Ordinary Happiness: Marilynne Robinson’s Tragic Economies of Debt and Forgiveness Aaron Mauro symploke, Volume 22, Numbers 1-2, 2014, pp. 149-166 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/566838 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] ORDINARY HAPPINESS: MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S TRAGIC ECONOMIES OF DEBT AND FORGIVENESS AARON MAURO In the wake of the 2008 debt market collapse and the ensuing home fore- closure crisis, the fi gurative economies that guide common conceptions of the American home as a basic social unit have been radically shaken. After this most recent period of deregulation and market manipulation, there is a renewed urgency to re-imagine the home as the fi gurative and economic foundation of family life. The familial home is, after all, the site where economic forces affect vast populations and the stage of so many contem- porary tragedies. Regardless of the demographic makeup of a home, great untold tragedies have affl icted the US and the world over these past years because of an ancient confl ation of family, economy, and the home. Where once classical tragedies represented the fortunes of a few households, this recent mortgage foreclosure crisis is ongoing and widespread. In the lead- up to this economic tragedy, Marilynne Robinson’s novels have employed this familial and economic symbol of the home to defi ne the psychological and spiritual basis of liberal Christian thought without recourse to the fi scal austerity. Robinson has written about the familial home for many decades— Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), and Home (2008)—and has long offered insights into the religious and rhetorical basis of debt and forgiveness. More radically, however, Robinson’s novels describe how grace can be used to abolish the indebted condition that demands austerity. From Thoreau’s idealistic vision of a simple shelter in the woods and the steady colonial brick homes of Boston and Philadelphia to the “big houses” of the slave holding south and their neighboring slave cabins, the American home is a continually evolving and evocative fi gure. These homes manifest a whole host of psychic and religious metaphors that continue to manifest a tragic national historical narrative and identity. After all, a house liter- ally homes our physical lives, but all too often these spaces metaphorically structure our psyches, identities, and cultural traditions. In a strange way, the house subtly encloses fi gurative expressions of inner secrets, restful repose, and shared solace; yet, our houses are also a simple necessity of life that rebuff such abstract meanings. Traditionally, this physical-fi gure © symploke Vol. 22, Nos. 1-2 (2014) ISSN 1069-0697, 149-166. 150 Aaron Mauro Ordinary Happiness appears most in the Freudian division of outer physical and inner psychic realities. As a means of describing the hidden, often Oedipal, compulsions of an unconscious mind, Freud demands that “the ego is not the master in its own house” (Freud 1955, 143). Modern literature and culture have long accepted this metaphor and Freud’s psychic schema of a conscious mind unconsciously divided against itself. This division between mind and body—between life and home—allows for the moral austerity of debt law and enforced enclosure. Yet, with her recent publication of Absence of Mind (2010), Robinson has theorized her rejection of the unheimlich—the unhomed or more literally unhomely—Freudian psyche: “If there is one thing Freud asserts consistently, from which every theory proceeds and to which every conclusion returns,” says Robinson regarding this Freudian concept of self, “that the mind is not to be trusted” (2010, 105). Robinson’s representation of the familial home in her novels undoes crude binary market logic, while binding classical notions of tragedy to contemporary Christian thought, to expose the source of economic power through debt. While the home must be understood as the imaginative and spiritual center of Robinson’s novels, these fi ctional spaces take up a complex aesthetics of forgiveness and refuge that divests them of the symbolic economy of debt and exchange. A Dead Pledge From the discovery of the New World to the Homestead Act of 1868, the founding of American home life has been built upon a distortion of ownership through the long held virgin land mythology and a desire to build wealth. These troubled homes must be understood as both an economic problem and a linguistic conundrum. After all, a mortgage is the contractual obliga- tion that underlies these personal and fi nancial crises. As the etymology of the word suggests—particularly in Old French, but the meaning survives obliquely in English as well—a mortgage is a dead pledge. The word arises because borrowers were very often incapable of paying the loans back and would therefore need to die to be released from its