Tag: Christianity

The “Free” and Fragile World of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell

Iris Murdoch is often considered one of the best English novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and The Bell is one of her best-known works. I bought it because I liked the idea, about a community of religious individuals living beside an order of nuns. These individuals are people who are disappointed with the world in one way or another, and yet are unable to withdraw from it completely, as have the nuns. (A little like your own blogger, in fact). Instead, they live in this fragile, liminal space, attempting to keep their lives in order. As newcomers arrive this space’s stability is put to the test. Rather than spoil the plot as I usually do, in this piece I will discuss the ways that the community crumbles from within, and comment on the question of freedom, as it applies to Murdoch’s characters.

Introduction to the Characters

At Imber Court, an old country house in Gloucestershire, there lives a lay religious community. It is lead by Michael, a closeted homosexual. Other members include James, his second-in-command, Nick, a man who once was dangerously close to Michael, and Catherine, Nick’s twin sister and an aspiring nun. The guests include Toby, a young man looking for a spiritual retreat before he starts at university, and a married couple, Dora and Paul. Paul is older, rich, and intellectual, while Dora is younger, cheerful, and trapped in a horrible marriage that she keeps running away from, unsuccessfully. Between all these people plays out a tragic drama, as past and present collide in the vulnerable space of Imber, which at first glance appears to offer a kind of isolated utopia, and yet in reality finds the world left behind much closer than at first anyone had assumed.

Shaky Foundations

Murdoch is good at showing the subtle ways that utopia fails to escape the old world. On the very first page of The Bell we are told that Dora comes from a “lower middle-class London family”, making us aware, unconsciously, that nobody is without background, even here. James and Michael, the leaders of the lay community, get on well not just because of their characters, but because both of them have “a certain clannish affinity” stemming from a shared upper middle-class background. Indeed, the utopia, where everyone lives in a rundown great country house and grows vegetables all day is only possible because someone owns that country house – Michael. Even as the community tries to emphasise equality – everyone addresses each other by their first names, for example – it is founded thanks to privilege, and within it a certain hierarchy still sees the well-bred and intelligent at the top.

Technology and Squirrels

Just as class undermines the community, so too do the differing conceptions of it that its members have. Michael thinks back to conversations with the Abbesshe had had before The Bell begins. She describes the people, “disturbed and hunted by God”, who can “neither live in the world nor out of it”. These people, who are looking for a way to make their “spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish”, are disappointed by the growing bureaucratised, technological world that was becoming ever more dominant in the years after the Second World War. They head to the lay community as an act of flight. It’s not clear what they want, so much as what they don’t want. For example, many of them see farming in much the same way as does Wendell Berry, aiming to use only horses and the simplest tools to provide for their own sustenance.

Michael, meanwhile, wants to purchase “a mechanical cultivator”. He doesn’t understand why they cannot make use of the good bits of the outside world – the technology – while avoiding the bad. For many of the others, the work loses its dignity when a machine is involved. Another argument breaks out of the squirrels and pigeons of the community. These and other pests have been eating the crops and fruits of the garden, and Nick and others have been shooting them. Long before tractors were invented, farmers defended their wealth from winged and furry intruders. But the community is divided yet again – Catherine does not want to see any of the animals getting hurt. Although they all want a bounteous garden in their utopia, nobody can agree on how to achieve it. They are united more than anything else by their desire to escape the world. Murdoch asks if that is truly enough.

Christianity – various interpretations

Murdoch was not a Christian, but she was, from what I gather, what we might term “spiritual” these days, and she has a lot of sympathy for the religion of the majority of the characters depicted in The Bell. At the same time, it is religion that must also bear part of the blame for the fragility of the world of the novel. Just as people retreat from the world for different reasons, so too do they believe completely differently in the same religion. This is exemplified in the two sermons recounted in the story, one by James and one by Michael. James’s sermon talks of the need to “live without any image of oneself” in order to achieve the good life. Personality, he thinks, gets in the way of goodness. James’s vision of the community is one of order and – for some, stifling – conformity.

Michael’s sermon, given later, essentially says the opposite. His speech, as introduced, begins just as James’s had, with the phrase “the chief requirement of the good life”. But Michael argues that the secret is that “one should have some conception of one’s capacities”. Instead of destroying personality, we must work within it, using it to better live according to God’s wishes. Michael’s view is influenced by his actions earlier in the novel, in particular by his guilt over his love for Toby and Nick. He convinces himself that God would not have made him the way he is without a purpose, and that in his love there is a great value, however wrong the love is.

