Christianity and LiteratureVol. 61, No. 1 (Autumn 2011)

Native Speakers:Identity, Grace, and Homecoming

Rowan Williams

An address delivered on the occasion of the Archbishop receivingthe Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on

Christianity and Literature.

Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance,as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native totheir life as he never could be. (Marilynne Robinson, Home, 249)

Marilynne Robinson's much-praised and much-discussed pair of novels,Gilead and Home, deal, as she has herself said, with the unfinished businessof the parable of the Prodigal Son (see the interview in Christianity andLiterature 58:3, 2009, 487-88). After homecoming, what? And what doeshomecoming actually mean? As the quotation with which I began suggests,the notion of homecoming is a very ambivalent one when there is no"home" to start with. The words represent what the prodigal's sister. Glory,is thinking as she picks up the pieces after her brother Jack returns from anepisode of desperate alcoholic escape. She has had to become "resigned" toforgiveness; as she reflects on why she cannot help but forgiveeven as shecontemplates withholding her mercy "for an hour or two"she recognizesthat it is partly because of the (lifelong?) sense of alienness that Jack carrieswith him, as if he has always been at a distance from their ethos and speech,even perhaps parodying these, unconsciously or not. He cannot but be anironist. And being an ironist means, in this context, never having a nativetongue. His father and his father's friend, his own godfather, John Ames,cannot speak with him without suspecting that he is somehow subvertingtheir own habitual discourse; and he is cripplingly conscious of this andfrequently silenced by it.

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

Jack covered his face with his hands and laughed. "The Lord," he said, "isveryinteresting.""I know you don't mean any disrespect," his father said."I really don't know what I mean. I really don't.""Well," the old man said, "I wish I could help you with that." {Home 157)

But of course he cannot. "I always seem to give offense," Jack says toAmes at one point, and Ames, denying any offense, responds, "I do wish wecould speak moredirectly" (Gilead 169). Even when, in their last heavilycharged conversation, John Ames gives him his blessing as "beloved son andbrother and husband and father" {Gilead 241), Jack's reaction makes Amesthink he has "named everything I thought he no longer was," although thisis "the exact opposite" of what Ames means. Ames has been trying to namewhat cannot be taken away from Jack's identity; but Jack cannot hear thesewords in a native tongue. He cannot help receiving them as an ironist, andthus receiving them as ironical, whether the irony is or is not intended. Atone point in Home, when Jack reads to his father, we are told that "therewas a kind of grace to anything [he] did with his whole attention, or whenhe forgot irony for a while"; and this can still surprise his father {Gilead146). Jack's irony is, we might say, the wrong kind of attention, an attentionto himself in the eyes of others rather than to the act or the word or therelational reality itself. But his virtual paralysis in relationship reminds ushow very difficult attention is, and how little it is a matteras his fatherthinksof being "wonderful when he wants to be" (ibid.).

In the great set-piece conversation about grace and predestinationrecorded in both novels. Jack's serious theological enquiryare some people,so to speak, born to sorrow and to foreignness and ultimately to hellisheard uncomfortably by both Ames and his father, and their response is, ashe says, "cagey" {Gilead 151). They suspect him of quiet mockery, but thetruth is that he has no language for the question that will sound sincereexcept to Ames' unconventional young wife, who is the only one able to givehim a reply that actually addresses him: "A person can change. Everythingcan change" {Gilead 153). Afterwards, affectionately and reproachfully, shesays to her husband that "Maybe some people aren't so comfortable withthemselves" {Gilead 154)almost a paraphrase of Glory's thought that Jacksees his family as "native to their life" in a way he is not and carinot be.

Yet Ames' wife. Lila, is capable herself of an impact not unlike thatwhich Jack has. When her husband first encounters her as a member of hiscongregation, he feels "there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING

like a kind of anger. As though she might say, T came here from whateverunspeakable distance and whatever unimaginable otherness just to obligeyour prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it'" {Gilead 21).She is no more a native than Jack is; yet, despite the strong sense she conveysto Ames that his words from the pulpit are judged and found wanting, shecomes to inhabit her identity as Jack never does. Later in the same book,as they sit together in desultory conversation, with Ames half-asleep. JackoflFers her a cigarette, and she declines on the grounds that "it just isn'tseemly in a preacher's wife"; and when Jack picks this up with a touch ofmockery, she replies, "I been seemly so long I'm almost beginning to like it"(Gilead 199). She has, though with difficulty and over a significant period oftime, learned to pass as a native, yet without losing her critical liberty. Her"unimaginable otherness" has not made a native tongue impossible for her.

