typology and memorialization in marilynne robinson's gilead

Christianity and LiteratureVol. 59, No. 2 (Winter 2010)

Burial, Baptism, and Baseball:Typology and Memorializationin Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

June Hadden Hobbs

It avails not, time nor placedistance avails not.Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

The Rev. John Ames knows he is dying. His challenge is to record hismemories so that his young son can "know his begats" and learn the lifelessons of a father he barely has time to know (Robinson, Gilead 75, 133).Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead,^ told in Ames' voice, is the story of a mansifting, analyzing, and categorizing memories to fight the true enemynotphysical death, but linear time and the inevitable process of forgetting. Hedescribes the problem by quoting a stanza of Isaac Watts' 1719 hymn, "O,God, Our Help in Ages Past":

Time, like an ever-rolling stream.Bears all its sons away;They y forgotten, as a dreamDies at the opening day. (103)

These lines, quoted frequently on American tombstones of the eighteenthand early-nineteenth centuries, are especially appropriate for a novel fullof burials, from literal graves for bodies. Bibles, hymnals, and guns to thenarrator's burial of a story that hovers over Ames' life until he resurrects itin the second half of the book. Ritualized burial, of course, is not so much amatter of disposal as of memorialization: a way to attach the abstract to theconcrete and thus fix it in time and space so that it is always at hand.

Memorializationthe physical presence of a tombstone, for exampleensures that what time bears away is not, indeed, forgotten. The rest ofWatts' hymn also counters the mutability of physical life by imaginingpersonal identity subsumed eventually within the unchanging natureof an eternal God, who, as Ames says later, "holds the whole of our lives

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in memory" (115). And herein is a paradox: both memorialization andtheology suggest that the only way to preserve the memory of a life may beto lose it in collective memory, a process that Ames resists rather decisively.If the end of human life means the unalloyed joy of what Watts calls "oureternal home" in God, Ames is skeptical. He is not willing to "believe wewill forget our sorrow altogether. That would mean forgetting that we hadlived, humanly speaking" (104). In other words, he can come to grips withbeing gone, but not with forgetting or being forgotten. And so he engagesin an act of creation that echoes the mythic narratives of Genesis 1 and 2,in which God creates the world with words. Quoting George Herbert a fewpages later, Ames acknowledges that "Preservation is a Creation, and more,it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment" (111). Writing,a sacred act that has always felt to Ames "like praying," both creates hislife in all its singularity and situates it within the eternal (19). Like prayer,writing allows mortals to commune with the immortal. As Ames tells hisson, "while you read this, I am imperishable" (53).

Looking at it another way, writing mediates between what LauraTanner calls the "textured particularity" of Ames' daily existence in timeand his perception that daily life can also be part of an eternal realm inwhich time has no sway. This mediation process raises two questions:"How does a person facing death experience life in a meaningful way?" and"How does a person immersed in savoring his last days face death in itsmost horrifying form, the possibility of ceasing to exist even in memory?"Tanner is interested in the first question and I in the second. She describesthe way Ames' "perception sharpens and slows" so that his senses functionwith greater clarity and time seems to slow down, a compensatory processneuroscientists associate with the old or gravely ill people facing their owndeath. She notes that this heightened perception allows Ames to live in theconcrete world even while he is building memories by translating his lifeinto abstract "typological patterns," (229-33). ^ By "typological patterns,"I assume she means those biblical stories such as the Exodus that oftenserve Christians as a shorthand version of human experiencewhat someniight see as the substitution qf^ clich^for thoughtful reflecjion. Whileacknowledging that typology can be lazy and inauthentic, however, I arguethat it is absolutely crucial to Ames' act of memorialization, the consciousconstruction of memory for a social purpose.

Ames uses both biblical and secular typologies to organize his memoriesinto meaningful patterns, and sometimes his biblical typologies have

TYPOLOGY AND MEMORIALIZATION IN GILEAD 243

secular counterparts. His use of the Christian typologies tbat readers wouldexpect of a Congregational minister include both burials and baptismsfollowed by resurrections, communion scenes, parables such as the storyof the Prodigal Son, and naming ceremonies. The secular though sacralizedtypologies include baseball, the American game. These recurring symbolstestify both to the novel's grounding in Christian historiography and toAmerican sensibilities during tbe historical eras through which Ames haslived (from 1880 to the 1950s), a time when secular culture challengedorthodox Christianity. As cultural geographers and anthropologists havenoted, the cultural secularization that started in the United States in the latenineteenth century peaked for most parts of the nation in the 1930s and 40s(Zelinsky). Ames' beloved older brother, Edward, illustrates this culturaltension. Having gone away to study theology in Germany, he returns toIowa an atheist. But Ames memorializes their relationship in one of the mostradiant scenes in the novel by using baseball as a symbol of what still unitesthem. In other words, sports has become a (perhaps the) source of usablesymbols for creating a memory of Edward that has eternal significance.Though baseball does not have the religious significance of, say, Christianbaptism, for Ames, it is as crucial to his act of memorialization as the moreorthodox symbols.^ And one might note that the scene in which Ames andhis brother play catch ends with Edward pouring a cup of water over hishead and reciting a Psalm. Here the symbolism of baseball and baptismmerge in a way that sacralizes the game {Gilead 64).

