts to reevaluate the consequences of unconsciously
accepting the modern, secular ideologies which have so thoroughly infused themselves into
contemporary systems of belief and reconstruct a more nuanced and holistic approach to the
nature of reality—one that retains the best values and practices of modern secularism while
1
The audio recording of this statement is available at http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/absalom
/aaaudio1.html
2
For a more comprehensive explanation of why certain scholars claim Faulkner as an early postmodernist, see John
Duvall’s introduction to Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John N. Duvall and Ann J. Abadie, UP of
Mississippi, 2002, pp. vii-xvi.
x
remaining open to the mystery of the religious and transcendent experiences that shape people’s
spiritual lives. My purpose in selecting these specific writers is threefold: first, rather than being
outliers, they are highly celebrated figures in American letters—each having won the Pulitzer
prize for fiction, all having been regular finalists for the National Book Award (Erdrich having
won in 2012), and Morrison was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. That the
literary community finds their work valuable and influential invites inquiry into what elements of
their writing speak to the concerns of the cultural time of which they are part. Second, they are
among the authors both John McClure and Amy Hungerford examine in the first wave of
postsecular literary criticism of American fiction, but in both cases select features of their writing
have been overlooked or misread. Third, each of these authors has regularly been compared to
Faulkner in their style, form, or subject matter, but little attention has been paid to the fact that
they are also similar to him in their sensibilities regarding the outcomes of modern, secular
ideologies. I do not believe such omissions or misreadings are intentional, but are rather an effect
of having accepted, consciously or not, a narrative of progress scholars have termed “the
secularization thesis.”
3
The secularization thesis is one of the most powerful progress narratives to develop in the
modern, secular era. It suggests that with increasing scientific knowledge, industrialization, and
technological advancements, religion and religious practice declines. In recent decades, however,
it has become increasingly clear that such is not the case. In spite of secularization’s attempts to
eradicate it, religion remains as present as it ever was—it has only changed shape.
4
While it is
3
See, for example, Wallis, Roy and Steve Bruce. “Secularization: the Orthodox Model.” Religion and
Modernization, edited by Steve Bruce, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 8-30.
4
For relevant scholarship, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford UP,
2003.; Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on a Post-Secular Society.” New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 2008, pp.
17-29.; Richard Rorty, An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. Columbia
UP, 2011.; Giorgio Agamben, The Fire and the Tale. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa, Stanford UP, 2017.; Martha C.
Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance. Harvard UP, 2012.; José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern
xi
true that the modern, secular impulses to compartmentalize, quantify, and measure have resulted,
among other things, in the privatization of religion and religious experience, the relegation of
religion to the private sphere does not indicate that it has been replaced by secular thought. In
fact, John Caputo suggests that had the cultural mood been slightly different, postmodern and
postsecular might have been synonymous terms (On Religion 37). But the postmodern response
to modernity and secularization came to be characterized by irony, nihilism, and a preference for
the virtual over the real. Most unfortunate, however, is that it has also been marked by a cynical
skepticism where religious topics and characters are concerned. For example, in a review of
Marilynne Robinson’s 2014 novel, Lila, the British novelist Colm Tóibín suggests that “One of
the purposes of literature . . . is to put religion in its place” (19). Neither religion or belief bother
him, per se; rather, his real concern is “a technical one: how do you create a religious or a non-
secular protagonist in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book?” (19). Tóibín’s
question is relevant for writers and those committed to literary study, regardless of belief system
or religious affiliation, because it is an informal acknowledgement of a widespread, almost
subconscious acceptance that modern, secular, critical readers are not interested in and may not
even be capable of taking such a character seriously. His assumptions demonstrate one of the
most challenging effects of secularization, which is that by privatizing religious experience it has
also divided our culture from the religious and spiritual heritage that provides a language better
suited to make meaning of the full range of human experience. As Taylor argues in The
Language Animal, our sense of reality, identity, and meaningful experience is constructed in
World. U of Chicago P, 1994.; Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Rethinking
Secularism. Oxford UP, 2011.; Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of
Religion in the Public Sphere. Edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Columbia UP, 2011.
xii
large measure by our ability to articulate it.
5
Without recourse to the religious and spiritual
language that has for millennia structured our understanding of human experience, we risk
becoming a culture unaware of its origins, full of people who are, in Steven Spielberg’s words,
like leaves who do not understand they are part of a tree (“Harvard”). Most significantly,
Tóibín’s perspective is an example of how even literary imagination can be limited by living
within what Taylor calls an “immanent frame” (542).
With the 2007 publication of A Secular Age, Taylor dramatically reoriented the
humanistic conversation about religion and secularism. One of the goals of his extensive
exploration of what it means to live in a secular age is to propose an alternative understanding of
secularism, wherein the narrative of a massive falling away of belief in God or a major recession
of religion from the public square is reinterpreted as a transition from a society where belief in
God is uncontested to one where it is not. In the section of his book titled “Conditions of Belief,”
Taylor offers a constructive theoretical account of the tensions between belief and unbelief. The
consequences of what is sometimes called disenchantment was the shift from the porous self that
viewed humanity as existing “vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers” beyond our earthly
experience (27) to what he describes as the buffered or disciplined self—a self fixated on
interiority and individualism. This “buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a
constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively
secular” (542). This orientation toward the world is what Taylor calls “the immanent frame”
(542), and everything important to human experience is located in what that frame deems the
“reality” of time and space in the world. Supernatural forces or “causal powers with a purposive
5
For a compelling example of how religious language expanded the possibilities for describing and shaping the
values upon which our declaration of independence and central understanding of our citizenship is based, see pages
162-164 of Marilynne Robinson’s essay “The Human Spirit and the Good Society.” When I Was a Child I Read
Books. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012.
xiii
bent” (539) are outside the “natural” order and are therefore both inaccessible and unthinkable.
This is not to say that living in the immanent frame negates the ability to believe in transcendent
or supernatural forces. The immanent frame may remain open to the possibility of a transcendent
reality for some, or it may remain closed to such possibility. His point is that regardless of what
one believes, everyone develops their beliefs within the context of an immanent reality, because
the immanent frame is not a belief system, but “rather it is the sensed context in which we
develop our beliefs; but in the same way, one or other of these takes on the immanent frame, as
open or closed, has usually sunk to the level of such an unchallenged framework, something we
have trouble often thinking ourselves outside of, even as an imaginative exercise” (549). The
normalization of the values and perspective of a closed immanent frame explains, in part, why a
critic like Tóibín struggles to conceive of a fictional character that is believably religious. If
editors, publishers, and the reading public exist as buffered selves that do not view transcendent,
spiritual, or religious experience as a valid element of reality, it makes creating such a character
nothing short of impossible outside the realm of fantasy or science fiction writing.
Additionally, Tóibín’s concern is related to what Taylor argues is the ultimate dilemma of
living in an immanent frame: meaning. For Taylor, the question of meaning is what keeps the
frontiers of modernity “unquiet” (711). Death, he argues, is the biggest threat to the modern
identity, because it separates us from everything the immanent frame claims is important.
Religion provides a meaningful response to death in its belief in transcendence and eternal love,
but death still requires everyone living in the immanent frame to search for meaning, and this
prevents anyone, secular or religious, from “settling into a comfortable belief” (727). Taylor
notes that while those who opt for unbelief “feel the imminent loss of a world of beauty,
meaning, warmth, [and] . . . the perspective of a self-transformation beyond the every day”
xiv
(592), those who move toward God or spiritual meaning “are haunted by a sense that the
universe might after all be as meaningless as the most reductive materialism describes” (593).
Though he is personally oriented toward belief, he readily acknowledges, “the struggle for belief
is never definitively won” (593). One might argue that both perspectives represent what Caputo
calls “a religious sense of life” where one longs “with a restless heart for a reality beyond reality,
to tremble with the possibility of the impossible” (15), but is never assured of it. Such a view is,
for me, part of what makes a postsecular sensibility compelling, since as a belief-oriented
approach it by definition cannot be definitive. A postsecular sensibility is activated by a lively
sense of belief in dialogue with unbelief, attentive to disavowals of either.
Taylor concludes with two possible paths for the future. He rejects the first: the
subtraction narrative where religion shrinks away into nothing, because that narrative functions
to certain degree on the tendency “to blame our religious past for many of the woes of our world,
[and this] will become less plausible over time . . . in part because it will be clear that other
societies are not following suit, and thus that this master narrative isn’t about universal
humanity; and also because many of the ills for which ‘religion’ was supposedly responsible
aren’t going away” (770). The second path, which Taylor predicts is more plausible, is that we
will continue to live in the tensions of the transcendent and the immanent. He suggests that
“exclusive humanists” will respond to, but misrecognize, the transcendent reality and shut out its
crucial features (768). While he acknowledges that everyone needs to shut out the transcendent
to some degree if we are to maintain equilibrium in our lives, he also points out that “Exclusive
humanism must find the ground and contours of fullness in the immanent sphere . . . The door is
barred against further discovery” (769). Taylor does not believe, however, that this is the end of
xv
the story. When immanence is most entrenched, he claims, people will begin pressing against its
boundaries, and transcendence may re-enter, though in unexpected and diverse forms.
Making sense of the unexpected and diverse forms in which transcendence enters
American literature in the late twentieth century is the goal of first-wave postsecular literary
criticism. Among the few texts to have taken up the challenge John McClure’s Partial Faiths:
Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison is the most direct attempt to articulate
the defining criteria for postsecular fiction. For McClure, postsecular narratives “trace the turn of
secular-minded characters back toward the religious; because its ontological signature is a
religiously inflected disruption of secular constitutions of the real; and because its ideological
signature is the rearticulation of a dramatically ‘weakened’ religiosity with secular, progressive
values and projects” (3). Though the texts McClure analyzes lend themselves nicely to his
criteria, his definitions narrow the possibilities for what constitutes postsecular literature by
limiting exploration of its challenges to approaches that value “weak” religion or “partial” faith.
Though such approaches are viable, they do not account for the religious beliefs and practices of
authors or characters devoted to specific doctrines or deities, or who resist the “weak religion”
that is born of certain strains of progressive politics. Furthermore, McClure’s approach prefers
“weak” religion to orthodoxy, claiming that by setting “aside ideas of transcendence, eternal life,
and absolute truth . . . [inviting humans to focus on] their historicity, their finitude, and their
fallibility . . . it [weak religion] makes a conversion to charity (rather than an anticipation of
judgment and eternal life) the core of its message” (13). However, orthodox faiths have long
emphasized the need for charity in light of human finitude and fallibility, and continue to value it
as a central principle bound to specific doctrines regarding transcendence, eternal life, and
absolute truth. McClure’s criteria for postsecular fiction brackets belief in the transcendent, and
xvi
by so doing closes the conversation to narrative that admits a full-hearted commitment to faith
while also recognizing the contingent nature of belief. McClure’s description of postsecular
religiosity as that which refuses both “the comprehensive maps and scripts that are essential to
sacred systems of domination” and “the comprehensive maps and triumphalist playbooks of
dogmatic secularism” (17) imagines a postsecular faith that is not merely partial, but
noncommittal—making it not only weak, but also potentially meaningless.
In contrast to McClure’s attention to religiously inflected content in postsecular fiction,
Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 celebrates
belief without meaning or content as a way to re-imbue literature with a sense of religious
authority and to give literary practice some social cachet in American religious circles. Though
Hungerford’s textual analyses are excellent, her primary argument regarding belief in
meaninglessness indicates a subterranean acceptance of the secularization thesis that keeps her
analyses securely situated within the immanent frame, and she seems to accept without concern
that we live in “an age in which one can no longer maintain religious belief without the
simultaneous knowledge that others do not believe, or that others believe differently” (xiv).
Hungerford claims that valuing belief without content functions as “a hedge against [this]
inescapable fact of pluralism” (xiii) and the perceived threat of meaninglessness that supposedly
accompanies it. She readily admits that while she takes a similar approach to McClure, she is
more interested in what the authors she engages believe about literature than what they believe
about anything related to the supernatural or the transcendent (xvi). The problem with this is that
her disinclination to think beyond the immanent frame causes Hungerford to misread and
undervalue the importance of the religious language, imagery, or perspective in some of the texts
she analyzes—especially when the objects of belief exceed the literary value of the text.
xvii
Both Hungerford and McClure raise serious and important questions regarding the
religious or non-secular elements of contemporary American fiction. They are aware, as Caputo
notes, that “Modernity had no spiritual vision to offer in place of the one it had torn down” (56),
and their work is an attempt to rectify that. However, they still locate postsecular literature
within the confines of the immanent frame, and thus their interpretations are limited by their own
commitments to secular ideologies, which they repeatedly demonstrate by way of their hesitation
to accept even the possibility of transcendence and spirituality as a real part of human
experience. The fiction in question, however, invites an alternative response to secular modernity
that acknowledges the complexity of human experience while rejecting the moral relativism,
utilitarian views of language, and hermeneutics of suspicion that characterizes much of
postmodern thought and its critical response.
In the alternative, postsecular tradition that develops alongside postmodernism, both
Faulkner and those whose work evidences similar postsecular sensibilities take religious belief
and experience seriously as essential and meaningful elements of human reality. Furthermore,
their efforts to reconnect readers to what Danièle Hervieu-Léger would describe as a particularly
religious “chain of memory”
6
further distinguishes their work from more traditionally
postmodern texts. For writers with a postsecular sensibility, the way we imagine the human soul
in relation to a divine other significantly affects how we respond to other human beings, and in
their work the sense of the human soul before God suggests an understanding of other lives as
sacred, which implies a moral imperative to deal justly and charitably with them. This
perspective is precisely what keeps those who write with a postsecular sensibility from engaging
in the didactic or fundamentalist tendencies that characterize what Faulkner understands to be
6
A chain of memory is a process by which a person takes part in a community that draws upon a shared
understanding or collective memory of the past to link current members with past and future members.
xviii
“debased” forms of Christianity—and religion in general. Faulkner’s postsecular sensibility
influences all of his writing, but it is in Absolom! Absolom!—which many consider his finest
novel—that he most clearly articulates the tragic effects of modern secularization on the human
soul.
Absalom! Absalom! is a text Robert Alter describes as “manifestly . . . modernist” (113)
for its labyrinthine chronological method and a linguistic complexity worthy of Joyce.
Throughout the text Faulkner brilliantly employs the fragmented, multivocal narrative style of
late modernism, while also providing a pointed critique of the modern, secular impulse to
compartmentalize and classify—an impulse that made possible a culture willing to rationalize
slavery and refuse to recognize each individual as part of the human family. Though Absalom!
Absalom! alludes to the biblical story of David and Absalom, and is likewise a tragedy, the text
is not a religious allegory and Faulkner resists any overt moralizing. In fact, apart from the title
the text is not thematically religious at all, except in its lexicon.
7
That lexicon, however, is the
lynchpin that allows Faulkner to communicate a meaningful message without resorting to
didacticism.
Along with most Faulkner scholars, I read the title as Faulkner’s lamentation for the
American South, whose destiny, like Absalom’s, he believes could have been different. At one
level the book can be read as a failed prodigal son narrative that functions as a warning regarding
the nation’s approach to race, and as a plea to form an American identity that accepts people of
color as part of its metaphorical “House of Israel.” Whereas the biblical Absalom, like the
prodigal son, remains loved, mourned, and accepted as a legitimate heir to his father’s household
in spite of any sinfulness or rebellion, Sutpen’s Hundred comes to an incendiary end as a direct
7
For more detailed commentary on Faulkner’s religious lexicon in Absalom! Absalom!, see chapter 3 in Robert
Alter’s Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton UP, 2010.
xix
result of Thomas Sutpen’s refusal to accept his mixed-race son, and recognize him as a
legitimate heir. From another perspective, the book can be interpreted as a longer, more
complicated version of Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech; itself a warning of the
dangers of divisiveness, drawn from biblical verse.
8
Either way, it is a tragic text—though no
more nihilistic than The Sound and the Fury is meaningless. Indeed, the sense of tragedy—or the
ability to feel the wrongness of something—that Faulkner evokes in the closing pages of
Absalom! Absalom! is precisely that which acts as a bulwark against nihilism and creates space
for hope. It is true that the house burns down, but in many religions and mythologies burning
opens the possibility of regeneration and rebirth. Furthermore, Sutpen’s progeny is not entirely
eradicated. There is one great-grandson, Jim Bond, whom Robert Alter reads as “no more than a
pathetic inarticulate witness to the final destruction of Sutpen’s Hundred” (105). Still, Jim Bond
remains, “Howling with human reason” (Absalom! 300). Though Jim Bond cannot speak, he
does have the capacity to think, understand, and make meaning of his experiences. Though Alter
is not alone in his assessment of the irrelevance of Jim Bond, in my reading his is a misreading
born of a modern inattentiveness to the significance of emotion and the privileging of speech in
the process of communicating reality. The enduring presence of Jim Bond at the end of Absalom!
Absalom! does not suggest a final judgment on the South, but rather represents a series of
probing questions regarding modern, secular assumptions about racial superiority, language as
merely a system of signs and signifiers, history as a progress narrative, and the value of the
individual in relationship to the community—all of which, in Faulkner’s view, have serious
moral implications. However, the most significant question Faulkner poses at the end of
Absalom! Absalom! is: having passed through this failed project, what now?
8
Matthew 12:25
xx
For the authors whose work my dissertation engages, the response to “what now?” is
neither to give into nihilism and despair nor to attempt to reinstate religion to an imagined pre-
secular position, since, as Michael Kaufmann points out, “the secular and the religious depend on
each other for meaning . . . [and] we can never therefore trace a simple trajectory from one to the
other because each concept is meaningless in isolation” (610). Moreover, they recognize that, as
Graham Ward explains, “The fruits of modernity in terms of the pursuit of humanitarian
principles, the advances in medicine and science, and the promotion of educational and political
ideals are evident: in public libraries, schools, universities, hospitals, law courts, etc.” (2), but
they remain concerned with the elements of modern, secular narratives that restrict articulation of
or access to the full range of human experience. The chapters of my dissertation demonstrate that
far from accepting a “partial faith” or a “belief in meaninglessness,” the postsecular sensibility of
the these late twentieth century writers instead inspires a corrective approach that does not seek
to deconstruct modern, secular ideologies, but to reinscribe the marginalized religious or spiritual
elements to the concepts and values that are of greatest importance in modern, secular belief
systems.
The first chapter of my dissertation examines the latter two novels of what critics have
come to call Louise Erdrich’s “justice trilogy,” The Round House (2012) and LaRose (2016),
comparing and contrasting the complications attendant to the modern, secular perception of
justice in legal terms to what Erdrich describes as an “old” form of justice that cannot be enacted
without giving and accepting mercy. In The Round House an Ojibwe woman is the victim of
violent sexual assault and attempted murder. But because the attack takes place in an area where
state, federal, and tribal lands intersect, the suspect cannot be apprehended until it is clear who
has jurisdiction over her case. Furious with the slow-pace of the legal process, the woman’s
xxi
teenage son, Joe, takes it upon himself to enact justice upon the perpetrator. Those who accept
the modern, secular definition of justice as that which equalizes through punishment will be
inclined to support Joe’s undertaking, but through the series of alternatives offered to Joe
throughout the novel—each of which he either ignores or denies—Erdrich warns that Joe’s idea
of justice might be closer to vengeance than he is willing to admit. Once Joe has achieved his
purpose the novel concludes with a solemn and uncertain verdict for him and his family: “The
sentence was to endure” (317). Though the perpetrator has been punished, justice remains out of
reach. Having demonstrated the insufficiency of justice understood in punitive terms, Erdrich
turns to a narrative where justice is summoned through continual acts of mercy. LaRose begins
with a fatal hunting accident, in which Landreaux Iron unintentionally kills his friend and
neighbor’s five-year-old son. Wracked with grief and guilt, Landreaux and his wife turn to the
traditions of their Native American heritage and give their own five-year-old son to the dead
boy’s parents. This is not an act of recompense, but one of charity—an offer to grieve with and
for a family whose pain no perpetrator’s punishment could heal. Though at first the decision
seems as if it will simply tear everyone apart, the presence of a little boy who has been blessed
with healing powers eventually results in a restoration of friendship between the two families. In
LaRose, justice has little to do with legal consequence and is instead focused on creating
wholeness or making things right. In contrast to The Round House, which ended with a sentence,
the mercies offered over time in LaRose lead to a communal gathering of friends, family, and the
spirits of the ancestors that evokes the sense of restoration and healing. My purpose in comparing
these novels is to illustrate that secular definitions of justice, insofar as they devalue the
transcendent experiences that exist beyond the realm of rational thought, ultimately limit the
possibility of doing justice. Non-rational experiences, on the other hand, open the possibility for
xxii
justice insofar as they value charity, without which, as Emmanuel Levinas insists, justice is
incomplete.
In my second chapter I turn to a consideration of Cormac McCarthy’s approach to the
modern, secular disconnect between faith and knowledge. McCarthy has been something of an
enigma for scholars of American literature, for he resists easy classification. As with Faulkner,
critics have quibbled over whether McCarthy is more of a late modernist or a postmodernist. His
fiction is overwhelmingly dark and violent, but never without glimmers of hope. The paradoxical
nature of his work can be flummoxing, but it is also purposeful. Of the authors included in this
dissertation, it is McCarthy who seems to find modern, secular progress narratives least
compelling. In his work uncertainty is an unavoidable feature of human experience and any quest
for a totalizing knowledge is a fool’s errand—and one with dangerous consequences. That is not
to suggest that McCarthy is not interested in the quest for knowledge, but in his work knowledge
is perceived not merely as the accumulation of scientific facts, but as an ever-expanding
understanding of reality based on relationships one develops with both mortal and divine others
in the world. After contextualizing McCarthy’s place in discussions of postsecular literature, the
chapter reviews the ways in which McCarthy uses the trope of the borderland to reveal the
complex relationship between faith and knowledge and then turns to a discussion of how
McCarthy’s villains in Blood Meridian (1985) and No Country for Old Men (2005) enact
Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of knowledge as totality—the outcome of which is the
annihilation of human agency. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the ex-priest’s tale, a
twenty-page selection from McCarthy’s The Crossing (1994), wherein McCarthy portrays the
risks and rewards of the indivisible relationship between faith and knowledge, and posits
interiority—an alternative to totality in which a life or even an experience derives meaning from
xxiii
something other than chronological time (history)—as a more effective method of recognizing
what is “real” in human experience.
My third chapter shifts slightly from the philosophical tone of the previous two in order
to address what is arguably the most destructive impulse of modern, secular progress narratives:
the marginalization of notions of personhood in exchange for a definition of identity dependent
on visible markers—race, in particular. The chapter focuses on Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy
(2008), wherein Morrison returns to early colonial America to investigate the impact of slavery
on personhood before slavery was bound inextricably to race. The novel is structured as a series
of episodic narratives which intersperse the primary recurring voice of Florens, a enslaved young
African woman who is on a dangerous journey to locate a free, black ironworker with whom she
is desperately in love and who also happens to be the one person who might be able to cure her
mistress of smallpox. Morrison has argued for much of her career that race is a social construct;
one used to instill and uphold narratives of victimization for black communities. With A Mercy
she demonstrates that the slave trade was not only destructive to the bodies bought and sold, but
to those involved in buying and selling. Thus, this chapter begins with a brief review of the
damage done to individuals who sought to tie people’s identity to their race, then offers an
explanation for why Morrison turns to fiction as a method of reshaping contemporary beliefs
regarding historical practices, and culminates with an extended analysis of the process by which
one character, the European tradesman Jacob Vaark, transitions from someone who enjoys the
possibilities of full personhood to one enslaved by the consequences of his unchecked desire for
material gain; and how another, Florens, transforms from accepting her identity as a slave to a
person capable of self-definition.
xxiv
The final chapter of my dissertation is a study of Marilynne Robinson’s decades-long
refutation of what she calls “modern thought.” Unlike most of her contemporaries, including
those in the other chapters of this project, Robinson denies the very existence of a
secular/religious binary and has in recent years questioned the utility of words like “secular” and
“postsecular.” The chapter begins with a review of the reasons for Robinson’s resistance,
followed by an overview of the response of some of her more orthodox readers, who attribute her
refusal to recognize what they understand to be a secular encroachment on religious life to her
own commitment to secular values. I argue, however, that her rebuttal to the secular/religious
binary is an effect of her belief—located in a specifically Christian theology—that all human
beings are part of a comprehensive reality she terms “existence” and none of them, regardless of
the degree to which they identify as religious or not, are beyond the reach of a loving Creator. As
an example of the way Robinson’s theory of an all-inclusive existence is made manifest in her
fiction, the latter part of the chapter includes a detailed analysis of the protagonists of her two
most recent novels, Lila (2014) and Jack (2020), both of whom could be described as religious
outsiders, but, as the novels demonstrate, neither of whom are denied God’s restorative grace.
Though the authors and texts my dissertation considers differ in style and subject matter,
they all demonstrate a postsecular sensibility to the degree that they accept transcendent
experience as a meaningful part of reality, and reach for the truth of experience as Faulkner
suggested: one phase at a time. Furthermore, the texts evidence a postsecular sensibility insofar
as they assume or explore the intersectionality of transcendence and immanence as humans
connect with the divine, eschewing the separation of the material world form that of spirit, faith,
and ethics. The seriousness with which each of these authors and their respective texts takes
belief, religion, spirituality, divine encounters, and the existence of the soul invites literary critics
xxv
do the same. However, since at least the early twentieth century literary critics have engaged in
an interpretive practice Michael Warner calls “critical reading” (33), which often divides the
author from the text, syntax from subject, language from historical context, and reader from
emotional response. This type of reading, Warner maintains, is “the unconscious of the
profession; whatever worlds are organized around frameworks of reading other than critical
protocols remain, for the most part, terra incognita” (33). As a result, current literary critics
remain committed to a type of critical inquiry that attempts to discuss concepts valuable to the
modern, secular project (e.g. reason, science, justice, human dignity), while bracketing the
religious and spiritual concepts that give weight and meaning to such values. In literary criticism,
the Frankfurt School notion of critique and the postmodern practice of deconstruction have been
so widely accepted, and the hermeneutics of suspicion that drives them so normalized, that
scholars struggle to accept affirmative approaches as equally rigorous or even intellectually
sustainable. Taking an affirmative approach to a text, however, requires rigor and intellectual
discipline, not least of all because it must be attentive to that which is most difficult—and
perhaps impossible—to count or quantify. Such an approach is essential to developing a
particularly postsecular body of scholarship, and so the secondary purpose of my dissertation is
to model a form of scholarship that is not merely another critical method one applies as if the text
were a mathematical equation to be solved, nor simply another technique for wringing academic
currency from a work of literature, but an approach to a text that is as earnest as the text itself.
Creating a mode of scholarship that remains open and responsive to what a text has to offer, and
one which accepts what a text sincerely reveals as of equal importance to what it might conceal,
is a prerequisite for making sense of a postsecular literary tradition committed to envisioning a
future wherein human flourishing is not merely possible, but real.
1
Chapter 1
“It’s the old way”: Louise Erdrich’s Postsecular Justice
In nearly forty years of an impressive and critically acclaimed literary career, Louise
Erdrich has written extensively about the problems and perils of seeking justice for Native
American communities in the United States. Her three most recent novels, The Plague of Doves
(2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016), constitute a “justice trilogy” wherein she
examines, in her own words, “the uselessness of revenge” (Chicago Humanities). In The Plague
of Doves Erdrich demonstrates the generational trauma caused by an act of vigilantism. The
second book in the trilogy, The Round House, is a novel inarguably intended to display the
insufficiencies of the modern justice system’s failure to serve Native American communities—
specifically Native American women. And in the final novel, LaRose, Erdrich invites readers to
consider the labyrinthine complications of seeking justice for an unintentional crime. Taken
together, these novels represent Erdrich’s most direct critique of the modern progress narratives
that have for centuries relegated Indigenous peoples to the margins of “civilized” society, and
marked them and their sacred traditions as primitive, savage, and impediments to the goals of
government justice systems founded on the principles of rational Enlightenment.
9
Because my
purpose in this chapter is to explain how Louise Erdrich illuminates the stark dichotomy between
the effects of internalizing the modern conception of justice-as-law verses taking an affirmative
approach valued in her Ojibwe religious tradition, and in light of Seema Kurup’s thorough
9
While this chapter will not focus in detail on the subject of primitivism, the primary argument’s underlying
assumption is that, as Sieglinde Lemke declares, “there is no modernism without primitivism” (Primitivist
Modernism 144), and that the value placed on modern principles of order, scientific inquiry, rational thought, and
individual rights develop partly out of fear of mystery, chaos, religion, spirituality, and a host of other intangible
experiences that cannot be accounted for within what Charles Taylor calls “the immanent frame” (A Secular Age
542) of human experience. For a more comprehensive treatment of the effects of modern progress narratives on
Native American experience in U.S. history, see Roy Harvey Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the
Indian and the American Mind (1988).
2
reading and analysis of the effects of generational trauma in The Plague of Doves, I will focus
only on the latter two novels of the trilogy.
10
At the time of its publication, The Round House, winner of the 2012 National Book
Award, could easily be described as Erdrich’s most ambitious and most overtly political novel to
date. In an interview with Time’s Belinda Luscombe, Erdrich herself described The Round House
as “a suspense novel masking a crusade.” Tereza Szeghi, a scholar of literature and human rights
at the University of Dayton, identifies that crusade as “an argument against a set of laws that
have limited tribal sovereignty and thereby contributed to a large-scale trauma afflicting
American Indians” (406). In 2013, one year after The Round House was published, Erdrich wrote
an opinion editorial for The New York Times titled “Rape on the Reservation,” wherein she
educates the public about the potential ramifications for Native American women if congress
failed to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which at the time extended protections
for women attacked by non-Native perpetrators on tribal lands. Among the many disturbing
statistics Erdrich includes in the editorial, is one from the Justice Department stating that “one in
three Native women is raped over her lifetime . . . [and] More than 80 percent of sex crimes on
reservations are committed by non-Indian men, who are immune from prosecution by tribal
courts.” Because federal prosecutors fail to prosecute nearly 70 percent of sexual abuses cases,
justice of any kind is out of reach for Native women and their families, and thus often remains
unsought. These challenging circumstances are dramatized in The Round House, wherein one
woman is violently raped and another brutally murdered near a sacred ceremonial structure on
the reservation boundary line. One of the central questions in this novel, then, is how to seek
justice for an intentionally harmful crime—an act of moral evil—especially when, as other
10
See “From Revenge to Restorative Justice in Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves, The Round House, and
LaRose.” American Revenge Narratives, edited by Kevin Wiggins, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 99-117.
3
literary critics have noted, “legality itself is part of the problem” (Bender and Maunz-Breese
144).
In LaRose, the final installment of the justice trilogy, Erdrich steps aside from the
complexities of seeking legal justice and instead offers readers a text that grapples with the
difficulty of seeking a more expansive, affirmative form of justice—what many scholars label
“restorative” justice. Erdrich’s term for this affirmative approach is “natural justice, a reparation
of the heart, an act that has old roots in indigenous culture” (New Yorker par. 16). Her purpose in
this narrative is to “imagine this alternative to the vengeance acted out in the first two novels”
(Kurup 114). The novel begins, as did The Round House, with a tragedy: while out hunting,
Landreaux Iron unintentionally shoots and kills his best friend’s only son. The novel’s central
question is voiced almost immediately by one of Landreaux’s teenage daughters, “What happens
now?” (LaRose 6). The answer to that question is different for each character in the novel, and
depends on their individual and collective willingness to offer and accept acts of compassion that
will open the possibility for this affirmative justice designed to restore balance to their lives.
Though this kind of restorative justice is located specifically in Erdrich’s Ojibwe religious
tradition, and functions within a non-Western worldview—where, for example, time is cyclical
instead of linear and there is a mutual exchange of influence between this temporal world and
other spheres of existence—Erdrich’s approach shares a set of fundamental values with several
other religious and philosophical thinkers who press against modern definitions of and
approaches to justice. Most importantly, the Ojibwe emphasis on communal health—prioritizing
the needs of others before one’s own needs—is a principle that is also fundamental to Levinasian
ethics and is at the heart of both Jewish and Christian theologies, however ignored it has been in
United States civil religion. As early reviewers suggest, LaRose is, as were the two novels that
4
preceded it, unquestionably a book that addresses serious historical injustices heaped upon
Native communities by Euro-American settlers. But as Seema Kurup suggests, “When read as
individual novels, as opposed to viewing the books as part of a trilogy, the fullness of [Erdrich’s]
message may be lost” (114). Therefore, LaRose is best understood as the culmination of a serious
interrogation of the deepest and most problematic impulses of the modern, secular approach to
justice. In the sections that follow I will first explain why secular perceptions of justice as law
are problematic, and how resituating justice in relationship to mercy makes a more lasting form
of justice possible. I will then offer a detailed analysis of the different approaches to justice in
The Round House and LaRose in order to demonstrate both the perils of accepting definitions of
justice as law and the efficacy of inviting restorative justice through repeated acts of mercy—the
latter of which, for Erdrich, is a better way.
I.
The modern, secular conception of justice is tightly woven to the rule of law. As John
Caputo notes, “Modernity has a powerful sense of jurisdiction” (46), and that sense of
jurisdiction is a key feature of Enlightenment philosophies that place highest emphasis on
rational thought and which value the individual rights of the human person. I am content to
believe that the modern, secular emphasis on rationality that welds justice to law was conceived
with good intent; in the ancient world, Plato sought for a justice born of rationality in part to curb
the impulses of evil passions that led to evil deeds. Aristotle’s focus on justice as measurement
encouraged a type of punishment designed to never exceed the intensity of a crime. Kant’s call
for a universal understanding of justice based on principles of rational thinking is rooted in a
desire for fairness in spite of personal biases or social and economic disparities. Later
Enlightenment philosophers, such as John Locke and Thomas Paine, continued to champion the
5
notion of human rights, and motivated Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation in the Declaration of
Independence (US 1776) that individuals are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights.” The Anglo-American legal and constitutional philosophies penned by the American
Founders inspired the Marquis de Lafayette and the Abbé Sieyès, in consultation with Jefferson,
as they draft The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen—a French document that
guarantees individual liberties, but couples that guarantee with the Kantian belief that reason
should govern all human affairs.
11
It is virtually inarguable that contemporary society has benefitted immensely from a
rationalist Enlightenment philosophy. However, the process by which the modern, secular
definition of justice came to be associated with the rule of law derives from a rather negative
presumption about the nature of human behavior. As Regina Schwartz notes in her most recent
treatise on justice, the aforementioned Enlightenment thinkers presume that human beings are
self-serving, competitive, and brutal by nature and so their inclinations for self-
advancement must be reined in, subjected to thought experiments that will render them
impartial, fair, and respectful of the rights of others, and that they must be induced or
forced to acknowledge the dignity of others as well as their duty to universal moral laws,
for their inclinations surely would not lead them to these ends. (Loving Justice, 13)
Visible in the interstices of this grim assumption is one of the primary motivating factors of
modernity’s impulse to equate justice with the law: a fear of the other. Modern, secular
philosophies regarding justice are the fruit of centuries of thought from individuals who were
acutely aware of the horrors unrestrained power combined with insatiable greed could conjure. In
addition to a philosophy of justice that would protect the masses, Enlightenment rationality also
11
For further reading on the various schools of thought that influence the modern, secular perception of justice as
rational, see Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988).
6
sought a philosophy of justice that ensured the safety of the self. A modern, secular conception
of justice concerned with comparison, weighing, measurement, and equality appears to be a fair
and effective solution—but it remains an attempt to combat the problem of self-interest from the
perspective of self-interest.
Justice, however, is not by definition concerned at all with the self, but is focused almost
exclusively on the well-being of the other. In The Oxford English Dictionary the term “justice”
(as in, “to do a person or thing justice”) is defined thus: “to treat or represent with due fairness or
appreciation; to deal with in a manner that is right or appropriate.” This broad and complex
definition contrasts sharply with the modern, secular understanding of justice as something that
is achieved by adherence to law understood as the self-interested management of self-interest. To
state the obvious, law is not concerned with what is right—it is concerned with what is legal.
Furthermore, as Giorgio Agamben observes, “law is not directed toward the establishment of
justice. Nor is it directed toward the verification of truth. Law is solely directed toward
judgment, independent of truth and justice . . . [and] judgment is itself punishment” (Witness, 18-
19). Conflating the seeking of justice with the practice of judgment can have dire consequences,
as such conflation often leads to what Schwartz calls “the modern twin terrors of ‘economic’
justice and ‘strict’ justice” (Sacramental Poetics, 40). Schwartz explains,
In economic justice, beings have a price—are owned and exchanged. The world is
reduced to property. In such a worldview, retribution is translated into systematic efforts
to assign adequate compensation for injury. Often, when the injury is felt to be immense,
these rational efforts collapse to revert to the raw motive that impels them: vengeance.
And in “strict justice,” that vengeance is infected by a dangerous absolute: the crime
7
cannot be paid off, only punished to the very end—with execution, genocide, or war . . .
strict justice is utterly destructive. (Sacramental Poetics, 40)
What economic and strict justice seem to have in common is an effort to “do justice” according
to what people deserve. Ironically, as Schwartz points out, understanding justice in terms of
deserving “conflicts with those who insist on equality or even equitability, as well as those who
insist that all have equal dignity and all are equally deserving” (Loving Justice, 6). Moreover, if
one accepts the negative assumption of human beings as fundamentally selfish, brutal creatures,
then getting what they deserve would be little more than an experience of being punished for
who they are—receiving selfishness for selfishness, brutality for brutality. Such justice often
gives way to vengeance or retribution because it is consumed by what is fair or right in terms of
the self. Thus, understanding justice in terms of deserving too often becomes the dark underbelly
of understanding justice in terms of equality, and the unfortunate result of both is an approach to
justice one might label a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” since this approach requires that an
individual constantly be wary of the intentions of others, and what harm they might do to or
power they might take from the self.
There is, of course, no particular reason our primary assumption regarding the nature of
human beings should be so relentlessly negative. When we take an affirmative view of human
behavior, focusing in particular on the impulse to show care and demonstrate love for other, the
possibilities for seeking justice expand infinitely. But taking an affirmative view of human
behavior requires attentiveness to the relationships among unique individuals and an acceptance
of the countless “irrational” experiences that shape human behavior within the context of the
various communities they inhabit. In contrast to the modern, secular view of justice as achieved
through an act of legal judgment, an affirmative approach perceives justice as a process that
8
prioritizes the other. This type of justice requires openness to what John Caputo describes as “a
religious sense of life” (15), and is what people of faith often refer to as “divine” justice—a
justice that is given and functions beyond human reason or law. The goals of this type of justice
are healing, wholeness, and restoration, and in Biblical tradition it is frequently understood in
terms of something revealed: a gift from God (Sacramental Poetics, 39). Understanding this kind
of justice requires us to disentangle ourselves from the idea of justice as juridical, measurable,
calculative, and instead to reconceive of justice as what Jacques Derrida calls “an experience of
the impossible” (244). The key attribute of this affirmative justice is one for which there is little
consideration in the modern, secular understanding: mercy.
Though mercy is understood to be a central principle in most Abrahamic theological
traditions, when viewed through the lens of modern, secular justice it seems an irrational
response to evil, wickedness, or crime because it dismisses the emphasis on equality in favor of
human singularity and contextualization of any given situation, and it does not fit neatly with the
self-interested notions that drive legal systems. Yet, as Emmanuel Levinas insists, mercy is at the
heart of ethical behavior and is the lynchpin for the possibility of justice. Levinas defines justice
as “the relation to the other” (Totality 89), and Derrida suggests that Levinas’s definition is
“closer to the Hebrew equivalent of what we would perhaps translate as holiness” (250). In an
interview with François Poirié Levinas describes justice as “the incontestable value . . . [an]
attitude of holiness [wherein] there is a reversal of the normal order of things, the natural order of
things” (Righteous, 47)—this normal order of things being, presumably, the justice-as-equality
incubated throughout the modern era—and then defines the realm of justice in terms evocative of
mercy, calling it
9
the ethical order, or the order of holiness, or the order of compassion, or the order of love,
or the order of charity, where the other man concerns me—independently of the place
that is given to him in the multiplicity of humans . . . He concerns me as a neighbor, . . .
He was the unique. . . . The interhuman relation in the gratuitousness or the holiness of
being-for-the-other” (Righteous, 50).
For Levinas, justice is possible only in relationship. It requires at least two individuals who are
capable of responding to one another. Relationship does not guarantee justice, since it is as
possible to respond with cruelty to another as it is to respond mercifully, but if justice is only a
possibility in relationship. Indeed, for Levinas justice and mercy are inseparable experiences.
12
This Levinasian concept of justice as love, or justice made possible by mercy, is rooted to
certain degree in Jewish theology where, he explains, “God is the God of justice, but his
principal attribute is mercy” (Righteous, 169). This understanding of justice inextricably
entwined with mercy is what Schwartz identifies as a “theological understanding of ethical life”
(Sacramental Poetics, 40) that can circumvent the tendency towards a type of justice that
“totalizes” individuals, doing them violence by “making them play roles in which they no longer
recognize themselves” (Totality, 21) as unique individuals, but rather as one among many. In
Levinasian philosophy, as Linda Bolton explains, “the ethics of justice are intrinsically
impartial” (14), and just as the biblical command to love the neighbor does not distinguish
between a friend and a stranger, Levinasian justice-as-love must apply to all others—but each
approached as a singular being. The great paradox of modern, secular definitions of justice is that
12
In an interview titled “Philosophy, Justice, and Love” Levinas repeatedly defines love as bound to justice, which
is a responsibility and a command to be obeyed impartially. At various points in the interview Levinas insists that
“justice itself is born of charity”, “in reality they [justice and love] are inseparable and simultaneous”, “Love must
always watch over justice”, “charity is impossible without justice, and that justice is warped without charity.”
Though he uses the terms love and charity, I have chosen to represent the concept of justice bound to love using the
term mercy.
10
although intended to improve human experience, in their emphasis on human equality such
definitions ultimately limit the possibility for doing justice because human beings are not the
same. In contrast, Levinas’s, affirmative approach, in opening itself to the non-rational, even
transcendent experiences with love, charity, mercy, forgiveness, and compassion that are unique
to each person and their experience in time—and refusing to separate them from the concept of
justice—opens the way for justice to take place, even if justice, as Derrida argues, “remains to-
come” (256).
II.
The concept of a justice “to come” plays a critical role in The Round House, which, like
many of Erdrich’s novels, begins with a distressing event: the wife of a local tribal judge has
been violently attacked somewhere near a sacred edifice called “the round house,” on the border
of her Ojibwe reservation where three classes of land meet. Geraldine Coutts, deeply traumatized
by the sexual assault she has experienced, cannot bring herself to reveal any information
regarding the details or location of the crime to either her husband—a tribal judge—or to the
state police. Her thirteen-year-old son, Joe, finding himself increasingly frustrated with her
silence and with the sluggish pace of the official investigation, decides to take matters into his
own hands. As the child of a tribal judge and a tribal enrollment specialist, Joe is not entirely a
neophyte when it comes to matters of legal justice. In the opening pages of the novel readers find
him furtively reading his father’s copy of Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law
(Round House, 2), and when questions arise regarding whether or not the crime against his
mother was committed on tribal land and if the perpetrator was Indian or non-Indian Joe
recognizes that he “already knew, in a rudimentary way, that these questions would swirl around
the facts . . . [and] that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably
11
change the way we sought justice” (12). The approach to seeking justice in The Round House is,
in typical Erdrich fashion, multifaceted. The plot moves forward through a series of experiences
wherein a friend, mentor, or family member presents Joe with a particular approach to or
definition of justice, which is coupled with or followed by some form of transcendent,
supernatural, or irrational experience designed to steer him away from the impulse to seek the
kind of “rough justice” demonstrated in The Plague of Doves. Additionally, the combination of
advice and transcendent experiences repeatedly challenge Joe to think beyond the modern,
secular interpretation of justice that his exposure to Western culture has instilled in him, but he
has so internalized the conception of justice as punishment that he misses opportunities to
experience and take part in a justice that is “right” and restorative – more of a process than an
event.
