does salvation appear?

Describing the "at best indifferent, and at worst hostile" universe of True Grit, Stanley Fish writes:

[T]here are two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.

At Life's Private Book, David T. argues that Christ unites these two registers and lifts

the veil on the transcendent meaning of existence: we live in a fallen, sinful world in which the just suffer as well as the unjust. Damnation and salvation are not capricious. Damnation happens when we refuse to unite ourselves with Christ's redemptive act. Salvation happens when we accept the suffering the world visits on us; we do not accept the injustice of the world, but we accept that justice can truly only be found in the way of Christ.

This is an excellent summary of the "paradoxical effect" caused by Christ's death. The problem that Fish has posed, however, requires us to focus on how "the veil on the transcendent meaning of existence" has been lifted. His question is whether the lifting of the veil can be an event in a narrative, whether it can be depicted. In other words, does the lifting of the veil, the "redeeming of the universe," have an observable effect on what still appears -- even after the lifting -- to be an "at best indifferent, and at worst hostile" universe? Do the roads to salvation and damnation have different scenery? Recall the opening to A Serious Man. The foreboding, the "dark comedy," the expectation with which the arrival and departure of Traitle Groshkover is narrated is left totally unresolved despite the presence of characters who clearly believe in dybbuks.

Fish began by describing the effect that the Coen's avoidance of "great cinematic moments" had on movie critic Dan Gagliasso. The "evenness [to the] movie’s treatment of its events" frustrates Gagliasso's "desire for something climactic and defining." Indeed, the evenness is so profound that, as Fish points out, heroism is "displayed by almost everyone, 'good' and 'bad' alike." Similarly, Peter Lawler pointed out that a "strange sort of cultivation" is distributed evenly throughout in the speech of illiterate men "raised on readings of Shakespeare and the King James Bible." If it is possible to narrate the "lifting of the veil," one would think that it is most likely amidst these men "who are more able to articulate who they are than we are." But think of how Hemingway, famous for a polysyndetic (and therefore "even") style derived, it is said, from the King James Bible, depicts characters who are virtuous because, according to Reynolds Price, "any form of stop would diminish . . . their grip on the rim of their own abysses." Reviewing Robert Alter's Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible last year in The New Criterion, Barton Swaim observed:

Alter is right that Hemingway’s style can grate over the course of a novel, and that it works best in the shorter form. The reader gropes in the dark to find his bearings, to find some circumstance or outcome with a plain meaning. By contrast, one of the reasons Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is so satisfying is that she finds a way to use a reticent, intermittently paratactical style without depriving the reader of moral direction—and indeed her novel is shot through with biblical associations. (emphasis mine)

Again, the question is whether a satisfying "moral direction" is part of the narrative or something offered along with the narrative. Robinson's book is "shot through with biblical associations" -- this observation calls to mind another relevant part of Fish's review (which I have already discussed here):

This and other pieces of scripture don’t emerge from the story as a moral kernel emerges from a parable; they hang over the narrative . . . never quite touching its events and certainly not generated by them. There are no easy homiletics here, no direct line drawing from the way things seem to have turned out to the way they ultimately are. While worldly outcomes and the universe’s moral structure no doubt come together in the perspective of eternity, in the eyes of mortals they are entirely disjunct.

Does not the reward that Christ speaks of in Matthew 5:43-48 --

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

-- does not this reward also only "hang over" any narrative that is not itself the Gospel? Fish's observation is not that "damnation and salvation are capricious" in the "perspective of eternity" but rather that their distribution is capricious "in the eyes of mortals."

David's argument is that the mortal eyes of one who has accepted the way of Christ include the perspective of eternity just as their wounds may redeem the universe when united with His suffering. To get at what I think is the core of Fish's article, however, maybe a better question is whether it is possible to portray the moment of salvation in the course of a "real" (Hemingway, not Dante) narrative. And, to return to Gagliasso's objection to the Coen's style, whether the cultivation of "great cinematic moments" would not similarly betray the material of narrative. Put another way: Is it possible to imagine an artist's rendering of the Transfiguration having as much of an effect on Dostoevsky as The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb? Christ's face "did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light." Is there anything in that description or in a corresponding painting that is as performative as a picture of a decomposing Christ?