Bells themselves help make clear to the reader the conflicting interpretations of Christianity that Michael and James offer. Each of them uses the image of the bell in their sermons, but reach a completely different result thereby. Photo by I, Randal.J. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Both sermons sound, at least to a layperson like myself, sufficiently Christian. And both I think have merit too – for anyone who has found the evil in themselves will inevitably oscillate between these two views about how to exorcise it, through the destruction of the personality that contains the evil, or through the transformation of that evil into good through force of personality. Yet these two sermons make it clear that Christianity, at least as most of us understand it, is full of contradictions. Dostoevsky, at this moment, would step up and say that that is the point. Only Christianity is capable of offering a way of life that can deal with human contradictions, thanks to its own contradictions – any other ideology will inevitably disappoint. However we look at it, though, within the context of The Bell religion has an ambivalent role, being another site where a supposedly united community divides.

Are Murdoch’s Characters Free?

I remember reading a comment from James Wood, a critic I like, that although Murdoch “again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of a great novelist … her own characters never have this freedom”. There are some excellent things in The Bell, but I cannot help but agree with Wood’s assessment. Murdoch’s characters are intelligent, they have their own personalities, but they are not at all free. Not in the sense that they are bound by external forces, like class – that kind of unfreedom is de rigueur for a realist novelist. Nor are they unfree in the sense that Bakhtin thinks Tolstoy’s characters are unfree – that they all, consciously or not, reflect Tolstoy’s way of thinking and force the reader into it. Murdoch’s characters are unfree in the sense that they do not escape her.

In preparation for this piece I watched an interview with Murdoch that I enjoyed a great deal, but one thing that struck me was the way that she emphasised just how much planning goes into her novels. The whole book is planned in great detail, even on the level of chapters and dialogues, long before she begins to write. It is perfectly reasonable to plan things, but I think that in this lies the unfreedom of her characters. They always feel incapable of spontaneity, even if they are supposed to be spontaneous, because any spontaneous actions have been meticulously planned out already. Whatever freedom they have is structurally insincere, and we feel that, reading the book. Murdoch is hostile to things like the “machinery of sin and repentance” that govern the characters’ personalities, but she seems to have overlooked the machinery of control that her own writing places upon them.

Conclusion

That her characters feel unfree is not, however, as big a criticism as it might seem. There are fewer free characters in fiction than it seems at first glance. It is only when characters claim to be free – as they do here – but are not, that we have a problem. Murdoch’s planning does so much good for The Bell that I do not want to seem like I am criticising it. The work is extremely intelligent, at times funny, very well written, worthy of analysis, and – what is far more important anyway – worthy of thought. Whether or not the characters are ultimately free and real is secondary to this. It deals with these simple, but rather important questions – of how we should live, what we should believe, and how to be good and free – in such an effective manner that I do not mind its one, rather small, fault.

The Bell is a novel I can certainly recommend, from an author I know I will read more of.  

Søren Kierkegaard – The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like so many other thinkers of their time, saw their century as one engulfed by a crisis of faith. But whereas Nietzsche aimed to destroy the last remnants of a rotting Christianity to build a world where values might be reimagined, Kierkegaard attempted to create a new, fresh, and serious Christianity to take the place of the old and moribund one. In The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air we have three discourses analysing the famous biblical Sermon on the Mount. They fit into Kierkegaard’s larger goal of answering “what it is to be a human being”, especially from a “godly standpoint”, by teaching us a little about silence, obedience, and joy. Where Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work always aims at making us think, here the goal is almost the opposite – here he wants us to act and change our lives.

I still have not decided yet whether I liked this short book. Kierkegaard places huge demands upon his listeners to act and be true Christians, demands which are unlikely to appeal to anyone who is not devout already. For those wavering, Kierkegaard has very little time. His faith is an all-or-nothing affair. But that does not mean that this work is without interest to the rest of us.

First Discourse: Silence

In the Sermon on the Mount we are called to consider, among other things, the lilies in the field and the birds of the air. From this pair Kierkegaard draws the lessons of The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air. The first discourse looks at the pair as a source of silence and explains why silence is important.