The first approach to justice Joe is presented comes from his father, Judge Bazil Coutts,
who has chosen to work within the U.S. legal justice system with the hope of incrementally
expanding tribal sovereignty. Legal justice, as his father presents it, is a sort of “best-we-can-do”
approach. In spite of Joe’s familiarity with the basic principles of legal justice he finds the law a
tedious, laborious, sluggish, ultimately ineffective and unreliable approach to seeking justice for
his mother. Furthermore, he remains impatient with both his father’s patient cooperation with
local tribal and federal authorities, and with the pace of the investigation. After months of
watching his mother languish in grief and despair, Joe finally explodes at his father, “Why do
you do it? I said to him, bursting out. Why bother?” (227). His father responds—as any
thoughtful parent might—with an object lesson. He pulls a rotting, uneaten casserole from the
freezer, “there so long the noodles had turned black, but stashed near enough to the cold
refrigeration coils that it had frozen and so didn’t stink, yet” (227). Judge Coutts proceeds to
12
organize a structure of silverware, carving and butcher knives, spoons and forks, on top of the
casserole. Once finished, he tells Joe, “That’s Indian Law” (228). He then explains that the
casserole represents a series of unjust decisions made against tribal communities, beginning with
Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) wherein George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Chief Justice
John Marshall conspired to strip Native peoples of their lands by upholding “the medieval
doctrine of discovery for a government that was supposedly based on the rights and freedoms of
the individual” (228). “But,” Bazil continues, “what particularly galls the intelligent person now
is that the language he [Marshall] used survives in the law, that we were savages living off the
forest, and to leave our land to us was to leave it useless wilderness, that our character and
religion is of so inferior a stamp that the superior genius of Europe must certainly claim
ascendancy . . .” (228-229). He goes on to name for Joe other cases that made tribal sovereignty
impossible, finishing with the one he most wishes to abolish: Oliphant v. Suquamish (1978), a
case which ruled that Indian tribal courts do not have jurisdiction over non-Indians just ten years
before Geraldine was violently attacked somewhere near the reservation border by a non-Indian
perpetrator. With the knowledge of his legal impotence as a tribal judge, and thus his inability to
use his vocational credentials to seek justice for his own wife, weighing upon him, Bazil
concludes the object lesson:
These are the decisions that I and many other tribal judges try to make. Solid decisions
with no scattershot opinions attached. Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be
crafted keenly. We are trying to build a solid base here for our sovereignty. We try to
press against the boundaries of what we are allowed, walk a step past the edge. Our
records will be scrutinized by Congress one day and decisions on whether to enlarge our
jurisdiction will be made. Some day. We want the right to prosecute criminals of all
13
races on all lands within our original boundaries. Which is why I try to run a tight
courtroom, Joe. What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or
trivial, or boring to you. (229-230)
Though Bazil’s object lesson is typically interpreted as a lecture on the importance of legal
justice, there is reason to believe that he does not fully ascribe to the principles behind Western
conceptions of justice as punishment. His approach enacts Derrida’s belief that “Law is not
justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is
incalculable” (240). Therefore, Bazil also lives by tribal codes of restorative justice which, as
Seema Kurup explains, is a practice “aligned with tribal wisdom and values, which include
meditated discussion and open dialogue, spiritual practice, and ceremony, community-based
conflict resolution and representation, and traditional reparation practices” (Revenge 101). His
efforts to increase tribal sovereignty are driven less by punitive impulses than a desire to decide
how to best do what is right by the standards of a non-Western value system.
Bazil’s adherence to traditional Ojibwe beliefs occasionally startles Joe, evidenced most
clearly in the conversation they have after Joe informs his father that he may have seen a ghost
creeping about their yard. To Joe’s surprise, his father calmly responds, “Yes, they’re out there”
(81) and pours himself another cup of coffee. When Joe expresses his incredulity at his father’s
easy acceptance of this unnerving visitor Bazil reminds his son that he once worked in a
graveyard where he learned to identify ghosts, and informs Joe that the ghost likely appeared
because of what had happened to Geraldine. Though Joe’s instinct is to fear the ghost, his father
simply reminds him that his grandmother “was from a medicine family . . . She would have said
to watch for that ghost. It could be trying to tell you something” (82). Joe’s reaction to this new
information about his father’s beliefs is typical for someone who values the predictability of
14
rational thought when that rationality is interrupted by another kind of reality: “That’s just great .
. . Now we have ghosts. My father, so strictly rational that he’d first refused the sacrament and
then refused to attend Holy Mass at all, believed in ghosts” (82). Though it might seem to
readers, as it does to Joe, that belief in ghosts is inconsistent with Bazil’s otherwise rational
approach to seeking justice, it merely illustrates his understanding of the world as a non-secular
sphere of existence. For example, while Bazil desperately wants to hear every detail related to
Geraldine’s attack, so that he can put together a logical case against her attacker, he recognizes
that no degree of rational conversation is going to be possible if Geraldine does not first
experience a spiritual breakthrough—since it is, as Joe describes it, “Some warm part of her
[that] was gone and might not return” (193). In an effort to initiate that breakthrough, he prepares
her to hear the information he does have about the case by re-telling a clan story. As Joe
explains, “an Ojibwe person’s clan meant everything at one time and no one didn’t have a clan,
thus you knew your place in the world and your relationship to all other beings. The crane, the
bear, the loon, the catfish, lynx, kingfisher, caribou, muskrat . . . people were part of these clans
and were thus governed by special relationships with one another and with the animals” (153-
154). After telling Geraldine the story of her great-aunt being saved by a turtle—a reminder that
there would always be help available to those willing to call for it—Bazil also relates the story of
the famous harp player, Arion, who after playing for his captors was cast by the Corinthians into
the sea, but saved by a dolphin moved by his music. Both stories attest to the power of
community and belief, and they provide Geraldine the strength to talk with her husband about the
details of her attack.
Joe’s observation of his father’s patient and open-spirited approach to seeking justice
could serve as an important model for how Joe responds to his own experiences with the
15
transcendent as he also seeks justice, but his narrow-minded quest to punish his mother’s
attacker prevents him from fully appreciating the principles on which those experiences function.
Quite early in the novel, before he sees the ghost and long before the moldy casserole, Joe travels
to the site of his mother’s attack in a desperate attempt to find any clue that would help move the
case forward. As he arrives at the bottom of the hill near the round house he experiences “a
moment of intense quiet” after which “a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery
logs of the round house . . . The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself” (59). Filled
with sudden emotion, Joe narrates the experience that ensues as if he were a detective following
the clues offered to him from this sacred Ojibwe ceremonial building. Once the sound dissipates,
Joe climbs the hill and as he approaches the round house the “sun fell like a warm hand” on his
shoulders, and though the door is missing and the windows have been broken out, he describes
the room as both tidy and peaceful. He contemplates the spiritual history of the place,
recognizing that there was no way to know the exact location of the crime. Then, without
warning or expectation, he relates, “a certainty entered. I knew. He had attacked her here. The
old ceremonial place had told me—cried out to me in my mother’s anguished voice” (60). That
“knowing” leads him to a nearby beach. Upon arrival, he inexplicably walks into the lake.
My heart was beating so hard as I followed the action in my understanding that I did not
feel the water. I felt his overpowering frustration as he watched the car disappear. I saw
him pick up the gas can and nearly throw it after the vanishing taillights. He ran forward,
then back. Suddenly, he stopped, remembering his stuff, the car, whatever he did have,
his smokes. And the can. He could not be caught with the can. However cold it was that
May, the ice out but the water still freezing, he’d have to wade partway in and let water
fill the can. And after that, as far out as possible, he had surely slung the water-filled tin
16
and now, if I dived down and passed my hands along the muddy, weedy, silty, snail-rich
bottom of the lake, there it would be. (61)
This experience provides Joe with a unique insight into what has happened to his mother. It
cannot be reasonably described as anything other than a spiritual experience—a moment in time
when unseen forces interrupted the limits of Joe’s rational approach and gave him information he
needed. Though Joe is not at all skeptical about his experience at the round house, the anger he
feels after having inhabited the attacker’s emotional state blinds him to the possibility that there
is any other purpose to or use for the information he has been given. In spite of experiencing
what we might call the mercy of the round house – the attempt to help “right” Joe’s
understanding of what happened to his mother, all he wants is to get her attacker; to “Watch him
burn” (62). Though connected to his care for and instinct to make things right for his mother,
Joe’s response is ultimately centered in a desire to punish the man who suddenly and without
cause disrupted the rhythm of Joe’s comfortable family life.
Although Bazil’s efforts to persuade his son that seeking justice requires patience and
caution seem to have fallen on deaf ears, Joe is given another opportunity to rethink his approach
to justice when he unwittingly becomes privy to his maternal grandfather’s nocturnal storytelling
habits. Mooshum is an old Ojibwe medicine man who functions as both a trickster and a sort of
prophet figure in the novel. Over the course of two nights while sleeping in the same room as his
grandson, Mooshum introduces Joe to the concept of “wiindigoo justice”—a process by which a
community can eradicate an evil or destructive being from their midst. Properly understood,
wiindigoo justice could significantly complicate Joe’s vengeful quest, but misinterpreting it can
have perilous consequences. In contrast to Bazil’s straightforward attempt to convince Joe of the
virtues of seeking justice through legal channels, Mooshum teaches Joe about wiindigoo justice
17
while in a dream-like trance. In Joe’s recollection, “Mooshum was not just talking in the random
disconnected way people do, blurting out scraps of dream language. He was telling a story”
(179). This differentiation is important because a complex, detailed narrative is more difficult for
Joe to rationalize away than a series of sleepy, erratic comments would be. A story is purposeful,
and usually offers some sort of meaning or message to the listener. In Mooshum’s tale a woman
named Akiikwe, or “Earth Woman,” is trying to save her people from starvation imposed upon
her community by European colonization of their lands. When the fish are no longer plentiful,
her unfaithful husband, Mirage, begins looking for a way out of his responsibilities. As
Mooshum relates, Mirage
was tired of Akii so he pretended he could see it happen. Some people in these hungry
times became possessed. A wiindigoo could cast its spirit inside of a person. That person
would become an animal, and see fellow humans as prey meat. That’s what was
happening, her husband decided. He imagined that her eyes were starting to glow in the
dark. The thing to do was you had to kill that person right away. But not before you had
agreement in the matter. You couldn’t do it alone. There was a certain way the killing of
a wiindigoo must be done . . . The only person who could kill a wiindigoo was someone
in the blood family. (180)
When Mirage tries to convince his oldest son, Nanapush, to do the killing, the boy refuses. After
a failed attempt by Mirage and the other men in the community, Akii and Nanapush escape. She
teaches her son a buffalo song, and sends him on a quest to find the old female buffalo—the one
who will provide food for the tribe. He eventually finds her, sings the song his mother taught
him, and kills her. In an effort to escape the winter storm, Nanapush crawls into the buffalo
carcass and “while unconscious, he became a buffalo. This buffalo adopted Nanapush and told
18
him all she knew” (186). Once the storm subsides Nanapush’s mother finds him, and they return
to the village with buffalo meat for all. She forgives the men who tried to kill her, but does not
return to her husband. Finally, Mooshum concludes,
Many people were saved by that old woman buffalo, who gave her self to Nanapush and
his unkillable mother. Nanapush himself said that whenever he was sad over the losses
that came over and through his life, his old grandmother buffalo would speak to him and
comfort him. This buffalo knew what had happened to Nanapush’s mother. She said
wiindigoo justice must be pursued with great care. A place should be built so that people
could do things in a good way. (187)
And so Nanapush, with Mooshum’s help, built the round house.
There are several points in Mooshum’s story that should give Joe pause. First, the story
clearly states that “wiindigoo justice must be pursued with great care” (187), and that there were
specific rules regarding the killing of a wiindigoo (e.g. a blood relative must do it and the
community must agree to it). The fact that Mirage was looking for reasons to believe his wife
had become a wiindigoo—and then “decided” that she was—also suggests that identifying a
wiindigoo must also be done with great care. In general, the moral of the story is that things are
not always what they seem to be, and rushing to judgment can cause great harm. Joe, however,
seems to hear a different message: there is such thing as a wiindigoo, it preys upon human
beings, and it must be killed. Moreover, Joe seems to recognize in his adolescent way, that “The
round house [is] . . . a metonymic feminine body. In violating Geraldine within the precincts of
the round house, [her attacker] simultaneously profanes the sacred feminized body representative
of the Ojibway tribe and culture” (Bender and Maunz-Breese145). Joe begins to think of Linden
Lark—his mother’s attacker—as a wiindigoo that needs to be eradicated from the community,
19
and he takes it upon himself to do it. Ironically, but perhaps not unexpectedly, scholars typically
come to the same conclusion—they read Lark as a wiindigoo symbolically, if not literally, and
thus tend to support Joe’s efforts to eradicate this “skin of evil” (Round House 256). Instead of
reading Joe as having misunderstood Mooshum’s story, Laura Castor suggests that it is “a sign
that he [Joe] can trust his own conventional search for ‘Wiindigoo justice’ in seeking out his
mother’s attacker” (40). Jacob Bender and Lydia Maunz-Breese justify Joe’s decision by noting
that Linden Lark is “explicitly identified” as a wiindigoo (146). Thomas Matchie describes Lark
as “a monstrous neighbor—‘a windigoo’ [sic]” (354), and Julie Tharp argues that Lark’s killing
would serve a higher purpose “Because Lark is a ‘wiindigoo’” (33, emphasis added). While there
are a number of tempting parallels to be drawn between Linden Lark and the mythical wiindigoo,
one of the central anxieties of the novel is that such a connection cannot be certain. Mooshum’s
story, like Bazil’s object lesson, was a tale of caution. However, because Joe still sees justice in
terms of punishment in exchange for crime, he instead throws caution to the wind. His
misunderstanding leads to his first significant mistake: valuing his power as an individual over
the responsibility to act in consultation with his family and other members of his community.
Joe’s misinterpretation of Mooshum’s tale is at least partially predicated on his
misunderstanding of another cautionary tale offered to him shortly after the FBI identified
Linden Lark as the primary suspect: Linda Wishkob’s story. Linda Wishkob is the biological
twin sister of the sociopathic Linden Lark, and is in every way his inverse double. Born with a
congenital deformity, Linda would have been left to die at her birth mother’s request if not for an
act of mercy from the attendant nurse. Left at the hospital by her birth parents, Linda was nursed
and later adopted by a reservation woman named Betty Wishkob. In spite of her deformity,
Linda’s childhood is safe and affirmative—her parents love her, her siblings defend her, and in
20
spite of minor resentment from her sister regarding her race she remains close to all of them.
Fifty years after being abandoned in infancy, and after her adoptive parents have died, Linda
receives a phone call from her biological mother. Her brother has kidney failure, and Linda is his
only hope. In spite of initial feelings of hatred for her brother, Linda decides to give him a
kidney. Linda is aware that her brother is not a good man, having been advised by the doctor that
Lark was responsible for his kidney failure, and having been on the receiving end of his
repulsive behavior while waiting for the operation. In spite of this, she gives him the kidney in an
extraordinary display of compassion for a man whose internal damage exceeded any external
damage she had suffered. After the operation she gets unintentionally trapped in the quicksand of
Lark’s sociopathic life, and develops what she calls “an infection of the spirit” (126) that is
ameliorated only by the help of her adoptive family, and Geraldine Coutts. Whatever help
Geraldine had to offer Linda Wishkob remains a mystery, but the moral of the story is clear to
Joe: Linda Wishkob is a good woman willing to help his mother heal, and Linden Lark is an evil
man intent on destroying her, body and soul.
Ironically, Linda’s story is not at all intended to convince Joe that Lark is a sinister force
to be destroyed. On the contrary, though Linda cannot stand to be near her loathsome twin she
does feel a deep sense of gratitude for him. Upon meeting her equally detestable birth mother,
Linda realized that her deformity was an incredible blessing—a gift from her twin unbeknownst
and unintended, but with profound effect. “Before we were born,” Linda tells Joe, “my twin had
the compassion to crush against me, to perfect me by deforming me, so that I would be the one
who was spared” (123). Besides causing her toxic biological family to abandon her, Linda’s
deformity also blessed her with a heightened awareness of other spirits, which in other terms
might mean that she is unusually sensitive to the needs of others. Linda’s gratitude, however, as
21
well as her inclination to show mercy to Lark, is lost on Joe, and the information he digests
regarding Lark’s moral emptiness returns to him upon hearing Mooshum’s story about wiindigoo
justice. Again, his desire for punishment, to give Lark what he deserved, prevents Joe from
recognizing the role of mercy in bringing forth a more expansive form of justice to his mother—
a justice that would heal her and help make her whole again.
In spite of his father’s, grandfather’s, and Linda Wishkob’s efforts to help Joe be more
deliberate in thought and temper his impulse for revenge, he eventually concludes that he must
kill Linden Lark. Once determined to kill his mother’s rapist, Joe realizes he needs to improve
his skill with a firearm, and so he devises a plan to convince the local Catholic priest—a former
marine with excellent aim—to teach him how to shoot gophers. When he shows up for his
Saturday Catechism class, feigning interest in being confirmed by the end of summer, what
ensues is an unexpected conversation wherein Father Travis attempts to instruct Joe in the matter
of divine justice, giving him one more chance to reconsider his approach. Humoring Joe’s phony
desire to prepare for the Eucharist and his sudden interest in a phrase he learned from the
Catechism, “Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance” (251), Father Travis elucidates the
importance of purifying the soul, pontificates on the problems attendant to material versus moral
evil—the latter of which he defines as deliberate action by an individual to cause another pain
and torment—and explains that moral evil exists because
God made human beings free agents . . . able to choose good over evil, but the opposite
too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn’t often, very often at least,
intervene. God can’t do that without taking away our moral freedom . . . The only thing
that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation . . . We
22
are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we? So it is that every evil,
whether moral or material, results in good. You’ll see. (253-254)
Refusing to accept the priest’s personal sermon, Joe grits his teeth and responds, “I’d sure like to
shoot some gophers” (254), to which Father Travis responds, “We won’t be doing that, Joe”
(254). Nevertheless, Joe continues to obtain ammunition and weave a series of lies regarding his
plans that he rationalizes as being “of no consequence, as I was dedicated to a purpose which I’d
named in my mind not vengeance but justice. Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Justice” (260). This
linguistic error, replacing the concept of vengeance with justice, is Joe’s second significant
mistake. Joe’s error is an example of the strict justice that develops, as Regina Schwartz warns,
when the more “rational” response of economic justice fails. One of the fundamental problems
with vengeance is that it is a form of punishment enacted without the approbation or authority of
any law—legal or divine. Substituting it for “justice” leads to moral evil according to Father
Travis’ explanation, and, perhaps more importantly, the fact that it is individually motivated
makes it an act of moral evil by the standards of wiindigoo justice. The most significant effect of
this substitution, however, is that by mistaking vengeance for justice, Joe denies himself even the
possibility of offering mercy—an act which both of his parents, his grandfather, the priest, and
even the perpetrator’s abused twin sister accept as necessary to the kind of justice that can only
be achieved through healing.
Most scholarship on The Round House is quick to identify the moral and ethical
complexities with which the novel’s thirteen-year-old protagonist, Joe Coutts, must contend.
Literary critics recognize the role adolescent impulsivity plays as he makes decisions regarding
how to seek justice for his mother. They are wisely hesitant to blame him for feeling he has no
choice but to permanently eradicate her attacker. They generously empathize with his frustration
23
regarding the bureaucracy involved in seeking legal justice. And they appreciate the weight of
responsibility thrust upon him throughout the novel—particularly in its final scenes. However,
these judicious efforts to avoid blaming the victim, coupled with an unquestioned adherence to
the Enlightenment’s reification of rational thought and individual rights, result in scholarship that
misreads important elements of the text and misunderstands the critique Erdrich is making
regarding the efficacy of justice defined in punitive terms. As Kurup observes, the tendency to
seek certainty through human reason results in a critical scholarship littered with efforts to justify
unjustifiable behavior on account of it being understandable behavior (112). For example, though
Joe explicitly interchanges the Catholic concept of “sins crying out to heaven for vengeance”
with his own version of “sins crying out to heaven for justice,” Laura Sevillano claims that
“Joe’s atrocious action cannot be easily categorised [sic] as the result of a vengeful behaviour”
(142), and “readers cannot simply condemn his barbaric action . . . [because] this murder
provides his family and community with the justice that the conventional legal system cannot
provide” (154). Frankly, the novel is complex enough that it should not be possible for readers to
come to any “simple” conclusions. And yet critics do simply assume that there is a natural
relationship between justice and punishment. Thomas Matchie, for example, describes Joe as “. .
. motivated by vengeance to bring his mother’s attacker to justice” (354). But vengeance does
not lead to justice. There is no meaningful relationship between those two concepts—they are
oppositional. Moreover, while The Round House suggests that Erdrich understands—as Kurup
once again points out—that “the absence of laws protecting Native Americans creates a space
where victims and their families take on the responsibility of finding justice themselves due to a
lack of legitimate legal options” (100), the novel’s heavy ending suggests that Erdrich does not
believe that “there is no other recourse” (Kurup 100) for seeking justice. Indeed, as Julie Tharp
24
suggests, “While Erdrich does depict survival and love in the midst of violence and
displacement, the circumstances are not inevitable” (39). There is always another way—another
possibility.
Joe’s decision to seek vengeance is undeniably rational and relatable; however, it is also a
denial of the foundational principles of the Ojibwe approach to justice, which seeks restoration
for all involved. In pursuing vengeance Joe repeatedly dismisses the wisdom his community
offers him, convincing himself instead that he has no choice but to kill his mother’s attacker—
and to do it alone. The fact that Joe feels trapped into his decision is in and of itself evidence that
it is not a just decision, for “doing” justice requires options and cannot fully take place without
the opportunity to choose right over wrong, or even a better option over a good one. While it is
true that Joe’s choices are limited, his determination to kill Linden Lark is, in fact, a choice.
Fortunately, Joe’s best friend Cappy—much better with a gun and with a deeper understanding
of the importance of communal action—appears unexpectedly at the last moment to help his
friend. Joe, however, does not realize Cappy is there until after he fires the gun, so he does not
initially comprehend that it was Cappy who fired the fatal shot. While much of the initial
scholarship on the novel is hesitant to criticize Joe for his decision to kill Linden Lark—and
some exuberantly seek to exonerate him—Joe is cognizant of his own responsibility regarding
Lark’s death. He muses, “how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when
planted in the wrong place. Ideas too” (293), and he considers how his mother regained her
spirit, and whether his will flee as a result of his action. “Would I become a wiindigoo?” he
wonders, “Infected by Lark?” (294). Although in the modern, secular approach to justice it is
rare to pronounce a sentence based solely on intent, it is clear that for Erdrich, intent matters.
25
Though intent makes both Joe and Linden Lark responsible for the heinous crime of
murder, one must also consider that Joe’s decision to murder Lark is vastly different from Lark’s
murder of Mayla Wolfskin—the woman who after having denied Lark’s advances had called
Joe’s mother for help on that fateful, deadly afternoon. Whereas Lark’s intent to murder grew out
of selfishness and rage, Joe’s decision to kill Lark originates in love for his mother. This partially
accounts for the scholarly solidarity regarding Joe’s innocence, making it possible to
acknowledge the wrongfulness of his decision without blaming him for it. To a certain degree
that is both right and fair—after all, Joe is a child who feels thrust into making adult decisions he
is not prepared to make while trying to make sense of the trauma inflicted on his family. Though
he is a son of legal professionals, he is not mature enough to understand the perils of equating the
concept of justice with law, as his parents and grandfather do. These realities should lead readers
to pity, for Joe is a pathetic character Erdrich has created to demonstrate the uselessness of
revenge and the impossibility of seeking justice when the system does not account for the mercy
needed to make justice possible. And while some have suggested that “Joe never suffered any
real consequences, legal or otherwise, for this shooting” (Bender and Maunz-Breese 142,
emphasis added), Joe’s re-telling of these events seems more like a confessional act of
restitution—implying that he has indeed suffered the consequences of his actions.
The confessional narrative structure of The Round House, in addition to illuminating the
long-term effects of vengeful behavior, is itself a subtle element of Erdrich’s complex and
multifaceted critique of the modern definitions of justice that reach for equality via punishment.
Readers familiar with Erdrich’s earlier work might expect a multivocal approach to seeking
justice in the novel. As Allan Chavkin notes, Erdrich “typically interweaves stories told by
diverse narrators and chronicles different generations of Euro-American and American Indian
26
characters” (1), but The Round House is one of few Erdrich novels—and the only novel in the
justice trilogy—to unfold under the direction of a sole narrator. Writing from the first-person
perspective of a single narrator allows Erdrich to gently manipulate readers into justifying Joe’s
decisions, particularly his decision to kill Linden Lark, because they are limited to his
interpretation of conversations and experiences. Because Joe is the only voice speaking, readers
tend to empathize more quickly with his pain and defend his actions based on that empathy.
When Joe feels angry or scared in a particular situation, ignores a conversation that might help
him, or misunderstands the deeper meaning of a story, readers are more likely to do the same.
While writing from the perspective of a single narrator affords Erdrich a number of literary
benefits
13
, the most important—and least acknowledged—is that it allows her to highlight the
problem of the modern, secular focus on the individual at the expense of the community. This
problem parallels the problem of adhering to a definition of justice that does not value the
concept of mercy, since mercy is only made possible in a communal setting. Though Joe’s
motivations were not completely impure, and while it is certainly true that “conditions that
encourage such vigilante justice for revenge are not in line with Ojibwe law or tradition” (Kurup,
Revenge 113), Joe’s decision was still located in vengeance, and carried out without the active
support of his community—and the outcome was not a blessing, but a sentence.
Bu the end of the novel, the need for restorative justice is profound. Not only has
Geraldine suffered the physical and emotional atrocities of rape and attempted murder, but at the
novel’s end there are three others whose deaths hang over Joe like a thundercloud refusing to
break. In addition to Mayla Wolfskin and Linden Lark, Cappy is killed in a car accident that in
13
Julie Tharp interprets the first person narration as an opportunity for Erdrich to “gesture” toward a better future
for Joe, and encourage readers to “think generationally, not just in the sense that these laws affect generations of
people but also that it may take generations to change them. One must take the long view but not give up” (31).
Additionally, Tharp claims that Erdrich’s narrative choice is “a strategically effective choice because he is a young
male. This increases the likelihood that the novel will be read by men as well as by women” (31).
27
Joe’s mind never would have happened if he had been more attentive to one of the novel’s most
irrational characters. Shortly after Lark’s death Joe has what turns out to be an eerily prophetic
dream wherein he witnesses the gunshot at the golf course, but having exchanged souls with
Lark it is he who is on the ground bleeding to death, helpless as Lark climbs the hill with the
intent to murder Cappy. Upon waking in terror from this dream Joe frantically considers who
could provide him the best counsel and some effective Ojibwe medicine to ward off his
nightmares, when he suddenly remembers an unusual conversation with Bugger Pourier, a local
drunk, petty thief and mail carrier, who had tried to steal his bike weeks earlier. Focused entirely
on getting his bike back, Joe impatiently dismissed Bugger’s mumbling about whether
something he had seen was real or a dream. Bugger finally dropped the bike and “staggered
away like a man in the grip of a magnetic force” (269), but when Joe finds him again he’s in the
hospital recovering from a broken foot and yearning for pancakes. After several failed efforts,
Joe finally manages to help Bugger focus on remembering the details of the experience he
thought might have been a dream. Joe watches as Bugger at first appears to be hallucinating
something awful, which leads to heaving sobs regarding a girl he had seen. Suddenly, as was the
case weeks earlier at the round house, Joe “knows” what happened to Mayla Wolfskin:
She was in the construction site, the earth mounded over her . . . I knew, down to the core
of me, that he had seen Mayla Wolfskin. He had seen her dead body. If we hadn’t killed
Lark, he’d have gone to jail for life anyway . . . The best thing for me to do was forget.
And then for the rest of my life to try and not think how different things would have gone
if, in the first place, I’d just followed Bugger’s dream. (310)
Joe’s recognition that there had been another avenue for seeking justice, that killing Lark was not
his only option, is the narrative climax, and yet remains virtually unmentioned in the critical
28
literature. Joe’s failure to acknowledge Bugger in the novel mirrors the scholarly obliviousness
to the value of transcendent and non-rational experiences while seeking justice in the text. Using
sports terminology, one might say Bugger functions as a “head-fake” in Erdrich’s larger critique
of secular definitions of and approaches to seeking justice. Following Bugger’s dream would
have lifted the burden of fear and responsibility he felt toward his mother by ensuring that Lark
would be permanently removed from the Coutts’s life. It would also have lifted the burden
Cappy felt to share responsibility for his friend’s intent to murder, and may have prevented his
own death—another death for which Joe feels at least partially responsible. The story ends with
the Coutts family left to bear a solemn and hollow burden. While driving back with his parents
from the accident that killed his best friend, Joe laments, “I knew that they knew everything. The
sentence was to endure . . . we passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small
forever. We just kept going” (317).
The heavy prison imagery with which the novel concludes is precisely the opposite of
what justice born of mercy has to offer, and although Joe continually misses, misreads, or
dismisses the non-secular advice and experience he receives, it is not for lack of opportunity. The
recurring elements of mercy in the novel are as ubiquitous as Joe’s inattentiveness to them. In
addition to Joe’s immediate family, Erdrich surrounds him with a community that is constantly
showing him mercy. There is Cappy, whose friendship is itself a mercy to Joe—and that mercy is
most obviously on display in the moment Cappy chooses to risk his own life to save his friend
from committing what their Catholic priest would consider a mortal sin. When Joe asks him why
he came, Cappy says, “I was always there . . . Every morning. I always had your back” (291).
There is also Joe’s aunt Sonja, who protects his secrets, funds his future educational endeavors,
and teaches him a painfully important lesson about the pitfalls of toxic masculinity—inspiring
29
him to spend his life trying to be something better than “just another guy” (223). And, as Bender
and Maunz-Breese observe, “Even Vince Madwesin, a member of the tribal police force . . .
[returns] a water jar Joe left at the scene of the murder, removing evidence that would directly
connect Joe to the crime” (148). Finally, there is Linda Wishkob, who Thomas Matchie
describes as “one of the most other-centered individuals in all of Erdrich’s fiction” (360). After
all Linda has knowingly done to help Joe, he hides the weapon he and Cappy used to kill her
twin brother under her front porch—an act that could potentially have serious legal ramifications
for her if discovered by the authorities. When Linda becomes aware of the contraband weapon,
instead of outing Joe she takes the rifle to her adopted brother, Cedric, who disassembles it and
helps her dispose of the pieces “in the Missouri . . . down back roads, and . . . in sloughs” (301).
Others read these influences as evidence “of an entire communal apparatus functioning together
to neutralize a common threat represented by a single being” (Bender and Maunz-Breeze 148),
but considering Joe’s disinclination to share his knowledge and experiences with the adults in his
life, seems more accurate to interpret their behavior as a combined effort to open the possibility
of restorative justice for Joe through repeated extensions of mercy.
Perhaps Erdrich’s most powerful claim for the necessity of mercy, however, is in the
existence of the round house itself. Built in memory of the women Nanapush loved, he and
Mooshum had “built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the
Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth” (Round House 315). In this description,
justice and mercy are interchangeable, if not entirely synonymous. The round house, aptly
described by Bender and Maunz-Breese as “a symbol of survival, resistance, and connection to
heritage” (144), is the physical representation of the kind of justice Erdrich’s Ojibwe tradition
cherishes. Oddly, in spite of Joe’s powerful spiritual experience at the round house, and in spite
30
of the fact that Geraldine managed to escape certain death within its walls, some critics read the
round house as having lost its efficacy, specifically citing its failure to “protect the mother when
she was raped” (Chen 16). Many scholars follow John McClure in viewing such “loss of faith in
the benignant powers of the sacred world” as merely “a further consequence of the historical
catastrophe” Native peoples have endured (153). This, however, demonstrates a significant
misunderstanding of the purpose of an edifice like the round house. By Erdrich’s own
description the building is a sacred space where members of the community can come together to
gather strength in the face of catastrophe, and express their belief in a creator who they trust can
and will provide a restorative justice, born of mercy. This communal experience is central to the
possibility of calling forth that justice-to-come, without which there is no alternative but a cycle
of despair.
III.
The legal entanglements that weave despair into the final pages of The Round House are
immediately rendered irrelevant in the opening scene of LaRose, wherein a tragic hunting
accident leaves a man responsible for the death of his neighbor’s five-year-old son. The injustice
of the accident reverberates throughout the community, and Landreaux Iron is overcome with
guilt and grief regarding his mistake. As Erdrich describes him, “Landreaux was a devout
Catholic who also followed traditional ways, a man who would kill a deer, thank one god in
English, and put down tobacco for another god in Ojibwe. He was married to a woman even
more devout than he . . .” (3). After consulting with the local priest and a night spent in suicidal
anguish, Landreaux and his wife participate in a traditional ceremony designed to solicit
guidance from their ancestral spirits. The outcome is a complete and nearly unbearable
understanding of a vision they had experienced together before their youngest son, LaRose, was
31
born: “Their son had come out of the clouds asking why he had to wear another boy’s clothing.
They had seen LaRose floating above the earth. He had put his hand upon their hearts and
whispered, You will live. They knew what to make of those images now” (11). So, the next
morning they gather themselves and take the boy to Nola and Peter Ravich with a simple
explanation: “Our son will be your son now . . . It’s the old way” (16).
With this stunning act Erdrich initiates an argument for a justice that is not born of
revenge or the impulse to equalize suffering, but a justice located in mercy and charity—
designed to restore balance and heal relationships through a willingness to share suffering
without trying to measure grief. From a purely secular perspective, offering LaRose to the
Ravich family not only appears completely irrational, but also utterly insufficient—and, as Ron
Charles notes, there is “something obscene about trying to substitute another boy for their dead
son” (par. 7). But LaRose is not offered in substitution for Dusty; rather, he is offered as a
response to the suffering both the Ravich and the Iron families are experiencing. In concert with
Landreaux’s explanation, Gertrude Himmelfarb describes such a response as an “old kind of
charity [that] left it to each individual to alleviate, according to his means, the suffering he saw
about him” (148, emphasis added). In contrast to modern, secular definitions of justice that
operate from self-interest and fear of the other, restorative justice hinges on this “old” form of
charity, which often requires sacrifice from one who—intentionally or not—has harmed another.
Sacrifice, as N. Scott Momaday explains, is related to the concept of the sacred: “Something is
made sacred by means of sacrifice; that which is sacred is earned” (105-106). Sacrifice is the
concept of a purposeful, consecrated act “made holy with offering—song and ceremony, joy and
sorrow, the dedication of the mind and heart, offerings of life and death” (Momaday 114), and is
a key virtue in both Landreaux’s Catholic and his Ojibwe traditions.
32
In offering LaRose as a form of sacrifice, Landreaux and Emmaline open the possibility
for a healing, restorative justice as they acknowledge that while Landreaux is individually
responsible for Dusty’s death and the anguish it has caused, he alone cannot restore what has
been lost. (LaRose 105). Thus, LaRose is presented not in exchange for Dusty, but as a gift of
recognition and an invitation of shared suffering. LaRose’s absence in one home and presence in
another is a reminder of the pain and suffering experienced by all involved, a memorial to
Dusty’s absence, and an unspoken plea for forgiveness. In his new role LaRose becomes what in
Levinasian terms would be called the hostage: “the one who is found responsible for what he has
not done. The one is responsible for the sin of the other” (Righteous 216). The act that makes
LaRose a hostage is Erdrich’s first signal that the search for justice requires more than equal
exchange, self-flagellation, or even the presence of a sacrificial lamb—it requires mercy, and a
community of people willing to give and receive it.
As Landreaux’s and Emmaline’s early vision and later experience in the sweat lodge
ceremony suggest, LaRose is sent with the express purpose to stop the chaos of bad luck the
accident has triggered (LaRose 105). LaRose is not merely suited for this responsibility because
of his age, but because he has a unique set of gifts and abilities bestowed upon him by his
ancestral name—a name Erdrich describes as “both innocent and powerful, and had belonged to
the family’s healers . . . it was as though LaRose had come into the world with that name” (11).
Though he is the fifth LaRose in Emmaline’s family line, he is the first male to be given that
name. The power provided by LaRose’s name “would protect him from the unknown, from what
had been let loose with the accident” (105). That power is not limited to assisting LaRose as a
healer of his immediate family, however. The generational nature of his name connects him both
to the suffering of his ancestors and to the healing practices of the LaRoses who preceded him. It
33
is as if he is a pebble dropped into the bathtub of cyclical time—his birth and life the culminating
factor that has the potential to send ripples of restorative justice through the generations. Such
has been the case for each LaRose, whose influence reaches for ancestor and progeny alike.
Through a series of narrative flashbacks Erdrich reveals that the first LaRose was the daughter of
an Anishinaabe medicine woman who taught her
how to find guardian spirits . . . how to heal people with songs, with plants, what lichens
to eat in an extremity of hunger . . . how to tell from the call of birds if you were going to
die or if an enemy was on your trail . . . how to leave behind her body when half awake or
in sleep and fly around to investigate what was happening on the earth . . . how to dream,
how to return from a dream, change the dream, or stay in the dream in order to save her
life. (198-199)
Her mother’s indispensable training helped the first LaRose navigate a life plagued by men who
harmed her, beginning with the father who sold her and her mother to a dangerous fur trader,
then by that fur trader’s decapitated head, which rolled after her in perpetual warning of danger
an destruction,
14
and finally to the white doctors who failed to heal her tubercular body and kept
her bones as part of a traveling medical display. When Wolfred, who had saved her from the fur
trader, asked her name, “She laughed, not wanting him to own her, and drew a flower” (145).
The name LaRose encapsulates the power of the unspoken name given to Mink’s daughter, and
the suffering and sacrifice of each succeeding LaRose increased its power. The second LaRose
uses her mother’s gifts and practices to survive and thrive in boarding school, whereas the third
LaRose specifically utilizes the name to ensure the proliferation of Native spiritual traditions
through inscribing it onto the material surfaces of the Indian boarding schools whose sole
14
Erdrich leaves the reader to determine whether the rolling head is literal or metaphorical.
34
purpose was eradicate anything “Indian” about its pupils. “I wrote our name everywhere, said
LaRose to her mother . . . in places it would never be found until the building itself was torn
down or burned so that all the sorrows and strivings those walls held went up in flames, and the
smoke drifted home” (134). The fourth LaRose took a slightly different approach, focusing her
healing powers on strengthening the confidence of the young men at the boarding school where
she taught and collecting documentation necessary to reclaim her great-grandmother’s bones.
She, like the women who preceded her, “learned two languages, four levels of math, the uses of
plants, and to fly above the earth” (202), abilities her grandson will also acquire.
Though the offering of LaRose is certainly an act of both justice and charity, the act alone
does not immediately ameliorate anyone’s suffering; and in certain respects it intensifies it for
everyone involved. Indeed, Peter Ravich finds himself “pierced with a sense of disloyalty” (17)
when showing the boy affection, and he is not certain whether his wife “accepted this
unspeakable gift as beauty, or whether she believed the child’s absence over time would leak the
lifeblood from Landreaux’s heart” (17). The pain associated with LaRose’s presence in the
Ravich home is reversed in the Iron home, where his absence takes an enormous emotional toll.
Aware of Nola’s mercurial temper and self-destructive tendencies, Emmaline and Landreaux are
concerned for LaRose’s safety. Furthermore, Landreaux’s suffering is compounded by the guilt
he feels for offering his son to begin with. He tells Randall, the local medicine man, “My family
hates me for giving away LaRose” (51), and admits that he had hoped Nola would bring LaRose
to visit, since she and Emmaline are half-sisters and the boys had been playmates. But perhaps
no character suffers as deeply as LaRose himself. After asking for his mother several times,
“he’d hung his head and cried, gasping. He’d never been away from his mother. There was his
rending bewilderment . . . [that night] the shivers LaRose had been holding back were so delicate
35
they hardly made it from his body. But soon he shook in wide, rolling waves, and tears came
too” (18). His anguish is briefly exacerbated by taunting remarks of the Ravich’s daughter,
Maggie, whose own angry grief has been lost in that of her parents. “You want Mom-ee? Mom-
ee? She’s gone. She and your daddy left you here to be my brother like Dusty was. But I don’t
want you” (18). What appears to be a worst-case scenario, however, quickly takes a turn for the
better as Maggie feels a sudden rush of fear and compassion. Recanting her vicious statement,
she curls herself around the suffering child and whispers, “I do want you” (19). This quiet
moment of acceptance, this small compassion, eases LaRose’s suffering, and in time he
remembers this moment as the one in which he and Maggie became family. Though not at all
pleasant, LaRose’s suffering creates the conditions necessary to extract compassion from
Maggie, and their comradery becomes the starting point for LaRose’s healing mission. Suffering,
under the right circumstances, can lead to empathy and the impulse to alleviate pain. That
outcome is part of the reason the Iron’s offering should be seen not in terms of substitution or
equal exchange, but as a response to suffering. For the suffering each family endures is crucial to
the development of their ability and desire to offer and accept the numerous small gifts of mercy
requisite for restorative justice to take place.
In this story, though, as in all stories, nothing is guaranteed. Extensions of mercy nearly
always involve some degree of risk and the possibility of humiliation. As Alan Jacobs observes,
we suspect gifts, and deny forgiveness to their givers, because we dislike being obliged to
another: We do not wish it even to be suggested that we are in another’s debt, or owe her
reciprocation. But this dislike, this discomfort, may not be praiseworthy. What if in fact
we are obliged to others, what if we do indeed owe something to them? In such a case
Derrida’s chimerical beast, the gift instantly forgotten by both giver and received, would
36
become ethically dubious because it would sustain us in a fictional self-sufficiency and
deny us the possibility of reflecting on what happens to that which we tender to others.
Conversely, the gift remembered by both giver and receiver could serve as a reminder of
our incompleteness and need for others to supplement and enrich our lives; moreover, it
could serve as a useful provocation to reflection upon the debts we owe one another. (80-
81)
Acknowledging one’s incompleteness and need for others is risky, especially when a relationship
was tempestuous to begin with, and pride can be a strong deterrent for receiving the help one
most needs. While Peter’s instinct is to return LaRose to the Irons after a few days, Nola intends
to keep him from them. Her behavior appears selfish, and at one level it functions as desperate
attempt to make him love her: “I’ll make LaRose a cake every day, she thought, if he’ll only be
my son, the only son I will ever have” (21). But Nola’s actions are also evidence of the self-
preservation to which Jacobs alludes—a self-preservation nurtured by the embarrassment of
having told only Emmaline that after Dusty was born she had stopped menstruating. The fact that
Emmaline is aware of Nola’s inability to have more children makes Nola feel vulnerable and
exposed. “Because her half sister understood her so well,” writes Erdrich, “Nola would turn from
her, afraid of her, and harden herself against Emmaline” (21). Nola’s impulse to harm her half
sister by keeping LaRose to herself is only one of the ways in which the members of the Ravich
family grapple with their grief. Peter, who stifles his own anger in an effort to balance Nola’s
outbursts, finally lashes out when he and Landreaux finally have a conversation. Having taken in
and been calmed by a stray dog that Peter believes might carry a piece of Dusty’s soul in him, he
invites Landreaux over for a beer. But when Landreaux arrives the sight of him incites a
37
“tremendous pain below [Peter’s] ribs” (67) and before he knows it he and Landreaux are
brawling in the kitchen. As the two men settle down, Peter finally faces the nature of his pain:
“I could make you into a dirty drunk. I could ambush and blow you away. I could
get you somehow but it wouldn’t do the thing I want.”
“Dusty. I dream about him every night.”
“Even with LaRose here?”
“I do, and I feel guilty, I mean, I love your boy.”
Landreaux relaxed at that your boy. He looked at Peter.
“I’d give my life to get Dusty back for you,” said Landreaux. “LaRose is my life.
I did the best I could do.” (67-68)
The exchange between Peter and Landreaux both highlights Peter’s understanding that revenge
will not solve the injustice at hand and demonstrates the difficulty of healing. Peter recognizes
the generosity of Landreaux’s offering, but it does not absolve him of grief. For the entirety of
the novel Peter and Nola grapple with the desire to harm Landreaux and Emmaline, but their
impulses are tempered and disaster prevented as they come to know and love LaRose. This love
for LaRose is what leads Peter to take the next step on the path to making things right between
the two families. In a subsequent encounter with Landreaux Peter admits his concern for what
the situation is doing to LaRose and concedes that Landreaux’s offering has been helpful, as
Landreaux hoped. Peter then acknowledges the pain LaRose’s absence must be causing
Emmaline, as well as the pain it would cause Nola to lose him at this point. Finally, he makes a
suggestion: “LaRose . . . We have to think of him. We should share him. We should, you know,
make things easier between us all” (76). Peter’s offering, like Landreaux’s, will cause both pain
and joy. While it tests the limits of Nola’s trust and sanity, it breathes life back into the Iron’s
38
home. LaRose’s brothers welcome him with video games and wrestling matches, and his sisters,
after weeping with joy, look “redeemed, like a light had been restored inside of them” (89). The
children especially recognize the value of their parents’ decision to share LaRose, as Maggie
tells LaRose’s sister, Snow:
“There could be a whole revenge plot going between our families. But now I
don’t think there ever will.”
Snow was startled.
“’Cause why . . . ’cause we guys all love LaRose?”
“Uh-huh.” (131)
Still, while Peter’s offer to share LaRose is an example of mercy begetting mercy, it is not an
even exchange. Whereas Landreaux’s offering was a response to the Ravich’s suffering, Peter’s
offering is a response to LaRose’s suffering. Peter and Nola cannot yet bring themselves to trust
or forgive Landreaux and Emmaline, but the love both families have for LaRose makes the risk
worth it, and keeps them from further harming one another. He is, as his given name—Mirage—
suggests, like water in the desert for all of them.
A secular approach to LaRose might interpret the young protagonist and his formidable
task as representative of Erdrich’s penchant for incorporating magical realism into her novels, for
like Lipsha Morriessey in Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), who was “born with the shaman’s
healing touch, [and] grows up with both Native American and Roman Catholic Religious
beliefs” (Rainwater, 405), LaRose occasionally demonstrates what some might call supernatural
powers. He can commune with spirits, he has an unusually prescient sense of what might happen
in the future, and there are moments in the novel where his spirit actually leaves his body to
witness a particular event. By certain definitions, reading his abilities as magical realism are not
39
only justified, but appear to place the purpose and technique of magical realist narrative within
the postsecular tradition.
15
Lois Parker Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, for example, describe
magical realism as a technique that resists “the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment
rationalism and literary realism” (6), and Amaryll Chanady defines it as an “amalgamation of a
rational and an irrational world view” (21). Maggie Ann Bowers further defines magical realism
as a narrative mode that offers “a way to discuss alternative approaches to reality to that of
Western philosophy, expressed in many postcolonial and non-Western works of contemporary
fiction” (1), and insists that the “ordinariness of magical realism’s magic relies on its accepted
and unquestioned position in tangible and material reality” (24). But magical realism is a fraught
term; an oxymoron that places apparently irreconcilable terms in conjunction with one another.
