Updike and Politics: New Considerations 1498575609, 9781498575607

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Updike & Politics

Politics, Literature, and Film Series Editor: Lee Trepanier, Saginaw Valley State University The Politics, Literature, and Film series is an interdisciplinary examination of the intersection of politics with literature and/or film. The series is receptive to works that use a variety of methodological approaches, focus on any period from antiquity to the present, and situate their analysis in national, comparative, or global contexts. Politics, Literature, and Film seeks to be truly interdisciplinary by including authors from all the social sciences and humanities, such as political science, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, history, religious studies, and law. The series is open to both American and nonAmerican literature and film. By putting forth bold and innovative ideas that appeal to a broad range of interests, the series aims to enrich our conversations about literature, film, and their relationship to politics. Advisory Board Richard Avaramenko, University of Wisconsin-Madison Linda Beail, Point Loma Nazarene University Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, University of St. Gallen Timothy Burns, Baylor University Paul A. Cantor, University of Virginia Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of California at Los Angeles Lilly Goren, Carroll University Natalie Taylor, Skidmore College Ann Ward, University of Regina Catherine Heldt Zuckert, University of Notre Dame Recent Titles Wonder and Cruelty: Ontological War in It’s a Wonderful Life, by Steven Johnston Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune: Pantagruelism, Politics, and Philosophy, by Timothy Haglund The Coen Brothers and the Comedy of Democracy, by Barry Craig and Sara MacDonald Popular Culture and the Political Values of Neoliberalism, by George A. Gonzalez The Final Frontier: International Relations and Politics through Star Trek and Star Wars, by Joel R. Campbell and Gigi Gokcek Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing by Tenderness, by Jerome C. Foss The Politics of Twin Peaks, edited by Amanda DiPaolo and James Clark Gillies AIDS-Trauma and Politics: American Literature and the Search for a Witness, by Aimee Pozorski Baudelaire Contra Benjamin: A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism, by Beibei Guan and Wayne Cristaudo Updike & Politics: New Considerations, edited by Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill

Updike & Politics New Considerations Edited by Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN: 978-1-4985-7560-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-7561-4 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Credits

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Updike and Politics: An Introduction Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill

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Part I: The Presidency 1 Updike and the American Presidency James Schiff 2 “We’re None of Us Perfect”: Watergate and Adultery in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays and Memories of the Ford Administration Marshall Boswell 3 Presidential Politics as Sexual Politics: Memories of the Ford Administration Judie Newman 4 John Updike’s Poetics of Hope Jo Gill 5 Updike on Demagoguery: Reconsidering Rabbit Redux in the Age of Trump Ethan Fishman Part II: The American Scene 6 “Love It or Leave It”: America in Red, Gray, and Blue in Rabbit Redux Sylvie Mathé v

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Contents

7 “Mail” Chauvinism: John Updike’s Postal Fetish and the Unrealizable Vision of American Democracy Yoav Fromer 8 The Failure of Moderation in Buchanan Dying and Memories of the Ford Administration Michial Farmer 9 Inside Reagan’s “Placid, Uncluttered Head”: Roger’s Version and the Rise of Neoliberalism Matthew Shipe 10 The Politics of Vulnerability in The Afterlife and Other Stories Biljana Dojčinović 11 John Updike’s Terrorist and the Politics of Hygiene Aleksandra Vukotić Part III: Updike Abroad 12 Updike’s Middle East: A Neoliberal Approach to Conflict Resolution Louis Gordon 13 Updike “Third-Worlds It”: Staging The Coup as Political Satire Kirk Curnutt 14 The Three Mile Island Accident and “the Man from Toyota”: Looking Back on the Cultural Politics of the Cold War in Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest Takashi Nakatani 15 John Updike and the World: The Politics of Identity in Brazil Pradipta Sengupta

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Index

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Contributors

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Acknowledgments

The process of putting this volume together has been a rewarding experience—one that has expanded our view of Updike’s fiction and his political thought—and we would like to express our deep appreciation for all the scholars who contributed their time and intelligence into making this collection a reality. We would like to express our gratitude to Lee Trepanier and Joseph Parry at Rowman & Littlefield for their enthusiastic support of this project. Thanks to the English Department of Washington University in St. Louis, and particularly to Professor Vincent Sherry, Dean Barbara Schaal, and Provost Holden Thorp for their support in obtaining the funding that helped cover the expenses needed to finish this project. Special thanks needs to be expressed to Yoav Fromer, who was instrumental in the early stages of this project, and to James Schiff, James Plath, and Marshall Boswell, who were gracious with their time and had sage advice when answering our (numerous) questions about the process of putting this book together. Additionally, we would like to thank James Plath for granting us permission to use his great photograph of Updike for our cover. We would also like to acknowledge the Estate of John Updike for the permission to reprint passages from Updike’s work, and Sherri Hinchey at Penguin Random House for all her help in securing those permissions. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their love and support as we worked on this project.

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Credits

An Ode, copyright © 1955, 1982 by John Updike; from THE CARPENTERED HEN by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Superman, copyright © 1955 and renewed 1982 by John Updike; “Sonic Boom,” and Fireworks from COLLECTED POEMS, 1953–1993 by John Updike, copyright © 1993 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Icarus, “Reading, PA,” and “Corinth, MS” from AMERICANA: AND OTHER POEMS by John Updike, copyright © 2001 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Subway Love from MIDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS by John Updike, copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, copyright renewed 1997 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. The Afterlife, “Tristan and Iseult,” and “A Sandstone Farmhouse” from THE AFTERLIFE AND OTHER STORIES by John Updike, copyright © 1994 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. ix

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Excerpt(s) from MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION by John Updike, copyright © 1992 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from ROGER’S VERSION by John Updike, copyright © 1986 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from TERRORIST by John Updike, copyright © 2006 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from RABBIT AT REST by John Updike, copyright © 1990 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from THE COUP by John Updike, copyright © 1978 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS by John Updike, copyright © 1989 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from RABBIT REDUX by John Updike, copyright © 1971, copyright renewed 1999 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “The Hillies” from MUSEUMS & WOMEN AND OTHER STORIES by John Updike, copyright © 1960, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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“Varieties of Religious Experience” from MY FATHER’S TEARS AND OTHER STORIES by John Updike, copyright © 2009 by The Estate of John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “A Wee Irish Suite,” “Endpoint: March Birthday 2002, and After,” “Endpoint: 03/18/03,” “Endpoint: Tucson Birthday, 2004,” and “Endpoint: Oblong Ghosts 11/6/08” from ENDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS by John Updike, copyright © 2009 by The Estate of John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Chapter 6: Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines grants the permission to reissue in English Sylvie Mathe’s article “‘Love It or Leave It’: America in Red, Gray, and Blue in Rabbit Redux,” first published in Couleurs d’Americque, RFEA n 105, September 2005, 93–107.

Updike and Politics An Introduction Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill

Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of John Updike’s political thought, Updike & Politics: New Considerations establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. Much like his contemporaries (Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion), Updike addressed the central political concerns of his era, his work chronicling the dramatic shifts that American culture experienced in the decades following the Second World War. Bringing together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, France, Serbia, Israel, and the United Kingdom, this volume presents the most comprehensive exploration of the rich political commentary that runs throughout Updike’s oeuvre. 1 Like Updike himself, the collection endeavors to be comprehensive as it covers a wide range of the work that he produced during his fifty-year career, including his too often overlooked poetry and his single play. The essays in this collection deal with a variety of political issues: from the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence, to the more divisive issues in Updike’s work like race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and the rise of neoliberalism. Several of the chapters focus on Updike’s underappreciated 1992 novel Memories of the Ford Administration, a work that in hindsight seems central not only for understanding Updike’s view of the American presidency but also his politics more broadly. Ultimately, however, Updike & Politics: New Considerations reveals how Updike’s immense body of work illuminates the central political questions and problems that troubled American culture during the second half of the twentieth century as well as the opening decade of the new millennium. 1

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Over the course of his lengthy career, Updike established himself as one of the most prolific and acclaimed writers of his era, with a new book appearing almost every year from the 1958 publication of his first book of poetry The Carpentered Hen, and Other Tame Creatures through the release of his final novel The Widows of Eastwick in 2008. During his five-decade career, Updike won the National Book Award for The Centaur (1963), the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), and the PEN/ Faulkner award for The Early Stories, 1953–1975 (2003). Beyond these awards, Updike’s tetralogy of novels chronicling the life and times of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a wayward former high school basketball star turned Toyota salesman, has been recognized as one of the most significant works in post-1945 American fiction. In their attention to the texture of middle-class American life, the Rabbit novels offer a sustained examination of the political events that shaped the United States during the Cold War. As his career progressed, Updike moved his fiction outside of the American suburbs, as his later novels considered the United States’ position within the world. Yet when the German journalist Willi Winkler asked him about his political commitments, Updike shrugged his reply: “I vote. But it is true that I’m not much interested in politics.” 2 He went on to explain that American writers haven’t had the same role in politics as European writers, adding, “I try to be useful to my society by telling the truth in fiction without trying to be a politician.” The interview captures Updike’s suspicion of explicitly political literature while at the same time suggesting the reason his writing is nevertheless valuable for thinking about politics: he explores the multi-faceted aspects of political experience without reducing them to any one narrowly defined ideology. He votes, but he doesn’t seek votes. It just may be that this reluctance to champion political causes through his fiction is its strength—or so it seems in an era of political polarization. Updike’s vast body of work instead addresses what Arthur Schlesinger famously called the “vital center” in US society. 3 To be sure, this is different than being apolitical. In 1966, Updike took up a fairly centrist position on the war in Vietnam: he was for the American intervention “if it does some good.” 4 This ambivalent comment was enough of a departure from the ranks of other American writers that the New York Times named him as the only writer “unequivocally for” the war, inaccurately placing him considerably right of center. Continuing this trend, the only reference to Updike in A New Literary History of America (2009) is in an article entitled “The Plight of Conservative Literature,” an entry that similarly misreads the complexity of Updike’s political sensibility. 5 Yet it is in views such as Updike’s position on Vietnam that we see the peculiarly American liberal individualism that he was unquestionably committed to, which—in all its foibles and even contradictions—pervades his writing. While his work was often deeply critical of American exceptionalism, it nevertheless kept faith with its democratic

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ideals. “When a Japanese says ‘Japanese,’ he is trapped on a little definite racial fact,” the narrator of “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time” observes, “whereas when we say ‘American’ it is not a fact, it is an act, of faith, a matter of lines on a map and words on paper, an outline it will take generations and centuries more to fill in.” 6 Such proclamations are characteristic of the ways in which Updike’s feelings toward his nation are intertwined with his religious belief. The sanctity of the individual was Updike’s authorial terrain, after all. In titling his memoirs Self-Consciousness (1989), Updike was not only naming that book’s subject but also gesturing to the pulse that animates his work— whether poetry, prose, fiction, and even his lone dramatic experiment, Buchanan Dying (1974). He rendered anew the particularities of human experience, however idiosyncratic or ordinary. Scholars of the novel form have long argued that the genre’s tendency to depict the inner lives of bourgeois characters helped spread, normalize, and justify the political assumptions of liberal individualism, and Updike seems like a perfect case in point. 7 Moreover, despite the fact that his work consistently criticized soulless consumerism and self-serving foreign policy, he believed that the United States played an important role in safeguarding forms of government that, at least in their ideals, cherish the rights and freedoms of individuals. The fairly consistent role of the Cold War in Updike’s fiction underlines his tendency to associate this ideal of individual freedom with both US culture and its military might. As D. Quentin Miller has shown, Updike’s writing provides a unique window into the way Americans feared “that our global rivals will begin to surpass us culturally and technologically, threatening the American ideal of freedom.” 8 The significance of national identity in Updike’s work is palpable in the way that his characters can at turns chauvinistically defend the United States government and satirize its stupidity. Precisely this combination of liberal ideals with nationalist faith, however, makes Updike’s work politically prescient for this particular moment—and the lack of politically focused criticism on his work surprising. 9 Updike’s fellow citizens are losing faith in the institutions built to protect and cultivate the ideals of liberal democracy. Addressing America’s role in cultivating precisely those ideals, the president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, Richard N. Haas, noted in 2018 that “liberalism, universality, and the preservation of order itself—are being challenged as never before” since the end of World War II. 10 Yet what is remarkable about these challenges is their surprising point of origin: But the weakening of the liberal world order is due, more than anything else, to the changed attitude of the US. Under President Donald Trump, the US decided against joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership and to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. It has threatened to leave the North American Free

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Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill Trade Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. It has unilaterally introduced steel and aluminum tariffs, relying on a justification (national security) that others could use, in the process placing the world at risk of a trade war. It has raised questions about its commitment to NATO and other alliance relationships. And it rarely speaks about democracy or human rights. “America First” and the liberal world order seem incompatible. 11

That last sentence would have been hard for Updike to imagine. For him, the US—and its writers—existed in order to create, safeguard, and cultivate the full flourishing of individual experience. “To transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery” is Updike’s oft-cited and celebrated aesthetic mandate. 12 Focusing on that middleness led his fiction to focus on precisely the cross-section of working and middle-class white America that voted Donald Trump into office, perhaps the most important event that has undermined the United States’ role in what Haas calls the “liberal world order.” Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy of novels follows the shifting beliefs and resentments of a character whose very middleness offers an instructive window into the changing ideals of US voters. While Rabbit’s patriotism never waned, his increasing distrust of that liberal world order played an important role in his slow migration from being a proud Roosevelt Democrat to becoming a supporter, an albeit shy one, of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The tendency of Updike’s fictional characters to identify with—and critique—US presidents inspires the first group of essays collected here. Part I: The Presidency opens with James Schiff’s essay on the consistent importance the presidency held for Updike, from his imagining of a Jewish American president in his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), to the ways in which Barack Obama’s impending presidency inflects his final poems, written and published five full decades later in Endpoint (2009). While Schiff nicely illuminates how the presidency looms over much of Updike’s fiction, Marshall Boswell’s following chapter pivots to Updike’s examination of Richard Nixon in particular. Turning to A Month of Sundays (1975) and Memories of the Ford Administration, two novels that are set against the backdrop of Watergate, Boswell explores how these two works use Nixon’s downfall as a useful symbol for imagining the marital failures that Updike’s adulterous husbands experience in these books. Complementing this argument, Judie Newman’s essay also focuses on Memories of the Ford Administration, a novel that centers both on Gerald Ford and James Buchanan. Yet Newman argues that the two presidents function symbolically for the novel’s deeper political preoccupation: a clash between two distinct conceptions of sexual politics. Setting the protagonists’ own relational failures against the palimpsest of the two different presidents’ administrations, Updike contrasts the

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nineteenth century’s Romantic view of a benign nature with the twentieth’s more chthonian forms of aggression and power in sexual relationships Part I concludes with two chapters that point toward how Updike’s work helps us better understand the political developments that have unfolded during the first years of the new century. Jo Gill’s chapter turns toward one of the most overlooked aspects of Updike’s work, his poetry, as a way of considering his evolving political outlook. The essay examines the political implications of Updike’s early light verse, but focuses on his final two collections, Americana (2001) and Endpoint, arguing that his political voice emerges most clearly in his late poetry. In particular, Gill explores the ways in which Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election becomes a crucial symbol of hope in Updike’s final poems. She sees Updike as embracing a politics of hope in the late poetry—a politics that seems even more poignant when combined with the ways in which Endpoint explicitly addresses Updike’s impending death from lung cancer. Complicating the politics of hope that Gill identifies, Ethan Fishman’s chapter looks at the ways in which Updike’s treatment of demagogues in his fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s helps illuminate some of the conditions that propelled Donald Trump to victory in the 2016 presidential election. By revisiting Updike’s treatment of demagoguery in Couples (1968), Rabbit Redux (1971), and the short story “The Hillies” (1969), Fishman contemplates how the conditions unveiled by the unrest of the late 1960s might help us better understand the circumstances that nearly fifty years later led to Trump’s ascendency. For Fishman, Updike’s fiction of the late 1960s operates as a sort of allegory that can help us better understand our current political climate, arguing that Updike’s suspicion of the radical politics of that era might still resonate in the age of Trump. Part II: The American Scene, centers on Updike’s chronicling of the social and political changes that transformed American culture in the decades following the Second World War. The section begins with Sylvie Mathé’s reconsideration of Rabbit Redux, the second installment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy. Rabbit Redux remains Updike’s most explicitly political novel, as Harry Angstrom struggles to come to terms with the political and social unrest of the late 1960s. An expanded and newly translated version of an essay that appeared in the Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines, her chapter offers an invigorating revision of Updike’s ambivalent response to the radical politics of the era. Yoav Fromer contemplates Updike’s conflicted attitude toward communitarianism, an ambivalence that he argues can be keenly felt in Updike’s long-standing fascination with the US Postal Service. Fromer’s chapter argues how Updike’s depiction of the US Postal Service in his novels and nonfiction reveals the central contradiction within his political thinking—how his belief in collective responsibility and civic duty complicated his impulse to preserve personal liberty. Turning to Updike’s only play,

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Buchanan Dying, and his novel Memories of the Ford Administration, a work that revisits the Buchanan presidency, Michial Farmer’s chapter illuminates how these two texts examine the implications of moderation as a political outlook. Farmer considers the ways in which Updike exposes the at times disastrous consequences of moderation while recognizing Updike’s attachment to such a perspective. In direct contradistinction to the ideal of moderation, Matthew Shipe’s chapter explains how Updike’s fiction imagines the increasing polarization established in the neoliberal policies ushered in under Ronald Reagan. Focusing on Roger’s Version (1986), Shipe suggests how the novel, the second entry in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, exposes the implications that neoliberal policies had on the American landscape and psyche as the Cold War came to its end. Then Biljana Dojčinović’s essay turns to Updike’s 1994 story collection The Afterlife and Other Stories. Dojčinović complicates our notions of Updike’s previous work and its relationship to the political aspects of human vulnerability and the ways that experiencing vulnerability can realign power relations. In particular, Dojčinović demonstrates how these stories mark a pivotal moment in Updike’s thinking on aging, sex, and feminism. Concluding the section, Aleksandra Vukotić reads the politics of Terrorist (2006) through the novel’s preoccupation with hygiene and its various religious, racial, and political registers. The novel exemplifies Updike’s capacity to be, as she cites, a “bad citizen” capable of imagining opposing political ideology through the idiosyncrasies of human experience. And yet, the unheralded strength of the critically panned novel lies in how it lays bare the cultural assumptions about purity justifying closed border policies. The concluding section, Part III: Updike Abroad, turns toward Updike’s global concerns and highlights the transnational bent of much of his fiction. From the Cold War intrigue of “The Bulgarian Poetess” (1964) to the politics of cultural tourism in The Widows of Eastwick, from the The Coup’s (1978) critique of American foreign policy and the threats to America’s postwar economy in Rabbit Is Rich, from the identity politics of Brazil (1994) to the religious ideologies of Terrorist, Updike’s fiction has transcended the decidedly domestic, suburban novels for which he is most famous. Accordingly, the essays collected under “Updike Abroad” demonstrate Updike’s consistent, but still underappreciated, acuity for representing the complexities of global politics and suggest, in turn, just how deeply informed his literature about America had been by international networks, forces, and events. Moreover, they show how key political themes across all of Updike’s work, from the fate of liberalism to the structural shifts in capitalism, are better understood through his fiction’s transnational contexts. For example, Louis Gordon elucidates Updike’s clairvoyant representations of religious conflicts with liberalism as a global geopolitical problem. Gordon argues that certain characters, like Henry Bech in “The Holy Land”

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(1979) and Jack Levy in Terrorist represent models for thinking about the uses of liberal institutions for a variety of political tensions across the Middle East. In the next essay, Kirk Curnutt turns toward Updike’s satirical treatment of American colonialism in The Coup. His essay recovers the attitudes toward the African continent, Islam, and Marxism that shaped readers’ reception of Updike’s 1978 novel, and suggests how the novel’s satire has been subsequently misread by critics who have failed to appreciate the political context that informed the book. The penultimate essay of the volume returns to the cultural politics of the Cold War and their return in contemporary politics. Takashi Nakatani argues that the crises of Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest exemplify a double-bind in the US Cold War cultural strategy: the Western bloc’s superiority is represented by a lifestyle dependent on highrate consumption of natural resources that is unsustainable for most of its members. Where Updike uses “the man from Toyota” in Rabbit at Rest to demonstrate this double-bind, after the Fukushima accident Japan is now witnessing its own “uncanny double” of the socio-cultural problems portrayed in Updike’s fiction. Nakatani places the apparently domestic—if not nationalistic—Rabbit novels in the full extent of the global issues they address. Our book concludes with an essay by Pradipta Sengupta that extends Curnutt’s focus on the developing world to Updike’s treatment of identity politics in Brazil. In it, Sengupta argues that Updike’s re-enactment of the myth of Tristan and Iseult revises the politics of identity through Tristan’s appropriation of hegemonic power structures in a specifically postcolonial context. The range of concerns these essays address should be proof enough of Updike’s value to political thought. Moreover, the diverse cadre of international scholarship behind the essays gathered together here speaks to that value as well. Yet the abstractions of political theory are not the primary strength of Updike’s writing. That most likely lies, as the following essays undoubtedly showcase, in how his near pointillistic rendering of human experience—imbued with all the contingencies of time and place—can help us review, and perhaps even renew, our politics. NOTES 1. Moreover, this volume participates in the increasingly international scholarship on Updike’s work as evinced in the recent volume edited by Laurence Mazzeno and Sue Norton, European Perspectives on John Updike (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018). 2. Willi Winkler, “A Conversation with John Updike/1985,” in James Plath, Conversations with John Updike (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 173. 3. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 4. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 1989), 113.

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5. Michael Kimmage, “The Plight of Conservative Literature,” in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 949. 6. John Updike, “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time,” in Collected Early Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff (New York: The Library of America, 2013), 774–75. 7. Perhaps best exemplified in the work of Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller. 8. D. Quentin Miller, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 37. 9. While scholars from Donald Greiner to Michael Szalay have touched on the political aspects of Updike’s work, the only full-length monograph on the subject is Miller’s book on the Cold War. 10. Richard Haas, “Liberal World Order, R.I.P.,” Council on Foreign Affairs, https://www. cfr.org/article/liberal-world-order-rip. 11. Haas, “Liberal World Order, R.I.P.” 12. John Updike, “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” in Assorted Prose (New York: Knopf, 1965), 147.

