Language Is Smarter Than We Are
marilynne robinson at the '80s NYTBR, pt. 1
The previous twenty-five posts in this series have covered Marilynne Robinson’s and Annie Dillard’s youth (I, II), some of their first influences (I, II, III, IV), their earliest available work (I, II, III, IV, V, VI), their grad-school theses and dissertations, their first published books for general audiences, and a random uncollected but representative Dillard essay. We’re up to the mid-1980s.
Here is a beautifully weird essay that Robinson writes for the New York Times circa 1987. It begins as it means to go on — the headline is “Language Is Smarter Than We Are.” The opening sentence is equally straightforward: “I think it is past time to put aside other business and to turn our energies to the remystification of virtually everything.”
Imagine the chutzpah! Here you are, in a Discourse ruled by Ronald Reagan, Michael Millken, Ivan Boesky, Margaret Thatcher, in a newspaper addressed, only a little more directly than the Wall Street Journal, to guys who admire those people (though you’re in the section that is addressed more to their handwringing-just-enough-to-reassure-myself-I’m-a-good-person classmates). It is the era of everything-is-just-something-infinitely-less. Society is just market transactions. Culture is just families — and families are just genes. College is just job training. Diplomacy is just war. Latin Americans are just savages (which is why we’re always selling weapons to the most savage of them), and black people are just an underclass. Governance is just torture: hence the School of the Americas. And even in the boho liberal enclave of the English department, a great work of fiction is just whatever the profession calls “a great work of fiction.” Thanks, Stanley Fish.
We still live in that world, in a lot of ways, but those ideas feel tired now; part of their horror is the sense that we can’t escape them even though nobody really buys them anymore. (The conservatives don’t: institutionally, they’ve gone from “We need a lot of small Ragnaroks to prevent the big one” to “We need Big Ragnarok. We love Big Ragnarok. We won’t be satisfied till Big Ragnarok. Please, Daddy, give us your Big Ragnarok.”) In the 1980s they were the very latest thing; they had the allure of hipness and novelty, and the support of real imaginations (David Byrne’s), real minds (too many to list), even occasionally real consciences (the later Bayard Rustin). And here comes Marilynne Robinson saying “Let’s re-mystify stuff.” Let’s assume everything is more than it looks like.
The balls on this lady. I love her.