Photograph of monument to Fernando Pessoa in front of cafe “A Brasileira” in Lisbon by Nol Aders, via Wikimedia Commons
If you are Pessoa curious, now is the time to read him. Let me explain why.
The name Pessoa means person. It is related to ‘persona’ which has an etymological connection to ‘mask.’ One of the things that Pessoa’s work does for us is to put pressure on our understanding and to make us think about the nature of the self and identity. His work seems to show that the self is not necessarily a unity, but can be multiple.
Pessoa is not just one, but several unique voices in European modernist literature. Contemporaneous with Joyce and Proust, Pessoa’s unique literary universe is simultaneously intriguing and exciting, illuminating, humorous and unsettling. In our upcoming introductory study we will meet Álvaro de Campos, futurist Whitmanesque poet, Ricardo Reis the stoical neo-pagan classicist, Pessoa the experimental modernist, and Alberto Caeiro, their master, the almost anti-poet (for whom metaphor itself is an anathema), along with Bernardo Soares, the Lisbon book keeper and author of The Book of Disquiet. All these identities resided within one individual.
So, what can we get from reading Pessoa in 2025?
Pessoa’s work is above all a deep exploration of identity – indeed, it is in many ways a shattering of it, of the idea of the single, stable self. Pessoa fascinates because of the method of self replication, represented by his heteronymous writing.
With Pessoa there is a lot to take in. In a group study we can grapple together with the meanings and implications of this unusual group of authors: is this an elaborate literary hoax? What does it mean that one of the heteronyms denied that Pessoa exists? What does it mean that another of the heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, gave to Pessoa, one evening in a restaurant where the two regularly dined, a bundle of papers, journals and aphorisms, philosophical musings and thoughts and dreams, which was to become The Book of Disquiet?
Pessoa lived through a time of incredible political turmoil to which he both did and did not remain immune. To read Pessoa’s many personas – his heteronyms – is to come to terms with a complex coexistence of different philosophies, world views and aesthetic sensibilities. Pessoa was an experimenter and an innovator, perhaps a revolutionary. As such he produced some of the most astonishing and unique writing of his age that continues to speak to our lives today.
Our six week Introduction to Fernando Pessoa begins on Tuesday 13 May (12.00 noon – 2.00 pm BST). If you are interested but uncertain about joining the study please email us and we will arrange for you to try the first session without charge!
In interesting news for lovers of The Odyssey, cinema seems to have caught the Homeric bug, with not one but two major films on the way.
In May, Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche will star in The Return. Director Umberto Pasolini tells the story of the final books set in Ithaca, thereby eliminating the need for special effects, monsters and turning his actors into pigs. Given that the glorious stop-motion visual effects produced by Ray Harryhausen for the 1963 epic Jason and the Argonauts made that the definitive visual version for so many, it may be wise to tell the story on screen as a purely human struggle (there is no Athena in the cast list, so there won’t even be an appearance by the goddess).
Meanwhile, Christopher Nolan is also working on a film version of The Odyssey with a release date in 2026. Cast members are being announced as I write, and it will be interesting to see how the director of The Dark Knight, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer tackles the challenges of bringing this foundational epic story to life.
The idea that there is no one way to experience or connect with The Odyssey is again in my mind as Toby, Jane and I start to prepare for our fifth trip to the small island of Agistri. Even though this will be our fourth time tackling The Odyssey in this unique setting, I don’t have the feeling of returning to a familiar groove. Each morning on Agistri I walk out to a headland to watch the sunrise, and I have never had the same walk twice: every day there is something new or different that catches my notice. Similarly, our subject may be the same but, as no two groups are alike, the discussion will always be as individual as the colours of the sunrise or the number of alpine swifts that swoop to catch insects as the heat warms the cliffs.
From ancient times, Homer has been praised for his vividness. As readers we can see, hear and feel every corner of his world. So we have not just the sweep of the narrative and the big themes of honour, hospitality and homecoming, but the texture and details of life – and it’s those details, impossible to absorb all at once, that for me make repeated readings so satisfying.
In the past, some participants have come to the study via the novel Ulysses, seeking a deeper understanding of the origins of James Joyce’s masterpiece. And this idea of The Odyssey as a deep well that has nourished and inspired writers since its beginning is central to our work with the text. I bring with me to the island a series of Odyssey poems written over time, by poets from Sappho to Terrance Hayes who, like other readers of The Odyssey, have found many ways to dip into the source and find something that they can make their own. Sharing these poems with the group opens up the text, bringing it into focus in our daily lives.
