A New Novel by Ron Hansen

An Incomprehensible
Certainty

by Gregory Wolfe

In Ron Hansen’s new novel, Exiles, there isn’t a single protagonist – there are six. For most writers, that would be an unwieldy number, but Hansen’s narrative gifts are strong enough to pull it off triumphantly. At the center of the story are five German nuns, who board a doomed trans-Atlantic steamship, intending to pursue their vocations of teaching and healing in the United States. And then there is a frail, sickly Jesuit, studying at a seminary in Wales, who would find in the nuns’ tragedy the event that would unleash his own vocation–a long-buried desire to write poetry. The seminarian’s name was Gerard Manley Hopkins and the elegy he would write to the drowned nuns was “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”
Hansen happens to hold the Gerard Manley Hopkins Chair at Santa Clara University, and has long been regarded as one of America’s leading Catholic writers. Exiles marks Hansen’s return to the territory he covered in his bestselling novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, published in 1992. Mariette tells of a beautiful young novice at a convent in New York State in the early 1900s who experiences the stigmata. This event causes dissension in the convent: is Mariette a mystical saint or a calculating fraud? Hansen lets the reader decide, but in the course of this lushly poetic novel he draws upon the wells of feminine mysticism, from Teresa of Avila to Therese of Lisieux. To his great surprise, and that of his publisher, Mariette became a bestseller, and has been compared to the novels of such French Catholic writers as Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac. Hansen’s other novels include  Atticus, a retelling of the story of the prodigal son which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, recently made into a film.
Exiles returns to many of the same concerns as Mariette: the mystery of vocation, suffering, and desire. As a fictionalized version of historical events, Exiles is scrupulously fair to the facts, which in the case of the five German nuns are hard to come by. Nonetheless, their stories are told with care: each one becomes a meditation on the way a vocation to the religious life, far from being a radical break from the circumstances of one’s story, grows organically out of each person.
For the young Jesuit Hopkins, vocation proves to be a painful, complex matter. His student days at Oxford University came during the heyday of the Oxford Movement, when a group of Anglicans called for a recovery of the sacramental and liturgical richness of the church. Its most famous exponent, John Henry Newman, eventually converted to Roman Catholicism.
But when Hopkins decides to enter the Society of Jesus, he experiences a conflict that many religious artists have struggled with over the centuries: how can a vocation to a life of faith coexist with the seemingly dangerous allure of art-making, ostensibly so useless and self-involved? He deliberately suppresses his impulse to write poetry and pursues his theological education in the occasionally stifling atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Catholic education.
In Hansen’s deft hands, the scenes at the seminary at St. Beuno’s are insightful and moving. There, Hopkins struggles with religious language that has become little more than discourse. To counter this, he seeks language that is charged with presence, language that does not merely describe a past encounter but becomes a present encounter–between the poet and the Mystery and between the poet and the reader.
When Hopkins encounters the tragic news of the Deutschland’s wreck, what has been dammed up within him is released through the permission of a superior. His poem seeks out the Word within words. The poet begs for understanding in front of death. Aware of his disproportion before reality, he is “soft sift in an hourglass,” open before God, whom he sees as “an incomprehensible certainty.”
As Hansen goes on to show, Hopkins himself will have to face an exile that will bring suffering and death: he is sent to Ireland to work in harsh, unhealthy conditions, dying at the age of 45. But the victory of Christ in his life was that, after writing “The Wreck,” his vocations, to priesthood and poetry–in other words, the fulfillment of his deepest desires–came together, leaving indelible traces in our history. As Hansen records, Hopkins’s last words were: “I am so happy. I am so happy.”