Lila's irony is, we might say, a reconciled irony as opposed to Jack'sunreconciled irony. She retains the capacity to question the attitudes of thosewho are too much at home with themselves or their world; and we mustassume that it is she who makes Ames able, after a painful conversation withJack, to acknowledge that the town of Cilead's surface decencies conceal asystemic untruthfulness, a refusal to ask what is to be learned from crisisor challenge: "we didn't ask the question, so the question was just takenaway from us" (Gilead 233-34). Its very existence depended on its role, inwhat is now a remote and forgotten past, as a stopping stage on the routeto Kansas for escaping slaves and anti-slavery radicals, "in the heat of anold urgency" (Gilead 234); but it has lost the capacity to ask what it is therefor. And because it has forgotten its history, and the question of its history(a forgetfulness reflected in the half-buried memory of the burning of a"negro" church, in Jack's father's unthinking racism and in Jack's knowledgethat he can never bring his African American wife to Gilead), we have toask what it now means to be "native" to a place like this. Lila's reconciledirony does not mean that her ability to pass for native is a muffiing of thequestion; on the contrary, she is able, as Jack generally is not, to give voiceto the possibility of change. She is able to speak, where Jack's paralysingawareness of the oflence he may give leaves him silent.

What makes the diflference? Jack and his father clearly love each other,yet are trapped in a painful inarticulacy toward each othermost poignantlyexpressed when the old man says that Jack has never "had a name for me.Not one you'd call me to my face," and Jack replies that he has never knowna name that didn't "seem wrong": "I didn't deserve to speak to you the way

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the others did" {Home 311). Jack cannot use the "script" of unselfconsciousfamily intimacy; but equally it is clear thatas his sister recognizesthisscript is presented to him both as an obligation and also as coriditional onbehaving appropriately. The language of "natural" family relationship, inother words, is a text that cannot accommodate Jack's self-awareness, hisconsciousness of himself as predestined to be a stranger, morally, culturally,religiously, an "exile from the ordinary world" {Home 201): as h says to hisbrother, "Sometimes it seems as though I'm in one universe and you're inanother" {Home 267). Glory, his sister, thinking of herself as '(resigned toJack's inaccessible strangeness" {Home 249) comes closest to seeing what theproblem is and knowing what is needed to resolve it, though her instinctivesense of what Jack needs comes somehow too late to make a difference tohim, or to his awareness of himself.

Being resigned to strangeness means also that Glory is unresigned toaspects of Gilead, aspects of the native and natural environment. Shewhohas herself been a prodigal of sortslooks at the town and all it means andsees it as "dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence" {Home 281). Hersuddenly vivid perception of the curse of sameness is like the moment inGilead when Ames sees the town as having forgotten the possibi ity of truth.Sameness cannot live with the question that history poses. The deceptivelytimeless surface of Gilead's life, the illusion of a life in which everyone is anative in an undifferentiated present, is a curse, is even, as Ames {Gilead233) calls it, hellish. What Jack perceivesand hears as a kind of sentenceon himselfis the stipulation that homecoming is necessarily a return tosameness, something that challenges both his own acute self-consciousnessof being a guilty outsider and his deliberate and costly alliance with othernessby way of marrying into an African-American family (in which he is, ofcourse, also a guilty outsider). His own personal "doubleness," his constantperception of himself from the other's standpoint, his acute ajwareness ofthe offence of his language and perhaps his very existence, all this is subtlyfused in the narrative with the doubleness of the history of racial division.the inbuilt possibility in the society and the cultural moment that Gileadrepresents of more than one story being told. That is the possibility Gileadhas buried, for Jack as an individual as for the neighbor of another race.