My process in this argument will be to analyze Robinson's use of biblicaland secular typology in the novel to show that this literary tool is particularlysuited to the act of memorialization. I will concentrate on burials, baptisms,and communion scenes to illustrate the use of biblical symbols and onbaseball as the most meaningful secular symbol. But first I want to remindthe reader of typology's historical significance and to clarify its definition.Because few contemporary authors use this venerable strategy, a staple ofAmerican literature from the times of William Bradford and the Pilgrims tothe nineteenth-century Romantics, it runs the risk of being misunderstoodand trivialized. "*

As a metbod of biblical interpretation, typology has been around fora long time. Early church fathers such as Augustine, Origin, and Jeromeemployed typology to create connections between the Old and NewTestaments. Sometimes they fought about the extent to which the symbolitself was important and how fanciful their interpretations might become


(Davis 13-28). But the basic strategy was to take a literal historical event orperson described in the Old Testament as a typethat is, a symbolandthen find its fulfillment in a New Testament antitype. One widely recognizedexample casts Jonah's three-day sojourn in the belly of a large fish as a typeand finds the antitype in Jesus' three days in the grave. Matthew 12 makesthe connection between Jesus and Jonah explicit. When the scribes andPharisees ask Jesus for a "sign" to prove his authority, Jesus replies thatJonah's experience is the only one he will provide: "For just as Jonah wasthree days in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nightsthe Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth" (Matt. 12:38-40, NRSV).Such typology is similar to allegory in that it starts with something concreteand then attaches another meaning to it. The differences are that typologicalinterpretation enriches both the type and the antitype and that typologyfocuses on recurring symbols rooted in human history. The Jonah storyacquires deep, mystical significance as it predicts the burial and resurrectionof Christ, and Jesus' reference to it suggests that God's historical patterns areintentional and accessible to interpretation. In other words, typology is nota two-dimensional trope like allegory. Typology allows human beings to seethat personal experience is a dynamic process: what happened in the past isfully meaningfully only when it comes to fulfillment; what happens todaybecomes a way to experience a historical moment in the present. Whenthe dying Ames watches television with his young son and feeds him bitsof food off his plate, he thinks of it as serving communion (127). The mealbecomes an act of nurture that fulfills the spirit of the religious ritual in away his son is unlikely to forget. At the same time, Robinson prompts thereader to revisit the narrative of Jesus' last supper in which he, like Ames,nurtures his followers in the future by creating a scene of remembrance.

It is probably impossible to be a Christian without employing typology .because, as the historian Marc Bloch observed, "Christianity is a religion ofhistorians."^ The doctrines of Christianity are statements of belief in historicalevents; Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter memorialize thoseevents. And Christians of all times have frequently seen the patterns of anej;errial God who operates in history^s themselves eternal (4-5). J'or theseChristians, typology is a way to assert that biblical patterns are repeated inthe lives of the saints.* Thus, Christian typology is a way both of readinghistory and of creating history. Martha Norkunas distinguishes historyfrom memory in a recent book about historical monuments in Lowell,Massachusetts, by invoking Maurice Halbwachs' definition of history as


(in her words), "an abstraction and an intellectualized reordering of thepast to fit into a coherent framework." Like Halbwachs, she believes thathistory begins when enough time has passed to threaten the loss of whatthe ancient rhetoricians would have called "natural memory" of the event(Norkunas 44).^ In other words, history is what we make of the past oncethose who bore witness can no longer speak. It is the record of what wechoose to remember. Similarly, memorialization is an act of inventinghistory, but often it begins before natural memory has faded. An excellentexample is Ames' story of the Model T that Jack Boughton stole and thenleft to be stolen again by so many other people that it was impossible to pinthe theft on a single culprit. Eventually, "the resources of the law were in noway sufficient [to deal with it], so the whole thing was forgotten officially[its history] and remembered for a long time afterward because it madesuch a good story" (181). Once natural memory lapses, however, historywhich can be created by memorializationremains. Typology is a tool forgiving significance to memorialized human events by describing them interms of sacred symbols. It is also a way to show that the most significantevents of the past recur, that the day of miraclesor at least of transcendentmomentsis not past.

When Ames evokes typological patterns, he too is not just makingsense of his life but investing it with meaning and recording it in a waythat memorializes what he wants to be remembered. Consider the constantreferences to burials I mentioned earlier. The most significant burial of alltime for Christians was the entombment of Christ, which, in fact, did notlastit led to a resurrection. This pattern is memorialized in the Christianrite of baptism.^ Watching his son play in a sprinkler, Ames recalls seeingthe ritual performed by Baptists, whose name refers to their practice ofimmersing only adult believers as a symbol of faith. As the newly baptizedChristian is raised from the water, he observes, "it did look like a birth ora resurrection" (63). Burial in Western society invokes secular typologyas well. The prototype is planting. In fact, we speak jokingly of burial asbeing "planted" and of graveyards as "bury patches." Ames describes hisown impending death by saying that "this old seed is about to drop intothe ground" (53). The point is that what is planted will come back up,transformed and more meaningful than ever before. As Gaston Bachelardobserves in the chapter on shells in The Poetics of Space, "A creature thathides and 'withdraws into its shell,' is preparing a 'way out.' This is true ofthe entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to


the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent" (111). In other words,burial is not so much an act of disposal as an expression of hope.^

Because concepts of burials are also situated in national history, it isuseful to consider how Americans have developed a perhaps unconsciousattachment to burial as a method for disposing of the dead and as a symbolof hope. The historical watershed ofthe early nineteenth century is crucialto understanding the significance of burial. During this time, Americansstarted called burial grounds "cemeteries," from the Greek for "sleepingplace," instead of graveyards (Linden 16, 310 n. 13). In 1831, Jacob Bigelowand others consecrated Mount Auburn Cemetery, the prototype of Americanrural or garden cemeteries, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, partly as an effortto foster a more natural (as in philosophically Romantic) attitude towardburial. Bigelow articulates his attitude toward the act of burial in termsof physical resurrection of the most natural kind. Blanche M. G. Lindendescribes his views in her history of Mount Auburn: "in a lecture in 1831,[Bigelow] assured Bostonians"

that decayed physical matter did not become "extinct and useless"but served as the substance "from which other living frames areto be constructed." The dead body "contributes its remains to thenourishment of plants around it." Without "this law of nature, the soilwould soon be exhausted, the earth's surface would become a barrenwaste, and the whole race of organized beings, for want of sustenance,would become extinct." (136)

Burial is, then, the necessary precursor of resurrection, whether of plantsor of humans from their graves. Taken together, everything in Ames'culturefrom the Bible to commonplace activities in a rural communityto the language of dreams to historical eventstells him that burial is notpermanent.

