Professor Amy
Hungerford: Today I wanted
to begin with that question I
left you with:
What does Housekeeping
have to do with the Identity
Plot?
Did you see elements of the
Identity Plot in this novel?
Who did and what did you see?
Yes.
What did you
see?Student:
Oh…Professor
Amy Hungerford:
Oh.
Now you have to make good.
Yeah.
Student:
Well--Professor Amy
Hungerford: I can come back
to you.
Student:
Would you?Professor
Amy Hungerford:
Yes, I would.
I would be quite happy to do
that.
Is someone else more ready to
say what this novel has to do
with the Identity Plot?
Yes.Student:
Well, outwardly speaking
Ruth struggles with her own
identity and how to fit it into
societal conceptions of what it
means to be a normal person,
to have a home and function in
society.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Absolutely.
And what details,
for you, most mark that
conflict in Ruth?
Where do you see that
happening?Student:
Well, you see it a lot in
her hair and in her dress.
Professor Amy Hungerford:
In her hair and her dress.
Yes.
So, by contrast with Ruth,
you see Lucille doing a lot of
work on her hair,
trying to make clothes,
become close with the home
economics teacher,
chiding Ruth for not looking
normal when they walk down the
street.
So, you really do see it in
that dynamic,
especially between the two
sisters, and,
as you say, in clothes and
hair.
Where else do you see this?
That sense of being at odds is
one part of it.
Where else do you see it?
Okay.
You're not talkative today.
Let's try something easier.
I'd like to read the first
sentence of the novel:
"My name is Ruth."
What can we say about that
sentence as the opening sentence
of a novel?
Any thoughts or observations
about it?
Yes.
Student: It recalls
Moby-Dick.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yes.
It absolutely does.
And what's the first line of
Moby-Dick?
Students:
"Call me Ishmael."
Professor Amy
Hungerford: "Call me--" Oh,
in chorus.
That was beautiful.
So, you may have read
Moby-Dick, even if
you didn't read this.
So, "call me Ishmael." Okay.
Absolutely.
Marilynne Robinson,
as is going to emerge in my
lecture today,
is very much preoccupied with
the nineteenth century.
She is very interested,
especially, in these classic
American writers of the American
transcendentalist school--and
that's Melville,
Hawthorne, Emerson,
Thoreau--also very interested
in Dickinson,
Emily Dickinson.
She has a sensibility that maps
very closely with theirs,
and I'll get into that towards
the end of my lecture today.
But, just as a narrative
strategy, how is "Call me
Ishmael" different from "My name
is Ruth"?
Anyone have ideas about that?
What's different about those
two sentences?
Yeah.Student:
Well, "Call me Ishmael"
sounds like it's more of a
choice on the character's part
to identify themselves,
where Ruth is something that
was given to her,
and it wasn't something that
she chose for
herself.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Okay.
Very good.
Yeah.
So, Ishmael says,
"Here's what I want you to call
me," and Ruth says to us,
"This is what people do call
me."
Yes.
Student:
One is interactive and one
is declarative?Professor
Amy Hungerford:
Absolutely.
Yes.
So the "Call me" implies a
"you."
It reaches out of the text and
uses that implied second person
"you", "Call me Ishmael."
"My name is Ruth," simple
declarative sentence.
It gives you that sense that
Ruth is more separate from you,
perhaps, as a reader,
than Ishmael is.
Ishmael wants to enter into
dialog with you,
wants you to reach out towards
him.
Ruth offers you herself as
something like the objective
contemplation of a stranger,
as a stranger.
That's what a stranger says to
you: "Hi.
My name is Amy."
That's the kind of address a
stranger gives you.
What else do you notice about
those two sentences?
Any other differences you can
think of, or similarities,
even, between the two?
What about those names,
Ruth and Ishmael?
Yes.
Is your hand up?
Your hand is,
yes, dangerously floating.
Yes, you.