Our study space on Agistri is open to the calm waters of the Saronic Gulf and part of the rhythm of the day is watching the boats arrive and leave from Skala port, every type of vessel from car ferries to sailboats chartered for a day trip to the island. To me they are all beautiful – at least as we watch from a distance – and it’s Tennyson that I recite most often to myself as one of them leaves the dock and glides silently away from us:
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices.
I am looking forward to sharing these experiences and more with another group of enthusiastic readers in the warm embrace of Agistri and the Greek sunshine.
Our 2025 Odyssey study on Agistri runs from 28 April to 5 May, there are still places available if you are interested in joining us.
Six months seems like a long commitment and reading this 933 page masterpiece can be a daunting prospect. There will be literary, historical and classical references you may not know (yet), but I promise you it will be worth it! Here are ten reasons why:
Ulysses teaches you to be a better reader.
Reading Ulysses helps you to understand your own interior thoughts and language.
Ulysses is frighteningly pertinent to today’s climate of xenophobia and tyranny.
Ulysses is funny.
Ulysses features a dancing, singing bar of soap.
Everyone who reads Ulysses finds references, allusions and images that resonate.
Once banned for obscenity, Ulysses is up-close and personal to the body.
The language of Ulysses can be breathtakingly beautiful: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit . . .”
The vivid and seductive response to ignorance and injustice in Ulysses will inspire you.
Ulysses is the story of one man, but a woman (Molly) gets the last word!
What past Ulysses readers in the Salon have said:
“I must thank you for a most wonderful study of Ulysses. I couldn’t imagine that I would actually make it through. Occasionally I felt inadequate, but always eager and always willing to reach. And what a reward in the end: to have read a brilliant novel, and to have made a connection with a group of fellow voyagers that I cannot praise enough. How fortunate we have all been. It is never really over though is it? Bloom will be with me forever, pulling me back to Dublin and the streets therein.”
“Those of us who have done Proust and Ulysses with Toby are longing for her to take us on another read . . . We all love the long read.”
For more on this join my lecture and discussion Why Read Ulysses? (Tuesday 24 November on Zoom), the cost is redeemable against our next Ulysses study starting in January 2025.
When Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet—Shakespeare’s longest and most deeply philosophical play—opened in 1948, the critics were almost without exception entranced. The exhilarating production won four Oscars, including Best Actor and Best Picture. Olivier’s celebrated version also paved the way for other filmmakers to significantly cut the text, an action already commonly undertaken in stage performances, but one which later critics were to lament. Among other cuts, Olivier and his co-editor, Alan Dent, struck Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the text along with Fortinbras’ last entrance and at least two of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquies. Had Olivier massacred the Bard?
Kenneth Branagh may have thought so. His 1996 production showcased nearly the entire script, resulting in a film with a running time of 4 hours and 2 minutes, nearly 1.5 hours longer than Olivier’s production half a century before, which came in at a slick 153 minutes. (It may or may not be significant that Branagh’s version garnered zero Academy Awards, though it did receive four nominations that did not include either Best Actor or Best Picture, but did include Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay).
Counter-critics to those lamenting Olivier’s cuts have praised the 1948 production for being, for example, ‘thrillingly intelligent and moving’ (Rafferty, 2000, para. 3), also referring to the interpretation as having been sensitively reduced to its ‘largest, most mysterious, and most intractable theme’ (Rafferty, 2000, para. 4): morality.
The London Literary Salon’s latest study of Hamlet also examines a carefully curated script. Our study will focus on 2,600 of Hamlet’s 4,167 lines. We will be working from the 1604 quarto, which was printed from a manuscript believed to be Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’ (his rough drafts). Our own ‘version’ is more exhaustive than Olivier’s. It includes all the play’s subplots—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras, and Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia—as well as all of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Together, we will dive into the heart of the text, considering not only its philosophical core but also its most spectral and cinematic aspects: the paranormal, incest, adultery, murder, madness, and above all, revenge.
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed . . .”
For many of us the opening lines of Ulysses, which usher in the one day (16 June 1904) on which Leopold Bloom takes his long perambulation around Dublin, are so familiar they scarcely need repeating. And yet, there are always people who have yet to read – or re-read – James Joyce’s monumental work of art. For anyone contemplating this journey through time we are planning a new Ulysses study starting early in 2025, details will be announced here on the website and in our newsletter soon (please make sure you are subscribed).
