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"She wanted to become possible again." This is Sister Norberta's response to her father's frustration at her irascibility. A funny way to describe the moment of grace for Sister Norberta --but it was this moment that led to her entering religious life and eventually boarding the Deutschland to meet her own death. I always think we're meant to pay attention when a writer does something funny or strange with language. I think this case is no different.

 

In a sense, her response is a consistent part of Sister Norberta's character -- her terse, impatient flippancy. But it's also something else. I think it offers a key to knowing how her fate is fitting, as Bishop Flores queried. Taking up Matthew's strand, I suppose the fittingness of her death is found in the complete "serenity of countenance in the woman. She'd been so hard on others. She'd seemed so cantankerous and unhappy, so little at peace. But this was how she looked when at rest."

 

Of course my knee-jerk Aristotleanism came to the fore when I put these two passages together. How does Aristotle define motion in the Physics? "It is the fulfillment of what is potential when it is already fulfilled and operates not as itself but as movable." Or, more simply, "the actuality of a potential (or a possibility)." Hoping that you're all staying with me on this and taking it a step further, rest, then, is that same actualized potential perfected -- that is, it is the end, the death, if you will, of motion.

 

I seem to remember St. Thomas saying somewhere that there is no motion in heaven. I've probably botched St. Thomas and sent us back to the dark ages with that botching, but I think the general gist stands pat. At any rate, it would be fair to say, I believe, that we are all at rest in heaven.

 

May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Rest in the peace of Christ. The peace which passeth all understanding. And so on.

 

Sister Norberta wanted to be possible -- and she wanted to perfect that possibility not with death but rest. She became possible -- and when she was at rest, she became actual. I know I'm jumping tall syllogisms in a single bound here, but the main point to keep in mind is that Sister Norberta was motivated by a desire to be "possible" in life -- but possible for what? Her father implies as anyone who uses the idiom would: that she is impossible to live with in Christian charity. (But don't take only dad's word for it. Sister Norberta, recall, demands of the Russian at dinner in the Deutschland's dining hall, "And what am I?" and "Procupi Papolkoff was stymied for a moment, and then feebly tried, 'Angry?'")

 

It is clear that this was her lifelong struggle: to love her neighbor as herself. In death she finds rest and (we assume by the look on her face) peace in the arms of her sister. It is important, I think, to note this detail. I couldn't help but picture her death in tableau: a very soggy, very cold version of the pietà, showing both a reconciliation -- if only symbolically -- with her neighbor, "lying with shut eyes against Sister Barbara's chest," and with Christ Himself. She became, in the end, "loveable," as Hansen writes, "Christ's bride." Her father on earth found her impossible. Her Father in heaven will find her not only possible, but loveable -- and at rest.

 

So Sister Norberta, who was impossible to live with in life, found at the last that charity made it possible for her to push past death and into the loving arms of her Groom . . .

 

 

But in pushing past death, the sisters have left us behind to make of it what we can. Those who climb the masts, it seems, are not merely denouement for the story but also the necessary contrast. How does one survive if one does not die? How do we survive death at all?

 

By way of a round-about answer, I would bring W. H. Auden's "Homage to Clio" into the discussion. My own mention of the muse of history led me to recall Auden's take on the tall silent beauty:

 

You had nothing to say and did not, one could see,

Observe where you were, Muse of the unique

Historical fact, defending with silence

Some world of your beholding, a silence

 

No explosion can conquer but a lover's Yes

Has been known to fill . . . .

 

Now, Auden went from bad-boy hedonist in youth to reverted High Anglican in his old age. His poems are filled with a particularly Catholic (English, albeit) understanding of history as being a finite thing -- one of God's finer tools. One of his most sacred mediums, for sure, but not the final arbiter of things in this world.

 

Clio will have her silences, it is true. But between those silences, man's works and days, deeds and doings find their meaning. As Matthew notes, a life is not a narrative -- and those who seek to make it so become stark-raving Frenchmen or stark-raving Nietzsche (because there can be only one of him, right?). Yet Hansen, I believe, is taking just the same tack (I really can't help myself on these nautical puns) as Auden.