Student:
Both biblical
names?Professor Amy
Hungerford: Yeah.
Absolutely.
Both biblical names,
and they have certain
similarities,
too.
Yes.
Student:
Well, both Ruth and Ishmael
were sort of strangers in the
cultures that they lived in.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Absolutely.
Can you explain more about
that?Student:
Well, Ishmael was the first
son of Abraham,
but he was not really brought
into the family,
and eventually he was left in
the wilderness.
The story is that from him
sprang up the Arabic
tribe.Professor Amy
Hungerford: That's right.
So he's Hagar's son.
He is the son of Abraham's--or
Sarah's--serving woman.
So, Abraham is unable to
conceive a child with Sarah,
so he sleeps with Hagar and
Hagar bears him a son,
Ishmael.
So, he's from the family of
Abraham, but he is outside that
family.
Now what about Ruth?
Do you want to continue?
Yeah.
Student:
Ruth married into a Jewish
family.
She herself was not from a
Jewish family.
She was from another genetic
tribe, but, when her husband
died and her father-in-law died,
instead of returning to her own
people she stayed with her
mother-in-law.Professor
Amy Hungerford:
That's right.
So she stays with her
mother-in-law,
Naomi, and they go back to the
land of Judah,
and there she becomes known as
a righteous woman,
a humble, loving and righteous
woman.
She is a daughter to her
mother-in-law,
Naomi.
She in fact stays with Naomi
because she loves her,
and there is this beautiful
line,
when Naomi urges her to go back
to her own mother and stay in
Moab, her own land.
She says to Naomi,
"Where you go,
I will go."
It's probably a line you've
heard, and it goes on.
It's a very beautiful--I
actually meant to bring my Bible
with me but I seem to have
forgotten it--a very beautiful
line.
So, it highlights her
faithfulness.
It's faith to Naomi that brings
her into the realm of Judah
under the protection of the God
of the Israelites and causes her
to become married to Boaz,
who is of a noble family.
And Ruth, finally,
is the great-grandmother of
King David.
So, she is an alien,
a stranger, who comes into the
Israelite fold and ends up being
in the lineage of their greatest
king.
And, in the New Testament,
of course, that also means that
she is of the House of Jesus,
because Jesus is of the House
of David.
So, in Christian teaching,
the story of Ruth is about the
foreshadowing of the gentile
inclusion of the Jewish
redemption.
So, the Jewish messiah is the
world's redeemer,
and the presence of the alien,
the stranger,
in his bloodline suggests that
expansion of the promise.
So, Ruth is a very
important character.
She is identified both by her
status as a stranger and by her
absolute centrality to a strong
identity,
either as Israelite or as
Christian, in these two versions
of this story of lineage.
It is no accident that this is
the name that Robinson has
chosen for this character.
Lots of elements of that story
enter into Ruth's story.
So Ruth, like her namesake,
cleaves to a woman relative,
and this is Sylvie.
She cleaves to and becomes
faithful to Sylvie,
her aunt, in place of her own
mother.
So, there is an exchange,
as in the biblical story,
between the mother that she has
lost, in this novel through the
mother's suicide.
She is replaced with an aunt.
There is also that sense that
she follows the aunt into a
wandering life.
So, in the biblical story,
the wandering has a very clear
end.
It's a wandering back to the
mother-in-law's land,
back to Judah.
You will have to think about,
as you get to the end of this
novel, whether there is an end
to the wandering in
Housekeeping,
 or whether it is an
unmitigated wandering.
Related to that question is
another one about narrative,
and that is:
where does this voice come
from?
What account of this voice are
we given?
Who is speaking to us and from
what position in the world?
This is a question I will get
to.
By the end of this lecture,
we will come to an
understanding of that question.
So, the biblical reference,
as well as the Melvillian
reference, suggests wandering.
And it suggests a complex
picture of identity,
and I think that's what you get
in the novel that connects it to
the conventions of the Identity
Plot.