In fact, none of the burials in Gilead lasts. As young Ames and fatherstand beside his grandfather's grave in Kansas early in the novel, he sees "aftill moon rising just as the sun was going down" (14). Sundown, perhaps the

_ most, common stock symbol of death in American culture, is paralleled by a _rising full moon turned toward the sun so as to reflect light on a full half ofits orb. Having just undertaken a grueling journey into a wilderness to findand care for his grandfather's grave, young Ames finds that burial and gravetending are acts of memorialization that naturally lead to resurrection. Anolder Ames resurrects his grandfather again and again in the following


pages by telling the stories ofthe grim old abolitionist with his unwaveringlyliteral grasp of scripture. All of these stories are also Ames' storieshisbegats, and predictors of the way he will refiect his grandfatherand partof his son's heritage. Significantly, the child is never named in the novel. Ishe John Ames IV? ^ Perhaps the point is that he cannot receive the identityof an inherited name unless he knows his antecedents. There is no point tohis being John Ames IV unless he understands who John Ames III, JohnAmes Jr., and the original prototypical John Ames were. Each John Amesor perhaps simply each Ames if the boy inherits only the surnamewilllive on in his son whether he is physically resurrected after burial or not.Each descendant can be transformed by knowing that the types before himpredict what he may become.

Even inanimate objects have trouble staying buried in Gilead. AfterAmes' grandfather dies, his father unwraps a bundle of objects left at theirhouse. In the bundle is a gun, a number of serrnons and letters, and somestained white shirts (78-79). Ames calls them "souvenirs," from the Frenchfor something used to make memory (86). After the old man's death,Ames' father buries these reminders of his own father as if he can bury hismemory and his deeds at the same time. And then he digs them upinfact, he digs the gun up twice and eventually buries it in pieces in the river,perhaps a symbolic action of embedding it in the passage of time, as if hisfather's bloody doings before and during the Civil War can be subsumedin the river of life always rushing to the sea. His father's words, of course,are imperishable so long as they can be read, and they probably representthe part of his father that he wishes to historicize, a very specific act ofmemorialization. Like old Ames' body, however, the bloody shirts he worenext to it are ritually washed and prepared (ironed) for burial and shroudedin a flour sack before being reinterred (79-81). Only the imperishable partsof Grandfather Ames are preserved in the end. As always, memorializationis a selective process of choosing the memories that serve a purpose anddisposing of the rest.

The novel is also full of buried narratives resurrectedperhapsreluctantlyin Ames' memory. The "disruption" of John Ames Boughton'sstory begins to hover over Ames' memories at the midpoint of the novel,when the younger man comes to visit, makes friends with Ames' wife.Lila, and becomes a figure of much interest to his child. Chronologically,the story begins with Jack's baptism, when old Boughton surprises Amesby naming his son for the friend who, it seems, will never have one of his


own. Ames' reaction is rejection: "this is not my child." Though it makeshim feel guilty, Ames has "never been able to warm to [Jack]," especially inlight of his namesake's youthful abandonment of his daughter, who must beresurrected in narrative to be able to tell Jack's story at all (122,155-59).

In telling the later story of Jack's common-law marriage to a Blackwoman and of his love for their son, however, Ames intertwines it withthe details of how he himself came to marry a woman thirty-five years hisjunior and father his own son. Resurrecting both stories shows that theyhave much in common. Jack makes the comparison explicit for Ames: "Youhave made a somewhatunconventional marriage yourself. You know alittle bit about being the object of scandal. Unequally yoked and so on. Ofcourse, Delia is an educated woman [unlike Lila, whose subject and verbsdo not always agree]" (230). Recognizing their commonalities, includingthe fact that each is abandoning a young son against his will, Ames finds away to heal the breach between them by blessing Jack as be leaves Gilead(241). His resurrecting these stories means that the reader witnesses atransformation of memory. The memory of John Ames Boughton is "saved"in the spiritual sense of being "healed, restored," as Ames translates theword in one of his doctrinal discussions (239). The memorialization thatbegins with a naming ceremony at baptism ends with what he's realizedeven before be told the story, that "John Ames Boughton is [his] son," bywhich he means "another self, a more cherished self" (189). The name "JohnAmes Boughton" itself memorializes Jack's story as Ames' own. As Amesobserves about the incredible good fortune of Lila's love, "grace has grandlaughter in it" (207). He will not live to see the son of his flesh grow up; buthe has lived long enough to see the son of his heart make him proud. Ameshas called Jack "the prodigal son," but the thrust of that typological story isin the prodigalityliberalityof the father's love.^' Ames recognizes "theabsolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving" (73).Like God, whose perspective he adopts frequently in the novel, he forgivesall because he knows all. '^

In addition to its symbolic re-creation of burial and resurrection,_th_e syinboU ritual _ofbap_tisrn_with_water as, a_way to name_a_child_-^as_a_member of a human family and as a child of Godis standard practicein Congregational churches. Typologically, it re-creates a signal event ofChrist's life in the life of a believer. What may appear to be strict adherenceto mindless custom, however, takes on new meaning in Gilead. Given themany references to doctrine and doctrinal discussions in the novel, we may


reasonably assume that Ames is an orthodox theologian. The narrativeburies and resurrects the Bible and other religious texts fairly frequently.Grandfather Ames loses a Bible crossing a river, and a Confederate soldiermails it back to him (90). His grandson remembers going with his father tohelp pull down a Baptist church hit by lightning and recalls how they buriedruined Bibles and hymnals in "two graves."

