On imperfection
Symposium on the Novel: Part III
[We’re delighted to share this guest essay by Phil Christman as part our Symposium on the Novel. You can find more of Phil’s work – including a number of essays on the novelist Marilynne Robinson – at his Substack The Tourist. He also writes the “Book Tour” column for Plough. Finally, you’ll hear Phil talk about this essay in the Fall as part of our debut ‘audio conversation’ reflecting on the topics that come up in the Symposium. —T. & Dh.]
I’m not sure when I first started to ponder the question of whether it mattered, from a Christian perspective, that art be good. It was as a lover of music, and not of literature, that this problem first presented itself to me. I was confronted, every Sunday of my childhood, with music I found painful when incompetently performed, and worse when done right. Our church’s music ran the gamut from the forced pep and aggressive joviality of ‘20s revival hymns to the Godvertising jingles of ‘80s Christian pop.
Even within this aesthetic field, where the good-enough hymnody of Fanny Crosby or a nice, sincere country tune like “I’ll Fly Away” represented the outer limits of artistic excellence, I could hear meaningful differences. Given a choice between two bad songs — especially two bad songs sung against a taped backing track — I preferred the incompetent singers to those who had a smattering of technique but no judgment. The latter sang about God; the former, in their very ineptitude, served as embodiments of the weakness in which God’s strength is made perfect. The harder they were to watch, the more vivid the lesson.
Marilynne Robinson has, as it happens, taken up something like this problem in her essay “Wondrous Love.” She writes of her surprise that hymns like “In the Garden” have become “a part of [her] substance,” despite flaws she clearly hears.
[F]or a long time, until just a decade ago, at most, I disliked this hymn, in part because to this day I have never heard it sung well. Maybe it can’t be sung well. The lyrics are uneven, and the tune is bland and grossly sentimental. But I have come to a place in my life where the thought of people moved by the imagination of joyful companionship with Christ is so precious that every fault becomes a virtue. I wish I could hear again every faltering soprano who has ever raised this song to heaven. God bless them all.
This opening to Robinson’s essay already suggests a partial explanation of my problem: Bad Christian art can, for a charitable viewer or listener, still evoke the keenness of that person’s “imagination of joyful companionship” with the divine, and kindle an answering imagination in the hearer. This is one way of engaging with art, and it even has analogues that we could call “secular,” if we think the secular really exists. Think of the unironic love that some fans of outsider art or sheer trash come to feel for their apparently incompetent favorite artists. When we watch Ed Wood’s cheaply made but deeply felt 1953 film Glen or Glenda, a messy and unresolved meditation on Wood’s own penchant for cross-dressing disguised as a mere exploitation film, or listen to a viral object of mockery like “It’s So Cold in the D” or an outsider-music oddity like “My Daddy He Died in 1969,” we are not moved in the ways the singer intends, but we are moved by the way that their mistakes and eccentricities create a vivid sense of a human presence. We think, in spite of ourselves, of moments when we have felt the emotions that the artist clumsily describes and, at the same time, not by skill but by presence, powerfully evokes. It is the same with Marilynne Robinson’s faltering sopranos.
The novel, of course, is not music—except to the considerable extent that it is. A euphony fetishist like William Gass or Rikki Ducornet, a novelist-musician like Joyce or Ellison, makes the similarities harder to tune out. (Please do not imagine for a moment that I use the term “euphony fetishist” any way but admiringly.) In another essay, Robinson likens characterization to finding the particular “music” of a character. A novel is made of words, but some of its deepest meanings are non-semantic.
In her own novels, Robinson does not seem to need the sort of defense that she provides for bad hymns. Her novels display a stunning range of masteries — of melody, structure, human psychology. Like all the greatest writers, she makes worlds so convincing that you forget, as you read, what she doesn’t and can’t include. (It’s difficult, for example, to imagine a Marilynne Robinson barroom brawl — though in Jack she shows she can write the aftermath of such violence just as well as Hemingway does.) But it’s notable that the greatness of her work is finally fully explicable in more or less the same terms as are those faltering sopranos singing “grossly sentimental” tunes: her novels powerfully evoke a human presence, human voices, human love. They do this not by manifesting aesthetic poverty but by depicting physical and, as it were, moral poverty.
Most readers of Housekeeping (1980) love Sylvie, its heroine, as I do, but the novel is a case study in bad parenting. Sylvie is erratic and mentally ill; she fails to see to the education of the novel’s narrator, Ruth, and her sister, Lucille; at the end of the novel, she burns her house and takes Ruth on the road, to live as vagabonds. That her catastrophic parenting style is, at the same time, the only way of making a home for Ruth that Sylvie can do — that she is, as even the novel’s title insists, keeping house — does not make any of it less catastrophic. She can’t do better, but she is morally obligated to. At some point — hopefully a point less crucial for other people — all of us find ourselves at the end of our own rope in this way, unequipped to be as good as we need to be.