WORKS CITED Haas, Richard. “Liberal World Order, R.I.P.” Council on Foreign Affairs, published on March 21, 2018. https://www.cfr.org/article/liberal-world-order-rip. Kimmage, Michael. “The Plight of Conservative Literature.” A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, 948–53. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Mazzeno, Lawrence, and Sue Norton. European Perspectives on John Updike. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Plath, James. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Schlesinger, Arthur. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Updike, John. “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood.” Assorted Prose by John Updike, 121–48. New York: Knopf, 1965. ———. “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time.” Collected Early Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff, 771–75. New York: The Library of America, 2013. ———. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Part I

The Presidency

Chapter One

Updike and the American Presidency James Schiff

In contrast to such contemporaries as Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Margaret Atwood, John Updike is not generally viewed as a political novelist. Instead, he has long been treated as a domestic writer, more interested in quotidian experience and romantic entanglements. Yet politics are pervasive in his fiction, a fact critics like Quentin Miller and, more recently, Yoav Fromer understand. 1 American political events—the assassination of Jack Kennedy, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s resignation, the OPEC-induced oil shortage of 1979, post-9/11 terrorism—are treated in his writings, particularly his Rabbit novels, and American presidents, either historical or fictional, are alluded to in nearly every Updike novel, beginning in 1959 with President Lowenstein in The Poorhouse Fair. In some novels, like Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), it’s hard to read more than a couple of pages without hearing about an American president—in fact, Updike’s narrator, Alfred Clayton, a historian, alludes to all forty-one (at the time) American presidents. Politics and presidents also turn up in Updike’s essays, short stories, and drawings (during the late 1950s Updike drew a series of political cartoons for the Amesbury Daily News). For a period Updike even served his country as a kind of unofficial literary and cultural ambassador, traveling to the USSR, Eastern Europe, Venezuela, South Korea, and Africa for the State Department, Fulbright Board, PEN, and other entities. With all these factors in mind, this essay seeks to better understand how the American presidency figures in Updike’s writings. Why are presidents alluded to so frequently? How are they depicted? What role do they play in the lives of his characters? And finally, why is Updike’s political interest not so immediately apparent to critics and readers? One reason we do not recognize the full extent of Updike’s political interest is because he often employs comedy, which reduces the gravitas one 11

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associates with political events and thought. Consider, for example, his treatment in Rabbit at Rest (1990) of China’s Tiananmen Square protests during the spring of 1989. In a Ha Jin novel, these events would be life-altering and traumatic; in a Robert Stone novel, they would be weighty and fraught with danger. Yet as Harry Angstrom watches the news on television, “its wires com[ing] out of the wall behind him, just like oxygen,” we witness a comic series of associations linking Harry not only to the private ablutions of his sitting president, but to people and events in China and Russia: The nightly news has a lot of China on it—Gorbachev visiting, students protesting in Tiananmen Square, but not protesting Gorbachev, in fact they like him, all the world likes him, despite that funny mark on his head shaped like Japan. What the Chinese students seem to want is freedom, they want to be like Americans, but they look like Americans already, in blue jeans and Tshirts. Meanwhile in America itself the news is that not only President George Bush but Mrs. Bush the First Lady take showers with their dog Millie, and if that’s all the Chinese want we should be able to give it to them, or something close, though it makes Harry miss Reagan slightly, at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself. With this new one you know he knows something, but it seems a small something. Rabbit doesn’t want to have to picture the President and middle-aged wife taking showers naked with their dog. Reagan and Nancy had their dignity, their computer-blur, even when their bowel polyps and breasts were being snipped off in view of billions. 2

In drawing a relationship between Harry and world events, Updike personalizes the political and reveals its comic dimensions. Presidents and world leaders, despite their mythic proportions, are treated as human beings; although Reagan is bestowed with a possible spark of the divine, Updike directs attention to the flawed, troubled bodies of these leaders: the naked George H. W. Bushes showering with their dog, Ronald and Nancy Reagan having diseased bodies parts removed, Gorbachev’s birthmark. One can only imagine how Harry, with his interest in the bodies of presidents, would view America’s 45th president, Donald Trump, notorious for his sexual liaisons, his small hands, the “golden showers” allegation of the Steele dossier, and his infamous phrase about women, “Grab ’em by the pussy.” In the Rabbit novels presidents are given a body and humanized and, as such, they participate, at times comically, in Harry’s interior life. Although Harry, unlike his creator, never comes close to actually meeting a president, Updike employs America’s head of state as a figure Harry knows, someone he can think about, question, learn from, and identify with. A brief discussion of how the American presidency has evolved, particularly during the twentieth century, may help to explain how this kind of a relationship between a fictional character and president emerged. During

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Updike’s lifetime (1932–2009) the American presidency grew more powerful and visible, both nationally and globally, than it had been during the nineteenth century. Several American presidents from this period—Roosevelt (FDR), Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Obama—evolved into mythical figures, as familiar as the era’s major cultural icons, e.g., Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. This may not seem unusual: leaders of nations are often viewed in mythical terms. Think of Mandela, Putin, Churchill, Stalin, Thatcher. Yet I doubt this is what America’s Founding Fathers had in mind when they formed a new government which bestowed power not in a single individual but three co-equal bodies. The United States was established as a representative democracy, a contrast to the royal monarchy against which it rebelled. Over the last seventy-five years, however, and with the assistance of radio and television, followed by the Internet and Twitter, the American president has become a larger-than-life figure, almost imperial in nature, who not only draws obsessive interest but is increasingly able to communicate directly and immediately to his people. Since the televised 1960 Kennedy/ Nixon debates, which were also the first general election presidential debates in US history, 3 Americans have been more aware of the body and appearance of the president, and we have been exposed to intimate, difficult, even horrific moments in the president’s life: images of Jack Kennedy’s brain exploding on film, audiotapes of Richard Nixon lying and plotting in the oval office, official government documents detailing oral sex between Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This has only ratcheted up in the era of Trump, where a twenty-four-hour cable news cycle delivers continuous updates on the president’s dealings with porn stars and Playboy bunnies, shady associates and Russian oligarchs, along with his battery of unhinged tweets to millions. Sean McCann traces the seeds for this larger-than-life executive back to Whitman and his deep feelings for Lincoln: “For Whitman, as for many of his successors, the president was less politician than a quasimonarch, at once a divinely sanctioned commander and a mere temporary vehicle for the popular will, a figure of awesome power and humbling vulnerability.” 4 While Whitman’s vision of Lincoln contrasts sharply with our current sense of Trump, Lincoln’s presidency for some marks the beginning of a strong American executive (others may argue it began years earlier with Andrew Jackson). Although Andrew Johnson’s impeachment in 1868 weakened executive power for a few decades, strong-willed leaders like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson eventually emerged. As McCann writes, “American politics increasingly became a national drama focused on the personality of the president” who, after 1945, would often be invoked, in the words of Clinton Rossiter, as “the one-man distillation of the American people.” 5 As noted, it is intriguing to speculate how Updike would have written about Trump. 6 He surely would have had little patience for the crass celeb-

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rity persona, the blatant and heinous deception and lack of integrity, the political hucksterism, yet one wonders about Rabbit. To a large degree Harry Angstrom falls into the Trump demographic: an aging, white, patriotic male from the declining Rust Belt who holds only a high school diploma and feels America has left him behind. As Charles McElwee points out in an article titled, “Did John Updike Foresee the Trump Era?,” both Trump and Bernie Sanders carried Pennsylvania’s Berks County (fictionalized as Diamond County in the Rabbit novels) in their respective party’s 2016 primaries, and “If Updike’s novels taught us anything, it’s that the Trump coalition is the consequence of the budding frustrations found in the Rabbit Novels.” 7 Perhaps Trump would have split Updike and Rabbit, just as he has divided the country. Or perhaps Rabbit would have voted for Bernie. It is rare to see a fictional character elicit such speculative thinking. Updike was so adept at conveying Rabbit’s intimate thoughts on presidents from Eisenhower through George H. W. Bush that a reader feels encouraged, compelled even, to imagine what Rabbit would have thought of subsequent presidents, such as George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump. This is one of the great feats of the Rabbit novels: that Updike’s protagonist, decades after his fictional death in 1990, lives on, offering a perspective that continues to shed light on contemporary presidents and events. Composed and published at ten-year intervals, the Rabbit novels have always been unique in giving the illusion, particularly for contemporaneous readers, that Rabbit exists outside the text as a living, breathing character, aging at the same rate as Updike, his reader, and the United States. The fact that both the New York Times and Washington Post thought Rabbit’s death in Rabbit at Rest was of enough consequence that they addressed it not only in their book review sections but through obituaries on their editorial pages strengthens the argument that Rabbit lives in the actual exterior world. 8 Now, three decades after his death and a decade after Updike’s, Rabbit persists as a living entity and cultural barometer. In 2016 Scott Dill published a piece in Front Porch Republic which posed the question, “Would Rabbit Angstrom Vote for Trump?” A conference roundtable at the 2017 American Literature Association in Boston asked, “Did Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom anticipate or parallel the rise of Trump voters?” More recently, a 2018 public plenary session at the 5th Biennial John Updike Society Conference at the National Library of Serbia focused on the question, “Does Rabbit Angstrom’s Political Evolution Help to Explain Trump Supporters?” Much like Huck Finn, Rabbit has become an American archetype, a kind of fixed sensibility through which readers, decades later, can survey and seek to understand the contemporary American landscape. A perfect mix of the author’s articulate brilliance and the nation’s crass candor, Rabbit is more than simply a fictional character—he’s a lens through which one can focus on the current state of affairs: presidents, national events, and evolving trends.

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Trump, of course, would have tested Updike’s generally supportive attitude toward American presidents (as Updike stated in 1982, “It’s not easy to be a president, and I, in a way, feel sorry for any president” given the difficult decisions they must make). 9 Though Updike could be critical of presidents, he was, in his fiction, largely affirming and sympathetic, making him one of our more patriotic novelists. Some critics, such as Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, have mistaken his patriotism for conservatism. In their massive assessment, A New Literary History of America, they refer to him only once and briefly, in an essay by Michael Kimmage titled “The Plight of Conservative Literature.” 10 Updike, however, was never politically conservative; possessing liberal values, he remained throughout his life a Democrat, voting for Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, and other progressive candidates, sometimes going to considerable trouble, while abroad, to cast his ballot at an American embassy. Yet during the late 1960s Updike had become, as he explains in “On Not Being a Dove,” uncomfortable with and skeptical of the anti-war movement: “I distrusted orthodoxies, especially orthodoxies of dissent” and found “the pill of anti-war, anti-administration, ‘anti-imperialist’ protest [. . .] oddly bitter.” 11 With his instinctive support of his country and its presidents, along with his respect for authority, which he associated with his high school teachers, including his father, Updike was drawn to a pro-interventionist stance on the Vietnam War, a position that “pained and embarrassed” him while surprising his friends and colleagues: I—I whose stock in trade as an American author included an intuition into the mass consciousness and an identification with our national fortunes—thought it sad that our patriotic myth of invincible virtue was crashing, and shocking that so many Americans were gleeful at the crash. I felt obliged to defend Johnson [. . .] I felt compelled to identify with the American administrations. 12

While many were vehemently opposed to the president’s handling of the war, Updike rose to his defense, a position he explains through a theory proposed by his first wife, Mary: “My wife of those years offered an interesting idea: that Johnson was a former schoolteacher and I identified him with my father, whose inability to maintain classroom order had been a central trauma of my growing up, a childish cause for fear and pity.” 13 Updike offers additional personal reasons for his support of Johnson and the unpopular Vietnam War: The possibility exists that, along with my authority-worshipping Germanness and my delusional filial attachment to Lyndon Baines Johnson, my wife’s reflexive liberalism helped form my unfortunate undovish views—that I assumed these views out of a certain hostility to her, and was protesting against our marriage much as campus radicals were blowing up ROTC buildings, government research centers, and, on occasion, themselves. 14

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For Updike, politics is always personal: one’s relationship with the president has less to do with policy, more with personal affairs and personality. Updike and his characters instinctively form bonds with their presidents, and perhaps none is closer than Updike’s attachment to James Buchanan, America’s fifteenth president. Often cited in discussions of “who is America’s worst president?,” Buchanan, who spent much of his life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (a mere thirty miles from Updike’s childhood home in Shillington), became a long-term fixation for the author. Struggling to understand and capture in prose Pennsylvania’s only president and America’s only bachelor president, Updike composed two books about Buchanan: Buchanan Dying (1974) and the aforementioned Memories of the Ford Administration. The experience created a keen sense of intimacy between the two Pennsylvanians; as Updike once stated, “I did so much research I began to dream about him. One day I woke up and told my wife, ‘James Buchanan is my best friend.’” 15 * While American presidents serve various purposes in Updike’s fiction, on the most basic level they function as historical markers for organizing and discussing one’s personal past. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry measures his own life against presidential administrations: “Somewhere early in the Carter administration his interest [in sex with Janice], that had been pretty faithful, began to wobble and by now there is a real crisis of confidence.” 16 The decline of his father-in-law, Fred Springer, is marked in Harry’s mind by Fred’s deterioration over the span of two presidencies: “When Nixon left him nothing to say he had kind of burst. Actually, he had lasted a year into Ford, but the skin of his face was getting tighter.” 17 Presidential administrations are also associated with the attitudes and fashion of an era. In Memories of the Ford Administration we are told, “Pussies were triangular in the Ford era, before high-sided swim suits compelled women to shave their groins of all but a vertical strip of natural adornment.” 18 Elsewhere in that same novel the president is said to represent and preside over the moral behavior of an era: “[I]n those far-off Ford days it was assumed that any man and woman alone in a room with a lock on the door were duty-bound to fuck,” to the point we are told, “Gerald Ford, in his two years and five months of Presidency, presided over a multitude—dare we say millions?—of so-called one-night stands.” 19 As Clayton concludes, “The Ford era was a time of post-apocalyptic let-down, of terrifying permissiveness.” 20 The president is linked to an era, though it is not always the president who defines that era—sometimes it’s the reverse—and the president becomes a marker by which everyday Americans can organize and track their historical pasts. While the president is the leader of the Free World, the most powerful figure on the planet, he is also recognized in Updike’s novels as a flawed

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human being with whom citizen Harry Angstrom can have an imagined personal relationship. In Rabbit at Rest, for example, Harry, struggling with inactivity and retirement, goes to the doctor, who tells him, “A man needs an occupation. He needs something to do.” 21 Harry ponders that advice while listening on his car radio to a caller declare that President George H. W. Bush is “not doing anything,” a piece of information he then applies to himself: “Well, Rabbit thinks, doing nothing works for Bush, why not for him?” 22 For many American characters and writers, however, the president is not so accessible; rather, he is a distant figure, a privileged Other with whom commoners have little in common. Writers as different from one another as Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Hurston, Baldwin, Kerouac, Morrison, and Diaz have written from the margins, positioning themselves and their characters as outsiders on the American landscape. In contrast, Updike never felt marginalized by his country, nor was he inclined to protest politically. Instead, he generally embraced and celebrated his culture and nation, finding a comfortable place near the center from which to observe and write. Further, as Updike explains, “Unlike most writers, I believe that there is a connection between political events and the life of a common working man.” 23 Within the democratic optimism of Updike’s fiction, the working man can relate to and imaginatively access the president, which makes him feel included in the national drama. On occasion this affinity can become so profound that the fictional character and real-life president mirror one another, experiencing similar problems and conflicts, as evident in these three examples from Updike’s oeuvre: Piet Hanema and Jack Kennedy in Couples (1968), Alfred Clayton and James Buchanan in Memories of the Ford Administration, and a deceased Harry Angstrom and Bill Clinton in “Rabbit Remembered” (2000). Though American presidents are alluded to in Updike’s first few novels, it is not until 1968 and Couples that they assume a larger role. In Couples President Kennedy presides over Camelot as well as Tarbox, the town in which Updike’s adulterous couples reside. The young and handsome president, who carries on sexual affairs while married with young children, is someone the residents of Tarbox can relate to, as indicated by a joke about Kennedy that one of them hears: One night about three a.m. Jackie hears Jack coming into the White House and she meets him on the stairs. His collar is all rumpled and there’s lipstick on his chin and she asks him, Where the hell have you been? and he tells her, I’ve been having a conference with Madame Nhu, and she says, Oh, and doesn’t think any more about it until the next week the same thing happens and this time he says he was sitting up late arguing ideology with Nina Khruschchev. 24

The couples view their situation as analogous to that of the president: like Kennedy, they are well-educated, liberal New Englanders who, experiencing unrest and conflict in the world, turn for pleasure and intimacy to adultery.

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Piet Hanema, in particular, has affinities with Kennedy, having taken, in Don Juan fashion, a variety of lovers while married to a beautiful, angelic wife. As Quentin Miller writes, “Kennedy is at the center of this world,” and his death, which haunts the final hundred and fifty pages of the novel, “becomes a pivotal point in the couples’ relationships with each other.” 25 Kennedy is assassinated on the day of the Thornes’ black-tie dinner party, which the couples agree to go forward with, demonstrating how personal concerns transcend decorum and a national tragedy. Dancing in the Thornes’ house with his wife, Angela, Piet notes, “I feel like we’re insulting Kennedy,” to which she replies, “Not at all. Yesterday, he was just our President way down in Washington, and now he belongs to all of us. He’s right here. Don’t you feel him?” 26 At one point during the party Piet, watching his friends dance, imagines “the couples were gliding on the polished top of Kennedy’s casket.” 27 The president’s death has unsettled them all, bringing to the surface their fears and sense of dislocation. Yet television coverage of and talk about the assassination figure as little more than background music during the party, which extends for twenty-five pages. What mostly transpires is small, drunken chatter amidst a sea of female breasts glowing in candlelight: “The fashion that fall was for deep décolletage; Piet, arriving at nine, was overwhelmed by bared breasts.” 28 While the president’s death has clearly shaken their psyches, what remains far more important to the couples are their own romantic entanglements, their flirtations and yearnings. For Updike the president’s death colors the mood of the party but does not prevent it from happening; again, the personal prevails over the national. Late in the novel, Foxy Whitman, Piet’s lover, sends him a letter from St. Thomas which outlines the views of her innkeepers, Larry and Linda; in the letter affinities between Kennedy and their “magic circle” of couples are suggested, along with a critique of their behavior: They think LBJ a boor but feel better under him than Kennedy because K. was too much like the rest of us semi-educated lovables of the post-Cold War and might have blown the whole game through some mistaken sense of flair. Like Lincoln, he lived to become a martyr, a memory. A martyr to what? To Marina Oswald’s sexual rejection of her husband. Forgive me, I am using my letter to you to argue with Larry in. But it made me sad, that he thought that somebody like us (if K. was) wasn’t fit to rule us, which is to say, we aren’t fit to rule ourselves, so bring on emperors, demigods, giant robots, what have you. 29

Whether or not their sexual instincts and flair make them unfit and irresponsible is left to the reader. What is clear is that Kennedy is important to the couples of Tarbox not for his economic views or his stance on civil rights, but for his presence as a larger-than-life reflection of themselves: through the president they can measure their behavior and actions as well as project their own shortcomings and anxieties.

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After Couples, politics, culture, newspaper headlines, and the presidency assume a larger role in Updike’s writing, figuring substantively in works like Rabbit Redux (1971), Buchanan Dying, The Coup (1978), Rabbit Is Rich, The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Rabbit at Rest, and Memories of the Ford Administration. Set during the summer of 1969, Rabbit Redux reflects the turmoil affecting the country during what Updike termed “the most dissentious American decade since the Civil War.” 30 Social unrest and protest surrounding the Vietnam War, second-wave feminism, and civil rights were pervasive, and these national events, via television and two strangers Harry befriends (a teenage runaway and black militant), literally enter his living room. At a time in which his life has become stagnant and in need of renewal, Harry identifies with another American besieged by the times, President Lyndon Johnson, who strives to keep his country in order, much as Rabbit struggles to maintain order within his own dysfunctional household. A few years later, in 1974, Updike published Buchanan Dying, a closet drama surveying the fifteenth president’s life, followed in 1975 by A Month of Sundays, which depicts, “at some point in the time of Richard Nixon’s unravelling,” a parallel scandal: the public embarrassment and exile of Updike’s adulterous minister-gone-astray, Rev. Thomas Marshfield. 31 Updike’s final two Rabbit novels, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, published in 1981 and 1990, also address politics and presidents, though again Updike, through Harry, directs attention to the private bodily matters affecting the president in power; for example, of America’s thirty-ninth president Harry thinks, “Carter of course has hemorrhoids, that grim over-motivated type who wants to do everything on schedule ready or not, pushing, pushing.” 32 Yet perhaps the deepest engagement in Updike’s oeuvre with any American president is found in Memories of the Ford Administration, in which the relationship between character and president becomes more personal and obsessive. Historian Alfred Clayton, who takes his name from the Republican presidential hopeful of 1936, Alfred Landon, is asked by the Northern New England Association of American Historians to jot down his “memories and impressions” of the Ford years (1974–77). Clayton, however, resists giving the association’s journal, Retrospect, what it expects—namely, discussion of the era’s major national events: the Nixon pardon, assassination attempts on Ford, and the return of the Mayaguez. Instead Clayton, writing in roughly 1990, offers a more personal reflection, discussing the two major events of his own life during the time when Ford was president: his marital crisis, and his struggle to write a book on President James Buchanan. Clayton focuses not on what history typically privileges, i.e., major public events and personages, but rather on the personal events, private crises, and sensations that account for his own life during that era. Once again, Updike demonstrates how the personal eclipses the political and public.

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During the Ford administration, Clayton was caught between wife and mistress, much as Buchanan, in the days leading up to the Civil War, was caught between North and South. Separated from his wife, Norma, whom he refers to as the Queen of Disorder, Clayton desired a divorce which would free him to marry his mistress, Genevieve Mueller, the Perfect Wife, yet simultaneously he desired to return to his wife and family. Buchanan, as viewed through Clayton’s eyes, is in a similar position. In his personal life Buchanan, a young, politically inclined attorney, was engaged to Ann Coleman, yet was unable to fully minister to the depths of her feelings, leading to their separation and her ostensible suicide. In his political life Buchanan was wedded to the North through his Pennsylvania roots, yet possessed a mistress, the South, which threatened to destroy that marriage. 33 Clayton even employs romantic terms to explain Buchanan’s political predicament, “He was pleading with the South like a man who, in love with his raven-haired mistress, yet still has a wife and children—those Pennsylvania voters in their pious, rural, tariff-hating innocence—to consider.” 34 Both historian and president are stuck in limbo, unable to commit fully to either of two options. Clayton’s academic writing life parallels his personal affairs in that he was also unable to commit fully to his Buchanan manuscript, which had become a hodgepodge of narrative, facts, and gaps. In telling Buchanan’s story, Clayton was unable to separate his own domestic crisis from his writing, leading him to project his emotions and anxieties onto his historical characters. His pain, loneliness, and fear poured into Ann Coleman, Buchanan’s fiancée, who died suddenly of a laudanum overdose. His indecisiveness colors his depiction of Buchanan, such that it becomes unclear to the reader whether his portrayal of a president who hedges, waits, and stalls has more to do with the historical record or with Clayton’s own personal traits. One of the many questions the novel poses is whether the historian can view the president objectively rather than through his own personal experience. Memories of the Ford Administration problematizes our understanding of history and biography: we see “how hard it is to say what actually did happen,” and presidents emerge as flawed figures who struggle with circumstances and try simply to “do their confused best.” 35 The novel also reveals how the basic existential dilemma for all collective social units—nations, tribes, marriages, households—is whether to stay together or break apart, and in wrestling with that dilemma Clayton employs Buchanan to justify, measure, interpret, and illuminate his own life. Male friendship does not loom large in Updike’s writing, but the relationship between Clayton and Buchanan, albeit textual and imagined, runs intimate and deep. While there are many Updike characters who contemplate and identify with American presidents, the most clever and singular relationship the author posits between a character and president occurs in his novella “Rabbit Remembered” (2000). Here, the connection is between Harry Angstrom and

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Bill Clinton, yet there’s one problem: Harry has been dead for a decade, having suffered a massive heart attack during a basketball game three years before Clinton was elected in 1992. In this novella Clinton serves as a standin for Harry, making us aware of the presence/absence of Updike’s protagonist during a 1999 Thanksgiving family dinner. The dinner reprises a recurring scene from the Rabbit novels in which Harry and his friends, over dinner or drinks, debate political and cultural issues. 36 Yet at this party it is not Harry who is thinking about the president; instead, it is the reader who is thinking about Harry, largely because of comments made by Harry’s two offspring, Nelson Angstrom and Annabelle Byer. Their remarks come during an emotionally charged family debate about Bill and Hillary Clinton, America’s first family at the time. With Harry now gone, the dinner is hosted by his widow, Janice, who has married his old nemesis, Ronnie Harrison, and there is clearly tension between the Harrisons and Angstroms, mostly because of Harry. Significantly, Ronnie’s former wife, Thelma, had a lengthy sexual affair with Harry in the years before her death, and “[t]he fact of the affair has long since leaked out and poisoned any get-together [for Nelson] with his stepbrothers [. . .] they see him as heir to his father’s guilt, to the pollution of their otherwise perfect mother.” 37 In addition, Annabelle, Harry’s illegitimate daughter from an affair with Ruth Leonard during Rabbit Run, is a further reminder to the Harrison children of Harry’s reckless sexual exploits and adulterous behavior. For the Harrisons, Nelson and Annabelle are living flesh reminders of Rabbit, and when the conversation turns to Hillary Clinton, a possible candidate for the US Senate in 2000, things turn sour. As Democrats, Nelson and Annabelle are defenders of the Clintons, whom the others refer to as the “king and queen of sleaze.” 38 While the dinner conversation is explicitly political, personal resentment and anger, due specifically to past relations between Harry and Thelma, fuel the debate. Harry becomes increasingly present, as if a kind of ghost that the others, along with the reader, conjure. Although mostly quiet, Janice begins “thinking of how much like Harry Nelson was, defending Presidents. [. . .] Why do they do it, care so about those distant men? They identify. They think the country is as fragile as they are.” 39 Annabelle, too, as Harry’s daughter, seems to be both representing and thinking about her father as she defends Bill Clinton, who in spite of his Rhodes scholarship has much in common, or at least did in 1999, with Harry: their larger-than-life size and appetite; the roving, sexually attuned eye, focused on women and their bodies; the unhealthy diet and attraction to junk food; the occasional recklessness and risk taking. Further, both Harry and Clinton are of humble roots and demonstrated a deep love of country, an instinctive patriotism, and a special zest for living. Thus, the debate about Clinton is simultaneously about Harry, whose offspring, in arguing for the president, are also expressing, albeit subconsciously, their affection for their father:

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It is an ingenious move on Updike’s part to have the spirit of Harry quietly hover over the dinner conversation. It also marks a point in which the reader, at least one familiar with Updike’s most famous protagonist, plays a more proactive role in the text, imagining a correspondence between that deceased protagonist and the president. Though some may view Updike’s engagement with American presidents as a superficial gesture, a kind of shorthand to establish historical verisimilitude, the reality is that presidents from Buchanan to Clinton serve a meaningful role in the imaginative lives of his characters. Piet Hanema, Alfred Clayton, and Harry Angstrom all experience intimate relationships with their presidents. Sometimes they benchmark their actions and behavior against that of a Kennedy or Clinton; at other times they project their insecurities and shortcomings on to Buchanan or Johnson. To some degree the commanderin-chief serves as a parent, a slightly greater, more knowledgeable being whom the character can watch and learn from. In Memories of the Ford Administration Clayton suggests to one of his students that someone should write about “effeminacy in the Presidency—the President as national mother. Like LBJ—he loved us all in sorrow, protest though we did. The most motherly, of course, was the one who sent the most American boys to their deaths—Lincoln.” 41 Given that presidents can be nurturing and wise in Updike’s writing—he has a more patriotic, forgiving attitude toward them than such peers as Robert Coover and Norman Mailer—it is not surprising he associated presidents with motherhood. How ironic and disappointing that the United States has yet to elect a mother, much less a woman, to serve as president. Just as one wishes Updike were still around to write about Trump, we would also welcome his impressions of our first female president, whenever she arrives. Or his impressions of Obama, who was sworn into office while Updike was dying. Two months before the 2008 election, Updike wrote in a letter, “Can it be that Obama is just too good for us all? I love the guy.” 42 While those sentences offer a hint, the rest will have to come from our imaginations, just as Updike employed the imaginative resources of his characters to show how they are linked to their presidents. Writing at a point in history in which much of the civilized world has become as interested in the common man and woman as in kings and queens, Updike reveals how we commoners still need to maintain a connection to our leaders, an imagined relationship that provides comfort, stability, and a sense of belonging.