First, however, we are introduced to the character of the poet. The poet represents an inauthentic relationship with nature masquerading as an authentic one. Society, Kierkegaard thinks, is full of people who listen to the Bible and would like to follow its teachings. However, they do not even try to do so because they believe such a life would be impossible. The poet dramatizes the wish to live religiously, thus obscuring the fact that it is actually possible. We must stop listening to poets and start listening to the silence of the animals.

Humans are gifted with speech, but we must learn to keep silence. The reason is that “becoming silent, silent before God, is the beginning of the fear of God”. And fearing God is a good thing – it draws us nearer to Him and His kingdom. The first step to reaching God is to be silent – not to do anything other than cease talking. Our speech is dangerous, it distorts our situation. The lily suffers, but does not speak, whereas a human suffers and talks and makes their suffering all the greater. “In this silence, the many thoughts of wishing and desiring fall silent in the fear of God”. In our silence we perceive God, we remind ourselves of Him and make ourselves small before Him. Poets may talk of silence, but they seek it in order to talk about it. Their search is dishonest, the opposite of what is needful.

Ceasing to think, to speak, is to become like the birds and lilies. They live entirely in the moment, untroubled – and through silence we too can live orientated towards the moment at hand. There is a lot here that reminds me of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, which I looked at earlier. The creatures, unlike us humans, are capable of repetition – they have faith that things will repeat, without needing to worry and distract themselves from the now before them.

Second Discourse: Obedience

Silence leads to the fear of God which leads to His Kingdom – that is the idea of the first discourse. The second takes us further by confronting us with a choice – an either/or. Either God or whatever we want, but not a God who is a half-measure. For Kierkegaard, if we think we can combine God with other interests, other choices, that means that we have a false conception of Him. In fact, if we don’t give God our everything, he continues, that means we hate Him. Wait a minute, you might say, that’s ridiculous. But Kierkegaard says that what God demands is “obedience, unconditional obedience”.

The lily and the bird are teachers of obedience. They do not complain about the circumstances of their birth; instead, they accept everything as God’s will. They then blossom or flourish as best they can, given whatever situation they find themselves in. We humans complain, we despair at our brief time alive – and all this disobedience gets in the way of us becoming who God wants us to be. It also makes us vulnerable to temptation. “Where there is ambivalence, there temptation is” and “where ambivalence is… deep down there is also disobedience”.

Accepting everything our authority tells us on faith, allowing no doubts or disobedience, and trusting that later we will learn the reasons behind these injunctions – how little such suggestions must appeal to a modern reader! If you are a Christian already, Kierkegaard is describing a harsh but honest way of living in a way that pleases God; but if you are not one, then this is just sinister and authoritarian rubbish, the kind of thing we’d expect from our dictators. And if you are on the fence now, in the twenty-first century, Kierkegaard is just going to push you right off into scepticism. But perhaps that’s what he’d want.   

Third Discourse: Joy

After all the business with the silence and the unconditional obedience, how happy we readers are to learn about joy! For after all, in spite of the suffering of the animals, they are actually joyous. In fact, they are “unconditionally joyful, are joy itself”. The best kind of joy for Kierkegaard is a state of being rather than a temporary state. He defines it as when one is “truly to be present to oneself” – that is, when one is silent about the future and past, and instead focused entirely upon one’s own existence within the present. He even says that “Joy is the present time”. The birds and lilies are joyous because they exist in the present.

But it is more complicated than that. After all, how could the creatures both “bear so infinitely deep a sorrow” while remaining happy? Because – and here Kierkegaard says something that sounds impressive, if nothing else – they cast all their care and sorrow upon God. With the help of faith, they offload all of their cares onto God, which empties them of their worries, and leaves only joy remaining. And even if there is only a little joy there, the absence of sorrow means that this joy will seem huge. Anyone can be happy, so long as they have no sorrow – that is the message. And from the creatures we can learn how to hurl or sorrows onto God – we can learn “dexterity”.

Conclusions

We have no excuses for not being proper, Christian Christians, in Kierkegaard’s view. Even in the midst of society one can still be a proper Christian, because birds group together, yet they still show unconditional obedience, are joyous, and are silent – and people are basically birds. If we too show unconditional obedience, unconditional joy, and silence our spirits, then we can abide in God – we can temporarily take part in the eternity which is God’s time. What a rousing conclusion, ay, readers?

As for me, I am not convinced. Or rather, I think that Kierkegaard’s description of a truly Christian way of living in The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. He smashes any suggestion that anything other than a life lived entirely for God can be a godly life, and for most of us wavering moderns this is a commitment far greater than what we are capable of.