We have some incredible readers who are just in the process of completing Ulysses with Toby, after six months of what she describes as: “mad reading, struggling for understanding, deep probing of textual complexity, gender roles and identifications, the awful weight of history, antisemitism, the haunting of grief and the meaning of the lemon soap – a lovely group of readers have triumphed in their work with Joyce – their final meeting happens this week.”
Unusually, we are not celebrating Bloomsday formally this year, BUT the gallery above is a reminder of Bloomsday and other Joyce-related events the Salon has enjoyed in recent years (and there will be more in the future). Meanwhile, here are a few things going on if you are keen to find a last minute opportunity:
The London Balloonatics, who can normally be found on Bloomsday re-enacting Bloom’s Dublin walk on the streets of London, are instead walking in Dublin this year (find them on the Bloomsday Festival website link below) but offer this audio for those of us who are not in Dublin with them!
Our friends at Audrey are offering a ‘listen-along’ Ulysses opportunity.
For anyone in Dublin the James Joyce Centre’s annual Bloomsday Festival has lots going on this weekend, as does the Derry-based YES Festival celebrating female creativity with a focus on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.
In London the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith is offering a play Norah & Jim and an art exhibition based on Ulysses.
“Strolling the decks in the morning sun as the ship cruises past the islands of Cephalonia and Ithaca is the nicest part of the trip”
The Man in Seat 61
That sentence sold me the idea of travelling to The Iliad study by train and ferry rather than plane. And it turned out to be worth every jot of the extra time, planning and money.
I started with The Man in Seat 61website, which recommended Day 1: Paris-Zurich-Milan. Day 2 Milan-Bari then overnight ferry to Patras. Day 3 Patras-Piraeus-Agistri. Looks daunting, doesn’t it? And to begin with it was. But once I started booking the trains, it fell into place and the trip itself went very smoothly and was fascinating.
Day 1: The Eurostar London to Paris. The schedule doesn’t dictate taking a night in Paris but, since I abhor early starts and have two nephews living there, I did. This enabled me to see the breath-taking Brancusi retrospective at the Pompidou Centre and visit the Musee de la Vie Romantique in Pigalle, a gem of a mansion-museum whose charming courtyard cafe is worth it alone. But you can go straight on to Milan that day. Typical timings: London 08.01-11.18 Paris; Paris 12.22-16.26 Zurich; Zurich 17.33-20.50 Milan.
Musee de la Vie Romantique, Paris
Normally there is a direct train Paris-Milan but, following a landslide in 2023, that route is closed until 2025. Going via Zurich lengthens the journey, but you get to see views of the Alps and travel alongside the Zürichsee and Lake Lugano for long stretches. Deeply enjoyable. I stayed at the functional but comfortable Mythos Hotel, 4 minutes from Milan Centrale Station (which is a stunning example of Mussolini-era grand architecture).
Architectural detail, Milan Centrale Station
Day 2: A train all the way down the East coast of Italy to Bari leaving Milan at 08.05, arriving 15.27. Try to sit on the left for beautiful views of the Adriatic. I paid an extra €20 for business class, giving very comfy seats and a little snack. Once in Bari, you could get a taxi to the ferry terminal, which would mean driving along the perimeter fence, entering by the vehicle gate and doubling all the way back. This is the walking route Google maps will show. But you can walk there more directly in about 30 minutes: go in a straight line from the station towards the port. Weave your way through the charming old town, bearing right around the impressive Castello Normanno-Svevo until you join the last stretch of the road route. Keep walking to your right (as you face the sea) until you get to the gate, then follow signs for Terminal Crociere. Don’t be deterred! The terminal is set up for cars not pedestrians and sometimes it looks like you are walking through a building site, but you eventually reach the big blue check-in building. Boarding starts at 17.00 for a 19.30 departure. The ferry is a huge modern complex so not as romantic as a Greek trireme, but the skies, the Ionian wind and the wine-dark sea are the same. I love sleeping on trains and boats, the motion providing a gentle lolling. You can get 1-4 berth cabins, a reclining seat or, as some brave souls were doing, just bed down in a corridor or on deck. In the morning you sail past Ithaca and into the Gulf of Patras, with marvellous sea and island views.