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NOTES 1. Focusing on the Cold War, Quentin Miller, writing in 2001, traces Updike’s emergence during the 1960s as a more publicly engaged writer, and explores how Updike’s fiction reflects America’s evolution from “a wide-eyed, optimistic, self-assured, relatively unified nation in the 1950s into a jaded, cynical, self-doubting, fragmented, but mature nation in the 1990s” (John Updike and the Cold War, 3). In three relatively recent essays, Yoav Fromer uses political science, intellectual history, literary studies, and Updike’s personal correspondence to reveal the ways in which the author was a writer of political ideas, and how his fiction deepens our understanding of the decline of New Deal liberalism. 2. John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990, 1996), 267, 268. 3. Presidential debates between primary candidates began slightly earlier, in 1948, with the Republican presidential primary between Thomas E. Dewey and Harold Stassen. US senatorial debates can be traced back much earlier, to the series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in Illinois in 1858. 4. Sean McCann, A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), xiii. 5. Ibid., 7. 6. This essay, composed largely during the late spring and summer of 2018, was submitted six months prior to the release of the Mueller report. 7. Charles F. McElwee, III, “Did John Updike Foresee the Trump Era?” American Conservative, December 9, 2016. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-john-updikeforesee-the-trump-era/. 8. James Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998), 28. For the two op-ed pieces, see: Brent Staples, “Why So Hard on Rabbit?” New York Times, November 5, 1990, A20; and George F. Will, “Updike, America, Mortality,” Washington Post, October 28, 1990, C7. 9. “Updike at Moravian College (1982),” in John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews, ed. James Plath (Bethlehem: Lehigh UP, 2016), 56. 10. While the sole placement of Updike in a chapter on “Conservative Literature” demonstrates poor judgment on the part of the editors, Kimmage does at least acknowledge that the Rabbit novels do not fit into such a category: “Updike was not writing as a conservative. He was not interested in creating a conservative body of fiction,” A New Literary History of America, Marcus and Sollors, 949. 11. John Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” in Self-Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 1989), 142, 124. 12. Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” 117, 124–25. 13. Ibid., 127. 14. Ibid., 134. 15. John Updike, “Why Rabbit Had to Go,” New York Times Book Review, August 5, 1990, 24. 16. John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1981, 1996), 43. 17. Updike, Rabbit Is Rich, 2. 18. John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (New York: Knopf, 1992), 174. 19. Ibid., 217. 20. Ibid., 248. 21. Updike, Rabbit at Rest, 433. 22. Ibid., 433. 23. Willi Winkler, “A Conversation with John Updike (1985),” in Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994), 174. 24. John Updike, Couples (New York: Knopf, 1968), 96–97. 25. D. Quentin Miller, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001), 31. 26. Updike, Couples, 306. 27. Ibid., 310. 28. Ibid., 295.

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29. Ibid., 449. 30. John Updike, “A ‘Special Message’ to purchasers of the Franklin Library limited edition, in 1981, of Rabbit Redux,” in Hugging the Shore (New York: Knopf, 1983), 858. 31. John Updike, A Month of Sundays (New York: Knopf, 1975), 3. 32. Updike, Rabbit Is Rich, 257. 33. Schiff, John Updike Revisited, 138. 34. Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration, 233. 35. Ibid., 254, 366. 36. I discuss the relationship between Harry Angstrom and Bill Clinton in an earlier essay, “Updike’s ‘Rabbit Remembered’: The Presence/Absence of Harry through Intertexts,” The John Updike Review 4.2 (Spring 2016): 62–63. 37. John Updike, “Rabbit Remembered,” in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel (New York: Knopf, 2000), 286. 38. Ibid., 294. 39. Ibid., 298. 40. Ibid., 295–96. 41. Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration, 86. 42. John Updike, Letter to David Remnick, September 6, 2008. Correspondence (5388), John Updike Papers, 1940–2009 (MS Am1793), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

WORKS CITED “Did Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Anticipate or Parallel the Rise of Trump Voters?” Roundtable Discussion, American Literature Association, Boston, May 25, 2017. https://blogs.iwu.edu/ johnupdikesociety/2017/03/05/updike-society-program-set-for-ala/. Dill, Scott. “Would Rabbit Angstrom Vote for Trump?” Front Porch Republic, July 14, 2016. https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2016/07/rabbit-angstrom-vote-trump/. Fromer, Yoav. “‘The Inside-Outsider’: John Updike as a New York Intellectual—from Shillington, Pennsylvania.” The John Updike Review 4.2 (Spring 2016): 29–55. ———. “The Liberal Origins of John Updike’s Literary Imagination.” Modern Intellectual History 14.1 (April 2017): 187–216. ———. “A New Deal, a New Updike: The Decline of New Deal Liberalism in John Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair.” Journal of American Studies 51.2 (Spring 2017): 385–410. Kimmage, Michael. “The Plight of Conservative Literature.” A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009, 948–53. Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors, eds. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. McCann, Sean. A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. McElwee, Charles F., III. “Did John Updike Foresee the Trump Era?” American Conservative. December 19, 2016. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-john-updikeforesee-the-trump-era/. Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001. Plath, James, ed. John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews. Bethlehem: Lehigh UP, 2016. Schiff, James. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. ———. “Updike’s ‘Rabbit Remembered’: The Presence/Absence of Harry through Intertexts.” The John Updike Review 4.2 (Spring 2016): 57–69. Staples, Brent. “Why So Hard on Rabbit?” New York Times, November 5, 1990, A20. Updike, John. Buchanan Dying. New York: Knopf, 1974. ———. Couples. New York: Knopf, 1968. ———. Letter to David Remnick. September 6, 2008. Correspondence (5388), John Updike Papers, 1940–2009 (MS Am1793), Houghton Library, Harvard University. ———. Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Knopf, 1992. ———. A Month of Sundays. New York: Knopf, 1975. ———. “On Not Being a Dove.” Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf, 1989, 112–63.

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———. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990, 1996. ———. Rabbit Is Rich. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1981, 1996. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf, 1970. ———. “Rabbit Remembered.” Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel. New York: Knopf, 2000, 177–359. ———. “A ‘Special Message’ to purchasers of the Franklin Library limited edition, in 1981, of Rabbit Redux.” Hugging the Shore. New York: Knopf, 1983, 858–59. ———. “Why Rabbit Had to Go.” New York Times Book Review, August 5, 1990: 1, 24–25. “Updike & Politics: Does Rabbit Angstrom’s Political Evolution Help to Explain Trump Supporters?” Public Plenary Session, 5th Biennial John Updike Society Conference. University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology, Serbia, June 1–5, 2018. https://blogs.iwu.edu/ johnupdikesociety/files/2018/05/JUS5-PROGRAM.pdf. Will, George F. “Updike, America, Mortality.” Washington Post, October 28, 1990, C7. Winkler, Willi. “A Conversation with John Updike (1985).” In Conversations with John Updike, edited by James Plath. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994, 172–75.

Chapter Two

“We’re None of Us Perfect” Watergate and Adultery in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays and Memories of the Ford Administration Marshall Boswell

In a chronological ordering of John Updike’s massive oeuvre, Buchanan Dying (1974), his obscure closet drama about the fifteenth president of the United States, sits snugly beside A Month of Sundays (1975), the first of Updike’s three novels to reimagine Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1852). Eighteen volumes down the shelf sits Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the clever cover of which merges Buchanan’s face with that of Ford, thus invoking the novel’s two-part structure, one narrative detailing the narrator’s crumbling marriage in the mid-1970s and the other consisting of fragments from the narrator’s unfinished biography of Buchanan. When read side by side, the three texts prove to be of a piece. At first glance, Buchanan Dying, a grim, historical enterprise grounded in mounds of dogged research, would seem to be the exact obverse of the playful, freewheeling Sundays, such that the two books appear to represent a firmly irreconcilable dichotomy. But Memories of the Ford Administration, in its jarring conjoining of the two modes, reveals that in fact the earlier pair of texts represents, in Updike’s insistently dialectical imagination, simply two sides of a single coin. In other words, Memories of the Ford Administration blends Buchanan Dying and A Month of Sundays into one book. Two real-world events loom behind this trio of texts: the fraying of the bourgeois social order in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Updike’s separation and divorce from his first wife, Mary. More specifically, both A Month of Sundays and Memories of the Ford Administration fictionalize the latter event against the backdrop of Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation from office 27

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resulting from the Watergate scandal. Stanley Kutler, in The Wars of Watergate, argues that Watergate had its roots in “the tumultuous events of the 1960s”: “The struggles in that decade of civil rights and over the control of the cities, and above all over the war in Vietnam, brought dramatic divisions and violence to American society and resulted in the destabilization of both civil and social institutions.” 1 Seen in this light, Watergate marked the end of the 1960s, much as John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 marked the decade’s true beginning. Updike, in his numerous personal accounts of his troubled reaction to the era and his struggle to address his ambivalence in his fiction, echoes much of Kutler’s language. Beginning with Rabbit, Run (1960) and Couples (1968) and culminating in Rabbit Redux (1971), Updike routinely connected the plight of his various characters to the real-world events that were causing him such anguish, creating what he has characterized elsewhere as a “running report” on the state of his heroes and the nation writ large. 2 Similarly, the civic unrest of the Nixon era and Watergate in particular scaffold Updike’s repeated attempts to make fictional use of not only James Buchanan’s failed presidency but also his own 1974 separation and divorce as well. In these works, as in the Rabbit novels, “the macroworld of the nation,” in Edward Vogel’s helpful formulation, “plays itself out within the microworld of one family.” 3 Or, to borrow Adam Begley’s favorable assessment of Rabbit Redux’s fictional repurposing of current events, A Month of Sundays and Memories of the Ford Administration blend “national trauma and domestic disarray so smoothly that they merge; the political and the personal are indistinguishable on every level.” 4 Similarly, Memories reverses the dynamic by depicting President Buchanan’s world-historical political decisions, which precipitated the nation’s slide into the Civil War, as growing directly out of the minute particulars of his domestic situation. The main difference between these two novels and their Rabbit counterparts is one of tone. Both Sundays and Memories are conspicuously playful, “wickedly” so, as William Pritchard would have it. 5 The tragedy of Watergate, and the tragedy of adultery and separation more intimately, represent in these books less an irrevocable destruction of established norms than a grimly comic reminder that, no matter how far the nation or a husband might fall, “the sky remained unimpressed,” and “we as a nation . . . [and] a circle of aging adults were obliged to plod on.” 6 As Updike reveals in his Afterword to Buchanan Dying, the play was originally conceived as a novel that would round out his “youthful vision of a tetralogy, of which the first novel would be set in the future, the second in the present, the third in the remembered past, and the fourth in the historical past.” 7 Although he knocked out the first three books—The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit, Run, and The Centaur (1963)—with relative ease, the fourth, his Buchanan novel, proved difficult going. The work, which he began in late 1969–1970, was originally designed to compare the pre–Civil War years of

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Buchanan’s disastrous presidency with era of social protest and revolt that backgrounded the novel’s composition. In his Foreword to a 2000 reprint of the play, Updike explains, “The questions raised in the crisis years 1965–1973 find echoes in the pre–Civil War crisis, when a peaceable, compromising, legalistic President presided over a widening split no compromise or legalisms could bridge.” 8 Unfortunately, Updike discovered that he was “too earthbound a realist or too tame a visionary for the vigorous fakery of the historical novel,” and abandoned the work in favor of a much more direct confrontation with the 1960s berserk, Rabbit Redux. 9 As the “crisis years” culminated in the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s ignominious resignation from the presidency, Updike’s personal life entered its own period of domestic crisis as a result of his affair with Martha Bernhard, which began around the time of the break-in at the Watergate hotel and which culminated in his departure from his family home in late summer of 1974, the time of Nixon’s resignation. A Month of Sundays, drafted between November 1973 and February 1974, predicts his departure, while Memories of the Ford Administration fictionalizes the period immediately afterward. 10 Perhaps because A Month of Sundays would later become the first part of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, with Roger’s Version (1986) and S. (1988) rounding out the series, not a great deal of attention has been paid to its intricate similarities to Memories of the Ford Administration. William Pritchard is the exception. Of Alf Clayton, the historian narrator of Memories of the Ford Administration, Pritchard notes that “in the gritty excess of Alf’s wordplay, his antic sense of humor and generally aggressive address to the world . . . , we are reminded of earlier Updike mischief makers like Tom Marshfield in A Month of Sundays.” 11 Elsewhere he notes that Memories is “wholly continuous with the satirical surface of A Month of Sundays.” 12 But the affinities between the two novels extend far beyond a shared love of wordplay and broad satire. In both works, the narrators produce their texts in excessive and exuberant response to an exterior prompt: Marshfield, a defrocked minister, has been ordered to compile a daily reflection journal as part of his month-long banishment to a desert retreat following the revelation of his numerous affairs, while Clayton, a history professor, produces his ungainly manuscript in response to a request from the Northern New England Association of American Historians to provide them with his memories of the Gerald Ford administration. As such, each narrative constitutes what Steven Kellman would call a self-begetting novel, that is “a narrative which is in effect the record of its own genesis.” 13 To add to the metafictional overload, both novels also employ footnotes: in Marshfield’s case, the notes speculate on the Freudian possibilities of typos left intact in the manuscript; in Alf’s, they spin out additional digressions in a narrative already overloaded by digression. Memories distinguishes itself from A Month of Sundays

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by the presence of the sections fictionalizing the life of James Buchanan, which episodes alternate with the scenes from Alf’s domestic crisis in the mid-1970s. Even so, were one to separate the two intertwined narratives, as one might untwist a double helix into its two distinct strands, Alf’s domestic narrative, doled out in short, bite-sized sections, would reveal itself as even more similar to Tom Marshfield’s concise narrative. According to Vogel, out of Memories’s total of 369 pages, “183 relate to Buchanan and 186 to the Ford era, ten installments apiece comprising the bulk of the work.” 14 Similarly, A Month of Sundays amounts to 228 pages in the original Knopf edition and is also divided up into concise journal entries, thirty in all. Tom’s promiscuity also matches Alf’s, tryst by tryst, including a pivotal assignation in a hotel for each protagonist. Finally, in both texts, a woman responds to kissing her lover following a bout of cunnilingus by exclaiming “I’m kissing my own cunt!” 15 For our purposes, one of the most striking similarities between the two works can be found in their opening paragraphs, both of which reference Nixon and Watergate right out of the gate. “Forgive me my denomination and my town,” Marshfield requests at the beginning of A Month of Sundays; “I am a Christian minister, and an American. I write these pages at some point in the time of Richard Nixon’s unravelling” (3). Similarly, Alf opens his “reminiscences” thusly: “I remember I was sitting among my abandoned children watching television when Nixon resigned”; Alf goes on to reveal that he and his wife, who “was out on a date” at the time of the memory, “had been separated since June. This was, of course, August” (Memories 3). Given that Tom’s narrative details the collapse of his marriage, and that Alf’s text seeks to intertwine a failed nineteenth-century presidency to his own marital separation, it is clear that Updike, in these paired Nixon references, invites his readers to connect Nixon’s failure to complete his own presidency with the marital collapses of his two narrators. Speculating on the possible root causes for the flood of sexual overtures he receives in the wake of his first affair, Marshfield observes, “Perhaps it was that surreal first summer of the Watergate disclosures; everything sure was coming loose, tumbling” (Sundays 133). Similarly, Alf credits his own adultery to the era’s “terrifying permissiveness” (Memories 248). Because A Month of Sundays purports to be an account of recent events in Marshfield’s life, which have culminated in his banishment to the desert retreat, his opening pages would have been penned in the immediate wake of his own unravelling. The key components of that unravelling include his affair with his organist, Alicia (the initial crime); his firing of her to protect himself (the cover-up); and her broadcasting of their affair (and of the additional dalliances that follow) to his final lover’s spouse, resulting in his being removed from his post. Alf Clayton’s story, told with the benefit of some eighteen years of hindsight, follows almost the exact same trajectory, with

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the distinction that his primary lover, Genevieve, or the Perfect Wife, breaks off their affair because Alf lies about his final adulterous dalliance, namely with the mother of one of his students, an affair revealed to Genevieve by her husband. In both cases, the novel’s domestic drama follows a similar arc: crime, cover up, reckoning. In these and other examples, Updike invokes a career-long strategy of linking the “macro-” and “microworlds,” as Vogel has it. As suggested earlier, Rabbit Redux, set five years before Nixon’s resignation but steeped in the unrest that secured his first term, marks an advance in Updike’s use of current events for fictional purposes. By deliberately opening the novel on Wednesday, July 16, 1969, the day of the Apollo 11 launch, Updike creates space for himself to connect the unfamiliar world of the late 1960s that Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom encounters throughout the novel with the moonshot more generally. Watching the moon landing on television while thinking about his new life now that his wife, Janice, has moved in with her lover, Charlie Stavros, Rabbit, in a layered moment, turns to his mother and says, “I won’t know, Mom. . . . I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything yet.” 16 Updike also makes use of the 1969 scandal involving Senator Edward Kennedy’s auto accident over an unmarked bridge on Chappaquidick Island, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, whose drowning invokes not only the death of Rabbit’s daughter, Rebecca, in Rabbit, Run, but also that of Jill, who is burned to death in Rabbit’s house (Rabbit Redux 80–81). In his “Special Message” for Franklin Library’s Signed First Edition of Memories of the Ford Administration, Updike explains, “While we write, over months and years, at a book, what happens around us, downstairs and outside our windows, creeps in, as mice in winter creep into a house.” 17 Updike’s observation recalls Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), whose hero, Godfrey St. Peter, another fictional historian, cannot decouple his memories of writing his eight-volume account of Spanish Adventurers in North American from the inconvenient sewing room he used as his study, where sewing “patterns and manuscripts interpenetrated.” 18 Because both A Month of Sundays and Memories of the Ford Administration depict as their first-order narrative the creation of the book we are reading, Updike’s comments about his own experience as an author also apply, palimpsest like, to the authorial role assigned to his two narrators. This overlap is particularly relevant in the case of Tom Marshfield, whose writing schedule—focused composition from nine to noon, followed by a round of golf—exactly matches the schedule Updike kept during his period in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he composed A Month of Sundays. 19 As mentioned above, Begley reveals that Updike drafted the opening pages of A Month of Sundays in early November 1973. According to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days, the key events relating to Nixon’s unravelling that might have crept into both Updike’s and Marshfield’s writerly consciousness in-

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clude Leon Jaworski being named Special Prosecutor, following the firing of Archibald Cox by Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, the third in command at the Justice Department (November 1, 1973); and the disclosure by Judge John J. Sirica that there was a suspicious 18.5 minute gap in a tape recording of a crucial June 1972 meeting between the president, John Ehrlichman, and H. R. Haldeman (November 21, 1973). 20 One indication that such news did creep into Updike’s imagination, whether unconsciously or consciously, can be found in the name he assigned to Tom’s arch nemesis, his “effeminate” assistant minister, Ned Bork: “Perfidy,” Tom declares, “thy name might as well be Bork” (Sundays 13). 21 In his role as Marshfield’s antagonist—largely owing to his also having an ongoing affair with Alicia—Bork provides Updike with an opportunity to articulate Marshfield’s political views regarding the 1960s more generally and Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 elections more specifically. Marshfield depicts Bork as a boyish, naïve “Nixonophobe,” that is, a fairly typical McGovern liberal, with an “unctuous, melodious, prep-school drawl” and a “limpwristed theology” that combines “Jungian-Reichian soma-mysticism” with a “dime-store dish of his generation’s give-away Gemütlichkeit,” or friendliness (77, 13). In contrast, Marshfield, like his creator, is a fierce advocate for the theology of Karl Barth, which posits a Wholly Other God and rejects what Marshfield regards as the “preposterous view of the church as an adjunct of religious studies and social service,” a combination he labels as “a warmed-over McGovernism of smug lamenting” (59). Not surprisingly, Marshfield also openly deplores “most institutional and political trends since 1965” (40). Also like Updike at the time, Marshfield supports the Vietnam War effort, arguing that, “short of the Second Coming, is war always the worst possible alternative? The Bible says not. I say not”; and although Marshfield admits, “I myself couldn’t bear to vote for him,” he nevertheless declares, “thank God Nixon and his knuckleheads won,” because the alternative was to sell out the country and “do business with the new thugs of collectivism” (88). Marshfield’s positions on these issues will be familiar to readers of Updike’s much quoted, and often misappropriated, essay, “On Not Being a Dove.” Included as part of his memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989), the essay provides a spacious, thorough and thoughtful articulation of his political views on the 1960s in general and on Vietnam in particular. His position, as he lays it out, has both a religious and a social dimension. As a Christian, he argues that “the world is fallen, and in a fallen world animals, men, and nations make space for themselves through a willingness to fight.” 22 This view is strengthened by his being a Lutheran, and a Barthian in the bargain. “Faith alone,” he argues, “faith without any false support of works, justified the Lutheran believer,” and so Updike turned a skeptical eye on efforts by