At the same time, we can take away things from this piece. The value of silence is universal, and so too is the value of orientating ourselves towards the present. But as for the middle section, the authoritarianism and recommendation of political and social quietism are more curiosities, than things I hope we may actually want to learn from.

If you want more authoritarianism, you can read my comments on some essays by Thomas Carlyle. If you want more Kierkegaard, here’s my piece on Repetition. 

Race and Redemption in Marilynne Robinson’s Home

Phenomenal, unbelievable, awesome: Home is one of those books I cannot recommend enough. In many ways a quiet, boring affair, much like Gilead before it, Home is so deeply packed with life, lived and felt, that it expands inside us like the impression of tree does, the moment we stop walking and start to give it the attention that its complexity and majesty undoubtedly deserves. Home takes place almost contemporaneously to Gilead, and the characters are shared between the two works, but the tone is very different. Gilead had seen the aging Reverend Ames writing letters full of love to his young son, consigning his own failures and guilts mostly to the margins. But Home, which takes us into the home of Ames’s friend Reverend Boughton as it deals with the return of a prodigal son, Jack, and a failed daughter, Glory, is a much more ambivalent tale.

The book is filled with tensions, with guilt, with shame, with pain. But at the same time it shines with the radiance of love, conditional and unconditional, and faith and grace. Unlike Gilead, where Ames’s occasional digressions on doctrinal matters such as baptism may have turned off readers with limited exposure to the Christian tradition, Home is a much more down-to-earth book in terms of its religious fundament. The central questions concerning redemption and grace are, I hope, a little more palatable to people, and more relevant to their own lives.

Glory

“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” Her father said, and her heart sank.

The opening line of Home is brutal, and immediately informs us of the pain at the centre of the novel. Glory is the youngest daughter of Reverend Robert Boughton, youngest of eight children, and almost forty when the book begins in the late 1950s. Where other brothers and sisters have made successful marriages, or started successful careers, Glory worked as a teacher while engaged in a long courtship with a man who ultimately abandoned her. Apparently married, she could not even return to her teaching job. And so she has returned home, the only place that will offer her a refuge.

Her father, Reverend Boughton, is not the sprightly, young-at-heart man that Ames was. He spends most of Home being carried from chair to bed to chair. He retired from the pulpit ten years before the story begins, and his mind has declined where Ames’s remains nimble. But he is determined to make his home be a place where his children are welcome, and to show them the unconditional love of parents towards their children, no matter what they have done. Glory has come home, and she doesn’t really know what to do with herself, so she gives herself up to her father, caring for him as best she can, cooking and cleaning and doing the practical chores he is too weak to do. But she is desperately lonely. In the town she grew up in, all she has is the radio for company.

The Prodigal Son

That is until her father receives a letter from Jack. Jack is the prodigal son, the vanisher – he hasn’t been home in twenty years. As a child he was the only Boughton to scorn the church and steal and hide away. Eventually, he turned to alcohol too. What hangs over him, at least in the eyes of others, are two particular acts, committed long enough ago. The first is that he seduced and then abandoned a young girl, whose child later died; the second is that he did not return home for his mother’s funeral either. But he is his father’s son, and Boughton is determined to show him kindness.

The letter that arrives says Jack will be home soon. Boughton’s joy is so simple, so pure: “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand… I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in the top right-hand drawer… So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

And though he delays, and sends further letters, Jack does eventually come:

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Robinson has an eye for the perfect detail. The action of Home takes place almost entirely within the walls of the Boughton home, and between these three people. But Robinson uses every sense, every minor gradation of feeling, to paint an extraordinary picture of family life in all its painful, wondrous, complexity.

Jack

Jack is back for his own reasons. For Glory, her older brother’s return is in a way a blessing. “At least I know what is required of me know, and that is something to be grateful for”. They have not seen each other for years, and Home is a record of intimacy gained, lost, fought for. Where Glory was duped, Jack is guilty. Most of all, he is battling against the notion of predestination, the idea that his life has already been decided for him, and that no matter what he may do he is doomed to hellfire because of something incorrect in his nature, in the very nature that God had given to him. He is a modern day Ivan Karamazov, knowledgeable about God and the Bible but unable to accept them for his own reasons, even as he rages against the despair stemming from having a terrible black hole inside him.