But his more potent memories of this incident are of people singinghymns and of the communion with his father, who gave him an "ashy biscuit"to eat from his own hands. In this scene, the written text is buried and thenresurrected in real time. The hymnals contain texts of "Blessed Jesus" and"The Old Rugged Cross." The people bring the hymn texts to life as theyliterally resurrect them from their graves by singing. Ames rememberseven "grand old women" with their hair down singing like young girls asif they thernselves have been resurrected in more vital form. The largercommunion ritual is even less formalized as the people simply pull out foodto share. Jesus' admonition to his disciples after the Lord's Supper was "dothis in remembrance of me"; the antitype occurs any time Christians takecommunion. Ames personalizes and memorializes the scene by associatingit with his father's coming to him with "scorched hands" to give him abiscuit covered with soot. Ames describes it as "[taking] communion frommy father's hand" and states that "whenever I have held a Bible in my hands... it is somehow sanctified by that memory" (95-96). Like the phoenix,the Bible rises from its charred remains to live in memory and in humanbehavior.

In calling his experience a communion, Ames participates in whatMaurice Halbwachs calls "religious collective memory," a crafted version ofhistory agreed upon once the last witnesses are gone. Halbwachs identifiesJesus as a distinctive link between past and present for Christians and agreeswith Bloch's assertion that "Christianity is a religion of historians." As heputs it, "the entire substance of Christianity, since Christ has not reappearedon earth, consists in the remembrance of his life and teachings" (88-89).In this sense, typology is invaluable as a way to access collective memoryexperientially as well as cognitively. Because Christ is a god, not merelya human religious leader, he not only acted in the past but continues tomediate the physical and metaphysical realms of existence for his followers.For this reason, Halbwachs agrees with Emile Durkheim that Jesus is verydifferent from Buddha: "For a god is above all a liyi^ ng beirig with whomhumans must reckon and on whom they must rely; but the Buddha is dead.


he has entered Nirvana; he can no longer affect human events" (qtd. inHalbwachs 89). Halbwachs explains that, according to orthodox dogma,Jesus not only shows the road to salvation by past events of his earthly lifebut intervenes on behalf of the penitent in the present to bring it about. Heinitiated communion to memorialize his crucifixion, but he is also presentin some form every time Christians celebrate it. Halbwachs argues thatmeditation on scripture alone is not enough to create personal revelation;in fact, he points out that "the study of the Gospel texts and of the scripturesmight serve just as much to alienate us from God as to bring us nearer tohim,"(89-91) given the difficulty of interpreting literature written so manycenturies ago. The believer who participates in concrete behavior such asbaptism or communion is participating in the life of Christ in a way thattransforms intellectual understanding into immediate human experience.

Ames articulates this need for human experience of the divine just afterhe tells the story of reading an old article on the nature of abstract faithBoughton found in Ladies Home foumal next to a particularly nauseating(and very concrete) recipe for molded salad his parishioners have oftenbrought to his house in times of trouble. In the style of a gospel writer whofollows a narrative with a parable or doctrinal discussion that illuminates thenarrative, Ames goes on to comment on the experiential nature of faith:

There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianityin the modern world. ... One is that religion and religious experienceare illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other isthat religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it isan illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, becauseit is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for thepurposes of the individual believer. (145)

Ames' use of typology is, in fact, a way to create undeniably scripturalexperiences in his own life and that of his son. In his use of the collectivememories of Christianity, he is both a dogmatist and a mystic. Dogmatists,as Halbwachs defines them, are those who "claim to possess and to preserve

. thejneaning_and understanding of Christian doctrine b_ecause_th_ey knQw_how controversial terms, propositions, or symbols have been defined inthe past, and also because they possess a general method for defining thesetoday" (100). In other words, they know how "the fundamental memories ofChristianity" have been established historically now that the time in whichJesus' words and behavior were open to many interpretations has passed


(Halbwachs 91-105). When Ames and Boughton discuss predestinationwith Jack, for example, they are dogmatists who know the language ofthe experts, words like "omniscience" and "omnipotence" (149-50). Theirpurpose is to find "truth." Dogmatists are inextricably linked to the past;according to Halbwachs, "they are not preoccupied with 'reliving' the pastbut rather with conforming to its teachingto whatever ofthe past can bepreserved, reconstructed, and understood today" (103).

Mystics, on the other hand, are concerned with bringing the experienceof the past into their present. Ames' direct, immediate experience oftypological realities in his own life provides much ofthe "textured particular"that Tanner describes. For example, immediately after a discussion withBoughton on biblical revelations of the afterlife, Ames' memories of hisfather's communion and of his love for his wife give him an imaginativeexperience of heaven: "Ashy biscuit, summer rain, her hair falling wetaround her face. If I were to multiply the splendors ofthe world by twothesplendors as I feel themI would arrive at an idea of heaven very unlikeanything you see in the old paintings" (149). Here his experience is mystical,in Halbwachs' sense of the word, because Ames brings communion andambiguous scriptural descriptions of heaven into his own life, where theyproduce a direct immediate religious experience. In a sense, Ames hasannulled the passage of time by bringing fundamental memories of hischurchcommunion and scriptural words about heaveninto concretereality. Traditional Catholic hagiography usually describes an immediateexperience of Christ's presence in the life of a saint, who, as Halbwachsexplains, "[claims] to abolish the passage of time and to enter as directlyinto contact with Christ as the apostles who had seen and touched himand to whom he appeared after death" (115). Ames' Protestant backgroundprobably will not grant credence to the supernatural experience of, say,a Catherine of Siena, but the long-established custom of fitting spiritualexperience into a typological framework provides a way to merge his naturalmemories with the artificial (in the sense of "crafted") collective memory ofhis church. His individual memory is not lost in the collective memory;rather, the collective memory is fulfilled in the individual.

