Title: Faith and the Unanswerable Questions: The Fiction of Doris Betts
Abstract: [I]f the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. --Flannery O'Connor (1) Doris Betts's fiction is about crises of character rather than of action. Her characters are grotesques, sometimes physically such as Violet Karl in The Ugliest Pilgrim, but more often spiritually like Homer Beam in The or Mrs. Applewhite in The Mandarin. They are trying to solve mysteries of faith, trying to make sense out of their lives and their world. They are seeking answers to unanswerable questions. Their questions are rarely philosophical in any existential sense. They do not ask Why is there something instead of nothing? Rather, they are asking, How do live in the something that is? They are asking must do to make sense of it? They are grotesques not because of what they lack but precisely because they are sensitive to the questions at the expense of the easy answers that lie around them. This dilemma is clearest in Betts's long story The Astronomer, a modern tale of abdication and reacceptance of responsibility. Horton Beam has retired from his job at a weaving mill where he has spent his life doing nothing but passing time. He is alone; his wife has been dead for fifteen years and his sons have died, one in the Korean War and one in a freak accident. Horton has given up trying to make sense out of any of this, and now, without his workday routine, is left to find some way to fill his time. Happening to glance through a copy of Leaves of Grass he comes across the line, Heard the Learn'd Astronomer and immediately decides to become an astronomer as well. There is no spiritual motivation behind his decision; he only wants to pass time. When a librarian remarks that The stars are beautiful these summer nights, the Astronomer (as Beam has become known in the story), does not respond to her sense of the beautiful. What did he care for that? No use. No purpose. No beauty, either. He was just learning something for its own sake. He had retired from all the parts of that story; he had even ... even abdicated. I hadn't noticed it, the Astronomer said aloud. (2) For reasons inexplicable to himself he allows a young man, Fred, and a woman who claims to be Fred's wife, Eva, to rent the upstairs of his home. After he finds out that they are not married and that Eva has run away from her husband and two children and is pregnant by Fred, the Astronomer allows them to stay on, telling himself that he needs the money to buy his telescope. Against all his resolution, he becomes interested and involved in Eva's problems. This dissolving of his resolution to become isolated is also reflected in his study of astronomy. He goes from charting the stars to studying the theories behind his science and finally to studying the mythologies behind the naming of the constellations. He moves from the secure position of pure empiricism to the study of the beliefs and faiths of man; by doing so, he loses the distance he had hoped to achieve--the ability to see himself as an unimportant speck in a giant universe. Eva too has unsuccessfully attempted to abdicate her responsibilities and sensitivities in running away with Fred. In Fred, she believes she has found the sort of unconscious life she is seeking. Fred, a used car salesman, now works the late night shift at a service station, where he spends his evenings reading road maps. …
Publication Year: 1982
Publication Date: 1982-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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