Prohibited Speech

Wyatt Mason’s wide-ranging NYT interview with Marilynne Robinson is full of interest for Robinson’s fans. In one of the most incisive portions of the interview, Robinson answers Mason’s question, “What do you think people should be talking about more?”

Her consciousness streams in reply: “‘One of the things that bothers me,’ she began, with feeling, ‘is that there are prohibitions of an unarticulated kind that are culturally felt that prevent people from actually saying what they think.’ From there, she raised her well-documented relationship to faith; said that students at Iowa from faith-based backgrounds seek her out; sketched the inhibition these students nonetheless feel in describing the sacred (‘If you’re Jewish or Catholic, you can make all the jokes about your mother or the nun, but in terms of saying on one’s deathbed, ‘What will it mean to me that this is how I would have described myself, how does the cosmos feel as it nestles in my particular breast?’ they are completely inarticulate about that’); addressed that inhibition and suggested its root (‘It’s as if when you describe something good, you are being deceived or are being deceptive’).”

Perhaps it’s postmodern irony; perhaps it’s fear of self-exposure (Robinson talks about the “respectability” of fear in contemporary culture). Whatever the cause, it results in an incapacity to talk and write straightforwardly about goodness.

It afflicts even the best, most religious, of writers: Robinson “offered Flannery O’Connor as an example of a religious writer who fails to describe goodness (‘Her prose is beautiful, her imagination appalls me’); evoked the nature of O’Connor’s failure (‘There’s a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart’); complained about the widespread ignorance of religion in American life.”  And the stream goes on further, to 1 Corinthians and the Lollards and elsewhere.

It must be said that what she spots as a weakness in O’Connor is not a weakness in Robinson, who created one of the most genuinely good characters in recent fiction with Rev. John Ames of Gilead, Iowa.