Ames' narrative also brings his young son into his heritage by includinghim in the symbolic reenactment of typological historical events. Inpreparation for serving the Lord's Supper early in the novel, he is musingon his physical body, from which he is about to be parted as Jesus was inthe crucifixion. Although he is fully aware of the beautiful symbolism ofthe communion ritual, he is also thinking about a body that, like the bread.


was "blessed and broken" and about the necessity for an agent to mediatebetween the spiritual and physical parts of existence. He realizes he wants topreach on "the gift of physical particularity and how blessing and sacramentare mediated through it" (69). The oft-quoted definition of a sacramentis "a visible sign of an inward grace," but in the scene that follows, Amesshows that breaking bread and sharing it is more than simply a picture ofsomething spiritual. Here the difference between allegory and typology isquite clear. Ames' meditation ends with his giving the communion bread tohis son at Lila's request. Even though the child is "too young" to understandthe theological implications of the "meal," he can understand in the mostphysical way his father's nurture (69-70). Robinson has commented inan interview with Jennie Rothenberg that communion is "the ultimateemblematic signifier of the holiness of giving and receiving sustenance,"(127) and such nurturing is repeated in several places in the novel, includingthe scene in which Ames humorously shares bites of food with his son whilewatching television. Ames brings his child into the fold of Christendomby enfolding him in his own love and care. Organized religion provideslanguage to describe the scene, but the experience is not an empty ritual.Beyond its importance as a physical act of nurture, it seals the experienceof communion in the child's individual memory ready to be plumbed formeaning when he is old enough to understand it in the wider framework ofcollective memory.

Ames has his own individual memory of an experience that later provedto mean more than it seemed at the time, perhaps because it was connectedto the secular ritual of watching a baseball game. His grandfather hadtaken him to see the great Bud Eowler play in Des Moines, only to have thegame called for a thunderstorm in the fifth inning before anything reallyhad happened (46-47). Bud Eowler's importance in baseball history wasnot only as a wonderful second baseman but also as the first professionalBlack player to join a white team in 1872 (Ward and Burns 40). But Fowlerwas never able to get beyond that first success because the prejudice againstBlack players was so overwhelming. Eowler himself observed that "if I hadnptjseen quite so black, I might have caught on^as a Spaniard or sornethingofthat kind. ... My skin is against me" (qtd. in Ward and Burns 40-41). Atthe time, young Ames was rather glad the game was over; his predominantmemory is of wondering if the thunder were God acknowledging thepresence of his formidable grandfather at a sporting event and of the rarepleasure of sharing a bag of licorice with him. As an old man, however.


Ames wonders if the experience of watching that partial game was whatspurred his grandfather's leaving Iowa and his family behind to go back toKansas, the scene of his agitation for the Free Soilers, who wanted to keepthe state free of slavery (46-47).

The conclusions he reaches about the effect of the game that day mustwait until Ames knows enough about the mythic nature of baseball to seetbe terrible irony of a game touted as gloriously democratic that still deniesa man his stab at the American dream of reaching his potential in the world.Grandfather Ames has fought all his life for social justice for Black slaves. Hehas even lost an eye in the war before coming home to drive his daughter-in-law crazy by frequently giving tbe poor the slender resources with whichshe had to care for her family (32-34). But here he is with his grandsonat a game in which even the weather will not give a Black man his due.Just as a baseball game suddenly creates Ames' epiphany about "how themoon actually moves, in a spiral," so the game itself may have helped himunderstand his grandfather's confusing bebavior (45). A man who takes thepromise of America as seriously as he takes the promises of the gospel hasto love baseball.

George Grella has observed tbat "anyone who does not understand thegame cannot hope to understand the country" (qtd. in Folsom 53). Forone thing, baseball was created in America and speaks to the Yankee idealsof creativity and individualism. It began in the mid-nineteenth-centuryperiod we call the American Renaissance, the golden age of Americanculture. One version of baseball's origins says Abner Doubleday sat downin Cooperstown, New York, one day in 1839 after a game of town ball anddrew up tbe rules for baseball. Or maybe not. Given that Doubleday was notactually in Cooperstown in 1839, the story is doubtful. Another version saysthat Alexander Joy Cartwright and Daniel Lucius Adams, charter membersof the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in New York City, wrote therules of the game in 1845 (Ward and Burns 3-4). The point is not so muchwhere the game was established but that baseball lovers need to have a storyabout its beginnings at all. A story that is true but not necessarily factualis tbe mark of all great creation myths. The continual reenactment of thatUr-game in specific times in history makes baseball a potent typologicalsymbol.

Besides myths of time, baseball recalls cherished American myths ofspace and escape from the stress of industrialized society.'^ Set in a greendiamond around which the player runs in an effort to reach home, the gameis associated with idyllic pastoral landscapes and the nineteenth-century


cult of domesticity, which encouraged men to fight their battles in the worldbut then return home to a spiritual refuge, the domain of women. (The factthat women also play baseball does not change its ultimate goal: to returnhome.) Despite its fanatically devoted fans, baseball is a leisure activity, asopposed to, say, football, which is more martial with its marching bandsspurring the warriors on to smash their opponents in the united invasioninto enemy territory.''' In contrast, baseball games might be accompaniedby organ music, which we associate with church services, not "fight songs"played on wind instruments and drums. And though baseball games requireteamwork, fans often prize the finesse of individual baseball players asmuch as the team's collective effort. A game that requires martial music andphysical attacks touches some primitive nerve that baseball does not. As inthe game Ames attends with his grandfather in Gilead, baseball contestsunlike football games and warscan even be called because of weather.Baseball is about re-creation, the nurture of mind and spirit, which occursin eternal time. Ames describes listening imaginatively to baseball gameson his radio later as the counterpart of pastoral counseling, when he mustlisten carefully to assess the "life" (in the sense of "energy" or vitality") in hisparishioners. It is perhaps this constant imaginative connection to matterseternal that keeps Ames alive during the dark days after the death of his firstwife and child (44).

