February 09, 2010
 
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| Notes from the Author: Ron Hansen on Exiles |
| by the InsideCatholic Staff and Friends |
| 7/18/08 |
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Bishop Daniel Flores writes: But it rides time like a riding river. I am grateful for Matthew's confession of "the soft bigotry of literary expectations," as it makes it easier for me to admit to a similar fault. When I finished the first read of Exiles, I was puzzled by the story, perplexed, even annoyed. But I must further (and happily) admit that I appreciate the story all the more for having had this initial reaction. I will try to explain. The expectations I brought to Exiles were more shaped by Atticus than by Mariette in Ecstasy. I so appreciate the graceful way Atticus led me to the joy of a convenient ending. By "convenient," I mean the artful reassembly and convergence of divergent threads. Like when Owen meets the nuns at the end of A Prayer for Owen Meany, or -- more overtly theological -- when Augustine the preacher tells us at the end of a long digression that he was not digressing at all, he was merely uniting Isaiah and Paul to clear up a muddy passage in John. Reading Atticus was like that, all the more enjoyable because the twists in the story came unexpectedly, and the neatness of the ending seemed both credible and fitting: Dignum et iustum erat.
Such expectations proved injurious to my first reading of Exiles. To be frank, I expected the nuns (and Hopkins) to die with more literary grace. When writing a story about an event that everyone already knows will end sadly, the art is usually in the rendering of the human grace attendant at the moments leading to the end. I wanted these spiritual children of St. Francis to leave this world more artfully. I wanted a sign -- subtle yet perceptible -- given to me, the reader, that despite its harshness, theirs was a fitting fate, that indeed it should so be that they were there on that ship.
But, at least initially, I perceived no such effective sign. I was left with the literary equivalent to the night of the senses. Mother Henrica was washed away so quickly, never really able to fulfill any real role as shepherdess of this tiny flock. Sister Aurea died in childishness, as she had lived; and Sister Norberta died with her self-preoccupations still occupying her. Sister Norberta was not even granted the grace of an act of contrition coaxed by Sister Barbara. At least Aurea was helped in this way by Sister Brigitta. Such depictions of a Christian death left me discomfited, on aesthetic grounds.
It struck me while reading the narrative that Hansen, in places, seemed deliberately to shadow the style of Hopkins's use of English. Hansen writes early in Chapter 1:
The limekiln under a quarried cliff sent out yellow smoke that dimmed the distance and made the stack of Denbigh Hill a dead, mealy gray, but the sun was sparkling through gaps in the raveled clouds . . . .
I had to read that aloud to myself a couple of times to catch the rhythm and sense. But then I have to do the same thing (only many more times) when I read anything Hopkins, be it a poem or a letter. But if Hansen at times consciously conforms his prose style to the linguistic twists, prolixity, and fluid austerity of Hopkins himself, then I suspect the whole of the story in some way tries to conform to the same kinds of rhythms and austerities found more generally in Hopkins's view (and experience) of providence.
With this in mind as a hunch, at least, I could settle to re-read this story more as a narrative commentary on "The Wreck of the Deutschland" itself, a commentary that in turn uses the poem as an interpretation of Hopkins's life and death. Exiles, it seems to me, like "The Wreck of the Deutschland," has as its principal object the merciful ways of a harsh providence, accepted (if not understood) in the darkness of faith in the Lord who is "Thou mastering me God."How does He master us? Looking first to the sisters, they die as they lived: imperfect, at times startlingly petty, and seemingly so ill-prepared. Yet the Master works all the while to master them; sometimes we perceive it, most of the time we do not. "But it rides time like a riding river." It is the manner and fierceness of His coming. And it comes to them with sudden dispatch, and we are left to ponder how this is a merciful mastering.
Upon reading the death scenes a number of times (and they merit innumerable readings), the convenience is there, only it comes much more subtly than my Atticus-trained eyes expected: not in the manner of Atticus at peace with his sons, not in the arc of convergent lines made nicely, in the end, to touch. It is rather the convenience of an un-converging convergence, a glimpse of the grace that makes no sense to observers, but which a man who knows "of his going in Galilee" can nonetheless embrace in hope and love. His coming, when at last He comes, is a coming that to our soft eyes often seems so heartless. But if it so seems to us, the problem, Hopkins would say, is with our eyes, not His coming.
To die as the sisters do is an ugly thing. It is an aesthetic that must traverse the forbidden lands of the death that seems so meaningless; it must confront in particularity the fact that "His ways are not our ways," and this conjures the questioning of Job. Sister Norberta poses it well when she asks the kindly Brigitta: "Why do you think God is doing this to us of all people? His devoted and adoring daughters?" (185). No doubt my first read was influenced by an unconscious kinship with Norberta, for I thought they deserved better than a death depicted so harshly. Not even an act of contrition for Norberta...
There is nothing poetic about the circumstance of Norberta's or anyone's death (the Tower of Siloam comes to mind). There is grace, though, in the surrender to the One who comes in it: "And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss."Hopkins wrote to his mother that "it is our pride to be ready for instant dispatch"(172), and though speaking of the Jesuit vocation, and his own frequent transferrals, he doubtless intended also the transitus toward which all changes of address tend, and which they all foreshadow. We can hope that Norberta knew this as well, and could silently offer it to the "Father and fondler of heart thou has wrung."
If hope is not enough for us in reading this end -- I speak for myself, at any rate -- then we are like those whom Hopkins describes as "trenched with tears, carved with cares."And we are thus shown to be in further need of the Master's particular touch, coming as of "an anvil-ding."
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