Postmodernist history and "Housekeeping"

The most unbelievably fortuitous thing happened to me just now.

In class today, while I was rather more animatedly than usual trying to get my thoughts together, I tried to reference a passage in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (which perhaps only my classmates from Coming-of-Age Novel have read, but it was a good book and I'm going to talk about it anyway even if not everyone else has read it). However, for the life of me I couldn't actually remember how it went, nor could I quite articulate what my point was in referencing it.

So, when I got home, I first sedated myself a little bit with a cup of tea and then got out my copy of Housekeeping to look for the passage in question. Unfortunately, having not read the novel in almost a year, I had no idea where to begin my search, and Google proved entirely unhelpful by only turning up results regarding, well, the literal keeping of one's house. So what, you may ask, did our quick-witted protagonist (by which I mean myself, obviously (yes, I am indeed being sarcastic)) do next?

WELL. She was suddenly hit by the promising realization that she'd had to keep a reading journal last year in Coming-of-Age Novel, which she located with unprecedented speed in her recently cleaned room to find that not only had she written an entry on the passage, but she had also cited it—with page numbers!—in her journal. So, while this entire anecdote is not exactly paramount to the overall topic of this blog, I think it's still worth sharing because I am simply reveling in the incredible amount of foresight displayed by the March 26, 2011 version of me in writing such a specific journal entry.

Anyways, it sort of dawned on me in class today that my frustrations with the postmodernist perception of history are oddly similar to my frustrations with the transient attitude presented in Housekeeping (although I was considerably less vocal about the latter). I find both philosophies interesting to think about and agree with both to an extent; however, they also both strike me as ultimately ignorant of the fundamental desire to hang onto the past that I personally believe is one of the things that makes us all human.

If you're missing the connection, think of Houdini trying to immortalize his mother by plastering pictures of her all over his house. Doctorow seems to find it foolish of him to even try to preserve her image after her passing because, as postmodernism argues, there's simply no way of ever creating a completely accurate portrayal of something that no longer exists—history can never fully rid itself of its many fictional aspects.  Thus, postmodernism tells us that it is and always will be futile to attempt to hang onto the past or to depend upon it as an absolute truth because, at the end of the day, nothing is an absolute truth—or at least, nothing is inherently any more true than anything else.

Housekeeping, meanwhile, seems to send readers away with more or less the same message. Sylvie's transient lifestyle proves to us that nothing is static, and that it's silly and pointless to try and hold onto the past because it's always going to slip right through our fingers. Indeed, she all but literally equates history and fiction by reading old newspapers purely for entertainment's sake—something that doesn't line up with our traditional view of newspapers as factual works meant to document real-life events, rather than as stories no inherently truer than those a novelist writes.

It doesn't seem to matter to Ruth, either, how real or true things are. "I remember her neither less nor differently than those I have known better," she says of a woman whom she saw once on a passing train but never actually met (Robinson 55). It reminds me of how, in Ragtime, Coalhouse Walker's story ends up impacting us readers "neither less nor differently" than those of characters who actually existed in real life. Thus, in both Doctorow's and Robinson's presentations of the world, no person, thing, or idea, it seems, can claim to be at all more real or important in the grand scheme of things than anything else.

All these connections make me wonder if Housekeeping is actually intended as a postmodernist text. I didn't think so when I first read it, but I also had little to no understanding of what postmodernism actually was at that point either. Going back over it, I'm not as sure. On the one hand, it does seem a little postmodernist in its philosophies, but at the same time, there's something about the story and the writing that's so pretty and quiescent that for some reason it reminds me much more of a 19th-century novel (it did at the time that I read it too, I remember).

Apparently, though, some people do take it as a postmodernist text—so says my Google search. In particular, I found an interesting passage from an online book called The Novel After Theory by Judith Ryan that deliberates this:

Shortly before the publication of Gilead, an interviewer asked Marilynne Robinson whether Housekeeping could legitimately be described as a postmodern novel. Robinson replied that much of what is termed postmodern is not substantially different from the structures and issues at work in a novel like Moby Dick. Nineteenth-century writers, she went on to explain, "just knew a great deal about the problem of knowledge." Indeed, she emphasized that these writers confronted the paradoxes inherent in consciousness and experience in a spirit of intellectual exhilaration rather than despair as many people might today.

This, I think, does a better job of highlighting my issue with the postmodernist take on history than I myself did in class today. It's not "the problem of knowledge" itself that doesn't sit well with me—at least, not entirely—because I'm fairly on board with that point. I understand that people are too inherently biased to ever present something exactly as it is or was and appreciate that postmodernists like Doctorow want to challenge their readers not to take what they've been told of history at face value.

However, I do still have a problem with the postmodernist idea of history, and that lies in the issue of "despair" raised by the end of the passage above. I suppose I don't entirely think that people like Doctorow take postmodernism so far that they entirely eliminate the possibility of life having a point—of us all being part of a larger history that actually is true enough to hold onto and to form some sort of purpose out of—but I do think they come dangerously close, and that's why I don't feel completely comfortable thinking too deeply into the concept.

See, as I just barely touched on at the beginning of this post, the reason that I can't quite accept the postmodernist view of history and never totally put my heart into Housekeeping is that I'm not okay with the idea that everything is transient, and everything depends on our interpretation, and everything is, in a way, fundamentally unknowable. I understand the rationale behind such a philosophy and legitimately see truth in it, but I can never completely buy into because I feel like it contradicts my basic human need to have something to latch onto and base life's purpose upon. I know that's an imperfect and unrealistic thing to need, but I for one am under the impression that that's just how human beings work—we can't simply accept that there's no such thing as a solidly true history because then what does that say for the present? Not much.

This brings me (finally) to the original Housekeeping quotation that sparked this entire blog entry, which is as follows:

In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its last extreme. But in the mountains the earth is most ceremoniously buried, with all its relics, against its next rising, in hillock and tumulus. (Robinson 87-88)

It may be slightly underwhelming given all the effort I put into finding it, but I think it hits on a very important idea, which is that where we are now is entirely based on our history. The idea that we're "step[ping] on fossils," to me, suggests that the past is what has built up underneath us to make the earth we stand on. So, if postmodernism steals from us the legitimacy of that past, we're left with no ground on which to support ourselves.

Thus, while the acceptance displayed by Robinson and Doctorow of life's lack of one universal truth does seem very ideal, I just don't see it as realistic. If everything is as meaningful as everything else, then everything is also as meaningless, and that's a philosophy that I don't feel can mesh well with human emotions and that need for stability that we all naturally have.