Marilynne Robinson on writing the new America

She’s won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and she’s one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. Her book of essays ‘The Givenness of Things’ is a passionate defence of the value of religion in the era of the ‘new atheism’. For Marilynne Robinson, the election of Donald Trump presents a huge ethical challenge to America. Trump “…has brought things to a kind of crisis state where we really will have to do a lot of very basic thinking about how the society goes on from this point”, “what we have to do is find out how deep American culture really is, how deeply democratic it really is. We will find that out.”

Here’s the full text of her Radio 4 interview with writer and editor Robert McCrum, part of our America Rewritten series.

ROBERT McCRUM: Marilynne Robinson is one of Obama’s favourite writers: a best-selling prizewinner. I’ve been an avid reader ever since her first novel, Housekeeping. Marilyn understands America’s frontier spirit like no one else. She’s also a Christian, which connects her to another part of the American Dream, and she writes like an angel.

In the rewriting of America that comes with every new President, I’m asking five great writers how they will make the transition from Obama to Trump. When you talk to Marilynne, you can see a focus for some opposition to Trump and how the challenge of the new administration might be answered by the integrity, candour and good humour of the American mind at its best.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Our literary tradition doesn’t tend toward explicit political writing, except in certain cases: most people try to avoid it in their fiction. But I think that that could certainly change: if people can simply see how they can use politics aesthetically, respectably – or something near respectably – people will be trying all kinds of things. It will be interesting to see what happens.

RM: One of the things about America is – I think – that it’s a society founded on words, on a written Constitution: during the Presidency of Barak Obama, he gave articulation to the rhetoric of the American Dream and also all the good things about it. It seems to me that what might be called for in the rewriting of America and the rewriting of your society in this situation, is that there will be a real responsibility for poets, novelists and short story writers to address this theme. Is that what you’re saying?

MR: Yes. Eighteen months ago or two years ago people would have felt embarrassed to say things that are simply outright, flat-out patriotic-sounding. But after Trump, that’s not true anymore: people have grown very, very fond of the idea of the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment and all these other things – the protections of the environment – that have been important and very much associated with what we considered an American tradition of political life.

RM: So is there a kind of rallying of opposition in the literary community?

MR: There’s a silence. There’s a moment to see what this actually will precipitate in terms of policies. I think people are watching to see where they can intervene from the point of view of policies: things like, for example, inappropriate treatment of immigrant populations and so on. When something that he [Trump] seems to threaten becomes actual, then I think people will begin to see how to get leverage on it. At this point, I don’t think anybody knows how to find leverage.

RM: One of the things about Trump is that he’s been described – not by me, but by every commentator – as (I’m quoting now) ‘a racist’, ‘a liar’, ‘a misogynist’, ‘a fantasist’, “a bully”, ‘a narcissist’. These abusive terms go on and on and on, and I wonder what that does to your society?

MR: One thing that I think has to be said is that he has brought things to a kind of crisis state where we really will have to do a lot of very basic thinking about how society goes on from this point. There were people like George W. Bush who were very unpopular and did very, very unacceptable things policy-wise, but he was still a President. He still behaved himself with the kind of personal dignity, more or less, that made it tolerable for him to have the title of President.

One of the reasons perhaps Trump was successful is that we have a habit of assuming that things will occur within a certain framework. I don’t think anybody’s ever known anybody who was so utterly deserving of all those adjectives that you have supplied – not at any point in any life. I’ve never known anybody like that – the way that he doesn’t seem to know he’s lying. He can, therefore, lie very successfully. It’s amazing. But in any case obviously there are problems in society that are more profound than Donald Trump. He brought them to the surface and they really have to be looked at and answered.

RM: Do you think that in some sense he does embody something dark in the American psyche?

MR: (laughs) I think he embodies something dark in the universal psyche. It’s terrifying to see how willingly he will divide a country that has thriven and historically is dependent on the fact that we don’t deal in those kinds of divisions. If he really puts his imprint on American culture, it will look a lot more like a lot of the unhappy or failed states in the rest of the world. I think we can look to the people that did not vote for Trump – and they are the majority by a considerable margin – to be a very meaningful resistance.

RM: So will you want to rewrite America?

MR: Oh yes. Well I always want to do that. (laughs)

RM: Some people listening to this might say, does all this stuff really matter? For the life of the ordinary man and woman in Main Street, life will carry on and he’s just the President and it doesn’t add up to too much of a problem. What do you say to that?

