It’s been a year now since the lauded and laureled Marilynne Robinson came to Strasbourg for the public celebration of the French translation of her latest novel, Home. Her appearance gave me the reason I’d been needing to settle down and read her three novels. Simply as human stories, the novels are wonderful, with a kind of restraint and gentle exploration of pain and delight worlds away from the sensationalistic scandal-mongering that pretends to be deep in most popular fiction. It is a relief, too, to see clergy portrayed as basically kind souls rather than hypocrites and perverts in disguise.

But perhaps what was most eye-opening for me was to realize that, on some level, as an American I am a Calvinist. And you, American Lutheran reader, are one too. Of course, we are trained in our polemic to understand Calvinism in very narrow ways, chiefly as denial of the bodily presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper and an unhealthy interest in predestination. But there is a quite a bit more to Calvin and Calvinism than that, and Robinson’s novels helped me appreciate them better. What struck me mostly deeply is the hallowing of all things, the gift of seeing the divine intention in realities of all sizes: in American literature, I learned from Robinson's talks in Strasbourg, this shows up in Emily Dickinson’s tiny poetic portraits of tiny things to Hermann Melville’s sprawling paean to a terrifying large whale. This is still too new an idea to me to say much more about at present; all I can do is recommend you spend some time with her books yourself and see if they resonate with you in the same way.

By a series of unexpected blessings disguised as strange coincidences, I had the chance to meet Marilynne Robinson during her time here and attend a couple of the sessions where she gave readings and answered questions, the content of which I frantically transcribed by hand. I have finally gotten my notes into typewritten form and so, without any further ado, here they are.

