Marilynne Robinson and the Elements of Transience

Shout-out to Housekeeping. It was a good run, Ruthie and company. One of the most obvious assets it’s got going for it is the ridiculous literary attention-to-detail.  Like I said in my LAST blog post, every sentence is freakin’ loaded with intriguing descriptive language and, in my opinion, serious symbolic imagery (Ooh!). I’ll admit, I feel like a broken record on the symbolism thing. In my past three Mitchell classes, I’ve written like two or three short essays on “symbology”, if I may. That’s not a word but I didn’t wanna use symbolism twice. Specifically, I think Marilynne Robinson focuses on the elements of nature as symbols of transience. Crazy, right? Time to lay it out for ya!

As some of you can probably guess from my preface, water is a huge part of this elemental symbolism. Let’s think about water for a second. No matter what you toss into it, what you slap it with, or how much you perturb the surface, the ripples will eventually cease, and the body of water will return to stasis as if nothing ever happened. Robinson caught on to a perfect device to communicate transience! We have two of the most monumental events in Fingerbone history—Helen’s suicide and the train disappearance—both of which are shrouded in factual dispute and disguised by the transient nature of the lake. Since when investigations are underway, the ripples have disappeared, and “[b]y evening the lake there had sealed itself over.” (9). All those lives and stories gone with a weasel-ploop. There’s a ton more water stuff in this book, which is fair considering it’s probably the most apt elemental symbol of transience one could find. That’s not to say I don’t have more though!

Another very common elemental example of transience is the air and wind. News flash, wind moves stuff around and makes it go places, often in random directional fashion. Going “wherever the wind takes you” is a common phrase for living out a transient ideology of wandering. Therefore, Robinson throws it in there an inordinate amount to drive her point home. One awesome excerpt involves air conjuring up the leaves, and directly relates to Ruth’s perception of life.

“Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, (…) the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.” (108)

It's a beautiful image; leaves being picked up by the wind, floundering as if to shape a figure or eventful dance, then just dropping to the side of a structure as the wind blows away. In a transient view, human life equates to leaves catching a drift and riding it out aimlessly for just a moment before ceasing. Pretty bleak I guess, definitely doesn’t make you feel too special. Hey! All you dead leaves! You’re just riding a drift for a few moments on the winds of time! There’s also mentions of Ruth and Sylvie’s clothes billowing out from the wind as if they’re about to be carried off, and Sylvie does open all the doors to expose their house to the elements, but especially air as a solvent. All are great uses of wind as a transience device.

The final of the major elements I noticed in Housekeeping would be fire. It has a brilliantly brief spotlight towards the end, and wraps up a transience-trilogy of interfering natural occurrences quite nicely. Fire burns stuff, and when stuff burns it goes away. Stuff often holds value and significance, things like memories are kept in stuff. So when it burns, especially in this non-digitalized world that the Housekeeping family lives in, all of its significance can go with it. As Ruth would probably say, such is life! Importance is forgotten in time! All things are insignificant! “The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted [!!!!]” (288). Sorry, there’s actually a period there. At least I bracketed the emphasis exclamations. EITHER WAY, what do Sylvie and Ruth do with fire? They burn lots of stuff inside their house, then eventually try to burn the whole dang thing down! Gosh darn transients, always stamping on all the fleeting permanence we have in life!! But wow, how blatantly symbolic can you get? The whole idea of Housekeeping going up in flames? All the cherished family memories that are sanctified in the maintenance of said house? All gone to the wind (and the flames) (and the water).

To close this off, here’s a little snippet that I think ties this all together. Here’s a brief passage Ruth uses to describe the ghostly state of affairs for Sylvie:

“She had haunted the orchard out of preference, but she could walk into the lake without ripple or displacement and sail up the air as invisibly as heat.” (307)

WOW, isn’t that everything I just talked about? Holy smokes! Sylvie, as the pure transient, doesn’t even RIPPLE the water when she walks into it, and can disappear at an instant like a smokeless trail of heat. How uneventful can you get? I think I’ll leave it at that. There’s the evidence you need to see that Robinson is employing these elemental minions to do her transience-preaching bidding. They do a darn good job after all.