“I confess it is a hard doctrine”

January 11, 2025 3:09 AM

Mattie travels through her past with such a steely countenance that I often found myself stopping and doubling back, imagining what she doesn’t describe, creating an unwritten text alongside Mattie’s. I found myself moved and troubled by the adult narrator’s attempt to write her younger self into stoicism. We’re invited, I think, to fill the novel’s unnarrated spaces with this psychology, and to understand that Portis has given Mattie this moralizing, allegorizing impulse for reasons that have to do with character: writing this story is her way of making it tolerable. from He Got Away With Everything: Reading True Grit After the Reelection of Donald Trump [LitHub]
posted by chavenet (10 comments total)

“Well, maybe. As the story advances, Portis makes it clear that Mattie has willingly, even willfully, recast her life’s story as a parable. The quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning.”

posted by HearHere at 4:39 AM on January 11 [3 favorites]

I realize that Lit Hub needs my help, but 70% of my screen is Lit Hub telling me it needs help. I suppose this in itself is a kind of political statement.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:17 AM on January 11 [6 favorites]

I call that bold talk from a one-eyed fat man.
posted by Lemkin at 6:28 AM on January 11 [11 favorites]

If you enjoyed True Grit (the novel), you should read his Masters of Atlantis. It resonates with our current predicament in much the same way.
posted by tommasz at 7:42 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]

The author of this article and Portis have aptly named and described Mattie's "project". The character lives in a time and place where modernity was encroaching fast via telecommunications and social / intellectual secularization, especially in the West.

I'm a Muslim who not so long ago was the very model of a modern secular-minded woman. I still live and interact in a culture that fosters and encourages the compartmentalization of faith in God so that it is just another "mode" one occasionally occupies, rather than the all-encompassing worldview Islam is meant to be. Hasan Spiker and other philosophers speak often on these aspects of being Muslim in the West.

My take on Mattie? She employs stoicism not only as a response to tragedy and violence but also to the rapidly changing national culture around her, which would affect even small-town dwellers more and more as the decades of the twentieth century rolled on. People with her pervasively God-centred worldview would find themselves more and more at odds with what they saw and heard in the national media.

Portis, as a journalist on the world scene, would have had special insights into these developments, no matter what his personal beliefs. Perhaps he found writing fiction more "true" than journalistic work.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 7:42 AM on January 11 [12 favorites]

Sofkey is a thing. Also noting the symbolic cleverness of Rooster having an eye patch over his shooting eye, justice being blind an all.
posted by Brian B. at 11:30 AM on January 11 [2 favorites]

I love True Grit, especially the book, and the language and the world it creates, as well as the Coen brothers' adaptation. Though I admit I'm hard-pressed to see how our travails under Trump figure into Mattie's story.

If anything, Mattie and Trump are alike in some ways. I could imagine a warped version of Portis's story written in an alternate universe, where a Mattie-like Trump-esque figure seeks political office to right perceived wrongs against him, however slight, getting vengeance on everyone who laughed at him or looked down on him.

While this character might seem petty from the outside, and correctly so, I imagine him just as inwardly and blindly righteous as Mattie. And worse, unlike her character, not paying any metaphorical price for it.

Was her quest for justice for herself, to realign the universe to her specific view of how it should be, or was it to right the wrong of her father's murder? I'm still not sure, even though I'm glad Tom Chaney got what was coming to him.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:43 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this chavenet, it reminds me that I was going to have our Book Club read True Grit, soon.
posted by storybored at 2:30 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]

This was wonderful, thanks for posting! I haven't read the novel, but plan to now.
posted by helpthebear at 5:24 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]

In other words, Mattie hopes LaBoeuf will read her text and reach out. It’s a call for companionship, and a gesture that contradicts much of what Mattie has told us about fate. Because if it’s all written in advance, by a God-author, why bother reaching out to LaBoeuf? If it doesn’t matter, if we can’t change things, why try?

This strikes me as reaching to the point of breaking. The author might equally ask why Mattie bothers exacting revenge on her father's killer, or why she bothers writing about it in the first place. The doctrine of predestination doesn't deny human agency as a thing that exists and affects the world. We can affect lots of things in the world, to our (and others) benefit or detriment. But on the logic of predestination, none of that affects whether we will be saved after death. (Which might explain why Mattie has no qualms killing the guy.)
posted by dmh at 8:06 AM on January 12 [1 favorite]