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liberals to remake the fallen world into a paradise on earth. 23 But his position also grew out of his middle-class disdain for what he calls the snobbish dismissal of [Lyndon] Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their enviable position could be maintained without anything ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. 24

The world is fallen and war is sometimes necessary; the protests were the privileged “luxury a generous country can allow a small minority of its members.” 25 Although Updike, in both this essay and in his fiction, Rabbit Redux in particular, repeatedly couches his position ultimately as a defense of Lyndon Johnson, for whom he cast a vote, and insists, accurately, that he “was a liberal,” or, more specifically, a Roosevelt Democrat, his distaste for the peace movement by the time of the late 1960s would have disposed him much more toward Nixon, who ran as an opponent of the liberal establishment and a proponent of the white, middle-class “silent majority” than to Hubert Humphrey, about whom Updike remained relatively silent, or to George McGovern, about whom, as we have seen, he repeatedly expressed his disdain. Updike bestowed variations on this two-tiered argument onto not only Marshfield but also on the Rabbit of Rabbit Redux as well. Whereas Marshfield takes primary possession of the religious component and hence remains genially self-doubting throughout—at one key moment of high tension, he expresses gratitude to Bork for locating a hole in his argument and in effect “stopping” him from saying more—Rabbit gives vent to Updike’s anger and class resentment, as when he tells the runaway hippy Jill, “You rich kids playing at life make me sick, throwing rocks at poor dumb cops protecting your daddy’s loot. You’re just playing, baby” (Sundays 89; Rabbit Redux 170). Like Updike, Rabbit regards Johnson as the political martyr of the peace movement. “Poor old LBJ,” Rabbit fumes at his wife’s lover, Charlies Stavros (anti-Vietnam), “Jesus with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the Goddam Union if they’d just stop throwing bombs” (Rabbit Redux 45). Updike even proposed, as a way to end the Vietnam division, that “President Johnson declined to run in 1968. That as a last service he terminated his life of valued service to the country,” which action Johnson did in fact take, a decision Updike went on to describe as “a victory of imagination, for in one stroke he has added credibility to his search for peace, [and] heightened the dignity of his office for the remainder of his

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term.” 26 Nevertheless, Rabbit’s fiercely pro-Johnson position no more disposes him to Humphrey than did Updike’s more nuanced arguments at Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere. Janice Angstrom, Rabbit’s long-suffering wife, sums up Rabbit’s awkward political position when she observes, “He’s silent majority . . . but he keeps making noise” (Rabbit Redux 47). Because Marshfield’s narrative is purported to have been drafted “late in 1973” and covers the years immediately preceding his public humiliation, Updike contextualizes Marshfield’s adultery within the general milieu of Nixon’s dissembling attempts to cover up the Watergate break-in without ever addressing the resignation per se. Marshfield’s dishonesty merely takes its cue from “The White House itself,” which, though “intended by its builders to be the center of probity and the symbol of candor, seems instead a burrow wherefrom the scorpion of falsehood emerges only to sting, and sting again, again, and to hide as before” (Sundays, 163–64). Conversely, Memories of the Ford Administration, written eighteen years later, begins its narrative specifically in August 1974, with Nixon’s resignation. As such, it provides a window into Updike’s vision of Nixon’s, and Watergate’s, legacy both on the nation and in the evolving political and social education of his protagonists. Alf’s predicament in the opening pages of Memories of the Ford Administration bears clear affinities with that of his creator. In 1970, the Updikes sold their first Ipswich home on 26 East Street to Alexander and Martha Bernhard, a younger couple with three boys, whom the Updike children would later babysit. 27 Sometime around February 1973, Updike and Martha embarked on an affair that would culminate in Updike leaving his second Ipswich home, located at the end of Labor-in-Vain Road, in late June 1974, and moving into a “dingy apartment” that he called home until he left Ipswich for Boston, and a subsequent life with Martha, the following September. 28 “Separating,” the 1974 Maples story that most directly fictionalizes this traumatic event in Updike’s first marriage, is also set in June, which the narrator notes was routinely beautiful, so much so that “the weather had mocked the Maples’ internal misery with solid sunlight.” 29 Astonishingly, Updike dates the story’s completion, or more specifically “the date on which a completed draft was sent off in the mails, irrespective of later revision,” as July 13, 1974, a mere month after the events it memorializes. 30 No wonder that a witness to the real-world events upon which the story is based, namely Updike’s oldest son David, has observed that the story’s final scenes, featuring his fictional doppelgänger, Dickie Maple, are, “in essence, as I remember them.” 31 Despite its almost real-time composition, however, the story makes no mention of then current events. Quite to the contrary, so preoccupied are Richard and Joan Maple with their unfolding domestic disaster that “the earth performed its annual stunt of renewal unnoticed beyond their closed windows.” 32

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Alf Clayton, whose situation mirrors that of the Maples, opens that closed window to connect his own domestic disaster to the Nixonian national disaster unfolding on his television. Like Kutler, Alf, also an historian, regards Nixon’s resignation as the natural culmination of the tumultuous decade that preceded it. As he explains, “The late Sixties and early Seventies had produced so much in the way of bizarre headlines and queer television that [his children] were probably less struck than I was” by the spectacle of a president resigning from office, an event that Alf, unlike his children, does regard as “epochal” (Memories 4). Nevertheless, Alf, who has only just recently resigned his place as the so-called head of his household, cannot help but connect Nixon’s plight with his own. “If my children were like me,” he speculates, “they were relieved to have a national scandal distract us from the scandal that sat like a clammy great frog, smelling of the swamp of irrecoverable loss, in the bosom of our family: my defection, my absence from the daily routine after dominating all the years of their brief years with my presence” (4). In short, watching “Nixon on television” makes Alf deeply conscious “of shame, . . . my new planet, since my defection, leaving my house hollow and (that Anglo-Saxon word of desolate import) hlafordleas, lordless” (12). Later in the novel, in a flashback to the April day on which he is forced to reveal his affair to Norma and inaugurate separation proceedings, Alf links his plight to the news in his Sunday Manchester Union-Leader and New York Times, both of which are “deliciously loaded with Nixon’s ramifying deceptions: grand jury, Judge Sirica, Leon Jaworski, House Judiciary Committee,” and so on (58). While Alf’s conflations of his own predicament with that of Nixon are, in the main, playful, the connections are part of the novel’s much more serious exploration of the interplay between the personal and the political. James Schiff, in John Updike Revisited, and Edward Vogel, in “Updike, American History, and Historical Methodology,” provide invaluable insight into the numerous ways Alf’s attempt to “reanimate” Buchanan’s life articulates what Schiff identifies as Updike’s “series of complaints . . . with the nature of history,” which is guilty of “ignoring the myriad quotidian facts that otherwise dominate daily human life.” 33 As already suggested, Updike depicts the political process as equally mired in and often determined by the “quotidian facts” of our politician’s otherwise elusive daily lives. In much the same way that Alf sees his domestic crisis reflected in Nixon’s national scandal, so, too, does Buchanan’s political decisions find their grounding in his personal domestic crisis. The valence works both ways. The decisive event in Alf’s “reanimation” of Buchanan’s life is the love quarrel between the future president and his bride-to-be, Ann Coleman. Months after his engagement to Ann, Buchanan pays a visit to Mary Jenkins, wife of his associate William Jenkins, where he meets a mysterious and threatening woman named Grace Hubley. When she learns of the encounter,

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Ann angrily breaks off the engagement. Immediately afterward, she dies in ambiguous circumstances. Distraught, Buchanan asks her father if he could “follow her remains to the grave as a mourner,” but his message is refused at the door (Memories 161). Shrouded in mystery and scattered across disparate texts which Alf likens to “pieces of a puzzle that only roughly fit,” these events become in Alf’s history the emotional seed of Buchanan’s political career; Buchanan himself is quoted as saying, “I never intended to engage in politics, but meant to follow my [legal] profession strictly. But my prospects and plans were all changed by a most sad event which happened at Lancaster when I was a young man” (165). The rupture with Ann gives birth to Buchanan the politician. Throughout the novel, Alf depicts the domestic tragedy with Ann as the source of Buchanan’s later caution, of his “divide-the-difference views,” and of his attempt to hold the Union together at all costs, primarily by placating the slaveholding South and hence inflaming the conflict between the abolitionist North and the pro-slavery South, thereby ensuring the Civil War that did indeed break out immediately after Buchanan’s departure from office (226). Yet contrary to the overwhelming consensus that would place Buchanan as one of the most spectacularly failed presidents in American history, Alf tries to “love the unlovable” and understand what made Buchanan tick, to “feel [the] mind underneath the words” (101). “Buchanan’s mind,” Alf explains, “people complained he couldn’t make it up, and I liked that. There is a civilized heroism to indecision” (13). In the wake of the Ann debacle, Buchanan, in Alf’s depiction, became “scared of the world. . . . He thought it was out to get him, and it was.” As such, “he tried to keep peace” (101). In an imaginative recreation of a possible 1855 meeting between Buchanan, then the ambassador to London, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American consul in Liverpool, Alf has Buchanan declare, “I was early wounded in life’s lists . . . , and have been a peacemaker ever since” (274). Nevertheless, Alf concedes that Buchanan’s vacillating, peace-making indecisiveness had disastrous historical consequences. Of Grace Hubley, Alf speculates that she might be “viewed, under a loving but stern Providence, as the source of Buchanan’s impending misfortune, and of a neurosis that decades later disabled his Presidency and plunged our nation into its bloodiest war” (72). But the connections between the private and the political do not stop there, for in yet another acrobatic feat of parallelism, Updike links the Ann/ Grace/Buchanan affair and its impact on Buchanan’s political life with Alf’s own domestic situation during and immediately after Nixon’s resignation. As Schiff argues, “as president, [Buchanan] must engage in dialogue with the secessionist South that, like Miss Coleman years earlier, threatens him with separation.” 34 Schiff goes on to show how Alf places “Buchanan’s pre–Civil War dilemma in romantic terms,” wherein Buchanan, “wedded to the North” as a Pennsylvania Democrat, “yet has a mistress, the South, which threatens

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to secede and thus destroy the marriage.” 35 In pleading with the South to temper its pro-slavery rhetoric, Alf likens Buchanan to “a man who, in love with his raven-haired mistress, yet still has a wife and children—those Pennsylvania voters in their pious, rural, tariff-hating innocence—to consider” (233). 36 In Alf’s own life, his mistress, the Perfect Wife, promises him a more “perfect Union,” or a perfect marriage, while his betrothed, Norma, whom he calls the Queen of Disorder, represents (as her name suggests) the North. When the calamity of disunion finally befalls the two men, both refuse responsibility. Buchanan, viewing the carnage in June 1862, observes, “I would be the happiest old man in the country were it not for the civil war; but I console myself with the conviction that no act or omission of mine has produced this terrible calamity,” a formulation Alf “loves”—and why wouldn’t he, considering that, when confronted by Genevieve with his own appalling duplicity both to her and to Norma, he archly declares, “How much of my behavior, I thought as I supplied these sentences, was indeed innocent. Most of it. As much as ninety-eight percent” (358, 286). Nevertheless, both men return to their betrothed, Buchanan to the North and Alf to Norma, whose name additionally suggests the idea of the “normal,” a connection fully supported by Updike’s political vision, as laid out in “On Not Being a Dove.” If Genevieve is the unobtainable Perfect Wife, then Norma’s characteristic state of “disorder” is, in Alf’s and Updike’s view, also the “normal” state of affairs, both in our personal lives and in the nation as a whole. Though we might strive for “a more Perfect Union,” the inherent fallenness and layered complexity of creaturely reality resigns us to the Norma’s abiding disorder. Perhaps the most provocative connection between Buchanan’s narrative and Alf’s is the overlap between Buchanan’s presidency and Nixon’s. While Updike does not always draw these latter connections overtly, their potency and pertinence confirm his oft-stated conviction that Buchanan’s presidency and the national unrest it failed to quell eerily mirrors what Updike calls the “crisis years 1965–1973,” and never more so than in the politics of race writ large. In Kutler’s introductory analysis of the political climate that led to Watergate, he argues that Richard Nixon promised the nation in 1968 that he would “bring us together.” But during his watch, the divisions persisted and even widened. He, even more than Johnson, became a focal point for the furies and frustrations that wracked American society. “Watergate” increasingly defined his Administration, and it provided the “sword,” as Nixon himself characterized, for dissident interests to use in successfully mounting their challenge to vested power and authority. 37

Buchanan’s presidency, in Alf’s depiction, follows Kutler’s depiction of Nixon’s in its failed attempt to unify forces that were already irrevocably opposed. But Nixon’s presidency also links up to Buchanan’s in their shared

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exploitation of southern racism. In Buchanan’s case, his adherence to “the Union” at all costs compelled him to cater to and embrace the southern position that slavery was “not a question of general morality, affecting the consciences of men,” by which utterance, Alf admits, Buchanan “forfeits the sympathy of all but the most perversely patient of historians” (243). Nixon cynically revived Buchanan’s placating of southern racism via his own Southern Strategy, as designed by his political strategist Kevin Phillips, which used fragrantly racist appeals to draw to the Republican fold those southern Dixiecrats upset about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964. 38 In Nixon’s own words, the strategy was built on the idea that “it was time to bring the South back into the Union.” 39 For all of these connections, Updike concludes the novel by contrasting the two eras. Buchanan’s vacillating sought to preserve the Union and ended up ushering in an unprecedented bloodbath; Nixon’s deceptions ended in the whimper of resignation. Alf’s own domestic drama, which parallels Buchanan’s, differs as well: his betrothed doesn’t die tragically but rather indifferently welcomes him back. These differences Updike also attributes to the gradual dismantling of taboos and sexual restrictions that characterized the Nixon era. By the time of Nixon’s resignation, the United States, in Alf’s description, “had absorbed the punch of widespread fornication and found itself still walking and talking, disappointingly enough” (83). Expanding on this theme, Alf depicts the time following Nixon’s resignation as one of “disappointment that the sky had not fallen. . . . We had worn love beads and smoked dope, we had danced nude and shat on the flag, we had bombed Hanoi and landed on the moon, and still the sky remained unimpressed. History turned another page, the Union limped on, the dead were plowed under” (247). Yet even here Updike is not ready to abandon the parallels between Nixon’s disgrace and Buchanan’s. For even though during the Nixon years “our heavenly favored-nation status had been revoked, the air had been let out of our parade balloon, and still we bumped on, as we had in 1865” (248). Characteristically, Updike’s Barthian God refrains from making judgment. As Buchanan himself is depicted as explaining to the czarina of Russia, “Notre Dieu tient à distance sublime; dans cette manière, il met à l’épreuve notre sincérité, et nous donne l’espace pour l’exercise de la liberté!” which translates (roughly) as, “our [American] God is at a sublime distance; in this way he puts our sincerity to the test, and gives us space for the exercise of liberty!” (210). In a moment of accidental prophecy, Nixon makes his first appearance in Updike’s fiction via an early 1960 story, from Pigeon Feathers, titled “WifeWooing,” later included as part of the Maples series, even though none of the story’s characters is named. In the piece, an amorous husband spends a langorous Sunday waiting for the night so that he can seduce his wife. Yet at

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the moment of seduction, she is found in bed reading about Nixon. “He fascinates” the narrator’s wife, addressed throughout in the second person. “You hate him. You know how he defeated Jerry Voorhis, martyred Mrs. Douglas, how he played poker in the Navy despite being a Quaker, every fiendish trick, every low adaptation.” 40 The wife, rebuffing her husband’s request to “let the poor man go to bed,” remains focused on Nixon’s effort to convict Alger Hiss. “Hiss was guilty,” the husband insists, still pressing his point. “We’re all guilty. Conceived in concupiscence, we die unrepentant.” 41 The wife’s sterner moral conscience refuses to let Nixon go. In her reluctance to put down the book, she inadvertently makes Nixon an apple of mild marital discord, one of the earliest instances of such in a long career devoted to the subject. Similarly, the husband, an early incarnation of Tom and Alf, sees in Nixon’s duplicity a license for his own concupiscence, insisting in a formulation that nicely caps Updike’s career-long treatment of the personal and the political, “We’re none of us perfect.” 42 In Updike’s fallen world, the depersonalizing generalizations of politics and the temporal telescoping of history obscure the fallible human at the center of both. And given that, as he explained in various ways throughout his career, his “aesthetic and moral aim” as a writer is “a non-judgmental immersion” in the messiness of that human fallibility, then it should not be surprising that even our worst presidents are granted the same level of sympathy that he lavishes on his adulterers. 43 As Alf himself shrugs, “Well, Presidents are people, too” (Memories 197). NOTES 1. Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 9. 2. John Updike, “Introduction,” Rabbit Angstrom (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995), ix. 3. Edward Vogel, “Updike, American History, and Historical Methodology,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 108. 4. Adam Begley, Updike (New York: Harper, 2014), 333. 5. William H. Pritchard, Updike: America’s Man of Letters (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2000), 302. 6. John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 247. 7. John Updike, Buchanan Dying (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 252. 8. John Updike, “Foreword to the Stackpole Books edition of Buchanan Dying,” in Due Considerations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 635. 9. John Updike, “Introduction,” Rabbit Angstrom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), xiv. 10. Begley, Updike, 368. 11. Pritchard, Updike, 303. 12. Ibid., 304. 13. Stephen G. Kellman, “The Fiction of Self-Begetting,” Comparative Literature 91.6 (December 1976): 1246. 14. Vogel, “Updike, American History,” 111.

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15. John Updike, A Month of Sundays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 35; Memories, 106, 292. 16. John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 100. 17. John Updike, “‘Special Message’ for Franklin Library’s Signed First Edition of Memories of the Ford Administration,” in More Matter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 827. I am indebted to James Schiff for pointing my way to this passage. See Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 140. 18. Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Vintage Classics Edition, 1990), 13. 19. From Begley: “In Ipswich [Updike] . . . established a regular routine that ate up most of the daylight hours. From breakfast until late lunch, he wrote. In that summer of 1957, . . . he made up his mind to produce a minimum of three pages every morning (and many mornings, he did better).” See Updike, 166–67. Although he reserved most of his afternoons for reading and research, he often played golf on days when he could spare the time. As Begley reveals, “His first swing of a golf club came just a few months after the move to Ipswich”: Updike could continue “to think about [golf], to dream about it, to write about it, for the rest of his life” (191, 192). 20. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 70–71, 94–95. 21. In a related, but totally accidental coincidence, the name of Alf’s similar arch nemesis, that is the spouse of the Perfect Wife, is Brent Mueller, whose last name, of course, corresponds to that of Robert Mueller, the Special Prosecutor in the Russian investigation relating to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency. Forgive me this indulgence: I write these pages at some point in the time of Donald Trump’s unravelling. 22. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 130. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 120. 25. Ibid., 131. 26. Ibid., 115, 116. 27. Begley, Updike, 355; David Updike, “Summer 1974, in Fiction and Memory,” The John Updike Review 5.1 (Winter 2017), 11. 28. Begley, Updike, 357. 29. Updike, The Early Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 788. 30. Ibid., 835, 837. 31. David Updike, “Summer 1974,” 10. 32. Updike, Early Stories, 788. 33. James Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 139. Alf describes his project as one of “reanimation” in Memories, 243. 34. Schiff, John Updike Revisited, 138. 35. Ibid. 36. Quoted in Schiff, John Updike Revisited, 138. 37. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, 10. 38. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, 54, 238. 39. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, 36. 40. Updike, Early Stories, 352. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Updike, “Introduction,” xi.

WORKS CITED Begley, Adam. Updike. New York: Harper, 2014. Cather, Willa. The Professor’s House. New York: Vintage Classics Edition, 1990. Kellman, Stephen G. “The Fiction of Self-Begetting.” Comparative Literature 91, no. 6 (December 1976): 1243–56.

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Kutler, Stanley I. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Pritchard, William H. Updike: America’s Man of Letters. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2000. Schiff, James. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Updike, David. “Summer 1974, in Fiction and Memory.” The John Updike Review 5, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 5–17. Updike, John. Buchanan Dying. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. ———. The Early Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. ———. “Foreword to the Stackpole Books edition of Buchanan Dying.” Due Considerations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, 63–63. ———. “Introduction.” Rabbit Angstrom. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995. ———. Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. ———. A Month of Sundays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. ———. Self-Consciousness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. ———. “‘Special Message’ for Franklin Library’s Signed First Edition of Memories of the Ford Administration.” More Matter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, 825–27. Vogel, Edward. “Updike, American History, and Historical Methodology.” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, edited by Stacey Olster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 107–21. Woodward, Bob, and Carl Bernstein. The Final Days. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.