The sports writer Thomas Boswell even compares baseball to a religionand quotes Annie Savoy's opening speech in Bull Durham to illustrate hispoint:

I believe in the church of baseball. I've tried all the major religionsand most of the minor ones. I've worshiped Buddha, Allah, Brahma,Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things.For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic's rosary and there are 108stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance. But itjust didn't work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me.I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there's no guilt in baseball.And it's never boring. ... It's a long season and you gotta trust it. I'vetriedJertLall, I really have, and the only church.that truly feeds the soul, _day in, day out, is the church of baseball, (qtd. in Boswell 189)

Boswell agrees wholeheartedly. He describes the textual analysis ("exegesis")that attends every game, play, and player but points out that baseball isremarkably tolerant, "a church without moralizing." He argues out thatbaseball is concerned with the eccentricities of the individual and that no


one gets lost in the crowd: "Baseball believes that a man writes his name inthe book of life and that what he writes, no matter how small, holds its spaceforever and will never be edited out of existence no matter how cumbersomeThe Baseball Encyclopedia... might someday become." In a society of plannedobsolescence, baseball never dismisses history or the pantheon of greatplayers. Best of all, baseball is an approximation of heaven, where "no one isequal. But everything is fair.... Year after year, you get another chance and afresh start.... A new self can perpetually grow out of the old self" (192-93).In other words, baseball creates a particularly American heaven.

At the end of his life, Ames employs baseball as a medium of hope. Whenhis worried parishioners install a television in his home so he can watchgames, he is both pleased and annoyed since TV seems "two dimensional"to him. He has always enjoyed hearing games on the radio, an oral mediumthat inspires the hearer's imagination. It is this imaginative world thatcontinues to interest the old man; he doesn't really care whether the Yankeesor Red Sox win. He has vowed to quit dwelling on his physical "discomfort,"so the prospect of a good game is "providential," presumably because itallows him the pleasure of exercising his imagination as an antidote to pain(126). Later, as he speculates about the nature of heaven, he decides that"Boughton is right to enjoy the imagination of heaven as the best pleasureof this world" (166). In these two passages, he suggests a parallel betweenheaven and its earthly American counterpart, a good baseball game.

Ames also enjoys playing and discussing baseball and frequently refersto pick-up games with friends and conversations about baseball, oftenin connection to politics and political elections (see 116 and 119). Thepower of regularly scheduled political elections to inspire hope likens it tobaseball in the American imagination and suggests yet another typologicalmotif. Even the word "election" might suggest a parallel religious tenet toa Calvinist like Ames, who clings to both the absolute sovereignty of Godand the possibility of glorious change in the human condition (see 149-53).Baseball also provides a forum in which Americans, particularly men, canform friendships and unite in a community very much like a church even ifit is nominally secular. Two of the most radiant scenes in the novel show thepower of baseball to repeat this historical pattern in a way that breaks out ofthe confining boundaries of stale ritual.

When Ames' older brother, Edward, comes home an atheist from hisdoctoral studies in Germany, the brothers are reunited in a delightful gameof catch. Edward gets "his arm back" in the game and young John Ames


catches a throw that stings his hand, only because he "didn't expect it" and"wasn't ready." In this qualification, the elderly writer protects his youngerreputation as a good ballplayer and reveals how much his sense of himselfis still grounded in his ability to play baseball (63-64). Since Ames was bornin 1880, this scene would have taken place during the social gospel era,when intellectuals such as Walter Rauschenbusch protested the "feminine"nature of faith that divorced spirituality from activity (367).'^ One wayto involve men in a more "muscular Christianity," as it was called, was tocombine theology with an intense interest in physical fitness and sports.^*No small part of the preacher Billy Sunday's fame rested on his reputationas a professional ballplayer known for stunts such as leaping onto his pulpitwaving American fiags at the end of a sermon (McLoughlin 101). Forthese men steeped in theological texts, baseball is a sign that they are bothChristians and real men. At the end of the game, Edward pours a glass ofwater over his head and recites from Psalm 133: "Behold how good andpleasant it is, / For brethren to dwell together in unity!/ It is like the preciousoil upon the head, / That ran down upon the beard." Ames remarks that"after that day I did feel pretty much at ease about the state of his soul,"partly because he realizes that he and Edward share a common knowledgeof religious texts (64). Since this scene follows the one in which Ameswatches his son and Toby play in the sprinklers and thinks of baptism, theglass of water Edwards pours over his own head suggests a self baptism intoa spirituality framed in terms ofthe sacred text of baseball, which still unitesbrothers.

The other radiant baseball episode in the novel brings Ames' biologicalson into the mythos of baseball along with his foster son, John AmesBoughton. Ames comes home one day to find the boy and Jack playing catch,with Jack teaching the child to "scoop up grounders" and delighting him by"announcing" his every move in a "sportscaster's voice." The description ofthe two playing ball immediately vaults Ames into a memory of his firstwife, Louisa, "skipping rope in that street in a bright red coat with herpigtails jumping in the cold" and then of playing catch with his old friend,

- Jack's father. The following passagexomments.on the nature.of memory, in.regard to his writing task. Ames says "it is hard to remember what matters"but that he is trying to record just those memories for his son (101-02). Inthese passages, Ames brings both of his sons into the folds of baseball, muchas he brought one into the fold of Christendom through baptism and theother through communion. He memorializes the scene for his children by


writing it down. Otherwise, it could be borne away on the stream of timethat "bears all its sons away." Ames stops the encroachment of time on thesethree scenes of play by connecting them to the eternal worlds of baseball.They will remain forever fresh and lovely in memory.

