Oldal 254 [254]
OCR
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 number 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 element 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, prodigality, 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 answer 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 Congregationalist-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 repudiation. 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.