Of course if one accepts the definition of “magic” as a catch-all term for that which encapsulates
mystery, extraordinary events, or spiritual experiences for which scientific rationalism cannot
account (Magic(al) 20-21), then Louise Erdrich is undoubtedly one of the best practitioners of
magical realism in American literary history.
Unfortunately, the majority of literary critics and lay readers define—or perhaps merely
unconsciously interpret—“magic” as that which is not real or even possible. Their understanding
of magic is best exemplified as a trick designed to produce an illusion, and as a result they
conflate magical realism with the literary modes of fantasy, fabulism, and occasionally
surrealism. For example, in his seminal 1954 lecture “Magical realism in Spanish American
fiction”, Ángel Flores defines magical realism as an “amalgamation of realism and fantasy”
15
The term “magical realism” has a long and labyrinthine history, and continues to be a contested and, in some
scholarly opinions, a contemptible term. Maggie Ann Bowers’s Magic(al) Realism (2004) provides a succinct
review of the term’s various etymological, methodological, and geographical histories. My purpose for discussing it
here is not to offer new definitions or privilege any existing ones, but rather to demonstrate that while certain
definitions could work in tandem with postsecular approaches to literature, the impulse of most readers to equate
magic with the illusionary limits its effectiveness as a label for Louise Erdrich’s work.
40
(189). Alan Velie goes one step further, suggesting that “Magical realism is a particular type of
the fantastic” (60). Arguing for the separation of magical realism from these other modes may
seem like splitting literary hairs, especially since Erdrich utilizes each of the literary modes
mentioned in all of her fiction, including LaRose. As a case in point, in the chapters that develop
the story of the first LaRose there is an evil character named Mackinnon who sexually abuses the
young girl until his clerk hatches a plan to poison him and escape with her. Though Mackinnon’s
death is gruesome, his head survives and chases the pair like a bad omen for the rest of their
lives. Erdrich’s description of the head is a superb illustration of the fantastic:
Mackinnon’s head, rolling laboriously over the snow, its hair on fire, brightly twitching,
flames cheerfully flickering. Sometimes it banged into a tree and whimpered. Sometimes
it propelled itself along with its tongue, its slight stump of neck, or its comically paddling
ears. Sometimes it whizzed along for a few feet, then quit, sobbing in frustration at its
awkward, interminable progress. (132)
Erdrich’s ability to incorporate such a fabulist character so seamlessly into the terrestrial reality
of her other characters’ lives is nothing short of masterful. And one could argue, as Caleb
Tankersley does, that “Erdrich’s shaping of the real around the magical is what firmly settles her
work as magical realist” (23). But such an assertion continues to place magic in opposition to the
real, and inches closer to the secular habit that causes Erdrich herself to resist the label of
magical realist: the conflation of the magical, the supernatural, the fabulous, or the fantastic with
the divine.
Conflating these “not real” experiences with the divine is, as Bowers argues, erroneous
(25); but it is also problematic for several reasons. First, it encourages the subterranean
superiority of Enlightenment rationalism that characterizes the colonialist scholarship magical
41
realist writers attempt to disrupt. Take, for instance, Alan Velie’s description of Erdrich’s
purpose for incorporating magical realism into her work. Velie suggests that magical realism “of
the sort Erdrich imports from South America, introduces apparently supernatural events into a
realistic setting in order to demonstrate the nature of reality as perceived by Indians, in this case
the Chippewa, or Anishinaabe, as they call themselves” (61). The caveat “as perceived by
Indians” is a subtle reminder that their reality is different. That difference alone would not be
cause for concern, except that Velie conflates the supernatural with the not-real. Thus, his
seemingly innocuous description demotes the manner in which Native Americans experience
reality, and lifts readers of the burden of taking their experience seriously as part of reality.
Second, conflating the supernatural with the divine leads to impoverished readings of the text.
When anything and everything that cannot be explained in physical terms is understood to be
fantastic or magical, and thus not real, critics are severed from frameworks that might offer more
expansive textual analysis. Mackinnon’s rolling head, for example, is designed as a device to
help readers understand the nature of historical trauma and its role in contemporary events, as
evidenced by the recitation of an origin story LaRose and his siblings hear from their
grandmother’s friend, Ignatia. This story also involves a rolling head, and to help the children
understand the head’s meaning, Ignatia explains, “It is about getting chased . . . We are chased
into this life. The Catholics think we are chased by devils, original sin. We are chased by things
done to us in this life . . . We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to
us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. We only have this teeny
moment. Oops, it’s gone!” (294). The rolling head, in this story and in Erdrich’s narrative about
the first LaRose, is clearly a fabulist literary device. To interpret what happens immediately after
Ignatia’s explanation in terms of fabulism, however, would be a nothing short of an interpretive
42
gaffe. In the middle of Ignatia’s playful lesson about the impact of trauma on history and the
present, she suddenly and unceremoniously dies. Her friend Malvern takes her by the hand, tells
LaRose to pay attention, and begins talking to Ignatia,
telling her the directions, how to take the first steps, how to look to the west, where to
find the road, and not to bother taking anyone along. She sad that everybody, even
herself, Malvern, who had never told her, loved Ignatia very much. They held Ignatia’s
hands for a long time, quietly, until the hands were no longer warm. Still, LaRose felt her
presence in the room. She’ll be around here for a while more, said Malvern. I’m going to
get her friends so they can say good-bye too. You go on home now. (294-295)
LaRose obeys, but as he walks into the cold he is aware of “so many sensations in his body that
he couldn’t feel them all at once, and each, as soon as he felt it, slipped away into the past”
(295). Like Mackinnon, Ignatia is a being that exists through and across time. Unlike
Mackinnon, Ignatia’s existence transcends a physical reality. To dismiss that as “supernatural” or
even as “magic” would be to misunderstand and overlook the spiritual dimensions of reality that
Erdrich and her characters take as a given. For, as Momaday explains, “Very old in the Native
American worldview is the conviction that the earth is vital, that there is a spiritual dimension to
it, a dimension in which man rightly exists” (39). This understanding, more than the secular
effort to explain away Malvern’s instructions or Ignatia’s lingering presence in terms of magical
realism, gives readers a sense of LaRose’s responsibilities. Moreover, Native traditions do not
adhere to Western or secular notions of time. Momaday continues, “according to the native
perception, there is only the dimension of timelessness, and in that dimension all things happen”
(53). Finally, to read the current of sensations that flow through LaRose as illusory in any way
not only denies the reality of invisible realities (i.e. emotions) all human beings experience, but
43
further denigrates the richness of a more expansive worldview. LaRose’s sensations are not
supernatural, but evidence of his unusual perceptiveness. Erdrich reminds readers that “People
utterly dependent on winter hunting . . . became adept at reading the world in a way that seems
supernatural to us. London cabdrivers who’ve memorized their city develop a spatial awareness
that seems uncanny, and anyone who loses one sense develops another sense to an acute
degree. What seems to us magical may be a specialized form of awareness” (New Yorker par. 6).
Randall, the Ojibwe medicine man to whom Landreaux goes for help with his grief, reiterates
this notion. Erdrich writes, “Randall talked about how people think what medicine people did in
the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now, but not magic.
LaRose can do these things too, said Randall. He has it in him” (52). LaRose, having been born
with this specialized form of awareness, is therefore less modern Houdini than ancient prophet.
Most accurately, he is a Native healer—a character Erdrich utilizes to demonstrate the efficacy
of love as a practical link to one’s community.
Though LaRose is not an all-knowing or all-powerful character, his innate tendency to
offer mercy to those who suffer is enhanced by his sensitivity to what one might call the unseen
world. Specifically, the friendship he developed with Dusty before the accident continues via
dreams and what might be described as visionary experiences. In a conversation with Landreaux
regarding the nature of the accident LaRose assures his father that it was indeed an accident, and
that Dusty knew that. He explains, “Dusty fell from a tree branch . . . I saw the place. One night
in my dream I saw the whole thing. Dusty followed the dog into the woods . . . Dusty told me
you shot him on accident” (151). Dreams are one avenue by which those who have passed on can
help LaRose fulfill his earthly mission; spiritual impressions are another. Once the dust of
sharing the boy has settled, “LaRose could not stop his thoughts. He was compelled to sleep on
44
the spot of ground where the boy he replaced had died. This inner directive was so strong that
LaRose lied for the first time in his life in order to accomplish it” (207). Once his mother is
convinced that he will be at the Ravich home, and leaves for work, LaRose gathers a rolled
blanket, some mosquito repellant, and a jar of water to his backpack and heads to the site of the
accident. It is clear that while LaRose is not entirely sure what he is to do, he does have some
sense of how one might invite the ancestors’ presence. He spreads his blanket, sings a four-
directions gathering song, offers his jar of water to each direction and then pours it into the
ground. Once he has made the ceremonial offering, he waits. He listens to the sounds of the
forest until he sleeps, and when he wakes he is disappointed to find no one there, and he sleeps
again. He wakes thirsty and hot, but is too comfortable to move. Suddenly, he senses a presence
he initially thinks might be his father, “But it wasn’t—in fact it wasn’t one person at all. It was a
group of people. Half were Indians and half were maybe Indians, some so pale he could see light
shining through them” (210). Though the group initially appears unaware of him one woman
finally sees him and comments on how much he has grown. LaRose describes her as
wearing a tight brown jacket, a billowy skirt and a hat cocked to one side decorated with
the wing of a bird. There was another woman with her, holding her hand, who looked
very much like her. She pointed out LaRose and they spoke together. The older woman
spoke Ojibwe. There was approval in her voice, but something about her was also quick,
formidable, and wild. She bent close, looked at him very keenly, examined him up and
down. You’ll fly like me, she said . . . [then] the woman who knew English spoke to him.
She spoke kindly and her eyes rested on him in a loving way. As he looked into her fine,
bold features, he recognized his mother. Intense comfort poured into LaRose. We’ll teach
you when the time comes, she said. (210-211)
45
Having been introduced to these women he notices that Dusty is also there, and the boys spend
some time playing with the action figures LaRose has in his bag. The visitation ends as
ordinarily as it began: “everybody got up and left. Just walked off in all directions, murmuring,
laughing” (211). LaRose’s visionary visitation with his ancestors is at one level the fulfillment of
a promise made to Mink’s daughter—the first LaRose—who in a moment of intense suffering
was visited by a “person from the other world . . . The being was pale blue without definite form.
It took care of her, dressed her, tied on her makazinan, blew the lice off, and wrapped her in a
new blanket, saying, Call upon me when this happens and you shall live” (63). From that
experience forward, whenever a LaRose has called for the help of the ancestral community it has
been given. It is evidence that now, as then, the remedy for suffering would require the
participation of not only the living, but also the dead. On another level, the vision’s quotidian
nature is further evidence that, as George Handley argues, “the divine has place in the very stuff
of our physical existence” (110). Being in his ancestors’ visible and felt presence comforts
LaRose and gives him the strength he needs to help the various members of his wounded family
whose grief continues to roll after each of them like Mackinnon’s blazing head.
The influence of kin from the other world on LaRose is especially important to the
physical safety of Landreaux, whose self-incrimination does not prevent those he has wronged
from seeking revenge. This is particularly true of Romeo Puyat, one of Landreaux’s friends from
his reservation boarding school who was permanently crippled when he broke Landreaux’s fall
from a bridge. Critics describe Romeo as “a Native Iago” (Charles par. 11), “a cursed man”
(Curwen par. 1), and “a half-man, living a half-life” (Tripney par. 4), while Erdrich describes
him as having “the soul of a rat” (182). Envious of Landreaux’s popularity, in love with
Emmaline, and nursing a grudge for the physical disfigurement Landreaux’s fall caused him,
46
Romeo has for decades been seeking to “get something solid on Landreaux to bring him down”
(219). Romeo’s thirst for revenge cripples both his emotional and intellectual faculties, and his
efforts to prove that Landreaux was high when he took the fateful shot nearly destroy any ounce
of goodwill the Ravich and Iron families have managed to rebuild. Though Peter recognizes that
Romeo “is slime . . . [and] is doing violence here” (324) his own stifled impulses for revenge
overcome him, and he finds himself convinced by Romeo’s story. Romeo knows the story he
told Peter will likely result in Landreaux’s death at Peter’s hands, and the guilt he feels presses
upon him until he confesses everything to the Catholic priest. In a fervent desire to justify his
actions, to justify his life, he relates,
I gathered every word from trusted sources. I assembled the whole report from pieces of
information relayed to me by people who were on the ground that day. That terrible day.
Even if the report doesn’t say exactly what I said [to Peter], there is corroboration . . .
These words, these connections, these facts. They fell into place. Little by little. They
added up! Into an inevitable story. I made diagrams. I procured a box of tacks. Tacks
were in my wall. Still there. I drew lines between words and then elided . . . . (334)
At that point Father Travis realizes the damage Romeo has done and rushes to stop Peter from
taking revenge on Landreaux, but LaRose “had already changed the story” (28). As Landreaux is
willingly walking in the woods toward Peter, ready to get what he believes are his just desserts,
Peter pulls the trigger, but nothing happens. The gun he always keeps loaded is empty, and in
horror he is filled with understanding: “LaRose. The picture of those small capable boy hands
now fills Peter. Those hands curving to accept the bullets. Loading and unloading his gun. And
the ropes, the poisons. Those hands taking them from their places and getting rid of them. The
missing rat poison, strychnine, the missing bleach. LaRose saving him now, saving both his
47
fathers” (342). What both Peter and Romeo learn from this harrowing experience is what Erdrich
has been arguing throughout her justice trilogy: first, those who allow themselves to be led by
suspicion are clouded in their ability to see the whole truth, and second, vengeance never leads to
justice.
In contrast to The Round House, however, LaRose does not end in tragedy—not even for
Romeo. In a stunning gesture of authorial goodwill, a demonstration of the virtues she has
championed throughout her trilogy, Erdrich brings justice upon Romeo as she acknowledges “all
[his] complexity and reveals [his] essential humanity” (Chavkin 2). Upon confessing his sins to
the priest, Romeo is given a vision of the pain that fills the living and the dead in his little
reservation town. He sees it in the east, the south, and the west, but he
doesn’t want to look north because he realizes he’s thought in the counterclockwise
fashion that belongs only to the spirit world, where, it appears to him now, he belongs.
His place of rest. So thoroughly relieved and convinced is Romeo in that instant, and so
fully does it seize him, the idea of his death, that he casts himself violently headlong
down the twenty cement church steps, to the very base. (335-336)
In a terrific twist of fate, Romeo’s attempted suicide results not in his death, but in a complete
physical and emotional healing. It is as if he who had fallen from grace fell again, but into it. The
novel concludes with a gathering at the Iron’s home to celebrate the graduation of their foster
son—and Romeo’s biological son—Hollis. As Romeo moves among the other guests at the
party, an awareness of a change in himself grows. It was, he muses,
As though I’ve been cranked up wrong ever since Landreaux fell on me and by throwing
myself down the church steps I am starting to get cranked around right . . . it was a
miracle . . . somehow the fall had not killed him but fixed him, pushing everything all
48
back together. That’s how it felt. A mysterious inner alignment was occurring. Romeo
was increasingly calm right down the center. He could even balance with his eyes closed
. . . . (366-367)
There are several approaches that might account for the restoration of Romeo’s physical and
emotional health. To begin with, as Erdrich explains, “Romeo was descended of the one Indian
in ten who had preternatural immunities, self-healing abilities, and had survived a thousand
plagues” (182). It may have simply been in his genetic makeup—the body, after all, is a self-
healing organism. One might also consider Romeo’s healing as a manifestation of his remorse
for his revenge-obsessed life, and desire to repent—to change. Handley’s definition of
repentance is in this respect apropos: “A going back, a repentance, is also a going forth, a
movement toward fulfillment whereby we remake the fragments of experience into a quilted
whole . . . This is a philosophy of hope” (Handley 121). Finally, Romeo’s restoration can be seen
as a direct result of his desire to be part of a community. As Romeo’s restoration illustrates—
down to the realignment of his bones—justice is a process. It happens over time, as one by one
individuals choose to extend mercy, forgiveness, and love to each other. To do so, argues
Caputo, “is to lift the weight of the past and give someone a new lease on life, a new future”
(15). Though he did not join the community of spirits as he had intended, he does have the
opportunity to be accepted again by his friends and family.
In the novel’s final scene Erdrich again draws attention to the necessity of a transcendent
reality in making room for justice to take place. As the Irons, the Ravichs, Romeo and others in
the community celebrate the future plans of one of their own, “the floaty feeling of being with
those other people came over LaRose” (371) and he again feels their presence—the fact of which
brings precisely the sense of wholeness that the final pages of The Round House lacked. In this
49
final gathering there are no enemies, no half sisters, and little distinction between those who exist
in this world and those who have passed on to the other world. Landreaux and Peter are at peace,
Mrs. Peace has assured the return of the stolen bones, Romeo has come to himself, the ancestors
are admiring the children, and LaRose, the nexus of love who ties the worlds together, hears
them speak in both languages and basks in the comfort of their “dance of ordinary joy” (371).
IV.
In both The Round House and LaRose Erdrich re-maps experiences of the sacred onto
two interracial, interfaith, contemporary communities. She does so by making use of what
McClure calls “the patterns and tropes of the return narrative to explore the possibilities for some
sort of religious regrounding in [a] context of apparently ineradicable intermixture” (152). Her
novels, as Catherine Rainwater notes, continue to “reflect the ambivalence and tension marking
the lives of people, much like herself, from dual cultural backgrounds” (405), and McClure’s
assessment that “Erdrich’s investment in the project of spiritual revitalization is as strong as her
skepticism regarding the possibility of what might be called ‘pure’ return, the full recovery of a
traditional way of being” (156) is accurate. However, in his analysis of Erdrich’s fiction McClure
treats the terms “revitalize” and “return” as synonymous with “restoration,”
16
and in doing so
misreads the type of restoration to which Erdrich is most committed. To revitalize something is
to make it live again, not necessarily to make it live exactly as it did before. In The Round House
and LaRose, Erdrich’s characters, not bound by McClure’s Western conception of time and
space, are looking not for a restoration of things as they were, but for a restoration of balance and
wholeness in communities that have endured long histories of injustice. Erdrich’s restorative
justice does not ignore the realities of the past, but the righting of past wrongs is pursued with an
eye toward the future. When her characters (and readers) ignore or misunderstand the sacred
16
See Partial Faiths, page 160.
50
experiences she is re-mapping onto a secular conception of justice as punitive or equalizing,
justice is thwarted. But when those experiences are consciously invited and properly honored,
the possibilities for justice expand.
Thus, through characters whose beliefs and practices originate specifically in a Native
spiritual tradition, but are influenced by Judeo-Christian conceptualizations of sacrifice, Erdrich
identifies the sacred as the site of possibility, regardless of the strictures and imperfections of
manmade law. In her Native theology, as in Levinas’s ethical philosophy, the sacred is located in
and manifested through relationships with other people. For Erdrich and Levinas alike there is no
possibility of justice between the two—as is the case in secular legal approaches to justice—
because what Levinas calls “the third party,”
17
is ever-present. The economic and strict
approaches to justice, as Schwartz explains them, are always harmful to the third party—the
others involved or connected to — because in both cases the justice for which they advocate is
totalizing; in other words, it ignores the singularity of the human being(s) in question. A justice
that is thoroughly restorative must account not only for the other, but for all others. This is why
Joe’s eradication of Linden Lark should be classified as murder, and not sacrifice—for, as
Schwartz explains, “In murder, the emphasis shifts away from the community to the individual
whose death does not satisfy collective justice, but whose murder threatens collective peace”
(Sacramental Poetics 46). Joes attempt to get even results in further imbalance. In contrast, the
sacrifice of LaRose initially causes the Iron family pain, but because it was done in recognition
of communal suffering it successfully functioned as a method to restore balance. The Round
House concludes with a sense of despair because Joe’s adherence to secular notions of justice as
equalizing prevent him from offering Lark the mercy that would, with time, make justice
17
Levinas discusses the concept of the third party in several of his books. For a brief overview of this concept see
Bettina Bergo’s entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/
51
possible. LaRose, however, culminates in hope as a result of each character choosing mercy and
forgiveness, in spite of their very human impulses to the contrary. When mercy is understood to
be an integral part of justice, instead of its weaker twin, we move from justice as punitive event
to justice as a continuing conversation. With this switch, Schwartz explains, “we are no longer
tempted to imagine an exchange of things nor a measure of quantity; instead, we think of a
response that evokes a further response, and this conversation becomes a model both for
theology as well as for the love that is its focus” (Sacramental Poetics 136). Through these
novels Erdrich invites readers into the conversation, encouraging them to see that the ethical
responsibility to the third party—to any and all others—affected by any injustice demands mercy
and charity if justice is to be made possible. She is not arguing for return, but for making things
right.
52
Chapter 2
“Nothing is real save his grace”: Cormac McCarthy’s Postsecular Faith
Living in a state of uncertainty is a distinctive feature of modern life. This observation, made by
Charles Taylor in the introduction to A Secular Age (2007), has become something of a truism
for scholars interested in postsecular studies, and for some has become the foundational idea
upon which their own interpretations of postsecular fiction hinges. Such is the case for John
McClure’s Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), one
of the earliest and most influential studies to focus on postsecular fiction in contemporary
American letters. According to McClure’s description, postsecular fictions develop out of a
variety of religious traditions, but in “the border zone between the secular and the religious” (10)
in which such fictions are created, postsecular novelists are “producing new, complexly
hybridized forms of thought and life” (10). In these new worlds, McClure explains, “qualities of
incompleteness and instability also shape postsecular representations of spiritual community . . .
But the communities founded or discovered by postsecular pilgrims are dramatically small,
fragile, and transitory” (4). By such definitions, there would initially seem to be no contemporary
American novelist who better fits McClure’s postsecular model than Cormac McCarthy, whose
narratives reference religious traditions as disparate as Kabbalah Gnosticism and Mexican Folk
Catholicism, and whose characters, especially in his later writing, breathe the hybrid air of the
geographic and linguistic borderlands of Mexico and the United States. That McClure makes
absolutely no mention of him, in spite of the fact that Harold Bloom listed McCarthy alongside
Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, (both of whom receive an attentive and thorough analysis in
McClure’s monograph) and Philip Roth as one of “four living writers in America who have, in
53
one way or another, touched . . . the sublime” (Pierce par. 8),
18
is unusual at best. Moreover, in
light of the long and vigorous debate regarding the place McCarthy and his oeuvre in American
literature, such an omission appears at first to be a significant oversight.
In the half-century since the publication of McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper
(1965), scholarly attempts to classify his work and style have been confounded at every turn.
According to Lydia Cooper, the “complex dialectic between despair and idealism [that] runs
through McCarthy’s corpus, [makes] any attempt to identify a unifying worldview in the novels
a challenging, if not impossible, task” (Cooper 1). Furthermore, McCarthy’s personal reclusivity
and professional eclecticism lead him to draw liberally from diverse literary traditions without
ascribing firmly to any of them—his only comment on the matter being that “The ugly fact is
book are made out of books” (Woodward par. 24). And since, as John Cant notes, “it has become
commonplace of contemporary criticism to equate eclecticism and postmodernism” McCarthy’s
work is frequently categorized as postmodern (5). Though his commitment to and acceptance of
intertextuality makes it tempting to read McCarthy as postmodern, the seriousness and
singularity of his writing make interpretations that reduce it to mere pastiche questionable.
Moreover, though McCarthy’s linguistic style has repeatedly been compared to Faulkner and
Shakespeare, he is not prone to embellishment and often manages to use minimalist language to
maximum effect. Perhaps most significantly, as James Dorson Observes, McCarthy’s novels
“transgress the postmodern taboo on sincerity, [using] conventional forms unironically in a way
that flies in the face of both institutionalized high culture and the ironic postmodern
appropriation of pop culture” (244). But if McCarthy’s work isn’t postmodern, neither does it fit
neatly within the parameters of literary modernism—there is no stream-of-conscious writing in
18
Of the four writers Bloom listed, only three remain living. Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018.
54
McCarthy’s novels, no access to his characters’ thoughts, and even in the face of total despair
and destruction his novels suggest the possibility that there could be better days ahead. But what
most separates McCarthy from his modernist predecessors and explicitly postmodern
contemporaries is his abundant trust in the power and utility of language to communicate
meaning. Meaning, however, is never fixed or permanent in McCarthy’s writing—it is a kind of
meaning that one might say exists at the periphery of experience, in a state of perpetual
unsettling. Dorson considers such unsettling evidence that McCarthy’s texts are pioneering
counternarratives “in the wave of recent fiction disaffected with the limitations . . . of a
postmodern style dominated by the ironic reflection on the narrative construction of meaning”
(283). Dorson’s call for a new way of thinking about McCarthy’s fiction is in some respects an
echo of Charles Bailey’s suggestion, decades earlier, that McCarthy warrants a classification
outside of postmodernism based both on the literary structure of his novels and the affirmation of
faith in the divine order of the universe that arises from them.
19
One approach might be to think of McCarthy a postsecular writer—one whose fiction
originates in McClure’s “border zone between the secular and the religious” (10) and which
incorporate features from both modern and postmodern traditions to produce characters who
function in hybrid worlds. There is, however, a significantly complicating factor to that
approach: McCarthy’s philosophy only partially aligns with McClure’s sketch of a postsecular
literary tradition. In addition to “qualities of incompleteness and instability” (4) and producing
“hybridized forms of thought and life” (10), McClure proposes four key features of postsecular
fiction, and offers two challenges to those writing it. Those features include “plots of partial
conversion, [postsecular fiction’s] project of ontological disruption, its efforts at once to reassert
19
See Bailey’s essay, ““Doomed Enterprises” and Faith: The Structure of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.”
Southwestern American Literature, vol. 20, no. 1, 1994, pp. 57-67.
55
and to weaken religious conceptions of reality, and its attempts to imagine a new, religiously
inflected, form of progressive politics” (7). His challenges insist that writers craft “compelling
spiritually inflected alternatives to the most relentlessly secular modes of seeing and being, and .
. . ensure that these alternatives will leave room for reflection, disagreement, difference, and
innovation” (13). While McCarthy’s writing celebrates hybridity and does not overtly subscribe
to any religious sect as the “one true faith,” it demonstrates virtually no interest in progressive
politics; indeed, his work often espouses a darkly essentialist view of a world where violence is a
deeply ingrained and ineradicable part of human nature and that such violence coupled with
increasing self-interest and modern technology have led less to political progress than to the
rapid unraveling of civil society. Moreover, those who are or become “heroes” in McCarthy’s
fiction are those characters least interested in power—political or otherwise. Their goals are
typically straightforward, and they tend to live by moral codes that do not always make sense to
modern readers. And neither their religiosity nor their belief systems appear particularly
“weakened” for having lived in a modern, secular world; to the contrary, their experiences with
uncertainty appear to strengthen their moral commitments more often than not. While there is
little argument that McCarthy writes tragedies, within those tragedies there is almost always an
act of unexpected compassion, a glimmer of hope for the future, and the sense that in the face of
everything—history, war, evil—human beings retain moral agency and are capable of
experiencing moments of providential grace. Such grace is, in McCarthy’s words, real
20
and has
effect in the temporal world. It may come directly from God, but it is frequently conveyed
through other people, in particular those whom Jesus called “the least of these.”
20
See McCarthy’s The Crossing, p. 158
56
Therefore, while it is inaccurate to classify McCarthy as a postsecular writer by
McClure’s standards, I would argue that his unique ability to find hope even as he grapples head-
on with the violence and perversion of the world that so depressed his modern predecessors and
which his postmodern contemporaries only manage to parody, and his willingness to stare into
the abyss of uncertainty and still write with a sense of faith in God and mankind serves as
evidence of a postsecular sensibility in his writing. My purpose in this chapter, then, is to
illustrate how McCarthy’s fiction meets McClure’s challenges even as it resists the idea that
hybridity leads to weakened belief systems, and denies the desirability of McClure’s religiously
inflected progressive political project. To accomplish this, I will discuss modernity’s
conceptualization of faith and knowledge as coterminous with uncertainty and certainty, and
explicate the ways in which McCarthy’s narratives reframe faith and knowledge as modes of
human experience that are distinct from certainty and uncertainty. I will also examine how
McCarthy’s employs the trope of the borderlands to evoke a postsecular sensibility in his fiction,
focusing specifically on the villains from Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. The
chapter will conclude with a close reading of what McCarthy scholars typically call “The
Hermit’s Tale” or “The Priest’s Tale,” a twenty-page selection from The Crossing (1994) that
reveals McCarthy’s philosophy regarding the inescapable experience of grace in an otherwise
starkly material reality.
I.
If the conversation regarding McCarthy’s status as modern or postmodern remains
inconclusive, the conversation regarding the religious scope of his fiction remains, as Manuel
Broncano suggests, “probably the most controversial issue in Cormac McCarthy studies” (1).
This controversy stems from a 1982 essay on McCarthy’s Southern fiction wherein Vereen Bell
57
claimed that McCarthy’s “novels are as innocent of theme and ethical reference as they are of
plot” (31), and subsequently suggested that there is a quality of “ambiguous nihilism” to his
fiction. Bell expanded this theory of ambiguous nihilism in The Achievement of Cormac
McCarthy (1988), the first book-length study of McCarthy’s corpus, notably describing the
world of McCarthy’s first novel as “an incoherent and unrationalized gestalt of mass and
process, without design or purpose, unless it is that some demented and unapproachable God
invisibly presides (Achievement 38). For at least the next decade, scholars fixated on textual
evidence that would refute interpretations of McCarthy-as-nihilist; claims that, as Rick Wallach
contends, “Bell . . . had never really made in the first place” (Forward, ix). Among those who
interpret McCarthy’s fiction as fundamentally theological is Edwin T. Arnold, one of the most
prominent voices in McCarthy Studies. In his essay, “Naming Knowing and Nothingness:
McCarthy’s Moral Parables” Arnold situates himself in direct opposition to Bell, claiming that
Bell’s “particular thread of anti-interpretation . . . [is] a reduction of McCarthy’s exceedingly
rich fiction” (31) and that “there is also evident in [McCarthy’s] work a profound belief in the
need for moral order, a conviction that is essentially religious” (31). He re-emphasizes this claim
a decade later, insisting, “that Cormac McCarthy is a writer of the sacred should be beyond
dispute” (“McCarthy and the Sacred” 215). For the most part scholars have tended to side with
Arnold, particularly as McCarthy published his later fiction – much of which was at least
somewhat less gruesome and more clearly invested in moral thought and action. David Cremean,
for example, reads McCarthy as a type of mystic, and maintains that understanding his “mystical
base is consequently critical to understanding him as a writer” (289). Taking a half-step back,
Robert Coles describes McCarthy “as a novelist of religious feeling who appears to subscribe to
no creed but who cannot stop wondering in the most passionate and honest way what gives life
58
meaning” (90). Then there are the overtly religious critics like Matthew Potts, who describes
McCarthy’s novels as trying to “discern some sort or moral system in light of metaphysical
collapse, and that they are everywhere adorned with sacramental language” (14). These scholars,
and many others, understand McCarthy’s work to be deeply invested in the ethics of hospitality
and attentive to the complex relationship between violent suffering and what appears to be
almost a pre-modern search for meaning, purpose, and value in human experience.
Though Bell himself swung at least slightly to the more hopeful end of the pendulum in
his review of McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992)
21
, his early focus on the dark perversity of
McCarthy’s earlier characters seems to have imprinted on a select strain of McCarthy scholars
who have sought to resurrect the case for a more nihilistic interpretation of his fiction. A self-
declared “agonizing agnostic” (146), Broncano describes the sort of nihilism in McCarthy’s
work as “the negation of being . . . and the rejection of any set of beliefs or values” (5), and he
reads McCarthy’s literary world as “largely void of divine essence” (6). Likewise, Eric Hage
declares that readers “can clearly trace a rejection of ecclesiastical forms in McCarthy’s work”
(87). While Adam Miller almost glibly quips that “It is a truism to say that Cormac McCarthy’s
novels . . . court nihilism” (117), he stops short of claiming they subscribe to, in Amy
Hungerford’s words, a “belief in meaninglessness” (xiv). Instead, Miller argues, “For McCarthy,
meaning isn’t bone deep. It’s penumbral. Meaning is a thin shadow cast by the mass of a
meaningless world” (117). Clearly, the only inarguable truism about McCarthy and his work is
that they are – as Bell observed over thirty years ago – uncategorizable (Achievement xii).
21
In his “Between the Wish and the Thing the World Lies Waiting” (1992) Bell writes, “McCarthy’s narratives
always seem to verge upon, without ever moving wholly over into, allegory: everything is potentially meaningful . .
. ” (par 9). Later, unwilling to entirely give up on his reading of McCarthy as at least a little nihilistic, Bell describes
him as “a genuine—if somehow secular—mystic” (par 23).
59
Though the difficulty of coming to any consensus regarding the religious scope of
McCarthy’s work or his place in American literary history is bewildering, what I find even more
bewildering is the utter failure of the scholarly community to question the impulse to classify
him at all. Classification—whether scientific, mathematical, social, or literary—is indicative of a
broader inclination in our modern, secular culture to eradicate uncertainty wherever it might be
found. The compulsion to eradicate uncertainty from human experience has become a central
tenet of the modern, secular project, which depends on our collective acceptance of narratives of
progress that have come to drive nearly every facet of society—from industry and technology to
culture and morality. That most people rarely pause to inquire or exhibit concern regarding the
overarching purpose of progress or the methodologies used to measure it suggests the breadth
and depth of its reach. Though in some contexts we might call our compulsion “the pursuit of
knowledge” or “the search for truth,” at its most basic level the modern, secular quest for
progress is motivated by a rapacious hunger for total certainty and unmitigated power over our
personal circumstances. It is this compulsion that drives, however subconsciously, McClure’s
hope that a postsecular fiction will advance a progressive political vision.
While I am not persuaded that modern, secular attitudes toward and definitions of truth
and knowledge pave a clear path to progress, I have no particular quarrel with searching for truth
per se, or with continued efforts to discover more about natural processes, human behavior, or
technological possibilities. A thirst for progress accounts for a number of exceptional
advancements that have been incalculably beneficial to human life. Neither am I suggesting that
McCarthy is a Luddite. To the contrary, McCarthy has spent decades studying complex-systems
theory with distinguished biologists, physicists, economists, computer scientists, and linguists at
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the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico
22
. His sole published work of non-fiction is a brief
essay titled “The Kekulé Problem,” which explores the relationship between language and the
human unconscious—not unlike his fiction. “Everything’s interesting,” McCarthy insists. “I
don’t think I’ve been bored in 50 years. I’ve forgotten what it was like” (qtd. in Woodward,
“Venomous” par. 48). What I am suggesting, however, is that McCarthy’s interest in and
dedication to scientific inquiry does not in any way weaken his commitment to the reality of
religious experience. Moreover, the attention to scientific principles and his radical openness to
the varieties of religious experience in his writing suggest an understanding of concepts like
faith, knowledge, truth, and even religion that are fundamentally different than what most
modern, secular subjects perceive them to be.
In our modern, secular age the concept of knowledge is tantamount to the practice of
science, and scientific knowledge, according to the British cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, is
“the most prestigious form of knowledge in modernity” (111). This is partly because, as Raphael
Sassower and Jeffrey Scholes explain, “science offers the means of understanding physical
reality, descriptions, and explanations of it that are open to confirmation (in the tradition of
induction) or falsification” (4). In contrast to the visible, tangible outcomes of scientific practice,
religious beliefs are usually invisible and intangible, and therefore “deemed historically, yet
naively relevant, but fundamentally superstitious, figments of the imagination, and therefore
dangerous in derailing human knowledge on its path to find the truth” (Sassower and Scholes, 7).
The separation of science and religion, and the perception of them as methods of seeking truth
fundamentally at odds with one another, is an unfortunate result of the modern, secular obsession
with classification and categorization. It is the predictable effect of the subtraction stories that
22
For a more detailed account of McCarthy’s participation at SFI, see Robert Woodward’s Vanity Fair article,
“Cormac Country.”
61
drive narratives of secularization, which insist that science is a rational method for seeking truth,
because the evidence it provides can be replicated and broadly applied. Its supposed certainty
makes it trustworthy. Religious experience, however, belongs to the realm of “faith.” The
modern, secular conception of faith is that it is something personal and not bound by rationality,
and is therefore uncertain and thus untrustworthy. As Sassower and Scholes note, “the
competitive view of the relation between religion and science is misguided because it suggests
that either discourse is correct but not both. This necessitates a replacement of one discourse with
the other instead of realizing that when a displacement takes place, both remain intact” (7).
Moreover, the impulse to synonymize science with knowledge and certainty, or religion with
faith and uncertainty, is an error that adversely affects attempts to articulate reality or recognize
truth when encountered.
At one level, the error is a result of inattentiveness to the nuances of definition. Though
perhaps tedious, a brief review of basic terminology and etymological history will demonstrate
the imprudence of such inattention. Let us begin with definitions of “certain” and “uncertain.”
23
To be certain is to be determined, fixed, sure, settled, exact, precise, unerring, unfailing,
inevitable, established as a truth or fact to be absolutely relied upon, indisputable, definite in
quantity, and not variable or fluctuating. To be uncertain, then, is to be ambiguous, not clearly
defined or outlined, changeable, liable to change, without a clear goal, and without clear
knowledge. Faith, as a verb, is defined as belief, trust, or confidence based on evidence,
testimony, or authority. As a noun, it is defined as the fulfillment of a promise, loyalty to
another, and the power to convince. Most unexpected, perhaps, are the definitions of “know” and
“knowledge.” To know is a term with biblical roots, and it means to take notice of, have regard
23
Definitions of terms in this section come from the Oxford English Dictionary online.
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for, care for, look after, guard, protect, or approve. In certain contexts, it means one has
experience or understanding. Knowledge is a bit more complicated. It can suggest the faculty of
understanding via the intellect, clear or certain perception of fact or truth, the state of having a
correct idea or understanding of something, possession of information, or perception by means of
the senses. However, it also has a relational element wherein it means recognition, acquaintance,
friendship, and intimacy.
Of course the dictionary is a living document prone to updates and adjustments, and its
definitions are not free from the influence of modern thought or changes in cultural perspectives.
Still, these definitions indicate that while the concepts of certainty and uncertainty are
straightforwardly inverse, the relationship between faith and knowledge is far more complex.
Faith, often used to indicate a state of uncertainty, is defined in terms of power, confidence, and
loyalty – none of which suggest the ambiguity that uncertainty requires. Faith inches even closer
to the relational elements of knowledge when we consider St. Paul’s definition. Writing to the
Hebrews, he declares that faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen” (King James Bible, Heb. 11.1, emphasis mine). For St. Paul, faith isn’t merely belief in
evidence, but the evidence itself. It is worthy of note, then, that knowledge, which modernity
would more closely pair with evidence, is defined in relational terms to which certainty has little
relevance. Yet, as Derrida explains, in the modern, secular world knowledge remains a
“temptation . . . The temptation of knowing, the temptation of knowledge, is to believe not only
that one knows what one knows . . . but also that one knows what knowledge is, that is, free,
structurally, of belief or of faith” (68).
24
This structural separation is also made manifest in the
modern, secular process of dividing the intellect from emotion, as Asad explains:
24
The term “faith” is bolded in the original source.
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In previous centuries ‘experience’ was taken to be the ground from which knowledge of
natural regularities could be asserted; by the end of the seventeenth century ‘experience’
itself came to be seen as capable of being disciplined and re-presented through
measurement and calculation—a critical step in the development of secular reason. The
mathematization of ‘experience’ (henceforth known in English as ‘experiment’) was a
way of ‘sterilizing’ feeling, of separating the intellect from what was supposed to be
inessential to it for genuine knowledge—that is, of disciplining an objectively oriented,
knowing self in a disinterested way. For new science, what could not be calculated did
not, strictly speaking, qualify as knowledge. (63)
In the modern, secular quest for progress, feelings, like faith, are incalculable and therefore
“inessential.” This process demonstrates a valorization of what Jeffrey Thayne and Edwin Gantt
would call an “idea view of truth” (55). Understanding truth as an idea, they explain, “separates
faith from knowledge [because typically], knowledge is thought of as justified belief in truth
(abstract ideas), while faith is seen as belief without justifying evidence. From this view, beliefs
are only justified (that is, knowledge) when they are based on repeated, systematic observations
of the natural or the social world” (55). But to separate faith from knowledge at a structural level
is as unproductive as trying to separate mercy from justice. Just as mercy is required for justice
to be possible, faith is a necessary process by which knowledge is gained or revealed. Faith is an
act of confidence required to navigate the ambiguity of experience and the disorientation one
might feel in the face of possible change. In the process of exercising faith, one develops
knowledge: that conglomeration of facts, observations, and experiences intellectual and physical
that lead to more complete—but never perfect—understanding. Unfortunately, modernity craves
perfection. The methodical eradication of uncertainty is a critical component of a modern,
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secular value system, and faith is a practice that accepts uncertainty as a given. Best then just to
ignore it.
McCarthy, of course, does not ignore it. Numerous scholars attest to the importance of
what Rick Wallach calls the “scientific subconscious” (“Scientific Bent” 218) of McCarthy’s
fiction, and there is no question regarding his devotion to scientific inquiry and its influence on
his writing. However, McCarthy’s scientific pursuits appear to have only increased his
acceptance of uncertainty as a given. Furthermore, McCarthy’s writing evidences a deep
understanding of the substantial risks involved in an unchecked quest for progress, including, but
not limited to, the risk of becoming inattentive to or dismissive of the role of faith in the search
for truth, the importance of human agency in forming relationships, and the possibility of divine
intervention in the material world. McCarthy’s impulse to question the progress narratives of
secular modernity suggests that while he can deftly navigate the world of idea truth he probably
ascribes more fully to what Thayne and Gantt would call a “a person view of truth” (55). Thayne
and Gantt’s thesis is that many contemporary believers struggle to understand the concept of
truth because they exist in a culture heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, which tended to
locate truth in rational ideas rather than in the personality or intentions of a divine being, and
thus truth became “distinct from any god who could carry on a dialogue with mortals” (32). As
will become clear later in this chapter, McCarthy’s theological philosophy suggests a much
closer affinity to a Hebrew understanding of truth as an experience revealed in relationships—
particularly in a human relationship with the divine. In person-truth, God—not ideas—is truth;
and to know God, in that biblical sense of knowledge as understanding, experience, and
familiarity with something or someone, is to know the truth. Therefore, Thayne and Gantt
explain, in a “person view of truth, the opposite of faith is not knowledge but rather being
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unfaithful. It is disloyalty . . .” (57), and uncertainty is an ineradicable element of the experience
because God, with whom one has a person-truth relationship, is not safe in the sense that he is
not bound by law to be predictable. God, Thayne and Gantt argue, “is always capable of
surprising us. We cannot ever wrap our minds around God so completely as to be able to
anticipate His will for us in all contexts of our lives. Our ideas of God are always at risk of being
rendered obsolete by God’s actual presence and activity in our lives” (67). Though his
unflinching acceptance of uncertainty as an ever-present state of being means that McCarthy’s
work does not definitively proclaim the existence of God, the question of whether God exists and
to what extent he is accessible to human beings is the governing conversation of all his published
works. The implications of the question are what motivate McCarthy to stare deeply into the
abyss of the darkest, most violent possibilities in existence without giving in to despair, and in
his fiction the promise and perils of uncertainty are conduits for the unexpected moments of
grace his characters experience. McCarthy’s postsecular sensibility—his interest in and radical
openness to just about everything—requires his characters to commit themselves to effecting
truth and justice even as they earnestly, and not always successfully, grapple with the oldest and
most hefty theological problem of human existence: the nature of good and evil.
II.
When discussing the literary elements of McCarthy’s fiction scholars typically divide his
career into two phases. In the first phase, his books are set in the Deep South where he was born
and raised, and demonstrate his proficiency with the elements of the Southern gothic novel. In
each of these novels, which include The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of
God (1973), and Suttree (1979), McCarthy entertains the relationship between good and evil via
tragicomedy. His characters are simultaneously grotesque and pathetic, and his representation of
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their experiences press readers to reconsider traditional, bourgeois views of religion and
morality. In the second phase of his career, from Blood Meridian (1985) to No Country for Old
Men (2005), McCarthy moves the setting of his novels from the Deep South to the American
Southwest. Though frequently lumped in with McCarthy’s “westerns,” his most recent novel,
The Road (2006), is more of a coda wherein the modern moral value system has reached its
catastrophic end and must be entirely reimagined. Thinking of McCarthy’s work in terms of
these phases is useful in many respects, but it is important to remember that McCarthy’s
overarching project is visible, as Philip and Delys Snyder astutely point out, from the opening
line of The Orchard Keeper, which reads: “For some time now the road had been deserted, white
and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening in the western sky” (7). In this line, the
Snyders explain, “the ordinary is cobbled together to produce the extraordinary – a whole of his
work contained within one portentous sentence” (32). Steven Frye describes the project in
similar language, suggesting that throughout his career McCarthy has been “building a new
house from old stones” (Understanding 1).