So, there is one element,
which is the whole theme of
Lucille and Ruth,
which I was talking about,
coming from your comment.
That's the simple version.
There is a more complicated
version that I just want to show
you on 96,97.
This is when Lucille and Ruth
are playing hooky from school.
They've made their summer very
long, starting at March.
I don't recommend this,
by the way.
And they are walking around by
the railroad tracks,
and they come upon some hobos.
This is the top of 96: 
We in our plaid dresses
and Orlon sweaters and velveteen
shoes and they in their suit
coats with the vestigial collars
turned up and the lapels closed
might have been marooned
survivors of some lost pleasure
craft.
We and they alone might have
escaped the destruction of some
sleek train [That's an Ishmael
reference right there.
Ishmael is the only person to
escape the Pequod to come back
and tell the story,
so there's an element of that
Melville reference right here,
too.]
some flying shuttle of business
or commerce.
Lucille and I might have been
two of a numerous family off to
visit a grandmother in Lapwai
and they might have been touring
legislators or members of a
dance band.
Then our being there on a
bitter morning in ruined and
unsuitable clothes,
wordlessly looking at the
water, would be entirely
understandable.
As it was, I thought of telling
them that our grandfather still
lay in a train that had slid to
the lake floor long before we
were born.
Perhaps we all awaited a
resurrection.
Perhaps we expected a train to
leap out of the water,
caboose foremost,
as if in a movie run backward
and then to continue across the
bridge.
The passengers would arrive
sounder than they departed,
accustomed to the depth,
serene about their restoration
to the light,
disembarking at the station in
Fingerbone with a calm that
quieted the astonishment of
friends.
Say that this resurrection was
general enough to include my
grandmother and Helen,
my mother.
Say that Helen lifted our hair
from our napes with her cold
hands and gave us strawberries
from her purse.
Say that my grandmother pecked
our brows with her whiskery lips
and then all of them went down
the road to our house,
my grandfather,
youngish and high-pocketed,
just outside their conversation
like a difficult memory or a
ghost.
Then Lucille and I could run
off to the woods,
leaving them to talk of old
times and make sandwiches for
lunch and show each other
snapshots.
There's a lovely movement in
that passage.
So, first she moves from a
fantasy that would make the
hobos and Lucille and Ruth part
of comprehensible wholes,
comprehensible social groups,
going to identifiable places,
moving through spaces that made
sense.
So, if they were legislators,
members of a dance band,
or the girls were part of some
large family,
if they were all on some
pleasure craft,
it would explain the
inappropriateness of their
clothes and how they were
ruined,
if there had been a disaster.
All these are ways of imagining
a stable and socially legible
identity for all the people in
the scene, hobos and girls
alike.
Then it slips into this moment
where the difference between
Ruth and Lucille and the hobos
is insisted upon when she says,
"As it was, I thought of
telling them that our
grandfather still lay in a train
that had slid to the lake floor
long before we were born."
By turning to the hobos,
and in her mind addressing
them, she pushes them further
away from her and Lucille,
and begins to craft a
distinction between them.
They, Ruth and Lucille,
are rooted in Fingerbone by the
very weight of their family
lying at the bottom of the lake.
So, it gives them a rootedness
to the place that the hobos
can't claim.
The hobos' transience is
highlighted by this imagined
address to them.
When she further dreams of
the resurrection of the whole
train, all the family at the
bottom of the lake,
it allows her to imagine
herself and Lucille in this
warm, coherent embrace in a more
fulsome way.
So, the family,
then, isn't just imagined to
distinguish them from the hobos,
but to imagine a more fully
alive presence to her,
a family that will restore her
identity and her legibility to
herself,
not just to the hobos or the
town.
And I love this repeated
structure, verbal structure,
"say": the proposition,
"Say that Helen lifted our
hair," a very intimate gesture,
"Say that my grandmother pecked
our brows with her whiskery
lips,"
so that it invites us in to the
sensual commerce of a family,
and that's what she uses her
imagination to do.
