The Bitter Morsel

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Wednesday, November 01, 2006
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My first exposure to Proust and his famous madeleine scene came in French lit class, where we read the excerpt in the original language. So that was two strikes against me: I was reading it out of context, a dictionary on my lap, only getting every third or fourth word. I'd been assured this was a celebrated milestone in world literature, and I wanted badly to "get" it. At the time I was obsessed with memory and nostalgia, though at age nineteen I had little real experience of either. I'll admit right now that I didn't get it, that I couldn't quite grasp why this passage was the one essential thing to know about Proust. And I'm loathe to pass along the experience. Nevertheless, I'm going to share a passage that, for me, occupies a similarly exalted space in my imagination, an excerpt from Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. Here, narrator John Ames recalls an instance from childhood, a scene that's been a touchstone in later life. He misremembers what happened -- the images in his memory make it more sacramental than it actually was -- but he knows he remembers it wrong. Anyway, here's the passage, from pp. 102-103 of the first edition:

There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all. I remember that day in my childhood when I lay under the wagon with the other little children, watching them pull down the ruins of that Baptist church, and my father brought me a piece of biscuit for my lunch, and I crawled out and knelt with him there, in the rain. I remember it as if he broke the bread and put a bit of it in my mouth, though I know he didn't. His hands and his face were black with ash -- he looked charred, like one of the old martyrs -- and he knelt there in the rain and brought a piece of biscuit out from inside his shirt, and he did break it, that's true, and gave half to me and ate the other half himself. And it truly was the bread of affliction, because everyone was poor then. There had been a drought for a few years and times were hard. Though we didn't notice it so much when they were hard for everybody. And I guess that must have been why no one minded the rain. There had been so little of it. One thing I do always remember is how the women let their hair fall down and their skirts trail in the mud, even the old women, as if none of it mattered at all. And then the singing, which was very beautiful as I remember it, though I'm pretty sure it could not have been. It would just rise up with the sound of the rain. "Beneath the Cross of Jesus." All the lovely, sad old tunes. The bitterness of that morsel has meant other things to me as the years passed. I have had many occasions to reflect on it.

When Dave Long and I started talking about the "Daily Sacrament" story contest Faith in Fiction and Relief Journal are teaming up to do, this passage came to mind. For me, it captures so much of what I love about Gilead, and what I appreciate in all fiction. Of course, like the madeleine episode, it remains one of those things you have to experience for yourself to really appreciate. It can't be grasped in excerpt.