For me, reading Updike has always been like eating cheese doodles: there is far more doodle than cheese to them, and after you have gobbled them up, you are still hungry. This is not a matter of craft, for Updike is an excellent craftsman. It is more of a "vision thing": his characters are all little people, people like us (if we are white, suburban, and retrogressively Christian). They are capable of little virtues and little vices, and of recognizing neither good nor evil, except as these categories may relate to such minor exigencies as the price of gas and getting the lawn mower to start. The real crises of good and evil slip in and out of such lives almost unrecognized, at least on a conscious level. No wonder the guy always has such a bemused look on his face.
You might contrast Updike with a writer like Joyce Carol Oates, a raging drama queen, for whom life seems to be a psychological campaign of shock and awe. Characters of outward stability are inwardly cauldrons of predatory violence, always near boil. You usually get violence, but even when you don’t, you get extreme weirdness (read, for example, a very good short story called "Happy Onion", in which a teenage girl watches her incredibly handsome boyfriend undergo the final deconstruction of autopsy). The desire to own and be owned, lust and be lusted after, murder and be murdered, cavort inside the same skulls like a pantomime of a typical episode of Springer. You look at the picture of Oates which adorned her books for decades, and it reveals an expression of vacant ecstasy. Self-awareness has no more place in her novels than it does in the works of her fellow literary naturalists, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. But extreme emotions, appetites, and self-dramatization? Boy, have you come to the right place.
Vacancy is the tie-in: her characters are just as clueless as those of Updike. They don’t know what they are doing, or why things are being done to them. Whether they live lives of unrelieved trivia and tedium, or bounce from one cataclysm to another like super balls, they remain as clueless as the iron lawn jockeys that adorn so many of the front lawns of Updike’s fictional characters. For Updike, the Englightenment’s bequest of freedom has left individuals tied to the same small habits of living that their predecessors had, but bereft of their confidence and their convictions, and circling – not quite inexorably -- the drain of their humanity. For Oates, that bequest is a declaration that every day is a day of the dead, and every night a night on Bald Mountain.
Updike is a great fan of Chesterton yet he's always struck me a bit like Martin Gardner, in awe of Chesterton's faith, yet for some reason unwilling to commit to it. People tell me that novel of a few years ago, THE LILIES OF THE FIELD (or something like that) was a deeply Christian work. Anybody read that?
In the Beauty of the Lilies.
I haven't read it. Perhaps I gave up on Updike too soon, although, from what I gather, it is more about the permutations of life-after-faith than about faith itself.
I was thrilled to see that Updike visited LR. I hope he inspired many students.
Updike told the interviewer on C-Span that he does believe, and that he is a great fan of Karl Barth. I read a review he wrote for the New Yorker of Barth's book on Anselm. He seemed very appreciative of the questions being dealt with.
Updike told the interviewer on C-Span that he does believe, and that he is a great fan of Karl Barth.
Santiago,
Thanks for that comment. If this is so, then either I missed something, or he failed to disclose it -- at least during his talk here. Of course, I haven't kept up with him in recent years. If he does believe, the question would be "believe what?" The former self-proclaimed atheist, Anthony Flew, now says he's a 'theist,' but doesn't believe in Jesus Christ. Updike may believe in Jesus Christ, and then one could ask what he understands by Jesus Christ. Barth, according to J.C. O'Neill (Edinburgh) doesn't believe in the historicity of the resurrection of Christ (any more, we would say, than the "Spirit of Vatican II" does). The next impertinent question might be, if he is a professing Christian, has he committed himself to membership in the Church or some ecclesial community? It would indeed be nice to know.
Having said that, I'm with Doister on the spiritual texture of Updike's work. He had, on occasion, some insightful and telling things slip out in his writing, such as the statement in Couples that the first step of adultery is the freest; and after that, constraints aping marriage develop. Yet his characters remain spiritually -- in contrast to, say, Walker Percy's Tom Moore -- unedifyingly at sea.
PP,
Isn’t literary criticism an absolutely perfect scholarly pursuit in a post-modernist world? Unlike philosophy, where a modicum of logical analysis is required (or at least preferred), you can make anything you want of any poem or work of fiction – nothing is off limits, nothing need be ruled out. Read something (or get a good set of Cliff’s Notes), read something else (ditto the notes), and voila!, you have source and influence – you decide which is which (A good tip is to choose as your source the work that was written first)!! The only limiting factor is the need to convince someone that your thesis is worthy of publication. Network, network, network!!
They pay you for this, PP – no kidding!
