Seite 254 [254]
PÉTER PÁSZTOR
using the term apologetics for the novel Gilead’ as well, which is an epistolary
novel, a long letter by an old minister preparing for death, to be given to his
now seven-year-old son upon growing up, insofar as it is strung with a num¬
ber of essays on various theological and philosophical conceptions in favour
of religion. Nevertheless, I believe, though perhaps somewhat stretching the
meaning of the word, “apologetics” is applicable to the strictly fictional ele¬
ment in Robinson’s writing. For her novels, Gilead and its twin piece, Home,’
read as though they were allegories, like mediaeval moralities, i.e. fictional
outworkings of Christian concepts ancient and modern vicariousness, prodi¬
gality, personalism, dialogism. Robinson’s greatness as a novelist derives partly
from her ability to fulfil our expectations of verisimilitude and psychological
plausibility, or authenticity.
Since the French Revolution, it has been regarded the business of young
men to revolt against their fathers, debunk authority in general, and carry this
to its logical conclusion by questioning the authority and existence of God,
a projection of authority into the cosmos. An influential formulation of this
was Freud’s Oedipus complex, and another the myth of killing and devouring
the primordial father which made the debunking enterprise seem a necessity
driven by the unconscious. The Christian message of reconciliation with God
the Father through his Son’s vicarious sacrifice might have been an adequate
refutation of the Freudian claim, but it seemed for all too many to be an an¬
swer based on sheer authority and an argument coming from without, from
transcendent sources ungraspable by reason. Though, we all know, reason was
likewise debunked by the Freudian enterprise, which thus has a share in the
20'*-century’s intellectual-political disasters.
Robinson enters with her story of a Midwestern, middle-of-nowhere Con¬
gregationalist-Calvinist minister, John Ames, elucidating the father-son
relationship in the case of the bearers of the Christian myth of reconciliation
— Iam using the word myth in Northrop Frye’s sense of archetypal story — the
bearers of the myth of reconciliation, three generations of pastors and their
children. She plays out the conflict of father and son on two planes. The first
plane is that of moral and intellectual dispute; the second is that of total re¬
pudiation. On the first plane, we have our minister explaining to his son what
kinds of conflict there were between his grandfather and father, his father
and himself. The grandfather had visions: conversed with Jesus Christ and
preached abolitionism and fighting in the Civil War from his pulpit with a
2 RoBINSON, Marilynne, Gilead, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. See also my Hungarian
translation, Gilead, Budapest, Magveté, 2012.
3 RoBINsoN, Marilynne, Home, New York, Hachette Digital, 2008.