Chapter Three

Presidential Politics as Sexual Politics Memories of the Ford Administration Judie Newman

In Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), Alf Clayton, the historian narrator, offers only a scant page directly concerning the presidency of Gerald Ford, and concludes that nothing can really be known about him. Alf dismisses him cursorily as “the only non-assassinated President whose name ends with ‘d,’ the only Nebraska native and Michigan politician to attain the office, and the only skier.” 1 The novel therefore appears to belong to James Buchanan, the fifteenth and only bachelor president, whose biography Alf is struggling to write, an impression strengthened for many readers by Updike’s own fascination for the Pennsylvanian president, the topic of his play Buchanan Dying (1974). Arguably, however, the real story is as much that of the Ford years, especially of the history and origins of their sexual politics, investigated through Buchanan’s and Alf’s parallel failures in their love relationships. Updike focuses on the nature of American political freedom and its relationship to art, taking his cue from a not-uncritical reading of Camille Paglia’s post-Nietzschean version of cultural history in Sexual Personae (1990). Paglia deploys the opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian in culture in order to challenge the Romantic concept of nature as benign, and of sexual relationships as healthily guilt-free. It is Alf’s understanding of sexual politics, the product of his experiences in contemporary culture, that informs his portrayal of the Buchanan presidency. In alternating nineteenthand twentieth-century scenes, the novel restores Paglia’s chthonian dimension to sex, as invested with power relationships and aggressive urges, and thus as always in some senses political. The inset nineteenth-century story revolves around Buchanan’s unsuccessful struggle to prevent the nation yielding to aggression and descending into Civil War, ending as the South 43

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secedes. As James Schiff has argued, Buchanan’s failure to maintain the political union is prefigured in the failure of his projected marital union with Ann Coleman, and her sudden, violent death. 2 Alf portrays Buchanan, pleading with the South, as a man who is “in love with his raven-haired mistress, yet still has a wife and children [. . .] to consider” (233). Where Buchanan’s failure hinges upon a minor breach of convention (taking tea with another lady before calling upon his betrothed), Alf’s problem is not repressive convention but the laissez-faire sexual politics of the Ford years. The framestory of the novel, set in the permissive era of sexual liberation, involves a battle of the sexes. Alf’s belief in sexual relations as benign founders on the rocks of male and female rivalries, in the shape of Brent Mueller, deconstructionist husband of his mistress Genevieve, and two women, Jennifer and Ann Arthrop, used as bait to discredit Alf. Both women play double roles; both have also been actors in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the original, classic battle of the sexes where women outwit men in the political sphere much as they do in the contemporary plot of this novel. Updike’s focus upon the ambiguities of freedom (both personal and political) conditions the twists and turns of the plot. Masks and personae animate the narrative structure, as Alf takes on the role and persona of Buchanan and is taken in by the personae of others, to his ultimate mortification. Updike and Camille Paglia make strange bedfellows, and the argument somewhat baldly stated above will stand some elaboration. In “Freedom and Equality: Two American Bluebirds” (1992), Updike invoked Paglia in a discussion of the relation between freedom and equality. Updike emphasized that the American constitution says little about equality, and is more concerned with balancing unequal entities (state and federal authority, judicial and legislative branches of government) to create a stable structure of power that is also responsive to the voice of the people. He described his own early fiction as focusing upon the elusive nature of freedom, with characters rebelling against a benevolent but confining order (The Poorhouse Fair [1959]), conforming to it to protect a child (The Centaur [1963]), and, in Rabbit, Run (1960), demonstrating that freedom is “running to nowhere” if purchased at the price of other people’s suffering. 3 In Memories of the Ford Administration, Buchanan’s legalistic constitutionalism, challenged by Andrew Jackson’s populist emphasis upon the passions of the people, is a major strand in the plot, as is the family misery caused by Alf’s sexual freedom. For Updike freedom is ambiguous. He cites James M. McPherson‘s argument that in the Civil War both sides thought that they were fighting for freedom (for slaves, for states’ rights) and notes also Jack Thomas’s idea that societies die from intensification of their own first principle, in Athens an excess of democracy, and in America, of liberty. 4 Athens was conquered by authoritarian Sparta in the final stages of the Peloponnesian War; the excesses of the liberated 1960s wreak havoc on America. Updike quotes Paglia’s “thrillingly Nietzschean”

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book, Sexual Personae, as arguing that freedom is an overrated modern idea, originating in the Romantic rebellion (exemplified by Rousseau) against bourgeois society, whereas in her view it is only in society that one can be an individual. 5 Outside its protection, nature “is waiting at society’s gate to dissolve us in her chthonian bosom.” 6 As Updike comments, human beings are centaur-like: “Half animal, half responsible citizen, we each offer up some of our chthonian longings, in exchange for freedom from chthonian chaos.” 7 Reviewing Paglia’s Sex, Art and American Culture (1992), a collection of previously published essays, Updike underlined the neo-conservative, antifeminist tenor of Paglia’s work, wryly condemning it as highly reassuring for the male reader, given that it applauds the uncontrollable elements of male sexuality. He nonetheless agreed with her argument that the roots of sexual attraction go deeper than our codes of civilized behavior allow. He describes the first chapter of Sexual Personae as “simply magnificent, dense with stark truths and sweeping insights” as Paglia sets forth her cosmology under the title “Sexual Violence, or Nature and Art,” opposing the female-Dionysianchthonian to the male-Apollonian-skyey. 8 For Updike, her awareness of the life-enabling religious impulses moving beneath the quirks of human culture is her most valuable and refreshing trait. 9 Discussing sexual attraction, Updike argued that we are attracted to psyches as well as bodies. Yet he also gives full weight to the Dionysian: Not only does the sexual appetite join us to “the beasts of the field” and our chthonian mother . . . “the ancient power of fright and lust”—but it calls into activity our most elegant faculties, of self-display, social intercourse, and idealization. 10

Updike notes Paglia’s demonization of contemporary feminism and of academia, two topics dramatized in Memories of the Ford Administration in Jennifer Arthrop’s vulgar feminism and in Alf’s own experiences as a lecturer in all-female Wayward College, where deconstruction has effectively dismembered the Humanities, and advanced a view of signification as arbitrary and history as merely a construction. In contrast, Paglia believes that history has an inherent shape and meaning; she defends the notion of culture as continuous from the Greeks, and holds that there is a person behind every text. Her work is founded on the desire to reinsert emotion into cultural history and to resist the tyranny of the word. Her rejection of Derridean deconstruction is as resounding as Updike’s, if not nearly as subtle as his comic portrayal of Brent Muller, a deconstructionist by career, yet in reality a churchgoer and traditional family man. Paglia also insists upon the religious dimension of cultural politics, in a fashion that, for all her supposed post-Catholic pagan-

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ism, resonates strongly with Updike’s own insistence on human guilt and shame, and on the ways in which the legacies of the past inflect the present. While clearly influenced by Paglia, Updike dramatizes her ideas in a variety of ways, to tease out the ambivalences and ambiguities in the connection between the personal and the political. Alf Clayton’s historical project draws upon Paglia’s stated aims, as described in her “Preface” to Sexual Personae: to rethink American cultural history in order to “flesh out intellect with emotion,” 11 to clarify the heritage of the 1960s, which heroically broke with the confines of the 1950s but failed in her view to sustain their energies, 12 and to restore a serious understanding of the Dionysian in culture, as the realm of chaos, disorder, and darkness. For Paglia society is a system of inherited forms that constitute a defense against the power of nature, of which sex is a subset. “Without society, we would be storm tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature,” she argues, introducing a marine imagery which Updike also adopts. 13 The idea of the ultimate benevolence of nature and God is the most potent of the survival mechanisms, without which culture would revert to fear and despair. The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion, conceal from us our subordination to nature: “But let nature shrug, and all is ruin. Fire, flood, lightning, thunder, hurricane, volcano, earthquake—anywhere at any time.” 14 Given that sexuality and emotion are at the intricate intersection of nature and culture, it is therefore an oversimplification for Paglia if sexual relations are reduced to a matter of social convention. Feminism is the heir of Rousseau, pitting nature against corrupt society. But aggression is part of nature; sex involves power struggles and identity forged in conflict. 15 Freedom is not without its darker underside: “Whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind. Romanticism always turns into decadence.” 16 Paglia understands culture as an uninterrupted continuum from the Greeks to the present, in which Christianity has not defeated paganism, which surfaces repeatedly in the work of art, memorably characterized as a sexual force field distorted by fluctuations in masculinity and femininity. 17 Culture at large is a continual opposition between the Apollonian (order, form, light, symmetry) and the Dionysian (chaos, fluidity, darkness, miasma). The Apollonian Western mind believes that by naming and classifying, nature and archaic night can be pushed back. To name is to control: “Name and person are part of the West’s quest for form.” 18 The aesthetic sense also involves a swerve from the chthonian as the eye excludes, selects, and enhances. Apollo is associated with the golden mean, moderation, a virtue distinctly evident in Buchanan’s quest for compromise, negotiation, and avoidance of excess. In contrast, the Dionysian involves dissolution, earthly depths, waste, muck, and is associated with woman, the oceanic matrix, or primal slime. As opposed to the Olympian gods, the Dionysian is the realm of the daemonic, spirits of altogether lower levels of deity. In

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Paglia’s distinctly uninviting portrayal, woman is the Dionysian miasma, the world of fluids, the “chthonian swamp” of generation. 19 Woman reeks of the sea. 20 Men may retain the reptilian brain, “killer survivor of the archaic era.” 21 But woman’s reproductive organs are labyrinthine, “lurid in colour, vagrant in contour, and architecturally incoherent.” 22 They evoke an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. 23 Women’s hair recalls Medusa in its “writhing vegetable growth of nature.” 24 In response culture creates personality, recurrent types and masks, in order to give shape and form, to enhance separation and individuation, and as a defence against engulfment or dissolution. (The persona of the femme fatale is one such recurrent type.) Yet the process is never secure: “In the day we are social creatures, but at night we descend to the dream world where nature reigns, where there is no law but sex, cruelty and metamorphosis.” 25 Paglia argues that Western personality originates in the idea of masks; society is a place of masks, of ritual theatre. Her notion of the persona draws upon its original Greek meaning as the clay or wooden mask, reverberating to project the voice of the classical actor. Historically, the term broadens out over time to become the actor in the role, the social role or public function, the individual as citizen, and finally to how we understand the term today. 26 Crucially, Updike not only emphasizes theatrical metaphors, social roles, and deceptive masks, but also inscribes this argument into his narrative structure. In the novel, Updike never writes quite for himself but always through the assumed persona of Alf, a fellow writer, who is himself projecting his own views and experiences through the figure of Buchanan. Alf’s own disordered life draws him to attempt to create a tightly bounded persona in the shape of Buchanan, while Updike uses Alf as a means to explore the sexual politics of the 1960s and 1970s. In the nineteenth-century plot of the novel, the struggle to maintain an Apollonian order ultimately proves wanting as the country lurches into the Civil War; paradoxically the contemporary plot initially appears to move away from the Dionysian toward a renewed order, though at Alf’s expense. Updike’s novel firmly establishes connections with Paglia, notably in relation to Alf’s personal sexual attitudes, which influence his predilections as a writer for an understanding of history as the product of the subconscious, disordered impulses of its subjects. Alf’s biography of Buchanan is not primarily interested in the historical record or the public deed: “My tropism was toward the unlit, the underside, the region of shades where his personal demon teased our statesman, visiting embarrassment upon his dignity and violence upon his peacefulness” (178). In terms of exploring the relation between sexual and national politics, Updike could hardly have invented a starker opposition than between James Buchanan, supposedly the only virgin president, and the promiscuous Alf, a creature of his era. “Sex still had a good name during the Ford administration” (6), when one-night stands, bath-

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houses, and sex shops abound. Indeed, “What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower, and racy under Kennedy had become, under Ford, almost compulsory” (6). Alf’s freedom is qualified, however, by images of Dionysian dissolution. The novel opens as, newly separated, he watches Nixon’s resignation speech in the gathering darkness, viewing the national scandal as a welcome distraction from his domestic one, which sits in the bosom of his family “like a great clammy frog, smelling of the swamp of irrecoverable loss” (4). When his wife, Norma, “the Queen of Disorder” (9), aptly named for Bellini’s pagan priestess, returns from a date involving sex in the woods with the leader of the local choral society (a comic reference to the Greek chorus), he comments on her “wiggly” (12) hair, the dust and cobwebs of the marital home, a “hairy, fringy nest” (8), her unfinished sentences and halfdone paintings. Form is never complete in Norma’s world. Her house, full of cats and dogs, is a realm of such animality that one night there sends Alf to the hospital with an asthma attack. In the broader public sphere, 1960’s freedoms are also shadowed by images of decadence and degeneration. The town of Adams is in economic decline, and the local movie house has descended quite literally into the Dionysian, evolving from popular blockbusters to a triple X sex cinema. One sexual encounter spells out the problems of the healthy, liberal 1960s ideal. At the beginning of his narrative, Alf recalls having engaged in sex with Wendy Wadleigh in complete conformity with the norms of the period. He finds her in some ways unattractive, but in the Ford era “it was assumed that any man and woman alone in a room with a lock on the door were duty-bound to fuck” (16). Postcoitally, however, Alf is seized with chthonian distaste, as icy slime drips onto him. Not quite as liberated as he might seem, he dwells upon the female genitalia as “livid, oysterish, scarcely endurable complexity” (15–16). Wendy seems like a primeval swamp in her excessive wetness; Alf keeps slipping “like a man in smooth soled boots on a mudbank” (19). Nonetheless his “reptile brain” (22) takes over, though Wendy is less than enthusiastic at the prospect of oral sex: “I’m all goopy down there” (23). While Updike is known for the abundance of his sexual descriptions, Memories of the Ford Administration pays an inordinate amount of attention to slime, bodily fluids, muck, the viscose and the oozing. Alf is overtaken here by revulsion and resentment, in a scene exposing the clash between the 1960’s idea of sex as good, clean fun and the chthonian realm of slime and aggression. In response, Alf adopts the male strategy of imposing a persona on female formlessness, objectifying woman as a means of fixing her form and stabilizing nature from flux. Paradoxically, Alf’s affair with Genevieve represents an attempt to reclaim an orderly life. First encountered by the reader fresh from church on Easter Sunday, in a houndstooth jacket and smartly pleated white skirt, she is a black-and-white figure, sharply defined in contrasting tones and geometric forms, her perfectly shaped silhouette and trim, compact

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body as neat as an artist’s image of a “nymph” (53). The emphasis is on separation, contrast, and firmly defined form. At home Genevieve maintains a “European” (54) sense of regularity, involving impeccable housewifery skills, obedient children, and a cool, ordered décor. Even the manicured garden displays her orderliness, with its weed-free beds and mulched plantings. Nature is under firm control. Norma’s psychosexual interior, unforgettably characterized as a tidal swamp where a narrow path wound past “giant nodding cattails and hidden egret nests, with a slip into indifference gaping on both sides” (55), contrasts with Genevieve’s entrails, “city streets, straight, broad, and zippy” (55). The Dionysian abyss has yielded to civilized form, with untamed nature becoming the city-state. When, however, Genevieve confesses to her husband and sets divorce in train, Alf is taken aback at the subsequent cocktail party as Genevieve plays her public role flawlessly with no sign of interest in him, her mask firmly in place. Alf remains uncomfortably aware that Brent and Genevieve have orchestrated the sequence of events. He has been cast in a social role that is not of his own choosing. “My part was all written,” he comments in resignation. “I was a character in their play” (56). As a result, when Alf turns to creating the character of Buchanan he reverses direction, moving from Apollonian ordered forms to a nightmarish story of darkness and dissolution. Just as Alf shows some reluctance to embark on matrimony with Genevieve, Buchanan is introduced, explaining to Ann Coleman that their wedding must be postponed on grounds of civic and legal commitments. The couple are imagined in 1819 walking across the city of Lancaster, formerly Hickory Town, but now renamed in a movement from nature toward culture, in imitation of an English city. It has even adopted as its emblem the red rose of Lancaster, historical badge of one side in the English Civil War, the Wars of the Roses. Alf presents the town through a series of European referents, signalling hierarchy and order, its former wildness subjected to naming and control, tamed by European inherited forms. The streets are named for the colonial past and for recurrent historical personae, and inherited titles: King, Queen, Duke and Orange streets. The inn is called after William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham. Wooden merchants’ signs depict fixed images of Indian chiefs and European kings. Demuth’s tobacco shop still features its 1770 signboard portraying a periwigged dandy with a snuffbox; they pass the house of Jacob Eichholz, a portrait painter who “fixed in paints” (42) the faces of the leading citizens. European forms contain and fix the human body as well; Buchanan wears a tail coat, waistcoat, constricting high collar, and well-tied cravat. In its sunshine the city seems to be smiling down on them like the historic carved face of the Eavesdropper on the Bowsman house with its blank stone eyes (40). Despite the abundance of light, Apollonian order seems to demand a degree of optical selection, even blindness. On the one hand Buchanan decries the domination of European

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ideas in American politics, castigating Madison for his passion for French rationality, and Monroe for creating in Washington a Versailles of empty etiquette (43). For him, “This continent was meant to be an escape from Europe, not a provincial imitation of it” (43). On the other hand, he expresses his fear of the common man and his “natural greed and low appetites” (44), implicitly recognizing the opposition between the passions of the people and politically restraining forms. Buchanan remains completely “wedded to the Constitution” (33), but never to Ann. In Ann’s eyes, though, Buchanan shares the thinness of the portraits around them, a shadow looming between her and the sun. To her, Buchanan’s dress is not so very different from the bewigged dandy. Indeed, his prospective mother-in-law characterizes him as a “popinjay” (40); Ann as a “half-man, a chimera” (46) with an “illusionary thinness, like a large occluding emblem of painted tin” (47), not even as thick as the signboards or the slate tombstones of the nearby burial ground. As they enter its shade, Ann recalls lines from Byron, “The bright sun was extinguished” (47). Byron’s “Darkness” (1816), written in the fabled year of no summer, the result of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, tells of an environmental apocalypse in which all natural light is extinguished and mankind becomes extinct. There are no religious references to the Day of Judgment; the world simply disintegrates into the dust and chaos from which it sprung. Ann supplies the final lines: The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need Of aid from them—She was the Universe. (48)

When she had first read the lines, she remembers feeling the front parlour falling away dizzyingly, and her terror at the mysterious She, with its Godlike capital letter. In “Freedom and Equality” Updike cited Tocqueville’s claim that the loss of the feudal class system and particularly the aristocracy, weakened by revolution, left a yawning void, which was filled by poets, in the absence of their previous heroic themes, with images of nature. 27 Updike’s scene is relentlessly textualized, a tissue of names and signs which make Ann fear becoming shut in “the coffin of a book” (47). Her fear appears informed by Tocqueville’s argument. In Europe, she thinks, poets may be allowed to frighten young women, but not in America, so recently seized from the Indians and “soaked with their blood” (48), as the autumn leaves supposedly demonstrate. European-inspired inherited forms appear to have yielded in America to a vision of archaic night, and the triumph of the destructive feminine. When Buchanan appears to slight her by taking tea with Grace Hubley, she breaks off the engagement, once more quoting Byron, infuriating Buchanan who views him as the acolyte of “the tyrant Napoleon” (92). Democratic Buchanan sees Byron as linked to political despotism, not Romantic freedom. Angrily he decides to give Ann a few days to

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cool off before winning her over and restoring the status quo. As a result, he seriously underestimates the power of both art and nature and the possible magnitude of the disaster at hand. Significantly Buchanan’s weakness for the Apollonian is a major factor in the catastrophe. Calling at the Jenkins house to report on the success of a legal case, Buchanan instinctively flinches at operating the doorknocker, a bare-breasted mermaid, and is relieved to enter an explicitly Apollonian scene, a temple of light brightly illuminated by the best spermaceti candles and smelling of the sea, “an august incense” (62). At its heart sits the enchanting Grace Hubley, on a sofa with a serpentine back, displaying an enticing amount of “siren breast” (62). Light suffuses the scene, from Grace’s radiant face to the mirrored sconces and her iridescent, Persian shawl. The fireplace mantle is shaped in the form of a Greek temple, with an entablature, pillars, and a carved classical frieze of acanthus leaves. Buchanan’s chair is neo-Grecian, with an appropriately Apollonian lyre-shaped splat. Grace is clearly a devotee of order, form and light, and has absolute faith in a benevolent deity (69), a point rather undermined in Alf’s view by her agonizing later death when her clothing caught fire. The serpentine and marine imagery strikes a warning note, suggesting the persona of the temptress. It is clear that some woman told Ann of the visit; sexual rivalries among women figure at the center of the causal knot. Like a siren, Grace has an enchanting southern accent, though she is passionately opposed to slavery (seen as Dionysian, involving the sexual abuse of women and a debasing immorality), and roundly, if classically, consigns all slaveholders to Hades (65). In response, Buchanan reminds Grace that in ancient Greece the contract between master and slave allowed considerable advantages to the slave. He brushes aside Grace’s abolitionism as evidence of excessive passion, as opposed to his own belief in the golden mean, compromise and moderation. The scene suggests that Buchanan is far too swift to discount the passions (abolitionist or otherwise) and lingers too long in an Apollonian illusion. The South and slavery will prove his nemesis in political terms, just as Grace wrecks his personal affairs. In Alf’s thesis, Buchanan’s loss of Ann made him forever after too cautious and indecisive in action. In the subsequent dramatization of the death of Ann Coleman (an artistic tour de force), Updike makes a clear distinction between passion safely contained in art and the actual angry passions of wounded pride, regret, and humiliation experienced by the scorned Ann. Alf, still clinging to a mythic order, cheerfully invents for Ann a coach ride to Philadelphia, in a Concorde carriage of the “Tallyho!” type usually featured in British prints, its panels painted with different sanitized renditions of erotic myth: Eros and Psyche, Venus and Mars, Artemis and Actaeon. Such is the movement of the coach, however, that Ann emerges almost seasick with the motion, and immediately takes to her bed. Her sister Sarah departs for a performance in Philadelphia’s New Theatre (splendidly

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illuminated by gaslight), featuring three British works, Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter, Collins’s Ode to the Passions, and the comic opera, The Adopted Child, which highlight the role of the passions in relation to democracy, and the extent to which art can or cannot contain them. In The Grecian Daughter Euphrasia saves her father’s life by breast feeding him in captivity, and then stabs to death the aptly named tyrant, Dionysus I, who destroyed democracy in Syracuse. A popular play in nineteenth-century America, it glorifies democracy, and woman’s role as its defender. Samuel Birch’s The Adopted Daughter, however, involves the restitution of ancestral power to an aristocratic heir. At this point Alf attempts to create an alternative history for Ann and Buchanan, imagining him pursuing her to Philadelphia, reconciliation, a long happy marriage and withdrawal from political life, with the result that Stephen Douglas becomes the fifteenth president, stifles abolitionists and southern fire-eaters alike, and sees slavery fade away. By the time Douglas defeats Lincoln in 1860, Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan would have forgotten, as if in a dream, their moments of angry passion (121). Alf, however, bookends this fairy tale of sweetness and light with quotations from Collins’s “Despair” (117) and “Anger” (121). Alf has yielded to a desire for Apollonian form and structure, but he cannot stick to it and the narrative turns away toward waste and death instead. Alf’s narrative oscillates continuously between the two forces of Apollo and Dionysus. He constructs scenes in order to thrust something into the “void where history leaves off” (112), but the void recurs. Much as he would like to confine passion and aggression within a literary form, he has to recognize their real strength. Ann Coleman died of hysterical convulsions, in some accounts by an excess of laudanum, even perhaps by her own hand. In the novel, responsibility for her fatal hysteria is firmly laid at the door of her oppressive father. Squeezed on all sides by patriarchal prohibitions, Ann becomes fevered, breathless and delirious. Hysteria (meaning frenzy) involves the conversion of psychological states into physical symptoms. (Alf’s asthma is rather similar.) The term originates in the Greek for uterus, seen by the Greeks as liable to wander around the body. Ann’s symptoms include a strange weakness, a feeling of floating off “below the waist” (123). In the 1980s feminists (notably Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous) reclaimed the term and argued that oppressive social roles lay behind the (now discredited) diagnosis. 28 In her decline, Ann feels as if “sunk into a shame of chaos, mad disquietude,” recalling “Darkness” with its images of volcanoes and cannibalism, “a turbulent muddy reality just beneath the glitter and comfort of afternoon tea” (121), a “muck of disgrace” (122). Her head echoes with formless images which she cannot organize or control, while outside the evening darkens, and the garden of frozen forms steeped in Philadelphian “miasma” (122) becomes colorless and disappears. Ann is cold as a “Greek slave of marble” (131) in a sunless world, like Byron’s, in which form disappears and dissolves, her mouth fills with slime, her urine smells like a

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horse’s stable, and she descends into a dream world ruled by terror. When she administers the fatal dose of laudanum, it is overtly presented as a yielding to the Dionysian. The opium floats like gold flecks in a “muddy-bottomed spring” (126), offering death as dissolution into slime and viscidity (133). The doctor describes laudanum as holding a demon, and it is contained in a small vial, shaped like a homunculus. As Paglia notes, Goethe’s Faust, a Dionysian drama, features Homunculus, a fabricated being hovering in a glass retort. 29 Ann sinks into image-filled dreams, as if yielding to decadent Romanticism and its idea of being snatched away in full bloom, of “emptying some dull opiate to the drains and sinking Lethe-wards” (127). Throughout this dark night of the soul Ann’s thoughts oscillate between an opium-led illusion of divine love and the notion of god as an absence. Men may have tried “to believe in eternal light,” but since the rise of the revolutionary spirit, darkness has become “our element, our punishment for wanting to be free” (132). So far, so chthonian. In the sequence of scenes involving Buchanan and Ann, Updike engages overtly with the Apollonian and Dionysian, and it is a fair judgment to say that the latter has been more in evidence than the former. Apollonian forms have not provided Alf with enough defence against a nature which seems almost monstrous. The cultural forms of America do not appear to be robust enough to protect Ann Coleman. Or, indeed, its citizenry. The interview which Alf imagines between Buchanan and Andrew Jackson in 1824 reinforces the impression that in America savagery and violence are only lightly contained. Jackson, the representative of “backwoods America” (183), is both violent and sadistic. While Buchanan is attempting a political negotiation (later the basis of the “bargain and sale” controversy) Jackson refuses any compromise whatsoever. Everything about him signals aggression, from frontier background to military record, scars, and the musket ball still carried from a duel in which he deliberately took aim at his opponent in his manly parts, ensuring an agonizing death. Equally delighted by his massacres of the Seminoles, British, French and Spanish he decries George Washington’s softness. America, for him, is characterized as “a contention of free wills and selfish interests, set loose in a wilderness to survive” (187). The conversation takes place in the open air (where Jackson’s rancid stink is marginally less offensive) against a background of architecturally incomplete forms, “ill-financed starts at marmoreal grandeur” (180), the half-built Capitol, and a White House lacking its Grecian portico, all pervaded by a miasmic mist from the surrounding swamps. Washington is a raw city, its classical designs unrealized. It is against this background that Jackson offers the moral that in America, power lies in the passions of the people (188). Despite its architectural pretensions, American democracy has yet to equal that of the Greeks, though it mirrors their deficiencies. Both men ignore a drunken,