But then, how it ends,
you can't miss this:
"Lucille and I could run off to
the woods."
The restoration of the family,
the resurrection,
is precisely what then will
liberate them to do exactly what
they're doing now,
running off to the woods,
being truant.
So, in this beautifully crafted
passage, where we see Ruth's
imagination moving from one
fantasy to another,
you see how the act of trying
to restore her own legibility
through this narrative,
through that repeated "say,"
the propositions,
finally gets her back to where
she was before.
So that the restoration of a
secure identity in a family is,
in fact, what then propels her
out, to imagine once again her
separateness from it.
So, what Robinson gives us,
I think, in this version,
not so much in the story of
Lucille and Ruth and the
difference between the two of
them,
which parses the problem as
being those who conform and can
be legible to the world and
those who are not and have to be
separate from the social world.
Lucille goes to the home
economics teacher.
Ruth goes with Sylvie.
That's a very simple split.
This passage,
and the way Ruth's mind works,
makes it much more complex,
so that it's the identity that
allows for the final alienation.
The identity or the security in
the family is what allows for
the finding of one's
separateness in the woods.
So, there are two kinds of
identity at issue,
the single and the communal,
or you could say the
contemplative and the social.
I think it's ultimately the
contemplative,
or the singular person,
that interests Robinson even
more.
But I will say that in the
initial reception of this
novel--because the Identity Plot
is so fixed in the pattern of
literary work in this period and
also fixed in the concerns of
critics--early readings of this
novel really were all about that
simpler version of
identification.
People read this as a feminist
novel that was really all about
women being liberated from a
confining domesticity and
finding their individual
identity out there in the world
some other way,
so that housekeeping and
its rejection were the major
terms of the criticism.
And, if you've ever seen the
film "Thelma and Louise," you
can sort of see the way it
chimes with a lot of what was
being thought in popular culture
on these questions.
You can think of Helen sailing
off the cliff into the lake,
which was seen as empowering,
in her car.
It did not take long for
readers of this novel to abandon
that, because of the
predominance of the themes that
I'm going to talk about next,
and that's the question of:
how can you be a coherent
person in this world?
What does that look like?
Ruth is very troubled by this
quality.
It comes though in tiny ways,
like on 78, with other
characters.
Lucille, we are told,
is caught cheating,
by her teacher,
on a test:
Lucille was much too
indifferent to school ever to be
guilty of cheating,
and it was only an evil fate
that had prompted her to write
Simon Bolivar and the girl in
front of her to write Simon
Bolivar when the answer was
obviously General Santa Anna.
This was the only error either
of them made and so their papers
were identical.
Lucille was astonished to find
that the teacher was so easily
convinced of her guilt,
so immovably persuaded of it,
calling her up in front of the
class and demanding that she
account for the identical
papers.
Lucille writhed under this
violation of her
anonymity.
What does it mean to call that
instance a violation of her
anonymity?
Well, what's imagined here is
that two minds,
by some mysterious process,
sort of melded with one another
and produced the same answers,
the exact, identical exams.
Lucille is so easy with the
idea of that kind of melding
that she is stunned by being
called out,
not as a violation of her
honor, but as a violation of her
anonymity.
She wanted to be without name,
essentially.
That's what being anonymous
means.
You're without a name.
You kind of blend in with the
crowd.
That's exactly what she was
doing when her mind blended with
that of the girl in front of her
and they produced identical
papers.
It's a funny little logic.
It's a tiny detail that you can
see, now, "rhyming" with other
details in the novel.
If you think of the
conversation between Lily and
Nona, the two maiden aunts that
take care of the girls for a
while,
that funny conversation on page
38, where, essentially,
these are two women who have
totally melded into each other.
They say the same things.
Their conversations are just
the ritual assurance of a shared
thread of thought:
"Someone filled the teapot."
"Children are hard for anybody."
