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The Troubles with Harry: Freedom, America, and God in John Updike's Rabbit Novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Extract
[I] had all of Shillington to say, Shillington and Pennsylvania and the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say.… In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea—this odd and uplifting line from among the many odd lines of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” seemed to me, as I set out, to summarize what I had to say about America, to offer itself as the title of a Continental magnum opus of which all my books, no matter how many, would be mere installments, mere Starts at the hymning of this great roughly rectangular country severed from Christ by the breadth of the sea.
John Updike's corpus is punctuated forcefully by his own magnum opus, the Rabbit series, a tetralogy that is simultaneously literature, cultural critique, and theology.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Religion and American Culture , Volume 6 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Religion and Twentieth-Century American Novels , Winter 1996 , pp. 1 - 33
- Copyright
- Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1996
References
Notes
Special gratitude for careful review and invaluable suggestions is due, in alphabetical order, to Florence Amamoto, Dean C. Hammer, Garrett E. Paul, Jennifer L. Rike, Eric J. Ziolkowski, and my students in “Rabbit's Religion.”
1. Updike, John, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1989), 106.Google Scholar
2. In general, no subjects receive more attention in Updike's novels than religion and sex. Although religious themes in Updike's work are often mentioned, the references sometimes are limited to the “iconic” level rather than penetrating to a deeper theological meaning. “Iconic” meaning is a term drawn from Scott, Nathan A. Jr., Negative Capability: Studies in the New Literature and the Religious Situation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 132.Google Scholar Scott notes that invocation of doctrinal language or religious setting is not the same as the religious significance of a work of art.
Moreover, it is a serious mistake to shortchange Updike's theological acumen. He knows that the theological vocabulary he uses is varied. Updike is not merely repeating unambiguous terms; he knows their contested meanings, and he is enough of a Kierkegaardian to appreciate the virtues of indirect communication about these languages and to establish his novels as contests among interpretations. What is contested in Updike's work is the cultural and religious meaning of such terms as “God,” “grace,” and “faith.” What is thrown into question, therefore, is the very relation between religion, culture, and God.
Thus, the force of “grace” in the Rabbit novels is less in Rabbit's own use of the term than in Thelma Harrison's understanding of grace, although she never uses the word and Rabbit does. To attend only to the immediate use of the term forces, for example, Greiner, Donald J., John Updike's Novels (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984), 49, 52Google Scholar, to accept uncritically Rabbit's pursuit as the proper mode of relation to grace. A similar error is contained in Tanner, Tony, “A Compromised Environment,” in John Updike, ed. and with an introduction by Bloom, Harold, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 51 Google Scholar, who assumes that, to be a “religious” writer, one must concentrate on “another world.”
Others simply dismiss the place of religion in Updike's work. For example, Mazurek, Raymond A., “ ‘Bringing the Corners Forward’: Ideology and Representation in Updike's Rabbit Trilogy,” in Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature, ed. Sorkin, Adam J. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), 157 Google Scholar, nearly spits at “momentary grace or whatever.” Detweiler, Robert, John Updike, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984)Google Scholar, when not ignoring the theological themes in his own quotations of Updike, tends to treat them dismissively. Janice's rescue and desertion of Charlie Stavros, for example, is reduced to “confused self-sacrifice” (127) without explaining why Janice's (or any other's) self-sacrifice is confused. Ristoff, Dilvo I., Updike's America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike's Rabbit Trilogy, American University Studies Google Scholar, Series 24: American Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), nearly denies the existence of religious themes in Updike's work, attributing them to interpreters who “fabricate a‘ theological’ or mystical explanation” (14).
Finally, there is a tendency to import uncritically one's own conceptions of religion as an overlay for interpreting Updike. Alice, and Hamilton, Kenneth, The Elements of John Updike (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970)Google Scholar, and Bawer, Bruce, The Aspect of Eternity: Essays (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993)Google Scholar, identify the ministerial figure of the Reverend Eccles with grace and identify law and grace so that grace is immediately moral.
In contrast, several excellent treatments of the complexity of Updike's theology and its roots include Neary, John, Something and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Hunt, George W., John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980)Google Scholar; Wood, Ralph C., The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and the short and excellent article of Martin, John Stephen, “Rabbit's Faith: Grace and the Transformation of the Heart,” Pacific Coast Philology 17, nos. 1-2 (November 1982): 103-11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The latter three all discuss Kierkegaard's influence on Updike, which should make interpreters wary of attributing Updike's position to any of his fictional creations.
3. Bloom, Harold, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).Google Scholar
4. Updike, John, Rabbit Is Rieh (New York: Random House, 1981), 108.Google Scholar Also see ibid., 116. Complete bibliographic information on the remaining three Rabbit novels is as follows: Rabbit, Run (New York: Random House, 1960); Rabbit Redux (New York: Random House, 1971); and Rabbit at Rest (New York: Random House, 1990). Hereafter, the novels are cited parenthetically as Run, Redux, Rich, and Rest.
