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{"id":16676,"date":"2014-10-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1536"},"modified":"2014-10-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-07T00:00:00","slug":"prohibited-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/10\/prohibited-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"Prohibited Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Wyatt Mason\u2019s wide-ranging\u00a0NYT interview<\/a> with Marilynne Robinson is full of interest for Robinson\u2019s fans. In one of the most incisive portions of the interview, Robinson answers Mason\u2019s question, \u201cWhat do you think people should be talking about more?\u201d<\/p>\n

Her consciousness streams in reply: \u201c\u2018One of the things that bothers me,\u2019 she began, with feeling, \u2018is that there are prohibitions of an unarticulated kind that are culturally felt that prevent people from actually saying what they think.\u2019 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 (\u2018If you\u2019re Jewish or Catholic, you can make all the jokes about your mother or the nun, but in terms of saying on one\u2019s deathbed, \u2018What 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?\u2019 they are completely inarticulate about that\u2019); addressed that inhibition and suggested its root (\u2018It\u2019s as if when you describe something good, you are being deceived or are being deceptive\u2019).\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s postmodern irony; perhaps it\u2019s fear of self-exposure (Robinson talks about the \u201crespectability\u201d of fear in contemporary culture). Whatever the cause, it results in an incapacity to talk and write straightforwardly about goodness.<\/p>\n

It afflicts even the best, most religious, of writers: Robinson \u201coffered Flannery O\u2019Connor as an example of a religious writer who fails to describe goodness (\u2018Her prose is beautiful, her imagination appalls me\u2019); evoked the nature of O\u2019Connor\u2019s failure (\u2018There\u2019s a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart\u2019); complained about the widespread ignorance of religion in American life.\u201d \u00a0And the stream goes on further, to 1 Corinthians and the Lollards and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

It must be said that what she spots as a weakness in O\u2019Connor 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.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"