1 - John Updike and the Existentialist Imagination

Summary

JUST A FEW YEARS BEFORE HIS DEATH, John Updike wrote a short essay for the National Public Radio series This I Believe. His remarks form the foundation of any theory about his treatment of the imagination. The essay's final paragraph reveals him as a man with split loyalties:

Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds. The power of materialist science to explain everything, from the behavior of the galaxies to that of molecules, atoms, and their submicroscopic components, can scarcely be doubted. Such science forms the principal achievement of the modern mind; its manifold technical and medical benefits are ours to enjoy. On the other hand, subjective sensations, desires, and, may we even say, illusions compose the substance of our daily existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address and placate these. We are part of nature, and natural necessity compels and in the end dissolves us; yet to renounce all and any supernature, any appeal or judgment beyond the claims of matter and private appetite, leaves in the dust too much of our humanity, as through the millennia it has manifested itself in art and altruism, idealism and joie de vivre.

On the one side stands a material world whose every atom science can, or will be able to, account for; on the other stands human consciousness, which presents itself to itself as fundamentally inexplicable in materialist terms. The distinction, broadly speaking, belongs to Jean-Paul Sartre, who divides being into l’être-en-soi (being-in-itself) and l’être-pour-soi (being-for-itself).

Relatively scant critical attention has been paid to Updike's relationship to Sartrean metaphysics, although Jack de Bellis's John Updike Encyclopedia discusses Sartrean politics in relation to The Coup (1978), and numerous critics have applied Sartrean ethics to Of the Farm (1965), which features as its epigraph a quotation from “L'Existentialisme est un humanisme” (Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946). John Neary's Something and Nothingness, meanwhile, discusses Sartre, but pits him, along with John Fowles, as a foil to Updike and Kierkegaard. Ralph C. Wood's The Comedy of Redemption likewise contrasts Updike's Midpoint (1969) with the Sartrean position that existentialism's “absurd human freedom means the impossibility of a God who could command our loyalty and obedience.” It is true that Updike cannot endorse Sartre's atheism or the nihilism that lurks just beyond his celebration of humanity's radical freedom.