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Succoring
Us in Our Infirmities: From Alma to Anne Tyler
by
Marilyn Green Faulkner
Recently I watched
an interview on television with Donny Osmond, who described years
of suffering from an anxiety disorder so severe that it threatened
the course of his career. Convinced that people were laughing at
him, he became more paralyzed with every performance of his hit
Broadway musical. A therapist worked with Osmond, assigning him
tasks that caused him to face his fears, and one day she had him
return two shirts he had purchased and ask for a refund. This famous,
successful star shed tears as he tried to explain how difficult
this simple task was for him, and the elation he felt when he was
able to accomplish it. His poignant story brought to mind a great
passage in the Book of Mormon that describes the ways in which the
Savior will take upon himself the sins and the pains and afflictions
of mankind, concluding with this fascinating insight: …He (Christ)
will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled
with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to
the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities."
(Alma 7:12)
What an interesting
word, infirmity. Webster defines it as "shaky, unstable, or frail,"
and the Oxford English Dictionary gives it as "weakness, want of
strength, or the lack of power to do something." This passage seems
to say that beyond the power to forgive sins, the Savior has to
power to "take upon himself" or enter into our weaknesses, frailties,
fears and failures and "succor" us in them, succor being defined
as "to aid, assist or relieve." This is a comforting thought, since
so many of our struggles in life have more to do with weakness than
wickedness. We fear, we falter, we fail, and we suffer the consequences.
It is important, therefore, to understand not only right and wrong,
but also something about weakness and infirmity. It is here that
a great novelist like Anne Tyler can help us. She is less interested
in the wickedness of the world than the weaknesses of people like
us. Consider, for example, her careful, compassionate description
of a man paralyzed by fear. Jeremy, the protagonist of Celestial
Navigation, is a talented artist and a gentle, kind man, yet
his fears cripple his ability to live a normal life:
These are some
of the things that Jeremy Pauling dreaded: using the telephone,
answering the doorbell, opening mail, leaving his house, making
purchases. Also wearing new clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting
the eyes of a stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning
on electrical appliances. (Celestial Navigation, 86)
There is something
incredibly moving about this list for me. This long paragraph describing
his difficulty with nearly every aspect of life concludes with Jeremy's
conviction that "other people seemed to possess an inner core of
hardness that they took for granted. They hardly seemed to notice
it was there; they had come by it naturally. Jeremy had been born
without it." (87) Jeremy is a study in fear, and the rippling, damaging
effect it can have. He appears to be the very definition of infirmity.
Mary, on the
other hand, is a study in strength, bearing child after child and
handling everything with aplomb. Her fatal flaw is a kind of selfishness
that leaves her unwilling to share her parenting relationship with
a man, though she relies upon one after another for support. She
must own the children; she protects them from their respective fathers
and trusts no one to enter the circle she creates for herself and
her brood. The climactic moment in the novel is the birth of the
fourth child (or fifth, we lose count) when Mary goes to the hospital
without Jeremy. He is finally completely excluded from everything
but the conception of the child. Every mother understands the sweet
circle of two that is formed when a new baby arrives, which then
opens to admit the father and complete the family unit. Mary cannot
take that step, turning her mothering into a kind of emasculation
of the males in her life. Jeremy sees what needs to be done but
lacks the power to step up and act. Mary sees that she needs help
yet lacks the humility to admit her weakness and let her husband
be strong. They need each other, yet cannot reach across the divide
and create a true married relationship. In the end they are truly
only pretending to be married.
All of this
comes to us in the interesting narrative structure of this novel,
through the voices of the inmates of Jeremy's home, which is let
out to renters. The boarding house, with its odd combination of
individual lives that bump into each other now and then in communal
spaces, feels like one of those dollhouses we played with as children,
with the front wall missing from all the rooms. We enter first one
room, then another, observe the inhabitants, and see how they interact.
Miss Vinton, a connecting link through the tale, describes their
situation and reveals Tyler's underlying theme:
If you want
my opinion, our whole society would be better off living in boarding
houses. I mean even families, even married couples. Everyone should
have his single room with a door that locks, and then a larger room
downstairs where people can mingle or not as they please. (141)
By using the
boarding house as a metaphor for the larger world, Tyler shows us
that we do, in fact, co-exist in much the same way as the inmates
of the Pauling home. Our triumphs and failures are interconnected.
Jeremy and Mary live out their lives in a confined space, yet many
are affected by their actions. Their story does not end happily,
yet somehow there is a hopeful element in their domestic woes. Though
in the long run Jeremy and Mary are unable to create a stable, happy
life together, they do create a family. They have children, they
go forward, and they overcome some of their fears and weaknesses
while succumbing to others.
The
Artist as Outsider
Anne Tyler
brings the perspective of an outsider to her observations. Raised
in a Quaker commune and home schooled by brilliant parents, Tyler
entered public school for the first time at the age of eleven. She
had never used a telephone, could strike a match on the sole of
her bare foot, was acquainted with home farming, Appalachian crafts
and already deeply immersed in the classics. Her early years in
the commune gave Tyler what she calls "my sense of distance." One
rarely has a sense in Tyler's novels of the hustle and bustle of
place and time; in fact, most of her books could take place anywhere.
Instead, one notices the workings of the inner lives of ordinary
folk. This sense of distance, the disciplined quiet of the Quaker
upbringing, and the pull of the land are evident in her settings,
her characters and her plots. "Daydreaming," she declares, "is the
most useful activity I know of, but until now it's been almost universally
frowned upon." (Anne Tyler as Novelist, p. 5) There is
a dreamy quality about her books that sets Tyler apart from the
plot-driven, sensational literature that crowds the bestseller lists
today.