Jack Boughton, the antihero of the ongoing roman-fleuve that so far encompasses Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020), is far more actively evil than Sylvie. He has been a petty thief and, in our terms — though not exactly the terms of his era — a child molester. (He gets a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old pregnant, then leaves. In a younger country, where 16-year-olds often worked full time, this only made you the worst kind of scoundrel.) In Jack, the novel that offers us the least mediated access to Jack’s consciousness so far, we learn that he has conscience enough to feel haunted by his own misdeeds. He tries to understand the urge in himself — the moral equivalent of the urge some of us feel, when standing on a precipice, to fling ourselves off it — that makes him want to do the worst possible thing in every situation in almost the same instant in which he perceives what that thing would be.
We might almost understand this urge as a kind of perverse self-protection: getting the worst out of the way immediately, rather than letting it hang fire. But understanding this urge is not condoning it. Robinson never asks us to condone Jack, and Jack himself is never pricklier than when he thinks someone he likes is about to commit the sin of condoning him. The novel asks that we apprehend him as deeply as possible.
In recent years it has been popular to argue that novels are valuable because they allow us to practice empathy. When I am saying may sound a bit like this line of thought, and certainly when read the saga of Jack Boughton with a growing and sometimes disturbing sense of intimacy and understanding of him. But I do not find the novels-as-schools-for-empathy view ultimately convincing. Novels don’t invariably have the effect this argument claims for them, for starters. Nor am I capable of hearing the word “empathy” at this point without also hearing the tinny buzz of a moment’s favorite cliche. Nor do I trust the way “empathy” has been elevated (most famously by the pop psychologist Brene Brown) as the morally superior cousin of “sympathy” — as though there were not a certain arrogance in the very idea of claiming to feel someone’s pain, rather than simply, levelly to recognize it. Nor do I like the way this argument makes the novel a preparation for life (and thus, implicitly, something we leave behind once we have read enough novels to be ready to go live the ethical, empathetic life on our own). Isn’t it more direct to learn empathy by talking to actual people?
Rather, I want to claim this experience of the evocation of a human personality as something good in itself. To do so, I’ll turn to a thinker with whom the Calvin-loving Robinson is probably not entirely in sympathy: David Bentley Hart, who has called the Calvinist God “monstrous” and “an abyss of pure, predestining omnipotence.” Doing so will also allow me to add a little definition to a word that I have thrown around rather freely thus far: beauty. In a 2013 talk, “Beauty, Being, and Kenosis,” Hart takes issue with the Thomist definition of beauty as “integrity, right proportionality, and brilliancy.” Such a definition rules out the possibility that one might find beauty in “gray days of silver rain and drifting mists,” in “plangent dissonances” or oddly shaped but compelling faces. “Speaking in this way confuses the beautiful with the pretty, the delightful with the merely obliging, enchantment with diversion,” he says. Rather, as he goes on to argue, beauty is whatever suggests to us the “sheer unnecessary thereness” and “simple gratuity” of being itself.
Hart’s rejoinder to the Thomists (with whom he feuds almost as often as he does the Calvinists) also helps us to understand what is compelling about good novels. Just as the “imperfections” of a face are often so integral to its power over us that it seems a category error even to label them “imperfections,” the power of a novel is its ability to evoke that most irregular and violent and contradictory of landscapes, the human personality. The novel is a music of human presence. This may be one reason why efforts to define a list of an absolute aesthetic criteria that the novel must satisfy – as formalist French critics did with drama in the 17th century, for example – have failed even more conspicuously than they have in the cases of the theater and poetry. (A subtler sort of Thomist might rejoin that a good novel, in its messiness, achieves a Thomistic fitness, a right proportionality, to the human personality. How they account for the beauty of a lopsided smile or a gloomy landscape, I’m not sure. After a certain number of patches, one either feels, or one doesn’t, that it is the Thomist aesthetic framework, rather than the subtly asymmetric face, that is too cantilevered to defend.) Novels can be as perfect as a Bach canon professionally performed, or as ramshackle as fundamentalist hymnody. A bad novel is not bad because it is misshapen or irregular but because it is lifeless, lacking the humanity of a faltering soprano.
The fictional character is thus not made worthy to exist by being a sort of child’s doll on whom we practice love. The fictional presences that a novel’s characters evoke, as well as the larger presence evoked by the whole sound and music of a novel – what we somewhat inadequately called the narrator or its voice – matter because, when a novel works, we experience the “sheer unnecessary thereness” (as Hart phrases it) of other people and of ourselves. We don’t practice empathy; we practice receiving and giving a gift — the gift of being itself. Except we’re not practicing. We’re doing it in fact.
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