Housekeeping (1980)
Previous twenty-one posts in this series on Marilynne Summers Robinson and Annie Doak Dillard, two writers this writer really loves.
An abiding preoccupation of the older Marilynne Robinson is dark matter: its nature (or non-nature), its importance, its obvious literary possibilities. For example, in The Givenness of Things (2015), she writes: “The physical as we have come to know it frays away into dark matter, antimatter, and by implication on beyond them and beyond our present powers of inference.” In When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), she playfully compares the pop-science magazines she reads to the apophatic tradition in theology:
In the stack of magazines, read and unread, that I can never bring myself to throw away, there are any number of articles suggesting that science, too, explores the apophatic—reality that eludes words—dark matter, dark energy, the unexpressed dimensions proposed by string theory, the imponderable strangeness described by quantum theory. These magazine essays might be titled ‘Learned Ignorance,’ or ‘The Cloud of Unknowing,’ or they might at least stand beside Plato’s and Plotinus’s demonstrations of the failures of language, which are, paradoxically, demonstrations of the extraordinary power of language to evoke a reality beyond its grasp, to evoke a sense of what cannot be said.
I call it her “preoccupation” rather than her obsession because, in a very literal sense, I’m not sure anyone who isn’t a trained physicist can really be obsessed with dark matter. It troubles you like a problem you know is there but don’t even have the conceptual resources to describe to yourself properly. Your mind turns toward it and it pushes your mind away, and so on, repeat.
In that 2012 essay, she goes on to liken this to any writer’s “attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said—or said by me, at least.” Any interesting book is out at that border, trying to move it outward an inch or two. But then she moves from this problem to another problem that has a similar shape: “As a fiction writer I do have to deal with the nuts and bolts of temporal reality—from time to time a character has to walk through a door and close it behind him, the creatures of imagination have to eat and sleep, as all other creatures do. I would have been a poet if I could, to have avoided this obligation to simulate the hourliness and dailiness of human life.” This is Valery’s famous thing about not wanting to write a novel because he can’t spend his life writing sentences like “The marquis went out at five o’clock.” Is she likening the second problem — making the quotidian readable, even beautiful — to the first one — raiding the unsayable? Isn’t the problem with the quotidian that it’s too sayable? Or are these — as her juxtaposition of them suggests — the same problem?