Townsend Center. Nov 3 2014. . Marilynne Robinson Religion and the Art of the Novel. LILA

Jonathan Sheehan, History and Dorothy Hale, English 

Robert Haas,English, and  Marilynne Robinson

The Pulitzer Prize winning Author 

There are two reviews which so far I have read about LILA, Marilynne Robinson's new novel.  Robinson is also speaking in the Arts and Lectures series at Nourse theater tonight, November 4, and the broadcast will be aired in December, 2014. Unfortunately, I missed it. 

Harpers. November, 2014. p 77,78,80 "Everyday Grace  Marilynne Robinson's unsaved" By Meghan O'Rourke
The Atlantic.  October, 2014.  p 34-36.  "The Power of Grace"  by Leslie Jamison.

Marilynne Robinson is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Author of Gilead, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, she has written a sequel concentrating on Lila, the wife, in this new novel, LILA.  You can download a sample on Kindle   Robinson was awarded the National Humanities medal in 2013.  

Sheehan poses two interesting lines of thought:  How do you write with scripture (Ruth, Job, Ezekiel) and why the Old Testament?  How does resurrection of the ordinary and fictional forms coordinate in your mind?  He adds:  "You have Calvinism in the novel; I read Leibnitz, who has objects mirror the universe, and minds become little divinities" (a paraphrase)  . How do you talk about religious disputation?

Dorothy Hale simply asks, "Why the novel?"   She quotes Robinson at length.  "The best novelists break the rules. ie Chekov, Dickens.   You said that you chose First  person for the other books because you found a voice.  Does that mean there was no voice for 3rd person, as 3rd person narrative can make you "not care" or be indifferent".  You said :"Implausibility" is a matter of style.  Do you turn to fiction to represent "otherness"?
Is it inhabitation of another identity? Do you imagine being "otherwise"?  You say "My characters are not simulations." How is the novel an act of style that enables us to see through someone else's eyes? 

Robert Haas.    reminds the audience that the novel is a secular form.  He sees the notion of the sacred being tested through forms of "hope vs plausibility" in the novel.  There is an emperical demand of the novel for a plot, which means there is a providential order. A novel is a dance between the picaresque or "one God damn thing after another. " This view has been revised from the perspective of a Christian narrative of conversion and enlightenment.   Plot suggests there is some pattern making in the universe.  Auden says of Jane Austen, that her novels are providential, with fairy tale endings, of stories with economic necessities.  Lila is a picaresque character; one goddam thing happens to her after another.   Lila  asks: "Is there any point/  What is religion? " 

Reponse by Marilynne Robinson:

My attraction to religion is that I see nothing that invests the world with more value.  You are given the gift to understand things that exceed understanding.  Complexity within complexity.  Complexity beyond complexity. Reading Scientific America confirms this for me.  Theology creates space for evaluation, for perspective, Science presents information that former data cannot survive in the new garment. Science is hypothetical.  I have a religious perspective, as a Realist.  I must assume the complexity of interaction at the level of language. 

I follow William James, not the other one.  We know anything to the degree that we know it at all.  New information makes us create new hypothesis about what is true.  The mind lives through the world.

She rejects "static providentiality" and sees Jane Austen as secular.  Her happy endings usually have to do with an unknown dead uncle...the moment one becomes rich, all sense of one's former class disappears.  All is needed is wealth. Austens characters "get a property"...

She continues, "People compare me to Flannery O'Connor, in whom they see "grace".  Let me say straight out: I do not see "grace" in Flannery O'Connor."

Lila is not a person who says "My Thinking is complex".  She is of two minds if you will, or  oblique.  She says she won't and then she does.  

I hear a voice in my mind.  It has colorations of my mind because I am interested in theology.  I am Christian and it has permeated my fabric since I was a child.  I don't see any reason to consider another system. Other religions may be profound if we knew them well enough.  My books are translated into Arabic, into Persian, into Russian...We need to be more open in America.  These countries are interested in my books, because they are about "belief".  Muslims are interested in religion being dealt with.   We are separated from the rest of the world.  We should all be students of religion.  Harmony goes across cultures. 

"Someone somewhere says you cannot do something". (This is motivation for her) " You hear that a novel is a secular form.  Tell that to Herman Melville.  The novel makes a hologram as opposed to a photograph, because it has dimension. "

"I am interested in the Old Testament because I am interested in what is distanced from us, by some polemic and in that which is neglected.  In reading the ancient texts, one recognizes a siege or a plague, and people living under difficult conditions and cataclysms. The Bible has a huge role in literature.  The Bible is "gracious" in recording experience.   People wrote to me that they thought "Housekeeping" is connected with Ruth, and so it is...Ruth is important to Lila.  Job gives me courage; for him appropriate boundaries of religious thought do not exist.  He is going to tell us The Divine.   We know people in the way we know them.  I so not suggest that any character is "knowable".    "Ezekiel" is a remarkable ancient wisdom which is interesting to Lila 
'
I like the Latin "datum" as meaning "gift" instead of "given".  The otherness of another and the commonality; of course,  these are my interests.I like the idea of "crossing over", that contradictions can co-exist.   My characters create me as much as I create them.

Why do I write novels? " I write because something is truly interesting for me to explore."  The process is much more inward.  A.  We know each other  B  We know each other profoundly. 

Lila is someone who has been told to keep her head down and her mouth shut.  Now she is married to a man who wants to know who she is.  She says, "I might, and I might not..."  

Q& A:  Audience 

What is religion?  Shared symbols of the sacred.  Robinson answers the question:  What is divine?  She says, "Reality".  "The world is divine". 

Robinson  answers the question:  What is love?  That we see a person in a particular way that causes us to hold them in love. It is the way we see them, and the way we see them is the way it is for us.