"The Hartwick has always kept
them out."
"And I understand that."
"I don't blame them."
"No."
"No."
And it goes on.
These are two people who,
like Lucille and the girl in
front of her,
their minds have melded this
time by long habit,
by long living together,
and by their love for each
other.
It gets darker, though, on 105.
It's hard, as it turns out,
to maintain your separateness,
or to maintain a sense that you
really are an entity as a
person.
"Where's Lucille?"
[says Sylvie to Ruth,
having woken up on a bench.]
"Home," [says Ruth.]
"Well, that's fine," Sylvie
said.
"I'm glad to have a chance to
talk to you.
You're so quiet,
it's hard to know what you
think."
Sylvie had stood up,
and we began to walk toward
home.
"I suppose I don't know what I
think."
This confession embarrassed me.
It was a source of both terror
and comfort to me then that I
often seemed
invisible--incompletely or
minimally existent,
in fact.
It seemed to me that I made no
impact on the world,
and that in exchange I was
privileged to watch it unawares.
But my allusion to this feeling
of ghostliness sounded peculiar,
and sweat started all over my
body, convicting me on the spot
of gross corporeality.
"Well, maybe that will change,"
Sylvie said.
We walked a while without
speaking.
"Maybe it won't."
I dropped a step behind and
watched her face.
She always spoke to me in the
voice of an adult dispensing
wisdom.
I wanted to ask her if she knew
what she thought,
and if so, what the experience
of that sort of knowledge was
like,
and if not, whether she too
felt ghostly as I imagined she
must.
This is an instance where what
Ruth experiences might be said
to be total identity,
a very stable identity.
She cannot alienate herself
from herself to know what she is
thinking.
So, if you think about that
construction,
"I don't know what I think," it
posits an "I" who could know the
self.
That's two entities, not one.
So, if you don't know what you
think, maybe it's because there
isn't that objective distance
between an "I" and a self.
You're not self-alienated in
that way that,
remember, Ambrose always is in
Lost in the Funhouse.
That's his curse,
that he is alienated from
himself, and he can never
integrate.
So, it's like he's Lily and
Nona in one person,
two entities but somehow the
same.
Ruth, on the other hand,
is like an indivisible
substance, but because it's
indivisible it seems,
the logic here imagines,
it's ghostly.
Somehow, it's like an essence
or something unsubstantive,
because it doesn't have that
alienation built into it.
How can you exist in the
company of other people,
if the structure for even
knowing oneself doesn't seem to
exist in the mind?
There are other manifestations
that have more to do with
nature, and you can find one of
these on 115,116,
the bottom of 116- 15.
This is when Lucille and Ruth
spend the night outside.
It's one of two very important
moments when Ruth spends the
night outside.
Here's one with Lucille,
and there'll be one right after
the page where I asked you to
stop for today,
with Sylvie.
For a while she [Lucille]
sang "Mockingbird Hill," and
then she sat down beside me in
our ruined stronghold,
never still,
never accepting that all our
human boundaries were overrun.
Lucille would tell this story
differently.
She would say I fell asleep,
but I did not.
I simply let the darkness in
the sky become coextensive with
the darkness in my skull and
bowels and bones.
Everything that falls upon the
eye is apparition,
a sheet dropped over the
world's true workings.
The nerves and the brain are
tricked, and one is left with
dreams that these specters loose
their hands from ours and walk
away,
the curve of the back and the
swing of the coat so familiar as
to imply that they should be
permanent fixtures of the world,
when in fact nothing is more
perishable.
Say that my mother was as tall
as a man, and that she sometimes
set me on her shoulders,
so that I could splash my hands
in the cold leaves above our
heads.
Say that my grandmother sang in
her throat while she sat on her
bed and we laced up her big
black shoes.
Such details are merely
accidental.
Who could know but us?