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ragged black man lying in a stupor nearby. The Athenian demos did not include slaves, and neither, as yet, does America. Nor did Athens include women. Updike, however, remedies the omission. Just as Buchanan’s relationships foundered on female rivalry, so Alf is faced with temptation in the shape of Jennifer Arthrop and her mother, in scenes in which national politics are shadowed by the role of the demos, the people, evoking the oldest democracy, that of Athens. America seems to have deteriorated since Jackson’s time. Alf’s apartment, in an area of Adams in decline from the 1830s when Jackson constructed it as an ideal industrialopolis and workers’ paradise (79), contains a monument to presidents Washington and Adams, with statues of Liberty and Equality (79), now decorated with obscene graffiti and painted pudenda. It is in this apartment that he is pursued by Jennifer Arthrop, a student ostensibly consulting him about her work, while getting ever closer to her prey. In her term paper, Updike provides a wickedly funny parody (contra Paglia) of the notion that sexual politics dictate national politics. Titled Protestant-Christian Mythmaking as an Enforcer of Male-Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, this magnum opus dwells upon McKinley on his knees in prayer before possessing the Philippines (“sexual significance of going down on one’s knees” [81]), the Philippines as a lightly clad maiden in cartoons, the vaginal innuendo of Dewy Bay, feminized images of Samoa, Roosevelt’s big stick policy, the reluctance of Colombia to cede canal rights (virginity), and the sexual symbolism of dredging the canal (81). Intellectually, however, Alf now rejects the 1960s idea that sex has a political heft: “all the screwing in the world will not rattle bank foundations or bring down the walls of the Pentagon” (82). Cunningly he quizzes his student on the non-annexation of Cuba by Buchanan, drawing attention to the Ostend Manifesto of 1854. “Who was James Buchanan?” asks Jennifer, a revelation of ignorance which quite quells her “siren’s song” (84). Back on firm ground, Alf bests her in the battle with her own rhetoric, calling attention to the phallic shape of Cuba, and the large cigars made there, big sticks all its own. When he discovers that she got his address from Brent Mueller, his suspicions are confirmed. Jennifer is a honey trap, deployed to disgrace him with Genevieve. With his apartment transformed into “a moral arena, a theatre of combat” (150) he fights back, taking his cue from Paglia’s contention that liberalism “defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother,” providing for its citizens, describing McKinley as nurturing and vulnerable, and declaring that his own pet project is to write about effeminacy in the presidency, the President “as natural mother” (86). 30 Mothers, however, may be less than nurturant. While Alf outwits the first attack on him, he meets his match in Jennifer’s mother, a mistress of the mask. Alf’s memory moves to Mrs. Arthrop when he recalls a performance of a play about Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst. At the theatre he had

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carried Genevieve, who had fainted in the interval, to the ladies room where a crowd of women took over, dragging her into a silken foyer faintly redolent of female urine. His mind moves to Wayward which also has a theatre, and to its student center, a similar “gynous concentration” (194) with a subliminal scent that bombards his pheromone receptors with the aroma of a hundred young female students, sharpening his memory: “The senses are Mnemosyne’s handmaidens” (195). Alf certainly puts the senses back into history, Paglia-fashion, but there is a price to pay. In Sexual Personae Paglia characterizes Emily Dickinson’s poetry as sadomasochistic, replete with images of violence and horror. “The brutality of the Belle of Amherst would stop a truck.” 31 She gives a representative example, quoting the phrase “A Small Leech on the Vitals” (from “One Anguish—in a Crowd”), a line suggesting chronic gnawing doubt, as “an invisible haemorrhaging wound like a stress ulcer.” 32 Genevieve’s faint is the result of a duodenal ulcer caused by the stress of her relation with Alf (193). So much for sex as healthy and benign. Genevieve’s faint also recreates her Apollonian, defensive mask. In Paglia’s view, Dickinson exploited a series of sexual personae in her poems, performances which reveal the Dionysian disorderings of stable social structures, the violence and aggression of nature, and apocalyptic visions of cataclysm. 33 Where a conventional feminist critique would see Dickinson as hemmed in by patriarchy, an impediment to her genius, Paglia argues that she uses personae in order to deal with the absence of limits, the excess of freedom in the Romantic solipsism of her imagination. 34 Paglia also draws attention to Dickinson’s fondness for deaths and especially corpses: “She values corpses as artefacts; personality has passed from Dionysian mutability into Apollonian perfection.” 35 Similarly, when Genevieve swoons, she resembles an effigy “in glossy, colorless wax” with “precise, decisively marked features” (193). Where Ann Coleman’s death was ascribed to both stifling patriarchy and Romantic imaginative freedom, Genevieve’s sexual objectification as a tightly formed persona appears to be a form of death-inlife. The female artist (Dickinson, as projected in the play by Julie Harris, the actress who played the role) has felled her into immobility. Mrs. Arthrop, however, knows how to exploit the mask in a suppler manner. In the novel, the battle between Apollonian and Dionysian is always essentially the same battle, between similar personae, wearing the same masks and expressing the same aggressive rivalry, Grace versus Ann, Genevieve versus Norma, and then Ann versus Jennifer. Importantly Alf meets Mrs. Arthrop when she attends the dress rehearsal of Lysistrata. Aristophanes designed his comic battle of the sexes around a conjugal strike. United, the women of Athens deny their husbands sexual relations in a successful bid to end the Peloponnesian War. “Screwing” (82) may not be a winning political strategy, but abstinence is. Appropriately, Brent’s tool, Jennifer, plays the male role of Cinesias, a small, male part, but with a big scene with

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“this real cock teaser” (200). In the play, Cinesias pursues his wife, the evasive Myrrhine, just as Jennifer had pursued Alf around his desk. In the novel, Jennifer, a woman, pursues a man, acting a role on behalf of Brent. In the play she plays a man pursuing a woman. Myrrhine finds endless reasons for delay, eventually disappearing into the female-occupied Acropolis, leaving Cinesias cursing in sexual frustration. 36 Lysistrata, one of the first portrayals of women onstage, was performed entirely by men in masks; it offers an inversion of the real world, calling into question conventional gender boundaries. In like fashion, Jennifer finds Myrrhine sadistic and feels like raping her (200). Jennifer is for the first time questioning the conventional binaries of male/female, sadist/masochist, desire/anger and war/love. Sex roles are not as simple or as biologically determined as Paglia’s theory would suggest. Lysistrata was produced as part of the Greater Dionysia, a festival both religious and civic, honouring Dionysus, and sponsored by the demos as a showcase for Athenian democratic ideology. The plays tend to advocate positions held by minorities, though they also show a consistent bias against populist politicians and the manipulation of democratic freedoms. Andrew Jackson would have got short shrift on the Athenian stage. Whereas in Greek tragedy women tend to be seen as wild, with gender strife often ending in disaster, in comedy harmony is normally restored. Lysistrata was produced in 411 BC, twenty years into the Peloponnesian War, at the end of which in 404 Athens had lost her navy, empire, and for a time even her democratic freedoms. In the play, the women win their point (beating the old politicians, the Magistrates) and the Spartan and Athenian ambassadors negotiate a peace. Jennifer sees this as a return for women to the role of sex slaves, reading the classic work in terms of Mueller’s deconstructionism, but in fact Lysistrata champions both her own sex and the civic values of all the Greeks. As an example of inherited cultural forms, the play may seem to work against Brent’s anti-canonical position, yet it does him a favor in the shape of Mrs. Arthrop, who reveals to Alf that she had played the role in her youth. Although today the play is often seen as feminist, Mrs. Arthrop underlines the fact that Lysistrata only gained her education by eavesdropping on men’s talk. In Mrs. Arthrop’s youth that point caused no offense; the play, staged during the Korean War, was controversial only for its anti-war theme. (It was acceptable to be against war in the abstract, but not when America was actually fighting.) Unlike the play, the novel emphasizes aggressive female rivalry. Mrs. Arthrop had the star role, while her daughter has only a bit part. Alf realizes that she is upstaging her daughter; this is, “Women against women. Women at war” (252). Mrs. Arthrop is under the impression that Alf has slept with Jennifer, and competitive jealousy is her motivation for sleeping with him. Alf’s projected biography of Buchanan had been partly inspired by the de-

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constructionist view, propagated by Brent, that history is only texts (35). Ironically, deeply enmeshed in the story of Ann Coleman, he sleeps with Mrs. Arthrop purely because she shares her name, allowing the word (Ann) to lead him, and to determine the course of his actions. Alf justifies the sexual encounter with the reflection that, as Tocqueville pointed out, “Americans prize freedom above all other goods” (217), but in fact the sexual encounter involves power struggles and conflicting identities. In essence, both Alf and Ann are masked. Although wearing her hair in a Grecian “Psyche” knot, Mrs. Arthrop’s face of “Olmec passivity” (221) suggests a more impenetrable American persona. Alf’s value to her was the fantasy of sharing a man erotically with her daughter; hers to him “a chance to rescue lonely Ann” (222). Alf was adopting the role of Buchanan, finally getting the girl. But when Brent reveals Alf’s adultery to Genevieve, she ends their relationship. Civil War in ancient Greece was ended (at least onstage) by women, a force for peace. Restriction on sexuality brought an end to violence. Buchanan’s unfulfilled relationship with Ann Coleman, however, leaves him forever a pacificator, unable to appreciate the feelings of either North or South, dismissive of abolitionist fervor and unable to maintain the peace. In nineteenth-century America, the full horror of war is unleashed. In the 1970s plot, Alf’s unrestrained sexuality cooks his goose. But what pulled the strings of disaster? Male desire or women’s rivalries? Sexual freedom, or sexual conflicts? How secure are the categories of male and female? And how does art relate to politics? The example of the classical play suggests that wisdom and truth remain embodied in the literary canon, a touchstone of continuity with the past. But for Alf the two women acting in it have given the deconstructionist his victory. To sum up: in the frame narrative Updike presides over a movement from Dionysian indulgence to Apollonian order and back, as Alf’s sexual desires lead him first to seek a more ordered existence with Genevieve and then return him to Norma, the Queen of Disorder, when Genevieve rejects him. In like fashion, his book on Buchanan remains in incomplete form, dissolving into fragments in the final chapters of the novel. In the inset story, Ann Coleman’s descent into death is followed by Buchanan’s flight from passion and his embrace of political formalities, legalistic pettifogging and diplomatic evasions. Two lengthy episodes focus on European courts and diplomacy. When Andrew Jackson dispatches Buchanan (a thorn in his side) on a diplomatic mission to the Russian court, he is plunged into a world of ceremonial ritual, high culture and art. Tsar Nikolai, an apparently cultured man, has a fondness for Romantic prints and a large collection of the Gothic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. This does not stop him, however, from setting up the secret police, ruthlessly suppressing the Decembrist revolt and hanging the poet Ryleyev (who died clutching a volume of Byron). Autocratic repression trumps Romantic individualism and the pursuit of democratic freedom.

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Buchanan moves on from Russia to London, again as a diplomat. The inset story draws toward a close with an explicit meditation on the relationship of art and politics. Memories of the Ford Administration offers a dark vision of American history, and of history itself, as dominated by less than idealistic motives. The point is developed in Alf’s portrayal of Buchanan’s 1855 meeting with Nathaniel Hawthorne, consul at Liverpool when Buchanan was ambassador at the Court of Saint James—the last fully fictionalized scene in his novel before its form breaks down into incomplete notes. Despite the European setting and the emphasis on inherited tradition, nothing could be less Apollonian than Hawthorne’s office, up an ill-lit stairway, and dominated by a hideous lithograph of Zachary Taylor, darkly veiled by black coal smoke. An unstable Windsor chair squeaks at Buchanan’s every movement, threatening collapse. The emphasis is upon incompletion and formal dissolution. Although busts and portraits line the walls, the effect is not of stability and form, but of shadowy figures which appear to be about to take on life. The sequence of presidents is incomplete, lacking the latest incumbents, and the map of the United States, twenty years out of date, lacks both Texas and California, underlining the vulnerability of the Union to the loss of more southern states. There is nothing immutable about America. Hawthorne, as much a political compromiser as Buchanan, had gained his lucrative appointment as consul by writing the campaign biography of the victorious Franklin Pierce. Now, however, he is perfectly clear that the Union is under threat and that the issue of slavery will not go away. It has become “a passion, on both sides, which there will be no quenching but with blood” (265). The passions of the people are in the ascendant; a bust of Jackson, fierce and terrible, presides over them. In conversation, Buchanan argues that politics is all about compromise. Hawthorne, however, draws a line between art and politics, reminding him that despite intense pressure on him to withdraw “The Custom House” from The Scarlet Letter, he resisted all such pleas: “A compromised work of art becomes on the instant worthless, since we look to art for an otherworldly integrity” (269). Alf has transported Buchanan into the Gothic world of Hawthorne, a world of animated portraits, dark masks and, in the example of The Scarlet Letter, America’s first fictional portrayal of sexual passion in relation to politics. Buchanan’s claims ring hollow, quite literally. The scene ends with his high-pitched laugh, mixed with the shriek of the chair, as Hawthorne feels on his neck “a chill of the uncanny,” as if the shriek had arisen in his own “haunted, reverberant skull” (277). Just as the mask formed a hollow resonance chamber for the Greek actor, projecting his character outwards, so Updike translates Hawthorne from the world of the stable, fixed persona to the realms of fluidity, and dissolution. The regions of darkness are not so easily excluded, and their presence remains continuous through art across the ages.

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NOTES 1. John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration, A Novel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992), 367. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 2. James Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998), 137. 3. John Updike, “Freedom and Equality: Two American Bluebirds,” in More Matter. Essays and Criticism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999), 10. 4. Updike, “Freedom and Equality,” 13. 5. Ibid., 10. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Ibid., 11. 8. John Updike, “She’s Got Personality,” in More Matter. Essays and Criticism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999), 606. 9. Ibid., 608. 10. John Updike, “Lust,” in More Matter. Essays and Criticism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999), 45. 11. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage, 1991), xiii. 12. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture. Essays (London: Penguin, 1992), vii. 13. Paglia, Sexual Personae, 1. 14. Ibid., 1. 15. Ibid., 2. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture, 13. 18. Paglia, Sexual Personae, 5. 19. Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture, 109. 20. Paglia, Sexual Personae, 92. 21. Ibid., 11. 22. Ibid., 17. 23. Ibid., 11. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. Ibid., 4. 26. Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture, 102. 27. Updike, “Freedom and Equality,” 4. 28. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 29. Paglia, Sexual Personae, 255–56. 30. Ibid., 3. 31. Ibid., 624. 32. Ibid., 626. 33. Ibid., 652. 34. Ibid., 652. 35. Ibid., 665. 36. Aristophanes, Three Plays by Aristophanes. Staging Women, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Henderson (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), lines 845–1025.

WORKS CITED Aristophanes. Three Plays by Aristophanes. Staging Women. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Henderson. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. First published as La jeune née. Paris: Union gé né rale d'é ditions, 1975.

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Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991. First published Yale University Press, 1990. ———. Sex, Art and American Culture. Essays. London: Penguin, 1992. Schiff, James. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. Updike, John. Buchanan Dying. London: André Deutsch, 1974. ———. Memories of the Ford Administration. A Novel. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992. ———. “Freedom and Equality: Two American Bluebirds.” More Matter. Essays and Criticism. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999, 3–15. ———. “Lust.” More Matter. Essays and Criticism. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999, 42–46. ———. “She’s Got Personality.” More Matter. Essays and Criticism. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999, 603–10.

Chapter Four

John Updike’s Poetics of Hope Jo Gill

Although best known and almost exclusively studied as a novelist, John Updike’s writing career was book-ended by his work as a poet. 1 He published his first poem in 1946 in his school magazine, Chatterbox, and others in the early 1950s in the Harvard Lampoon. 2 In 1954, as he was later to recall, his “breakthrough” came with the acceptance by the New Yorker of a poem, “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums.” 3 His first book was a collection of poems, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, published in 1958—one year before his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), and two years before the work of fiction for which he is best known, Rabbit, Run (1960). A poem from The Carpentered Hen (“Ex-Basket-ball Player”) suggested the character of Harry Angstrom and thus provided what Donald Greiner calls the “ur-text” for the Rabbit sequence of novels. 4 Over the next five decades, Updike was to publish another eight volumes of poetry, including Telephone Poles (1963), Midpoint (1969), Americana (2001), and, posthumously, Endpoint (2009). This essay seeks to restore Updike’s work as a poet to critical attention and to suggest that it is through reading his poetry that we are best able to track his lifelong engagement with cultural, historical, and political change. Poetry, I will argue, provided Updike with a form and a language in which to examine political issues both as broadly conceived (for example, changing gender roles) and in their specificity (the Iraq War or the 2008 global financial crisis). It enabled him to compress or crystalize particularly pressing concerns, thus bringing a greater degree of focus than we sometimes find in the fiction, while also allowing for the exploration of various subject positions and the recognition of differences of perspective—both crucial political insights. In poems as varied thematically and stylistically and as far apart chronologically as “Superman” (Carpentered Hen), “Bendix” (Telephone 61

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Poles), “Subway Love” (Midpoint), “Icarus” (Americana), and the long, late sequence “Endpoint,” Updike leaves an invaluable and hitherto unexamined record of the dynamics of postwar American life, from the Cold War through the first and second Gulf Wars to the Obama era. In these and other poems, Updike turns his sardonic eye on the affairs of the day and uses poetry to calibrate, or in poetic terms to get the measure of, otherwise dichotomous positions. It is in the final and, to my mind, great poems of Endpoint that Updike finds a definitive political and indeed poetic voice, and with this a saving degree of hope. It is here that his poetry works best to distil order from the contemporary political chaos. LIGHT AND SERIOUS Beginning as a writer in the early 1950s, Updike enthusiastically aligned himself with the then widespread mode of light or occasional verse. This was a form to which he was to return again and again over the years, even as the mood changed, and as his peers and contemporary literary commentators began to focus their attention on more “serious poetry.” 5 Updike was aware of the shift in temperature. As he recalled in his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Carpentered Hen (1982): “I did notice, around the time of John Kennedy’s assassination, that the market for comic, topical rhymes was slowly drying up.” 6 Nevertheless, he continued to use and to value light verse as a medium for telling important stories well: “Light verse’s hyper-ordering of language through alliteration, rhyme, and pun is a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word not entirely lacking in Promethean resonance” (xvii). From this point of view, light verse is simultaneously socially engaged (“dealing with the universe”), self-reflexive (exhibiting a self-consciousness about its own language more familiar in avant-garde and postmodern poetries) and performative; it brings things into being through its own declamatory effects. As Updike acknowledges, light verse is a form that waxes and wanes in particular cultural and political circumstances. W. H. Auden, writing in the introduction to his Oxford Book of Light Verse in the late 1930s when fascism was on the rise, was to defend its latent seriousness and to argue that it is a form uniquely suited to the conditions of democracy: “poetry which is at the same time light and adult can only be written in a society which is both integrated and free.” 7 Likewise, Updike relished the liberty (in the sense both of the freedom and the right) to use light verse as a mechanism for highlighting the perceived inadequacies, inequalities, and vanities of postwar American life. He returns to the topic in his 1964 essay, “Rhyming Max” (a review for the New Yorker of a collection of Max Beerbohm’s verse) and again in the preface to his own Collected Poems (1993), where although he is at pains to distinguish “light

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verse” from (real?) “poems,” he is equally intent on showing that both give him the purposeful and “excited sensation of being a maker, a poiētēs.” 8 For Updike, light or occasional verse retained an important critical edge. The form allowed him, under the veneer of polite or witty observation, to make political points often in highly condensed and thus incisive (even barbed) style. To take a couple of early and disparate examples of occasional verse used for polemical purposes, “An Ode,” from The Carpentered Hen, is prompted, as the epigraph explains, by a 1955 Life editorial: “Wanted: An American Novel.” The poem sets its playful riposte in terms that signal and satirize the magazine’s patriotic demands. The call for a literature that celebrates, to quote Life, “the incredible accomplishments of our day,” is met by a pledge to cover “The home, the mill, the hearth, the Bill / Of Rights, et cet., et cet.” The dismissive “et cet., et cet.” mocks the emptiness of the magazine’s aspirations (8). “Superman,” in the same collection, in spite of its comic and effervescent surface (“I drive my car to supermarket, / The way I take is superhigh,”) warns of creeping consumerism (“Supersuds are what I buy”), globalization (“supersonic” planes) and—in anticipation of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, The Silent Spring—environmental threat (“Superphosphate-fed foods”). His next collection, Telephone Poles (1963), its light verse veneer notwithstanding, also speaks to the Cold War, space race, consumerism, and its politically conformist context. Written across the Eisenhower and into the Kennedy years, these poems work on several levels both to affirm a surface narrative (for example, of shared enjoyment of postwar peace and prosperity) and to expose some of the unsettling sub-currents that lie beneath. In his essay, “Rhyming Max,” Updike is clear that the “artifice” of light verse is always and necessarily conjoined with “the inhuman darkness of reality.” 9 The opening poem, “Bendix,” first published in the New Yorker on February 15, 1958, exemplifies this relationship by taking an apparently unpromising everyday object, the Bendix washing machine, and wrestling from it a subtle but nevertheless telling commentary on the conditions of postwar suburban domesticity, masculinity, consumerism, faith, and violence (the poem closes with an image of “apocalypse”). 10 A later poem, “Cosmic Gall,” adopts the guise of the ordinary man bombarded with Sputnik-era scientific insights (5). It begins with an epigraph taken from a 1960 article in the periodical American Scientist, “An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics,” which describes the action of neutrinos on the human body. Updike has fun with the concept, imagining neutrinos passing through skin and walls and “barriers of class,” but what he doesn’t specify is that the research on which the article was based, as the synopsis in American Scientist shows, was conducted “for the President’s Science Advisory Committee and the [. . .] Atomic Energy Commission in connection with the proposed Federal Program to support high energy accelerator physics.” 11 There is thus a poten-

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tially troubling subtext to the speaker’s bemusement. “Sonic Boom,” likewise, shows the effect of the contemporary space race—and specifically the rush to develop ever more powerful military jet planes—on the ordinary American who must learn, when the “Thump of Doom” is heard, to “Relax. It’s sonic boom” (13). The poem first appeared in the New Yorker in August 1959. Some three years later, an unsigned talk piece, “Boom,” in the same magazine, observed: “As if the poor Pentagon didn’t have enough headaches these days, it is now being assailed by a mounting wave of public indignation over the Jet Age phenomenon known as sonic boom.” 12 The report quotes the Air Force major charged with community relations on this issue who explains that: “Since 1957, which was the first statistically significant boom year, we’ve received some thirty-five hundred claims” (33). He proceeds, as though to confirm Updike’s point, “We can only hope that [as jet planes proliferate] the public may have accepted sonic boom as a normal, reassuring sound” (34). In this and many other examples, Updike’s light verse engages explicitly with its historical and political moment, and although it is tempting (a temptation to which Updike himself has sometimes fallen prey) to dismiss the light and occasional work, it is also important to note, as Cary Nelson has argued in a slightly different context, that even poetry in conventional modes might be a “vehicle for sharply focused social commentary.” 13 In a 1968 interview with the Paris Review, Updike defended his writing as follows (he is talking about his novels, but the point, I think, extends to his occasional poetry): “My fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more history in it than history books, just as there is more breathing history in archaeology than in a list of declared wars and changes of government.” 14 Drawing on Siobhan Phillips’s work in The Poetics of the Everyday, we might say that it is precisely in Updike’s engagement with the “daily doings of ordinary people” that his strength as a verse chronicler of, and political commentator on, post-war American culture lies. Phillips describes the poetics of the everyday as a poetics that recognizes how “daily life can be a vital form as well as a central subject” and makes of this a democratizing vision of the “structures of living that all people share.” 15 In other words, political life is experienced and expressed on an immediate and quotidian basis as much as on a macro level. We might add—and this is a key insight of Updike’s poetry in all of its modes—that contemporary politics come to us through a variety of routes including our own day-to-day encounters, our engagement with news media and other forms of popular culture, and our understanding (always already mediated) of the nation’s history. If Updike’s poetry is interested in politics, it is also interested in the processes by which the nation’s politics are expressed, received, and understood. As just one of many examples, “Meditation on a News Item” from Telephone Poles offers a quizzical commentary (or, perhaps, a meta-commentary) on a Life report of a 1960