obligation. Thoreau may well be an enduring critic of such a social problem in Walden (1854), where he once identifi es mortgages as a symptom of simple human frailty: “I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfl uous property as a fund in store against the future” (20). He also correctly identifi es the etymology of the word by referencing his friends that are beholden to their mortgages to such a degree that “only death will set them free” (Thoreau 1995, 21). In a 2005 interview that touches upon Thoreau’s concerns, Robinson grieves the loss of historical awareness about the origin of debt law. As Robinson sees it, America overtook Britain as an economic superpower because new world bankruptcy laws allowed for individual citizens to take risks in business and not be entrapped by the poverty of over-indebtedness: symplokeˉ 151 The model for our early bankruptcy laws was Deuteronomy, the idea that, under certain circumstances—in Deuteronomy, it is simply the passage of seven years’ time—people are released from debt, simply because they are released from debt. No more debt. You start over again. This has been a very powerful model in this country. It’s being destroyed now. People talk about how much new employment, new wealth, and so on are continuously gener- ated in this country. One of the reasons for that is because people can afford a risk. (Daniel 2005) Robinson radically argues that debt forgiveness between individual persons is one of the founding beliefs of the United States, but Deuteronomy does not command a free and open redistribution of wealth or forgiveness of loans to larger non-human fi nancial entities; when Deuteronomy commands, “thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him” (“Deuteronomy 15.8” 1769), the emphasis on the personal pronoun is all the more pronounced in a time of massive bank bailouts. As a theologically informed political philosopher and novelist, Robinson’s novels show how grace works as an anti-austerity belief system. Robinson repeatedly references the “openhandedness” of this passage in her most recent collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012) in an attempt to realign American Christian thought to notions of a “liberal reward” for a socially progressive politics (Robinson 2012; 77, 68). Austerity appears as the expression of a theologically informed moralizing that aligns sin and debt. So, while her work serves as an important introduction to a rigorous and theologically informed critical thought, Robinson’s novels are equally at home as a humanist ethics, a political commentary, or a divine grace. From this perspective, Robinson’s novels are redefi ning the traditional alignment of the sin of indebtedness and the salvation of forgiveness by reclaiming grace as a theologically radical and polysemic term that also holds a profoundly progressive social imperative. In an essay simply titled “Family,” from her 1998 collection The Death of Adam, Robinson works to wrest Christian family values from the so-called Religious Right or Conservative movements by describing them as a kind of free market economic theocracy on par with the totalizing effects of Communism. Those “self-ordained, golf-shirted” admin- istrators of the American economy operate under, says Robinson, a point of faith or “some unexamined fealty to economic principles” (1998; 101, 97). This particular “reemergence of something so crude as Social Darwinism” only highlights the failure of the economic system in the United States to integrate logically with Christianity and produce the secular happiness that Thomas Jefferson describes in the Declaration of Independence: “Why do we never imagine,” Robinson asks, “that the happiness [Jefferson] mentioned might include a long supper with our children, a long talk with a friend, a long evening with a book?” (106). Given that she contextualizes her vision of family home life through the Declaration of Independence, it is easy to imagine Robinson including Jefferson’s reference to “property” in place of 152 Aaron Mauro Ordinary Happiness “happiness” in the fi rst draft of this founding document. It is also easy to see how closely aligned simple human happiness is to the property of the home. Yet, the family has been hollowed out by politicians eager to hitch economic ideologies of “free and natural markets” to a traditional and pleasurable life within a family (101). It is necessary to cite Robinson’s open defi nition of family, which she offers with a kindness that is emblematic of all her writ- ings: “one’s family are those toward whom one feels loyalty and obligation, and/or from whom one derives identity, and/or to whom one gives identity, and/or with whom one shares habits, tastes, stories, customs, memories” (87). The problem of current family life, as Robinson sees it, is that “we have exorcised the ghost and kept the machine, and the machine is economics” (91).