And since their thoughts were
bent upon other ghosts than
ours, other darknesses than we
had seen,
why must we be left,
the survivors picking among
flotsam, among the small,
unnoticed,
unvalued clutter that was all
that remained when they
vanished, that only catastrophe
made notable?
Darkness is the only solvent.
While it was dark,
despite Lucille's pacing and
whistling, and despite what must
have been dreams (since even
Sylvie came to haunt me),
it seemed to me that there need
not be relic,
remnant, margin,
residue, memento,
bequest, memory,
thought, track or trace if only
the darkness could be perfect
and permanent.
So, Ruth feels her boundaries
overrun when the content of her
mind and the quality of the
world become indistinguishable,
the darkness in the mind and
the body indistinguishable from
the darkness outside her.
And this is a positive
condition for her,
insofar as it seems to
eliminate the need for things
like memories,
traces, remnants,
that list that we're given.
And I'm going to talk much more
about the question of loss on
Wednesday.
That's the theme for that
lecture on this novel,
so I'm going to leave that as
something for you to think
about: what is the status of
loss in the novel?
But for now what I want to note
is how the overrun boundaries of
the self is imagined as
redemptive.
So, the loss of identity,
as against some other outside
thing--be it nature,
another person,
another piece of the community,
another group--that is imagined
not as a problem but as
something to be embraced.
These observations about
Ruth's permeability,
and the general permeability of
persons one to another,
brings us back to that question
that I asked a little while ago.
Where does Ruth's voice come
from?
And here I want to note that
language is imagined to be all
mixed up with the material of
the world.
And, if you look on page 85,
you can see one example of
this.
(Oops.
Sorry.
I think that's not the-- Sorry.
Yes, this is the one I want.)
I remember Sylvie walking
through the house with a scarf
tied around her hair,
carrying a broom.
Yet this was the time that
leaves began to gather in the
corners.
There were leaves that had been
through the winter,
some of them worn to a net of
veins.
There were scraps of paper
among them, crisp and strained
from their mingling in the cold
brown liquors of decay and
regeneration,
and on these scraps there were
sometimes words.
One read Powers Meet,
and another,
which had been the flap of an
envelope, had a penciled message
in an anonymous hand:
I think of you.
Perhaps Sylvie when she swept
took care not to molest them.
Perhaps she sensed a Delphic
niceness in the scattering of
these leaves and paper,
here and not elsewhere,
thus and not otherwise.
Words are all bound up in the
material of the world,
the stuff that gathers in the
corners of a house.
And, moreover,
they are words that are very
evocative, "Powers Meet," as if
somehow language and leaves
meeting in the corner of a house
signifies the various powers of
the cosmos coming together:
"Powers Meet."
"I think of you" and its
anonymity, its character as
coming from an envelope flap,
the kind of piece of paper that
travels from one person to
another, suggests a
communicativeness,
a general intent surrounding
these pieces of matter,
leaves and paper.
So, two things associated
with language,
the words themselves,
and also intention,
gather around these debris.
If that is true,
we might also think of 126,
the dictionary full of pressed
flowers.
This is another beautiful image.
So, Lucille has asked Ruth to
look up "pinking shears" in the
dictionary, because she's trying
to make her dress and she
doesn't know what the pinking
shears are that are called for
in the pattern.
And so she asks Ruth to look it
up.
Ruth finds, pressed in to old
dictionary, flowers that her
grandfather has gathered,
all filed under their
alphabetical name.
And, she is much more concerned
with the flowers than she is
with getting the definition of
"pinking shears."
So, here you have two visions
of language: one--the "pinking
shears," language,
the horde of words--is for
identifying things so you can do
practical tasks.
And, in this case,
the practical task is Lucille's
effort to blend in with the
town.
Ruth's conception of language
is that it is a horde of
expressive gems or (Well,
that's not a good way of
putting it) it's a vocabulary of
the world that includes not only
words but also flowers.
And that there are beauties of
each, all in their place,
in this dictionary.