Ames' act of creation in selecting and memorializing parts of his lifeis deliberate and purposeful. As I have observed before, he takes on thefunctions of God a number of times in the narrative, by creating a world, byforgiving sins, and by mediating between the physical and spiritual realmsof existence with the use of typology. Ames' concept of composition is verymuch like that of Walt Whitman, the great American poet who sometimeswrote into being an audience for a poem long before the readers were evenborn.'^ Whitman also loved baseball, which he described as "our game. ...America's game; it has the snap, go, fiing of the American atmosphere; itbelongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as ourConstitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life"(qtd. in Ward and Burns xvii). He saw it as an antidote to the breach betweenNorth and South caused by the Civil War and a particularly Americanpastime (Eolsom 42). In section 33 of "Song of Myself, " he imagines himselftraveling "afoot with my vision" of a mythic America that transcends spaceand time (1. 714). Through a portion of this long catalog, he creates scenesthat show Americans re-creating themselves "upon the race-course, orenjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball / At he-festivals" (11.750-51). These lines demonstrate well the pastoral timelessness of baseball,especially for American men.'*

Toward the end of Gilead, Ames differentiates between temporal andeternal memories in recounting a story about his parents. His father andmother have relocated to the Gulf Coast with Edward's help when Amesis a young adult. His father urges him to leave Gilead, which he says willbe revealed for what it is, "a relic, an archaism," if only Ames can get someperspective on it. Ames is "touchy on the subject of paraochialism," andhis father offends him by saying they have lived bounded by "notions thatwere very old and even very local" and urging him to seek a "larger life thanthis." Even at that point in his life, Ames recognizes the difference betweenloyalty to "customs and doctrines and memories" associated with God andthe loyalty to memories of immediate spiritual experience with God. "TheLord," he says "absolutely transcends any understanding I have of him" (24,234-35).


Yet he still baptizes people, serves communion, buries the dead,and watches baseball games. These typologies merely allegorize his lifeexperiences if the only important burials, baptisms, and baseball gameswere the originals and if even those belong to a stale official version ofhistory at odds with the "textured particular" of real life. But one balm inGilead is the knowledge that living there is not, as Ames' father suggests, away to evade experiencing "the wonders of the larger world" (235). Gileadis at once very important to Ames in the way its history feeds his story andunimportant in that the wonders of the world are not spatially bound. Theeternal patterns that Ames is wise and learned enough to recognize in hisown life are what allow him to escape the accusation of parochialism. JohnAmes is not a citizen of a larger world just because, as he says indignantly,he's read "Owen and James and Huxley and Swedenborg and, for heaven'ssake, Blavatsky" (235). It's that he has lived thoughtfully with eyes open to theeternal in his temporal Ufe. And in his memoir, he makes himself eternal bycreating tbe world in wbich eating peanut butter sandwiches on raisin breador ashy biscuits is raised to a new level once be invests it witb tbe eternalsignificance of a communion meal. Like Whitman, another man who lovedbaseball and concrete sensual experience, Ames knows that the only way toannul time within time is to write the local and temporal and mundane intothe eternal time of collective memory. He does not lose the vivid details ofhis life, but, in fact, uses those details to fulfill the potential of typologicalpatterns and memorialize his life within these shared interpretive visions ofthe eternal. In so doing, he stops the flow of time, proving, with Whitman,that time and place "avail not" when literature cuts across the stream of timethat otherwise "bears all its sons away."

Gardner-Webb University

NOTES

'I am indebted to my friend Eileen Welch Spears for introducing me to Gilead.Thanks are ajso due, to_Scptt LaMascus and_an anonymojis reader for Christianityand Literature for their encouragement and editorial advice. Finally, I am gratefulto Gayle Bolt Price and Gardner-Webb University for two Writing Across theCurriculum retreats that gave me time and space to begin the paper in the fall of2008 and finish revising it in the fall of 2009.

^Tanner's reading of Gilead illuminates the great brilliance of Robinson'sstorytelling in depicting the thought processes of a dying man who lives more fully


because he knows he is dying and in showing how a winsome character of spiritualdepth and maturity creates his own "good death," bravely bucking what PhilippeAries names a culture of "forbidden death" (85-107).

'One might also note the increasing popularity of sports symbols andreferences on American gravestones during the past twenty years. The trendRobinson embodies in Edward Ames has become so prevalent that sports symbolsare replacing Christian symbols in what Wilbur Zelinsky describes as an activity"particularly indicative of personal values." In this sense, Gilead, like every novel, isultimately a novel of the time in which it is published.

^Typology has a long history in American literature, in which it often served asocial purpose. The American colonists we call the Pilgrims frequently employedit, as did their contemporaries, the Puritans. William Bradford's Of PlymouthPlantation uses typology to justify genocide when he compares the Pilgrims to theChildren of Israel and the native Pequots to the Canaanites that God commandedthe Jews of the Exodus to exterminate (294-96). Typology remained a potentliterary strategy until well into the nineteenth century. For example, Harriet BeecherStowe typologically compared the death of Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin to thecrucifixion of Christ, and Henry David Thoreau used various elements of nature asnonbiblical types (symbols) of what it is to be a human who incarnates the divinespirit.

^Judaism and Islam are also religions of historians.'Here, of course, I use "saint" in the Protestant sense to mean any believer.^For the classic definitions of natural and artificial memory, see Rhetorica Ad

Herennium, a text once attributed to Cicero.^Robinson herself points out in an interview with Jill Owens that biblical baptism

is "baptism unto death. The meaning of it being that in a certain sense you take onmortality of identification. So that the idea of blessing and the acknowledgement ofthe fact of mortality are very implicit together."