Lila's story is different not because she finds Gilead any moreunproblematic than Jack does but because the "text" she has encountered isnot simply that of sameness. Her unsettling presence in Ames' congregation,her "unimaginable otherness" (which Jack's "inaccessible strangeness"

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 11

echoes, surely deliberately), is recognized for what it is by the preacher,an invitation to native speakers to grasp the possibility of other narrativesand discourses. She is able to find a "home" in Gilead, specifically in Ames'world, because the text of Ames' preaching is able to live with the possibilityof its own failure or lack of truthfulness. It is not that Ames simply rejectswhat he has had to say: Lila looks on as he baptizes two children, and hesenses himself asking a question back to her: "If you know a better way todo this, I'd appreciate your telling me" {Gilead 21). He challenges her angerwithout denying her seriousness, and this, we must assume, is part of whatbuilds not only her relationship with the Church but the possibility of hereventual marriage to Ames.

Thus we are gently directed back to the question of what it is aboutAmes' own preaching that makes this possible. Robinson gives us a fewhints, particularly when Ames muses wryly about the books he would liketo be found clutching in the event of a sudden death: "The ones I considered,by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth's Fpistle to the Romans andVolume II of Calvin's Institutes. Which is by no means to slight VolumeI" {Gilead 115). Karl Barth appears again at the end of the conversationwith Jack about predestination. Ames suggests that Jack might find Barthhelpful, and Jack's response is sardonic: does Ames recommend Barth totormented souls on the doorstep at midnight? Ames turns the remarkaside, but reflects to himself that "I don't recall ever recommending him toany tormented soul except my own" {Gilead 153). It is the other side of thecoin from what his wife's loving rebuke about some people not being "socomfortable with themselves" implies. Ames knows that he stands underan alien judgment, and Barth's theology is one of his resources in learninghow to abide its scrutiny. As his recollection of his first encounters with Lilais filled out furtherquite late in Gileadhe describes her presence andhis increasing obsession with her as "a foretaste of death," an experience inwhich he is "snatched out of [his] character" {Gilead 205). "I simply couldnot be honest with myself, and I couldn't deceive myself, either" {Gilead203). But a Barthian theological perspective (certainly one informedby Barth's Romans commentary) would suggest that precisely such asimultaneous recognition of truth and falsehood is the expected conditionof the person who has faith. Faith is not the acknowledgement of a simpleconsonance between what I think/believe and the truth of God, but thetwofold acknowledgement of the incalculable gulf between the truth of Godand my own subjectivity along with the inseparable commitment of God

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to the self-deceiving and helpless heart. "There is no other righteousnesssave that of the man who sets himself under judgment, of the nian who isterrified and hopes" says Barth early in his commentary {Romans 41); andlater, "the questionableness of our situation becomes a source of strength"{Romans 156), and "Christ in us is ... both the place where we are judgedand the place where we are justified' {Romans 286).

For Ames to be found with Barth's Romans in his hand rnakes goodsense. And, without elaborating details at this point, the same holds of thesecond book of the Institutes, which deals broadly with "The Knowledgeof God the Redeemer" including the whole question of what it means tomaintain the apparently shocking and counterintuitive claim that we are inno way "free" to collaborate with the act of God. Redemption is to do withthe ways in which grace brings alive the life of Christ in the human self. Anindependent human will as source of transformation and life would makenonsense of anything like Ames' simultaneous recognition of^ truth anddeceit: Calvin's idea of faith and the restoration of the divine image is morelike a connection always already made, appearing now from this angle,now from that, within the hopelessly unstable experience of the believingsoul; never a possession, yet always a presence because it is the presenceof an active savior. And hence the absurdity of suggesting that grace is afusion of divine and human initiative, as if the divine and the human wereagencies operating on the same level, potentially in competition] potentiallyin harmony. If Calvin's perspective is the foundation of Ames' preaching,we can see a little of why he isjustable to hear the question that Gileadoverall has lost. He may be broadly "comfortable," as Lila suggests, but itis not a comfort that defends itself by refusing what is strange. His settledfaith is based on awareness of a strangeness at the very center of his identity:Christ in him, in Barth's terms, is a given, a presence not dependent onhis own self-correspondence. There is in his identity something that is notmere sameness. And so, if his starting position is an identity or ai:-homenessthat is aware of the alien action of grace in the background, Lila's journeyis a kind of reverse image as she moves away from sheer alienness towardrecognition or integration, toward her ironic but reconciled inhabiting of anative language shared with her husband.