So, if language comes,
almost viscerally,
from nature,
here we can see exactly how
Robinson is in the realm of the
nineteenth-century
Transcendentalists,
and here I'm going to read you
a little bit from Emerson's
essay Nature.
This is what he says about
being in the woods.
Within these plantations
of God a decorum and sanctity
reign, a perennial festival is
dressed,
and the guest sees not how he
should tire of them in a
thousand years.
In the woods we return to
reason and faith.
There I feel that nothing can
befall me in life,
no disgrace,
no calamity leaving me my eyes
which nature cannot repair.
Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe
air, and uplifted into infinite
space, all mean egotism
vanishes.
I become a transparent eyeball.
I am nothing.
I see all.
The currents of the universal
being circulate through me.
I am part or parcel of God.
The name of the nearest friend
sounds then foreign and
accidental.
To be brothers,
to be acquaintances,
master or servant,
is then a trifle and a
disturbance.
I am the lover of uncontained
and immortal beauty.
In the wilderness I find
something more dear and connate
than in streets or villages in
the tranquil landscape and
especially in the distant line
of the horizon.
Man beholds somewhat as
beautiful as his own
nature.
So, the transparent eyeball,
"I am nothing.
I see all," that is the sense
you get of Ruth's voice,
that Ruth's voice is like the
voice of that transparent
eyeball.
The difference between
Emerson's vision and Robinson's,
I think, is the way Robinson is
willing to let the human
environment,
the built environment,
the house, become part and
parcel of that woodsy whole that
Emerson so wants to immerse
himself in.
So, the house is opened to
leaves;
leaves are mixed up with pieces
of paper with words.
And so, you get that sense of a
creation that is saying
something to this consciousness,
in the same way that Emerson
imagines, but it can happen in a
house.
She embellishes this vision of
a speaking, material world.
So, Ruth's sense of self
mirrors that fluidity that you
get in the transparent eyeball.
There is also something that
you can see.
(Wait.
Hold on.
I'm now trying to find the page
number that I need.
This is 16 through 19.
Here it is.) That fluidity of
consciousness that the
transparent eyeball gives you is
beautifully on display in this
passage towards the beginning of
the novel,
when Ruth is thinking about how
her grandmother responded to the
death of her husband and the
departure of her daughters.
I'm not going to read this
whole thing because it would
simply take too long,
but I just want to show you
what happens over these three
pages.
So, on the top of 16,
this is another one of those
hypotheticals:
One day my grandmother
must have carried out a basket
of sheets to hang in the spring
sunlight,
wearing her widow's black,
performing the rituals of the
ordinary as an act of faith.
Say there were two or three
inches of hard old snow on the
ground, with earth here and
there oozing through the broken
places,
and that there was warmth in
the sunlight,
when the wind did not blow it
all away.
And say she stooped
breathlessly in her corset to
lift up a sodden sheet by its
hems,
and say that when she had
pinned three corners to the
lines it began to billow and
leap in her hands,
to flutter and tremble,
and to glare with the light,
and that the throes of the
thing were as gleeful and strong
as if a spirit were dancing in
its cerements.
That wind!
she would say,
because it pushed the skirts of
her coat against her legs and
made the strands of her hair
fly.
It came down the lake,
and it smelled sweetly of snow,
and rankly of melting snow,
and it called to mind the
small, scarce stemmy flowers
that she and Edmund would walk
half a day to pick.
Did you catch that little
transition there,
transition from proposition,
"Say that this happens,
say this is what my grandmother
did and saw and smelled," to a
seamless inhabitation through
that free,
indirect discourse.
Ruth enters the mind of her
grandmother and starts to
inhabit her memories of her
husband from long before the
time when Ruth was born.
We smell the wind,
with Ruth, through the
grandmother, and we know that it
reminds her of the flowers that
she and Edmund would pick.
And then, you get a long
meditation of the most private
thoughts that the grandmother
has about her husband,
and what he's like in the
springtime.
