...And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was...

Sunday, May 9, 2010

On Keeping House

I am, at least nominally, a housekeeper, and while I don't keep house quite as indifferently as Sylvie Fisher, one of the main characters of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, I can't deny feeling a troubling affinity with her. When I "keep house," after all, I am undertaking a task that is ultimately futile. The house, in the end, will not be kept.

That futility -- the sense of being shadowed by ruin -- is what Housekeeping is about. It is filled with drowned and desolate houses, peopled with the ghosts of fathers, grandmothers, mothers, and children, and haunted by Shakespeare, Melville, and the Old Testament. Its very first lines are recitations of loss:
My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher. Through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother's house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it. It was he who put us down in this unlikely place. He had grown up in the Middle West, in a house dug out of the ground, with windows just at earth level and just at eye level, so that from without, the house was a mere mound, no more a human stronghold than a grave, and from within, the perfect horizontality of the world in that place foreshortened the view so severely that the horizon seemed to circumscribe the sod house and nothing more.

There from the beginning, then, are Melville ("My name is Ruth"), the Old Testament (the litany of generations), the already dead and disappeared ancestors, and the ghosts.  The absence of the girls' mother, her erasure from this opening passage, creates its own ghostly presence on the margins. There is also the house, the "grandmother's house," already trailing in its wake the specter of another house -- the "mere mound," the grave.

Housekeeping
is sometimes more of a long, beautiful prose poem than a novel, but its meditations on memory, mourning, loss, the mystery of consciousness, and the ephemera of the everyday are grounded by the story of two sisters confronting the deaths of their mother and grandmother. Lucille, the younger sister, clings to the flotsam and jetsam of conventional domesticity and self-renovation; she anchors herself in hair curlers, dress patterns, sturdy brogans, orlon cardigans, daily calisthenics, and a journal of self-improvement. Ruth draws ever closer to embracing her Aunt Sylvie Fisher's metaphysical transience. Sylvie, whose very name suggests woods and water, constantly blurs the distinction between outside and inside:
Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie's housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping.

...

Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship's cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic. Lucille and I stepped through the door from sheer night to sheer night.

For Sylvie, and eventually for Ruth, the only way to keep house is to let it go, to remember that even in our holding on, we are always saying goodbye. That kind of elegiac sense of the everyday is too hard, and perhaps too heartbreaking, to dwell on for long. But Sylvie and Ruth are right; it's always there, like the imperceptible breeze that rustles dry leaves and bits of paper in the corners of Sylvie's kitchen, or like the "ghost children" who in Sylvie and Ruth's imagination are hiding just out of sight near a ruined house deep in the woods.

Ruth's final meditation at the ruined cabin in the woods is one of the book's most beautiful passages:
I sat down on the grass, which was stiff with cold, and I put my hands over my face, and I let my skin tighten, and let the chills run in ripples, like breezy water, between my shoulder blades and up my neck. I let the numbing grass touch my ankles. I thought, Sylvie is nowhere, and sometime it will be dark. I thought, Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone, and I would rather be with them, if only to see them, even if they turned away from me. If I could see my mother, it would not have to be her eyes, her hair. I would not need to touch her sleeve. There was no more the stoop of her high shoulders. The lake had taken that, I knew. It was so very long since the dark had swum her hair, and there was nothing more to dream of, but often she almost slipped through any door I saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished. She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.
That's what it means to keep house, to be always reminded not of what we are keeping, but of what we are losing, have lost. To have before us, or behind us, or somewhere just out of reach, the knowledge that we will certainly, one day, be unhoused for good and all.

Now, if you'll excuse, I have some laundry to fold.

No comments:

Post a Comment