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meeting between Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro wherein the two iconic figures are engaged in a fishing match (37). The winner is self-proclaimed amateur, Castro. The poem takes evident delight in imagining the circumstances which led to the encounter and takes issue with Life magazine’s deadpan coverage of what, by any measure, must have been an astonishing moment. And in seeking to imagine how the match could possibly have come about (did Castro really have to fill out an application form identifying himself as a dictator, Updike asks), the poem both exposes and troubles our sense of the difference and the relationship between these distinct cultures and the men who represent them. By the time of Midpoint (1969), the national mood has further changed, and although a long section of light verse is included in this collection, the influence of the more introspective strains of confessionalism, the more experimental poetics of the San Francisco poets, and the urbanity of the New York school are apparent. We see this in the long title poem with its attempt to bring the personal and the political together through a combination of selfscrutiny, historic critique, formal experimentation, and polemic. 16 More successfully, perhaps, poems such as “Report of Health” and “My Children at the Dump” develop what was to become a distinctive and compelling lyric voice. This is at one and the same time intimate and open, self-referential and shared, personal and, to an extent, collective (68, 70). The voice persists in many of the poems of Tossing and Turning (1977) and even among the ekphrastic, nature, and travel poems of Facing Nature (1986), where Updike’s rueful observations guide his readers through an increasingly unfamiliar modern world. To return to Midpoint: here, it is Updike’s rendering of everyday experience which invites recognition and empathy and, in turn, carries a political resonance. In “My Children at the Dump,” for example, he is speaking for a particular constituency of men who feel themselves to be cast adrift from the norms of family, gender, and work that had hitherto pertained. “Fireworks” turns the everyday experience of watching July 4th celebrations into a critical evaluation of some of the old saws of American political life, marking a timely intervention in this decade of civil rights, Vietnam conflict and resistance, feminism, and counter-cultural radicalism. The poem presents the celebratory fireworks of the title as a series of “spasms” of light, as a “terminal display,” and as a dangerously jingoistic frenzy which leaves the watching children’s faces “in bleached dismay,” thereby exposing the relationship between violence in Vietnam and patriotism on American shores (47). Throughout this collection, small town and suburban America retain a hold on the imagination, but Midpoint also ventures into Cold War Europe (see the sequence of “Postcards from Soviet Cities”) and beyond. It is the first collection to expressly consider the racial politics of the time, for example, in “Subway Love,” a highly charged poem which works by simultane-

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ously establishing and undermining the speaker’s particular (white, male) position vis-à-vis the black woman who is the poem’s ostensible object. “Subway Love” opens with an apostrophe to a “Negress serene” who the speaker has spotted on the subway (74). In using this term of address— already contentious by the time of the poem’s 1969 publication—Updike is emphasizing and thereby both ironizing and critiquing his viewer’s prejudice. As Lerone Bennett, Jr., writing in Ebony in November 1967 explains: “A large and vocal group is pressing an aggressive campaign for the use of the word ‘Afro-American’ as the only historically accurate and humanly significant designation of this large and pivotal portion of the American population.” Bennett cites Dick Edwards of the black newspaper The New York Amsterdam News which had dropped “Negro” in favor of “AfroAmericans”: “There is a cringing from the word ‘Negro,’ especially by the young, because of the oppression into which we are born, and because that name was imposed on us.” 17 The issue is one of power, of language, and of the right to assign identity. Updike’s speaker (a “poor sooty white man”) proves incapable, despite his best efforts, of imposing the name “Negress serene” on the woman. In the final stanza she breaks free of his gaze, exits the train, and ascends “into night,” leaving him powerless, isolated, and exposed. Thus a poem that opens with a confident attempt at objectification reads, in the end, as an allegory for the disruption of hierarchies of gender and race in contemporary America (75). PAX AMERICANA? The early ebullience of the light verse, the self-conscious experimentation of Midpoint and the lyrical expansiveness and thematic range of Tossing and Turning and Facing Nature are succeeded by two late collections, Americana and Other Poems (2001) and Endpoint and Other Poems (2009). Both assume a more measured tone. The stance that Updike had earlier adopted, that of spokesperson for the ordinary American man faced with the challenges of everyday life, is still evident, but this position is now, at least to an extent, qualified or moderated. The voice is less declamatory, more tentative, and more willing to recognize and even to tolerate the complexities and nuances of contemporary politics. Americana and Other Poems opens with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s novel, Lord Jim, which sets the tone for this and, I would argue, his next collection (Endpoint) alike. The epigraph reads: “For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.” 18 In Americana, as in the earlier collections, Updike continues to trace the vicissitudes of con-

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temporary American life as manifested in ordinary and everyday experience, but this time he also seeks grounds for optimism among the chaos (Conrad’s sunny arrangements wrested from “disorder”). This collection, more than any other, looks at America from a slight remove and with a degree of selfconsciousness. It adopts a series of mobile perspectives (many of the poems are written while in transit) commensurate with the conditions of the postmodern age, or what Marc Augé defines as “supermodernity.” 19 The title poem, for example, as the subtitle explains, was first drafted at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on “Thursday, October 14, 1993” and recorded only on a page torn from an in-flight magazine. The manuscript is first lost, then found, resumed in New Jersey in November, lost again, and finally comes to fruition in the process of reading, even if that reading, as the final lines suggest, “struggles to consume” the meaning (5). Americana also includes some of the sardonic light and occasional verse common in earlier collections. “Slum Lords” takes a tilt at the absentee “superrich” with their multiple houses and their tendency to make ghost towns of whole neighborhoods (84). “Money” marvels at the flow of capital in the modern age. “Money is such a treat,” it opens, “It take up so little space.” In the former Soviet Union, by comparison, there is “nothing to buy, / nothing to spend” (85). One of several flight poems, “Icarus,” makes a more explicit political point. Like others in the collection (see “Americana” or “The Flight to Limbo”), the poem emerges from a specific and personal experience but has a resonance that far exceeds the occasion. Again, the frame is the relationship or tension between “disorder” and the “small conveniences” to which Joseph Conrad had alluded. The stakes in this case are high. The poem was completed on January 26, 1997, and because of its subject matter, and because it came out in this 2001 collection, it has been variously misread as a post-9/11 meditation on the fear of flying, and an uncanny foreshadowing of that day’s events. John McTavish, for example, proposes that this “scary” poem “virtually predicts the horror show.” 20 It has also been viewed, with understandable disquiet, as an expression of anti-Muslim prejudice. Mark Strand, considering the typescript for the New Republic, gently suggested to Updike that he might avoid offense by amending the rather confrontational opening line: “O.K. you are sitting in an airplane and / the person in the seat next to you is a sweaty, swarthy / gentleman of Middle Eastern origin” (14). 21 Updike declined the invitation. His refusal is significant. The first-person speaker’s position (emphatically not Updike’s—this is a necessary distinction; for political effect he is manipulating the lyric voice to suggest a persona not his own) is crucial to the tone and thus the meaning of the poem. A gentler opening would have undermined the poem’s exposé of the speaker’s unwarranted hostility. As it is, in his portrayal of the frightened and implicitly white, male traveler, Updike asks us to think carefully about the relationship between speaker and racialized “other,” about the preconceptions that cloud

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judgment, and about our own (the speaker’s and the readers’) complicity in fostering a climate of fear. The poem’s five irregular stanzas track the speaker’s ever-growing anxiety as he finds himself seated on a plane next to a traveler who is not only “swarthy” and apparently “Middle Eastern,” but who also carries a “bulky black brief-/case” which, in the speaker’s fevered imagination, he can hear “ticking, ticking” above the sound of the jet engines. The apparent horror of the situation is both exemplified and cast into comic relief in stanza two by the speaker’s primary concern—the inconvenience that his “careful packing” might end up as “floating sea-wrack five miles below.” The poem notably never names the “Middle Eastern” passenger as a terrorist. Indeed, it never uses the term. Instead, it guiles us as readers into making that association, into misreading the clues (the color of the man’s skin; the imagined sound of his “ticking, ticking” briefcase; his refusal to engage in conversation and apparent devotion to prayer) and thereby into imposing that identity on him. It is our assumptions that are at fault. Who poses the real threat here? Who is innocent (the quietly sleeping “gentleman”?) and who is guilty (the agitated observer?). In this respect, “Icarus” reads as a political parable for the age. That Updike is inviting us to reflect on our position is evident from the poem’s opening apostrophe to a “you” who is simultaneously the speaker himself (a self-referential “you”) and the poem’s readers, or a collective “you.” Imagine yourself into this position, the poem urges. What would you do? (What it doesn’t do, of course, is open out that “you” to include the person closest to him, his fellow-passenger, or indeed any “other” to whom the prejudiced speaker might object.) Even so, “Icarus” asks us to make the first of several important leaps of imagination or empathy without which the reconciliation of different ideologies, cultures, and beliefs cannot happen. It invites us to imagine ourselves into the speaker’s position and to share his anxiety and misplaced fear, or at least—and here we find one of several ethical twists in the poem—to accept his justification of how he arrived at his figurative destination. “Icarus” is a curious and, as I have indicated, a troubling poem. In this respect, it’s worth reading alongside Updike’s later novel, Terrorist (2006), which similarly deploys various forms of knowing, and unacknowledged, prejudice. But it is also, I think, to be credited for exposing the folly, or bad faith that lies at the heart of the speaker’s, and by implication, white America’s, approach to terrorism. In 2004, the official report on 9/11 cited “failures of imagination” as fundamental to the United States’ inability to anticipate and thus pre-empt the attack. 22 Updike’s poem, to an extent, substantiates this position. The speaker is at fault because he cannot see beyond the limits of his own imagination or cannot escape the prejudices that cloud his understanding of the situation. But the poem also suggests that too much imagination (the speaker’s febrile dread of all the things that might go wrong), or an

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imagination that is preoccupied only with the self (his “careful packing”), might be equally damaging. In the end, the poem asks us to think again and to think differently about our rights and responsibilities; the “Icarus,” of the title, of course, signals the shaming power of hubris. Most of the poems of Americana were written between April 1993 and September 2000. They thus span President Bill Clinton’s two terms of office and show us an America seeking an accommodation with its expansionist and industrial past, and its changing global status in the post-industrial present. By way of example, a series of six sonnets, “Corpus Christi,” “New Orleans,” “Corinth, MS,” “Reading, PA,” “Near Clifton, Perhaps,” and “NYC” (16–21) take us from the Gulf of Mexico northwards through the country’s one-time manufacturing heartlands (Reading, Pennsylvania, and Clifton, New Jersey) to Manhattan. En route, we see signs of past conflict (recent, as in the rusting hull of the World War II aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington, “moored across from the aquarium” in the first poem in the sequence) and, further in the past, such as the one-time railroad hub of Corinth, Mississippi, which in the Civil War was “hot / property for any army that could take it” but now remains “uncoveted.” These are nostalgic poems. “Reading, PA,” in particular, the city near which Updike grew up, looks back on years of boom and bust, celebrating Reading’s nineteenth-century heyday and mourning its rapid decline as industry relocated “and malls came in,” leaving the center “hollow, but for some Hispanic boys.” Memory persists, though, in filling and populating the landscape. A suspended aside in lines six and seven, littered with astonished exclamation marks, conveys the pull of the past: “Pomeroy’s / Department Store! soft pretzels! Santa Claus!” The octave picks up the theme and takes us further back into the city of memory. These are seductive scenes, exposed as chimerical by their very vibrancy (in other words, they are almost too good to be true). And indeed, whatever the truth of the city’s past posterity, all that now remains in the post-industrial present is “blank blue glass: banks and welfare offices” (19). This mood represents something of a keynote for the whole collection. There is a sense that in place of the former “populace” (italicized for emphasis in line 12), isolation and atomization have taken hold. 23 In “Corinth, MS,” the speaker laments, “I stood there all alone” (18). In “New Orleans,” we find that “all is spoiled” (17). “Near Clifton, Perhaps,” the gas stations “have no maps for sale,” while the terrain is “impossible to map,” and sales staff are “reluctant to give directions.” All in all, as the sonnet punningly concludes, it is a “sorry state” (20). Even New York City is to be understood as a hellish site of spectral and dissociated souls: “where lone / lost spirits preen” (21). We are close, here, to the tone of “affective dislocation” that Catherine Jurca sees as characteristic of much postwar American fiction. 24 Jurca’s point is that in the work of novelists from Sloan Wilson through Updike to Richard Ford, the affluent, white, male protagonist

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is able to perceive himself as alienated and to present his own privilege as a form of oppression. The insistence on memory throughout the collection signals something of the historical and cultural context in which it emerged and was read. As Colin Harrison, citing Frederic Jameson and Andreas Huyssen has suggested, a “‘crisis of historicity’ loomed over the last decades of the millennium, a sign of anxieties about the relationship to the past and a declining ability to imagine the world to come.’” 25 This “crisis” is manifested in Americana’s preoccupation with the relationship between the past and the present, between America as manufacturing powerhouse and America as a nation in industrial decline, between an America bound by its communities and America as a mismatched and dysfunctional collection of individuals. Americana depicts a nation no longer defined by its Cold War commitments but unable or unwilling to cede its global stature; a nation which has not yet reached a reconciliation with its past or any kind of racial equality but where affluent white men, such as the speaker, are embittered and dissatisfied. As Jurca, again, notes with respect to the fiction of the period, “anxiety has replaced complacency as the prevailing mood” (163). Americana is thus an inescapably political book in its exploration of what it means to be an American in this moment. It is a collection of observations, memories and propositions, hence the “Americana” of the title which suggests the curation of curiosities that somehow represent particular circumstances. But “Americana” also signals, and questions, the concept of “Pax Americana,” the assumed world dominance (military, cultural, economic, and political) of the United States in the postwar era—a situation that, as this collection shows, had started to unravel. This is an America of abandoned battlefields (“Corinth, MS”), redundant manufacturing sites (“Reading, PA”), and depleted ideologies (“Money”). Updike gives us a body politic whose decline and diminution are matched and mirrored in the inexorable decay of the speaker’s own home (“Replacing Sash Cords”) and failing health (“Song of Myself”). ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS In Updike’s final and posthumous collection, Endpoint (2009), he reaches something close to a reconciliation with the forces of history and finds in the process some vestiges of reassurance and even glimmers of hope. The sometimes self-pitying protestations of Americana give way to a more meditative and elegiac tone. The effect is deeply felt and highly personal, particularly in the opening sequence, “Endpoint.” I say this not to reduce his work to autobiography but, after Deborah Nelson, to invoke the particular political and historical circumstances in which this kind of self-revelation became pos-

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sible. 26 In looking back on his own story at this moment in time, in a culture that has given license to (male) self-scrutiny and to personal narratives of suffering, Updike also takes the opportunity to reflect, at least implicitly, on the life and times of his generation. The personal is also and always political. “March Birthday 2002, and After,” the first in the title sequence and one of a succession of anniversary poems, depicts the speaker’s declining health. As he ages and ails, the country advances. A one-time sign of modernity (the “Philco” radio in stanza two of part one—a brand that ceased production in the early 1960s) now reads as a metonym for his own obsolescence. 27 The familiar view from his bedroom window shows oil tankers approaching Boston and planes coming in to land—both signs of increasing globalization and the exponential exploitation of the environment. Part three of this opening poem, recalling a recent flight, gives us a hint of the terrorist threat which had, six months earlier, paralyzed the United States: The pilot takes us down Manhattan’s spine— [. . .] We seem too low, my palms begin to sweat. The worst can happen, we know it from the news.

Updike was in the city on September 11, 2001, and saw some of the events from the Brooklyn side of the river. Contributing to the New Yorker’s “Tuesday, And After” feature on September 24th (note the echo of the title in Updike’s later poem), he emphasizes the importance of ensuring that life goes on, even in the midst of crisis: “fly again we must; risk is a price of freedom.” 28 By extension, of course, art must continue to find a way to engage with political reality even, or especially, when manifested as violence. As Kristiaan Versluys notes of “Tuesday, And After” (and here I expand his point to include poetry): “Updike’s very prose demonstrates freedom in action. Aesthetics is turned into a form of ethics, in that the subtlety of his observations and the felicity of formulation counter the fierce literalness of terrorist violence and vouchsafe a sensibility utterly alien to the vehemence of blind ideological alliance.” 29 The following year, poem “03/18/03” in the sequence, the political resonance is more explicit. No longer recording the passing of time through birthdays, the speaker adopts war as a unit of measurement. Written just two days before the coalition attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, when as the New York Times and numerous other media reported, President George Bush and his allies had given Hussein forty-eight hours to leave the country, the poem is replete with geopolitical foreboding, cast in epic terms. 30 Part two opens: “The winds of war, warm winds in desert dust, / have been unleashed, the fifth war of my life” (5). The sense of impending crisis triggers memories of past conflicts, from Vietnam (the poem proposes that today’s anti-war protestors are “dust[ing]” off their banners and (re) mounting “their irreproach-

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able high nags”) back to World War II when the windows of the speaker’s childhood home “wore blackout” and he kept lookout for submarines in the sea beyond. Further back still, the final stanza invokes the men of World War I, popularly known as lions lead by donkeys, or in this poem’s terms, those who “serve from bleak necessity campaigns / conceived in cozy offices” (6). Birthday poems over the next few years are also written within the context of the escalating political conflict in the Middle East, even if this rarely features directly. “Tucson Birthday, 2004,” for example, opens with a vision of the baking Arizona landscape, of “melting tar,” “desert distances,” and “fuming, SUV-infested haste.” Such images inevitably bring to mind the cause and scene of the war in the oil states, a conflict that was then marking its first anniversary. In the first stanza of the second part of the poem, the metaphorical focus moves from sunlight to “sun damage” to the therapeutic burning of the “doctor’s liquid nitrogen attacks” and from there to an image of a “star / that flattens like a fist, and burns to kill.” Thus Updike takes us from the natural through the medical to the military. We recall that the first and second Gulf Wars were widely broadcast, often in real time (prompting Jean Baudrillard, in 1991, to assert that the first Gulf War could not and did not take place). 31 In his “Tuesday, And After” essay for the New Yorker, Updike recalls that seeing the attack on the second tower of the World Trade Center, “there persisted the notion that, as on television, this was not quite real” (28). In both cases, Updike confirms Baudrillard’s point that the war is a media spectacle while also questioning his thesis that this is all it is. Either way, the speaker’s health crisis serves as a synecdoche for the larger state of global politics. Other poems, besides those composed on a birthday theme, invoke the contours of social and political change. The underlying moment or occasion of these poems—that is, Updike’s own increasing age and, in turn, ill health and the limited mobility that came with successive courses of treatment— provides a specific and telling vantage point. At one and the same time, it heightens his sense of the passing of time, amplifies the significance of each day’s experiences, and exacerbates his impatience with the folly of contemporary political circumstances as, for example, in “The City Outside 12/11/ 08” which depicts “atrocities, default, / and fraud” (Endpoint 25). Rather like in Americana, the speaker’s gradual decline offers a mirror to the financial crisis then enveloping the United States and other Western economies. Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, had filed for bankruptcy on September 15, one of many signs that all was not well with the hitherto bullish economy. Later in the collection, a series of eighteen sonnets written on various themes and occasions, from a visit to France (“Evening Concert, SainteChapelle”) to the contemplation of a crew of Brazilian and Greek painters at work on his home in America (“Stripped”), simultaneously displays the crystallization of Updike’s political thought and his growing sense of the under-

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lying connections that sustain global capitalism. Second in the sonnet sequence is the three-part “A Wee Irish Suite” (“Paris-Dublin, at Night,” “Portrush, Northern Ireland,” and “New Resort Hotel, Portmarnock”). “ParisDublin, At Night,” opens the “Suite” with a sense of foreboding. The night flight in the opening octave is through a “void” or “swarm” or poisonous environment (66). The sestet provides little relief; the “Channel nothingness” persists, the “Irish sea kills us all,” and even the cityscape of Dublin, when it comes into view, offers at best an ambiguous welcome. The second poem, “Portrush, Northern Ireland,” continues the theme. It opens with an admonition (a sign in the hotel bedroom giving the penalty for smoking) and then moves on to a further warning about a group of youngsters gathered in a bar whose humor can barely disguise their history of violence or the uneasy truce that pertains. The final sonnet in the “Suite,” “New Resort Hotel, Portmarnock,” indicts the flimsy excesses of the hotel accommodation: the sockets and gadgets that don’t work, the vacuous (hence the disruptive line break) promotion of a “Preferred / Lifestyle.” These serve as local metaphors for the unsustainable rise of the so-called Celtic Tiger, shown here with its “crooked teeth,” and thereby foreshadow the ensuing crash which was then, as we saw in “The City Outside 12/11/08,” beginning to bite (66–67). As the larger sequence of “Sonnets” of which this group forms part confirms, this is a global situation. “Phnom Penh,” “Madurai, India,” “St. Petersburg,” Vermont, Florida, and various places between are the stopping points on this end-of-life tour of cultures and places. Each time, and this is in part an effect of the arrangement of the “Sonnets” as a distinct group, it is the underlying connections—the “cobwebs” and “thin filaments” as “Paris-Dublin, At Night” puts it—that merit attention. Unifying themes include mobility across space and time (the motorbike ride and “traffic jam” of “Phnom Penh,” the sandal-wearing traveler in a snowy Boston airport in “White Horizon”), the global market for goods and services (street hawkers selling postcards in “Madurai, India,” the “poshest hotel” in “Subcontinental,” and the “pricey white hospital space” in “Chambered Nautilus”) and the persistence of belief and/or ideology. These are symbolized by the illuminated windows and surging music of “Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle,” the legacy of Pol Pot in “Phnom Penh,” and the “glorious cause / for Hectors’ and Achilles’ men to die for” in “Fair Helen” (65–78). Again, the contemporary and seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East, with its roots in the (unholy) clash of culture, capital, and ideology, is a persistent, if often implicit, backdrop.