Bari Old Town
Day 3: The ferry lands at 13.00 at Patras on the West coast of Greece, so you need to get a bus/train combo to Piraeus. This was quite challenging, but that great technological aid of asking the people around you still works pretty well. Follow the lorries to find your way out of the port. You might be able to pick up a taxi here, but it was rather deserted. I teamed up with three youngsters from Zurich, Paris and Boston and walked 20 mins along the coast to the old station. The trains no longer run from here or from Patras at all – you have to get a substitute bus for the first leg, but a very friendly women inside sold us the tickets and told us where to get the bus to Kiato (a further 20 minute walk). It leaves at 14.25 so you have plenty of time. It travels mainly along the south side of the Gulf of Corinth, with mountains visible over the water. Beautiful. From Kiato you pick up the regular train to Piraeus (though be alert: at one point it was “all change” and we had to get a train on the adjacent platform to continue). Arrival in Piraeus is 17.41 so you can get straight on a ferry to Agistri (though you would miss part of the first evening session), but I stayed overnight (Hotel Lilia, another simple and welcoming hotel) and had a lovely Italian meal in Restaurant Parmigiano overlooking Zeas Harbour in Pasamilani. This also gave me the next morning in Piraeus to explore its many charms such as the Kastella district, the Archaeological Museum or the Hellenic Maritime Museum before hopping on a ferry around lunchtime.
Zeas Harbour restaurant in Piraeus
The reckoning? A flight would have taken a full day door-to-door and cost £100-200. My trip could be done in 3 days and the cost for transport plus Milan hotel was £700. Clearly overland options are only for those with budget to spare or who can cut down on expenditure elsewhere to make it possible. But what price do you put on the glory of seeing the Swiss Alps outside your window, feeling the evening vibe of Milan Centrale, strolling through the old town of Bari, meeting other foot passengers on the ferry, each on their own odysseys, eating a breakfast coffee and croissant as you sail past Ithaca and engaging with the local people of the country you are in. It beats the inside of an airport and plane!
Each travel study is its own epic experience. We work hard to put together the text, the group, a special site, unique eating experiences, relevant gallery or museum visits, outdoor adventures and of course, a wild swim or two, but still I experience a healthy anxiety in hoping that all the planning will result yet again in the magical coming together of minds, words and ideas that makes these times so unique.
The study of a book that I have not previously worked through makes this pre-trip tension even greater. For our latest big Woolf read, Night and Day in Alfriston earlier this month, I had the great privilege of working with Dr. Karina Jakubowicz, whose deep knowledge, great energy and humour made the facilitation electric. She also makes a fine fire!
Added to this, we had a core group of dedicated Woolfians – some of whom are in the ongoing diary study of Woolf – who had prepared reflections from that work that informed our reading of Night and Day.
We were also truly enriched by our contact and meeting with the brilliant folks at Much Ado Books in Alfriston. The space they have created, with such love for books and art, welcomes all readers into the bright and illuminating world of beautiful books. They have a wonderful variety of rooms and extra buildings dedicated to different aspects of literary art, and they kindly hosted one of our sessions in the barn that houses their collection of Book Art – a vibrant response to the meeting of word and material. I value this connection greatly and was inspired by their embracing space and passion for books. We plan to be back in Alfriston next April and look forward to more events and exchanges with this very special location.
On first diving-in, Night and Day can seem like a conventional late nineteenth century novel of romantic entanglements, but our time around the work introduced new understanding as we were guided by Woolf’s probing – and at times ironic – gaze into family life, women’s work and social relationships in the late Edwardian era. In his literary theories, Mikhail Bakhtin developed the proposal that social situation and relationships determine the structure of utterance. Night and Day, positioned at a moment of immense change in the world, as portrayed in Woolf’s later novels, captures this change by using traditional language to address the rigid values around marriage, love and the position of women. But into this (teetering) order, Woolf inserts dreams, darknesses, gaps in language and volition that reflect the difficulty of resistance to a system in which one is embedded. By the novel’s end, some of the characters are stepping out towards a new world, just as Woolf herself will move towards more experimental forms of language and complex understanding of character in all her subsequent works.
During our time in Alfriston, some of us would venture to Seaford early in the mornings for a dip in the sea to get our minds moving. As we drove to the beach on 13 April, we learned of the Iranian missile attack on Israel (particularly relevant to one of our participants, a political journalist whose radio interview that morning was abruptly cancelled). Suddenly, war and global conflict invaded our idyll, giving us a different understanding of how Woolf could have written this most domestic of novels in the midst of the Great War (a concern voiced by many critics, especially in her immediate group). We realised that with the threat of war around us (and I believe that awareness of our global position means we are all implicated in war anywhere in the world) we might turn purposefully to the drama of human relationships, where conflict can spark and glow to destruction. We also reflected that, in the chaos of the news around us, the generation of hope in human potential for progressive change is an ember that must be nurtured.