Because McCarthy is using “old stones” to structure his narratives, lay readers and
literary critics alike tend to overlook some of the more important elements of McCarthy’s
originality. For example, even a critic as erudite as Harold Bloom adoringly labels Blood
Meridian “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed” (v). But McCarthy isn’t merely writing
westerns—he is reinventing them. And the shift in setting from Tennessee to the borderlands of
the United States and Mexico is a significant turning point in his thematic project. With the
change in setting McCarthy’s writing becomes, as Edwin Arnold observes, “increasingly solemn,
his style more stately, his concerns more overtly theological” (“Blood and Grace” 14).
Introducing the trope of the borderlands allows McCarthy to draw upon the ancient practice of
67
going to the wilderness to encounter the Divine, and finding also that such wilderness is replete
with danger and destruction. McCarthy’s later fiction is, in Arnold’s description, “a wild place . .
. and its God a wild and often savage and mostly unknowable God, but a God whose presence
constantly beckons” (“Blood and Grace” 14). The complexity of the borderlands invites readers
to interpret the experiences McCarthy’s characters have therein on multiple levels, and critics
have taken somewhat varied approaches in their interpretations of how the borderlands function
in McCarthy’s later work, particularly in Blood Meridian and the novels that make up his Border
Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)).
Mark Busby, for example, suggests that “McCarthy uses the border as a metaphor for a complex
and oxymoronic melding of nihilism and optimism, good and evil, illusion and reality, and
several similar contrasts. He also employs similar structural patterns to examine the complex
intertwining of positive and negative forces to present ultimately a worldview that suggests a
nihilistic optimism” (227). In a similar vein, Frye reads McCarthy’s fictional world as “a kind of
purgatory, in which human beings struggle for a time but do so with the overwhelming sense that
material existence shrouds a transcendent mystery” (“Histories” 7). Others, including Arnold and
Hickman, describe the borderlands as a matrix or a womb—a site of creative potential that
depends “on the shedding of blood, both human and animal, for its space to be cleared”
(Hickman 19). Hickman further suggests that in McCarthy’s work the border represents “a seam
or rift where genesis and apocalypse haphazardly trade positions” (21). Regardless of any one
particular interpretation, it is clear that in McCarthy’s novels “the place has something to say,
often violently, and it informs and shapes what the characters do and who they become”
(O’Connell 588). The borderlands, then, are a space both geographical and allegorical where
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McCarthy can best articulate his sense of reality; that anything is possible but nothing can be
certain.
Furthermore, McCarthy’s devotion to accurate depictions of the natural world, and the
scientific principles that guide it, is the sine qua non for persuading a modern, secular reader to
take his religious philosophy equally seriously. The geographical accuracy of McCarthy’s
descriptions of the borderlands in his novels is impeccable. He does not create fictional towns or
fabricate historical events. He is as faithful as possible to the latitude and longitude of his
characters’ journeys, and any building described by name probably existed at one point.
McCarthy’s acute attention to the scientific detail of the natural world both gives his writing an
air of authenticity and counters any dismissal of his setting as literary embellishment before it
can even be made. If a postsecular perspective is, as Timothy O’Brien and Shiri Noy suggest,
“not a middle ground between a preference for science and one for religion, but a distinctive
worldview that reconciles science and religion in all but a few ways” (94), McCarthy goes one
step further: he does not try and reconcile science and religion at all. Instead, he accepts both as
legitimate modes of a single, comprehensive reality, finding no reason to fret over minor
differences when both practices evidence remarkably similar goals and approaches to realizing
them. This is not surprising, considering McCarthy’s insistence that uncertainty is the mainstay
of human experience. Both science and religion, in spite of impulses that drive them to seek
certainty, exist in an atmosphere of mystery and surprise. Both must depend on that inexplicable
mix of work and revelation if they hope to evolve. In addition to refraining from the urge to
reconcile religion and science, McCarthy intentionally puts them in relationship to one another,
illustrating, says Jacqueline Scoones, “how biological life and political existence have become
indistinguishable, yet he also portrays the continuing existence of a specific type of consecrating
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action, evidence of a faith that perpetually consecrates the world” (101). The natural world, then,
becomes an inseparable part of an allegorical reading of the borderlands, and McCarthy’s
welding of temporal and spiritual represents his sense of the borderlands as a place where one
must grapple with what John Beck calls “the materiality of the eternal” (211).
Thus, the borderlands serve as a concrete space within which McCarthy can both explore
the complexities of reality and the nature of truth, while simultaneously critiquing what Robert
Jarrett calls the “national myth of historic progression from nature to civilized domination of
nature” (139). In contrast to the traditional popular western, however, his exploration and
critique employs characters that rarely fit neatly in to black and white hats. This is not to say that
McCarthy’s narratives lack heroes and villains, but rather that the majority of his characters are
sufficiently ordinary that they can and often do shift from one role to the other, occasionally
inhabiting both at once. A case-in-point is Sherriff Bell, the protagonist in No Country For Old
Men. Bell is by profession a man of the law, and by traditional standards of the western genre
would therefore be a good guy responsible for effecting justice by taking down the bad guy. At
face value, that is exactly what he spends most of the book trying to do. Bell, however, lacks the
moral confidence to fulfill his mission, escaping into retirement instead of nobly dying in a
shootout. In a particularly compelling reading, Rachel Griffis describes Bell as the “defeated
spokesperson for morality” (539) whose sin of acedia (spiritual apathy) places him between
Llewellyn Moss and Anton Chigurh—the other, more obviously sinful characters—in the middle
of Dante’s Upper and Lower Hell. Bell is an unusual character, in part because while he
repeatedly demonstrates a clear understanding of good and evil, as well as the process by which
good can be overcome by evil, he retains deep and serious doubts regarding his own place in a
moral universe. Haunted by the weakness that drove his decision to abandon his comrades in
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Vietnam, Bell perceives himself as someone who stole his own life and who in his old age is
“bein asked to stand for somethin that I don’t have the same belief in it I once did . . . [who]
failed at it even when I did” (No Country 296).
Yet, there is something about Bell’s self-reflectivity that makes Griffis’ reading of him as
morally insufficient seem unduly harsh. As is the case in many of McCarthy’s books, No
Country For Old Men concludes with a dream—literally—of hope for a better day. In the final
pages of the novel Bell recounts a dream he had after his father died. He describes his father as a
man who “knew about horses and he was good with em. I’ve seen him break a few and he knew
what he was doin. Very easy on the horse. Talked to em a lot. He never broke nothing in me and
I owe him more than I would of thought” (308). In the dream, Bell is riding a horse through a
snowy mountain pass when he encounters his father coming the opposite direction. The men ride
silently past each other, and Bell recounts that his father is “carryin fire in a horn the way people
used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And
in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere
out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.
And then I woke up” (309). The conclusion of the novel ends, predictably, in uncertainty. Bell’s
dream suggests a degree of hopefulness for the world, but, then again, he wakes up. What this
waking means is unclear. Is he waking to a less hopeful reality? Or does the dream’s content
wake him from the sleep of apathy for which Griffis places him in Hell? If Bell’s moral failures
negate his status as a hero, the fact that he is concerned about the state of his soul at all aligns
him with McCarthy’s moral characters, who, as Lydia Cooper describes them, “tend to
recognize—and often agonize over—the fragility of their belief in the worth of their own
choices” (21). Bell’s honest doubts make him more akin to McCarthy’s other desert dwellers
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(priests, gypsies, blind prophets), who Schaefer argues function less as bastions of moral
certainty than “tools for managing uncertainty” (8), than to either Moss or Chigurh.
If Bell’s status as a hero is compromised by his moral insufficiencies, Chigurh’s status as
a villain is compromised by his unusually rigid and exact adherence to a code of moral evil. In
fact, William Butler Yeats, who also provided the title for McCarthy’s crime thriller,
25
describes
the nature of hero and villain in this particular story nearly perfectly: “The best lack all
conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” (“The Second Coming” lines 8-9).
Bell lacks conviction. Chigurh feels intense passion for nothing apart from fulfilling his role as
an agent of fate. If Bell’s uncertainty—his lack of conviction—makes him appear weak, it also
prevents him from committing irreversible acts of violence against others. By contrast, Chigurh’s
absolute certainty in the workings of fate not only functions as an excuse for committing
atrocious acts of violence, but is also a denial of human agency. Chigurh is passionate and
intense in his devotion, but lacks any fidelity to conscience. His worldview is best understood in
terms of his two coin tosses. In the first exchange where a coin toss is relevant, Chigurh has
stopped for gasoline. What begins as a routine conversation between clerk and customer quickly
turns into a tense interrogation of the store clerk’s personal history. The clerk, sensing a danger
he cannot quite name, does his best to get Chigurh out of the store and on his way. To his
repeated insistence that it’s closing time, Chigurh responds with a non sequitur: “What’s the
most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?” The proprietor, confused, insists he doesn’t know.
Chigurh is by this point annoyed, but is committed to finish his task. He draws a quarter from his
pocket, tosses it, and tells the proprietor to “Call it” (55). He refuses to tell the man what is at
stake in the toss, insisting only that he must call it and that it would not be fair or right for
25
Yeat’s “Sailing to Byzantium” begins with the line, “That is no country for old men.”
72
anyone else to call it for him. It is at this point that McCarthy first describes Chigurh’s face:
“The man looked at Chigurh’s eyes for the first time. Blue as lapis. At once glistening and totally
opaque. Like wet stones” (56). There is nothing good, nothing bad to be seen – his eyes are
without interest or emotion. The man insists once more, “I didnt put nothing up.” To which
Chigurh responds, “Yes you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life. You just didnt know
it . . . [This coin has] been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And I’m
here. And I’ve got my hand over it. And it’s either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it”
(56). Finally, the proprietor calls heads. Chigurh looks, nods in approval, and hands the man the
coin. He advises the man that it is a lucky coin, and shouldn’t be mixed among the others in his
pocket and thus made indistinguishable from them. Before leaving the store he offers the man
this brief and vexing explanation:
Anything can be an instrument . . . Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They
pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an
accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For
instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the
problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history
might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well,
it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it? (57)
As with Bell’s dream, Chigurh’s coin toss ends with an inflection of uncertainty. A sensible
person might read the coin toss as a perverse display of power—a sort of philosophical chest
puffing designed to intimidate a stranger. Chigurh, however, understands the coin toss as a
manifestation of an inevitable fate. In his congratulatory response to the proprietor there was no
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sense of hurt pride or personal loss—it was simply the man’s lucky day. Had the man guessed
wrong, it would have been his most unlucky day. Nothing less, nothing more.
The indiscriminate nature of Chigurh’s violence is re-emphasized in the conversation he
has with Carla Jean Moss late in the novel. Though she has never before seen him, she appears to
know exactly who he is and why he is in her home. Though she insists that she no longer has any
of the money her husband stole, and repeatedly reminds Chigurh that he has no reason to hurt
her, he calmly insists that he is merely there to fulfill a promise he made her dead husband—a
promise that he would kill her if she failed to give him the money. That she does not have the
money is irrelevant; he must keep his promise. Their conversation mimics the circular exchange
between Chigurh and the gas station attendant earlier in the narrative, and finally, as did the
proprietor’s, Carla Jean’s moment of fate arrives. “All right,” Chigurh concedes, “This is the best
I can do” (258). He pulls a coin from his pocket, turns it so she can see both sides, and flips it.
Though there appears to be as much chance in this exchange as with the man at the gas station,
the outcome is without surprise. Though she accuses him of using the coin as a ploy, Chigurh
insists,
I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a
choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is
scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to
move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom
changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly . . . You’re asking that I make
myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for
special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people dont believe
that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How
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to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you
understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle,
and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently.
That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some
other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see?
Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.
Good, he said. That’s good. Then he shot her. (259-260)
26
Here again, McCarthy has provided readers a worldview open to multiple interpretations. The
simplest reading is that Anton Chigurh is a sociopath without conscience or care for the world.
But it is difficult to dismiss the rationalization of his behavior in light of the cool logic that
structures his moral code. From one angle, such logic appears to represent the total indifference
of the natural world to human laws, customs, or desires. From another angle, however, Chigurh’s
belief system could be read as a representation of the consequences of taking the modern, secular
drive to progress to its logical outcome: annihilation of human agency, or what Emmanuel
Levinas calls the process of totalization.
The narrative Chigurh offers Carla Jean regarding the structure of her life—as that which
has a beginning, a middle, and an end—is an almost verbatim echo of Levinas’s definition of
totalization: a process of violence against others that “is accomplished only in history . . . It rests
on the affirmation and the conviction that the chronological order of the history of the historians
outlines the plot of being in itself, analogous to nature . . . Birth and death as punctual moments,
26
There is a brief episode in The Crossing (p. 162) where the protagonist asks the border guard for a half-dollar
loan so he can buy something to eat. Eric Hage interprets the exchange (which lacks any of the apparent significance
of Chigurh’s coin tosses) as “a reversal of the Greek myth of Charon, the guardian figure of the Styx” (69). The river
Styx represents the fluid border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Since the outcome of
Chigurh’s coin tosses are also matters of life and death, and there is always a liminal space of time where everything
is at stake, the connection to the myth of Charon is also worth considering in No Country for Old Men.
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and the interval that separates them, are lodged in this universal time of the historian” (55). In
other words, totalization is the name for a narrative that exiles, smothers, eradicates, or otherwise
delegitimizes the infinitely singular experience of a person and their sense of self. In
contemporary terms, totalization is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a
single story.”
27
The violence of totalization, explains Levinas, “does not consist so much in
injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in
which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their
own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action” (21).
Though Chigurh accuses Carla Jean of this very act when he tells her, “You are asking that I
make myself vulnerable and that I can never do,” he follows that with the acknowledgement that
he has “only one way to live” (259), suggesting that he has already accepted his existence in a
totalized state. Chigurh is so tightly bound to the notion of a single story, of one way to live, that
he cannot imagine that others might have other ways to live. He either cannot fathom or simply
does not accept agency as an influencing factor in human experience. His actions, however,
especially in the moment of the coin toss, are not violent in a merely material sense. Chigurh’s
greatest violence—against the man at the gas station, against Carla Jean, and against everyone
else he encounters—is that he denies people their agency. Carla Jean loses her agency at his
hands both in the moments before and in the moment of her death. The gas station proprietor,
after his encounter with Chigurh, “put both hands on the counter and just stood leaning there
with his head bowed” (58). He is left with his life, but a smaller, defeated version of it. Though
the physically violent outcomes of these two instances are radically different, in both cases
Chigurh systematically and dispassionately breaks his victims’ spirits. Chigurh’s opaque and
27
This phrase is drawn from the title of Adichie’s TED Talk given in July 2009 and can be accessed here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en
76
stony adherence to his twisted moral code makes him an atypical villain. But he is spared being
labeled “evil incarnate” as a result of his apparently genuine belief that he is merely a pawn in
the system—equal, in that respect, to everyone he meets. He remains, at least in his own mind,
subservient to some greater power. Chigurh’s subservience to a vindictive fate weakens his status
as an archvillain; making him slightly more creepy than your average cutthroat assassin, but
infinitely less terrorizing than McCarthy’s most bodacious bad guy.
Scholarly descriptions of McCarthy’s true archvillain, the psychopathic Judge Holden,
have yet to do any justice whatsoever to the sheer enormity of his grandiose evil and gratuitous
violence. To Arnold the Judge is one of McCarthy’s “malevolent destroyers . . . [who] are also
agents of retribution and thus figures of judgment” (34). Bloom, noting the Judge’s “mythic
status” (vii), likens him to Moby-Dick, “another white enigma . . . [who] cannot be slain” (ix).
The best description of the Judge, however, is McCarthy’s own. He introduces readers to the
Judge in the first few pages of Blood Meridian as an “enormous man dressed in an oilcloth
slicker” (6) who has stepped into a tent revival meeting. “He was bald as a stone,” McCarthy
continues, “and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He
was close on to seven feet in height and stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of
God . . .” (6). The Judge’s first act is to incite violence against the preacher with unsubstantiated
claims regarding his religious authority. The preacher instantly recognizes the Judge for who he
truly is: “This is him. The devil. Here he stands” (7). And devil he is.
Countless arguments have been made regarding the depth of Judge Holden’s evil nature,
and scholars have repeatedly sought to prove his wickedness by itemizing the atrocities he and
his followers commit, or by parsing his dense philosophies and decoding his cryptic parables.
Unique among these arguments, however, is Amy Hungerford’s suggestion that the Biblical style
77
of the Judge’s parables and speeches makes his voice almost indistinguishable from “the archaic
cadence of the narrative voice” (Postmodern Belief 86). This suggestion is meant to support her
larger argument: that McCarthy aspires to give his writing “the authoritative status of scripture”
(90), but emptied of its meaningful content. She argues that this aspiration “places McCarthy
firmly among the generations of writers who have imagined the artist as God” (92). In the
context of Hungerford’s primary argument regarding contemporary American fiction as
characterized by its “belief in meaninglessness” or “belief without content” (xiii), the argument
that McCarthy privileges authoritative style over meaningful content is persuasive and, as
Christina Bieber Lake admits, “difficult to refute” (106). But McCarthy appears to be at least
equally committed to the content of his writing as he is to its stylistic authority—if not more so.
Along with Lake, I understand McCarthy’s evocation of Biblical style as an attempt to “draw
readers into a metaphysical dialogue with it and not . . . in order to draw an ersatz authority from
it” (Lake 112). To read McCarthy in terms of the language of authority is to impose a modern,
secular worldview on an author whose “narratives push against what Charles Taylor calls a
‘closed immanent frame’: the modern conviction that humanity must bring its own meaning to an
otherwise meaningless world” (Lake 107). It makes sense, of course, that Hungerford would, by
the standards of this modern conviction, equate the Judge with the voice of the narrator. After all,
the Judge, as Adam Miller explains, “wants to know everything because, for him, knowledge is
annihilation” (121 emphasis mine). And, as Arnold explains, “The heart of the judges arguments
. . . is that life is infinitely fascinating but ultimately has no meaning other than that man imposes
on it” (“Naming and Knowing” 45). If McCarthy equates the narrator with an omniscient and
omnipotent God, of course the Judge would want to also inhabit that space.
78
Hungerford's argument is of course not entirely original
28
, and would have been more
persuasive if Blood Meridian had been McCarthy’s final novel. Her conclusions, however, are
necessarily as limited--and as incomplete--as is her strategically chosen core sample. The Judge
is only one of the characters in one of McCarthy's western novels, all of which were available for
analysis when Postmodern Belief was written. And since each of the other novels offers a more
affirmative view of the world than does Blood Meridian, she seems to be cherry-picking the
evidence in order to reach her conclusions about McCarthy generally. The Crossing, specifically,
troubles Hungerford’s argument that the narrative voice of Blood Meridian and the Judge’s
words are indistinguishable, and for at least two reasons. First, the narrative voice of Blood
Meridian is remarkably similar to the narrative voice of The Crossing. To equate that richly
philosophical and abundantly gracious narrative voice with a character who, in Arnold’s
description, is “a child molester and murderer, drawn to the very innocence he needs to destroy”
(“Naming and Knowing” 44) would be deeply cynical at best. Second, in the content of
McCarthy’s writing, as Arnold reminds us, “the division between good and evil [is never] easily
distinguished nor are the agents easily identified and cast (“Naming and Knowing” 38). By
creating characters who do not always qualify for the definition of “hero” or “villain”—or who
radically exceed the traditional expectation of those roles--McCarthy shapes narratives that
“demand that readers wrestle with the theological and metaphysical problem of evil, one of
humanities’ most enduring and universal enigmas” (Shearer-Cremean 50). In other words, he
invites readers to use their agency to determine what is moral and what is not. What has
28
Traces of Hungerford’s argument can be heard in the final chapter of Cormac McCarthy (1997), where Robert
Jarrett argues, “What belief that can be registered in McCarthy’s fiction is first a belief in the significance of the
choice of linguistic style and a belief that fictional and human identities are both not fixed but derive from choice.
Second, McCarthy’s fiction expresses a belief—a highly qualified belief—in narrative as a replacement for the older
verities of divine narrative . . . Beyond their considerable range of language and style, McCarthy’s narratives gain
their power largely through the intensity of this belief in narrative and narrative alone” (153).
79
meaning, and what does not. Whether God is present in a violently indifferent natural landscape,
or whether he is not. His narratives become the borderlands where readers become witnesses as
they converse (either internally or via annotation) with the text, and then decide what meaning, if
any, is there. The conversation, then, is what matters most profoundly to McCarthy, which
explains, in part, the degree to which his writing continually emphasizes the importance of
telling the tale.
29
III.
The second novel in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, The Crossing, is a story about stories
and storytelling. Structured a bit like a matryoshka doll, the novel is a tale comprised of other
tales, each told by characters with unique perspectives on the nature of the world, all of which
are necessary to the novel’s overall purpose. In comparison to All the Pretty Horses, Arnold
suggests that The Crossing is a “darker, sadder, but also deeply compassionate work” (“Blood
and Grace” 12). Though, as Frye observes, it “tended to confound expectations with its
philosophical density and tortured religious preoccupation” (Understanding 114), it remains, as
Broncano attests, “the most lyrical and the most overtly religious and spiritual of Cormac
McCarthy’s novels” (72). The vast philosophical scope of The Crossing “rivals Blood Meridian .
. . exploring the most essential questions: the role of suffering in the material world, and the
possibility and present potential of the divine” (Frye, Understanding 119), and its content is
29
It is worthy of note that Robert Jarrett understands McCarthy’s disinclination to provide definitive meaning as
evidence that McCarthy’s fiction is postmodern. Jarrett specifically lists the conclusion of The Crossing as an
example to support his claim that “McCarthy’s narratives early were termed either existential or nihilist because this
quest for meaning is never resolved authoritatively . . . Nor can the quest for meaning be resolved, at least within
secular fiction like McCarthy’s” (Cormac McCarthy 153). Jarrett’s interpretation is well argued and persuasive, but
in light of the ubiquitous religious symbolism and allusions in McCarthy’s writing I remain unconvinced that the
lack of resolution is as inherently secular as Jarrett seems to assume. Though I am not entirely sure what Jarrett
means by “secular fiction,” I suspect that he uses that description because of McCarthy’s attention to the scientific
processes of the material world. However accurate that may be, McCarthy’s writing is at least equally invested in
the religious and philosophical elements of human experience in the world, which I think strengthens the argument
that he writes with a postsecular sensibility.
80
richly diverse and compelling. Charles Bailey describes it as a novel about “how human beings
exist in a dimension of time, which separates them from God” (58), and Phillip Snyder values its
extensive examination of “the destructive aspects of either taking or not taking individual
responsibility for the other” (“Cowboy Codes” 206-207). Stylistically, The Crossing occasionally
evokes a sense of hypnagogia—that transitional state between wakefulness and sleep—as it is,
observes Arnold, “a book predicated on dreams and visions” (“Go to Sleep” 57). Above all,
however, The Crossing is a narrative exploration of the boundaries that constitute the nature of
reality, of consciousness, and of the relationship between the human and the divine. Among
McCarthy’s apparently infinite interests, the relationship between language and consciousness
has remained at the forefront throughout his career. In fact, his sole nonfiction publication, “The
Kekulé Problem” (2017), is a rumination on the origin of human language. The essay is at once
probing and perplexed, as McCarthy observes both that verbal language (as we understand it) is
unique to human beings among whom it has “spread with considerable speed” (par. 7), the
linguistic processes by which we organize thought and turn that thought into speech take place in
the unconscious. What perplexes McCarthy, however, is that though “the unconscious
understands language perfectly well” (par. 1), it is “a biological system before it is anything else”
(par. 3). And yet, he explains, “There is no selection at work in the evolution of language
because language is not a biological system and because there is only one of them” (par. 11).
McCarthy’s befuddled conclusion is that the “truth is that there is a process here to which we
have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness” (par. 6), but he cannot shake the
feeling that “the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us” (par. 13).
Though, as usual, McCarthy offers no definitive conclusions, his inquiry into the origins
of language and the nature of consciousness is instructive insofar as it demonstrates his attention
81
to and investment in two features of human experience that constitute reality to a degree that
rationality cannot fully measure. The relationship between the unconscious and language, as
McCarthy’s efforts to grapple with it suggest, is akin to what Levinas calls “interiority,” which
he defines as “the very possibility of a birth and a death that do not derive their meaning from
history. Interiority institutes an order different from historical time in which totality is
constituted, an order where everything is pending, where what is no longer possible historically
remains always possible” (55). Levinas argues that in contrast to totality, which is “accomplished
only in [chronological] history” (55) and the outcome of which is the annihilation of human
agency, interiority is an alternative approach to contemplating what is “real” in human
experience. Reality, he argues,
must not only be determined in its historical objectivity, but also from interior intentions,
from the secrecy that interrupts the continuity of historical time . . . We have always
known that it is impossible to form an idea of the human totality, for men have an inner
life closed to him who does, however, grasp the comprehensive movements of human
groups. The way of access to social reality starting with the separation of the I is not
engulfed in ‘universal history,’ in which only totalities appear. The experience of the
other starting from a separated I remains a source of meaning for the comprehension of
totalities, just as concrete perception remains determinative for the signification of
scientific universes. Cronos, thinking he swallows a god, swallows but a stone. (57-58)
What is most important about interiority—this invisible and perhaps inexplicable inner
experience that affects the outer (“historical”) life—is that it is what produces language, and
language is the means for developing a relationship by way of conversation. For Levinas, and, I
think, for McCarthy, conversation is fundamental to the search for truth and meaning. For truth,
82
explains Levinas, “arises where a being separated from the other is not engulfed in him, but
speaks to him. Language, which does not touch the other, even tangentially, reaches the other by
calling upon him or by commanding him or by obeying him, with all the straightforwardness of
these relations” (62). In McCarthy’s work the telling and re-telling of the tale is the
conversational method by which interiority can be expressed, and it is what coaxes the
possibility of divine revelation while avoiding the totalizing violence of making a complex and
infinite situation utterly and permanently knowable, and thus dead. Repeatedly telling the tale
creates a space for characters (tellers and hearers alike) to exercise agency, insofar as it maintains
the possibility of an indefinite number of outcomes. And, as Ty Hawkins points out, “man is
unique among creation in the degree to which he is able to use his consciousness to
fundamentally alter the world” (39). The telling and retelling of a tale, the process of narrative, is
nothing less than what James Lilley calls a “reweaving of the world” (2) – the materials may be
the same, but in organizing and reorganizing them we change what exists in a person’s
consciousness, thus fundamentally altering the world.
If in Blood Meridian McCarthy demonstrates the dire consequences of totality, he
illuminates the possibilities of interiority in The Crossing. The novel follows sixteen-year-old
Billy Parham as he embarks on a series of journeys across the border between the United States
and Mexico, determined to return a captured she-wolf to her native land. Over the course of his
journeys Billy encounters several “vaguely angelic strangers” (Arnold, “Go to Sleep” 58) who
engage him in conversations about the nature of God and the world. His first encounter takes
place among the ruins of an old church in the town of Huisiachepic
30
As Billy passes among the
wreckage a man with “sandy hair and pale blue eyes . . . called out to him first in spanish and
30
Though many of the geographical locations and named buildings in McCarthy’s novels either exist or existed at
one time, Huisiachepic appears to be a fictional town.
83
then in english [sic]” (The Crossing 137). In what turns out to be a significant act, Billy responds
to the call and is invited in and fed, enacting what Levinas would call the “ethical relation” (51)
of conversation where one welcomes being taught by another. In addition to physical
nourishment via scrambled eggs, the man—a self-described Mormon born, former Catholic
priest—offers Billy spiritual nourishment by way of a story. This story, which scholars
informally call “the Priest’s Tale”
31
is a philosophical discourse that traces the perils and
possibilities of seeking to know God even as it functions as an affirmation of divine presence in a
material world.
The Priest’s Tale begins with the priest’s search for a man, twice saved from disaster,
who lived and died in Caborca, a city in the Mexican state of Sonora. In childhood, says the
priest, “This man’s parents were killed by a cannonshot in the church at Caborca
32
where they
had gone with others to defend themselves against the outlaw American invaders” (The Crossing
144). Shortly after the boy was discovered under the rubble in the arms of his dead mother, he
was brought to Huisiachepic. He grew, married, and has a son. While the boy is still young the
man takes him on a journey, and promises his young wife a gift upon their return. In the town of
Bavispe he leaves the boy with his padrino [godfather] while he attends to business elsewhere,
and the child is tragically killed in an earthquake. The boy’s corpse is the only gift the man has to
bring the mother of his child. The priest continues,
31
Because McCarthy gives the man living in the church at Caborca no formal name, scholars refer to him by
various titles: the Mormon hermit, the priest, the caretaker, the ex-priest, etc. In this essay I have chosen to refer to
him as the priest because that is the moniker he uses for himself as he relates his tale.
32
La Purísima de Concepción de Caborca is an old mission church in Sonora, Mexico. It was originally built by
Jesuit missionaries in 1694, and has been destroyed and rebuilt several times since then. For more information, see
the National Park Service’s brief historical summary here: https://www.nps.gov/tuma/learn/historyculture/la-
purisima-concepcion-de-caborca.htm
84
We lose sight of him for some years. He abandons his wife in the ruins of this town.
Many friends are dead. Of his wife nothing more is known . . . After many a youthful
wandering this man appeared at last in the capital and there he worked for some years. He
was a bearer of messages . . . [and later] a pensioner in Mexico . . . On a certain day he
rose and put his few possessions into an old valise he’d kept beneath his bed these years
and descended the stairwell for the last time. He carries his bible beneath his arm. Like
the peregrine minister of some paltry sect. In three days’ time he was in the town of
Caborca of sacred memory. Standing there by the river squinting up in the sunshine
where the dome of the broken transept of the church of La Purísima Concepción de
Nuestra Señora de Caborca floated in the pure desert air. (146-149)
So this man, who spent most of his isolated life nursing a cynical and sorrowful view of God and
his fellowmen, settles under “that perilous roof . . . and there he made ready to receive that which
had eluded him” (150). The people of Caborca come, as people do, to watch this unusual
stranger pace and fret and argue with the sky. “This is what they saw,” explains the priest, “An
old hermit. A man with no history . . . and many were scandalized who’d not . . . seen God
bearded in his very house” (150). They call for the priest, who comes to try and convince the
man of the goodness of God, to no avail. Weeks later, as the old anchorite lays on his deathbed,
the priest returns only to be driven away once again. He makes a final attempt in three day’s time
and listens to the old man give what he interprets as a sort of confession. When the priest begins
the words of absolution, however, “the old man seized his arm midway in its crossing there in
the still air by his deathbedside and stayed him with his eyes. He let go the priest’s other hand
and raised his own. Like a man going on a journey. Save yourself, he hissed. Save yourself. Then
he died” (157).
85
Though it is tempting to read the tale as tragic and meaningless, one must remember—as
the priest tells Billy—that “The end is not yet told” (144). Though the anchorite has died, the
story becomes meaningful through the lessons the priest learned and reflects upon with Billy. In
this case, the tale has the flavor of a scientific phenomenon called the Mobius strip. A Mobius
strip is a one-dimensional surface, and has the mathematical property of being nonorientable.
However, as a Mobius strip is divided or turned it appears to have multiple dimensions and
surfaces—and if turned just so it will create an infinity symbol. Likewise, at face value the
Priest’s Tale is merely the story of one man’s suffering. However, as James Keegan notes, the
priest claims for his story “the status of myth, the ur-story that is all stories. By extension, the
pensioner becomes . . . everyman. The priest becomes all narrators. Billy (and the reader)
becomes . . . every ‘witness’” (48). The multidimensional nature of the tale invites readers to
understand it in metaphysical terms, and the process of “turning” the tale through continuing to
relate it keeps the interpretive possibilities open even though the “facts” remain the same. Critics
have made good use of this multidimensionality, attending in their criticism everything from the
possibility that the tale is “a mock scholastic dialogue . . . [wherein] the words of the old man
under the dome in Caborca often echo the concepts of Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense” (Woodsen, “McCarthy’s Heroes” 19) to reading it as a “new parable of human
life in all its dimensions” (Hall 194). In addition to the many thorough and compelling readings
of this tale, I would argue that the Priest’s Tale is a demonstration both of the futility of trying to
know or define God, and of the importance of conversation in the process of coming to
understand God. It is a tale that establishes an indivisible relationship between faith and
knowledge.
86
Consider, to begin with, the vexed position of the anchorite. After surviving a human-
caused disaster in his childhood and the natural disaster that killed his only child, “he found
himself severed from both antecedents and posterity alike. He was but some brevity of a being.
His claims to the common life of men became tenuous, insubstantial. He was a trunk without
root or branch” (The Crossing 147). Friendless, he makes a living delivering messages of no
interest to him. As the priest relates, “He had no faith in the power of men to act wisely in their
own behalf . . . [though he] did not cease to believe in God. Nor did he come to have some
modern view of God. There was God and there was the world. He knew that the world would
forget him but that God could not” (148), for as one whose life has been twice spared he
perceives himself as “elected out of the common lot of men. For what he was asked now to
reckon with was that he’d been called forth twice out of the ashes” (148) and over time he finds
himself surrounded by “an enormous emptiness without echo” (148). Before his final journey to
the dilapidated church in Caborca the old pensioner begins dreaming of God—not a God without
body, parts, or passions, but an intelligent, complex, mysterious being who appears to act with
intent in the world and among humankind. The God in these dreams
was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could
see Him bent at his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of his own
presence. Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it
vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study. A
God who seemed a slave to his own selfordained duties. A God with a fathomless
capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix.
And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was
a thread that was he and he woke weeping. (149)
87
These dreams heavily influence the anchorite’s perception of God, and though he comes to
“believe terrible things of Him” (148), his sense of having been chosen gives him the audacity to
believe that he can “strike some colindancia with his Maker” (151). A rough English translation
of colindancia is “the state of being on the border or frontier.” Thus, to strike a colindancia, as
the priest explains, is to “Assess boundaries and metes. See that lines were drawn and respected”
(151). Though the details of the anchorite’s “plot against God” (149) are never specified, his
devotion to study is clear. The priest describes him as thumbing the pages of his bible as he
mutters and paces beneath frescoes that depict “the very events he pondered” (150). When the
priest offers an explanation of grace and the nature of God “the old man raised his book aloft and
shouted . . . You know nothing . . . You know nothing” (151). The anchorite’s attempt to strike a
colindancia—to in some way impose his will upon God—is representative of the modern, secular
impulse to totalizing knowledge. He continues to seek evidence against God in part because he
understands God as “the worthy adversary” (153); one who in being defined gives human beings
definition.
In contrast to the anchorite, the priest is described as “a man of broad principles. Of
liberal sentiments . . . [who] believed in a boundless God without center or circumference” (152).
Yet, even in his priestly calling he functions as a representation of modern rationalism. His
impulse to offer orderly explanations infuriates the anchorite, and that fury might reasonably be
considered hypocritical if not for one vital detail: “The priest wagered nothing” (151). The
anchorite committed himself to a futile quest, but, as the priest acknowledges, he “stood on
ground once blessed and fraughtful . . . By his arrogance he had engaged the living thing. On that
perilous ground he had made of himself the only witness there can ever be” (152). The priest,
however, “chose to stand outside the critical edifice of his own church and by this choice he
88
sacrificed his words of their power to witness” (152). Thus, it is the anchorite who demonstrates
real faith – action in the face of the uncertain, and a willingness to converse with God under a
dome that could feasibly come crashing down upon his head at any given moment. The physical
risk of the instable edifice in which he has planted himself is symbolic of the spiritual wager he
has made in taking a stand against what he perceives to be a terrible and tragic God.
Paradoxically, it is the wager—the faith the anchorite’s conversation suggests—that moves him
to a clearer understanding of God in the end. For he knew, as McCarthy writes, that God does
not
whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to
their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them
but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his
presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their
exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only
darkness and despair. (152)
When the anchorite, whose understanding of God is specific, accuses the priest of knowing
nothing, he is not merely speaking of intellectual facts; rather, he has identified a problem with
the priest’s inclination to make God manageable by imagining him as formless and without
boundary. What puts the priest in “mortal peril” (152) is that “in his grandness he had ceded all
terrain. And in his colindancia God had no say at all” (153). In other words, by refusing to grant
God definite qualities and boundaries (though they may not be understood or accessible to
human beings), the priest also totalizes him and annihilates the possibility for God to
intentionally intervene in the world. If God is incapable of intervention, then grace becomes an
impossibility.
89
Ironically, but true to McCarthy’s instinct to avoid clean conclusions, he deems both men
“heretics to the bone” (151). In the final hours of his life the anchorite finally divests himself of
his bitter self-importance as he comes to an understanding that “God had outwitted him . . . and it
was true that He did indeed contain all else within Him even to the reasoning of the heretic else
He were no God at all” (156). He also came to understand that “It is God’s grace alone that we
are bound by this thread of life . . . This flesh is but a memento, yet it tells the true. Ultimately
every man’s path is every other’s . . . All men are one and there is no other tale to tell” (156-
157). His unorthodox exercise of faith through his willingness to converse with God leads him to
a more complete understanding of both God and of his own experience in the world. The priest’s
mistake—confusing darkness with nothingness—takes longer to rectify. Though he remains in
his calling for some time after the anchorite’s death, the questions their conversations created for
him overcome his ability to remain as he was. Again, conversation led to revelation.
33
The
priest’s revelation is worth quoting at length, in part because so many McCarthy scholars
interpret it as representative of McCarthy’s personal philosophy.
34
In the end what the priest came to believe was that the truth may often be carried about
by those who themselves remain all unaware of it . . . Then one day, in that casual
gesture, that subtle movement of divestiture, they wreak all unknown upon some
ancillary soul a havoc such that that soul is forever changed, forever wrenched about in
the road it was intended upon and set instead upon a road heretofore unknown to it. This
new man will hardly know the hour of his turning nor the source of it. He will himself
have done nothing that such great good befall him. Yet he will have the very thing, you
33
In Totality and Infinity Levinas writes, “Revelation is discourse; in order to welcome revelation a being apt for
this role of interlocutor, a separated being, is required . . . To hear the divine word does not amount to knowing an
object; it is to be in relation with a substance overflowing it own idea in me” (77).
34
Ty Hawkins, for example, suggests that the conclusion of the Priest’s tale is “the clearest articulation of
McCarthy’s cosmology to appear in his entire corpus” (45).
90
see. Unsought for and undeserved. He will have in his possession that elusive freedom
which men seek with such unending desperation.
What the priest saw at last was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the
witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only. The priest therefore
saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor
against. The truth is rather that if there were no God there could be no witness for there
could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that
there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a
heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him.
Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront.
Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones
themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we
shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.
(158)
These final paragraphs of the Priest’s Tale are more than just the conclusion of a tale. They are
words of warning and wisdom offered both to Billy Parham and to those reading the novel.
Though the process by which the two men come to clearer understanding is complicated by their
modern, secular tendencies toward totalizing forms of knowledge, the grace of God ends up
being sufficient for each of them. While God may need no witness, both men become witnesses
to God’s grace through their interaction with one another. Conversation is both an act of faith
and, as Regina Schwartz describes it, a gift. “We have much to gain” Schwartz insists
by framing the question [of the gift] . . . not economically, but linguistically. There is a
world of difference, for when we shift the trope about love from gift to conversation, we
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are no longer tempted to imagine an exchange of things nor a measure of quantity;
instead, we think of a response that evokes a further response, and this conversation
becomes a model both for theology as well as for the love that is its focus. (136)
The conversations, the telling and re-telling of the tale, are ultimately acts of faith and of love.
Derrida proposes that the “act of faith demanded in bearing witness exceeds, through its
structure, all intuition and all proof, all knowledge” (98). To give up that impulse for “all
knowledge” and accept the uncertainty of relationships both human and divine is the act required
for the gift of grace to become a possibility in human experience.
IV.
In McCarthy’s narrative world there are no certainties—only possibilities. He, more than
perhaps any contemporary novelist, is able to look deeply into the darkest abyss and maintain
faith that something is there. His work unflinchingly accepts the reality of evil, illuminates the
consequences of violence, and manages to find hope for the miserable, the perverted, and the
grotesque in the process. His understanding of grace is as awesome as it is unconventional: “The
grace of God don’t rest easy on a man. It can blind him easy as not. It can bend him and make
him crooked. And who did Jesus love, friends? The lame the halt and the blind, that’s who.
Them is the ones scarred with God’s mercy. Stricken with his love” (Outer Dark 226). And each
of his novels concludes with the promise of another day. These features are what allow him to
create, in McClure’s terms, “compelling spiritually inflected alternatives to the most relentlessly
secular modes of seeing and being, and . . . ensure that these alternatives will leave room for
reflection, disagreement, difference, and innovation” (13). McCarthy has spent his career wading
through the questions, concerns, evidence, and potential outcomes of the modern, secular project,
and his corpus evidences serious attention to the tropes and figures of literary modernism and
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postmodernism alike. His work consistently illuminates the possibilities presented by modern,
secular arguments even as it unfailingly leaves room for the sacred. Though his plots, settings,
and characters embrace hybrid languages, belief systems and geographical spaces, that hybridity
seems only to strengthen his characters’ conversions and deny the predictability of a progressive
political project. From The Orchard Keeper to The Road he reminds readers that the world
existed long before us and will remain long after we are gone—and our influence is fleeting, at
best. His approach both continually invites faith even as it prevents certainty, because he is
forever posing the question with which he concludes his essay on consciousness: Are you sure?
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Chapter 3
“I was not a soulless animal”: Toni Morrison’s Postsecular Personhood
In the closing pages of Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy (2008), an Angolan woman
seized by “soul traders” (Johnson 28) narrates the traumatic journey from her homeland to
Barbados and on to the American colonies. She describes the inter-tribal violence that precedes
her capture, her desperation during the middle passage, and the humiliation of being first penned
up and then put on a “platform in the sun” (194) to be sold to a sugar king. In Barbados, she
explains, “I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was
negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song—all of it cooked
together in the color of my skin. So it was as a black that I was purchased by Senhor, taken out
of the cane and shipped north to his tobacco plants” (194).
35
Through this Angolan woman’s
realization, Morrison shines a spotlight on the signal feature—and the greatest failure—of the
modern, secular age’s dependence on slavery: the denial of personhood that results from
equating identity with skin color instead of with the soul.
What exactly defines a person is a contested issue, because definitions depend on a
particular thinker’s moral, philosophical, or religious background. In his most recent work on the
subject, Christian Smith reviews a number of possible understandings of what a person is. “Are
we simply self-conscious animals”, he queries,
Improbably appearing for a moment in a cosmos without purpose or significance? . . . Or
are we rather illusions of individuality destined to dissolve into the ultimately real
Absolute? . . . Are we instead really materially acquisitive hedonists or carnally desiring
35
The Angolan woman’s explanation of her denied personhood mirrors Andrea Stuart’s description of the greatest
trauma imposed on a free person forced into slavery, which Stuart claims, “was not material but psychological: the
system was designed to transform the way he saw himself and perceived his own interests. From his earliest days on
the island, the slave was discouraged from speaking his language, prohibited from practicing his religion, and
prevented from living in the manner to which he had previously been accustomed. The slave, therefore, had a past
but not a heritage” (Sugar in the Blood 91).
94
sensualists who have nothing higher to which to aspire than the gratifications of
possessions and physical sensations that we can use our money and relations to consume?
Or maybe only bodies with capacities to define by means of the exercise of will and
discourse our identities through self-description and re-description? Or perhaps are we
children of a personal God, whose perfect love is determined to rescue us from our self-
destruction in order to bring us into the perfect happiness of divine knowledge and
worship? Or maybe something else? (What is a Person? 7)
For Smith, as for everyone, the perspective one takes matters, insofar as understanding what a
person is will affect the way people behave and treat one another. For the purposes of this
chapter, I argue that personhood is comprised of at least three key features that combine to
produce what Morrison calls the “specific individuality” (Origin 39) of a human being, a
singularity I think is best described by the term soul, though for the purposes of this chapter I
will use the term person instead.
36
Smith identifies the first in his book Moral, Believing
Animals: “Human persons”, he writes, “. . . are nearly inescapably moral agents” (148). Agency,
or, the capacity to make decisions, is only effective, however, to the extent that it is exercised in
relation to other beings. The second element of personhood, therefore, is the need for
relationship, which, as Christina Bieber Lake insists, is the experience for which “embodied
persons [are] made” (6). The third key element of personhood, then, is language – the ability to
articulate an idea or an emotion in a way that is effectively communicable to another, as well as
to the self. This narrative process, as Charles Taylor argues in The Language Animal, is essential
36
Defining the term “soul” is equally, if not more, difficult than defining the term “person.” As Emmanuel Levinas
reminds us, consciousness has been the Western tradition’s explanation for what makes us human (Entre Nous 190),
and consciousness is often the modern world’s preferred term for the soul. Alternatively, in many religious
traditions, the soul is interchangeable with the concept of spirit. When I use the term, I am referring to that
combination of elements and experiences—seen and unseen, tangible and intangible—that give each person that
unique and mysterious “something” that differentiates them from all others of their species, and from which they
draw both their intellect and their capacity for moral agency. A soul, then, is both a person and that which exceeds
the embodied person.
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to personhood, because story is the apparatus through which people define their identities (317).