And this is at the bottom of
17, and it concludes with this
line: "At such times…."
She's just imagined him as a
primitive man rather than formal
Edmund.
At such times he was as
forgetful of her as he was of
his suspenders and his
Methodism,
but all the same it was then
that she loved him best,
as a soul all unaccompanied,
like her own.
It's that "soul all
unaccompanied" that most
concerns Robinson as a writer.
And here Ruth imagines a kind
of free access to that other
soul that is her grandmother.
And, if you look in the middle
of 18, there is one of these
amazing tense shifts.
Ruth is going from meditating
on her early widowhood as a
memory, to a time a little less
far back,
to the wake of her daughters'
departures, the grandmother's
grief at their departure.
And now [That's the "now"
referred to in the middle of
18.]
And now to comfort herself my
grandmother would not reflect on
the unkindness of her children
or of children in general.
She had noticed many times
always that her girls' faces
were soft and serious and inward
and still when she looked at
them just as they had been when
they were small children,
just as they were now when they
were sleeping.
If a friend was in the room,
her daughters would watch his
or her face intently and tease
or soothe or banter and any one
of them could gauge and respond
to the finest changes of
expression or tone,
even Sylvie if she chose to,
but it did not occur to them to
suit their words and manners to
her looks and she did not want
them to.
In fact, she was often prompted
or restrained by the thought of
saving this unconsciousness of
theirs.
She was then a magisterial
woman not only because of her
height and her large,
sharp face, not only because of
her upbringing,
but also because it suited her
purpose to be what she seemed to
be so that her children would
never be startled or surprised
and to take on all the postures
and vestments of matron to
differentiate her life from
theirs so that her children
would never feel intruded
upon.
She's careful to guard their
separateness.
And then, you get this
wonderful meditation--quite
mysterious, and I don't actually
have a full account of it--why
the grandmother finding the
potatoes in the garden comes to
be a moment of revelation.
Maybe this is something you can
think about.
Why is it specifically that
detail that Robinson chooses to
make a moment of epiphany when
the grandmother says:
"What have I seen?
What have I seen?
The earth and the sky and the
garden not as they always are,"
and she saw her daughters' faces
not as they always were or as
other people's were and she was
quiet and aloof and watchful not
to startle the strangeness away.
She had never taught them to be
kind to her.
So, in that three-page passage,
Ruth's voice inhabits her
grandmother's mind at widely
varied moments in the
grandmother's life:
important,
extremely intimate moments,
even the strange moment of
epiphany in the garden.
No one is anywhere near or
around.
It's a very mysterious kind of
epiphany.
Who knows, really,
what it means?
And yet Ruth can tell us about
it.
Robinson has described her
writerly project as giving us
access to the kinds of things
that people would say if they
could,
and I just want to read you
this quotation from Robinson:
"One of the primary mistakes
people make is to take people's
spoken language to be equivalent
to the level of their thinking.
I think it's one of the oddest
errors."
What she takes herself to be
doing is to be providing for
Ruth's mind a language that can
match the flexibility of this
young person's consciousness,
its range, its permeability,
and also in that very supple
voice to be her identity,
so the voice becomes who Ruth
is.
So, no matter how far she
ranges across her boundaries of
person, no matter how indistinct
the darkness in her mind is from
the darkness outside her body,
that voice can still be heard.
And it can still be identified
as hers, even as it ranges in
and out of her grandmother's
thoughts,
in and out of Sylvie's
thoughts, in and out of
Lucille's thoughts,
in and out of her mother's
thoughts.
So that, in the end,
is what constitutes something
like identity in this novel.
Now, on Wednesday,
in the very short time I will
have, I'll talk about what that
voice has to do with the
question of loss which haunts
this novel in every sentence,
as I'm sure you've noticed,
very elegiac sense to this
novel.
So, I'm going to reconcile this
argument that I've made today
with an analysis of what that is
doing in the novel.