There were so many moments of glittering insight and pleasure during our time together engrossed in this lesser-known Woolf work. I became aware of how the great privilege of time dedicated to this process of exploration results in an expanded space in the mind. Like swimming in fresh waters, the flotsam is softened and made fluid. With time spent focusing on a narrative, away from the needs of home, work and family, my mind gains strength as I move towards a healthy kind of attention.
The study of great literature gives me an envelope within which to manage the disparate struggles of being human. There is no absolute truth to learn, but always a greater understanding of who we are in relationship to others and the world around us.
Fernando Pessoa by unknown photographer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was, quipped one critic, Portugal’s three greatest modern poets. It is certainly true that to read Pessoa is not just to read one poet but to enter into a whole literature.
Pessoa’s attempt to forge a new literary modernism for Portugal took shape through his creation of different literary personas. He called these personas ‘heteronyms’, to distinguish them from pseudonyms, as essentially distinct personalities, all with biographies, literary styles and philosophical and political ideas as different from each other as from Pessoa himself.
Pessoa authored works under at least 72 different names throughout his life, and this compulsion seems to have been both an aesthetic and a psychological necessity. But at the centre of his most important and accomplished literary achievements is the poetry authored by the three main heteronyms: Alberto Caiero, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis; by Pessoa himself as one of that company of heteronyms; and his great prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, authored by the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares.
As readers of the poetry of Fernando Pessoa we encounter the works of four unmistakably distinct poets: Alberto Caeiro, Zen-like nature poet; Alvaro de Campos, avant-garde author of futurist odes; Ricardo Reis, melancholic classicist and philosophical stoic; and Pessoa himself, whose poetry restlessly explores questions of identity and self.
In The Book of Disquiet readers encounter something utterly unique in world literature. Described by Pessoa as ‘a fact-less autobiography’, this text is fragmentary, circular, without beginning end or middle, without narrative, plot or conclusion. Almost impossible to categorise, this work may be regarded as (among other things) one of the greatest literary/philosophical studies in mood, in melancholy, in existential ennui, and their relation to meaning and existence.
What we find in Pessoa’s oeuvre is the radical co-existence of seemingly disparate and contradictory ideas; we find bold experiments of avant-garde-ism and quiet accomplishments of form and tone; we find the perennial themes of art, philosophy, identity, the nature of the self, the sense we have of our place in the cosmos. For me, Pessoa’s work captures a psychological truth of the modern age – one which by its nature resists reductionism, but in which we might recognise ourselves and our contemporary struggles for meaning. We find that in these preoccupations, Pessoa is our contemporary.
If you have not yet read Pessoa I can promise you an extraordinary literary experience. If you are intrigued, we are offering an introduction to his work starting in March.
One of the challenges we face in the Salon is the viability of ‘Long’ or ‘Slow Read’ studies. These are designed to offer a more in-depth consideration of a text. Instead of visiting a few significant passages, the ‘Long Read’ studies give time and attention to all the richness of the writing, we move slowly enough through the text to address greater complexity and the quieter moments of revelation.
The challenge is that while there is enthusiasm for these studies — and participants find them immensely satisfying — over time people’s circumstances may change, forcing them to drop out or take a break. The good news is that there are some extended studies — for example the Ulysses Slow Read, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Finnegans’ Wake, The Iliad Unhurried — that it is quite possible to join part way through. The groups immersed in these huge texts will support and help new recruits to enjoy the meditative rhythm of the experience. Some (Ulysses and Iliad) do require you to have read the work once, but for others this is not necessary and in all cases the facilitator can advise you and suggest ways of getting up to speed before you decide whether or not to join. You can see what’s currently available to book (including more typically-paced readings of Ulysses and the Iliad, with more to be announced soon) on our study calendar.
So why not take a chance? You may find the pay-off to be increased attention and focus, a practice of consciousness that is, as Iain McGilchrist describes below, ‘the ultimate creative act.’ I also encourage you to widen your perspective by choosing a study outside of your comfort zone — dip into the classics for a new perspective, see what George Eliot is exploring in her portrayal of tensions in the social relationships and gender roles of nineteenth-century England, check out the distilled power of poetry or short stories — and, if you find you have benefited from your work in the Salon, do please tell a few friends (you could even gift them a Salon study for the New Year).