In short, the stories people tell themselves about their experiences shape who they are.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century, modern, secular narratives regarding the New
World frequently romanticized it as a place promising adventure, liberty, and upward mobility
for any courageous enough to seek it. These narratives, as William D. Hart explains, at least
partially replaced medieval Christianity’s quest for “providentially guided . . . salvation” (198-
199),
37
and in the process naturalized an idea of early America
38
as a space where individuals
with shared cultural identities purposefully formed communities that planned and executed
deliberate social and economic goals. This deterministic approach to history, however, is in
direct contrast with the process by which events actually take place. As the celebrated U.S.
historian David McCullough observes, “nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Any
great past event could have gone off in any number of different directions for any number of
different reasons. We should understand that history was never on a track. It was never
preordained that it would turn out as it did” (par 1). In fact, the early American experience, in
contrast to what traditional narratives suggest, was significantly more fluid—a mélange of
individuals scrambling for land and power, and a place where exiles and escapees might start
anew. The practice of slavery was as common in New World as it had been in the Old World—
indeed, as Toni Morrison famously told Paul Gilroy, “Modern life begins with slavery” (Small
Acts 178). But it did not begin with slavery based on skin color. Initially, enslavement was often
tied as much to class or gender as it was to race. And it is to that moment in time that Morrison
37
Here, Hart is drawing upon language from Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by
Robert M. Wallace, MIT Press, 1983, p. 15.
38
I purposefully use the term America here to acknowledge that while the novel is set in seventeenth century
Virginia, the social and economic processes by which slavery became racialized in the New World were dependent
on colonial endeavors in both American hemispheres.
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returns in A Mercy in order to investigate and renegotiate the history that ultimately bound
slavery to blackness in America for centuries.
The narrative voice that structures A Mercy belongs to Florens, a young, enslaved African
woman who believes herself to have been abandoned by her mother—Morrison’s Angolan
woman, who kept “her little boy” (A Mercy 6) and offered Florens to Jacob Vaark instead, as a
method of payment for her owner’s debt. Florens’s narrative is the story of her dangerous
journey to find the one person who might be able to save her mistress from smallpox: a free
black iron worker hired to craft an ornate gate for Jacob’s final house, and a man with whom
Florens finds herself feverishly in love. Florens’s tale is interrupted in regular intervals by third-
person episodic narratives from each of the other people who inhabit Jacob’s farm. Each shorter
narrative further contextualizes the larger narrative within which Florens’s journey takes place as
the various characters relate the traumatic events that shape their own experiences and their
relationships with others on the Vaark farm. For both Jacob and Rebekka, his mail-order bride,
exile from Europe is a welcome escape. Jacob is a self-described “ratty orphan become
landowner” (13), whose “mother, he was told, was a girl of no consequence who died in
childbirth. His father, who hailed from Amsterdam, left him with a name easily punned and a
cause of deep suspicion” (38).
39
For a man whose poverty and lack of proper bloodlines stripped
him of both country and kin, the New World is a place where “rank [can] tremble before
courage” (29) and so on his inherited northern land, Jacob is determined to make “a place out of
no place, a temperate living from raw life” (13). Even more consequentially, the New World
offers Rebekka safety both from the horrors of Mother England’s religious intolerance and from
her own violent, zealous mother. Though conscious of the risks involved in committing to a life
39
Vaark may be related to the Dutch word varken, which translates into English as “pig.”
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in an unknown world with an unknown man, Rebekka remembers vividly the “pile of frisky, still
living entrails held before the felon’s eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames .
. . the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame . . . Quakers beaten bloody in their
own meetinghouse” (90), and decides, “America. Whatever the danger, how could it possibly be
worse?” (91). For this humble pair, the New World promises the possibility of economic security
and provides the pleasure of being “good, common people . . . in a place where that claim was
not merely enough, but prized, even a boast” (103). But for the others at the Vaark farm, exile is
the painful experience of being a powerless stranger in the land of one’s birth. Those others
include Lina, the “praying savage” (5) whose family was exterminated in a smallpox epidemic
initiated by European settlers; Sorrow, a mixed-race woman born at sea and orphaned in a
shipwreck, the trauma of which erased all memory of her life before the storm; Willard and
Scully, the white indentured servants whose term limits seem to be ever-increasing; and of
course Florens, emotionally undone by her mother’s abandonment and desperate for affection
and belonging. Critics and reviewers have regularly described the laborers on the Vaark farm as
sort of “improvised family” (Simon 244), but as Chiara Cillerai argues, what they really are is “a
cosmopolitan community that emerges from a lack of rootedness in place . . .” (179). Their
diversity is crucial to Morrison’s purpose, which, as she explained to NPR’s Lynn Neary, is “to
separate race from slavery. To see what it was like, what it might have been like, to be a slave,
but without being raced” (NPR). On the Vaark farm a person’s enslaved status is a result of any
number of social misfortunes, and color is not fate.
The decision to detach race from slavery, to focus instead on the singular, inner
experiences of a person, goes directly against the grain of the modern, secular ideologies that
claim race as central to an individual’s identity. But for Morrison, as Elisabeth Loevlie points
98
out, that is where the “truth of history and of its traumatic happenings lies” (345). Moreover,
Morrison’s attention to her characters’ interior sense of self demonstrates the postsecular
sensibility that moves through so much of her writing. While she does not deny the
psychological and physical impact of race on either individuals or their communities, Morrison
has long argued that race is a social construct—like class and gender—that modern, secular
ideologies have used to simplify complex human persons and to justify various forms of
enslavement. This chapter argues that in an attempt to reinscribe the values of personhood into
modern, secular definitions of identity, Morrison repositions race-based slavery not as an
historical inevitability but as a system borne of human choices, a story told and retold until fully
naturalized into national mythology. The chapter will begin with an abbreviated review of how
modern, secular ideologies work to divide personhood from identity, followed by an explanation
of why fiction is a particularly effective medium for Morrison’s project, and then turn to an
analysis of the transformative processes by which Jacob and Florens, two of the primary
characters in A Mercy, struggle to lay claim to their personhood in a world determined to impose
socially constructed identities upon them.
I.
Economy, Religion, and the “Présence Américaine”
Scholarly conversations regarding modernity, secularism, and postsecularism have been
in full force for more than two decades, but until recently attention to the relationship between
race and secularism—particularly as it unfolds in the Americas—has been relatively thin.
40
40
As the reference list from Lloyd and Viefhues-Bailey’s introductory essay, “Is the Postcolonial Postsecular?”
indicates, there is a growing number of scholars attending to a network of conceptually similar questions and topics
regarding race, secularism, postsecularism, and postcolonialism, but as of yet it lacks a common terminology and is
inclined to focus on the global south, rather than the history of race and secularism in the United States. The only
collection of essays that specifically does that, to date, is Race and Secularism in America, edited by Vincent W.
Lloyd and Jonathon S. Kahn and published in 2016.
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Regarding this negligence, Jonathan S. Kahn delivers a vigorous critique of Charles Taylor’s A
Secular Age: “the Ur-text for contemporary secularity studies . . . is eight hundred pages long,
but never does it take up the question of how patterns of enslavement and colonization in the
Americas shape Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of the secular” (243). Even
more unfortunate, argue Vincent W. Lloyd and Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, is that “Taylor’s focus
on the European social imaginary results in reproducing precisely the repressions constitutive of
that social imaginary, and that which is repressed often has the strongest hold on us . . .” (16).
Here, Lloyd and Viefhues-Bailey are referring are the manner in which scholars define the
secular and the postsecular, but the failure to consider the consequential impact of enslavement
and colonization in the New World is to ignore the repressive role of white supremacy in
modern, secular narratives of progress.
The most obvious goals of modern, secular progress in colonial America, particularly in
what became the South’s agrarian economy, were financial. And the financial success of
Southern crop productivity was, as Walter Johnson insists, “always and already based upon
racial expropriation” (26). Though modern, secular explanations attribute the South’s economic
success to advances in technological machinery, the lifeblood of the agrarian system was a
cotton plant “designed to the specifications of an enslaved person’s hand” (Johnson 26-27). The
following excerpt from Johnson’s essay is both a startling example of the economic logic behind
slavery, and of the hierarchical logic of modern, secular ideologies that created space for notions
of white supremacy. Johnson writes,
The merchantability of cotton on the exchange in Liverpool depended upon this [Petit
Gulf] cotton not being dusty or stained, a market standard that was defined by grades:
high-quality, fair, middling, ordinary, trash. All of those grades had different prices. The
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very things that made Petit Gulf “pick-able” also made it vulnerable. The fibers, so easily
detached in the grip of a human hand, might also blow away in a strong wind. Cotton had
to come out of the field extremely quickly after it bloomed to preserve its marketability.
When it bloomed, it needed to be picked. If it was not, then that wide-opened boll was
likely to get dust blown into it. Or it would rain, and a mud puddle would form at the
bottom of the cotton plant. And then new drops of rain would come down and splash
muddy water up onto the open cotton plant. When slaveholders drove people to pick
more, faster, better, cleaner cotton, they were doing it for a reason. It’s not simply that
they were all psychotics or sadists, although many of them surely were. It was because
they had a market standard in mind. (27)
Whether or not they were intentionally or consciously sadistic, Southern merchants set aside any
enlightened notions of liberty, fraternity, or moral reason, and chose to value production over
personhood. Many of these merchants were at least nominally Christian, and in order to justify
their participation in what Samantha Schreiner rightly calls “an iniquitous system” (38) they
cloaked their narratives of white supremacy in Christian terminology. Thus, Josef Sorett
declares, “colonialism . . . [became] coterminous with the development of Christianity in the
modern era” (50), even as Christianity became coterminous with whiteness. And the process by
which enslavers denied the enslaved personhood was strategic. Their first move was to
categorize any religion that was not Christian to the realm of the secular.
41
As Hart explains,
“early theorists of religion drew invidious distinctions between the rationality of Christianity and
the irrationality of primitive religions” (180). In contrast to the reserved, controlled, intellectual
41
Joseph Sorett takes this one step further, suggesting that “to be a modern subject was not simply to become
secular or to lose one’s religion. Rather, it was to acquire ‘good religion,’ which meant ascribing to a particular sort
of Christianity” (50). This process was partly what allowed Protestants to become the dominant religious force in
colonial America, pressing their Catholic counterparts, in particular, to the margins.
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nature of Christianity, “primitive” religion was characterized in terms of emotion, instinct,
glorification of the body and its processes, and so forth.
4243
Furthermore, oral culture was often a
feature of “primitive” religions, and as Peter Brown observes, “The lack of literacy [among the
Sub-Saharan Africans sold into slavery] was taken as evidence . . . that they were metaphysically
inferior in ‘race’ and, thus, morally fit to be enslaved to the superior ‘white’ race” (165).
Therefore, those involved in “primitive” religions were relegated to the realm of the subhuman,
or, the animal. Once the enslaved were deemed non-persons, lacking both rational intellect and a
moral soul, they could be further categorized in terms of physical composition. Conveniently, the
vast majority of these “religious primitives” had dark skin. Therefore, the secular was defined
not only as that which was not Christian but also as that which was not European, or white. The
reasoning undergirding narratives of white supremacy was simple, if not sound, but it worked
only to the degree that enslavers were able to keep the enslaved illiterate. If the enslaved were
taught to read, or if they were given a more complete understanding of Christian principles, they
might come to believe—as many did—that their enslavers “were not Christian at all but the
children of the devil who lacked any ‘religion’ or potentially lost religion by holding onto
slaves” (Blum 92). For Kahn, the hypocrisy of white enslavers—and European colonial settlers
in general—is evidence that the secular is actually a function of an irreligious whiteness (244).
But a mere flip of the script is an insufficient method for solving the deeper problem, because it
continues to connect identity to skin color, which eventually allows for arguments that black
42
For an in-depth review of how “the primitive” has been characterized in the modern era, see section 1 (“Defining
the Primitive/Reimagining Modernity”) and section 12 (“Physicality”) of Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive:
Savage Intellects, Modern Lives.
43
While discussing the role of mythology and folklore in her work with Charles Ruas, Toni Morrison observes that
discrediting those forms of knowledge is tied to contemporary connotations of the word “primitive.” She explains,
“We also say ‘primitive,’ meaning something terrible. Some primitive instincts are terrible and uninformed, some of
them are not. The problem is to distinguish between those elements in ourselves as human beings, as individuals,
and as a culture, that are ancient and pure or primitive—that are there because they’re valuable and ought to be
there—and those that are primitive because they’re ignorant and unfocused” (113).
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people are hyper religious—a problem that, as Joseph Sorett laments, continues into the present.
“From stereotypes of natural religiosity and myths of magical Negros to accounts of uncritical
allegiance to churches, bus tours in search of ‘authentic’ gospel music, and incubators of sexual
taboo and intolerance,” writes Sorett, “black communities continue to be imagined as special
sites of spiritual virtue and vice” (47). Relying on skin color to identify whether a person is
spiritually “primitive” or spiritually advanced remains a particularly modern, secular impulse,
and its result is the same: the totalization (or, in Morrison’s Angolan woman’s terms, the
“cooking together”) of both the complex religious history of a given black community and the
even more varied and complex religious beliefs and experiences of each person in those
communities. As Joseph A. Brown asserts, whether through the animalization of black people, or
the (self-inflicted) demonization of white people, “Death—of personhood, of humanity, and of
self-esteem—is the logical outcome of slavery” (712).
While recent analyses of the relationship between race and secularism, and arguments
that claim the secular as a manifestation of white supremacy, have not yet adequately addressed
the degree to which concepts of personhood have been marginalized by modern, secular
narratives that define identity in terms of race, those involved in writing such scholarship are
responding, at least in part, to a call Paul Gilroy made in his seminal 1993 text The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Demonstrating what now could be called a
postsecular sensibility of his own, Gilroy declared, “Defenders and critics of modernity seem to
be equally unconcerned that the history and expressive culture of the African Diaspora, the
practice of racial slavery, or the narratives of European imperial conquest may require all simple
periodisations of the modern and the postmodern to be drastically rethought” (42). Just a year
earlier, Morrison had published a series of essays titled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
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Literary Imagination, wherein she argued that the work of most major authors in the American
literary canon contained “significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, [and]
heavily nuanced conflicts” that hide the “real or fabricated Africanist presence [that] was crucial
to their sense of Americanness” (6). Both Morrison and Gilory were responding to an increasing
interest in what Khachig Tololyan calls the “literature of lamentation” (12)—or, diaspora studies.
As Robin Cohen explains, the term “diaspora” means “to sow widely” (507) but by the late
twentieth century the term had increasingly come to imply an event associated with “catastrophic
origins and uncomfortable outcomes” (Cohen 507). Cohen even goes so far as to label certain
diasporic communities—notably members of the African diaspora—as part of “the victim
tradition,” having experienced traumatic interludes in their histories (512). While centuries of
slavery in the Americas was undeniably a colossal traumatic interlude for black people, Morrison
is as loath to surrender to narratives that would totalize black experience as victimhood as she is
to those that totalize it as slavery.
44
Her fiction suggests that she believes, as Peter Brown
suggests, “the reified myth of Black innocence—the innocence of the victim—is just the inverse
of the perverse myth of white dominance and, more importantly, is inadequate to undergird the
community in the face of the crisis of freedom” (200). Thus, Morrison prefers to emphasize
personhood by using a model of identity formation rooted in shared experience. In this model
persons from radically different backgrounds have the opportunity to build relationships and use
their diverse strengths to form an entirely new culture. And there is no better time or place to
44
In the case of A Mercy, Morrison’s hesitation is an effect of her understanding that race-based slavery in the early
colonial era had not been fully institutionalized, but Morrison’s work generally resists notions of victimization even
as her characters suffer profoundly the effects of both institutional and direct, interpersonal racism. In a 1993
interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison vehemently proclaims, “I am not a victim. I refuse to be one.” In the same
interview, she implies that the real victims of racism are the white people who enact it. She insists, “[racism] has just
as much of a deleterious effect on white people, and possibly equal, as it does black people. I always knew that I had
the moral high ground . . . I thought they knew that I knew that they were inferior to me, morally . . . If you can only
be tall because somebody is on their knees, you have a serious problem. And my feeling is, white people have a
very, very serious problem. And they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it.”
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consider the possibilities of such a model than in the New World—a site to which Hall refers as
the “Présence Américaine” where diaspora begins. Hall’s conception of diaspora, in contrast to
the “victim tradition” Cohen speaks of, “is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the
recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives
with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are
constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference”
(Hall 244). Hall’s emphasis on the transformative experiences of diaspora is especially useful to
Morrison’s project because it allows her to reshape the story of slavery in early America without
insulting the collective memory—which Tololyan defines as “a foundational element of [that
community’s] distinct identity (13)—of any particular group. In A Mercy, Morrison demonstrates
that slavery was as much a function of class and power as it was of race, and by so doing
repositions slavery as a unifying element of early colonial American experience, but not as a
racially definitive element. Morrison achieves this, in part, by placing people of color at the
center of the tale, and portraying them as persons whose choices and behaviors have impact on
their own lives and the lives of others in their community.
II.
Possibilities for Personhood in History and Fiction
Reframing any historical narrative poses significant challenges, but writing an accurate
historical account of early American experience is further complicated by the fact that in many
cases records of the people’s history
45
have been all but obliterated. Such obliteration was
frequently calculated—records were destroyed or not kept to begin with, and, as Caribbean
studies scholar George Handley points out, many in these communities “had little or no access to
45
I use “people’s history” in the same sense that Howard Zinn does in his A People’s History of the United States
(1980); the term emphasizes narratives of those whose experiences were marginalized by more dominant political or
religious groups.
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written expression, and their testimonies often held feeble legal force” (26). While these
omissions have made it extremely difficult to recreate an accurate sense of New World
experience, there is sufficient evidence in legal histories of colonial America to trace the
dehumanizing processes by which slavery was bound to race. The process initiated in the
Eurocentric narrative framing of New World origin stories that justified legal efforts to divide the
inhabitants of colonial America by race. As Valerie Babb explains, “Origins narratives were one
means of unifying polyglot Europeans of different ethnicities into a single white ‘race’ whose
‘divine destiny’ included land acquisitions through Native American removal and economic
development based on African enslavement” (150). The creation of what was effectively a caste
system
46
was little more than a thinly veiled attempt to rationalize policies and practices that did
not align with either the foundational principles of humanism, or the basic tenets of Christianity.
As La Vinia Delois Jennings explains, the first group of twenty Africans who arrived in the
colonies in 1619 “were converted to Christianity and therefore, under English law, could not be
enslaved perpetually . . . Twenty-one years later, in 1640, the Virginia court handed down a
sentence of perpetual enslavement to a person of African descent, establishing a legal precedent
for slavery based on race” (648 emphasis mine). In a relatively short period of time, that legal
precedent snowballed into a series of laws initiated and perpetrated by those whose desire for
wealth and power was insatiable. Jennings continues,
The colonies needed a permanent, dependent labor force that could be set apart visually.
Colony after colony passed legislation recognizing slavery as a legal institution.
Massachusetts was first in 1641, Virginia recognized slavery as a legal institution in
46
For further reading, see Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste (2020), Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of
Slavery and Empire (2013), Willie James Jennings’s The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
(2011), Timothy Fitzgerald’s Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (2007), and Richard
Dyer’s White: Essays on Race and Culture (1997).
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1661, and Maryland followed in 1663. In 1691, the year after the time setting of A Mercy,
the colonies passed legislation making it illegal to free an enslaved person of African
descent unless that freed person left the colonies. Race slavery was not an inherent
ideology that was socially or psychologically in place at the founding of Jamestown but
was instituted one law at a time during the second half of seventeenth-century colonial
America. (648)
Pernicious as these late seventeenth century laws were, as T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes remind
us, “it was not until the slave codes of 1705 that the tragic fate of Virginia’s black population
was finally sealed” (5). It is perhaps little surprise that Morrison chooses that particular moment
in time for the setting of her novel, before the solidification of the slave codes, when laws were
still in flux and narratives of the inevitability of race-based slavery nascent. As a writer,
Morrison has never been interested in what she calls “totalizing approaches [to literary history] .
. . which have no drive other than the exchange of dominations” (Playing in the Dark 8). She
prefers, instead, to leave room for alternative outcomes. As she told Zia Jaffrey, “I can’t take
positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand
articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book—leaving
the endings open for reinterpretation” (140). Her instinct to leave room for reinterpretation
suggests a particular understanding of history as story—a tale constructed by human beings
making choices in real time. Of course, Morrison is not technically an historian, but rather a
novelist—or, better said, a storyteller. Though a skilled and meticulous researcher, Morrison’s
purpose is neither anthropological nor scientific, but rather imaginative. Due to the legal
decisions and the social assumptions that subsequently developed in colonial American culture,
particularly regarding access to literacy, black people were prevented from owning and
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articulating their own history, and as a result, much of that history has been lost. In the face of
historical erasure, fiction becomes a hopeful, transformative site for reimagining these histories
of oblivion. As Handley explains, “The recourse to fictional language, a language of the
imagination, is crucial to this transformation of oblivion in filling in the . . . ‘space left by
historical omission’ because it attempts to stand only rhetorically in the stead of an absent
history” (32). Fiction, then, is that which can envision possibilities for marginalized communities
other than those that history has assigned them.
Accepting Morrison’s attempts to reframe traditional narrative histories of colonial
America requires recognition of the thin line that separates imaginative writing from “historical”
writing. While most literary scholars acknowledge that history (insofar as that word denotes
factual accuracy of described events in chronological time) is not exactly the same thing as
fiction, the two genres are remarkably similar. According to literary critic and historian Hayden
White, “All stories are fictions” (“Literary Theory” 9). Additionally, White argues, “historical
discourse is possible only on the presumption of the existence of the past as something about
which it is possible to speak meaningfully” (“Literary Theory” 1). In other words, events can
only be discussed if one is able to make sense of them in relationship to other events. In another
essay, White offers a method of thinking about historical writing that is particularly useful to
Morrison’s project. He proposes that narrative—including chronological, event-based histories—
is structured through a process he terms “emplotment.” Emplotment, says White, is the method
by which “events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them
and the highlighting of others . . . [and] most historical sequences can be emplotted in a number
of different ways, so as to provide different interpretations of those events and to endow them
with different meanings” (“The Historical Text” 84-85). In other words, because it is not feasible
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for a storyteller to tell every detail of every event, he or she must make careful decisions
concerning the most crucial details and events so that the story’s intended purpose and meaning
become as clear as possible. Emplotment, then, can be seen as a method for making sense of
lived experience; for as White claims, “We do not live stories even if we give our lives meaning
by retrospectively casting them in the form of stories” (“The Historical Text” 90). Before they
are emplotted into a meaningful narrative, White explains, “historical events are value neutral”
(“The Historical Text” 84), and it is important to have access to as many of these facts as
possible because “the more we know about the past, the more difficult it is to generalize about it”
(White “The Historical Text” 89). Storytelling (the novelist’s term for “emplotment”), as Lake
argues, is at heart “a theological activity because it continually affirms and reaffirms the
transcendent value of personal being” (7), and Morrison’s “work reveals what happens when a
writer begins with that conviction” (Lake 10). Furthermore, storytelling is at the heart of
diasporic experience, and in her role as a storyteller, Morrison participates in the poetics of
oblivion in order to reshape traditional narratives of black victimization into a validation of the
African American experience. She does this by giving readers access to the inner perceptions of
the various members of the Vaark farm, which under any other circumstance would remain
private and unspoken. The novel’s multivocal narration presents both the positive connections
each character makes with others, and the individual decisions that ultimately begin to separate
them. Morrison’s approach reveals the wisdom in Breen and Innes’s caution that “[a]n awareness
of the awesomeness of this tragedy [the 1705 codification of slavery in terms of race]—for white
and black alike—must not blind us to the variety of human relationships possible during the
preceding eighty years” (5). The postsecular sensibility that pervades A Mercy subtly encourages
readers to bracket preconceived notions regarding the inevitability of race-based slavery and its
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ensuing narratives of black victimhood. Moreover, the novel resists one-dimensional definitions
of any character as hero, saint, or villain. With A Mercy, Tessa Roynon argues, Morrison “poses
a challenge to the apparently ordered and ordering powers of the Enlightenment . . . [which] was
always and already defined by paradox, moral ambiguity, and even chaos” (“Her Dark
Materials” 604). At the heart of that challenge is her insistence that history is structured by
people whose decisions are just as paradoxical, morally ambiguous, and chaotic.
47
III.
A Slave by Choice
A Mercy, at its most fundamental, is a classic bildungsroman for young Florens, whose
journey is marked by several formative experiences that radically transform her sense of identity.
In what is arguably the most overtly traumatic incident in the novel, the blacksmith banishes
Florens from his life forever, in punishment for her violent behavior toward the blacksmith’s boy
ward, Malaik. Furious, the blacksmith refuses to let Florens explain herself. The only reason he
offers for his condemnation is that she is a slave. Confused, Florens replies, “What is your
meaning? I am a slave because Sir trades for me” (166). “No.” The blacksmith retorts, “You
have become one” (166). In desperation, Florens again repeats her devotion to the blacksmith,
only to be instructed, “Own yourself, woman, . . . as I live and breathe, a slave by choice” (166-
167). What is most interesting about this exchange is that race has no part in it. Florens does not
in any way connect her status as a slave with her skin color. Her understanding is that she is not a
slave because she is black (after all, the blacksmith is also black, and a free man), but because
47
Jonathan L. Walton articulates one such paradox with which Morrison’s novel grapples: the definitional
dependency of freedom on slavery. He explains, “for someone to be free, there needs to be another who is enslaved.
Similarly, there is no such thing as the civilized, enlightened, and rational apart from a conception of that which is
primitive, dark, and superstitious. Autonomy and self-sufficiency are based upon notions of dependency and
subjection. Progress is measured against those deemed traditional. Freedom and slavery are two sides of the same
coin” (170-171).
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she has been purchased. Her sense of enslavement is that it is a result of economic disadvantage.
As for the blacksmith, at face value his accusations indicate an acceptance of enlightenment
rationality that privileges mind over body—a perspective that grows out of religious assumptions
regarding the inherent sinfulness of the body. But, at another level, it illuminates the value he
places on human agency. In the blacksmith’s estimation, a slave is not merely a definition of
one’s legal status, but someone who has willingly or thoughtlessly given dominion over their
mind, body, or both, to another. What he finds so offensive about Florens is that she so willingly
gives her self away. Though the blacksmith levels his accusation at Florens, she is not the only
character in the novel that is a slave by choice. Morrison uses the episodic narratives to showcase
each individual’s struggles to maintain their sense of personhood, but it is Jacob she directly
positions as Florens’s literary double. Though they are different in nearly every measurable
way—he a middle-aged, white, male, landowning merchant and she an enslaved, young, black,
female—both of them are entirely transformed by their respective journeys through the perilous
geography of the New World. Through the doubling of Florens and Jacob, and by inverting the
outcome of their journeys, Morrison troubles modern, secular narratives that equate race with
slave identity, and examines the role of human agency in entering or leaving a state of slavery.
In the beginning, Jacob is presented as a person whose future is full of opportunity, and it
appears as though his unique combination of decisions and good fortune have put him on the
road to genuine, if modest, success. Though Jacob comes from nothing, he is given the chance to
reinvent himself when he inherits a small portion of land from an unknown uncle in what is now
upstate New York. Despite his hardscabble youth, Jacob can read, as evidenced by his boyhood
job “as a runner for a law firm. The job required literacy and led to his being signed up by the
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Company” (38),
48
and his work as an agent, coupled with the moral instruction he received “in
the children’s quarter of the poorhouse” (15), made him “a quick thinker” (14) and careful
observer of human nature. Though he exhibits certain of the assumptions and prejudices typical
of his time, Jacob initially, as Babb suggests, “represents the possibility of an alternative white
maleness that does not take advantage of arbitrarily constructed race and gender privileges”
(154). In his search for a spouse, his requirements are relatively modest: “he wanted a certain
kind of mate: an unchurched woman of childbearing age, obedient but not groveling, literate but
not proud, independent but nurturing. And he would accept no scold” (A Mercy 23). He does not
seek a beautiful woman or one with respectable lineage. He simply wants a woman with whom
he can build a stable family life. To his delight, the woman he sends for is better than anticipated.
In fact, in Jacob’s opinion, “Rebekka was ideal. There was not a shrewish bone in her body. She
never raised her voice in anger. Saw to his needs, made the tenderest dumplings, took to chores
in a land completely strange to her with enthusiasm and invention, cheerful as a bluebird” (23).
In the early stages of their marriage, this Adam and his Eve find comfort and pleasure in the
labor required to maintain their small farm. Though Jacob is not a natural farmer, and Rebekka
has no farming experience of her own, they “seemed mindful of a distinction between earth and
property, fenced their cattle though their neighbors did not, and although legal to do so, they
were hesitant to kill a foraging swine. They hoped to live by tillage rather than eat up the land
with herds, measures that kept their profit low” (64). Furthermore, Jacob, while not personally
interested in religious associations, does not forbid Rebekka her participation. However, “[a]fter
some initial visits and Rebekka choosing not to continue, his satisfaction was plain. They leaned
on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency” (102). Were it not for
48
Presumably the Somers Isles Company, which ran commercial ventures between England, Bermuda, and Virginia
from 1615 to 1684, and was what remained after the dissolution of the Virginia Company in the 1620s.
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the deaths of their children—several infant sons and a five-year-old daughter who suffers a kick
to the head from one of the horses—the Vaark farm would almost resemble Rebekka’s
description of Anabaptist heaven, which was “Not a blue and gold paradise of twenty-four hour
praise song, but an adventurous real life, where all choices were perfect and perfectly executed”
(116). Even Willard and Scully, the indentured servants borrowed from a neighboring farm,
imagine the Vaark’s and their laborers as a kind of family, made up of
a good hearted couple (parents), and three female servants (sisters, say) and them helpful
sons. Each member dependent on them, none cruel, all kind. Especially the master who,
unlike their more-or-less absent owner, never cursed or threatened them. He even gave
them gifts of rum during Christmastide, and once he and Willard shared a tipple straight
from the bottle. (169)
Lina, however, refuses to indulge fantasies of filial connection. She is aware that while “Sir and
Mistress believed they could have honest free-thinking lives . . . without heirs, all their work
meant less than a swallow’s nest . . . they were not a family—not even a like-minded group.
They were orphans, each and all” (68-69).
In spite of Jacob’s obvious potential, there are flaws in his character and fractures in his
desires to enact what would come to be called “the American Dream” that, left unchecked, lead
to the disintegration of the life he works so hard to shape. Like most weaknesses, however,
Jacob’s are intermingled with corresponding strengths. For example, Lina, having been with
Jacob longer than any of the others, observes that he is a man
[w]ithout patience . . . and reluctant to seek advice from villagers nearby, he was forever
unprepared for violent, mocking changes in weather and for the fact that common
predators neither knew nor cared to whom their prey belonged. He ignored her warning
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of using alewives as fertilizer only to see his plots of tender vegetables torn up by
foragers attracted by the smell. Nor would he plant squash among the corn. Though he
allowed that the vines kept weeds away, he did not like the look of disorder. Yet he was
good with animals and building things. (58)
Lina is wise to be wary of Jacob’s individualism, since, on the one hand, as Julia Eichelberger
explains, “defining the individual as responsible for shaping his own destiny, is another
assumption that justifies obvious inequities such as racial and economic stratification, one that
ignores material conditions that give one person leverage over another and that glorifies this
position of relative dominance as inherently meaningful and beneficial” (6). On the other hand,
taking responsibility for one’s own destiny is also a crucial element of human agency, and
necessary to developing a sense of one’s personhood. Jacob’s sense of himself as a person who
can make choices is part of what makes him an alluring figure in the novel, and it is also what
makes his downfall so tragic. Naturally, Morrison refuses to make Jacob a two-dimensional
character, but she does foreshadow the root cause of his transition from personhood to slavery in
the opening paragraph of his narrative, when Jacob alights from a boat onto the Virginia shore,
and finds himself in the midst of a thick, golden fog.
Jacob’s journey begins in “1682 . . . [when] Virginia was still a mess” (A Mercy 12). In a
land where nothing has been solidified or centralized, Jacob “could not be sure of friend or foe”
(11), and he is aware that, “Carrying several kinds of specie and a single knife, he was a juicy
target” (12). Though aware of the risks, he “took delight in the journey. Breathing the air of a
world so new, almost alarming in rawness and temptation, never failed to invigorate him. Once
beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful
enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking” (13). His description of the surrounding
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landscape reveals a hint of his yearning for conquest—not merely for the sake of material gain,
but for the satisfaction of proving himself equal to the colonial upper class, who in the New
World are no longer set apart from him by lineage as they were in Europe. In fact, he resents that
the dangers surrounding him in Virginia are the result of a class war
49
that
spawned a thicket of new laws authorizing chaos in defense of order. By eliminating
manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only; by granting
license to any white to kill any black for any reason; by compensating owners for a
slave’s maiming or death, they separated and protected all whites from all others forever.
Any social ease between gentry and laborers, forged before and during that rebellion,
crumbled beneath a hammer wielded in the interests of the gentry’s profits. In Jacob
Vaark’s view, these were lawless laws encouraging cruelty in exchange for common
cause, if not common virtue. (11-12)
Repulsed by efforts to divert attention from class inequality by creating a sense of racial disparity
among the colonial poor, Jacob exhibits no particular sense of superiority based on race. He is,
however, sensitive to notions of superiority based on class. His defensiveness regarding class
status is further exposed and heightened by an unflattering religious intolerance and sense of
moral superiority in his description of Maryland, where he is slated to do business with Senhor
D’Ortega, a Portuguese gentleman, “notorious for unpaid debts” (28), who has once again
defaulted on a loan and has summoned Jacob to his plantation home, called Jublio, in order to
strike a deal. As he approaches his destination he finds himself fighting mixed reactions. He
admires Maryland’s willingness to engage in foreign trade, but Maryland is Catholic, and as
Jacob relates in disgust, “Romish to the core. Priests strode openly in the towns . . . their sinister
49
Historians named this war “Bacon’s Rebellion.” It took place from 1675-1676, and became part of the precedent
that motivated the creation of the Slave Codes in 1705.
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missions cropped up at the edge of native villages . . . and overdressed women in raised heels
rode in carts driven by ten-year-old negroes. He was offended by the lax, flashy cunning of the
Papists” (15). The antipathy Jacob feels for his Catholic countrymen is rooted in his Protestant
education and intensified by his meeting with D’Ortega. He notes the “graven idols” that
surround the table where the men begin their business (18), and blames D’Ortega’s financial
failure on a “wrongheadedness” exhibited by “all of the Roman faith” (19), but his distaste for
the Portuguese gentleman is not driven purely by religious intolerance. Though his sense of
moral superiority is genuine, it is the difference in rank between himself and “this substitute for a
man” (30) that Jacob most despises; this man in whom Jacob senses “something soft, as if his
hands, accustomed to reins whips, and lace, had never held a plow or axed a tree” (26-27). Nor,
for that matter, is Jacob impressed with D’Ortega’s wife, whom he describes as a “chattering
magpie . . . making sense-defying observations, as though her political judgment were equal to a
man’s” (20), or his sons, “wearing periwigs like their father as though they were at a ball or a
court of law” (21-22). Tucked in these criticisms is the real reason Jacob is so perturbed by
D’Ortega: he knows that seeking legal recourse regarding D’Ortega’s failure to pay his loan,
“would lead to years in a lawsuit in a province ruled by the king’s judges disinclined to favor a
distant tradesman over a local Catholic gentleman” (26). The rush of freedom and possibility he
felt while traversing the landscape dissipates as Jacob is forced to admit once again—if only to
himself—his social inferiority, and feels “the shame of his weakened position like a soiling of
the blood” (27). Though Jacob knows his strengths, and even acknowledges that some of the
bitterness he feels toward D’Ortega and his family is the “unworthy . . . result of having himself
no survivors . . . to reap the modest but respectable inheritance he hoped to accumulate” (22), he
cannot rid himself of the shame he feels. Having accepted the narrative that inextricably links his
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human worth—his personhood—to his class status, he places his hopes first in Rebekka’s
relative youth, “confident she would bear more children and at least one, a boy, would live to
thrive” (24), and second, in what Yvette Christiansë identifies as his “belief that the old class
hierarchies can be overcome, especially through the possession of things” (200).
In a savvy attempt to prevent simple assumptions or accusations regarding Jacob’s
character, and thus the inevitability of his decline, Morrison uses his visit to Jublio to highlight
both his moral weakness and his moral strength. For while Jacob despises D’Ortega’s religion
and finds himself envious of the man’s wealth, he finds the method by which D’Ortega has
garnered that wealth appalling. Morrison writes, “Jacob sneered at wealth dependent on a
captured workforce that required more force to maintain” (32), and when it becomes clear that
D’Ortega has nothing to offer Jacob in payment for the debt except slaves—any of his
choosing—Jacob at first refuses, insisting that “Flesh was not his commodity” (25). However, in
an attempt to call D’Ortega’s bluff, he asks for the “clove-smelling woman who brought the
food” (23). As Jacob expects, D’Ortega refuses. But in the middle of their standoff, the Angolan
woman unexpectedly comes forward and pleads with Jacob to take her daughter instead. Though
Jacob is “struck by the terror in her eyes” (30), he remains committed to his original request until
“Suddenly the woman smelling of cloves knelt and closed her eyes” (31). In that moment Jacob,
misreading the intention of the mother, takes pity on the child, later telling Rebekka that he
accepted the girl because “the mother had no use for her” (113). Just the same, his act
exemplifies, as the Angolan woman observed, that he is a man with “no animal in his heart”
(191). Though he remains dissatisfied with the exchange, Jacob confesses that a degree of
sympathy drove his decision to take the girl. He explains,
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He knew he had excused the bargain by thinking Rebekka would be eager to have her
[the girl], but what was truer than that was another thing. From his own childhood he
knew there was no good place in the world for waifs and whelps other than the generosity
of strangers . . . He refused to be sentimental about his own orphan status . . . Yet he
continued to feel a disturbing pulse of pity for orphans and strays. (37-38)
Of course, neither Jacob’s pity nor his disinclination to trade directly in what he calls “the most
wretched business” of slavery (30) absolves him of the repercussions attendant to owning human
beings. For one thing, as Kim Kwangsoon perceptively argues, “Jacob’s possession of slaves for
charitable reasons foreshadows the rise of the later Southern slave holders, who would go on to
justify slavery as a kind of charitable system” (76). Furthermore, his assumption that the
Angolan woman was abandoning her child demonstrates, first, a total obliviousness to the
woman’s motives, in spite of the fear he sees in her eyes, and second, as Natália Fontes de
Oliveira contends, “a distorted view of motherhood that sees black mothers as cruel and
detached. This assumption benefits Jacob because it releases him of any guilt for his action of
buying a young slave girl and, thus, depriving her of her mother’s company” (130). Moreover,
his original intent was to take the mother, without any apparent thought for what might happen to
her children when he did. Still, the fact that Jacob experiences his decision as coming from a
place of compassion is critical, because it implies that there was something in him that could
have made him truly different from D’Ortega—and it had nothing to do with class status, but
rather with his ability to see personhood in others.
Unfortunately, the seeds of Jacob’s demise are sown in the moment he first lays eyes on
Jublio. He is stunned by D’Ortega’s sizeable brick house. In fact, “He had never seen a house
like it. The wealthiest men he knew built in wood, not brick, riven clapboards with no need for
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grand pillars suitable for a House of Parliament” (17). Most impressive to Jacob is the iron fence
that surrounds the plantation, and he wonders,
mighten it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his own meadow?
And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on his own property? On that
rise in back, with a better prospect of the hills and the valley between them? Not as ornate
as D’Ortega’s. None of that pagan excess, of course, but fair. And pure, noble even,
because it would not be compromised as Jublio was. (31-32)
At this point, Jacob could have given in to the better angels of his nature and refocused his
attention on building a modest life in which he could take genuine pride. Instead, he allows
himself to dwell on the things, material and otherwise, that separate him from D’Ortega and the
rest of his class, and by the time he mounts his horse and starts for home, Jacob’s shame has
shifted into a determination to “prove that his own industry could amass the fortune, the station,
D’Ortega claimed without trading his conscience for coin” (32). What might have begun as a
worthy goal, however, begins to unravel almost immediately. In the first of what becomes a
series of what Jacob downplays as minor moral contraventions, a “hawker turned middle-man”
(36) he meets in tavern persuades him to look into the rum business in Barbados. Though the
salesman does not sugar coat the grotesque human cost of production, Jacob sets his scruples to
the side long enough to listen to the details of a trade where “In a month . . . a man can turn fifty
pounds in to five times as much” (36), with a product that promises to remain “for lifetimes to
come” (36). Jacob does not readily accept the lavish promises of the hawker’s tale, but
“Knowing full well his shortcomings as a farmer—in fact his boredom with its confinement and
routine” (40), he yields to the temptations of the burgeoning trade. And, having rationalized at
least two of his previous acquisitions of female labor as instances of “rescue” (40), it is not so
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difficult for him to convince himself that “there was a profound difference between the intimacy
of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados” (40). Each of these infractions are
of Jacob’s choosing—choosing to listen to tales of easy money, deciding to investigate,
participating in self-deceptions regarding his degree of involvement in the slave trade, all in an
effort to rid himself of the shame caused by a socially constructed identity. The night is clear and
full of stars, but Jacob once again finds himself enshrouded, if only metaphorically, in a golden
fog.
Trading Conscience for Coin
Among other things, Jacob’s narrative is a confession of his own guile and hypocrisy, for
while he judges D’Ortega’s wealth not worked for, Jacob is also a man who “has a clever way of
getting without giving” (7). Still, depraved as his decisions are, they have not yet fated him to
ruin. While, as Mina Karavanta wryly observes, Jacob “forges a community of orphans precisely
when he chooses to participate in the slave plantation economy that reproduces a cycle of
orphanage, deracination, exile, and slavery” (732), his excursions to Barbados initially produce
exactly the profit he so doggedly pursues. He brings home exciting tales and gifts for Rebekka,
and “it was some time before she noticed how the tales were fewer and the gifts increasing, gifts
that were becoming less practical, even whimsical” (103). Having previously critiqued D’Ortega
for “Turning profit into useless baubles . . . [and] wasting candles in midday” (22), Jacob’s
impractical gift giving maps his ironic and deleterious transformation into precisely the sort of
man “he earlier so despised” (Hansen 215). For a time, Rebekka silences her growing concern
and refrains from inquiring or meddling in Jacob’s business affairs, but when he tells her he
wants to build another house, she balks, telling him,
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“We don’t need another house . . . Certainly not one of such size.” She was shaving him
and spoke as she finished.
“Need is not the reason, wife.”
“What is, pray?” Rebecca cleared off the last dollop of lather from the blade.
“What a man leaves behind is what a man is.”
“Jacob, a man is only his reputation.”
“Understand me.” He took the cloth from her hands and wiped his chin. “I will have it.”
(104-105).
This brief exchange both exposes the degree to which Jacob has accepted that his identity is
nothing more than his class status, which he can prove only by accumulating material goods for
public display, and indicates the lengths to which he is willing to go to get what he wants—not
least of which is his willingness to discount the opinions and desires of the woman who has for
so long been his reliable, loving help meet. Rebekka, however, is not the only member of the
Vaark farm whose enthusiasm for Jacob’s grand project is thin. Lina, too, harbors deep
reservations about the building of the big house. Though she understood why he had replaced the
first with one better equipped to withstand the climate, Lina sees “no need for a third” (50). In
spite of her hesitation, Lina admits “she had never seen him in better spirits . . . It was not a
sudden change, yet it was a deep one. The last few years he seemed moody, less gentle, but when
he decided to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself, he was
cheerful every waking moment” (51).
Just as the white, Christian enslavers of the next two centuries would become the soulless
animals they intended to make of their enslaved Africans, in Jacob’s thirst to prove himself
worthy to a world where worth is measured primarily in pieces of eight he, too, reaps only what
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he sows. As Lina predicts, Jacob’s “efforts . . . stir up malfortune” (51), and the rotten fruits of
his labors appear in the form of deadly disease. Florens notices that upon what turns out to be his
final return “he is different, slow and hard to please. He is short with Mistress. He sweats and
wants cider all the time . . . He vomits at night and curses in the day. Then he is too weak to do
either” (42). The blisters spreading over his body bewilder him, as “he has chosen help . . . who
are survivors of measles” (42). He is so enslaved by his belief in the material legacy he has
determined to build that he cannot seem to grasp that the illness which “alters his mind as well as
his face” (43) is the direct result of his time spent away from home. And in the tragic final
moments of his life, he begs to be carried through the pouring rain into his empty, unfinished
house, and no one is certain whether he lives long enough “to smell the new cherrywood floors
he lies on” (43). As for the others, Melanie Anderson observes, “the legal realities of the time set
in, and . . . their female community slowly disintegrates” (132). Rebekka finds herself one of
those women who “after a mutually loving relationship, become like children when the man was
gone” (115), and in spite of the religious terror of her youth seeks safety and salvation through
connecting with the neighboring Anabaptists, whose women “refused meaningless and the
random” nature of suffering (115). Once a fair and gentle mistress, Rebekka transforms into what
one of Jacob’s borrowed indentured servants, Scully, describes as “a penitent, purse and simple.
Which to him meant that underneath her piety was something cold if not cruel” (179). Florens
agrees, noting that, “Each time she [Rebekka] returns from the meetinghouse her eyes are
nowhere and have no inside . . . She makes us all, Lina, Sorrow, Sorrow’s daughter, and me, no
matter the weather, sleep either in the cowshed or the storeroom . . . Her churchgoing alters her
but I don’t believe they tell her to behave that way. These rules are her own and she is not the
same” (187). Her grief having hardened into a righteous anger, Rebekka determines to sell
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Florens, give Sorrow away, and keep only Lina—whom she no longer treats as a friend, but as a
slave. The communal collapse of the Vaark farm demonstrates that at the end of Jacob’s days,
having exchanged his value of personhood for the love of profit, and with no progeny to inherit
the big house with iron gate, his legacy is indeed what he left behind: nothing.