 

Perhaps Hansen is unable to get any closer than he has to filling in Clio's silences -- regarding the "world of your beholding" that is the sisters' and Hopkins's. Perhaps he cannot get any closer because he wants us to see that the "lover's Yes" of sisters and Hopkins is close enough. Again, this does not satisfy the fiction reader, and that's too bad, because I believe that there is plenty of room to play around in when it comes to a "lover's Yes" in fiction. But if we can arrive at the point where Hansen wanted to answer as much as Hopkins did to the mystery of the moment that was the wreck of the Deutschland and "The Wreck of the Deutschland," perhaps we will arrive at the nut resting at the center of all of Exiles's clustering shells.

 

In fact, I would slightly modify what I asserted earlier: Amy is right in a certain sense. Hansen is approaching Hopkins/sisters and Deutschland/"Deutschland" with a certain reverence -- but I believe it is not a reverence to Hopkins, but to his text:

 

Ah! There was a heart right!

There was a single eye!

Read the unshapeable shock night

And knew the who and the why;

Wording it how but by him that present and past

Heaven and earth are word of, worded by? (29)

 

Here's Hopkins own homage to Clio -- that muse who controls time, "present and past" -- but as Hopkins points out, it is "a single eye" alone that can encompass time and its metaphysical counterparts, "heaven [present] and earth [past]."

 

Again, the reportorial approach Hansen uses becomes the vehicle for the narrator. But for all that, his omniscience is just history (newspapers, letters, biography, etc.) swirling around the immovable bulk run aground in the Thames estuary and the equally immovable bulk run aground (finally) in Dublin. Hansen does no more than infer what the last things that both bulks deal with are "word of" and "worded by" -- in other words, he makes no greater claims than Hopkins, that the mystery of the final things must remain intact for the eye to read some sort of meaning into the "unshapeable shock night," which for all of us is death.

 

Furthermore, he will show us what these things are through the blinds of history in the moments of poetry. To do more, to invent or elaborate on the final moments beyond the correspondences of life and death that we've been discussing, would be to do a violence to the history as it exists in memory (the past) -- of Hopkins, the sisters, the survivors, and yes, even us the readers, since we enter into the history as much as the poetry of the account.

 

 

OK, heady stuff, I know. But I'll return us to earth by citing Aristotle again, this time in the Poetics. He states somewhere that poetry is more philosophical than history because it deals with what is possible, while history only with what is. So when the two -- poetry and history -- meet, as in Hopkins's poem and, more importantly (for our purposes, anyway), in Hansen's novel, history is the framework that encloses the mystery of existence, and poetry is the rubrics by which one can approach the mystery in a meaningful way. It seems that Hansen does what he can to approach the sanctuary, describe it, and allows us glimpses of those who have assented to its mysteries.

 

In fact, returning to Auden, I think it's fair to say that the historian has only the facts at his disposal, but the poet has the facts and then some. History remains deaf to the poet, but the poet is always, it seems, imploring history:

 

I dare not ask you if you bless the poets,

For you do not look as if you ever read them

Nor can I see a reason why you should.

 

Auden recognizes that while history remains deaf to the poet, the poet must constantly address history (though he never "dare" do so directly) -- even if Clio remains closed-lipped to the end. So too Hansen doesn't seek so much to be consoled as to console in Exiles. He does not look for history to guide him, but takes history at its silent face value and offers fiction at a greater price. History, to paraphrase Matthew's point, is not a narrative, and so has no concern for narrative as such. Paradoxically, though, as Hansen and Hopkins demonstrate and Auden points out in his homage, only poetry can make a narrative of history:

 

A cock pronouncing himself himself

Though all his sons had been castrated and eaten,

I was glad I could be unhappy . . .

 

 

The grave of a friend, to make an ugly scene,

To count the loves one has grown out of,

Is not nice, but to chirp like a tearless bird,

As though no one dies in particular

 

And gossip were never true, unthinkable:

If it were, forgiveness would be no use,

One-eye-for-one would be just and the innocent

Would not have to suffer. . . .

 

Indeed, though the cock of time sings to himself, we humans must sing to one another -- even through our "not nice" tears -- if only to become, like Sister Norberta, possible to live with one another.