An Evening with Marilynne Robinson at the University of Strasbourg

Q: What is the distinction between thinking and dreaming?
MR: The distinction is too absolute. Your mind is much larger than your conscious intention and habits. You have metaphors that you may not consider “fully daylit, fully rational.” Habit becomes a substitute for the real. Most good writing comes from consulting parts of the mind that we do not normally want to consult.
Q: How do you reconcile being a teacher in a didactic mode with being a writer?
MR: I’m nourished by the teaching—I can talk about the mysteries that preoccupy me in private. Historically people have found all kinds of things to be rational. A writer’s job is to rotate the cliché of truth and see if it really is that way. Fact, objectivity, and rationality are fictions themselves, in continual need of scrutiny. They are more dangerous as unacknowledged fictions, far more than any fiction that acknowledges the fact that it is fiction.
Q: Can you say something about the importance of generational transmission?
MR: The next generation wants a way of acknowledging its origins as meaningful. In the West we try to pass on the best poetry, music, etc. in order that more of it may be made. We have a coercive model now, assuming that the next generation doesn’t want it and it has to be crammed down their throats. The opposite is true—the new generation’s challenge is to rise up to the highest level of the one before. I only teach seminars that my students request.
Q: How do you combine being didactic with being creative?
MR: The didactic part is me instructing myself. I only write about what I don’t already know about. I feel uneasy about the state of a question, so I do research and find out what I think. Most essays started as lectures with some expectation on the part of the hosts of what I would say. That made me uncomfortable, so I followed the discomfort.
Q: Does your reading nurture you?
MR: I did a lot of graduate work on Shakespeare. I didn’t buy the interpretations I read, so I started reading the things that Shakespeare himself would have read. This is how you liberate your own mind. I wrote my two novels set in the Midwest because when I moved there I was told that there was no history there. I hate the thought of being a passive conduit of things I can’t believe in.
Q: Regarding Jack in those two novels—what kind of research leads to that kind of character? The historical research can’t provide that. Is your research for that “dreaming”?
MR: I don’t know where characters come from. I feel like I’m spying on the human race. Think of dreams—someone you forgot but now remember, someone you don’t know but is fully realized—the mind can put together someone so convincing. Characters come to you and then—tristesse—they leave you! Calvin said that God may love us aesthetically rather than morally. So that was a good problem, a character who is loved for his beauty even if he would make you uneasy. Jack was that. I thought, “God would love him!” There is an enormous number of people out there who are deeply and profoundly loved by others while being completely impossible human beings—judging by my mail—but there’s no way to talk about this, which hurts us—it’s a kind of moral snobbery that I think God Himself would not engage in.
Q: Jack, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief—is he Christlike?
MR: Yes. Jack’s suffering is very profound—loneliness, incapacity for accepting love, self-defeat, inevitably acting in ways he cannot justify. Sorrow is sorrow. Christ as man of sorrows embraces a wider range of sorrow than we normally acknowledge.
Q: I heard you say once “anything that breaks your heart enlarges your life”—do you remember that?
MR: No—but it’s true! People ask me why Jack isn’t rescued. Because many people aren’t. It enlarges our moral imagination.
Q: Did you feel the same way about Sylvie as you do about Jack?
MR: I thought I was writing an unpublishable book so that gave me some latitude. I systematically read every novel reviewed on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review and was so disturbed by the two-dimensionality of the characters. People in the north woods had the conflicting impulses of nesting and exploring the outlying word. People make one choice and are haunted by the one they didn’t make. I set out to put a character through a range of avatars. Lucille and Sylvie are sad characters.
Q: What are your favorite books?
MR: Moby Dick! I teach it every two years. I read nonfiction much more than I read fiction. It’s embarrassing how little I know of my own contemporaries. It’s part of my anxiety to have a mind of my own.
Q: Why Moby Dick?
MR: It’s the most successful metaphysical novel of all time, casting nets of metaphor, with profound insight into how thought proceeds.
Q: Can you say something about the changing role of religion in the U.S. over the past hundred years?
MR: The mainline traditions receded and provide no more public voices. Now there are too many—maybe “fundamentalists” is not fair—but the media is drawn to them to make a sideshow version of religion. U.S. churches are diverse and autonomous and small, creating a feeling of intimacy and the dependence of the church on the people in the pews. The familial model predominates. Success is practiced on an intimate scale. The church is not associated with a hierarchy.
Q: I have a question about evil. Is there a range of good and evil in your fiction? Jack is the first to emphasize his vices. Jack is Christ; is he also harm?
MR: Yes. Behind Jack is a malicious, destructive act—the girl and her child—whose lives are as valuable as his—Jack did it to break with his father, which is selfish. People have clear non-negotiable ethical responsibilities to each other, and to break them is evil. But we are never as cruel as when we decide that some person, group, or idea is evil. Evil is the ability to trigger this wheel of identifying-as-evil. I’m confident that we have to apply the idea of evil to our own behavior. But we also have to suspend the idea as much as possible applied to other people. There is nothing worse that episodes of purgation.
Q: You were so wonderfully generous with the father trying to be good to his son. It’s an ode to generosity.
MR: People have the stereotype of the cranky old minister—but look at what he actually worries about: Jack’s well-being.
Q: By the end the father’s quite irritable. The last moment when the father won’t take his hand is the most tragic: the act of non-forgiveness.
MR: No… not taking the hand is refusing to say goodbye again.
Q: You show gracious self-restraint with your characters, not revealing all the lurid details of their lives. You don’t show for instance Jack’s emotional reunion with his wife, only allude to it.
MR: Glory is the narrator, and she is discreet. I do believe in being compassionate with characters. I talk to me students about not making characters deliberately wretched and putting them through the worst of it. You are God relative to them and such treatment makes you incapable of writing a good character.
Q: Do you know where your story is going as you write?
MR: Housekeeping: I was right out of grad school, my head was full of other’s people’s prose. I had to distrust my first two impulses, but I could trust the third. I disciplined myself not to know where the first two novels were going, but in the third of course I had to follow the story arc.
Q: What do you fear is lost in translation?
MR: There’s some loss… but I’m not too worried. It’s gratifying to know that something I’ve written is of interest to Arabic and Chinese speakers… I’m glad for whatever does survive.
Q: I’ve heard that you don’t rewrite. How long is your writing process?
MR: 18-20 months. I tend to be obsessive about anything I do… If I don’t know the sentence I need, I take a walk or listen to music or teach. It’s a matter of hearing the music of the sentence. I wait for the sentence before I continue. If I do something simply on an expedient level, I’ve thrown it off and I can’t take my own cues.
Q: Can you teach creative writing?
MR: I believe in it because a lot of good writers have come through the program. We have 850-1300 applicants for 25 places. We look for a voice in the manuscripts they submit—for the potential. We never talk about publication and don’t grade. You look for people who look like they will be interesting practitioners of your art and you talk to them for two years.
Q: There’s a lack of reference to the year and current events in your novels—why?
MR: I wrote it for an American audience that would pick up on the cues that it’s happening in the 1950s.
Q: Are Midwestern small towns different from other places in the U.S.?
MR: Yes. The Midwest was settled in the 19th century first by New Englanders and New Yorkers, then European immigrants, so you have Norwegian universities and Dutch towns and Czech towns. The northeast corner of Iowa is very conservative, the rest of the state very progressive. During the caucuses electing Obama, he went to many small towns. I was very happy the night he won the primary. It’s a different from, say, Massachusetts, which can be stuffy.
Q: I think of Gilead in comparison to King Lear, since the final line is from King Lear right as he slides into dementia. Was it a political observation on the dementia of the Bush years? Is Obama a lucid moment in it only?
MR: I was so glad that Obama liked Gilead… I wrote it in appreciation of a historical moment in Iowa’s past. A historical ember can be fanned into a flame. Who knows what comes next? A deep spiraling down into deep stupidity. The media is picking up on stupid ideas. Anarchism, the resentment of government at all, property rights trump all else. If BP had been regulated as it should have been, all those people on the coast would’ve had their lives still… If the government doesn’t overwhelm them, corporations will—and you want the government to protect the corporations?
Q: Do students complain about classical works of literature?
MR: I don’t teach contemporary literature because they can read it unassisted. I teach what they ask because they ask me to. By then they want to read what nobody bothered to tell them before. They have undergrad degrees from the best universities—and it’s incredible what they don’t know! They feel cornered and left out of the big conversation. We treat the heritage as medicinal: “This is good for you,” and their jaw clamps shut. In my opinion, classical lit is so because it’s interesting.
Q: How have the students changed over the years?
MR: They’ve improved. We have a more varied student body than before. Now we have a former soldier of the Red Chinese army. Earlier on it was like everyone was trying to write the same story. The flaw is coming in with an idea of what a story is and how to write it. You are to write a testimony about how the world seems to you. Consult deeply within yourself. A wide variety of skill in grammar and syntax… We are looking for some kind of energy. As soon as they begin writing fully out of themselves, the syntactical problems go away.
Q: Do you make active use of your own dreams?
MR: Absolutely not! I forget amazing dreams all the time. I have enough sense of my own dreams to be impressed by them.
Q: I just wasn’t sure what was the meaning of “dreaming” at the beginning of this conversation.
MR: I place daydreaming and night-dreaming on a continuum.
Q: Hate is full of energy, which is what you look for in writing. Do you exclude that?
MR: Yes… but sometimes they slip through the cracks! Some contemporary writers are fueled by hatred. We reject those applicants.
Q: Who are the hateful writers?
MR: Nietzsche. I don’t know why he’s respected. I think he’s a hate-fueled polemicist. That shocks some audiences.