MR: That’s best case. The thing that bothers me so much, which really saddens me, is that the apparent tendency of his government will be to undercut social supports that have helped exactly the people who voted for him – social security, ObamaCare, minimum wage reform, all kinds of things. Some great failure occurred where people absolutely did not understand where their values, their interests lie. I do blame the churches – many, many of the churches of the branches of Christianity in this country – for participating in this polarisation and for radically mis-stating what are in fact Christian values. The great opposition that has developed politically in this country against helping the poor, against – God knows – doing justice to the foreigner (all these kinds of things that are ancient, classic, biblical, Christian values) have been swept away by people who claim Christianity as if it were a tribal membership rather than as if it were an ethical, moral, metaphysical system of understanding.

RM: You’ve given many sermons in your time on all kinds of subjects – faith, redemption and so forth. If you were asked to preach to Trump or on Trump, what sermon would you preach today?

MR: What we have to do is find out how deep American culture really is, how deeply democratic it really is. We will find that out. I hope there are no more bad surprises. But I think that there are things like integrity and radical criticism of materialism and so on. And I know they sound like clichés, but when you watch this man with his ridiculous gold-plated everything, you get the feeling that perhaps we really have fallen back into some sort of primitive[ism]. Not all of us… I don’t want to overstate it, and I know I’m doing it, but meaningful democracy is built on the very deep and wide-ranging integrity of individual people, and that is what we have to be sure we have secured. That’s what people have to be very serious about.

RM: One of the great things about America, historically, is that it has had this genius for resolving and for healing contradiction and conflict. On your coins is the Latin phrase ‘E Pluribus Unum’ (one out of many), so, making a whole out of many disparate parts. Is that something you’re talking about in part?

MR: Yes. I think that at our best we have not even felt these parts as all that disparate: we have our classic old problems, but basically I think people enjoy a complex, urban mixed population. That’s easy to demonstrate – people gravitate towards it. There is the gated community side of the culture, but that’s really quite a radical minority. The word ‘tolerance’ is often used, but it’s not [just] tolerance: it’s pleasure, enjoyment, enrichment. It’s been true right across the cities of the United States. It’s not like an effort. In a way it’s recognising a gift.

RM: When you look at this problem and you talk about the role of American society, do you think it is up to the challenge?

MR: Yes I do. I always return to the fact that Hillary Clinton won the [popular vote in the] election. A lot of people probably didn’t understand what the challenge would be, or they were persuaded by all the polls that showed Mrs Clinton winning, and so they cast a protest vote or something like that. But American culture is very, very rich with centres of authority: it has many people who are very highly educated and deeply thoughtful; it’s a great danger to us to forget that there’s a huge sort of basic integrity in this country. People are always talking about economic weakness, but our economy is always overwhelmingly powerful and only weak relative to somebody’s expectations: with so many things, we have to take advantage of a conscious awareness of the fact that we have many resources of many kinds.

RM: If you were counselling a troubled voter or a confused Brit from abroad, is there a book you’d point them to, to draw comfort from the American tradition?

MR: I always go back to my dear old 19th century people – people like William James and Walt Whitman. And Emerson. And Thoreau. And Melville, who makes this little poly-ethnic world out of a whale ship, and this sort of regime of equality. There is a great deal of very, very idealistic, high-minded American writing that occurs especially in the 19th century. I think that we should go back to these people who made a very beautiful articulation of a world view that is quite unique.

RM: When you think of those writers, those readers, and those times when often the same kind of doom-laden predictions were made about American society, does it make you optimistic for the future?

MR: The future is (laughs) a strange beast. I’ve never felt quite comfortable with the word ‘optimism’. The future will be as good as we make it and a huge burden has fallen on us. We should have recognised before to articulate what we need to know about ourselves and what we need to wish for ourselves. That will be the future, I hope. Somehow we have been afflicted as a culture by a sort of diminishing of the sense of possibility, and I think that we could recover that sense very, very quickly – simply because so much is possible in fact, with so much information, so many ways to publish, so many ways to articulate. I will be interested: something really interesting can happen.

RM: Do you see it as possibly a galvanising shock to the system?

MR: It will be that. Whether or not that will be the prevailing or the adequate response to it, time will tell: but yes indeed, I can see ‘galvanising’ going on already.

This transcript has been slightly abridged.