5. Neary, Something and Nothingness, employs the categories of the horizontal and vertical with considerable success.
6. On basketball's metaphorical significance, see Alice, and Hamilton, Kenneth, The Elements of John Updike, 138 Google Scholar; and Detweiler, , John Updike, 37.Google Scholar
7. Olster, Stacey, “Rabbit Rerun: Updike's Replay of Popular Culture in Rabbit at Rest ,” Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 45–59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, contains an extensive analysis of the significance of Disney throughout the Rabbit series.
8. See Alice, and Hamilton, Kenneth, The Elements of John Updike, 141 Google Scholar; and Detweiler, , John Updike, 33.Google Scholar
9. Rabbit recalls this ad vice thirty years later as he runs to Florida for the last time, following intercourse with his daughter-in-law: “Rabbit wants to see once more a place in Morgantown, a hardware store with two pumps outside, where a thickset farmer in two shirts and hairy nostrils had advised him to know where he was going before he went there. Well, now he did” (Rest, 363). He knows where but will never know why. The futility of Rabbit's dream is sometimes overlooked. Judie Newman, John Updike, Macmillan Modern Novelists (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988) and even the usually insightful Greiner, John Updike's Novels, persist in understanding Rabbit as a heroic individual rebelling against deadening social structures. In part, this is true, but both Newman and Greiner fail to note Rabbit's need for those structures; others must recognize him. Newman and Greiner can explain Rabbit's run but not his return to Brewer.
10. Rabbit's angst recaptures the proper sense of anxiety in Kierkegaard, Søren, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Original Sin, ed. and trans. Thomte, Reidar and Anderson, Albert B. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).Google Scholar This anxiety, Kierkegaard notes, “is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite” (42). Angst's objeet is “something that is nothing” (43). At the beginning of Rabbit's run, he is “pricked by an indefinite urgency” (Run, 23), nothing more. This indefiniteness is why, as Detweiler, John Updike, 34, observes, there is no explanation for Rabbit's run.
11. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson with an introduction by David Knowles (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972), 196-215.
12. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. and with an introduction by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1961), 78.
13. See Eccles' comment at Run, 121.
14. That Rabbit is biting Ruth, devouring her, at this very moment exemplifies the connection between domination and ecstasy discussed below. See also Neary, , Something and Nothingness, 52–57.Google Scholar
15. Rabbit's father, Earl, notes but does not resolve the paradox (Run, 154).
16. Allen, Mary, “John Updike's Love of ‘Dull Bovine Beauty,’” in John Updike, ed. Bloom, Harold, Modern Critical Views, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 69–95 Google Scholar, echoes the charge of Updike's sexism. The essay makes several unwarranted conclusions: (1) that the presentation of characters that can be called “sexist” constitutes endorsement of them; (2) that the plainness of Updike's women debases them, whereas Updike's men are no more glamorous; and (3) that there are no women who are positively significant in Updike's work, a conclusion that we will see is patently incorrect. An excellent response to Allen and others is Stacey Olster, “ ‘Unadorned Woman, Beauty's Home Image’: Updike's Rabbit, Run,” in New Essays on Rabbit, Run, ed. Stanley Trachtenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 95-117. Olster also has a clear account of why Rabbit must seek to maintain “blankness” in his women (104-5), as does Oates, Joyce Carol, “Updike's American Comedies,” in John Updike, ed. Bloom, Harold, Modern Critical Views, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 61.Google Scholar
17. See, for example, Rich, 359, 368, in which Rabbit successively realizes that Janice is “his fortune” but follows this with thinking of Janice as a “dumb mutt,” a description used in Run. Margaret Morganroth Gullette's sanguine interpretation of Rabbit's progress in middle age in her Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) is implausible for several reasons, one of which is that Gullette asserts that, by the time of Rich, Harry has ceased thinking of Janice as a “dumb mutt” and that he therefore no longer chafes under the confinements of marriage.
18. Hegel and Kierkegaard are both rejected. Kierkegaard's aesthete is, in many ways, the horrible precursor of the canonization of feeling, just as Hegel's critique of Romanticism accused the latter of having no Standard of legitimacy other than its own opinion and feeling. Bellah, Robert N. and others, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 77 Google Scholar, note that this is also the dominant ethos of contemporary America: “ ‘Being good’ becomes ‘feeling good.’ ”
19. Rabbit's father comments that Harry “ ‘never hurt a fly if he could help if ” (Redux, 318). Martin, “Rabbit's Faith,” 105, is correct to say that “this confusion of his internal feelings with external grace is the direct cause of Rabbit's hardness of the heart.”
20. Rabbit also senses his own guilt more deeply than most others in the novels. This is discussed in the second section of this article.
21. Pasewark, Kyle A., A Theology of Power: Being Beyond Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 200–201.Google Scholar
22. Although thoughts of death increasingly occupy Rabbit as the years pass, this zero-sum game is present already in Run. See especially Run, 266.