One recent Proust participant described the Salon experience like this: “ . . . thoroughly enjoying the Proust. Exactly what I anticipated and wanted. It’s the stimulus of the discussion I find motivating. I’m not that interested in the reading round it. The group is warm and tolerant enough for me to utter things that I quickly realise are wrong (a long-standing way of learning with me) and I can readjust. I guess the dialectic approach has always appealed to me and it is great to be in a rich environment in which I can indulge it without irritating people (too much anyway!) and deepen my understanding. Basically a blast! “
Another gift of the Salon: receiving reading recommendations galore! Thanks to a Salonista I am just discovering the wisdom of Iain McGilchrist, this really speaks to me of what I gain in the ongoing practice of deep reading and broadening discussion:
“The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent. Once again, this leaves no room for a philosophy of ‘anything goes’. What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it—if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.
“The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’.”
Marilynne Robinson — winner of the Pulitzer Prize (2005), PEN/ Hemingway Award (1982), Women’s Prize for Fiction (2009), National Book Critics Circle Award (2015, 2004) among many others — is considered one of the world’s greatest living novelists. She was Barack Obama’s choice for philosophical discussions to help him in his Presidency of the USA, and she has been cited as an inspiration by many recent writers of fiction and non-fiction. Even so, I am surprised to find very well-read people who have not heard of her or who have never read her.
For me, reading Robinson’s novels is like being immersed in a mountain stream after an arduous, sweaty hike. She goes directly into what is tormented and messy in the human heart and, through her crystalline prose, finds what glows there. Robinson is drawn to the places of paradox in the human psyche. For example, in the Gilead Quartet one of her questions is how a community, historically defined by a fierce commitment to the Abolitionist movement, might evolve in a later generation to disregard the racism at the core of the American project (and therefore at the heart of apparently ethical small-town, Protestant America).
Robinson’s theology is an essential part of her vision. While this may put some readers off, what Robinson does with her faith is to employ it in her muscular inquiry of human behaviour. How is it, for example, that some of those who are most committed to a monotheistic code of a life of good values, end up becoming rigid and dangerously dogmatic in their views? How is it that the Christian values of charity and grace seem to grow into prejudice and harsh judgements of neighbours?
A recent Salon discussion around Home (published 2008) became one of the most respectful and rich interfaith exchanges I have had the privilege to experience: the group comprised practitioners of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, an Anglican priest, a few raised in the Catholic church, an atheist, several agnostics and a few who follow Buddhist principles. Because Robinson creates a community of faith that she then uses to consider how faith may be used – or misused – in translating values into living, we as a group found material that helped us consider how our various theological imprints shaped our view of the world, specifically in the realms of forgiveness, salvation and grace. As Nicky Von Fraunhofer, co-facilitator for the Robinson studies commented: “Jack’s position in the family is the provoker of questions about the family’s faith and attitudes, especially over the theology of guilt and sin. This plays very directly into the story of the Prodigal, but Marilynne extends it here, to what happens after the son comes home.”
A recent piece in the New Yorker gives a precise reading of what Robinson offers, particularly in reflection of the tormented story of American history:
Her nonfiction had taken on the thunderous tones of a prophet, but in her fiction she found the range of the psalmist, sometimes gentle, sometimes wild, and always full of empathy and wonder. “I have a bicameral mind,” she says, explaining that her lectures and essays are a way of “aerating” ideas that often originate in agitation or outrage, whereas the novels are a different exercise entirely. The essays are the most explicit expression of her ideas, the novels the most elegant. “With any piece of fiction, any work of literature, the assumption is that a human life matters,” Robinson says. For her, this is a theological commitment, a reflection of her belief in the Imago Dei: the value of each of us, inclusive of our faults. “That is why I love my characters. I can only write about characters I love.”
Casey Cep, The New Yorker
Robinson’s vision, as expressed in her fiction, honours the immediacy of life; rendering the details of sensation and thought with a lyric and respectful attention. Her view is intimate and direct to the quiet inner lives of her characters, but from that personal space, she takes in huge questions – around faith, family, homelessness, hypocrisy, grief, identity, ecology – engaged with the natural world, but always in respectful and exploratory mode that invites the reader in.
There are passages in her fiction that I just relish (I have been known to pull out her book in the midst of a dinner party and subject the guests to a reading):
“For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”
Marilynne Robinson
Robinson’s work generates energetic, even passionate discussions as the exploration in her fiction goes deeply into the contradictions of contemporary existence and the history we have inherited. Housekeeping, her first novel, asks us to consider how a model of parenting that is – quite literally – outside the social spaces might be right and appropriate for a grieving young woman.
In the coming months, we have several Marilynne Robinson texts on offer — coming soon, her first work Housekeeping — you are warmly invited to join our own exploration.