Tyler has something
to teach us about our infirmities, our weaknesses and our fears.
She also invariably has something hopeful to say about the human
spirit. Though Jeremy fails at relationships, his art expresses
something he is unable to say in language. Though Mary is unable
to sustain a marriage, she is a strong, nurturing mother. Even childless
spinsters like Miss Vinton have a vital role to play as they lend
support to this struggling family. In Tyler's world, few people
are really evil, and everyone is good for something. Small victories,
like the day when Jeremy walks seven blocks to see his daughter's
play, are celebrated with quiet grace. As Miss Vinton says, "There
are other kinds of heroes than the ones who swim through burning
oil." Her characters may be full of infirmities, but Tyler believes
in them. As we come to understand their struggles we may receive
a little help in conquering our own fears, and kind of succor that
lifts us and draws us closer to those we love and seek to understand.
Readers
Comment on Celestial Navigation
Our book club
members offered a variety of comments on Anne Tyler's novels and
on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Here is a sampling:
I have to tell
you Anne Tyler has been one of my favorite authors ever since I
saw her recommended in an article written by an English professor
from BYU. Her characters have helped me understand some people in
my life that have been hard for me to deal with. I always wondered
if she read her husband's files on his clients. - Sherri
I finished
reading Celestial Navigation yesterday. I could hardly
put it down. One place highlighted in my book is page 85 "Sad people
are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things;
they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon
forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep
you from being in the end what you were in the beginning; lost and
lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do
the butterfly stoke." A sad thought I feel, but it gives a feeling
of how negative one can become.
I was very
interested in Mary. She got married young. Was an only child, and
loved children? I was the same way and we even had the same number
of children, six. Because of divorce, I also had to raise them alone
for a while. How lost one can feel. From there on our lives were
different and made me realize how much I have to be thankful for.
Already I have gone back and re-read some passages. I had never
heard of this book. Probably will end up reading through the book
again. - Donna
This is a book
about despair in all its guises. Despair in its final form is the
absence of hope, and in this book the only person who has come to
terms with it is Miss Vinton, who acts as the prop for all the rest
of the characters in their various plights. The book portrays the
final lesson that despair in its ultimate form is largely self-induced.
There were times in the book when I wanted to grab Jeremy by the
scruff of his neck and kick his rear end from here to eternity.
Mary's solution to her problems was to stop the world and get off
for w while and she managed to do this successfully at least three
times, until at last she succeeded in unwittingly destroying those
that loved her, Jeremy, Brian and the rest. I am not sure whether
I enjoyed the book or not. It teaches and powerful lesson; that
you cannot quite on yourself, and if you do, you damage many other
lives and your own as well. - Phil
One of the
qualities I admire in good writing, and this is very prevalent in
Anne Tyler and most definitely in Shakespeare, is what I call character
integrity. Some writers create characters for their fiction and
then twist them around to suit the plot. In my estimation, when
a real, rounded character is created, the writer has to craft the
plot to accurately reflect the fictional person. There are certain
traits and actions a character will follow and to have them do something
otherwise just to make a "good" story is to betray the individual.
It immediately sets a jarring note when an inconsistent action is
taken by a character. I tend to see this a lot on television but
it also appears in fiction writing. Tyler's people may be quirky,
and heaven knows they are, but they follow their own patterns of
quirkiness and are true to who they really are in the context of
the novels. Shakespeare's creations are also consistent, if in a
larger, more dramatic scale.- Cindy
Thank you for
your wonderful email. I also think Ken Branagh's Othello is a brilliant
video. I was lucky enough to see him at Stratford in Henry Vth when
he was just taking the English stage by storm and then later when
he had formed his own production company in a performance of Romeo
and Juliet. Just a tip your readers may consider. I did my degree
in Elizabethan Theatre and studied many of the Bard's plays. I always
found it really useful to get a childrens version of whatever play
I was about to study -this would get the plot and all the main characters
clearly into my head! The milk before the meat I guess. - Kim
Shakespeare
is a remarkable meld of enigma, buffoonery, and profound thought,
and he does it in a very studied way in order to appeal to his audience
at the particular moment. The profound matters that Shakespeare
talked about were completely familiar to his audience; they experienced
them every day. The enigma can only be described as sheer beauty,
and it is astonishing but refreshing that he gave these great lines
to minor characters, viz: the narrator's lines in the opening of
Henry V "think, when we speak of horses, you see them printing their
proud hooves into the receiving earth" or Caliban's lines from the
Tempest " this island is full of twanging and sweet sounds that
hurt not.... and when I wake, I cry to dream again" and so on.
I am not sure
I agree with your conclusion that Shakespeare would have loved the
great sprawling film productions of today, although I have to confess
that I enjoyed every one of them, particularly Richard lll with
Olivier. Maybe this is a typically 20th century viewpoint. There
is an intimacy about Shakespeare's work and it's production in the
late sixteenth, early seventeenth centuries; hence its universal
appeal; there are no cast of thousands, and much of the play(s)
consist of only a few characters on the stage at any time, and in
almost every case the great profound moments are confined to a single
individual. I very much like your interpretation that Shakespeare's
concentration was putting across the individual character and it's
reaction to moments of great stress. - Phil
Thanks to all
who sent comments and read along with us. In April our book is Silas
Marner, by George Eliot, a beautiful little tale about the
redemptive power of love. Join
Meridian's Best Books Club for extra updates and information, and
to share your insights as you read.
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