'Burials are also an important feature of Robinson's first novel. Housekeeping,which, in fact, begins with a burial. Ruth, the narrator of the novel, explains how hergrandfather died when a train plunged into a glacial lake on the edge of Fingerbone.The story replicates itself when her mother drives herself off a cliff "into the blackestdepth of the lake"(22). By the end of the story, Ruth and her Aunt Sylvie have fakedtheir own deaths in the lake and become drifters. Much of the story, then, is drivenby what is lost and by the fact that burying something is a good way to begin thecreation of memory and sometimes the more formal process of memorialization.

'"Robinson said in an interview with Jennie Rothenberg that she deliberatelyleft the child nameless partly because she "didn't want to be judging whether hewould or would not be another John Ames like his father and grandfather andgreat-grandfather before him." We know from Home, of course, that Ames hasreturned the compliment of naming a son after him by calling his boy "RobertBoughton Ames" in honor of the friend he lovingly refers to as "Old Boughton."


"Morton Kelsey describes the father of the story as a "prodigal, spendthriftlove" and observes that the story should probably be renamed "the parable of theprodigal father" (59).

'^ In a personal conversation, Robinson suggested that in Home Jack becomes atype of the thief on the cross, whose last-minute penitence and acknowledgementof Jesus' sinlessness prompts Jesus to say, "Today you will be with me in Paradise"(Luke 23:39-43).

"During a reading at the 2008 Modern Language Association Conference inSari Francisco, Robinson recalled following the Braves as a child. She describedbaseball as a "beautiful game" for its "slow rhythms and spaciousness" as well its"explosive" plays. She observed that a baseball game seems to generate its own senseof time.

'"For a delightful discussion of football as typology, see Nicholas Howe's Acrossan Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin, pp. 82-83, where he describesthe passion for football in Oklahoma as particularly appropriate given the historyof the state's land runs, in which "Boomers" and "Sooners" competed to taketerritory.

'^ For a fuller discussion of Rauschenbusch's ideas, see pp. 147-52 of Hobbs, "/Sing for I Cannot Be Silent: The Feminization of American Hymnody, 1870-1920.

'*See Clifford Putney's excellent book. Muscular Christianity: Manhood andSports in Protestant America, 1880-1920, on this subject. Robinson says in theinterview with Jill Owens that she hired a graduate student to do research on earlybaseball for the book, and I assume that she would have known the connectionbetween sports and religion in the era, given that she mentions baseball as a"national obsession" of the period. She also says in the same interview that Ames"was interested in baseballthat was just one of the givens of his character."

'^I'm thinking specifically of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," in which Whitmantells the reader, among other things, that "I consider'd long and seriously of youbefore you were born" (1. 88), an evocation of God's voice in Psalm 139.

'^ Clearly, it would require a much longer study to explore fully this timelessnessand the meaning of baseball in Robinson's narrative.

WORKS CITED

Aries. Philippe. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the MiddleAges to thePresent. Trans. Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon,1994.

Bloch, Marc. The Historian's Craft. Trans. Peter Putnam. New York: Knopf, 1963.Boswell, Thomas. "The Church of Baseball." Baseball: An Illustrated History. Ed.

Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns. New York: Knopf, 1994. 189-93.


Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. Ed Samuel Eliot Morison.New York, Knopf, 1970.

Davis, Thomas M. "The Traditions of Puritan Typology." Typology and EarlyAmerican Literature. Ed. Sacvan Berkovitch. Amherst: U Mass. P, 1972. 11-45.

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. New York: Cambridge UP,1994.

Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1992.

Hobbs, June Hadden. "I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent": The Feminization of AmericanHymnody, 1870-1920. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, andCulture. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997.

Howe, Nicholas. Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin.Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

Kelsey, Morton T. The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation. NewYork: Paulist, 1976.

Linden, Blanche M. G. Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes ofMemory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery. Rev. ed. Amherst: U ofMassachusetts P, 2007.

McLoughlin, William G., Jr. Billy Sunday Was His Real Name. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1955.

Norkunas, Martha. Monuments and Memory: History and Representation inLowell, Massacusetts. Washington: Smithsonian, 2002.

Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sport in Protestant America,1880-1920. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Rauschenbusch, Walter. Christianity and the Social Crisis. Boston: Pilgrim, 1907.Rhetorica Ad Herennium. Trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge, Harvard UP,

1954.Robinson, Marilynne. "The Epistolary Marilynne Robinson." Interview by Jill

Owens. Powells.com Interviews. Powells, 19 January 2008. Web. 7 Dec. 2008.. Gilead. New York: Picador-Farrar, 2004.. Home. New York: Farrar, 2008.. Housekeeping. New York: Picador-Farrar, 1980.. Communication with the author. 29 December 2008.. "A Reading by Marilynne Robinson." Modern Language AssociationConference. Hilton, San Francisco. 29 December 2008.

Rothenberg, Jennie. "Gilead's Balm." Interview with Marilynne Robinson. The. Atlantic Online. The Atlantic, 17 Nov. 2004. Web. 7 Dec. 2008.

Tanner, Laura. "'Looking Back from the Grave': Sensory Perception and theAnticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead." ContemporaryLiterature 48.2 (2007): 227-52.

Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Leaves o/Grass. 1855. EarlyNineteenth Century: 1800-1865. Vol. B. of The Heath Anthology of AmericanLiterature. Ed. Paul Lauter, et al. 5th ed. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton, 2006.2995-99.


. "Song of Myself." Leaves of Crass. 1855. Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865.Vol. B. of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter, et al.5"- ed. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton, 2006. 2937-82.

Ward, Geoffrey C, and Ken Burns. Baseball: An Illustrated History. New York:Knopf, 1994.

Zelinsky, Wilbur. "The Uniqueness ofthe American Religious Landscape."Geographical Review 91.3 (2001): 565-86. Academic Search Premier. Web.18 September 2009.

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