IV.
Too Tender for Life
Throughout the novel Morrison marks Jacob’s transformation from personhood to
enslavement by using the trope of sickness, beginning with the shame he “felt . . . like a soiling
of the blood” (27) and culminating in the physical disease that addled his mind and defeated his
body. In similar fashion, Morrison marks Florens’s journey from enslavement to personhood by
using the trope of shoes. Florens’s footwear corresponds with each phase of her development,
but the shoes she wears are never her own. The first pair, which she wears before being sent to
the Vaark farm, are Senhora D’Ortega’s worn, broken cast-offs. Though several scholars
interpret these shoes as evidence of Florens’s personhood, claiming, for example, as Cheryl
Emerson does, that “shoes announce a recognizably human life over mere animal existence”
(16), and, adds Christiansë, “are one of the many things that separate . . . slaves from free
people” (214), in this case the shoes are evidence of weakness. Florens explains, “When a child I
am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes” (A Mercy 4), a request which
causes her mother to frown. Though Florens reads her mother’s expression as one of anger, it is
actually one of fearful concern. Her mother believes wearing shoes is “dangerous . . . and wild”
(4), because it invites male attention to the girl’s maturing body. Knowing first hand the
harrowing consequences of such attention, Florens’s mother tries to discourage the girl by telling
her, “Only bad women wear high heels” (4). Though her mother relents, because of the shoes, as
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Lina later tells Florens, her “feet are useless, will always be too tender for life” (4). After Jacob’s
death, when Rebekka falls ill, Florens is easily the best choice to send for the blacksmith, but she
remains a tenderfoot. To help Florens travel quickly across the terrain, Rebekka lends her a pair
of Jacob’s boots. But the “boots fit a man not a girl” (4), and Lina and Rebekka must “stuff them
with hay and oily corn husks” (4) to make them fit. Once again in shoes not her own, as she
fumbles her way to the blacksmith Florens navigates a series of potentially dangerous encounters
that eventually provide her a clearer comprehension of her place in the world. In the final phase
of her transformation, having been once again cast aside by a person she loved, Florens returns to
the Vaark farm unshod—and ready to tell her story.
Having been covertly taught to read by a Catholic priest, Florens is somewhat unique
among her enslaved peers. She is given this advantage in part because the priest takes pity on her
mother, who continues to suffer the intense trauma of being forced into slavery, the
accompanying horror of being sexually assaulted by overseers, and whatever unmentionable
abuses heaped on her by D’Ortega and his wife. Whether or not the priest understands her words
remains unclear, but he does seem to understand that just as there is a psychological journey into
slavery there is a psychological journey out of it, and that process begins with hope. The
Angolan woman recalls,
He told me not to despair or be faint of heart but to love God and Jesus Christ with all my
soul; to pray for the deliverance that would be mine at judgment; that no matter what
others may say, I was not a soulless animal, a curse; that Protestants were in error, in sin,
and if I remained innocent in mind and deed I would be welcomed beyond the valley of
this woeful life into an everlasting one, amen. (194-195)
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The Angolan woman, however unsure she is regarding the nature of her soul, does believe that
“there is magic in learning” (191). The space between what the priest is trying to teach (a gospel
of salvation) and the reason the Angolan woman gives for her interest in learning is an example
of a postsecular impulse that John McClure describes as “locating religious energy at the edge of
things” (103). The priest plays a limited role in the novel and never speaks in his own voice—
Morrison only gives readers his words through either Florens’s or her mother’s recollection. And
while the priest, whom Florens describes as “the only kind man I ever see” (8), intends to give
hope for eternal salvation, in helping Florens and her mother master the language he offers them
something shoes could never provide: the possibility of articulating their personhood through
both the written and the spoken word.
That Florens is literate is crucial to Morrison’s larger project of re-emplotting the “victim
narrative” of African American experience in the colonial era. As Morrison frankly states in
Playing in the Dark, “My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to
the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the
serving to the served” (90). It is no accident, then, that the only two first person narrative voices
in A Mercy belong to Florens and her mother, since, as Peter Brown notes, “Toni Morrison’s
instinct is that sovereignty . . . is to be forged in language and self-representation” (167). The
structure of Florens’s narrative is paradoxical and multilayered. Though she initially describes it
as a “telling” (3), it quickly becomes clear that her narrative is actually written, as she informs
those who would read her tale as a confessional that, “Confession we tell not write as I am doing
now” (6-7). Typically, as Amy Hungerford explains, “Morrison privileges the oral and the
illiterate over the literate for the conservation of both meaning and power” (101), but in A Mercy
she conflates the power of oral and written narrative in order to locate Florens as part of several
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important early American traditions. First, Josef Raab connects Florens’s journey to the
blacksmith with both pre-colonial exploration narratives and with the journals Lewis and Clark
kept while on their expeditions (223). Second, Morrison places Florens’s narrative within the
tradition of early “Puritan clerical elite whose religious writings, journals, and histories formed
the basis of the earliest literature of the future United States” (Babb 150). Like the Puritans,
Florens’s “errand” (A Mercy 5) takes place in the northern colonies, and she encounters many of
the dangers described in their tracts and sermons (e.g. animals, indigenous peoples, witches).
Third, and most importantly, Florens’s narrative serves as a precursor to the slave narratives that
would burgeon throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As with other slave
narratives, Florens’s journey is a salvific experience shaped by her transition from accepting an
identity defined by others to defining herself as subject, which requires both the acquisition of
literacy and the development of a distinctive voice. Florens’s voice, however, is not merely
distinctive—it is singular. At Jublio, Florens and her mother would have spoken at least
Portuguese, and it is possible that the Angolan woman may have also spoken to her daughter in
some form of Bantu she would have learned as a child. Florens does not learn English until she is
sent to the Vaark farm. She recalls, “At first when I am brought here I don’t talk any word. All of
what I hear is different from what words mean to a minha mãe and me” (7).
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Out of these
languages Florens creates a hybridized English, wherein she speaks solely in the present tense.
As Susan Strehle describes it, the “lyrical compression, its departure from the conventions of
standard English, and its very eccentricity make this language Florens’s own” (120). One of the
most interesting effects of Florens’s voice is that it gives the text a particular musicality, as the
novel undulates between her voice and the various stories of other characters chapter by chapter,
50
Minha mãe is Portuguese for “my mother.”
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creating a sense of sea-like motion throughout the novel. This oceanic musicality that
underwrites the narrative perpetually gestures to those who suffered the Middle Passage, that
ever-present absence that permeates not only Florens’s family history but also the general history
of the New World and the development of the “big house” plantation narrative. Even as every
word Florens speaks indicates her existence in the present, the rhythm in her voice is a continual
call to the past.
Though Florens’s ability to read and write are essential to the narrative process through
which she expresses her personhood, her telling reveals that for most of her life Florens’s
understanding of her relationships, and thus her sense of place in the world, are impeded by her
tendency to misread the unspoken meaning in particular words, actions, and intentions. As Mark
Knight explains, “Words . . . are the means by which persons relate to one another in personal
communication. Yet the communicative value of words is easily lost” (39). Florens
acknowledges that while she is capable of reading certain signs—a pea hen’s failure to brood as
a precursor to bad dreams, for example (3-4)—she struggles to make sense of others. “Often
there are too many signs,” she admits, “or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to
recall, yet I know I am missing much” (4). Though her misreadings are disorienting and painful,
they ultimately pave the way for the watershed moment wherein Florens finally takes
responsibility for her personhood and is able to define herself on her own terms. The first, and
most painful, misreading takes place in the moment her mother gives her away. Though in
Jacob’s narration of the exchange it is clear that the woman is offering her daughter in a
desperate attempt to save the girl from the abuses she herself has endured, for Florens the
exchange is experienced as a traumatic abandonment. The shame of being unwanted causes
Florens to fear “mothers nursing greedy babies . . . [because] I know how their eyes go when
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they choose. How they raise them to look at me hard, saying something I cannot hear. Saying
something important to me, but holding the little boy’s hand” (9). This scene, of her mother
“standing hand in hand with her little boy, [with Florens’s] shoes jamming the pockets of her
apron” (4), haunts Florens for the entirety of the novel as she repeatedly experiences the shame
of her abandonment in dreams and visions. “In those dreams” Florens explains, “she is always
wanting to tell me something. Is stretching her eyes. Is working her mouth. I look away from
her” (119). Incapable of interpreting her dreams as anything more than evidence of her mother’s
disapproval, as Shirley Ann Stave argues, “Florens is bereft of identity . . . and welcomes the
gaze of an other to indicate who and what she is” (144). At first that other is Lina, whose
motherly attention helps Florens adapt to her new life on the Vaark farm. But, as Sorrow
discerns, “when the blacksmith came, the weather of the place changed. Forever” (147).
Each member of the laboring community at the Vaark farm responds differently to the
blacksmith. Montgomery reads him as a man who “offers an alternate model of selfhood—one
that is not dependent upon hierarchical social arrangements” (631), but such is not entirely the
case. It would be more accurate to say that the blacksmith offers an alternative model of
blackness—one that is independent of slavery. He is, however, still part of a hierarchical class
system, which accounts for Willard’s response to him. Willard, though he admires the man’s
talent, is incensed when he realizes the blacksmith is paid for his labor, and thereafter encourages
Scully to ignore “any request the black man made” (176). He changes his tune, however, when
the blacksmith addresses him as “Mr. Bond” (177), and though he remains “rankled by the status
of a free African versus himself . . . the smithy had a charm and he did so enjoy being called
mister” (177). Sorrow is initially unsure what to make of the blacksmith, noting only that “He
seemed complete, unaware of his effect” (147). But when he single-handedly saves her from a
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sudden and severe disease, her opinion of him is decidedly clear: “the blacksmith was a savior”
(150). For Jacob and Rebekka, the blacksmith “was too skilled and valuable to let go” (113), not
only for his ironwork, but for his curing power. Florens is “crippled with worship of him” (74).
Only Lina remains skeptical, and fearful of “the shattering a free black man would cause” (71). It
unnerves her that the blacksmith is Jacob’s social equal, and believes his freedom makes him
dangerous because it gives him an inflated sense of his own importance (53). Worst of all, to
Lina, is that the blacksmith “had already ruined Florens . . . When Lina tried to enlighten her,
saying, ‘You are one leaf on his tree,’ Florens shook her head, closed her eyes and replied, ‘No. I
am his tree.’ A sea change that Lina could only hope was not final” (71). The need for approval
and affection is part of what draws Florens so forcefully to the blacksmith, but it is also a matter
of intense physical attraction. When she first sees him he is “shaping fire with bellows” (43), and
she finds herself shocked with desire. “Nothing stops it,” she remembers,
. . . My eyes not my stomach are the hungry parts of me. There will never be enough time
to look how you move . . . Before you know I am in the world I am already kill by you.
My mouth is open, my legs go softly and the heart is stretching to break . . . when at last
our eyes hit I am not dead. For the first time I am live. (44)
To her delight, the blacksmith returns her affections. Though, as Lina fears, the blacksmith has
no motivation for becoming sexually involved with Florens beyond lust and her immediate
availability, Florens (mis)reads his attention as evidence of love. Lina again tries to warn her,
telling her, “Men have two hungers. The beak that grooms also bites. Tell me, she says, what will
it be when his work here is done. I wonder she says will he take you with him?” (124). But,
feeling chosen for the first time, Florens ignores Lina’s warnings and chooses instead to believe
that the blacksmith is her “shaper and [her] world as well” (83). Though the blacksmith does, as
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Lina predicts, leave without a word of goodbye, Florens’s continued obsession with him makes
her the perfect envoy for Rebekka’s desperate errand.
Nothing But Wilderness
In an attempt to mitigate any suspicion a young, black woman traveling alone might
arouse, and knowing that no matter the depth of her devotion or determination Florens’s journey
from the Vaark farm to the blacksmith’s house is riddled with danger, Rebekka writes a letter
verifying her ownership of the girl. Though the letter is intended to legitimize Florens and
improve her chances for safe passage, it does not prevent Florens from being handled
inappropriately by the wagon driver, who presses his hand too hard and longer than necessary on
her backside while helping her up, or protect her from the teasing of several young Native
American boys who stop to give her water. Though both incidents embarrass Florens and give
her a heightened sense of her social impoverishment, the event that most radically reshapes her
sense of self is the physical examination forced upon her by a group of witch hunters during her
overnight stay with the Widow Ealing and her daughter, Jane. Florens is at the house by
happenstance, having earlier left the wagon group with whom she began her journey, when the
witch hunters arrive. Though they come to the house under the pretense of inspecting the
widow’s daughter,
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the witch hunters are immediately distracted by Florens’s presence. Upon
first noticing her, “The women gasp. The man’s walking stick clatters to the floor . . . The little
girl wails and rocks back and forth . . . One woman speaks saying I have never seen any human
this black” (130-131). In their horror, and in their thirst to find reason for their cause, they
assume she is the black man’s minion. In this context, the black man of which they speak is
51
As Valerie Babb notes, “some historians have theorized that accusations of witchcraft were often leveled against
women of independent means (generally those under no direct male influence) to separate them from their assets”
(157). Additionally, the daughter, Jane remarks, “It is the pasture they crave, Mother” (A Mercy 128). This practice
of confiscating land from widowed women may also partially account for Rebekka’s sudden and fervent devotion in
the wake of Jacob’s death—joining with the Anabaptists was one method of shielding herself from losing her home.
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either a demon or the devil himself, and while Florens does not entirely understand their
accusation she does recognize that she is in real danger. Remembering the purpose of Rebekka’s
letter, she offers it as proof that she is indeed a being “of this earth” (125). The letter does give
the witch hunters temporary pause, but they feign skepticism and take Florens to the storeroom
for inspection. After instructing her to remove her clothes, they meticulously examine her body
from head to toe while she watches “for what is in their eyes. No hate is there or scare or disgust
but they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition. Swine look at me with
more connection when they raise their heads from the trough” (133). Even after Jane helps
Florens escape, the enormity of this most recent ordeal haunts the rest of her journey. She cannot
forget what she saw in the witch hunters’ eyes as she suffered the humiliation of being
scrutinized like an animal:
Eyes that do not recognize me, eyes that examine me for a tail, an extra teat, a man’s
whip between my legs. Wondering eyes that stare and decide if my navel is in the right
place if my knees bend backward like the forelegs of a dog. They want to see if my
tongue is split like a snake’s or if my teeth are filing to points to chew them up. To know
if I can spring out of the darkness and bite. (135)
Having comprehended for the first time, as Jennifer Terry explains, “her place within a racial
hierarchy that naturalizes her proximity to the nonhuman” (140), Florens starts to lose the soft,
innocent, timidity that until then had characterized her person. It is worth noting that while her
humiliation at the hands of the witch hunters teaches Florens that blackness is undesirable, that
undesirability remains detached from her status as an enslaved person. As Morrison explains,
when Florens “discovers that her color is a problem, it’s because of religious things—not racist
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things.”
52
Still, the injustice of having been instantly identified as something evil because of her
skin color combined with the weight of her realization that without Rebekka’s letter she is, as
Anderson also argues, a “non-person” (140) ignites a permanent transformation. She writes,
Inside I am shrinking. I climb the steambed under watching trees and know I am not the
same. I am losing something with every step I take. I can feel the drain. Something
precious is leaving me. I am a thing apart. With the letter I belong and am lawful.
Without it I am a weak calf abandon by the herd, a turtle without shell, a minion with no
telltale signs but a darkness I am born with, outside, yes, but inside as well and the inside
dark is small, feathered and toothy. (135)
Though it appears that Florens is losing her sense of self, her response to this latest trauma
actually conforms to her tendency to accept whatever identity others place upon her. If she is
treated like an animal, it is not surprising to hear her describe herself in animal terms. What
makes this acceptance of dictated identity different, however, is that accepting the “inside dark”
paves the way for her eventual transformation to someone who refuses to accept any identity but
the one she gives herself.
After all Florens has suffered, she is overjoyed to see “glee in [the blacksmith’s] eyes”
(159) when she arrives at his cabin. His excitement at the possibility that she has come to him of
her own volition dissipates, however, when he learns the real reason she is there. He instructs her
to wait for him while he attends to her mistress, stating that the journey will be faster alone, but
the real reason for leaving her behind is that he has taken in an abandoned child, a little boy
named Malaik. Putting the boy in Florens’s care is evidence of how tightly the man is wrapped in
his own sense of superiority, for, as Strehle maintains, “this man of mind who has aroused and
52
From an interview on Charlie Rose, recorded November 11, 2008.
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satisfied her passions has not made any real contact with Florens’s mind . . . He does not know
her history; while she is a willing sexual partner as he creates Vaark’s gates, he is evidently
unaware that her mother gave her away while keeping the baby boy” (119). Neither is he aware,
upon his return, of the recurrent nightmares the presence of this boy has again called forth for
Florens. He has no idea that in his absence Florens has not only again dreamed of her mother
with the little boy, but that she has also had a terribly unsettling nightmare regarding her own
existence. In the nightmare, she is in a fragrant landscape, “at the edge of a lake” (162). As she
leans to look in the water she is startled to find that she has no reflection, and she recounts in
horror, “Where my face should be is nothing . . . [and when] I put my mouth close enough to
drink or kiss but I am not even a shadow there” (162). Suddenly, the widow’s daughter, Jane
appears next to her, and reassures Florens that she will find her face. Then she wakes, only to see
her mother and the little boy standing next to the cot, but in this waking dream the little boy has
become Malaik.
In spite of the fear the boy triggers in her, Florens is determined to stay permanently with
the blacksmith. “Here I am not the one to throw out” she insists. “No one steals my warmth and
shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat
because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my
body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging” (161). But then
her borrowed boots go missing, and she blames the boy. In an infantile response to her
unfounded assumption, she takes Malaik’s cornhusk doll and puts it on a shelf out of his reach.
In response, he screams so loud Florens quits the house, and does not return until he has fallen
silent. When she returns, he begins to scream again and in an effort to quiet him Florens grabs
him by the arm. Though she does not intend to hurt him, she pulls too hard and dislocates a bone.
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It is at this unfortunate moment that the blacksmith returns, and to Florens’s utter dismay it is not
her name he calls. In a rage, the blacksmith knocks her away, “shouting what are you doing?
shouting where is your ruth?” (165). Florens is aghast, not because the blacksmith is wrong
about what she has done, but that he does not stop to inquire as to what provoked it. “Yes,” she
admits,
there is blood. A little. But you are not there when it comes, so how do you know I am
the reason? Why do you knock me away without certainty of what is true? You see the
boy down and believe bad about me without question. You are correct but why no
question of it? I am first to get the knocking away. The back of your hand strikes my
face. I fall and curl up on the floor. Tight. No question. You choose the boy. You call his
name first . . . I am lost. No word of sorrow for knocking me off my feet. No tender
fingers to touch where you hurt me. I cower. I hold down the feathers lifting. (165)
Florens does not articulate her questions to the blacksmith, but even if she did his response
would have been the same because he has already determined that she is a slave. In his anger, he
tells her, “Your head is empty and your body is wild . . . You are nothing but wilderness. No
constraint. No mind” (167). His accusation that Florens is “wilderness” demonstrates the
blacksmith’s own mindless adherence to what Terry describes as “a familiar patriarchal
hierarchy in which woman is corporeal, irrational, excessive, and aligned with the nonhuman
world as opposed to masculinized civilization” (139). Additionally, argues Karavanta,
“Identifying her as ontologically depraved rather than trying to understand her vices as the vices
of a human being who has been . . . oppressed, the blacksmith, a freed black man, defines
Florens, an enslaved black woman, as an absolute negative . . . a mere nothing” (735). It is an
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unusually ironic response for a man who does not even have a name.
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With full and sudden
realization of how little she means to the man to whom she was willing to give dominion over
her entire being, Florens once more takes on the identity that has been ascribed to her, and lashes
out violently against the blacksmith. “Now I am living the dying inside,” she remembers. “No.
Not again. Not ever. Feathers lifting, I unfold. The claws scratch and scratch until the hammer is
in my hand” (167). The blacksmith manages to wrench the hammer from her, but he fails to
prevent her from grabbing tongs and swinging wildly, and she does not flee until she sees him
“stagger and bleed” (185).
Dark Matter
Having survived the blacksmith’s coup de grâce, and having become the wilderness that
so frightened her mother and disgusted the blacksmith, she returns to the Vaark farm an entirely
different person. As Scully and Willard observe, “The docile creature they knew had turned
feral. When they saw her stomping down the road . . . they were slow to recognize her as a living
person” (171-172). Florens is so “blood-spattered and bedraggled” (172) that “she looked less
like a visitation than a wounded redcoat, barefoot, bloody but proud” (174). Furthermore, Scully
recognizes that before the blacksmith, Florens’s character was a “combination of
defenselessness, eagerness to please, and, most of all, a willingness to blame herself for the
meanness of others” (179) that made her easy prey. But, in the moment he sees her “marching
down the road—whether ghost or soldier—he knew she had become untouchable” (179). Such
descriptions suggest that while Florens’s transformation is significant, with the “inside dark”
(135) she first notices during the witch hunters’ examination having been made manifest in her
53
Maxine Montgomery interprets Morrison’s decision to leave the blacksmith nameless as “an act of metonymic
displacement that underscores one of the linguistic strategies employed in literature to engage the Black subject.
Florens’s lover has no identity apart from his occupational role. He is the always-present but invisible constituted
Africanist presence that enables a sense of American-ness on the part of White colonists” (634).
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outward visage, it is not entirely positive. Florens locates her moment of change as “the
withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild . . . born in the Widow’s
closet” (187). For the blacksmith and Jacob, the only free men Florens has known well,
wilderness is something to be brought under control or mastered, definitions which cause Florens
to misread the nature of her change in perception as an “inside dark” (135) that indicates
wickedness, when in reality what she is experiencing for the first time is simply the natural
instinct to defend oneself against wrong. She is afraid of that sense of power, which she has only
felt on one other occasion, when she climbed a hill near Jacob’s property to watch for the
blacksmith. At that point, Florens knew that she did not “know the feeling of or what it means,
free and not free” (81), but, while picking flowers, she notices “a stag moving up the rock side.
He is great. And grand” and in his presence Florens suddenly feels a broader sense of her human
possibility. “It is as though I am loose to do what I choose,” she explains, “the stag, the wall of
flowers. I am a little scare of this looseness. Is that how free feels? I don’t like it” (82). It should
come as no surprise that feeling the power of human agency frightens Florens, as she has never
been allowed to make any choices about her own life. Moreover, it is not entirely unreasonable
for her to experience her withering as a loss—because it is. In the widow’s closet, and again
when the blacksmith banishes her, she loses a tenderness and vulnerability that had been tightly
woven to her prior sense of self. To accept that she has “become wilderness” (189) is to accept
that she is no longer tame, domesticated, or enslaved, but rather a person responsible for her own
choices and self-definition. She has become what Scully describes as “dark matter . . . thick,
unknowable, aching to be made into a world” (183). What her new world will be, only Florens
can tell.
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V.
In the closing chapters of A Mercy readers come to realize not only that Morrison has
masterfully conducted them through the labyrinthine processes by which a person can become a
slave and vice versa, but that all the while they have figuratively inhabited Jacob’s vacant
mansion along with Florens, who has spent her evenings haunting that hollow house. Placing
Florens and her readers in the big house is yet another instance of Morrison’s postsecular
sensibility, since, as McClure explains, “the new communities that form in postsecular fiction
often appropriate buildings once used by traditional churches; in text after text this appropriation
bespeaks both continuity and difference, an acceptance of shelter and an implicit repudiation of
the ideal of fixed religious dwelling or permanent enclosure” (102). Though Jacob’s house is not
a place of worship, but rather a “profane monument to himself” (51), Florens sanctifies it first by
her simple decision to take shelter in a forbidden space, and second by literally inscribing her
story on the walls and floor where her master took his last breath—an act which is nothing if not
a repudiation of her prior status as his slave. Additionally, Florens’s narrative functions as an act
of manumission from the blacksmith, to whom her words are specifically directed. As she learns
how to own, or, better said, to take responsibility for herself—the last of his directives she will
obey—she comes to understand that his social status as a free man has not freed him from
weakness or imperfection. “You say you see slaves freer than free men,” she reminds him. “One
is a lion in the skin of an ass. The other is an ass in the skin of a lion . . . Still, there is another
thing. A lion who thinks his mane is all. A she-lion who does not” (187-188). By composing her
narrative to the blacksmith, Florens not only “extracted a choice out of choicelessness” (564), as
Zhou Quan suggests, but has demonstrated her conversion into full personhood as she chooses
(agency) to communicate her own experience (language) to another person (relationship).
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Though Florens’s personhood is no longer in question at the conclusion of her narrative,
whether her story will be read remains uncertain. For one thing, the blacksmith is illiterate, and
incapable of reading what she has written. Still, she issues the invitation: “Maybe one day you
will learn. If so, come to this farm again, part the snakes in the gate you made, enter this big,
awing house, climb the stairs and come inside this talking room in daylight. If you never read
this, no one will. These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves” (188).
Whether or not the blacksmith will read her telling almost immediately becomes a moot point,
however, as Florens realizes there is another option: “Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words
need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose
and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow
and flavor the soil of the earth. Lina will help. She finds horror in this house and much as she
needs to be Mistress’ need I know she loves fire more” (189). At one level, burning the house
down would erase any physical evidence of Florens’s existence, to say nothing of her newly
claimed personhood. But her reasons for wanting to do so may have more to do with the “one
sadness” (189) she claims will never leave her: “That all this time I cannot know what my
mother is telling me. Nor can she know what I am wanting to tell her. Mãe, you can have
pleasure now because the soles of my feet are hard as cypress” (189). Florens’s sadness
demonstrates, as Handley explains, that “ultimately, what is more important than language is
what it cannot say . . . A poetics of oblivion declares that what is said, what is remembered, is
always less than what it reaches for; language always defers to what it tries to represent” (30).
For Florens, whose feet no longer require the use of borrowed shoes, letting the ashes of her
story spread across the landscape is not merely a desire to destroy the material evidence of both
her and Jacob Vaark’s existence, but a hope that somehow those ashes might carry her message
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to her mother. Morrison does not say, however, what Florens chooses. True to form, she leaves
Florens’s future open-ended. There remains, however, reason to hope that, if nothing else,
Florens survives. As Roynon points out, “Both from the present tense in which she tells her tale,
and from the fact that her name is a present participle in Latin (“flourishing”), a form that implies
the continuous and continuing present or a different kind of ‘stillness,’ we gain the sense that she
endures” (“Miltonic Journeys” 57). And Florens says as much in her own final unapologetic
words to the blacksmith. “You are correct,” she tells him. “. . . I am become wilderness but I am
also Florens. In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I
last” (189).
Still, no matter the triumph of Florens’s transformation from slavery to personhood, the
remorse of never knowing why her mother gave her away leaves her story incomplete. Morrison
highlights the tragic depths of this mother/daughter separation in the final chapter, when the
reader hears a minha mãe’s explanation that her daughter never will. Her reason for sending her
daughter with Jacob is what most readers would have guessed in the beginning: she was trying to
save the girl from the sexual advances of their owner. She takes the chance because, as she has
learned, “There is no protection but there is difference” (195), and for the Angolan woman,
Jacob’s acknowledgement of her little girl “as a human child, not pieces of eight” (195)
54
was
“not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human” (195). Through this brief
exchange between a free, European man and an enslaved, African woman, Morrison reiterates
54
As a matter of interest, “pieces of eight” is a colloquial term for the Spanish dollar, which, as Murray Rothbard
explains, was “By far the leading specie coin circulating in [colonial] America . . . The dollar was divided into
“pieces of eight,” or “bits,” each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar. Spanish dollars came into the North American
colonies through lucrative trade with the West Indies. The Spanish silver dollar had been the world's outstanding
coin since the early 16th century, and was spread partially by dint of the vast silver output of the Spanish colonies in
Latin America. More important, however, was that the Spanish dollar, from the 16th to the 19th century, was
relatively the most stable and least debased coin in the Western world” (49).
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that history has been constructed by human choices and indicates that any hope for the future of
human society lies in a person’s ability to look past the visible, measurable identity markers that
modern, secular ideologies so value and choose, instead, to recognize the personhood of the
other.
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Chapter 4
“A person can change”: Marilynne Robinson’s Postsecular Hope
Marilynne Robinson has regularly been described as one of the finest religious writers in
the history of American letters, though she does not care to be labeled as such. When Sarah Fay
asked Robinson if she thought of herself as a religious writer, Robinson replied, “I don’t like
categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it
becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively
probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not”
(“Art of Fiction”). Though admiring readers might agree with Aaron Mauro’s description of
Robinson as “a theologically informed political philosopher and novelist” (151), the self-
descriptive term Robinson prefers is “contrarian” (Death of Adam 1). And contrarian she is, for,
as Alex Engebretson observes, Robinson is “a woman critical of feminist scholarship; a political
progressive and cultural traditionalist; a liberal Protestant who admires John Calvin, an
environmentalist who was sued by Greenpeace; [and] a celebrated novelist who has published
more essays than fiction” (Understanding 2). Though in the preface to her most recent essay
collection Robinson attributes these idiosyncratic impulses to age—“I am too old to mince
words” (What Are We Doing Here? xiv)—and as Casey Cep observes, she has never been one to
“suffer fools, or foes, or sometimes, it must be said, friends” (par. 31). Ironically, this contrary
approach has broadened, rather than limited, her reading audiences. In Robinson, Keith Johnson
explains, “Conservatives hear a sympathetic voice who rejects identity politics and extols the
virtues of faith and tradition. Progressives see a self-proclaimed liberal who advocates for better
wages, environmental protection, and access to health care for the poor. Robinson is an ally and
critic of everyone at once” (67). Her rare intellect and sense of awe for the singularity of the
human mind have frequently led Robinson to criticize the galling tendency to reduce the
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grandeur of human consciousness and experience to mere economics, and her essays often
lament the suspicious mood that leads us to assume an “intrinsic fraudulence in the old arts of
civilization” (Death of Adam 3). “I miss civilization,” she mourns, “and I want it back” (Death of
Adam 4). Perhaps not surprisingly, Robinson lays the blame for these contemporary suspicions
directly on the shoulders of modern thought: “it seems to me that for a very long time people
have been addicted to a low-level, grinding pain for some reason, and I think that this begins
with modernism” (Schaub 243-244).
Robinson’s quarrel with modern thought is evident in many of her early essays, collected
and published as The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). However, her most
direct critique can be found in Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern
Myth of the Self (2010), published just over a decade later. In Absence of Mind, Robinson
identifies—in no unclear terms—what she understands to be the primary problem with modern
thought: its tendency to locate (and confine) human consciousness to the brain, and to explain
human experience in purely material terms—including, and perhaps in particular, experience one
might call non-rational, spiritual, or religious. “The characterization of religion by those who
dismiss it” writes Robinson, “tends to reduce it to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful
thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death, and this
makes its persistence very annoying to them” (Absence 15). For Robinson, however, efforts to
account for religious experience in what modern thinkers usually call scientific terms not only
reduce the import of religion, but also make hollow the extraordinary advances of science. She
explains,
The great new truth into which modernity has delivered us is generally assumed to be that
the given world is the creature of accident, that it has climbed Mount Improbable
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incrementally and over time through a logic of development, refinement, and elaboration
internal to itself and sufficient to account exhaustively for all the complexity and variety
of which reality and experience are composed. Once it was asserted, and now it is taken
to have been proved, that the God of traditional Western religion does not exist, or exists
at the remotest margins of time and causality. In either case, an emptiness is thought to
have entered human experience with the recognition that an understanding of the physical
world can develop and accelerate through disciplines of reasoning for which God is not a
given. (22-23)
Robinson’s recognition of the emptiness in much of modern thought both suggests and propels a
sensibility in her writing that I would call postsecular. Robinson’s writing, however, sets itself
apart from John McClure’s description of postsecular narratives that “affirm the urgent need for
a turn toward the religious even as they reject (in most instances) the familiar dream of full
return to an authoritative faith” (6). On the contrary, her characters’ paths often lead directly to
“the domain of conventional religious dwelling, where life unfolds under a sacred canopy of
ontological givens, moral codes, and organized community” (McClure 6). Within that “sacred
canopy” Robinson creates characters wholly believable in both their earnest adherence to the
doctrine and practice of specific religious traditions, and in their entirely human struggles with
the complexities of living their beliefs.
Robinson also differs, however, from other contemporary authors who evidence a
postsecular sensibility in her disinclination to revive, restore, or reinscribe any particular
religious or spiritual element to secular values or concepts. Instead, Robinson delivers a “great
new truth” of her own: that—at least by the lights of her theological understanding—there is no
secular/religious divide at all. For Robinson, every jot and tittle of human experience is part of an
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all-encompassing reality she simply calls “existence,” and in this reality no one exists beyond or
apart from the loving influence of a divine Creator. She describes the fundamental reason for this
worldview most clearly in a recent interview with the Iowa Writer’s Workshop director, Lan
Samantha Chang:
Traditions vary in the degree to which they see the physical as something different from
the spiritual. And my own tradition . . . does not make that distinction with any degree of
rigor. If you encounter another person—and of course what you’re encountering is a
physical body—but it is also an image of God, and the spiritual meaning of the physical
presence is so intense that there is no distinction, in effect, between one and the other . . .
I myself could not write something that made a clean distinction between the physical
and the spiritual. (Chang)
55
True to form, this Calvinist contrarian refutes the tenets of modern thought—so often driven by a
hermeneutics of suspicion—by engaging in what Paul Ricoeur calls “a hermeneutics of
affirmation” (qtd. in Coleman 32) in her writing. Robinson, of course, would likely chafe at the
idea that she writes with a postsecular sensibility, especially since she has repeatedly—and with
increasing frequency—resisted the terminology of secularism altogether.
56
She prefers the term
55
This comment takes place at about minute 56 in the recorded interview.
56
In a recent essay Robinson queries, “Is the word secularism actually descriptive or useful?” (“Protestant
Conscience” 174). This initially seems an odd question, considering that Robinson has elsewhere specifically
claimed loyalty to secularism (see p. 159 in her essay “Memory” from The Givenness of Things), but the question is
less a genuine question than a savvy critique of those who would define secularism as primarily adversarial to
religion. How better to disrupt notions of a secular/religious binary than by invalidating the conceptual value of its
basic terminology? To the extent that Robinson is willing to discuss secularism, she demands that it be defined and
contextualized. As she explains in an interview with Jason Stevens,
Secularism as anti-clericalism arose in France and flourished gaudily during the French Revolution. That is
to say, it arose and has persisted very strongly in a culture that is historically Catholic . . . Atheistic
secularism emerged in the Russian Revolution and persisted in a culture that is historically Orthodox. That
Protestant influence lay behind either seems to me most unlikely. Then there was the imposed secularism of
Maoist China, which I believe was fundamentally Confucian. (This Life 265)
Robinson is obviously hesitant to allow Protestantism (her own religious history) to take the blame for any waning
of religious practice over time, but her wariness of the term “secularism” defined in opposition to religion also stems
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“modernity,” but as modernity and secularism have developed in tandem and exert mutual
influence on each other, it is expedient to consider the degree to which Robinson’s work
responds to their influence. Thus, this chapter will begin with a review of how Robinson’s
tendency to bend from certain of her faith’s more orthodox doctrines shapes the postsecular
sensibility of her writing. It will then turn to a longer analysis of the nature of belief in the latter
novels of Robinson’s Gilead series, Lila (2014) and Jack (2020), the focus of which will be the
ways in which her postsecular sensibilities, rooted in a hermeneutics of affirmation, are
embodied in two of her least institutionally orthodox characters: Lila Ames and Jack Boughton.
In these most recent meditations on loneliness, abandonment, and what hope there might be in
this world or the next for those who are lost, Robinson again makes the case for the reality of
transcendence in the material world and attempts to reestablish human consciousness as a
method for experiencing such transcendence.
Both Lila and Jack are first introduced to readers as secondary characters in Robinson’s
second novel, Gilead (2004). Though Robinson offers little detail regarding Lila’s history in
Gilead, and even less in its sister novel, Home (2008), it is clear that Lila and Jack share a
common bond based on their experiences in the world beyond the sleepy safety of Gilead, Iowa.
With the publication of Lila, Robinson reveals the backstory to Lila’s appearance in Gilead, and
provides a much more complete sense of the events that shaped her character. In Lila, readers
meet an orphaned child whose hardscrabble life under the care of a transient woman leaves her a
genuine societal outsider with little formal education and no formal religious training
whatsoever. Then, on the cusp of middle age and hungry for human connection, Lila finds
herself falling in love with an elderly preacher and begins reading the Bible for the first time.
from her commitment to democracy—a tradition she believes has been greatly benefitted by secularism. For a more
complete version of her critique of secularism, see the essay “Sacred Inwardness: Why Secularism has no meaning.”
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Like everything else in Lila’s life, her path to religious belief is atypical, and is characterized by
a sense of Christian theology structured by her understanding of the material world in which she
was raised. In the section on Lila I will trace the development of her natural theology through
the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theories regarding the necessity of belief and the usefulness of
Christianity, focusing first on the tensions between the need to believe and the desire to know in
Lila’s transition from a secular to a religious worldview.
The chapter will conclude with a consideration of Jack, who, in total contrast to Lila, was
raised in a large family with parents who loved him and offered him every bit of religious
training and opportunity one might hope for. In spite of his comfortably middle-class upbringing
in an institutionally devout Presbyterian family, Jack recognizes himself—even in childhood—as
existing in “a state of categorical unbelief” (Gilead 220). Though Jack obviously functions in
both Gilead and Home as a prodigal son for his family and for his small-town community, he
also can be read as a site of possibility, or perhaps even a mood, through which Robinson
explores the religious productivity of doubt, the problem of predestination, and the mysterious
nature of grace. With the publication of Jack, Robinson again provides a backstory, this time for
John Ames Boughton, a character who, like his namesake, is as much a “man of sorrows,
acquainted with grief” (King James Bible, Isa. 53.3) as he is a prodigal son.
I.
To describe Robinson has having a postsecular sensibility is not to claim that she has
somehow moved beyond a secular existence (indeed, she has never really considered herself part
of one), but rather to note that, as John Caputo might say, she is writing as one who has “passed
through modernity” (On Religion 60). Naturally, Robinson would prefer to consider herself
unmoved and generally uninfluenced by modern culture, musing in one early interview, “I watch
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culture, I’m sort of interested by it, it swims past me . . . [but] I’ll think what I want to think,
when; I didn’t sign any paper that committed me to think like my contemporaries. I’ll do what I
want” (Schaub 243-244). Setting churlishness aside, there is ample evidence in Robinson’s
writing—her essays, in particular—that she has not remained untouched by the effects of
secularization. This is nowhere more apparent than in her self-admittedly selective adherence to
the “classical tenets of Christianity” (Robinson “Credo” 28), for which she has come under
increasing scrutiny from even her most admiring orthodox critics.
Of course, any arguments regarding degrees of orthodoxy depend on comparison. To the
strictly secular, Robinson’s engagement with theological dilemmas, the scriptural exegeses that
infuse her fiction
57
, and her regular allusion to hymns and psalms would be sufficient to render
her entirely orthodox – whatever that may mean to them. But to the theologically committed,
Robinson’s willingness to bend from long-standing doctrinal beliefs or reinterpret key doctrines
taught by such ancient and revered theologians as John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, and St.
Augustine
58
, coupled with self-descriptions as one who “began as a pagan and have ended as
one, though only in the sense that [she has] never felt secure in the possession of the ideas and
loyalties that are dearest to [her]” (Death of Adam 229-230), are cause for genuine concern, and
have generated a range of responses. In one essay, for example, Robinson declares a total faith in
Christ, whom she describes as “a gracious, abiding presence in all reality, and in [whom] history
will finally be resolved” (“Fear” par. 2). Yet, she elsewhere questions the validity of the very act
57
E.g., Ames’s explanation of the commandments, or of the first chapter in Romans in Gilead, or Lila’s
engagement with various Old Testament narratives in Lila.
58
For example, in the 2020 interview with Lan Samantha Chang, beginning at about 19 minutes and 42 seconds,
Robinson admits that she believes the concept of predestination was a “mistaken idea” rooted in antiquated notions
of time and causality. She explains, “We are in a state of knowledge now where we know that time is not what they
would have taken it to be – a sort of sequential chain, you know. And we know that causality is utterly mysterious to
us. There is no necessity that makes a causal sequence fall out the way that it does. It is predictable—but it is not
necessary. So if you take those two factors out of consideration you are not forced to accept predestination the way
people did who thought of time as much more determinist . . . I feel a little arrogant saying, ‘Well, the great
theologians were wrong.’ But that’s what I think.”
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most devout Christians believe would make Christ a “gracious, abiding presence” capable of
resolving human history: the literality of his atoning sacrifice for sin.
59
What disappoints her more orthodox readers is perhaps best articulated in Alan Jacobs’s
assertion that Robinson presents a secular audience with “a picture of what the world looks like
when it is irradiated by faith or the possibility of faith; but it is never a faith that calls upon her
readers to act differently, socially or politically or morally, than they would normally be inclined
to act” (“The Watchmen” par. 37). In other words, Jacobs is concerned that Robinson’s fiction
does indeed offer what McClure might call a “weakened” religion (Partial Faiths 4). For Todd
Shy, part of the problem is that Robinson’s theology seems overly influenced by terrestrial
concerns. He explains, “Robinson’s theology reflects modern priorities in its elevation of social
justice and ethics to thrones formally occupied by less concrete debates . . . but what is central to
her is a product of religious crises spawned by industrialization, urbanization, scientific advance,
modern textual studies, political reform, and other non-theological developments” (255).
Attention to these crises lead Thomas Haddox to suggest that in place of genuine belief in the
tenets of Christianity, Robinson has instead “espouse[d] something like [Amy] Hungerford’s
‘postmodern belief,’ in order to highlight what she perceives as a suppressed link between
political liberalism and Christian faith” (166). He suggests that by affirming “tolerance and
spirituality more than the content of orthodox Christian doctrine and practice” (166) readers fail
to notice that Robinson “does not press the claims of whether the Calvinist Christianity that she
advocates is true—only that it is more humane, and less obviously false” (188). Ironically, these
59
In an essay titled “Metaphysics”, published in Robinson’s 2015 collection The Givenness of Things, she admits,
“I defer with all possible sincerity to the central tenets of Christian tradition, but as for myself, I confess that I
struggle to understand the phenomenon of ritual sacrifice, and the Crucifixion when explicated in its terms. The
concept is so central to the tradition that I have no desire to take issue with it, and so difficult for me that I leave it
for others to interpret. If it answered to a deep human need at other times, and if it answers now to other spirits than
mine, then it is a great kindness of God toward them, and a great proof of God’s attentive grace toward his
creatures” (194). For a detailed and generous response to Robinson’s confession, see the latter third part of Keith L.
Johnson’s essay, “The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinson.”
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critics sense the same sort of emptiness in Robinson’s approach that she identifies in the realm of
modern thought.
Others, of course, are less concerned about Robinson’s revisionist Calvinism
60
and her
disinclination to dwell on dogma. Christopher Leise, for example, reads Robinson’s emphasis on
the humanist elements of Calvinist theology as evidence that “religions are dynamic, not static”
(351), and suggests that she is merely adding “to the ever-growing quilt that is America’s
Calvinist tradition and stitches her own interpretation of Calvin’s writings onto those of a group
to which she belongs, not from which she is distinct” (351). In Leise’s view, Robinson’s belief
system is what Engebretson calls a “humanist faith” (Understanding 114) that creates space for
Robinson to utilize a literary technique Daniel Muhlestein labels invitation. Muhlestein suggests
that Robinson’s efforts to create “common ground between persons of faith and humanists
generally are themselves postsecular responses to a cluster of secular initiatives” (“Post/Secular
Wilderness” 2), and invitation is the method by which Robinson can—without the pressure of
total conversion—give readers the opportunity “to judge persons of faith more kindly, to
understand their perspectives more fully, and to empathize with them in a way that we are not
always wont to do” (“Post/Secular Wilderness” 6). Robinson’s invitational style is particularly
appealing to Ray Horton, who insists that the “form of religious vision in Robinson’s fiction . . .
is a pervasive component of the subject’s phenomenological interpretive context and an occasion
for aesthetic revitalization, persistently inviting us to look again at whatever appears most
immediately in front of us, to look again and to see it differently” (Horton 121). Both Horton’s
and Muhlestein’s unspoken assumption is that Robinson does indeed encourage her readers to
60
Though the term “revisionist” can be pejorative, I have elsewhere written about Robinson’s revisionist Calvinism
in more positive terms—a literal “re-visioning,” or seeing anew, the possibilities and potential of an old tradition.
See Steiner, Makayla. “Saints in Gilead: Robinson’s Revisionist Calvinism and John Ames as a Reconciliatory
Figure in American Congregationalist History.” Literature and Belief, vol. 34, no. 2, 2014, pp. 55-73.
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change their behavior by way of presenting a perspective that allows them, but does not compel
them, to change their mind. In this respect, Shy observes, “Robinson manages to have her cake
and eat it too” (251).
