10 - Roger's Version

Summary

UPDIKE WOULD NOT RETURN TO The Scarlet Letter for more than a decade. Roger's Version, as the title suggests, comes from the perspective of the Roger Chillingworth character, the man of science who is cuckholded by the man of faith. But the categories are confused, because Updike's Chillingworth is not a scientist but a professor at a divinity school, a former minister whose career was ended by an affair. Roger Lambert still identifies as a Christian believer, but his faith lacks the passion that Søren Kierkegaard demands from genuinely religious people. “I have,” Roger tells us in the novel's opening paragraph, “been happy at the Divinity School. The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile—there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living.” He has transferred personal faith into the academic realm, becoming the sort of loathsome character that Kierkegaard lampoons as the “assistant professor.” Assistant professors, he tells us in the Afsluttende Uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de Philosophie Smuler (Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, 1846), lack not only faith but even humor; they are “so devoid of comic power that it is shocking; even Hegel, according to the assurance of a zealous Hegelian, is utterly devoid of a sense for the comic. A ludicrous sullenness and paragraph-pomposity that give an assistant professor a remarkable likeness to a Holberg bookkeeper are called earnestness by assistant professors.” In his journals, Kierkegaard takes the attack further:

How ludicrous an assistant professor is! We all laugh when a Mad Meyer tugs at a huge boulder which he believes is money—but the assistant professor goes around proudly, proud of his knowledge, and no one laughs. And yet that is just as ludicrous—to be proud of the knowledge by which a man dupes himself eternally.