If the text of a native language is to be in some sense hospitable.Robinson implies, it must be a text with a shadow or margin, conscious ofa strangeness that surrounds it and is not captured by it, a strangeness thatinterprets it or at least offers the possibility of a meaning to be uncovered.

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 13

on the far side of questioning. And the paradoxical conclusion is that theperson who "inhabits" with integrity the place where they find themselves,in such a way as to make it possible for others to inhabit it in peaceablecompany with them is always the person who is aware of the possibilityof an alien yet recognizable judgment being passed, aware of the strangeralready sensed in the self's territory. To be, in the Augustinian phrase, aquestion to oneself is what makes it possible to be oneself without anxietyand so with the possibility of welcome for the other. Odd as it sounds to saythat the awareness of judgment is the solvent of anxiety, it makes sense inthe Barthian context of seeing judgment and justification in the same place.Anxiety is bound to the impulse to justify oneself: judgment assures us thatthis is out of our hands.

Thus the tragic standoff between Jack and his father in Robinson'sfiction reveals the constantly frustrated search for appropriate language,language that can be "justified": Jack believes that he can never deserve tocall his father by the names that the other children can use, and his fatheris listening (without ever quite knowing this is what he is doing) for alanguage from Jack that is not challenging or offensive, a language with nostrangeness or questioning. In the event, they silence each other.

Jack shrugged. "I have to go now. I wanted to say goodbye." He went to hisfather and held out his hand.The old man drew his own hand into his lap and turned away. "Tired ofit!" he said.Jack nodded. "Me too. Bone tired." {Home 317)

The inarticulate love finally expressed in Jack's parting kiss cannotbridge the gulf created by exhaustion and non-communication. At the endof Home, Glory remains, significantly, the mediator, who welcomes Jack's(African American) wife and child, while still knowing that they cannotyet be made welcome. Delia, Jack's wife, has "had to come into Gilead as ifit were a foreign and a hostile country" {Home 324); Jack's own frustratedwish that he really lived in his father's house {Home 323) has foreshadowedthe rejection his family will experience. Glory, recalling Jack's wish to beat home, tries to be hospitable, fully aware that she cannot truly welcomethe family because the discourse and imagery of where she liveswith herfather. Jack's fathercannot receive strangers. So she dreams of a future inwhich her entire life will be, so to speak, justified when Jack's son returnsas an adult, recognizing the place as familiar, as his father's house; as if

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her entire life has been oriented toward making room for the stranger, thequestion. And the young man will never know that he has completed thecircle of her hopes, or that "he has answered his father's prayers" (Home325). Justification will be the gift of a guest who arrives trustingly It cannotbe guaranteed, planned for, scripted, but it can, it seems, be irituited as apossibility. If Jack and Glory both know this, their narrative is not over,despite the terribly poignant and apparently unreconciled parting betweenJack and his father.

Ames recognizes, however stumblingly, that justification is not to bewon, and so is able in some degree to sense it at work; Jack is left silenced bythe impossibility of winning it; Glory dreams of a moment in which it willbe briefly visible. For all of them, justification depends on the abandoningof the hope of winning it. Ames grasps this in an eflective way. Glory hasan inkling of it. Jack, according to the author, prays for it un'knowingly.even unhopefuUy His doubleness of vision and hearing, theawareness of how he seems to those he speaks to, incorporates