23. It is fundamentally misguided to insist that Rabbit be more political than he is, as does Mazurek, “ ‘Bringing the Corners Forward,’ ” Part of the point is that Rabbit cannot be related to the social world except parasitically or as a slave to its content.
24. The charge that churches engage in “mere ritual” is largely a complaint that repetition of the same formulae comes at the price of excitement and religious feeling. This fadishness in American religious life is well presented by Bellah, and others, Habits of the Heart, 219-49.Google Scholar
25. Sociological analysis might well ask whether this religious dilettantism is a side effect of the “scientific study of religion.” Both refuse an inward involvement with the object of study and therefore exclude transformation by their object. Ziolkowski, Eric J., ed., A Museum of Faiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993)Google Scholar, aptly chooses the metaphor of observation in a museum as expressive of a purely external relation to religion.
26. See also Rich, 433: Rabbit thinks that “maybe God is in the universe the way salt is in the ocean, giving it a taste.” It is, of course, impossible to partake inwardly of this divine presence, salt water being undrinkable.
27. Janice marks this change in Rich when she complains, “ ‘You always want what you don't have instead of what you do’ ” Rabbit slips the accusation without denying its truth: “ ‘You're wrong about my wanting what I don't have. I pretty much like what I have. The trouble with that is, then you get afraid somebody will take it from you’ ” (Rich, 66). Detweiler, , John Updike, 175-76Google Scholar, also notes this new emphasis.
28. See Run, 89; Rich, 356; and Rest, 147.
29. Even Eccles recognizes this (Run, 157).
30. Wood, , The Comedy of Redemption, 218 Google Scholar, sees this as “moral progress.” It is progress only in the odd sense that Rabbit is too weak to be dangerous. Moreover, Wood ignores the return and persistence of the desire for freedom.
31. For contrast, see especially Run, 152, 164.
32. Rabbit may be Mr. Death to Ruth, but “when he was good he could make her into a flower” (Run, 179). See also Wood, , The Comedy of Redemption, 210.Google Scholar
33. See also the pivotal exchange between Rabbit and Eccles at Run, 101.
34. Kruppenbach's attack on Eccles (Run, 158-60) is correct as far as it goes, as even Eccles recognizes. But Kruppenbach and Eccles both posit an absolute estrangement between God and world. God resides only in heaven. Without a notion of the Spirit, Kruppenbach's Christ is also absent, “ ‘dead, but you will see him again in Heaven’ ” (Run, 159) and not, apparently, before. Rabbit senses that this “collision of two opposed realms” is “an encounter a terrible God willed” (Run, 275).
35. Mary Palmquist convinced me of the importance of Rabbit's uncircumcision.
36. See, for example, Redux, 26.
37. Even Rabbit's delight at being in the hands of others is largely because it served his need for dominance (Rest, 135).
38. Smith, Kent D., Faith: Reflections on Experience, Theology, and Fiction (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), 96 Google Scholar, views Rabbit's initial meeting with Thelma as insignificant precisely because Rabbit does not choose Thelma. Smith's commitment to an activist understanding of freedom and religion is apparent.
39. To be sure, Thelma follows “ ‘Just existed’ ” by adding particular qualities she finds attractive in Rabbit. The question, however, is the order of events, and Thelma's first Statement, which also is the ground for her looking for Special desirabilities in her love, is that Rabbit “ ‘Just existed.’ ”
40. The exception is Rabbit's son, Nelson, who is redeemed from complete disintegration by the end of Rest. But Nelson also was passive at the first stage of his journey, compelled against his wishes to go to a clinic.
41. Rabbit also believed that he knew love during his time with Ruth but understood it as an inflation of self. Similarly, on the return flight from the Caribbean, Janice says she loves Harry, but he responds only with a flip matter-of-fact, “ ‘Oh, really? Well, same here’ ” (Rich, 401). Rabbit was offered love relatively frequently.
42. Updike, Self-Consciousness, 40-41, paraphrase.
43. The assertion of Smith, , Faith, 5 Google Scholar, that Rabbit is “trying to participate in the suffering of God” is incomprehensible. It is true that Rabbit seeks transcendence (11), but it is to escape suffering.
44. Rabbit does manipulate Janice into an alliance against Pru, which passes over his offense. But the “unforgivable” is therefore sidestepped, not forgiven.
45. Both Detweiler, , John Updike, 134 Google Scholar, and Wood, , The Comedy of Redemption, 228 Google Scholar, assert, without textual evidence, that Rabbit gradually learns forgiveness. Detweiler finds Rabbit's acceptance of forgiveness emerging in Redux, in which Rabbit explicitly refuses forgiveness at the novel's conclusion.
46. See also Bawer, The Aspect of Eternity, who thinks that Rabbit's problem is that he does not appreciate our “duty to rise” (232). On the contrary, this duty is exactly what he tries to fulfill, and it is the source of his difficulties.