Unfortunately, as Muhlestein observes, invitation is a method Robinson uses far more
frequently in her fiction than in her essays. Therefore, as Christopher Douglas notes, her “liberal
Christian opposition to the doctrinal certainty characterizing much of the contemporary
evangelical and fundamentalist Christian resurgence” (345) often leads her, as Jacobs laments, to
write “highly critical interpretation[s]” of people who are not reading her essays to begin with,
which “leaves the core assumptions of [her] audience unchallenged” (“The Watchmen” par. 37).
Muhlestein agrees, noting that when critiquing authors with whom she disagrees, Robinson is
able to “skip across the surfaces of texts rather than plumbing their depths . . . because of her
strategic choice of listeners” (“Post/Secular Wilderness” 12). He gives, as examples, the lecture
series at Yale, which were later published as Absence of Mind (2010), and her 2019 address at
the ultra-progressive Chicago Theological seminary, wherein she issued an extended critique of
the Christian Right. “In neither case” remarks Muhlestein, “was Robinson hazarding the lion’s
den” (“Post/Secular Wilderness” 12). Such criticism is a fair and important element of an ever-
growing body of Robinson scholarship. What is most useful, however, is that the critiques
leveled against Robinson’s doctrinal selectivity inadvertently illustrate the most common
patterns and tendencies that give Robinson’s work a uniquely postsecular flavor. By highlighting
what they interpret as hypocrisy or even low-grade apostasy in Robinson’s worldview, her critics
provide evidence of Charles Taylor’s thesis regarding the impossibility—even for an
unabashedly Christian writer—of remaining untouched by the forces of modern culture in a
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secular age.
61
They prove that no matter how professedly vague her interest in the culture that
“swims past” her, Robinson remains in the water (Schaub 243).
Though the arguments of religious scholars and critics who would relegate Robinson to the
margins of orthodoxy for her self-admittedly selective adherence to doctrine and for her
hesitation regarding the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death are not entirely unwarranted,
Robinson’s devotion to Christian theology and history in both her professional and in her daily
life, coupled with her efforts to engage readers of any religious persuasion, leave me disinclined
to cast metaphorical stones. More importantly still, Robinson’s selectivity cannot be said to
dilute her devotion. To the contrary, as Robinson has embraced a deep commitment to the
hermeneutics of affirmation her writing, especially her fiction, has increasingly troubled the
secularization thesis (that religion disappears or becomes irrelevant as secular ideologies become
more prominent), openly challenged Amy Hungerford’s characterization of postmodern fiction
as that which embraces “belief in meaninglessness” (Postmodern Belief xiv) or “belief without
content [as] . . . a hedge against the inescapable fact of pluralism” (Postmodern Belief xiii), and
categorically denied John McClure’s definitions of postsecular literature as generating “new,
weakened and hybridized idioms of belief” (Partial Faiths 4). By engaging a hermeneutics of
affirmation, Robinson’s fiction opens a religious sense of the world and invites readers to
consider what it makes possible that might otherwise not be available to them. Her approach is
multifaceted, and, as Muhlestein elsewhere admires, “her texts consistently articulate an almost
palpable sense of engagement with the world, a version of religious and philosophical praxis
61
The foundational assumption on which the arguments in Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) rests is that in the
centuries since about 1500 C.E. Western culture has shifted from being “a society where belief in God is
unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and
frequently not the easiest to embrace” (3). In Taylor’s view, even believers “cannot help looking over [their]
shoulder from time to time, looking sideways, living [their] faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty” (11).
While Robinson’s work suggests sympathy to Taylor’s effort to push against the “subtraction stories” (22) of
secularization, it is a creation nonetheless of a religious mind significantly shaped by its engagement with modern
ideas and advancements.
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which is equal parts meditation, mediation, worship, and attempted transformation”
(“Transfiguration” 7-8). At its best, Robinson’s fiction approaches the nature of belief as a
worldview developed in the intersection of concrete human experience in the material world and
the pull of the intangible and transcendent realities of love, devotion, and sacrifice.
As previously mentioned, Robinson’s affiliation with the hermeneutics of affirmation is
in large measure a resistance to the idea that human consciousness is fragmentary and illusory
(and therefore, presumably meaningless), which is the primary assumption of Freud, Nietzsche,
and Marx—the “three masters of suspicion . . . [who] present the most radically contrary stance
to the phenomenology of the sacred and to any hermeneutics understood as the recollection of
meaning and as the reminiscence of being” (Ricoeur 33-35). The hermeneutics of affirmation, as
Coleman succinctly explains, are associated
with the religious belief that revelation has occurred already and that the process of
reading or interpretation involves the realization or recollection of that revelation’s depth
of meaning. . . . For the hermeneutics of affirmation, the text is to be venerated,
appreciated and analyzed for its truth and beauty; for the hermeneutics of suspicion, the
text is unaware of its own motivations or contents . . . and the reader needs to discover
what it is that exists behind the text’s lack of self-awareness. (32)
In other words, the hermeneutics of affirmation value the earnestness with which Robinson
wants us to approach “the old arts of civilization” (Death of Adam 3) and the splendor of human
consciousness. Robinson is so repulsed by the idea of consciousness as delusional or false that
she dedicates an entire book—Absence of Mind (2010)—to a systematic debunking
62
of Freud,
62
Though inclined to affirmative interpretations of primary sources, Robinson is also an efficient reader well
trained in the hermeneutics of suspicion, which she uses in Absence of Mind to reveal the shortcomings of that
interpretive approach. While the very notion of “debunking” is a feature of the hermeneutics of suspicion, in
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Nietzsche, Marx, and the New Atheists who posit science as the secular alternative to a religious
understanding of existence and its crowning achievement: the human soul. In The Givenness of
Things (2015), Robinson writes, “I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of
a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience” (9). To devalue
human consciousness by way of Neo-Darwinist approaches to science and definitions of reality,
she argues, “is a major work of dehumanization” (Givenness 12). This sort of dehumanization is
what Alan Jacobs might identify as the result of “An absolute suspicion . . . [which] is the natural
outworking of despair” (Theology 89). Robinson rejects this despair entirely. She accuses these
practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion of denying human beings selfhood, and a self that
cannot know or trust its own mind, intuition, and emotional response is denied the possibility of
purposeful creativity, meaningful relationships, and the hope for a better world—all of which are
fundamental principles of Christian theology. To deny such principles, for Robinson, is to deny
the reality of Christ.
Robinson’s focus on the worth and potential of human souls illuminates another element
of her affiliation with the hermeneutics of affirmation: a sober devotion to what Jesus himself
called the first and second great commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And
the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (King James Bible, Matt.
22.37-39). In an essay directed to fellow believers, Robinson insists, “We as Christians cannot
think of Christ as isolated in space or time if we really do accept the authority of our own texts.
Nor can we imagine that this life on earth is our only life, our primary life. As Christians we are
to believe that we are to fear not the death of our bodies but the loss of our souls” (“Fear” par. 3).
Robinson’s capable hands it becomes tool by which she can illuminate the possibilities of consciousness and
humanism that these practitioners of suspicion have, unwittingly or otherwise, denied or simply ignored.
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In Robinson’s tradition, one way to lose our souls, as individuals and as a nation, is to fail to take
seriously the divine mandate to love our neighbors—especially the orphans, the strangers, and
the wanderers. She frequently cites as evidence the following instruction from Moses to the
children of Israel: “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt”
(Deut. 10.19). This is a pervasive theme in Robinson’s work—not least of all her novels. Her
characters in Housekeeping (1980) are orphans and transients, strangers to each other and to their
neighbors. Gilead is an epistolary novel wherein an elderly pastor in poor health addresses his
anxiety over leaving his wife and young son a widow and an orphan, respectively. Home is a
contemporary re-telling of the parable of the Prodigal Son, who has wandered and squandered
both his inheritance and his self-respect. Her most recent novel, Jack provides further insight into
the life of that wandering prodigal son, stranger to his family and the world at large. It comes as
no surprise, then, that the protagonist of Robinson’s third novel in the Gilead series, Lila, is an
orphan, an outcast, and a stranger. As earlier mentioned, Lila lacks any sort of formal or informal
religious training. Yet, in the course of her conversion to Christianity she develops a theology
that matches—and possibly surpasses—that of John Ames, in both sophistication and surety.
That theology is ultimately located, as will later be evident also in the analysis of Jack, in what
one might call the restorative mission of Christ, described by the prophet Isaiah as process by
which those who have suffered will receive “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the
garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isa. 61.3).
II.
The restorative mission of Christ is a theme central to Robinson’s first novel,
Housekeeping, and considering Robinson’s affirmation of Sylvie and Doll as sister characters
(“A Conversation” 30), it is little surprise that Robinson returns to it again in Lila. As was the
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case in the critical aftermath of Housekeeping, much of which focused on the feminist elements
of the text,
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Robinson again finds an ally—albeit more unexpectedly —in Julia Kristeva. In
spite of her position as an avowed atheist, Kristeva, a French feminist philosopher trained in
Freudian psychoanalytic theory, is also discomforted by the basic assumptions of the
hermeneutics of suspicion. In a 2009 collection of essays and interviews titled This Incredible
Need to Believe, Kristeva distances herself from Freud by refusing the claim that “religion is
merely an illusion and a source of neurosis” (83). Instead, Kristeva sees religion—Christianity,
in specific—as the precursor to humanism; a set of ideas and values from which humanism grew
and then ruptured. Kristeva’s interest in Christianity may initially come as a surprise to those
familiar with her feminist writing, but they are not altogether separate interests. In these essays
Kristeva connects certain of the fundamental principles of Christianity (e.g. suffering,
compassion, forgiveness, the possibility of rebirth) with what she calls the “feminine genius”
(42) that immediately connects woman to the other, through the possibility of maternity and
birth. She argues that all human beings are driven by a “prepolitical and prereligious need to
believe” (xvi), and that need prompts us first to speech and then to confidence—in the mother, in
the divine, and in the self. Secularized societies have regrettably ignored this “incredible” need,
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In 1988 Thomas Foster published an essay titled, “History, Critical Theory, and Women’s Social Practices:
“Women’s Time” and Housekeeping,” wherein he reads the character Sylvie as representative of Kristeva’s third
generation of the women’s movement. Later scholarship has often referred to and built upon this early reading.
Select examples include Kristin King’s 1996 essay, “Resurfacings of the Deeps: Semiotic Balance in Marilynne
Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Laura Barrett’s 2008 essay, “‘[T]he Ungraspable Phantom of Life’: Incompletion and
Abjection in Moby-Dick and Housekeeping,” and Elizabeth Klaver’s 2010 essay, “Hobo Time and Marilynne
Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Housekeeping was, by Robinson’s own admission, a feminist approach to the 19th
century transcendentalist writing of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville. Thus, interpretations utilizing
Kristeva’s feminist psychoanalytic approach made sense. To invoke Kristeva in defense of Robinson’s theological
approach, however, might initially seem absurd, as Kristeva would likely understand the self (or “soul”) as always in
process and unstable, possibly even incapable of recognizing itself independent of outside acknowledgement from
others. Robinson, conversely, may perceive the self as in process, but would resist the assumption that the self
cannot be understood or trusted. While Kristeva’s psychoanalytic perspective of the self can be useful in tracing the
process of the self’s development, it does not adequately account for the possibility of coming to a clearer,
articulable understanding of that self.
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which, if taken seriously, Kristeva believes would help confront “the collapse of authority and
the absence of moral foundation” (13) indicative to them.
While it is true that Kristeva is less interested in Christianity’s doctrinal validity, her
understanding of Christianity as a mode of creative thinking and being that makes hope possible
aligns her, in important respects, with Robinson. For example, Kristeva asserts that “Nihilistic
depression comes from the programmed decline of the singularity that is ‘intelligence acting
through love’ which slumbers within each one of us and which, in longing to encounter the
totally other, recognizes what is extraordinary in him or in her . . . and takes inspiration from it in
order not to die itself of boredom in a world devoid of a beyond” (41). In other words, a
fragmented or delusional consciousness unaware of its own selfhood is not fully capable of
recognizing (or loving) the “extraordinary” uniqueness of another person, and the inability to
connect to others in a way that the hermeneutics of affirmation might describe as divine,
spiritual, or revelatory leads to nihilistic despair. Such despair is, for Kristeva and Robinson
alike, the damnation of human progress and possibility. In Christianity, however, Kristeva
suggests that access to the sacred is made possible “in a unique way because [in that tradition
such access is] infinitely renewable” (ix). Part of what makes access to the sacred renewable is
Christianity’s dedication to questioning everything—including belief itself.
The Need to Believe
In placing Robinson in conversation with Kristeva I do not wish to elide their vastly
different approaches to the doctrinal validity of Christianity. Kristeva’s appreciation for various
elements of Christian theology remains limited to their theoretical and ideological usefulness.
Robinson, in contrast, regularly and clearly declares her commitment to the doctrines of
Christianity, which in her purview entirely supersedes commitments to ideology or nationalism.
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In one of her more pointed responses to critics who view her theological liberality as unpatriotic,
Robinson quips, “Until there is evidence that ideology mattered to Jesus, it will be of no interest
to me” (When I Was a Child 139). In another, she declares, “I defer to no one in my love for
America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them. I have tried to
live up to my association with them. And I take very seriously Jesus’ teachings . . .” (Givenness
133-134). Thus, while Kristeva’s atheism puts her at a significant philosophical and theological
remove from Robinson, Kristeva’s reading of Christianity is useful in helping readers
contextualize Lila’s conversion in terms of the need to believe. For both Kristeva and Robinson,
belief is a form of knowledge less characterized by a set of intellectual facts than as a type of
understanding gained from human experience. Robinson explains, “We know things the way we
encounter them. Our encounters, and our methods and assumptions, are determined by our
senses, our techniques, our intuitions” (Givenness 13-14). Likewise, for Kristeva belief, as a
particular kind of knowledge, is not merely supposition or a wishful illusion, but rather a
statement about what one holds as true. She explains, “A truth keeps me, makes me exist. Rather
than being an idea, a thing, a situation, might it be an experience?” (3). It is important to note
that while both writers recognize the impact of experience in the material world—via the
physical senses—each is also interested in how those material experiences are processed through
the inner experiences of thought and emotional response. One of Kristeva’s complaints
concerning the notion of an illusory consciousness is that when “Faced with that continent we
now call sublimation, intelligence, in a hurry, has done its best to limit reason to a calculating
kind of consciousness: knowledge, as a result, has grown disinterested in inner experience, even
going so far as to ignore its intrinsic authority” (viii). In Lila Robinson attempts to resuscitate the
authority of inner experience in shaping belief by developing a character she describes as a
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“natural theologian”—someone who finally makes arguments for the existence of God or an
afterlife based on ordinary experience in the natural world (“A Conversation” 30). In so doing,
she again addresses concerns of sympathetic secular critics regarding the difficulty of crafting
fictional characters who are at once religious and believable. With Lila, for example, Robinson
creates a character with a sort of innocence that Colm Tóibín describes as “feral” (23), but what
Robinson might better describe as “earned” (Gilead 30). Lila’s is an innocence born of
experience (often sorrowful) that leads her to the development of a natural theology and an
affirmative understanding of the self in the world.
In contrast to the characters in Gilead and Home, Lila’s complete lack of formal religious
training leaves her with nothing but material experience, therefore creating a space wherein
Robinson can demonstrate an affirmative reading of a self raised in an overtly secular world,
who has no compelling reason to trust or believe in anything beyond her immediate experience.
However, as Tóibín suggests, “Robinson . . . wished to make Lila a soul as much as a body”
(23), because she insists that it is the soul that exhibits the need to believe—a need formed by an
inexplicable human impulse to love others that is intensified by spiritual insufficiencies if
experience is material alone. Lila’s belief system is primarily shaped by the nature of her
hardscrabble life. She is an orphan raised by a stranger named Doll, who came “like an angel in
the wilderness” (30) to Lila when she was a young child. Doll is a woman hardened by life on
the road, and evidence suggests that she may have killed someone with the paring knife she
carries wherever she goes. It is safe to assume that Doll is a generally suspicious character. She
loves Lila—and saved her from abuse, malnutrition, and certain death—but she teaches her to be
wary of strangers. Though they travel with a group of other migrant workers and transients, Doll
and Lila keep mostly to themselves. Still, Lila learns that people outside of their group are not
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safe—particularly if they are from town or church. “Doane always said churches just want your
money, so they all stayed away from churches, walked right past them as if they were smarter
than the other people” (11).
In fact, Lila perceives people in much the same way that she understands the natural
world: as something that might bless or destroy, that can give life and take it, but that is finally
unpredictable and thus demands attentiveness. For example, Lila is aware that Doll knows how
to catch and kill rabbits, where to find bird’s eggs, and which herbs cure a stomachache. Doll
teaches her “how to get by so long as nobody bothered her. Plenty of fish in the river. There were
dandelion greens. Mushrooms. . . . You can eat the roots of things. . . . Doll said you just had to
know what wouldn’t kill you” (27). Though the earth does provide, Lila’s experience as a
transient during the Dust Bowl also teaches her a key lesson about any form of physical or
emotional security, which she repeats in various forms throughout the novel: “You can’t set your
heart on it” (25). This lesson is solidified the day Doane leaves her on the steps of a church, Doll
having disappeared for several days with no sign of a speedy return. Robinson writes,
Lila wasn’t the same to her [Doll] after what happened while she was gone . . . They were
just figuring out where to leave her. For her own good . . . So after that she couldn’t love
Doll like she did all those years. For a while she couldn’t. She’d never thought she might
be sitting on that stoop again, at night probably, watching Doll sneak off into the woods.
One way or another, it comes out the same. Can’t trust nobody. (69)
Being left on the church steps was a painful reminder that Lila is an orphan, and belonged to
nobody. This sense of isolation and distrust influences Lila’s thoughts and beliefs well into her
marriage with John Ames. One day, she tells him, she had “been thinking that folks are their
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bodies. And bodies can’t be trusted at all” (172). Bodies are, after all, as material as anything,
and as likely to change as the weather.
Though Lila expresses distrust for bodies—and the people who inhabit them—her
material experiences as an embodied person, many of them profoundly sorrowful, also help her
develop a sense of empathy that Haein Park describes as “the self’s capacity to hear the other’s
voice of appeal” (112). Doll teaches Lila that strangers are dangerous, but she also inculcates her
with a sense of compassion for others who wander or are lonely. That compassion is born of both
her personal experience with loneliness, and the experience of having it ameliorated through
contact with another person. Lila thinks, “Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world,
and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other
warm in the rain” (5). This image is the very epitome of compassion, which is etymologically a
promise of company—the desire not only to empathize with another’s suffering, but to do
something to alleviate it. Compassion is often the result of having experienced to certain degree a
similar type or intensity of suffering oneself. Despite the sense of distrust that Lila cannot seem
to eradicate from her sense of the world, she does offer compassion particularly to those in
whom she recognizes profound loneliness. She tends what she perceives to be the neglected
gravestones belonging to the deceased Mrs. Ames and her baby, in part as a kindness to John
Ames, but also because she feels for a young woman and her child who experienced difficulty in
life and whose resting place was in need of care and attention.
There is also the incident with the runaway boy who inhabits Lila’s abandoned shack.
Lonely, dirty, frightened, and alone for the first time in his life, he is full of grief for having
attacked and abandoned his abusive father. Though there is little Lila can do for him, she does let
him keep the money she had hidden away in a jar, she shares her cheese and crackers with him,
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and though he initially refuses her invitation to stay in Ames’s home, or to take her coat (“What?
I can’t wear no woman’s coat!” (153)), she only gets halfway to Gilead before turning around
and taking it back to him. When she arrived,
The boy was curled up in the corner where she had slept, the one that was intact enough
to give some shelter, and he was wrapped in that sad old scrap of a blanket, the little
bundle under his head. He looked at her, but he didn’t move. She took off her coat and
draped it over him. “Just for tonight,” she said. “So maybe you can get some sleep.” He
didn’t say anything, he just settled himself under it. She pulled the collar up around his
ears. She said, “Feels good, don’t it?” And he laughed. (154)
This demonstration of compassion is simple, but it is born from an understanding of what it feels
like to be “skinny and dirty and a good child all the same. Nobody’s good child” (153). Such
understanding prompts both pity and an inclination to show kindness. Though Lila does not
personally know the boy, their similar experiences with loneliness, homelessness, and
abandonment make him less of a stranger than the people in town.
The paradoxical combination of distrust and compassion in Lila’s belief system is also
that which draws her to John Ames. At first glance one would assume that the quiet, elderly
preacher and the wary wanderer had nothing at all in common. It is true that Ames’s life has
been different from Lila’s in every material way. He grew up in a home with multigenerational
influence, was born into a particular theological and religious tradition, and, apart from a few
years at Seminary, lived all of his life in the same town. In contrast to Lila’s natural theology,
Ames is deeply invested in revealed theology—a belief system native to the hermeneutics of
affirmation in its emphasis on the revelatory nature of divine texts. Rebecca Painter has
acknowledged that by most accounts Ames is a “presumably dull literary figure, a man of virtue”
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(“Virtue” 93), and so he is. However, that virtue—like Lila’s earned innocence—is born of
suffering. It is not by accident that Robinson names her fictional town “Gilead,” since in the
Bible Gilead is the land of family strife—and the Ames family had more than their share of
strife. Fathers deserted children, and children disappointed parents, siblings died or left the faith,
and finally even Ames’s childhood sweetheart and their little girl were lowered into the ground.
Though he has lived in relative material comfort, never struggling for food or shelter, in many
ways Ames is as much an orphan as Lila. Both have been bereaved of those they love most, and
while Ames believes in the goodness of God and the world, he struggles constantly with the
tendency, as Lila does, to not trust—God, himself, or others.
Their shared tendency to distrust also tempts both Ames and Lila to what they consider to
be “meanness.” Ames recognizes, for example, that although his vocation requires him to
provide others with compassion and company, he does have a tendency to judge others more
harshly than he should. While, as Painter suggests, Ames’s habit of vigilant and “Candid self-
scrutiny makes [his] story virtuous from both a religious and a secular perspective” (“Virtue”
100) insofar as it allows him to reflect on and question the motives for his behavior, such
vigilance also highlights the episodes of meanness with which he struggles throughout his
epistles in Gilead—especially as it concerns his feelings toward his father and his grandfather,
and his inability to forgive his best friend’s son for a variety of youthful misdeeds. As evidence
of the seriousness of his hypocrisy, Ames at one point perceptively suggests: “If you want to
inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the
meanest, most desolate place in your soul” (Gilead 208). It is noteworthy that Ames connects
meanness with desolation, since it is the latter that seems to most frequently motivate Lila’s
meanest impulses. She repeatedly comments that Ames is “beautiful for an old man . . . He
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looked as if he’d had his share of loneliness, and that was alright. It was one thing she
understood about him” (18), and yet, in spite of her obvious, irresistible attraction to him, Lila
continuously frets, and almost fantasizes, about the possibility of leaving him or vice versa. The
only explanation for this is a meanness born of desperation. Lila explains that meanness
makes you feel like you’re there, you’re doing something. He is such a beautiful old man.
All that kindness would be gone out of his face, and she would see something else, not
beautiful, not the face he had worn all the years when he had only good people to deal
with. That wife never meant to leave and take the child with her. So he didn’t really know
much about being left. Lila thought, Maybe I can teach him a new kind of sadness.
Maybe he really does care whether I stay or go. (56)
What these ruminations indicate, for both Lila and Ames, may be less the impulse to meanness
than the impulse to shield oneself from pain or embarrassment. As Alan Jacobs observes, “To
love one’s neighbor is always a risk, for whether that neighbor returns or shuns our love we will
in the striving for charity reveal . . . elements of our character that will not be pleasant to have
revealed” (Theology 32). The difficulty Ames and Lila have trusting, especially each other, is
rooted in the risks attendant to their burgeoning relationship—risks that complicate their
incredible need to believe that the suffering each of them has endured has had a purpose, and can
lead to something as meaningful as joy, and love given in return.
The Desire to Know
The painful and uncertain process of Lila’s budding romance with John Ames is
indicative of another aspect of the need to believe that Kristeva calls a “corrosive and liberating
capacity: the desire to know” (xii). The old cliché that the only thing certain about human
experience is uncertainty is the truth by which Ames and Lila make interpretive decisions about
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the meaningfulness of their respective experiences in the world and with one another. Their
incredible need to believe that their difficulties have purpose drives their desire to know, or
understand, what that purpose is. Early in her marriage and successive pregnancy, Lila wonders
about the significance (or possible lack thereof) of her early life experiences:
How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened. But if it did
matter, how could the world go on the way it did when there were so many people living
the same and worse? Poor was nothing, tired and hungry were nothing. But people only
trying to get by, and no respect for them at all, even the wind soiling them. No matter
how proud and hard they were, the wind making their faces run with tears. That was
existence, and why didn’t it roar and wrench itself apart like the storm it must be, if so
much of existence is all that bitterness and fear? Even now, thinking of the man who
called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What
if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the
world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts,
but they returned to her, and she returned to them. (112)
The anxiety evident in her thoughts is an effect of the Nihilistic depression of which Kristeva
speaks when one does not or cannot imagine a world beyond this one. Lila honestly needs to
believe that her experiences are meaningful, because if they are not then the pain and loneliness
they have caused is unbearable. However, Lila also needs to believe in an afterlife because the
thought of losing beautiful and pleasurable experiences is also unbearable. During one of her
happier conversations with Ames, Lila thinks, “If there was one thing she wished she could save
from it all, it was the way it felt to walk along beside him” (114). That death might nullify her
relationships and experiences does not sufficiently account for the intensity of feeling associated
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with them—an intensity that is as physical as it is emotional. These anxieties are the continuation
of Lila’s earlier concerns—concerns that, had she been fully committed to Christianity, might
have been ameliorated by Kristeva’s observation “that [in Christianity] depression is an
indispensable and decisive stage of thought . . . [and] that suffering is the flip side of creative
exaltation . . . Christianity refines suffering into joy” (84). But at that point Lila was not yet a
Christian, and the process by which she might decide to become one was fraught with still more
difficulty, anxiety, and significant emotional labor. Furthermore, it presented her with the
complicated decision of shifting her loyalties from an identity developed in her life with Doll and
the identity she would espouse through her marriage to John Ames. She could not make such a
decision in good faith without first knowing more about what Ames’s faith would make of her.
So she stole a Bible from his church, and began to read.
Lila’s practice of furtively reading the Bible is one of the understated, but significant,
factors in the development of her journey to a belief in an afterlife. Initially she intends only to
gain greater access to John Ames’s world, as Robinson explains, “She wasn’t getting religion,
she just wanted to know what he was talking about” (33). Lila’s reading, however, is coupled
with the practice of copying passages onto her writing tablet in order to improve her penmanship
and commit new information to memory. Reading the Bible therefore has several tiers of
importance for Lila: it is an effort to learn and an effort to improve in practical skill, both of
which are important elements of her desire to not be an embarrassment to John Ames. It is also
an exercise that allows her to fill the emptiness caused by loneliness and sorrow, and recognize a
spiritual element in her existence. This is possible because, as Coleman writes, “reading plunges
us into the central paradox of spiritual life, at one and the same time emphasizing and even
enforcing our isolation, the fact that we are uniquely and finally alone, while also reminding us
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that we are connected to and interdependent with the world beyond our own skins, with others,
and ultimately with the Other, with God” (7). Lila’s reading becomes a “tactile, gustatory,
olfactory, oral, visual experience . . . a carnal experience associated with the flesh of the world”
(Kristeva 36) as she encounters what Coleman describes as a presence in the structure of
absence. Much like the act of prayer, reading, Coleman explains, “reminds us that we are cut off
from the voice we are listening to, that we are alone. It also reminds us of the solitude of the
Other, of other people, of the author, and it makes us reach responsively toward that absent
Other” (71-72). Reading is therefore a concrete experience that allows Lila to experience a
reality beyond the material world.
Still, it is the tangible nature of Lila’s study—reading, copying, and thinking—that
creates a space wherein she can recognize and reevaluate her own knowledge and beliefs. Lila
models what Alan Jacobs would call charitable reading insofar as she approaches the text with
humility and the intent to learn and be changed. She is surprised to find that much of what she
reads resonates with her own life experiences, having “never expected to find so many things she
already knew about written down in a book” (176). However, the familiarity of the text is
coupled with stories that strike her as fantastic and strange, and her experience reading scripture
is not unlike her experience with church attendance, which she also finds strange. Strangeness,
however, need not be a negative experience. In fact, Rowan Williams suggests, “If the text of a
native language is to be in some sense hospitable . . . it must be a text with a shadow or margin,
conscious of a strangeness that surrounds it and is not captured by it” (12) For Lila, the
strangeness of the Old Testament stories she reads echoes the strangeness of her reality. As she
juxtaposes her experience as a transient with her experience attending church, she muses,
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Salted babies, sparkling calves’ feet. Strange as it was, there was something to it. Well,
there was the strangeness of it. That old man had no idea. Let us pray, and they all did
pray. Let us join in hymn number no matter what, and they all sang. Why did they waste
candles on daylight? . . . There was no need for any of it. The days came and went on
their own, without any praying about it. And still, everywhere, meetings and revivals,
people seeing the light. Finding comfort where there was no comfort, just an old man
saying something he’d said so many times he probably didn’t hear it himself . . . The
evening and the morning, sleeping and waking. Hunger and loneliness and weariness and
still wanting more of it. Existence. (74-75)
Reading is a particularly useful endeavor for Lila, who is most comfortable in empty spaces:
fields, her old abandoned shack, and Reverend Ames’s garden, but not in town or at the church
or any place where she might encounter other people. Such solitude offers plenty of time for
thought, but not much opportunity to receive answers. But in the Bible she finds company and
thus enacts the type of reading experience Robinson most values—one that is affirmative, faith-
oriented, and awe-inspiring. “Open a book and a voice speaks,” she writes. “A world, more or
less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be
understood” (Givenness 15). This is precisely what happens to Lila, who finds not only that
reading in solitude is not at all a solitary experience, but that it also vexes her general tendencies
to solitude insofar as it fills her mind with questions whose answers require further explication.
In short, reading both leaves her in awe of the strangeness of the narrative, and elicits feelings of
admiration for the characters she encounters there. In the moments where Lila recognizes
elements of her own “strange” experiences in the biblical narratives, what would have been a
mere repetitive practice transforms into an act of ritual.
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Lila’s journey to religious devotion and an expanded belief system includes
familiarization with the most inexplicable parts of the Bible—the creation of the world, Ezekiel’s
dream, the story of Job—all of which engage her interest and create an environment in which
Lila can experience a new kind of spirituality. This spirituality is what Coleman describes as “a
drive or energy in ourselves that is outward-reaching, that is a kind of longing to be meaningfully
connected . . . Spirituality, in this sense, is both generative and responsive: our inner longing
drives us outward, but that inner longing rises out of our givenness, our createdness, our
dependence on others . . . ” (9). Her new knowledge helps Lila re-shape her own understanding
of belief and its role in her world, and also prompts questions concerning her most important
relationships—with Doll, Doane, and the other travelers, and with Reverend Ames. Lila’s
meditation on these relationships begins with doubt, but in time shifts to a realization that certain
acts of faith are tied to the human need to love and be loved, and that such acts might have
meaningful impact on the way a person experiences existence. She reasons,
There are the things people need, and the things people don’t need. That might not be
true. Maybe they don’t need existence. If you took that away, everything else would go
with it. So if you don’t need to exist, then there is no reason to think about other things
you don’t need as if they didn’t matter. You don’t need somebody standing beside you.
You don’t, but you do . . . There was no reason to let an old man dip his hand in water
and touch it to your forehead, as if he loved you the way people do who would touch
your face and your hair . . . All right, she thought. All right. (76)
Ultimately the comfortable strangeness of scripture, together with a greater involvement in a
church community and her ever-increasing attraction to John Ames, compels Lila toward a
formal religious union with the reverend and his world. The desire to know finally coaxes her to
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consider baptism as a means of assuaging the need to believe she feels but doesn’t know how to
completely fulfill.
Baptism as Spiritual Binding
For most practicing Christians, baptism is an act that may serve a number of purposes.
Baptism is the process by which sins are remitted. It makes one free from sin. It provides the
opportunity for a rebirth and a new identity. It joins a child or an adult to a particular community
and the household of faith. It is a covenant bond between the human and the divine. It is a
blessing, a prayer, and a signal to God that one intends lifelong devotion and obedience. For Lila,
however, baptism is something simpler than that: it is a chance to be clean. When she was a girl
Lila heard a preacher at a tent revival describe baptism as “The great gift . . . which makes us
clean and acceptable—” (65) and she thought, “Clean and acceptable. It would be something to
know what that felt like, even for an hour or two” (67). Lila’s concern here has little to do with
sinfulness, and everything to do with the fact that as an orphan and a transient she is rarely
physically clean and her association with “folks”, as Doll describes their rag-tag group, makes
her unwelcome, intolerable, or unsuitable in regular society. She feels the weight of this, even
more than she feels the weight of her experience as a prostitute in St. Louis, though that also
gives her pause. Baptism, then, represents for Lila not only a remission of sin or a formal
recognition that one has joined a particular religious sect, but also the opportunity to experience
rest, safety, and the comfort of no longer being a stranger.
Clearly, Lila wants to believe in the possibility of rest, cleanliness, and even resurrection,
but she harbors serious doubts and concerns regarding the decision. Baptism represents, among
other things, a change in spiritual identity. One becomes clean and acceptable through this
ordinance by shedding whatever it was that made them unclean and unacceptable. Baptism is
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also a type of pardon which, as Kristeva explains, means that it is a “by-gift: to give oneself a
new time, another self, unforeseen bonds” (25). Those bonds, according to Christian doctrine, are
that which makes one free to start again, and as Kristeva notes, “Freedom means having the
courage to start over” (44). The question is whether or not Lila has—or even wants—that kind of
courage. More than anything she wants to know “why things happen the way they do” (29),
because at the heart of this question is a pressing concern for the un-churched and un-baptized
people with whom she spent her youth—especially Doll—and the adulterous women in St.
Louis. “For a little while,” writes Robinson,
Lila had liked the thought of resurrection because it would mean seeing Doll . . . She
understood the word ‘resurrection’ to mean just what she wanted it to mean. The idea was
precious to her. Doll just the way she used to be, but with death behind her, and all the
peace that would come with that . . . But Boughton mentioned a Last Judgment. Souls
just out of their graves having to answer for lives most of them never understood in the
first place . . . And there Doll would be, whatever guilt or shame she had hidden from all
her life laid out for her, no bit of it forgotten. Or forgiven . . . Lila hated the thought of
resurrection as much as she had ever hated anything. Better Doll should stay in her grave,
if she had one. Better nothing the old men said should be true at all. (100-101)
If Lila is somehow purified, or released from her past through baptism, what happens to Doll,
who by definition, Lila worries, would remain impure and bound to the past because of her lack
of baptism? Doll is one of the few people for whom Lila has ever felt authentic love and
devotion, and “If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her,
holding to the skirt of her dress” (21). Finally, Lila asks Ames that most difficult question:
“What happens to you if you’re lost?” (99). He tries to ease her mind, but his theology is
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insufficient to explain what exactly happens to people like Doll. This fear manifests itself in
Lila’s nightmares, where Doll is running from Jesus and “don’t want no grave, so He can’t find
her” (142). Her understanding of Jesus—incomplete though it may be—is that He is the one who
judges whether or a not a person is clean and acceptable. He who holds the keys to resurrection
also determines who receives damnation. And while Lila admits that she is scared of Jesus, she
never overtly articulates her fear that Doll, Doane, Mellie and the others might end up in hell.
Though Ames’s reservations regarding the merits of considering hell fail to quiet her concerns,
Lila ultimately agrees to let him baptize her. He does so twice: first in a private ceremony near
the river, and again shortly after their child is born.
Though Lila’s baptisms differ in important respects, both are tangible experiences in the
material world, and both are infused with meaning through love, devotion, and hope for a world
to come. Lila’s first baptism is informal, private, and impromptu. Having just retracted her
suggestion that she and John Ames get married, it also feels somewhat like an apology. It is,
however, a baptism well suited to Lila’s sense of self. It takes place outdoors, with a bucket full
of river water and only the Bible for “the cloud of witnesses” (87). Lila’s decision appears hasty,
but could also be read as a leap of faith. “She’d do this and think about it afterward” (86), but
when Ames touches his hand to her head and baptizes her, she begins to cry. The emotional
release could be attributed to the workings of the Spirit, to exhaustion, or to the simple fact that
Lila is in love with John Ames and would rather not be. Whatever the reason, Lila’s baptism
signals a change in her identity. When she finally considers this, she has second thoughts, and
sneaks back to the river to scrub the baptism from her forehead.
She eased herself down to the edge of the water and put her hands in it. She took it up in
her cupped hands, poured it over her brow, rubbed it into her face and into her hair. Then
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she did the same thing again, wetting the front of her dress. And again . . . The river was
like the old life, just itself. Nothing more to it. She thought, It has washed the baptism off
me. So that’s done with. That must be what I wanted. Now, if I ever found Doll out there
lost and wandering, at least she would recognize me. (22)
Lila’s ambivalence concerning a change in her spiritual identity, and her lingering fear of Jesus,
however, are not enough to actually release her from the effects of her baptism. When she
suggests to Ames that baptism is a type of prayer, he responds, “No . . . baptism is what I’d call a
fact” (237). Even if one intends to wash it off, how could one reclaim whatever uncleanness had
been on the soul to begin with? When Lila expresses regret for her work in St. Louis Ames
confidently proclaims, “Lila Dahl, I just washed you in the waters of regeneration. As far as I’m
concerned, you’re a newborn babe” (90). His confidence is troubled, however, by the knowledge
that Lila intended to recant the baptism with which he had blessed her. His preoccupation with
keeping her safe and close to him leads him to baptize her again—this time in the church, and
without her express permission.
Lila’s second baptism is as impromptu as the first, though it represents a different sort of
shift in her identity. Whereas her baptism at the river was personal, her baptism at the church is
formal and public. Furthermore, it is a baptism more for the benefit of John Ames than for Lila
herself. Interestingly enough, Ames baptizes Lila again for the same reason he is baptizing their
infant son for the second time: to ensure that the ordinance is done properly and with evidence of
real intent. Ames assumes that the river water in which he baptized Lila and the melted snow
with which he baptized their baby is as clean and acceptable as the holy water used in the church,
but he is not willing to risk being wrong. Lila recounts, “when the Reverend had baptized their
infant at the church that day and put him into her arms, he touched the water to her head, too,
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three times. He turned his back to the people and murmured to her, ‘I don’t really know what I’m
doing here. I should have asked you first. But I wanted you to know that we couldn’t bear—we
have to keep you with us. Please God” (257) The second baptism is perhaps less a fact and more
a prayer, but it evidences the depth of Ames’s love for Lila, and the intensity with which needs to
believe that she will never be lost to him. This moment parallels Lila’s efforts to wash the earlier
baptism off of her, which she did out of the same desire to not be lost to Doll’s recognition. Their
need to believe is founded in love, and their behavior is an act of faith.
Choosing Belief
In the end belief is a decision for Lila—a decision that reflects both Kristeva’s thesis
regarding the incredible need to believe and Robinson’s recurrent thesis concerning the
magnificence of human consciousness. In an interview with Bill Moyers shortly after Lila was
published, Robinson reiterated her perspective on the matter:
There’s something miraculous about human beings. They exist wildly in excess of any
sort of survival model that could be posited for them . . . If the most exquisite expression
of cosmic reality is the human mind . . . this is a thing to be honored and felt as a
privilege . . . People really are too splendid to be contained in seventy years of life, if they
are lucky. If there’s an economy in reality, it’s an enormous extravagance that we are
what we are. And that there’s something very excessive about human beings. They are
brilliant beyond any imaginable use. (“Keeping Faith”)
The awe and respect with which Robinson treats the human person is central to her development
of Lila as a character who comprehends the worth of every soul, and who recognizes that
whether or not one practices a particular religious faith, each one is accountable to every other.
Finally, Lila understands the importance of treating the stranger and the wanderer with love, if
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for no other reason than the fact that they are, as Robinson suggests we all are, “creatures of
singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be
even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth” (Givenness 29).
Lila chooses belief in eternity because she cannot fathom a meaningless existence, and
because her experience in the material world does not sufficiently fulfill either her need to
believe or her desire to know. She comes to believe that “In eternity people’s lives could be
altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things
either. So she decided that she should believe in it, or that she believed in it already. How else
could she imagine seeing Doll again? Never once had she taken her to be dead, plain and simple”
(Lila 257). In Lila’s renewed perspective Heaven becomes the promise of eternal company,
open not only to God’s chosen people, but also to the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the
wanderer, the lost and the lonely. She imagines eternity as a place where she might meet Doll
again, tell her how things worked out, and where they both would be welcomed as the old hymn
so beautifully expresses, “no more a stranger, nor a guest, but like a child at home” (Watts).
Though Lila knows that nothing in this life is certain, and that each living soul is a stranger and a
pilgrim on this earth, she also knows that the only eternity worth believing in has room for all
those we cannot bear to live without. As for John Ames, “Someday she would tell him what she
knew” (261).
III.
If Lila can be conceived as a sort of fictionalized embodiment of Robinson’s view of the
exceptionality of the human mind, even in what some might consider its most “primitive” or
uneducated state, then Jack might be conceived as the fictionalized embodiment of Robinson’s
belief in the mysterious nature of grace—the concept on which her understanding of the problem
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of predestination pivots. Creating characters in this manner – as representations of ideas – has
been common practice for Robinson from the beginning. In Housekeeping, for example,
Robinson does not think of her three main female characters as “fully distinct” but describes
them rather as “a suite of impulses—yearnings, regrets, loyalties, intentions—that could occur
together in one mind” (Stevens 258). And she extends that perspective to her characters in
general: “In my fiction my characters are not simulations of ‘actual people,’ whatever they are.
They’re much more like figures in dreams to me, in the sense that the meaning they have is
nuanced and modulated in relation to the emotional logic of the thing being imagined” (Schaub
242). This approach to character creation is entirely consistent with Robinson’s defense of the
mysteriousness of human conscience, and to witness Jack’s development over the course of the
three novels in which he is a major figure (Gilead, Home, and Jack) is to witness Robinson
working through the intellectual and spiritual challenges of doctrinal conundrums like
predestination, grace, and forgiveness. At heart, Jack is a representation of the theological
question Calvin believes is put to a person when they encounter another human being: “what
does God want from this moment?” (Robinson qtd. in Abernethy par. 20). In developing Jack as
a character, Robinson is not nearly as concerned with troublesome questions regarding the state
of his soul as she is about drawing attention to the moral insufficiencies of the family and society
who encounter him—those whose attitudes and behavior functionally relegate him to a state of
perdition, regardless of what God has intended for him.
Prevenient Grace
Jack’s character is first revealed through the perspective of John Ames III, an aging
Congregationalist minister with a terminal heart condition who is penning a series of
autobiographical letters for his young son. As Laura E. Tanner observes, Ames is “[h]aunted by a
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past of uncommunicative fathers and emotionally damaged sons” (227), and his letters are, in
part, an effort to curb the emotional damage his death might wreak on his own little boy. Ames’s
letters, however, are also continually disturbed by the long-awaited return of his best friend’s
son. Jack first appears in Ames’s narrative as somewhat of an apparition—the ghostly trace of a
person so long out of sight and out of mind that when Glory mentions her brother’s possible
visit, Ames has to take “a minute to think who that was” (Gilead 18). Ames briefly mentions the
anxiety Jack’s father and sister feel when there is no further word from him, but otherwise does
not mention Jack again for over forty pages. When it becomes evident that Jack really is coming
home, Ames’s description of him is ambivalent:
There has been a telephone call from Jack Boughton, that is, from John Ames Boughton,
my namesake . . . I suppose he’ll appear sooner or later. I don’t know how one boy could
have caused so much disappointment without ever giving anyone any grounds for hope . .
. He is not the eldest or the youngest or the best or the bravest, only the most beloved . . .
Old Boughton is so eager to see him. Perhaps anxious as well as eager. He has some fine
children, yet it always seemed this was the one on whom he truly set his heart. The lost
sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son, not to put too fine a point on it. (72-73)
At this point in the novel readers have been carefully conditioned to share Ames’s suspicions
regarding Jack. Ames has presented himself as a loving father and husband, a devoted minister, a
good and loyal son, and a man with a rich intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life. In short, he is
a man whose interpersonal instincts seem trustworthy. So, when Ames worries about Jack’s
behavior—what he has done and what he might yet do to cause harm—so do his readers. When
Ames is vexed by his inability to understand causality, why Jack acts as he does, and thus
assigns bad motive to his return to Gilead, readers are inclined to do the same. This is a
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purposeful narrative set-up, wherein Robinson plays into modern impulses toward suspicion only
to demonstrate not only the foolishness of such impulses, but also their potential to do real harm.
As is eventually made clear, Jack is less driven by meanness than an inclination to test the limits
of Ames’s theology—not to pick a fight, but to gauge if that theology is able to offer his mixed-
race family sanctuary from a society that delegitimizes its very existence. Thus, while Ames’s
interactions with and descriptions of Jack invite suspicion, over the course of the novel Ames’s
focus on Jack’s past behavior, and his misreading of Jack’s present motives, ultimately
demonstrate Ames’s insufficiencies toward Jack as a man in spiritual need.
