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Under the Skin of John Updike: Self-Consciousness and the Racial Unconscious

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jay Prosser
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Abstract

Psoriasis is the structuring principle of John Updike's Self-Consciousness. The condition is also a metaphor for Updike's writings, in their concern with surface and their proliferation. Updike seeks to avoid self-revelation by making Self-Consciousness a memoir about the other. Displacing his psoriasis into a consideration of black and mixed-race skin. Updike reflects, in the mirror of the autobiography, his self with a letter to his half-black, half-white grandsons. In a series of pronominal substitutions, in which Updike's grandsons are transformed from addressees to narratees. Self-Consciousness discloses a racial unconscious. This racial unconscious is also that of American history. As slavery was founded on a Manichaeanism of black-white skin, desires for crossing the skin border were repressed. The unconscious dimension of racism survives in the stigmatization of differently marked skins. Reading the surface of Self-Consciousness as profound, this essay assigns Updike a novel place in a racially conscious American canon.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 116 , Issue 3 , May 2001 , pp. 579 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2001

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