|
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
 | ||||||||
 | ||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
A Melvillean Note
29 November 2004"[U]nless you are a believing Christian with strong fundamentalist leanings," writes Lee Siegel in New York, "you cannot truly understand Gilead," the second novel by Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, one of the great novels of the 20th century. "Robinson currently represents everything that liberal, urbane, ironic culturati are now derided for smugly disdaining." No -- just everything that ill-informed critics are derided for earnestly dismissing. Robinson is as far from fundamentalism as one can get in the spectrum of American Protestantism. The New York Times, meanwhile, really does represent much of what reactionary, anti-urban, smug culture warriors are now derided for smugly disdaining. And yet, if they can gulp back their bile and take a chance on a deeply Christian, and deeply un-fundamentalist book, they will find a worthy review of it in yesterday's paper. Robinson's "is a mind as religious as it is literary -- perhaps more religious than literary -- in which silence is itself a quality, and in which the space around words may be full of noises," writes James Wood. "In ordinary, secular fiction, a writer who 'takes things down to essentials' is reducing language to increase the amount of secular meaning (or sometimes, alas, to decrease it). When Robinson reduces her language, it's because secular meaning has exhausted itself and is being renovated by religious meaning. Robinson, who loves Melville and Emerson, cannot rid herself of the religious habit of using metaphor as a form of revelation. [The main character] spends much time musing on the question of what heaven will be like. Surely, he thinks, it will be a changed place, yet one in which we can still remember our life on earth: 'In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.' There sings a true Melvillean note."
|
|