Although Ames is not an entirely reliable narrator, he does come by his suspicions
honestly. By all accounts, Jack really was a difficult, mischievous child who regularly caused his
family heartache and embarrassment, impregnated and abandoned a young girl, showed little
remorse when the child of that union died, and then disappeared for over twenty years with
virtually no contact—unless he needed money. At one level, Ames’s grudge against Jack is tied
to the love and respect he has for Jack’s parents. But he also resists the awkwardness that
accompanies having the same name as that incorrigible boy. For example, Ames writes, “Jack
said once he was glad not to be the only one of them who ever got his name in the newspaper.
That was a pretty bitter joke, considering how hard his parents took the embarrassments he
exposed them to. And it was harder for them because of that way they have of printing the entire
name. It was always John Ames Boughton” (87). Though Jack’s behavior never actually sullied
Ames’s reputation, the irony of their shared name surely caused the Boughtons pain, and it
clearly embarrassed Ames, too. So much, in fact, that after two decades without speaking so
much as a word to one another Ames can still say, “I have never felt he was fond of me” (91).
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This perception, genuinely felt, allows Ames, then, to justify his own aversion to his best friend’s
beloved son, even as the better angels of his nature prompt his conscience to do otherwise.
When Ames first sees the adult version of the boy who gave them all such grief, he is
surprised by how much Jack resembles his father, “though, of course” he quickly notes, “in
everything that matters they’re like night and day” (91). Though Jack greets Ames and his family
with what appears to be genuine friendliness, Ames responds (at least, internally) with
immediate defensiveness and astonishing jealousy. When Jack frankly acknowledges that
Ames’s failure to mention his namesake to his wife and child suggests that “bygones are not
bygones yet” (91) Ames responds (again, internally), by referring to Jack as a “creature” (92) he
should have warned them of. He also recognizes with sudden intensity how old, feeble, and short
he has become:
I swear it was as if I had stepped right into a hole, he was so much taller than he’d ever
been before. Of course I knew I’d been losing some height, but this was downright
ridiculous . . . then I caught that look on your mother’s face and on yours, too, which I
know could not have been because of the contrast we made. You didn’t wait till this
morning to realize that I am old. I don’t know what it was I saw, and I’m not going to
think about it anymore. It didn’t set well with me. (92-94)
Clearly, fear is at the core of Ames’s petty and jealous defensiveness. He is an aging man with a
weak heart, and he is terrified that his wife—several decades his junior—and adored child will
end up with this man he can barely stand to look at. This is the first of a series of interactions
between Ames and Jack, none of which go especially well, and the defensiveness that marks
Ames’s initial reaction reappears to some degree in each successive meeting. Unfortunately, that
defensiveness also punctuates Ames’s thoughts for much of the narrative thereafter, as if in a
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tug-o-war with his efforts to be generous and kind. At one point, after relating a story in which
he disappointed his own exacting grandfather, Ames laments, “These people who can see right
through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re
making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult, and well meant and deserving of
some little notice” (98). Though he appears to be speaking of his grandfather, the ambiguity of
the phrase “these people” might suggest he is also thinking of Jack, especially since he later
admits, “I must somehow contrive to think graciously about him, also, since he makes such a
point of seeing right through me” (123). Yet, somehow Ames remains unaware that Jack may
also feel that Ames sees through him. For a man who, as June Hadden Hobbs describes him, “has
lived his life thoughtfully with eyes open to the eternal in his temporal life” (258), Ames’s
perception of Jack is an uncharacteristic blind spot.
Jack, of course, is not immune to misunderstanding, and he is as flummoxed in his efforts
to communicate with Ames as the old reverend is with him. Each man is a mystery to the other,
and their instinct to assume guile only leads to further unnecessary injury. Perhaps the most
obvious instance of misunderstanding between Jack and Ames is Jack’s interpretation of Ames’s
sermon on Hagar and Ishmael. Ames’s initial decision to preach on Hagar and Ishmael is
prompted by the comfort he finds in the story. Ames explains,
The story says that it is not only the father of a child who cares for its life, who protects
its mother, and it says that even if the mother can’t find a way to provide for it, or herself,
provision will be made. At that level it is a story full of comfort. That is how life goes—
we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it
seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness
unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that
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wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s. I need to bear this in mind. (118-
119)
One does not have to read carefully between the lines to understand that Ames is reading his own
family situation into this biblical narrative. He, like Abraham, will soon be “abandoning” his
wife and child into the wilderness—a life wherein he cannot control what happens to them, and
he cannot offer them protection of any kind. The story reminds him that God is the protector, and
will provide when others are unable. His interpretation is innocent enough, but when Ames gives
the actual sermon Jack Boughton is unexpectedly in the congregation—seated, no less, by the
wife and child for whom Ames feels such extraordinary anxiety. Though Ames begins with his
prepared remarks, he allows himself to shift from organized discourse to extemporaneous
rumination. Instead of focusing on the comfort to be found in the belief that God protects the
vulnerable, Ames’s sermon turns to the question of “why the Lord would ask gentle Abraham to
do two things that were so cruel on their face—sending a child and his mother into the
wilderness, and taking a child to be bound on an altar as if for sacrifice” (129). In his attempt to
suggest an answer, Ames wanders into a condemnation of parents who abuse or reject their
children. First time readers may wonder why, at this point, Ames notices Jack’s expression and
immediately jumps to defensiveness:
Now, as I have said, I did not expect him to be at that service. Furthermore, there are
plenty of people whose behavior toward their children falls far short of what it should be,
so, even when I departed from my text, and even though I will concede that my
extemporaneous remarks might have been influenced by his sitting there with that look
on his face, right beside my wife and child, still it was considerable egotism on his part to
take my words as directed at him only, as he clearly did. (131)
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What Ames and Jack both know, and what Lila and various members of the congregation may
know, is that twenty years prior Jack had fathered a child with a young, impoverished girl and
that the child—whom he never recognized or did anything to provide for—died. So when Ames
paraphrases Jesus’s assertion that anyone who offends a child should have a millstone hung
around his neck and be cast to the bottom of the sea, Jack naturally takes it as a personal
accusation. Flustered, embarrassed, and feeling immediate regret, Ames complains, “I just don’t
know why he isn’t worshipping with the Presbyterians” (131).
The mutual misreading of the other’s intentions is further intensified by a visit to the
Boughtons Ames hoped would smooth things over. After a period of listening in silence, Jack
breaks into the conversation with what appears to be a simple and innocuous request, “So,
Reverend, I would like to hear your views on the doctrine of predestination” (149). Though Jack
is entirely serious, Ames cannot help but feel defensive. Predestination, he explains, “is probably
my least favorite topic of conversation in the entire world . . . I’ve seen grown men, God-fearing
men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that came to my mind was, Of course he
would bring up predestination!” (149-150). Though Ames does his best to evade the question,
Jack persists, “This is a grave issue, isn’t it? We’re not really dealing here with a mere
abstraction” (150). After more waffling, some equivocation, and an inability to provide an
explanation satisfactory to either Jack or himself, Ames becomes upset: “Nine-tenths of the time
when some smart aleck starts in on theological questions he’s only trying to put me in a false
position, and I’m just too old to see the joke in it anymore” (152). Though the implication of
Jack’s question is that he is asking about himself, his own capacity for change, Ames assumes
Jack is just another smart aleck needling him into making a theological pronouncement to which
he is not entirely committed. As Christopher Douglas notes, “Jack’s terms seem to be
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concentrated around questions of ‘truth,’ while Ames insists rather on the ‘authenticity’ of the
Christian experience: religion is not so much a matter of claims about the true as it is authentic
and incommunicable experience” (346). Though Jack craves certainty on this matter, his father
sides with Ames, suggesting that when it comes to reconciling competing doctrines “To conclude
is not in the nature of the enterprise” (152). Ames’s instinct to hedge on the matter of
predestination is representative of Robinson’s own pattern of doing the same. Robinson
recognizes that predestination is a meaningful concept, but with a caveat: “meaningful is not the
same as wholly sufficient or correct” (“Credo” 23). Furthermore, it is the sense of mystery in the
doctrine of predestination that Robinson finds most compelling. She explains, “We do not know
how God acts or what he intends, toward ourselves or toward others. We know only that his will
precedes us, anticipates us, can never forget or look away from us. I think a sense of mystery,
therefore reverence, is appropriate to all the questions at hand” (“Credo” 24).
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What is
interesting about Robinson’s understanding of predestination as a site of mystery is that it not
only accommodates Ames’s view, but includes Lila’s also. Ames’s unwillingness to either admit
or deny that it is possible a person could be “born evil, live evil lives, and then go to hell”
(Gilead 151) is rendered almost entirely irrelevant by Lila’s quiet imperative, “A person can
change. Everything can change” (153). Lila’s words are a balm to Jack, and a rebuke to her
husband. For in the mystery of predestination, as Lila—a changed woman herself—can attest,
nothing is final or finished.
Lila’s hopeful proclamation marks a turning point in the novel. While it does not result in
an immediate change of heart for Ames, it does prompt him to reflect in detail upon the incidents
that have led to his particular distaste for Jack Boughton, and identify the origins of his distrust.
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As Tiffany Eberle Kriner notes, Robinson attributes the difficulty of reconciling apparently oppositional doctrines
as a “failure to understand time” (127). Refer to footnote 5 for Robinson’s recent explanation of the matter.
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After finally fully relating his version of events regarding the young girl and child Jack
abandoned in his youth, Ames writes what may be the most painfully honest self-assessment of
his grudge towards Jack:
. . . remembering and forgiving can be contrary things. No doubt they usually are. It is not
for me to forgive Jack Boughton. Any harm he did to me personally was indirect, and
really very minor. Or say at least that harm to me was probably never a primary object in
any of the things he got up to. That one man should lose his child and the next man
should just squander his fatherhood as if it were nothing—well, that does not mean that
the second man has transgressed against the first.
I don’t forgive him. I wouldn’t know where to begin. (164)
Ironically, in this confession Ames identifies exactly where he should begin. Having lost a
daughter and wife in his younger years, Ames is incensed that Jack, of all people, should
“squander his fatherhood as if it were nothing.” His anger and disappointment at the deep
injustice he feels is triggered in part by the fact that the Boughtons metaphorically offered their
child as recompense for the child lost, by giving him John Ames’s name. Though Jack was
originally meant to be named “Theodore Dwight Weld” (188), in the moment Ames holds the
boy in his arms to baptize him he learns the child is to be called John Ames Boughton. Ames,
without sufficient time to consider the good intent in this act, internally recoils.
As it was, my heart froze in me and I thought, This is not my child—which I truly had
never thought of any child before . . . I have thought from time to time that the child felt
how coldly I went about his christening, how far my thoughts were from blessing him.
Now, that’s just magical thinking. That is superstition. I’m ashamed to have said such a
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thing. But I’m trying to be honest. And I do feel a burden of guilt toward that child, that
man, my namesake. I have never been able to warm to him, never. (188)
Ames’s recognition that he “didn’t feel that sacredness under [his] hand . . . that sense that the
infant is a blessing to me” (189) leads him to not only wish he had the chance to baptize Jack
again, but that he is at least partially responsible for the quality of Jack’s life. Where Ames has
long perceived an enemy, he begins to see “another self, a more cherished self” (189).
Ames’s desire for another chance to baptize Jack, to rectify whatever harm he may have
caused by his failure to love his namesake as he should have, is renewed as he listens in on a
conversation between Jack and Lila. He observes that Jack is at ease with Lila, “like someone
speaking to a friend” (201). Perhaps it is because Ames knows his beloved wife has a sordid past
into which he has never deeply inquired that he desires to understand Jack differently—to better
understand Jack would be to better understand Lila. Alternatively, his wife’s kindness to Jack
may simply encourage him to act with greater kindness himself. “I wish I could put my hand on
his brow” he writes, “and calm away all the guilt and regret that is exaggerated or misplaced, or
beyond rectification in the terms of this world. Then I could see what I’m actually dealing with”
(201). In a sense, Jack’s climactic disclosure that he is “married in the eyes of God” (219) to an
African American woman, with whom he has a son, provides Ames with the clarity he desired.
Though it seems abrupt, Robinson has foreshadowed Jack’s revelation from the earliest pages of
the novel. In Ames’s earliest introduction of himself and his profession he writes,
That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the
subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come
into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of
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life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness,
where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either. (6)
This new information regarding Jack’s family status promotes a significant shift in Ames’s
perception of Jack. Though Ames has already begun to think of Jack as “another self” (189),
hearing Jack relate the events that had transpired since he met Della—his wife—elicits from
Ames a kind of pastoral and personal compassion that transcends anything he could have
expected to feel for this weary wanderer. A skeptic might doubt the sincerity of this radical turn
of mind, but as Ames himself proclaims, “transformations just that abrupt do occur in this life,
and they occur unsought and unawaited, and they beggar your hopes and your deserving” (203).
Jack’s earthshattering news, however, does not automatically fill the conversation with
sweetness and light. Jack takes what appears to be a subtle stab at Ames’s own “unconventional
marriage” (230) and Ames thoughtlessly refers to Jack’s abandoned daughter when reflecting on
whether or not Boughton would be pleased to meet Jack’s mixed-race son. And in spite of
Ames’s efforts to comfort Jack with an embrace and an affirmation that he is a “good man”
(231), whether or not Jack’s family could safely live in Gilead—the subterranean concern of his
entire stay—remains unresolved. Still, the change in Ames’s perspective is sufficient to both
make him “wish there were grounds for my old dread” (233) and to confess that “I’d have
bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own” (233).
Of course, Ames can neither resolve Jack’s predicament nor convince him to stay in
Gilead, but his change of heart nevertheless inspires him to do what he can to give this prodigal
son a little hope on his journey. In place of a ring, a robe, and a fatted calf, as Jack prepares to
again leave Gilead indefinitely, Ames offers him a book, a blessing, and a little bus money. The
book is one Jack might have filched now and again as a boy: Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence
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of Christianity. Though one might not have anticipated a man of the cloth choosing an atheist’s
critique as a parting gift, Ames dog-ears page 20, where Feuerbach writes, “Only that which is
apart from my own being is capable of being doubted by me. How then can I doubt of God, who
is my being? To doubt of God is to doubt of myself” (qtd. in Gilead 239), a gentle reminder that
regardless of what one believes, at least from Ames’s perspective, God is always with him. In
their brief conversation Ames also tells Jack that “doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of
talking about belief, and . . . that the Greek word sozo, which is usually translated ‘saved,’ can
also mean healed, restored . . . So the conventional translation narrows the meaning of the word
in a way that can create false expectations” (239).
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With each of these points Ames means to
give Jack hope—hope he will need to face his uncertain future and make peace with his painful
past. At the end of the conversation Jack accepts twenty dollars from Ames, and agrees to accept
a blessing from Ames. As he places his hand on Jack’s forehead, Ames first repeats a
benediction from the book of Numbers before concluding with a more personal plea, “Lord,
bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father” (241). With
this blessing, as Rebecca Painter notes, “Rev. Ames has, in effect, re-baptized his namesake as
he sets out in abject sorrow and hopeless bravery for a life without those he cherishes”
(“Loyalty” 331).
To read Ames’s blessing of Jack as another baptism is consistent both with Ames’s own
sense of the relationship between baptism and blessing, and with his desire to have the chance to
re-do Jack’s original baptism. As Ames explains, “[t]here is a reality in blessing, which I take
baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a
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The three points Ames makes in his final conversation with Jack are also representative of Robinson’s
understanding of the relationship between doctrine and belief. As Andrew Brower Latz points out, in Robinson’s
worldview “Beliefs are necessary—there is no denigration of doctrine or theology here (quite the opposite)—but
they are necessary, at least partly, as a foundation for a way of living, seeing, and experiencing” (287).
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power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a
creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time”
(23). If baptism is primarily a blessing, then a blessing could also be considered a form of
baptism. Like Lila’s baptisms, each of Jack’s baptisms suggests a potential shift in identity.
Ames’s concern that the coldness of his blessing on Jack as an infant may have somehow
impacted the events of his life or the nature of his being are partly what drive Ames’s desire to
bless Jack with greater peace in the future. This second blessing can be read as an effort to
reverse any ill effect of the first baptism and restore any blessings Jack might have had had
Ames been less begrudging from the beginning. In any case, the blessing serves as a benediction
of hope against the injustices Jack has experienced and will probably continue to experience at
the hands of individuals and society alike. Moreover, the opportunity to do what he can to make
things right in his relationship with Jack lifts the pall of guilt and resentment Ames has carried
for decades, which allows him to tell a sleeping Boughton—with total earnestness—“I blessed
that boy of yours . . . I love him as much as you meant me to. So certain of your prayers are
finally answered, old fellow. And mine too, mine too” (244). Ames is so relieved, in fact, that he
claims he would have “gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for
that one moment” (242). In the aftermath of Jack’s blessing Ames experiences a type of grace
that Robinson elsewhere describes as “a law of completion” (Housekeeping 92). In this instance,
it is the experience of receiving grace in the moment one offers it, and for Ames the grace he
receives is the ability to see the truth of Lila’s proclamation—“A person can change. Everything
can change” (153)—not only for Jack, but for himself. Once he is able to envision change for
Jack, Ames is given the courage to recognize a change in himself. This change wrought in Ames
as he comes to terms with his feelings toward Jack also helps him come to terms with the other
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fraught relationships in his family—between his father and his brother, Edward, between his
father and his grandfather, and, most importantly, between his father and himself. As his
grudges, guilt, and grief are lifted, Ames can confidently conclude his epistle with a statement he
has perhaps only yearned to believe from the start, “hope deferred is still hope” (247). Through
its epistolary structure, Gilead becomes “an act of hope and change” (Evans 132) wherein Jack
functions as a prevenient grace that opens the possibility for Ames’s change of heart.
Hope Deferred
Though Gilead concludes peacefully for Ames, Jack’s homecoming experience beyond
his interactions with the Ames family remains largely opaque, which partly accounts for
Robinson’s return to Gilead in her third novel, Home.
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As with Gilead, Robinson has stated a
reliance on the Parable of the Prodigal Son as an influence for the narrative structure of Home,
but as many readers and literary critics have noticed, it is not a direct re-telling. Whereas a
traditional interpretation of this parable focuses on the fatherly forgiveness offered to a penitent
son, Robinson views it as “a parable about grace, not forgiveness, since the father runs to meet
his son and embraces him before the son can even ask to be forgiven” (Painter, “Further
Thoughts” 488). For Robinson, grace is inextricably bound to the doctrine of predestination
insofar as it is the only appropriate response to the mystery of God’s intention for another human
being. She explains,
A virtue of the doctrine of is that it acknowledges the freedom of God, the fact that no
one can actually know one’s own or anyone else’s standing with God. It means that,
though there is ample text that tells us how to work out our own salvation, most of it
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When asked why she chose to return to the same characters Robinson explains, “With Jack and old Boughton
especially, and with Glory also, I felt like there were whole characters that had not been fully realized in Ames’s
story. I couldn’t really see the point in abandoning them” (Fay “Art of Fiction”).
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having to do with uprightness and generosity, the mystery is richer and deeper, unfolding
in every instance in the souls of all humankind. The atheist who is deplored today may be
on his way to God’s love and favor in a day or a year, which, of course, means he enjoys
them even now because God knows his intention for him. I find this highly consistent
with Calvin’s view, that everyone is properly the object of deepest respect, because our
human life, all human life, is a sacred mystery. (“Protestant Conscience” 178)
By shifting focus from the (un)repentant son to the response of those awaiting his return,
Robinson renders meaningless any readerly anxiety regarding the state of Jack’s soul. But if
questions of Jack’s repentance are irrelevant (is one predestined to perdition even capable of
repentance?), questions of grace remain—for, as Christina Bieber Lake notes, “Jack is not
returning in order to seek forgiveness for his dishonorable treatment of his family” (183). Rather,
he is, as Ray Horton describes him, “the one always hoped for and looked for but never arriving,
the one who arrives but never as the one who was awaited” (127).
As was the case in Gilead, Jack is first introduced in Home through the eyes of another—
this time by his younger sister, Glory, herself a sort of prodigal daughter, returned home in the
shameful aftermath of a failed relationship. The novel begins with a description of the Boughton
home from Glory’s perspective: though “too tall for the neighborhood, with a flat face and a
flattened roof and peaked brows over the windows . . . it managed to look both austere and
pretentious ” (3-4). To her father, however, the house “had a gracious heart however awkward its
appearance” (4), and “embodied . . . the general blessedness of his life” (3). In spite of the good
family memories and the oak tree still flourishing in the yard, to Glory the house seems
“abandoned” and “heartbroken” (4). To begin with a description of the house is, for Robinson, to
begin with a description of those who live in it. As Jordan Kisner declares, “Robinson’s
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trademark is the house as a metaphor for the soul” (89), so it is no surprise that Glory’s
assessment of the house is immediately tied to her family’s greatest source of pain: her brother,
Jack. Jack, on whom the rest of the Boughton children tattled, even if reluctantly. Jack, whom
they worried might end up in jail. Jack, who made them “constantly alert to transgression and its
near occasion” (6). Jack, for whom their father “would always intercede” (6), and who “could
apologize as fluently as any of the rest of the Boughtons could say the Apostles’ Creed” (6).
Jack, who “cast a shadow over their household” (6). Jack, who while the rest of the family sang
and danced together, “if he was there at all, looked on and smiled and took no part in any of it”
(7). Of course, Glory does not fail to remember the tragic business with Jack’s abandoned
daughter, and the toll it took on the family. All of this before anyone imagines there will be a
letter announcing Jack’s return. When it does arrive, Glory hesitates to let her father read it in
private, fearing that Jack may have “written from a ward for the chronically vexatious, the
terminally remiss. [Or f]rom jail, for heaven’s sake” (24). Though setting up Jack as a ne’er-do-
well is intended to explain, if not justify, Glory’s suspicion regarding his return, her grim
recollections suggest that there will, at least initially, be little balm in Gilead for Jack. Indeed,
upon arrival Jack once again finds himself in the land of family strife, unable to escape or
assuage the anxieties and anger of his father and sister, whose love for him, while genuine, is not
exactly the “perfect love [that] casteth out fear” (1 John 4.18).
Robert Boughton’s reception of Jack begins with jubilation, and ends in devastation. He
has spent the greater part of his life fretting over the well-being of this miscreant son, fighting
guilt and grief and anger and embarrassment, fearing he had failed Jack as a father, that—as he
eventually tells Jack—“there was something you [Jack] needed from me and I never figured out
what it was” (114). Upon receiving Jack’s letter, Boughton is filled with irrepressible hope. In
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the aftermath of his surprise, he “napped, prayed, composed himself, set aside grievances and
doubts, suffered the pangs of anticipation, sought footing in the general blessedness of his life for
a posture of heroic and fatherly grace, and perhaps skirted dangerously near rupture of some part
of the sensorium given over to grand emotion” (24-25). When Jack finally arrives, the ember of
hope smoldering in Old Boughton’s heart bursts into flame. To commence the welcome dinner
Glory has prepared for Jack, Boughton offers a prayer that gives voice to his deepest desires,
“Lord, put the veil of time and sorrow aside for us. Restore us to those we love. And restore the
ones we love to us. We do long for them—” (41). At this point Jack interrupts, almost
unwittingly, with a soft “Amen.” Kriner suggests that this interruption is evidence of “Jack’s
confession of spiritual hunger, his despair at himself, his seeking to preserve honor and honesty,
his asking for and granting forgiveness” (132-133). However, given the circumstances under
which Jack has returned—secretly and fervently hoping that Gilead could be a place of safety for
his mixed-race family—it is more likely that he is thinking of Della and his son, desiring the
safety and restoration of his own family. Yet, over the course of the novel it becomes
increasingly clear that not only is Jack’s family unlikely to be safe and welcome in Gilead, but
they may not even be safe or welcome in the Boughton home. Though Boughton demonstrates
sincere concern for Jack’s welfare throughout the narrative, their differences regarding race
relations are the beginning of the end for them.
The first incident takes place shortly after Jack has Glory purchase a television. He sits
with his father to watch the news, only to witness the violent police response to black civil rights
demonstrators in Montgomery. In response to Jack’s concern, Boughton remarks, “In six months
nobody will remember one thing about it” (97). When the white police officers begin “pushing
the black crowd back with dogs, [and] turning fire hoses on them” (97), Jack profanely expresses
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his dismay. Offended by Jack’s taking the Lord’s name in vain, Boughton responds, “That kind
of language has never been acceptable in this house . . . I know those words don’t mean much to
you. They do to me. You could respect that” (97-98). He continues to fixate on Jack’s language
well into the evening, telling Glory, “I have never heard him speak that way. No, he was always
respectful, as far as that goes. Here in my house. I may have made too much of it. No, it’s
something I don’t feel I should tolerate” (99). Though Boughton briefly senses that he may have
overreacted, the implicit racism of his being more offended by profane language than by the
destruction of human life has been laid bare. This is only the first of several conversations,
however, that demonstrate Boughton’s moral insufficiencies that further separate him from his
suffering son. A short time later, while watching more bad news out of the South, Boughton
suddenly announces, “I have nothing against the colored people. I do think they’re going to need
to improve themselves, though, if they want to be accepted. I believe that is the only solution”
(155). Jack, ever respectful, but testing the waters a little further, responds, “I’m a little
unimproved myself. I’ve known a good many Negroes who are more respectable than I am”
(155). In the comment that follows, Boughton exposes an even deeper degree of racism: “I don’t
know where you get such a terrible opinion of yourself, Jack” (155). As if Jack could have done
nothing worse than assume a black person had better character than he did. And Boughton is not
finished. He continues to rail on about how “the colored people” have created their own
problems, until Jack softly asks his father if he is familiar with Emmett Till. When it becomes
clear that Boughton’s understanding of events is quite different from Jack’s, Jack observes, “We
read different newspapers” (156). And when Jack suggests that he has been treated well by the
black community in St. Louis, Boughton concludes with this regrettable advice: “Your mother
and I brought you children up to be at ease in any company. Any respectable company. So you
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could have the benefit of good friends. Because people judge you by your associations, I know
that sounds harsh, but it’s the truth . . . You could help yourself by finding a better class of
friends” (157).
The realization of his father’s deep-seated racism, coupled with his increasing despair
over not receiving any word from Della, convince Jack to leave Gilead again, presumably for
good. His father, who is clearly nearing the end of his mortal days, is so bitterly disappointed that
he loses all composure, and releases the spill of grief and anger he has kept so carefully guarded
all those years. He looks carefully at Jack’s face, then mutters in disgust, “‘Well, what did I
expect. His life would be hard, I knew that,’ and he fell to brooding. ‘I was afraid of it, and I
prayed, and it happened anyway. So here is Jack,’ he said. ‘After all that waiting’” (294). At
Glory’s suggestion that he ought to be kinder, Boughton explodes into a tirade about the grief
Jack has caused, particularly the grief associated with his abandoned child, before he comes to
his furious final point: “and he’s telling us goodbye. You know he is” (295). In spite of his
father’s meanness, Jack spends his last days in Gilead doing what he can to make the old man
comfortable before they part ways. Though his father does not always seem entirely coherent
during this period, his final interaction with Jack is razor sharp. As Jack prepares to leave, “The
old man looked at him, stern with the effort of attention, or with wordless anger” (317). When
Jack offers his hand, his father “drew his own hand into his lap and turned away” (317). Jack
then leans down and kisses his father’s brow. In spite of every difficulty attendant to his return,
he remains the man who “just wanted to come home . . . wanted to see [his] father” (210).
With this stunning act of compassion, Jack turns the Prodigal Son narrative on its head. Instead
of receiving grace from his father, Jack offers it to him.
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In contrast to her father, Glory’s relationship with Jack begins in suspicion, but ends in
devotion. When Jack first announces his return, Robinson writes, “Glory had her own hopes,
which were also too high—that this visit would happen at all, that it would be interesting, and
that Jack would not remember her as the least tolerable, the most officious, the least to be trusted
of his brothers and sisters. She thought and hoped he might hardly remember her” (26). And as
her father’s anxious waiting becomes increasingly insufferable, Glory prepares angry diatribes to
be delivered upon Jack’s arrival. Her anger, however, is somewhat extinguished when she sees a
“thin, weary, unkempt” man who had appeared at the kitchen door “Like a ghost” (31). Although
Glory softens at Jack’s pitiable appearance, and takes up the cross of waiting on him and her
father, it is not until they have spent several weeks getting to know one another again that she
comes to see him as more than a nuisance. Contrary to her earlier understanding, Glory learns
that Jack’s youthful behavior had not been as motivated by malice as she might have expected,
but was rather a consequence of the inexplicable discomfort he felt in his own skin. With each
glimpse into the mystery of Jack’s sense of the world, and each shared confession, Glory’s
fondness for him increases. Their shared experiences caring for their father, their conversations
about books, and the closeness born of the simple tactile exchanges that accompany giving and
receiving a haircut eventually bring Glory to feel such loyalty to Jack that upon learning about
Ames’s sermon on Hagar and Ishmael she proclaims, “I’ll never forgive him” (211). What most
draws Glory to Jack, however, is the glaring agony he suffers while waiting for a letter from
Della. Though Jack naturally does not reveal the most salient details of his relationship with
Della, details that would, among other things, explain the depth of his alarm at the violent
retaliation against civil rights protesters in Montgomery, he shares enough that Glory can
commiserate with the pain he feels at being separated from her. Though Glory is aware of her
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brother’s concern for this woman, it is not until she is processing the aftermath of Jack’s most
desperate moment—his drunken attempt at suicide by asphyxiation—that Glory most clearly
recognizes the depth of his despair and her inability to do anything more for him that prepare a
good meal. The meal, however, is not meaningless; rather, it is a ritual through which Glory can
channel the love her mother would have offered in similar circumstances. That motherly love
that filled the home with “the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and
dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what” (252). By
the time Jack is ready to leave again, Glory—who had initially been horrified at the thought that
she would inherit her father’s house—promises Jack, “If you ever need to come home, I’ll be
here” (317) and resolves to leave everything unchanged, for the sake of his memories, no matter
what.
Of the three major characters in Home, only Glory experiences a significant
transformation by the end of the novel. In spite of his painful love for Jack, Boughton remains
incapable of forgiving him, and Jack, as Glory observes, is at last much as he was in the
beginning:
He was too thin and his clothes were weary, weary. There was nothing of youth about
him, only the transient vigor of a man acting on a decision he refused to reconsider or
regret. No, there might have been some remnant of the old aplomb. Who would bother to
be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men
hide their face. Ah, Jack. (318)
What Glory does not realize, and what few readers seem to have noticed, is that it is Jack’s
presence—and shortly thereafter, his absence—that has been an essential element in her
transformation. If Jack had not come home, the resentment Glory felt about her own
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disappointments and betrayals may have festered for the remainder of her life. But something
about his presence, about his need and vulnerability, gave her the opportunity to reflect on and
share her own sorrows, leaving her with a fresh sense of purpose in her life and hope for what
her future might hold. Shortly after Jack leaves Gilead, Della and their son come seeking him.
Though their visit is brief, it proves to be a hopeful experience for all of them. Della notes the
potted petunias on the porch “as if a message had been left for her” (320), Glory is able to speak
for a moment with her nephew, and then reflect on the significance of what their presence in
“Worn, modest, countrified Gilead” (324) would have meant to Jack. Though much of the
literary criticism on Home focuses on the final scene wherein Glory imagines the return of Jack’s
son as the culminating hope of her life, the visit prompts another, more immediate—and
hopeful—realization for Glory:
Dear Lord in heaven, she could never change anything. How could she know what he had
sanctified to that child’s mind with his stories . . . She knew it would have answered a
longing of Jack’s if he could even imagine that their spirits had passed through that
strange old house. Just the thought of it might bring him back, and the place would seem
changed, to him and to her. As if all that saving and keeping their father had done was
providence indeed, and new love would transform all the old love and make its relics
wonderful. (323)
Although Jack does seem to attract trouble wherever he goes, his very existence is an occasion
for hope. As Lisa M. Siefker Bailey explains, “in Robinson’s vision, being becomes more
significant than how one is being. Existence itself is a miracle and part of the celebration of the
mystery of God’s grace” (273 emphasis mine), and by coming to Gilead Jack unwittingly brings
his family there, too. Their presence intensifies the hope that Glory feels, for her brother in the
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present and for the possibility of goodness in the future. Though Robinson has not yet revealed
what happens to Jack and his family after he leaves Gilead, readers know that it will be about ten
years before the supreme court strikes down anti-miscegenation laws with their decision on
Loving v. Virginia. Jack will be in his early fifties by that time, and his boy will be nearly a man.
But, Jack’s family did come seeking restoration, suggesting yet again that even for this broken
man, hope deferred is still hope.
Man of Sorrows
Near the end of Home Jack tells Glory, “I really am nothing . . . Nothing, with a body. I
create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be
called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe” (288-289). Jack’s assessment of himself as nothing,
trouble, and as one shrouded in mystery is a foreshadowing of a version of his character of
whom, until recently, Robinson had only given glimpses. With the publication of Jack, the latest
installment in the Gilead novels, Robinson offers further insight into the consciousness of one of
her most complex and opaque characters, and the incidents that continually beset his best efforts
to be better than he actually is. As was the case with Lila, Jack takes readers to a time and setting
that precede the events of Gilead and Home. The novel begins, perhaps not unexpectedly, with
Jack in trouble. Readers quickly learn that his quarrel is with Della, at the end of a date gone
horribly wrong. Though Jack has an entirely sensible explanation for why he excused himself in
the middle of their dinner and left her to pick up the check, all Della knows is that Jack left her
twenty cents short and humiliated. Furthermore, she is not interested in his attempts to explain
himself. “Well, there’s nothing to talk over” she huffs. “You go home, or wherever it is you go.
I’m done with this, whatever it is. You’re just trouble” (Jack 5). Jack simply nods in agreement,
“I’ve never denied it” (5). This opening scene is only the first of many incidents that have
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brought Jack in contact with trouble. While he accepts as fact that there is something about
himself that attracts difficulty and repeatedly frets about his own capacity to cause harm, Jack
also recognizes that “His great problem, after himself, was other people” (196). Though
Robinson never directly explains what it is about Jack that others, especially other men, find so
bothersome about Jack, it clearly has something to do with the softer elements of his
personality—his vulnerability, his reticence, perhaps even his bookishness. The cognitive
dissonance between his efforts to avoid doing harm and yet finding harm around every corner
leads him to experience his life as “an engrossing confusion, very small change cosmically
speaking, and still anything at all could loom up like a great foreshadowing and accuse him. A
baffled struggle in a dark place” (258). Despite its strangeness, Jack is accustomed to and more
or less comfortable in his mercurial existence, until the moment he hands an umbrella to a
stranger in the rain. Suddenly, this man, this “mere unshielded nerve” (259), finds himself not
only in love with, but receiving love from “a kindhearted, luminous schoolteacher, unwilling to
joke about God or grace — a true believer with a soft spot for an out-of-place soul” (Libman
“Shells and Spheres”). Jack’s incomprehension regarding social norms makes it easy for him to
fall in love with Della, but the anti-miscegenation laws of 1940s Missouri make it impossible for
their relationship to avoid harm.
To accentuate the degree to which other people are Jack’s—and Della’s—biggest
problem, Robinson creates a narrative space where readers can witness the relationship mostly
unencumbered by expectations other than their own. Trapped in the darkness of St. Louis’s
famous Bellefontaine cemetery—they are, quite literally, locked in—Jack and Della find
themselves deep in conversation about topics that would be available to them in almost no other
setting: Shakespeare and the nature of spirits, their families and their fears, predestination and the
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possibility of meaninglessness. At one point, Della even brings up Jesus. In this conversation
race does not cease to matter—Bellefontaine is, after all, a white cemetery where neither bums
nor black women are welcome—but in the safety of the unpeopled evening it becomes a
secondary matter. Ironically, in this extended cemetery conversation, which takes up nearly a
quarter of the novel and has been described as “one of the most audacious scenes in recent
American fiction” (Stanfield par. 1), darkness and solitude are what make it possible for Jack and
Della to plumb the depths of each other’s souls—and for Robinson to bring key elements of
Jack’s soul to light. Conversation allows Robinson to make Jack more three-dimensional as a
character than he ever could have been in Gilead or Home. He acknowledges that he is “a simple
man who was brought up by a complicated man” (23), and describes himself as “at [his] best
unseen. The Prince of Darkness. The Prince of Absence, for that matter” (48). Despite his self-
recrimination, the softness and vulnerability in Jack becomes evident in his efforts to share
himself with Della, not least of all in his attentive observations of the workings of nature—
spiders and crickets and tree toads:
It had seemed to him sometimes that, however deep it was, the darkness in a leafy place
took on a cast, a tincture, of green. The air smelled green, of course, so the shading he
thought he saw in the darkness might have been suggested by that wistfulness the breeze
brought with it, earth so briefly not earth. All the people are grass. (18-19)
The unexpected richness of Jack’s thoughts make his person all the more beautiful, and they
stand in stark contrast to Della’s matter-of-fact assessments—even when she intends kindness.
The contrast of the accessibility of Jack’s mind and the inaccessibility of Della’s is important,
because as Lily Meyer points out, “The resulting experience is one of talking intimately to Della
without truly knowing her mind—is, in other words, like creating closeness in real life” (“Grace
199
is for Everyone” par. 6). Oddly enough, the only real insight to her invisible life Della offers
comes after she proclaims, “I don’t go around revealing my innermost thoughts.” Then, a
confession sufficiently serious to cause Jack alarm. “I am actually full of rage.” Della explains,
‘Wrath. I think I feel a little like God must feel the second before He just gives up and
rains brimstone. I’ve heard people blame Him for that! I don’t blame Him. I can imagine
the satisfaction. I have to wonder when that last exasperation will come and I burst into
flames. Nothing in particular, everything in general, plus one more thing, maybe one very
tiny thing. Whoosh.’
‘Really?’
‘Do I sound like I’m joking?
‘Not a bit. You’ve actually scared me.’
‘Don’t worry too much. All my life I’ve been a perfect Christian lady. It’s nothing
I can help, I guess. Something to be grateful for, really. It makes my mother happy. I plan
to keep on with it . . . Sometimes I shut myself in my room and throw myself down on
my bed and I just let it run through me. All that wrath. In every bone in my body. Then it
seems to sort of wear itself out and I can go for a walk or something. But it never goes
away.’ (65)
Quite a lot to take in, from this woman “clothed in twilight” (63), but it is enough to provide Jack
with the relieving realization that they really do have something in common: “We are not as we
appear” (66).
Of course, the enchanted evening must end, and when it does Jack and Della find
themselves back in a world that makes their relationship not merely complicated, but criminal.
Jack is not unfamiliar with the trauma other people can instigate in his life. Though he cannot
200
quite summon to tell Della he has spent time in prison, it is not because there is a sin to be
ashamed of, but because he maintains a sort of melodramatic pride that prevents him from
admitting how often and how senselessly he is taken advantage of. When the scoundrels who
ruin his date with Della leave him with nothing but a punch to the gut and a gouge under his eye,
his first thought is “Now I can’t go home, ever . . . I can’t see Della again, I can’t go to the
library, I’ll have to close my lapels over my shirt the way bums do, and that was all terrible. But
the way his father would sorrow over this unconcealable wound was the thought he could not
bear” (129). It is that same “quivering nerve of pride, which was always ready to heighten the
misery of any occasion” (130) that keeps him from telling Della that he went to prison for a
crime he did not commit. Though Jack does admit he “had always felt a silent hum . . . around
objects that had nothing else to recommend them” (191), it is sheer bad fortune that he was in the
way of a thief who managed to deposit the evidence of his crime—twice in five minutes (193).
And although Della has provoked a foundational change in Jack’s motives, she has not managed
to change his luck. After attending a local A.M.E. church for a couple of weeks Jack decides to
discuss his predicament with the pastor, only to be informed that he has “wandered in on the
most respectable family on this round earth” (188). As it turns out, Della is the child of a
prominent and influential bishop in Memphis, whose family is especially “devoted to the
betterment of the race” (188) and therefore unlikely to accept Jack as an appropriate match. To
Jack’s disappointment—but not to his surprise—Pastor Hutchins, who seems also to believe in
the virtues of separatism, advises Jack to let Della go.
In an uncanny parallel to the experience Jack will later have in Ames’s church, Pastor
Hutchins delivers the first of two sermons designed to convince Jack to leave Della alone. In lieu
of preaching about a biblical text, the pastor decides to “speak [his] mind” (222) and discuss the
201
topic of debts. “‘I’m not talking about money you owe . . . I’m talking about the debts you rack
up when you lie, when you make promises you don’t mean to keep, when you disturb a peaceful
home.’ Jack had not felt so targeted by a sermon in years” (222). What follows is yet another
man of God who, when called upon, refuses to offer a blessing on a stranger. In spite of Jack’s
naked honesty regarding his life and his intentions where Della is concerned, the closest the
pastor can come to offering relief is the suggestion that Jack should consider his inexplicable
compulsion to do harm as “temptation” rather than impulse (230). That Jack returns once more to
this man’s church is perhaps only evidence of desperation, but the sermon proves decisive. The
pastor preaches on the value of teaching, and the role schools like Sumner High—where Della
teaches English—have in providing sacred opportunities for young people to “make good lives
in a world that can be hard and cold, a world made difficult in order . . . to keep them at a
distance” (272). Jack realizes with devastating force that by continuing to be part of Della’s life
he would be keeping her from flourishing in her teaching career, thus preventing the
opportunities necessary for people in her community to progress. So, he writes her an apologetic
letter, and leaves for Chicago.
The last time Jack was in Chicago, he was not avoiding a woman, but looking for one—
hoping to make some sort of amends for what his family considered an almost unforgivable sin
(the matter of his impregnating and then abandoning a young woman and his child). Though that
experience ended with a sense of shame that essentially drove the next decade of Jack’s life, his
second stint in the city is marked by an unaccountable sense of hope, born of a sliver of good
fortune. The small kindness he shows a stranger on the bus produces a place to stay, and his love
of literature leads to a stable job. Soon, despite his efforts to the contrary, he finds himself
thinking of Della. Though he felt “[f]lourishing seemed wrong in a man so disheartened as he
202
was” (288), imagining her there with him encourages him to flourish. He gets a raise, he
frequents black neighborhoods, he saves a little money, and he remains loyal to the idea of
himself as a married man. He also impresses his landlady, first with his piano playing and then
with his drawing. But when he tells the woman his “wife is a colored lady” (294), he is again
confronted with the sting of racism and the danger of his situation. Finally, exhausted and aching
for the woman he loves, he catches a bus to Memphis. He has little trouble finding Della’s father,
who, as expected, informs him, “You can never be welcome here . . . You have disrupted our
lives, but not our intentions” (306). Jack could say the same.
Though the waters never seem to part for Jack, each of the Gilead novels in which he
appears culminate in grace for those who have encountered Jack, and suggest at least a glimmer
of hope for his future. Gilead ends with the affirmative blessing he receives from Ames, Home
concludes with Della and Robert searching for him, and Jack culminates with “the knowledge of
the good . . . [and] the sweet marriage that made her a conspirator with him in it, the loyalty that
always restored them both, just like grace” (309). Near the end of their conversation in the
graveyard, Jack suggests that changing his life would be close to impossible, because it would
mean changing his nature. He tries to explain,
I have not actually chosen this life. The path of least resistance is not a choice, in the
usual sense of the word. I know it appears to be one. But when the resistance you
encounter on every other path seems, you know, indomitable, then there you are. I’m sure
I have been too easily discouraged. Still, I know whereof I speak, more or less. (69-70)
Jack is, of course, not entirely wrong—but neither is he entirely right. He does, of course, make
choices, and not always wise ones. But it is also true that any path he chooses is full of perils and
pitfalls created by the laws and customs of the societies in which he lives. Yet, his decision to
203
follow Della to Memphis, to face the shame and embarrassment of all that awaits him there and
forever after, is a decision—it is a decision to accept the grace Della offers him, and it is in her
that he finds reason for hope.
IV.
It is no accident that the most profound moments of grace in Robinson’s fiction are
almost always dependent to some degree on her least religious characters—those who wander
and appear lost. As Ben Libman observes, “Her transients are her most enigmatic and
spellbinding characters; they live according to their own clocks, their own mores, their own vast
systems of signs” (“Shells and Spheres” par. 17), and in Robinson’s theology nothing is ever
lost, or even goes unnoticed, because of the gracious, all-abiding presence of Christ. Robinson
signals her intent to “bring back” civilization (which would presumably include restoring notions
of human beings as essentially holy) in a key passage from Housekeeping, wherein the main
character, Ruth, considers the restorative mission of Christ:
Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than
we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not
born to drown. And when he did die it was sad—such a young man, so full of promise,
and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread
everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked
and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along
the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat
down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was. There is so little to remember of
anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over
again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will
204
fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the
perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our
hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long. (194-
195 emphasis mine)
There is no indication that Ruth is religious, in any habitual way. No particular mention of
churchgoing, bible study, or traditional forms of prayer. That Robinson breaks into Ruth’s
psyche with an advanced theological understanding of the relationship between memory and
resurrection is evidence of her devotion to a larger project: to restore hope in the human spirit in
the face of what she finds to be the cynical, empty disillusionments of so much of modern
thought. It is an ambitious project, but in all of her writing Robinson proves herself, to use
Flannery O’Connor’s term, “no vague believer” (Collected Works 804). That Robinson’s work
considers souls in various states of belief and finds hope in all of them is a reflection of her
“belief that this world is secure in the love of God, and in every way profound” (“Credo” 22); a
belief which leads her also to remember that “we inhabit a reality far larger and more complex
than our conception of it can in any way reflect” (“Credo” 23). The earnestness with which her
characters experience hope becomes believable because Robinson, like Lila, is a genuine
believer that “a person can change.”
205
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