Framing Marilynne Robinson's fiction within the dynamics of
everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and
content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson's
novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as
symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of
the quotidian in Robinson's novels often registers powerfully and
beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is
enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the
ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday
self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to
the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar;
scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world
of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss.
Stiffly perched on the edge of un-cushioned furniture or propped
awkwardly in the midst of someone else's conversation, Robinson's
characters hover in the margins of a lived experience they are
often forced to observe self-consciously and vigilantly. The
signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson's
narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of
absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending
death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the
repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), the prohibition of
everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the
tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of
transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson's novels
within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of
trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory
and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of
the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for
the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson's
fiction.
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