paralyzingsomething

absolutely vital to human integrity, the knowledge that I do not coincidewith myself, that who and what I am is significantly out of my control. Theproblem is that this is unconnected with the "graceful" doubleriess that wesee in Ames and Lila, the knowledge that the stranger whose perception ofme I cannot control, isfinallynot my enemy or my competitor but thegenerative source of myself. What I cannot master, the perspective I cannotby definition attain or imagine (to borrow a thought of Simone Weil's), isthe presence that makes me alive and that also makes welcome possiblenot only a being at home but a creation of home for the human other. And,if we return to the question of irony, this is a perspective that allows anironizing of the ironic selfand therefore allows the attention that opensto grace. Instead of the great gulf being fixed between the meanings I aloneunderstand and the appearances that others are content with, it is betweenevery meaning I or anyone else can master and the hidden purpose thatis at the center of my and everyone's lifewhich enjoins on us all theattentiveness or expectancy Ames is able to bring to his encounters (sensing"a kind of incandescence" in those who come to him (Gilead 44). "Whenyou encounter another person..., it is as if a question is being put to you.So you must think. What is the Lord asking of me in this mornent, in thissituation?" (Gilead 124). And Robinson, in the interview already quoted,points out that, against such a background, predestination is a liberatingdoctrine in that it tells us that "God's view of us is essentially mysterious"

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 15

{Gilead 489); so far from imposing on us an unchanging character, itdeclares that our future is radically unknowable to usso that change isalways imaginable, the answer to the question is always open from the sideof our awareness.

It isas Robinson does not fail to insist quietly in her evocation ofGilead's racial defensivenessa political understanding as much as atheological one. Identities are not sealed off from history. Gilead's radicalorigins may decay into the defensive complacency that forgets the burningof a black church and politely declines to be a home for Jack's family; oldAmes may work his way late in life toward a more painful awareness of the"question" than his blameless ministry might have led us to expect, thanksto Lila and Jack. The possibility of changed identity for an individual is nomore and no less extraordinary than what David Jones called "the turnof a civilization." But to recognize this also highlights a deeply significantcultural question, at the centre of Robinson's recent lectures on Absence ofMind. "Whoever controls the definition of mind," she writes, "controls thedefinition of humankind itself, and culture, and history" {Absence 32). Howwe think about thinking is a profoundly political issue; and thinking, in thiscontext, includes all that we have so far been considering about questionsand native languages and identity. Absence of Mind attempts a diagnosis ofthe contemporary near-obsession with defining mind in reductive terms,"as a passive conduit of other purposes than those the mind ascribes to itself{Absence 71). The effect of this, she argues, is to neutralize the questionsthat the mind puts to itself about itself: the questions we put to ourselveshave the capacity, it seems, to change things (32 again), and so to silencethe questions is to assume that intentional change is literally unthinkable.

But, connecting this to earlier observations about irony, the effect ofsilencing such questions is bound also to be a dismissal of the possibility ofirony. Irony places two registers of meaning in juxtaposition, two levels ofdiscourse, one apparent, the other hidden; the irony lies in their consciousjuxtaposition and the different senses in which they might be said to betrue. But while the reductive theses Robinson confronts appear to juxtaposeregisters of discoursethe appearance of consciousness or intention andthe actual biological determination of all that is said or donethis is not infact the case. The underlying story is presented as unambiguously true andthe surface discourse as false. This is not irony, the generative play betweentwo registers, but a simple contrast between fact and error. The determiningmaterialist narrative cannot itself be "ironised." This account thus becomes

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one that denies any possibility of its own unsettlement; whichserious political statement in that it cannot thus be other than adiscourse, inimical to change. There is no tension between

is indeed acontrollingnative and

other languages because in an important and troubling sense there are nospeakers: language itself becomes a form of determined behavior. It hardlyneeds saying that the theorists targeted in Robinson's critique in Absence ofMind would make the writing of fiction impossible, since fiction dependssubstantially on various kinds of significant gap between what is said andwhat is shown, between perspectives embodied in different sorts of speech.It may be a matter of Dostoevskian "polyphony," the unresolved pluralityof voices allowed expression in the text; or, say, of the extraordinary doublevision of Dickens' Bleak House, with its alternation between not only narratorsbut tenses, a "resolved" narrative in the past tense and a wholly unresolvedand unhealed authorial present tense; or of the unreliable narrators of latetwentieth century fiction, the shifting lights of Ian McEwan's Atonement, forexample; or of Robinson's careful delineation of the diverse ironies of Lilaand Jack. But none of these is thinkable if language is determined behavior.None of the varieties of unpredictable narrative change work without apicture of language as fundamentally behavior that invites and proposesquestion.

