“A Regime of Small Kindnesses”

Abstract

The monosyllabic opening of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), My name is Ruth, immediately conjures up Melville's brash invitation, Call me Ishmael! (25). Yet her own haunting spondaic rhythm serves as a quiet drum roll for funereal list of family members that follows, until style metamorphoses within a page, in Ruth Stone's account of her grandfather's westering to a land of uncountable (4). Abruptly, time and space pull asunder as Fingerbone Lake floods family home, with Ruth scrambling descriptive tenses, gently echoing herself, swelling lyrical in a recollection of then and now, there and here: seems there was a time when dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of margins, as between mountains as they must have been and mountains as they are now, or between lake as it once was and lake as it is now. Sometimes in spring old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping threshold, stairway gone from sight after second step (4-5). The puzzling margins of things are first temporal limits, as past and present collide (former mountains, older lake), before she veers into a future tense (One will open) that paradoxically strains temporal limits, anticipating novel's resurrection of ordinary (18). It is as if flooded basement itself provoked emergence of a lyrical voice (wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping threshold), with water, air, vegetation, basement, all commingling, outdoors and in, while tableau slips and slides among descriptive registers. This forms a baffling dislocation of setting as well as style before we realize how fully novel celebrates things out of place, not merely in scenes that defy conventional household management but in a narrative voice loosely constrained by figurative forms of housekeeping. Robinson's title refers to more than just house, then, becoming a trope for strategies of imposition and order as well as for gestures of restoration and accommodation. The very word registers this ambivalence: the maintenance of a household; management of household affairs, but also keeping of a good table--hospitality (Shorter OED). In turn, hospitality is cited as the reception and entertainment of guests or strangers with liberality and goodwill. The tension between these polarities structures Ruth's efforts to assuage her feelings of abandonment, imagining lost voices of her grandfather, grandmother, mother, and sister as she plucks from memory shards of a past that might help shape a tolerable future. Yet she does so in a mixed mode, both stylistically and narratively, defined by twin poles of housekeeping: she grants guests of her fragmented life a hospitable hearing, as she structures her account to ensure a suitable order. This ambivalence is evoked toward end in a telling simile when Ruth concedes that even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams (207), acknowledging ineffectiveness of too one-sided housekeeping in very breath that fosters its restorative psychological analogies. And her narrative style pays tribute to her grandmother's striving for domestic harmony and order, as she models herself on her aunt Sylvie's eccentric discombobulations by shifting registers, entertaining anomalies, embracing paradox and contradiction. (1) In fact, novel bridges very tensions of its title, cherishing recuperative possibilities of both housekeeping and narrative as if conceived reciprocally--of housekeeping as a form of imaginative accommodation akin to narrative, restoring a tentative order that nonetheless keeps ambiguity alive, paradoxically defying closure yet knitting a fragile resolution together. As Robinson elsewhere reminds us, at a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which together, make world salubrious, savory, and warm. …