The value of an exceptional novel lies in its ability to
embed itself in your memory long after you have finished reading it. Its value
is measured in how often you find yourself thinking in the voices of the
characters, or thinking through the ideas, or remembering its images. A great
novel has its after-image in other books, films, people, and events. A truly
great novel has a spectral presence that will follow you for days, weeks,
months, even years.
In reading and re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Lila I have entered into the lives of
her characters, and part of me feels ashamed to talk about them, fearing that I
will be a mere gossip, failing to capture the essence of their lives, which has
been so beautifully rendered in Robinson’s sparse and elegant prose. That
Robinson writes her novels empathically, as an exploration of character, is
something which she has discussed in her collection of essays, When I Was A Child I Read Books. In the opening
essay, ‘Freedom of Thought’, she writes about her fiction in terms both modern
(“self-awareness”) and old (“soul”),
When
I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to stimulate the integrative work of a
mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience,
belief or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire- a mind shaping the moment
of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding
one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating
and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense. These things do happen simultaneously,
after all. (p. 7)
Lila is Robinson’s third book set in the
town of Gilead, Iowa. The novel is set before the events of either Gilead or Home, and allows Robinson to explore characters that have been
encountered before from an earlier time and from a different perspective: the perspective of the outsider, Lila, who comes to the town, and
has plans to continue on from it, in the itinerant way she has come to live her
life. In this first blog in our series I will focus on the opening of the
novel, and examine the way in which Robinson draws out for the reader
“integrative work“ of Lila’s mind, allowing us to enter in, to dwell there for
a time, in both her present and in her memories of her past.
Lila opens with a
heart-rending scene of a lonely, rejected, and ill-abused child, sitting alone
on the stoop of a house. Not even the cats will tolerate her, scratching her
arms, “the harder she held on to it,” (p. 3) and hiding under the house, where
she is too afraid to venture. She sits and waits for something to happen, and
it does, in the form of Doll, a character whose presence will haunt the novel,
a ghost of the past. Indeed we do not discover until the following page that
this nameless, unloved child is Lila, the narrator. It is her memory of her
childhood she is describing, and she sees it much more positively than the
reader does, “Lila would never tell anyone about that time. She knew it would
sound very sad, and it wasn’t, really. Doll had taken her up in her arms and
wrapped her shawl around her.” (p. 4) This image of the miserable child who is
taken up in the arms of someone who is not their own kin in an act of kindness
and grace is one that Robinson will return to throughout the novel. However, it
is no rose-coloured fairy tale that Robinson is telling, but a story of how
suffering and grace can co-exist in the one life, in the one mind, and how both
contribute to the identity of Lila.
The link between our memory and our identity has been widely
studied, not just in literary departments, but also by cultural theorists,
historians, psychologists, and neuroscientists. The notion that we are
indelibly shaped by our past, not just our own past, but our shared cultural
past, which is often mediated (an idea known as ‘prosthetic memory’), and that
we are specifically shaped not by the facts of the past but by our memory of
it, has come to be regarded as somewhat irrefutable. That there is yet another
novel exploring this very idea is unsurprising given that this seems to be the
concern of many authors across a wide range of literary genres at present.
However, Robinson seeks to explore this seemingly worn-out path of literature
from a different vantage point, specifically the impact of grace on memory and
identity.
In one of their earliest conversations Lila asks the
Reverend John Ames about her life, about “why things happen the way they do.”
(p. 29) She is attempting to not just make sense of her life, but of herself,
and his answer in the first instance is to tell her of the sorrows of his life.
Robinson is revealing here the power of stories, of narratives, to help us
answer those questions. However, there is more to it, and the Reverend Ames (and
Robinson, I guess) gives a clear, if didactic response, “’I think you are
asking me these questions because of some hard things that have happened, the
things you won’t talk about. If you did tell me about them, I could probably
not say more than that life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace
of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep
mystery.’” (p. 31) Later he writes her a letter that expands upon this, drawing
upon the image of our relationship with God as of a father and child, and reflecting
on the life of Christ, who in experiencing humanity and in suffering with and
for us, reveals a God who knows us intimately.
The Bible teaches us that we cannot know the mind of God
(Job 11:7, Romans 11:33-36), as Robinson shows, the human mind is full of
mystery, too. But that we can experience God’s loving kindness, through each
other and ultimately through his Son, is something that should, and does, have
a powerful impact on our identity.
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