Working wonders: Neil Morgan says Friends should pay attention to Marilynne Robinson

‘At heart, Robinson is simply amazed by life.’

Marilynne Robinson’s writing is the literary equivalent of Marmite or Bovril: you love it or you hate it. Robinson, a US writer and academic, came to notice with her first novel Housekeeping, (1980) and earned a Pulitzer Prize for her 2004 novel, Gilead, about an aging pastor’s letters to his young son. Her non-fiction books include The Death of Adam: Essays on modern thought (1998), Absence of Mind (2010) which I want to look at here, and a later essay collection, What are we doing here? (2018).

Absence of Mind consists of four essays, and is subtitled The dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the self. Its central, unifying argument is that, over the last hundred years or so, culture has profoundly changed – in Robinson’s view, for the worse.

There is, in society, a vastly-diminished interest in matters of the mind, and its perspective. From history to the arts, this has reached the point where consciousness is seen as ‘the hard problem’. There even exists a very significant philosophical school called ‘eliminist materialism’, which is seeking ways to explain it away. Robinson thinks that this is a sort of madness, where humanity has shot itself in the foot. Different forms of intelligibility (which we could call the scientistic and the religious) confront each other here, which is most vividly presented in our understanding of ourselves.

For Robinson, the hope, and task, is to find a way of understanding ourselves in the twenty-first century. This must not be radically self-undermining, and should not require us to deny the obviousness of our inner subjectivity. Robinson wants to reclaim the existence of consciousness as one of the most familiar aspects of being human, but at the same time she acknowledges that it is one of the most astonishing things about the world. Indeed the ‘problem’ of consciousness cannot just be quarantined in the mind. Instead, she says, it points to the possibility (perhaps even the necessity) of a different way of comprehending the universe, one that cannot be subject to empirical verification.

This other way of approaching the world has also been explored, in a very interesting way, by the well-known philosopher Thomas Nagel (in Mind and Cosmos, for example). But unlike Nagel, Robinson suggests that dwelling on consciousness and the mind leads us inevitably to a spiritual perspective. Our conscious minds have a degree of value and importance that we cannot adequately grasp. Pondering the existence of consciousness creates a sense of puzzlement, but also wonder – indeed amazement. She sees the mind, and this consciousness, as a miracle.

This sense of miracle, which is not eradicated by modern science, is the basis of her religious faith. We should, in her view, cleave to it, and its implication, as a simple fact, rather than be bullied out of it by our modern fetish for computational ‘evidence’. This is not to refute science – far from it – but to keep in sight and respect a very different vertex of feeling. We should not confuse science (good) with scientism (bad). We can value different sorts of evidence while still being ‘evidence-based’. This means that as well as space rockets, or molecular biology, we need to value the evidence, for example, of our own daily quotidian lived experience. We also need to come to our own, personal, human conclusions, based on both models. Such lived evidence is always near at hand, if only we pay attention to it.

Robinson therefore kicks back against a reduction of complex concepts to simple-minded explanations. Instead, in the tenderest way, she draws our attention to the numinous world of the very ordinary, and invites us to explore its depths. This includes, for example, our senses, as mindful beings looking up at the stars. In Robinson’s perspective the domestic, the homely, and the commonplace, are inevitable pointers to grace, fused into a sense of revelation that we have simply lost touch with lately.

The word ‘unfashionable’, perhaps even ‘contrarian’, applies to her writing – this is what I meant when I talked about Marmite. One needs to make allowances. Robinson can perhaps be a little starchy when she is telling us off, which she does when she tells us we have too-easily surrendered our private, personal experience on the altar of science. She wants us to keep our sense of wonder.

Here Robinson follows seers like William Blake, albeit with a wagging finger. Her writing is ardent, but never religiously dogmatic. Adherence to doctrine can foreclose, or even restrict, our focus, she says. On the contrary, she writes, ‘I believe that faith is liberation of thought’. At heart, Robinson is simply amazed by life, and feels we should not lose that feeling. For her, the sense of wonder at the mind and its self-reflection has all sorts of implications. Her understanding of her own marrow of experience, as an independent thinker and writer, only makes sense for her through a passionate religious lens.

One might come to Robinson’s writing from her essays or her novels; each reinforce the other. Alas there is not enough space to discuss her novels here, but Gilead is a wonderful piece of self-conscious writing, as well as a tender description of being alive – of living a life. Robinson presents her personal religious thought simply, as plain common sense, as her own lived experience. That is, for me, the particular beauty of her vision, and what makes it so worthwhile to read her work.

---

Comments

Thank you. I’m a devotee of her novels who came unstuck with her non-fiction but am grateful for this analysis. I would encourage anyone who likes fiction to be a slow, deep, gently sensual and spiritually emotional experience to read the novels.

By suehampton@btinternet.com on 12th May 2022 - 10:19

---

Dear Sue ,
I could not agree with your recommendation more.

By Neil M on 12th May 2022 - 12:48

---

Please login to add a comment