“Calvin aux Etats-Unis” at the Faculty of Theology in Strasbourg

MR: I have always revered Moby Dick, which like most 19th century American literature is full of theology, so eventually I read what those writers were reading, namely Calvin. At the same time I got interested in the early 19th century abolitionists of New England and New York, most of whom were Calvinists. Whether the ocean (Melville) or a fly (Emily Dickinson), size doesn’t matter: the divine implication is there. The problem is that we are flawed perceivers who have a habit of making idols out of our own perceptions so they harden and cease to reveal. Moby Dick is a case of coming to a conclusion and having it shattered again and again. Calvin insisted that every person is an image of God, even the murderer before you—and Christ is waiting to take on even his sins. So what does that mean for your perception? There is a Calvinist divinization of the image of God. The awareness of perception is valorized in these authors’ writings’ beauty. The style of that period is a celebration of the richness of perception. Only after reading Calvin did I understand the theological basis for these glories of perception. I could not write contemptuously of any character—I accept the Calvinist prohibition. Theology pulled them forward—the only true knowledge of God is born of obedience, said Calvin. So there are two things at work. One, God continually confronts you, gives you something to respond to, a new duty to obey. Two, you can go into any moment asking what you have to offer, how you can obey here in this moment. You can’t discriminate among experiences to decide which is most important. There is a celebration of all things, for instance sailors in Melville, or just anyone in Whitman. How do I understand this person as sacred? God thinks experience is sacred, every encounter. People say my novels are set in small towns and nothing much happens, but Calvinists can be miniaturists, because everywhere is the stage for God, finding the beauty like Emily Dickinson in small things, in a trick of the light.
Q: What you say is the reverse of the popular caricature of Calvin. It’s probably the same with Feuerbach.
MR: I tend to think the prevailing assumption is wrong. Take the popular opinion, rotate it, and come up with something better. The people called heretics—it’s the same story over and over again. There’s a very persistent polemic through European history, so their books aren’t read. I’m struck by how clearly Calvin was a Renaissance humanist. I’d encourage a re-reading of him in that light. The first chapter of his Institutes is one of the most beautiful celebrations of the whole of humanity ever written. There are two traditions of Calvin in America: 1) the old school New England abolitionists and founders of Ivy League schools, but they never call themselves Calvinists because they don’t know that they are; and 2) the ones who call themselves Calvinists and have the good libraries, but are more rigid than Calvin. The American liberal tradition is Calvinist but has lost the name and doesn’t know it. I belong to a very liberal Calvinist Congregationalist tradition, which I love, but I’m trying to reinsert a sense of its origins so it knows it has a history to embrace, not just one to reject—the European history that came over with the Mayflower. The New England Calvinists are called intolerant—true: they refused to tolerate slavery. I can live with that!
Q: People I meet associate Calvinism with Apartheid. Are you interested in its different fates?
MR: There were Calvinists against it too! Every cultural tradition has accommodated racism, slavery, etc. No religious tradition is without disgrace in its history or in its present practice.
Q: Where should an interested reader start in Calvin? And what in Calvin do you disagree with?
MR: I disagree often—which Calvin would accept. I love the Institutes, the commentaries on Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Micah. His social ethic is close to the Prophets. The problem with Calvin is that he like everyone else in the 16th century used polemic—it’s even in Thomas More; Luther is known to have thrown some punches! It’s regrettable, but Calvin didn’t turn me away because I already knew 16th century literature so I wasn’t surprised by the polemic.
Q: What is the importance of the family in a Christian context?
MR: The images of God we’re given in the Bible are ultimately familial. It’s a standard of love that can be discovered and realized with the family, with forgiveness… “Being is a sort of utterance of God, that He gives us a language.” Calvin doesn’t construct a universe, but the universe is continually re-created and expressive of God. Unconsidered theologies look naïve—layers of universe with heaven at the top and God as an old man with a white beard.