!3~426±Ebke Omnusûü-ÃÊY

English Language and Literature Vol. 58 No. 3 (2012) 413-25 History Remembered: Religion, Violence, and “the War Against Slavery”* Wiebke Omnus Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter (1998) are confessional narratives which re-tell the American past. These two contemporary novels introduce characters modeled after historical figures, as the respective protagonists each engage with an ancestor who was involved in the abolitionist movement. Facing death in their old age, two men communicate their very personal understanding of American history. In Gilead, Reverend John Ames narrates his grandfather’s1 life as part of a memoir, which he hopes his young son will read as an adult. In Cloudsplitter, Owen Brown retells the story of his father for the sake of an academic who is writing John Brown’s biography, which Owen sees as an opportunity to appease the ghosts of Harpers Ferry that continue to haunt him in his silence. Out of their descendants’ accounts, both Ames’s grandfather and John Brown emerge as men of controversial religious conviction who believe that slavery needs to be abolished by means of violence and blood sacrifice. Robinson and Banks create narrators who are clearly unable, and perhaps also unwilling, to emotionally detach themselves as they tell obvi- ously subjective stories despite their claims of objectivity. Thus, Gilead and Cloudsplitter may be called examples of the confessional narrative, which is said to be rooted in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, “though there was religious confessional literature long before Rousseau” (Herman 82). In the confessional narrative, something for- merly disguised is revealed and the account is marked by “self-awareness and the search for self-knowledge” (Herman 82). John Ames and Owen Brown reveal the painful and shameful secrets of their pasts, creating fic- * The present research has been conducted by the Bisa Research Grant of Keimyung University in 2010/11. 1 John Ames’s father and grandfather share his name, thus I refer to them as “the father” and “the grandfather.” 414 Wiebke Omnus tional versions of themselves. Comparing Gilead and Cloudsplitter, I examine whether narratives that trouble the notion of historical truth nec- essarily also undermine the concept of truth itself, as the grandfather and John Brown firmly cling to religious truth and use it to justify violence against the self, against the enemy, and against the family. The two novels I discuss here may, in one way or another, be considered historical. They engage with the time period surrounding the American Civil War, more exactly the abolitionist movement. Specifically, they focus on a historical figure, John Brown (1800-1859), for whom, as his biographers note, religion was the motivation and justification for the abolition of slavery (McGlone 322). The abolitionist Brown remains a paradox, as few biographers and historians have been able to “present information about Brown’s life factually, unfiltered by partisan bias” (Reynolds 8). The leading question biographers continue to debate is whether Brown was a hero or a killer, a saint or a self-centered madman (Reynolds 8). The man who is responsible for the brutal Pottawatomie massacre in 1856 and the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, which “is wide- ly acknowledged as a major event leading to the Civil War” (Reynolds 10), and who was tried and hanged for his crimes, “conspiracy to incite a slave insurrection, treason against the State of Virginia, and first-degree murder” (Reynolds 348), is a mystery in many ways. Brown has come to be seen as a prophet because he foretold accurately that slavery would not be abolished without much bloodshed (Reynolds 480). History has proved him right and in some ways justified him, one might say; howev- er, Gilead and Cloudsplitter raise the question of whether there is such a thing as “true history” at all. How accurately are the things that happened, which we may call reality, represented in historical writings? Can we even speak of reality if each person experiences historical events differently? Robinson and Banks write at a time in which the concepts of truth and history as absolute have come to be questioned thoroughly, as they are considered to be subjective and perhaps even, as twentieth-century philosopher C.S. Lewis puts it, irrelevant (1). This understanding of truth as relative is characteristic of modern thinking and the process of secu- larization (Gillespie 270-71). One truth that has explicitly been questioned is that of historical knowledge2—there is now no longer “a single 2 My interest is not in the critique of the Hegelian notion of history as a coher- ent process; rather, I focus on the concept of multiple perspectives on history, many of which remain unheard while a privileged few write capital