Jack comes home, he tends to the garden, he fixes the family car. He drinks, he hides, he hurts himself. His alcoholism is one part of his character, but in a way, as an addiction it sums up the heart of his problem. Anyone who has faced addiction will know the way that it can feel like predestination to fall back into old habits. No matter how we try, it seems as if an external force, like a cruel god, drags us back towards our vices. When faced with addiction, it’s sometimes impossible to feel that we can ever change, that we can ever right our course. While the two reverends discuss the thorny nature of predestination within their respective churches, it is Lila, Ames wife (and heroine of Robinson’s third Gilead novel), who steps up to reassure Jack. “A person can change. Everything can change.”

Like Jack, Lila has spent most of her life as an outcast. But after she meets Ames, something we only really hear about vaguely in Gilead, her life changes for the better. She is, in a way, saved. Does Jack redeem himself? Does Jack get saved? I’m not sure these questions are the point of Home. Jack comes home, and he leaves again. Life is not neatly tied up, and Home recognises that. In Jack’s story – here, in Gilead, and no doubt in Robinson’s latest novel, Jack –what matters is the process. Jack’s life is a swinging between salvation and perhaps, as he claims, perdition. And in our own lives, full of mistakes and guilt and yet bursting with beauty and always with the possibility of making things right again, Jack appears as a thoroughly human, thoroughly sad, brother.

Race and Religion in Home

Last summer I read a lot of books about race, but Home is probably more effective than any of them. At the end of Gilead we learn about why Jack is interested in racial tensions, and in Home this information is once again saved for the end. But early on, when Glory finds him reading W. E. B. DuBois, we have a sense that even though the village of Gilead is made up of traditional rural white Iowans, race will someway figure in the novel. Later, to entertain their father, Glory and Jack get him a TV set. Home is set during the height of the American civil rights movement, and Jack has spent a lot of time in the South. His father, meanwhile, appears scarcely to have even left his state.

Now, I confess, being not an American, I know little about the civil rights movement, so I may get a few bits wrong. As they watch the television, and read about protests in the newspaper, a division appears in the family.

After reading about white police with riot sticks attacking black peaceful demonstrators, Boughton speaks to calm his son: “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

But Jack replies. “Some people will probably remember it.”

Boughton is a religious man, but he is not necessarily a wise one. His vision of the world is small. The idea that the African Americans who were suffering may have slightly longer memories than his own, watching them on the television, is not something that comes naturally to him. It is less hypocrisy, than ignorance, but it remains a problem. When Jack cries “Jesus Christ” after a particularly brutal moment, Boughton’s anger is aimed at his blasphemy, rather than the actions of the police. Eventually, he attempts to be conciliatory. “Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We have to forgive each other.”

At times like this Robinson describes Boughton as “statesmanlike” – she uses this adjective several times, and in a way that is far more ironic than anything else. Boughton asks who can judge, but the answer, for readers, is clearly that we can. We know better, we know now the suffering of black Americans thanks to social media and publicised brutalities. We know that the civil rights movement has not finished, and Boughton’s faux-conciliatory remarks which paper-over real and legitimate suffering are just the same ill-judged remarks we hear today, from certain sections of society. The blacks were rioting, they were violent. But even when disproved we continue to hold fast to these lies. I don’t mean to disregard the violence of certain protests last year, only to indicate that there is a continuity not just in terms of the problems, but also in how they are represented and dealt with.

Robinson’s story reveals that underlying hypocrisy. Yes, we should avoid judgement in many things. But in matters of racial justice, at least in the sense that we shouldn’t tolerate brutality, refraining from judgement becomes a moral stance. And we know, I hope we know, enough to know that things that were wrong then, in the 1950s, must still be wrong now.

Conclusion

Gilead was in many ways a paean to the blessings of the everyday little things that make life so magical but which we often pass over without a thought. And Home is filled with that same, slightly religious sentiment. But Home goes further than that, in that it asks moral questions too. Are we managing to be good people, even as we enjoy the world? Is there a chasm between our beliefs and our actions? Are we Christians or whatever to all people, or only to a few? In its portrayal of Jack’s tortured complexity, both his good and his bad, and his struggle for what perhaps we could call redemption, Home is a much more gritty book than its predecessor. But it is a book whose message is every bit as important as that of Gilead. Perhaps, unfortunately, given the world we currently live in, it may be even more so.

But either way it’s fantastic, brilliant, and well worth reading.