It is from this rather cynical perspective that I conducted a wee bit of research on the subject of Updike’s status as a religious writer – a status I am not willing to grant him, but others are.
First of all, this is not a reflection on Updike’s personal religious beliefs (if any exist). Those are his business. His interest in Karl Barth may be deep and profound, or it may be a species of intellectual playfulness. He may mine Barth, Kierkegaard, Pascal, and Richard Hooker (all of whom have been quoted in various works) for insights and quotations that he places in an entirely ironic or incidental context. I believe that something like this can be said to be afoot in his novel "Marry Me", but occasional religious rest stops hardly amount to a consistent, much less profound, religious sensibility informing his body of work.
Robert K. Johnson, described as a "Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary", disagrees. An article of his, written in 1979, is available on the internet:
http://www.religion-online.org/s....asp?
title=1195
[ctd]
[ctd)
The article, "John Updike’s Theological World" is actually temperate in its claims, and sometimes convincing. Johnson points out that, although Updike writes of contemporary life,
". . . most critics have seen his interest in it as more than sociological and have rightly affirmed the novelists religious underpinning, even while disputing the exact nature of his beliefs. Kenneth and Alice Hamilton’s major study, The Elements of John Updike (Eerdmans, 1970), regards his vision as stemming from historic Christianity. Others have located his "religious" center in a form of theistic existentialism. Still others have understood Updike to be involved in a continuing quest for belief. All agree that he is writing in reaction to a modern Protestantism once comfortably ensconced in small towns (like Shillington, Pennsylvania, where Up-dike lived as a boy), but now caught up in the secularism of the expanding megalopolis. However defined, Updike’s religious consciousness informs all of his work; a close reading of his fiction supports the claim that he is seriously involved in enfleshing that marginal belief which underlies life for an increasing number of Americans."
I won’t drag this out much further – anyone interested can read the article, a sound, if somewhat standard, example of what academics say of artists. I think the notion that Updike’s disgust with the banality of the culture somehow translates into an oblique thrust toward religious sensibility is a difficult case to make. On the other hand, certain characters in certain stories occasionally seem to grope for exactly that. So who knows.
By the way PP, if you are interested in seeing this theme pursued in a far more earnest and undetached way than Updike has ever shown himself capable of, may I suggest "The Blood of the Lamb", by Peter de Vries. Sooner or later I end up recommending this novel to everyone. It will break the heart of any reader who has one.
DeVries is not a Christian writer, either, though his involvement with Christian themes is deep, heartfelt, and emphatically personal, quite unlike the attitude of slack indulgence I frequently notice in Updike. But he is defeated, ultimately, by suffering.
"What, I thought to myself as I gazed at Carol, if anything should happen to that creature? Looking back, we seem to detect clairvoyance in certain moments of apprehension, but mine were no more than pass like a chill over the heart of any parent watching his treasure asleep in bed or taking off down the road on a bicycle, which we call premonitions by hindsight if our fears materialize. A neighbor had been robbed by the Fates of a nine-year old boy whom I will unabashedly describe as hyacinthine-haired, and a year later was still inconsolable to the point of unfitness for human society. I reminded him sharply that he had three other children, and he turned to me with clenched fists. "There aren't enough children in the world to make a dent in grief for one," he said. I had little suspicion then that I would be crying foul myself, under terms more final than his own. This being then foreshadowed, I can say, like the narrator in 'Our Town', 'I reckon you know what the third act is about.'"
A great novel, by an author whose soul, I pray, now rests in peace and consolation.
I should have written:
"DeVries is not a Christian writer, either, though IN THIS NOVEL his involvement with Christian themes is deep, heartfelt, and emphatically personal, quite unlike the attitude of slack indulgence I frequently notice in Updike. But he is defeated, ultimately, by suffering."
Doister,
Thanks for your thoughtful ruminations about Updike and DeVries. Peter DeVries was a graduate of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an institution of the conservative, well-heeled and very educated Christian Reformed Church established by Dutch immigrants in the U.S. Aside from the Catholics, the Reformed are about the only ones with a comparable intellectual tradition and philosophical tradition. Calvin College, a school of around 3000 students, had around eleven full-time faculty in its philosophy department when I was there in the 1970s. All of which is to say, it's no surprise why DeVries is familiar with Christian themes. One couldn't have come out of that ethos without having been immersed. DeVries is regarded with a mixture of admiration and dissapointment as a sort of bete noir celebrity in Dutch Reformed circles. His sense of humor, as you know, is wickedly funny, but underlying it is a river of pathos that is harrowing in is despair.
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