H-History. History Remembered: Religion, Violence, and “the War Against Slavery” 415 narrative” of history, but rather “an increasing emphasis on the diversity of . experience” (Appleby 3). In her collection of essays, The Death of Adam (1998), Robinson herself uncovers the concept of history to be extremely unstable. She finds the term itself to be very imprecise, arguing that “[t]he English Language should provide us with a way of distinguishing among the very different things we call ‘history’—the temporal past, the past inherited as culture, the recorded past, the past interpreted” (Adam 126). According to Robinson, what we might consider the “true past” is completely mysteri- ous from the point of view of the present (Adam 126). Historical records, Robinson suggests, are always shaped by “the motives, enthusiasms, sen- sibilities, talents, and scruples of interpreters” (Adam 126). Robinson declares that especially a group such as the abolitionists would be likely to create, and shape, their own history, since they “were profoundly self- aware” (Adam 126-27). The reader senses this self-awareness in Gilead and Cloudsplitter, as the narrators of both novels constantly feel the need to justify their positions and describe the abolitionist movement from various, very personal, points of view. 1. Visions of Freedom in Gilead Critics have noted how deeply Robinson’s Gilead is rooted in American history. Touching on specific events like “the Civil War, John Brown’s uprising, the Abolitionist movement, the underground railroad, [and] the battle to situate Kansas as a free or slave state” (Weele 231), Robinson creates a character who is modeled after one of John Brown’s supporters, a man who shares John Brown’s philosophy of violence and his religious convictions: “The grandfather is modeled on John Todd from Tabor, Iowa, who came west with his friends from Oberlin College. Characteristically, these abolitionists were scholars. Many of them knew Hebrew and Greek” (Montgomery-Fate). Ames’s grandfather is a passionate abolitionist and a passionate pastor who is serious about his Greek and Hebrew. He is directly involved with John Brown, who makes only a brief appearance in Gilead. Robinson states: “I try to be discreet in my use of historical figures. My John Brown is only a voice heard in the darkness” (Robinson Paris Review). The abolitionists have done much good, Robinson believes, and they deserve to be acknowledged rather than simply being considered “all violent crazy people” (Bendis 34). 416 Wiebke Omnus Nonetheless, Gilead asks if violence is ever justified, even in the fight against a tremendous societal wrong, and if a notion of truth can be upheld in a subjective narrative. Gilead illustrates Robinson’s understanding of history as dependent upon the point of view of the historian. The very fact that Gilead has a companion novel, Home (2008), in which Robinson re-tells some of the events which John Ames narrates in Gilead, focusing heavily on Jack Boughton and his sister Glory, underlines that there are several sides to every story. The author herself takes advantage of this format to subtly undermine the proclamations of her protagonist, John Ames, by creating an alternative point of view. In Home, the reader gains a different per- spective of Ames, but he or she also comes to appreciate the intimate insight into Ames’s mind that Gilead provides. Gilead is a confessional novel, a father’s letters to his young son, whose adulthood he fears he will not witness because his death of heart failure seems near and unavoidable: “If you’re a grown man when you read this—it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then—I’ll have been gone a long time” (3). Ames’s voice in Gilead is at times that of a dead man, addressing his son in a future Ames will not experience: “That is the main thing I want to tell you, that I regret very deeply the hard times I know you and your mother must have gone through, with no real help from me at all, except my prayers, and I pray all the time. I did while I lived, and I do now, too, if that is how things are in the next life” (4). At other times, he speaks of the present, describing his experience: “I see you standing up on your swing, watching some boys about your age out in the road” (30), and of the past, narrating his memories: “You know, I suppose, that I married a girl when I was young” (17). Thus, the past, the present, and the future are always in dialogue in Gilead, shaping each other. Ames himself frequently reminds his son, the intended reader of his narrative, that he is highly subjective in his musings. At other times, when Ames claims objectivity, the reader notes the opposite to be true, sensing that Ames desperately desires to paint a positive image of himself for his young son, or that Ames is simply unaware of some of his own struggles and shortcomings.

Load more