Butto connect this discussion with the internal issue of howAmes' language in the novels becomes open to the challenge of grace, oftransformation that enables someone to receive the radically strangethereare fictions that not only work with irony but attempt to show how whatI earlier called "reconciled irony" enacts in its language a perception andreception of grace. To identify Robinson's novels as examples of this is to saythat they voice a range of imagined personal perspectives within which it ispossible to see how a particular voice or particular "textual" constructionof the self allows a radically unknowable element in by both inhabitingand relativizing its own place. It does not seek to be without place, withouthome: that is thein fact unimaginableterminus of Jack's compulsive anddesperate ironising. Nor does it seek to dissolve the question addressed to theself by fabricating an identity that collapses everything into sameness, intoformal reconciliation. The voice of grace is one in which the unknowablejudgment of God is constantly invoked; and by those mysterious processesthat Calvin (not least in Ames' beloved Book II of the Institutes) describes,the freedom of God is, as it were, introduced into the human frame ofreference and radical change becomes imaginablenot because the human

IDENTITY, GRACE, AND HOMECOMING 17

self is free but because God is. We have made ourselves subject to necessity,a necessity that is, paradoxically, "unnecessary," in tension with our natureas God intended it (see Institutes ILiii.5); we are not compelled to evil, buthave always already chosen not to be free by our fantasy that we can live welleither by isolating our will from God or by imagining that we co-operatewith God as we might with another subject. Change occurs when we receivethe gift of a relation with God that makes us "natural" againat home withGod and ourselves precisely because we have given up the solitary struggleto justify ourselves (e.g. Institutes II.v.15).

In the order of grace, the native speaker is not one who has neverquestioned the language she or he speaks and has no awareness of whatother possibilities exist for speech; the native speaker is the one who caninhabit language without anxiety, without constant defensive activity on theborders of the territory, because of a knowledge that all truthful speech andaction is activated by what is and always remains unsaid, the hinterland ofGod's unimaginable judgment. By such an alignment with an unseen andunspoken judgment, the speaker is aligned with the divine liberty: not agift of independent human freedom but an openness to the alien marginsof human discourse out of which comes the raw possibility of change inthe direction of absolution and generosity. I do not coincide with myself;this is a given, we might say, of all serious fiction, of the modern fictionalconsciousness, preoccupied as it is with growth, self-delusion, recognitionof self and of difference. But for the Christian imagination, seeking wordsand pictures for grace, that fictional consciousness has to be connectedwith not only the mystery of change but what might be called the mysteryof absolution, the unpredictable arrival of the liberty both to absolve andto receive absolution, without any denial of the chains of cause and effect.Grace, the strange gift of becoming a native speaker of the language properto humankind, the language of being a creature, arrives at right angles toplanning and deserving. It rightly provokes both baffiement and gratitude;and a fiction that is hospitable to the gospel will work out of both.

Faced with the sight of the illegitimate child of Jack's youthful affairplaying in the riverside sunlight with her mother, "Glory said, T do notunderstand one thing in this world. Not one'" {Gilead 164). And Ames, atthe end of Gilead, significantly transfers the language of "prevenient grace"to "prevenient courage"the bravery needed "to acknowledge that there ismore beauty than our eyes can bear," the courage which alone allows us tobe generous, hospitable. Bafflement and gratitude both require that courage;

Robinson's novels measure something of what such courage entails. It is

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both the courage to be judged, as Ames is by the alienness of ^^ ila, and thecourage to inhabit, as Lila does, a speech and a style of living that you knowto be provisional to the point of near-absurdity because it does in spite ofeverything make space for absolution. It is also the couragefor those whoare not quite touched by grace to the extent that Ames and his wife aretoimagine, as Glory does, a "justification" of all frustrated faithfulness andendurance in terms of a homecoming that is equally personal and political.Ultimately, that is what the Christian fiction is, an imagined justification,achieved (artistically speaking) by trying to voice what it "sounds" like tospeak under an unknown judgment that is constrained by nothing but thenature of a liberty for which "the one sufficient reason for the forgiveness ofdebt is simply the existence of debt" {Gilead 161).

WORKS CITED

Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns. London: OxfordUP, 1933.

Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010.. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.. Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

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