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THE AUDACITY OF HOPE In this final, thoughtful, and elegiac collection, Updike takes his immediate circumstances (a trip to the Big-Box store in “Birthday Shopping, 2007,” or “A Colonoscopy,” or a “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting”) as the catalyst for a series of often mournful deliberations on the past—a past that grows increasingly present to him, as his present horizons diminish. He looks back, as Sylvia Plath puts it in her 1961 poem, “Tulips,” on “a country far away as health.” 32 The role or persona that he tends to adopt in Endpoint, with more than a hint of wry self-consciousness, is that of nostalgic curmudgeon: “agèd, average, dullish, lame, and halt” as “Flying to Florida” puts it (74). The places that swim back into view, including Shillington, Boston, and the Manhattan of Updike’s New Yorker days, stand for a promise and a sense of community and nationhood, now apparently lost or at least altered beyond recognition. To an extent, the tone and the trajectory echo that which Donald Greiner has observed in the fiction: “Updike’s view of American exceptionalism becomes less assured as the 1950s fade in the glare of the dying century.” 33 However, I would argue that the poems of Endpoint, and in particular of the title sequence, offer a rather different stance; that the persona of the poems is aware of, and keen to shake off, the guise of pessimist, and that rather than becoming “less assured,” this late collection shows Updike embracing a saving degree of optimism. Indeed, what we can say is that Updike is growing into his own voice; that he is stepping free of his sometime, and restrictive, role of spokesperson for a particular group of disaffected white men and instead is looking for new ways of understanding his personal and political circumstances. There is a renewed interest here in the power of the word and in the relationship between rhetorical and lyric language, the oracular and the personal style. We see this most particularly in “Oblong Ghosts 11/6/08” from the “Endpoint” sequence. Written just two days after Barack Obama’s win in the presidential election, the poem opens with an utterance at once intimate and collective: “A wake-up call?” The ostensible subject is new evidence of pneumonia in the speaker’s lungs, the “oblong ghosts” of the poem’s title and third line. But the idiom also invokes contemporary campaign rhetoric. It is a phrase that Obama used in a 2005 speech commending those writers and artists who were capable of “jolt[ing] us awake from our political cynicism with a few ingenious images and a clear phrase that can often speak more truth than a thousand words. And this is the kind of wake-up call our politics need today more than ever.” 34 Interestingly, in light of Updike’s childhood ambition to be a cartoonist, Obama was referring to Herb Block and Tony Auth, two political cartoonists with whose work Updike would have been familiar. The concept of the wake-up call also circulated more widely in the run up to the 2008 election as a way of signaling the need for change. The

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metaphor of the “call” or a “calling” was repeatedly used by Obama, in part to give his campaign the stamp of necessity, in part to show his willingness to work in dialogue (a form of call and response), and in part to signal that his was a sacred duty or religious calling. See, for example, his commitment to respond to “the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot [. . .] and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land” in his New Hampshire primary speech of January 2008 or “the call for a new dawn in the Middle East” in a July 2008 speech in Berlin. His election night victory oration returned to the concept of the “call”: “This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.” 35 After his own particular “Wake-up call,” Updike’s “Oblong Ghosts” proceeds to anticipate the progress of his diagnosis, reporting ruefully that the “pneumonia” which shadows one lung may prove dangerous to the very young or the “very old (over 75).” It’s a poignant moment, masked by a characteristically sardonic edge, and emphasized by the pause before the sestet. Here, at the volta, the sonnet turns, summons its strength, and looks away from the specific personal crisis (the “wake-up call”) to the broader context in which it has been received. “Meanwhile,” the sestet begins, “our President Obama waits / downstairs to be unwrapped.” The metaphor encapsulates the excitement of the unknown and operates on the speaker as a tonic, enabling him to situate his own immediate experience amidst a longer and more affirmative narrative of change. It is here, I suggest, that we see Updike reaching an accommodation with his fate and identifying with the restorative promise of Obama’s candidacy. There is a careful equilibrium in the poem, sustained by the conventions of the sonnet form (and corroborated by the very young/very old binary of line eight), which situates it at a pivotal, and also liminal, point in the speaker’s and the nation’s story. And it is in this space that the speaker, in a move that seems to surprise even himself, is able to find redemption and at least a glimmer (“air soft and bright”) of optimism (defined by Lauren Berlant as “a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us”). 36 The image in the sestet of the child poised with his hand securely “upon the banister,” as he anticipates the pleasure to come, particularly when understood in the context of the speaker’s recent diagnosis, gives us a compelling example of the audacity of hope that was Barack Obama’s credo. “Oblong Ghosts” is a sublime poem, not only in its tenderly self-elegiac tone but also in the way that it visibly takes deep succor from the promise of Obama’s election. Poised on his own threshold between life and death, just as Obama is poised in that strange period between the election and the inauguration (he “waits / downstairs to be unwrapped”), and coming at the end of a period of private and public trauma, Updike unexpectedly finds something to look forward to. The excitement of the moment, captured in his childhood memories of Christmas mornings at the family home in Shilling-

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ton, and in metaphors of soft, clean air and evergreen trees, suggests that Updike has not yet entirely lost faith in America. The election allows him to think again about the relationship between past and present; self and community; the personal and the political and—the odds notwithstanding—to respond to Obama’s “call” to cast aside “our political cynicism” with a new poetics of hope. At the end of his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, Obama meditates on the theme of his title: That was the best of the American spirit, I thought—having the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family [. . .] we had some control—and therefore responsibility—over our own fate. It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent. 37

Poetry, more even than fiction, allows for the distillation and representation of these complex conditions. In “Oblong Ghosts,” Updike drops the sometimes brittle façade and skeptical consciousness of earlier poems and commits instead to a poetics of intimacy, and of some urgency, both in the service of the political good. Updike, of course, grew up in the shadow of W. H. Auden’s famous assertion, in his “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But he shows himself here ready to admit the possibility, to risk believing, that things might be otherwise. In Endpoint, Updike is able to wrest some kind of order from his own and his country’s recent history, and out of this to find cause for personal and political optimism. NOTES 1. See Stacy Ostler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), the essays in which make only fleeting mention of the poetry and overlook two extant collections, Telephone Poles (1963) and Facing Nature (1986). 2. For more on Updike’s early life, see Jack De Bellis with David Silcox, John Updike’s Early Years (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013) and for a brief consideration of the poetry, see Donald J. Greiner, The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981). 3. Updike was later to recall the impact of that publication: “their acceptance of a poem and a story by me in June of 1954 remains the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.” Charles Thomas Samuels, “John Updike, the Art of Fiction 43,” Paris Review 45 (1968): 89. 4. Donald Greiner, “Contextualizing John Updike,” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 1 (2002): 194–202. 5. Robert Von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 10. 6. John Updike, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. 2nd Ed. (New York: Knopf, 1982), xv. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses.

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7. W. H. Auden, ed., The Oxford Book of Light Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938). 8. John Updike, Collected Poems, 1953–1993 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), xxiii–xxiv. 9. John Updike, “Rhyming Max,” New Yorker, March 7, 1964, 177. 10. John Updike, Telephone Poles and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1963), 3. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 11. M. A. Ruderman and A. H. Rosenfeld, “An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics,” American Scientist 48, no. 2 (1960): 209. 12. “Boom,” New Yorker, May 19, 1962, 33–34. Updike had previously submitted talk pieces to the New Yorker; this particular one is unsigned and he had stopped regularly contributing by this time. Nevertheless, published after his poem “Sonic Boom,” it shows something of his influence. For more on the New Yorker years, see Thomas Karshan, “Portrait of the Rabbit as a Young Beau: John Updike, New Yorker Humorist” in Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical, ed. Fiona Green (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 161–87. 13. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 23. 14. Samuels, “John Updike,” 106. 15. Siobhan Phillips, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1, 21. 16. John Updike, Midpoint and Other Poems (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969), 84–86. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 17. Lerone Bennett, Jr., “What’s in a Name? Negro vs. Afro-American vs. Black,” Ebony 23 (November 1967): 46. 18. John Updike, Americana and Other Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), vi. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 19. Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2008). 20. John McTavish, Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016), 111, 114. 21. Mark Strand, Letter to John Updike. n.d. [1997?]. John Updike papers. Houghton Library Harvard University. Box 198, folder 2521. 22. “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec. htm. 23. Robert Putnam’s essay, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” (expanded in book form in 2000) was first published in Journal of Democracy in 1995 (vol. 6, no. 1) and seems to capture some of the same angst as Updike’s poem. 24. Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7. 25. Colin Harrison, American Culture in the 1990s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 3. 26. Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 27. John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009), 3–4. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 28. John Updike, “Tuesday, And After,” New Yorker, September 24, 2001, 29. 29. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 154. 30. See Michael R. Gordon, “Allies Will Move In, Even If Saddam Hussein Moves Out,” New York Times, March 18, 2004. A16. 31. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). 32. Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 160. 33. Donald Greiner, “Updike, Rabbit, and the Myth of American Exceptionalism” in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacy Ostler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 150.

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34. Wolfgang Mieder, “Yes We Can”: Barack Obama’s Proverbial Rhetoric (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 184. 35. Mary Frances Berry and Josh Gottheimer, Power in Words: The Stories Behind Barack Obama’s Speeches from the State House to the White House (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 149, 219, 255. See for example Deepak Chopra’s essay, “Obama Is ‘Wake Up,’ McCain Is ‘Let Me Sleep,’” Huffington Post, October 27, 2008. 36. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses,” New Formations 63 (2007–8): 33. 37. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 356–57.

WORKS CITED Auden, W. H. ed. The Oxford Book of Light Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. 2nd Ed. London: Verso, 2008. Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated by Paul Patton. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Bennett, Lerone, Jr. “What’s in a Name? Negro vs. Afro-American vs. Black.” Ebony 23 (November 1967): 46–48, 50–52, 54. Berlant, Lauren. “Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses.” New Formations 63 (2007–8): 33–51. Berry, Mary Frances, and Josh Gottheimer. Power in Words: The Stories Behind Barack Obama’s Speeches from the State House to the White House. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010. “Boom.” New Yorker, May 19, 1962. Chopra, Deepak. “Obama Is ‘Wake Up,’ McCain Is ‘Let Me Sleep.’” Huffington Post, October 27, 2008. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/obama-is-wake-up-mccain-i_b_ 129620.html?guccounter=1. De Bellis, Jack, and David Silcox. John Updike’s Early Years. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2013. Gordon, Michael R. “Allies Will Move In, Even If Saddam Hussein Moves Out.” New York Times, March 18, 2004. Greiner, Donald. “Contextualizing John Updike.” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 194–202. ———. The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981. ———. “Updike, Rabbit, and the Myth of American Exceptionalism.” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, edited by Stacy Ostler, 149–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Harrison, Colin. American Culture in the 1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Karshan, Thomas. “Portrait of the Rabbit as a Young Beau: John Updike, New Yorker Humorist.” Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical, edited by Fiona Green. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. McTavish, John. Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016. Mieder, Wolfgang. “Yes We Can”: Barak Obama’s Proverbial Rhetoric. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Nelson, Deborah. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.” https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.htm.

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Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Ostler, Stacy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Phillips, Siobhan. The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Plath, Sylvia, Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Putnam, Robert. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (1995): 65–78. Ruderman, M. A. and A. H. Rosenfeld. “An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics.” American Scientist 48, no. 2 (1960): 209–17. Samuels, Charles Thomas. “John Updike, the Art of Fiction 43.” Paris Review 45 (1968): 84–117. Strand, Mark. Letter to John Updike. n.d. [1997?]. John Updike papers. Houghton Library. Box 198, folder 2521. Updike, John. Americana and Other Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001. ———. The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. 2nd Ed. New York: Knopf, 1982. ———. Collected Poems: 1953–1993. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. ———. Endpoint and Other Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009. ———. Facing Nature: Poems. London: Andre Deutsch, 1986. ———. Midpoint and Other Poems. London: Andre Deutsch, 1969. ———. Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. ———. “Rhyming Max.” New Yorker, March 7, 1964. ———. “Sonic Boom.” New Yorker, August 8, 1959. ———. Telephone Poles and Other Poems. New York: Knopf, 1963. ———. Tossing and Turning: Poems. London: Andre Deutsch, 1977. ———. “Tuesday, And After.” New Yorker, September 24, 2001. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Chapter Five

Updike on Demagoguery Reconsidering Rabbit Redux in the Age of Trump Ethan Fishman

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans have struggled to account for the election of a president who, to many citizens, would appear to be a volatile demagogue whose erratic behavior seemingly puts the national interest of the United States at risk. The conventional method to understanding Donald Trump’s presidency would be to consult classic social scientific research on the subject. Sociologist Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) and psychologist Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) both developed theories about the social conditions necessary for the appearance of demagogues in democratic republics, and their respective works offer one way we might understand Trump’s victory. Another approach would be to read fiction that explores themes in American cultural history that illuminate the factors that produce demagogues. In many ways, John Updike’s fiction would seem to be especially relevant in the age of Trump. Perhaps more so than any of his literary contemporaries, Updike chronicled the changes that transformed American life in the second half of the twentieth century, his work closely focusing on the shifting contours of middle-class life. Indeed, Updike’s fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in particular his 1971 novel Rabbit Redux, offers a fascinating portrait of some of the political and cultural forces that, fifty years later, would help produce the conditions that propelled Trump to the presidency. In Rabbit Redux, Updike introduces Skeeter, an African American Vietnam veteran turned political radical, whose beliefs and outsized persona unsettle and, to a certain extent, seduce Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom as he attempts to make sense of the political and personal chaos that defines his life in the late 1960s. Through Updike’s depiction of Skeeter, we can see him consider both the appeal of demagogues 81

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and the consequences that compel individuals to follow them. Beyond exploring the consequences that can befall those who are seduced by demagogues, Updike, in his novel Couples (1968) as well as his short story “The Hillies” (1969), explores the upbringing of children who one day may be ripe for the exploitation of demagogues. While focusing largely on Rabbit Redux, this essay will explore how Updike’s fiction furthers our understanding of demagoguery by beautifully humanizing the conditions that Durkheim and Fromm theorize in their academic work. In their respective studies, Durkheim and Fromm investigate the process by which people acquire feelings of normlessness, or anomie, and powerlessness, or alienation, during periods of extreme change that result in them losing their jobs, status in society, and moral compass. Durkheim concentrates on the relationship between anomie and social dysfunction. When such radical transformations deprive people of what were once the fundamental means of structure and stability in their lives, they are thrown back wholly on their own resources with, Durkheim concludes, disastrous outcomes. They become disconnected from one another, develop a sense of worthlessness, participate in self-destructive personal and political behavior and, in extreme cases, kill themselves. Fromm discusses what he calls the “ambiguity of freedom.” 1 While freedom serves as the foundation for self-reliance and democratic governance, he maintains, it also has the potential to strip away the communal bonds that help people ward off their anxieties about existing in isolation, futility and despair. In times of societal turmoil, when their sense of alienation can increase exponentially, Fromm argues, people may be tempted to support a demagogue who promises to restore constancy to their lives in return for complete obeisance. “Aloneness, fear, and bewilderment remain; people cannot stand it forever,” he writes. 2 Under these circumstances, they may make the cruelly ironic choice of combating powerlessness with tyrannic rule. Durkheim and Fromm offer timely warnings to contemporary voters who feel estranged from the American political system for being unresponsive to their needs and look to politicians like Donald Trump for simplistic solutions to the complicated causes of their estrangement. Like many social scientists, however, Durkheim and Fromm tend to deal with flesh and blood human beings as if they were abstract integers. Updike’s fiction transforms these cold abstractions into vivid, personal portrayals. As Robert Detweiler has observed, Updike possesses the uncanny ability to impress “his readers with the intensity and complexity of modern individual and collective neuroses through the brilliance and rightness of his narrative art.” 3 In Rabbit Redux, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the protagonist of four of Updike’s most celebrated novels, puts Durkheim and Fromm’s theories into daily practice. As the “angst” in Rabbit’s name implies, he embodies the very personality traits demagogues frequently seek to exploit.

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The year is 1969. Rabbit is residing in a Pennsylvania suburb not far from his birthplace. A producer has scouted out the area as the setting for a film that is to take place in a typical middle-American town. 4 It has been a tumultuous time for both the United States as a whole and Rabbit in particular. Virtually everything in his life is being challenged, leading him to suffer from a serious spiritual malaise. He is fired from his occupation as a linotype operator in favor of a cheaper automated form of offset printing technology. His wife is cuckolding him. His home is destroyed by arsonists. He is forfeiting the respect of his young son. All this is happening to him during a decade Updike once claimed was “the most dissentious” in the history of the United States “since the Civil War,” as it involved inner city race riots, women’s liberation, a drug epidemic, students occupying college campuses in opposition to the Vietnam War, and astronauts leaving Earth to land on the moon. 5 To make matters worse, Rabbit experiences what historian Richard Hofstadter calls “status resentment.” 6 This condition did not exist in feudal cultures where people had no choice but to accept their predetermined position in the socio-economic order. With the coming of social mobility, however, unprecedented psychological pressure was placed on citizens, whose value as human beings now became tied to their ability to acquire and keep a good job. According to Hofstadter, therefore, when white men like Rabbit are replaced in the American workforce by machines, women or minorities, much more is at stake for them than their unemployment. Amidst the tumult, Rabbit becomes morally unmoored. “Where has the side of right gone,” he wonders early in the novel (30). “When my wife walked out on me, I kind of lost my bearings,” he confesses to a police officer in the wake of his house being destroyed by arsonists (284). Rabbit has mental images of floating on a “parabolic curve, trying to steer on it, though the thing he was trying to steer was fighting him, like a broken sled” (32). In his bewilderment, Rabbit makes some ominous decisions. He randomly meets Jill, a runaway eighteen-year-old white girl estranged from an affluent Connecticut family, and takes her home to live with him. Tagging along is Skeeter, who shoots the girl up with heroin and acts as her pimp. Calling himself “the black Jesus. . . . There is none other” (187) and proclaiming that “There is no salvation, ‘cepting through me” (233), Skeeter agitates for the murderous overthrow of the white-dominated status quo. He is, in many ways, a classic demagogue. He instinctively recognizes that people suffering from extreme cases of anomie and alienation, like Rabbit and Jill, are desperately in need of direction from someone like him. “Confusion is God’s very face,” Skeeter asserts in one of his many lectures to Rabbit (233). “Order is the Devil’s chains,” he instructs a little later (241). His manipulation of Jill involves sex and narcotics. With Rabbit he resorts to “mau-mauing the flak catchers,” a term invented by journalist Tom Wolfe in 1970 to describe the guilt-trip technique cunning black militants

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used to convince well-meaning white people they should take personal responsibility for every act of racial oppression committed since the onset of slavery. 7 It is noteworthy that Updike portrays Skeeter as a pimp because demagogues essentially are political pimps. Sexual pimps customarily are found in urban bus stations trolling for confused girls running away from dysfunctional families in search of someone who understands their anxieties and promises to cure them through loving relationships. Demagogues target mass audiences of alienated voters who have lost faith in the ability of government to restore the jobs and social status they lost due to mechanization, globalization, and affirmative action. Sexual pimps manipulate the love of these girls for monetary gain. Demagogues manipulate the support of voters for political power. In Rabbit Redux Skeeter seeks to perform both of these roles. It also is of significance that Updike creates a demagogue out of a dispossessed African American. A school of thought apparently exists claiming that classes of people, such as African Americans, who historically were denied political power by racist demagogues, cannot themselves be racist demagogues. Updike must have been aware of the Black Muslim movement that designated all white people as devils, and Louis Farrakhan, one of the movement’s most virulent leaders, who was implicated in the assassination of Malcolm X. Being unable to square this school of thought’s claims with the existence of the Black Muslims, as well as other radical African American groups, Updike simply must have rejected their arguments out of hand. In the meantime, Rabbit’s existence continues to be defined by contradictions. His sister, Mim, calls him “Mr. Muddle” (321). He recognizes that Eisenhower-era norms, in which he once felt some comfort, have been discredited. But he is reluctant to accept the counterculture values that are being offered in their place. He realizes that he should condemn Skeeter for the nonsense he teaches as well as for the violence and criminality he represents. Yet he admires him for holding tightly on to certain convictions, no matter how outrageous, while he and other Americans remain stuck in what seems like a conviction-less void. When Skeeter thus asks Rabbit whether he can accept him as “the Christ of the new Dark Age,” Rabbit, puffing on a marijuana joint, replies, “I do believe” (243). In short order, all hell breaks loose. Neighborhood boys spy upon Skeeter while he is having sex with Jill. They report the scene to their fathers who react by burning down Rabbit’s house with Skeeter and Jill in it. Skeeter is able to escape but abandons Jill to die in the flames. Again Rabbit appears conflicted. Although he is repelled by his cowardice, Rabbit helps Skeeter flee the local police who want to interrogate him about his role in the conflagration and jail him for jumping bail on an old drug charge. Again Skeeter bends Rabbit to his will. The magnetic attraction of a charismatic demagogue during such troubling times is just too difficult for Rabbit to resist.

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One of the issues left undeveloped by Durkheim and Fromm involves how the supporters of demagogues are raised as children. Updike actually portrays that upbringing as well as its consequences in his 1968 novel Couples and 1969 short story “The Hillies.” Couples tells the story of swinging adult husbands and wives who live in the fictional town of Tarbox, twentyseven miles south of Boston, around the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The cultural changes to which they are trying to adjust involve post–birth control pill sexual mores. Echoing Skeeter, one of them describes 1963 as “one of those dark ages that visits mankind between millennia, between the death and rebirth of gods, when there is nothing to steer by but sex and stoicism and the stars.” 8 The chief adulterer of the bunch is Piet Hanema, whom Updike portrays as a pious hypocrite. He attends church and has sex with his neighbors’ wives religiously. In theory the swingers are the “heirs of the Puritans,” responsible uppermiddle-class contractors, dentists, professors, engineers, architects, bankers, and stockbrokers who care deeply about the future of their children and country (235). In fact, they are self-absorbed hedonists and crass materialists who pay virtually no attention to anyone other than themselves. By spending more time in their neighbors’ bedrooms than their children’s playrooms, they leave the youngsters in what Updike identifies as a “distressed and neglected” condition (61). At least one of the children is obsessed with death. To further demonstrate the magnitude of their parents’ narcissism, the author has them attend a formal cocktail party on the night of Kennedy’s death. As one of the wives observes, it appears as if they are “waltzing on the poor guy’s grave” (256). Updike links the swingers’ self-absorption to what he calls “that surprising phrase woven into our flag, ‘the pursuit of happiness?’” (21). The hedonistic lifestyle these couples have chosen to lead corresponds to the popular, contemporary view that rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence are given by God to Americans to be used any way they want. But an older, less permissive interpretation of the Declaration exists as well. Based on the concept of moral responsibility, this alternative view assumes that authentic happiness derives from citizens putting communal and family interests above their own. Updike’s point seems to be that the couples’ essentially amoral pursuit of happiness—a pursuit that Rabbit also engages in—represents the primary cause of the misery they inflict upon themselves and others. Things also quickly begin to fall apart in Tarbox. Piet develops a case of clinical depression. Late in the novel, Piet diagnoses himself a “lost soul” (353). Like Rabbit, he has nightmares that denote helplessness. In Piet’s case, the dreams are of crashing to death in an airplane (256). He impregnates one of the wives, Foxy Whitman. Piet’s wife, Angela, and Foxy’s husband sue for divorce. Foxy gets an abortion arranged by one of the other husbands, Freddy Thorne, on the condition that Freddy can sleep with An-

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glea, a deal to which she reluctantly agrees. At the conclusion of the novel, Piet and Foxy marry and move away, leaving Tarbox behind. The town’s ancient Congregational Church is struck by lightning and burns down, with only its gilded weathercock left standing. As the weathercock is lifted finally to the ground, neighborhood children parade around it. The scene seems to have been written by Updike to invoke the biblical image of Israelites dancing about a golden calf they constructed to mock the Ten Commandments being brought down by Moses from God on Mount Sinai. The fate of the couples’ children, what Michael Novak calls “a disdaining, disowning generation yet to come,” is portrayed by Updike in “The Hillies.” 9 They are now teenagers. Locals remember them innocently “peddl(ing) lemonade or pedal(ing) a tricycle” when they were little. 10 Now they and their friends are loitering in disarray on a steep grassy hill overlooking the center of town. Updike uses the term “torpid” or numb to describe their appearance (24). A debate ensues in the Tarbox newspaper about what is going on. They are not hippies or flower children. They don’t seem to be interested in government. There are no references made to Vietnam or Richard Nixon, the chief political issues of the day, for example. A reader of Tarbox newspaper argues the teens are seeking to “reemploy human-ness as a non-relative category.” Others are irate that they are not finding jobs and going to work (23). The backgrounds of the hillies and Jill from Rabbit Redux bear striking similarities. Both were neglected emotionally by their parents. As one of the hillies reveals “he was driven from his own home by the ‘stench of ego’ and ‘heartbreaking lasciviousness’” (25). Jill confesses “Nobody wants me. That’s all right. I don’t want anybody” (34). Both reject their parents’ hedonistic and hypocritical behavior but have no value system with which to replace it. At the end of Rabbit Redux, Jill is engulfed by flames while zonked out on drugs supplied by Skeeter. The hillies, on the other hand, linger on a grassy knoll like proverbial sheep, too spiritually disillusioned to recognize they may one day be the victims of an attack on their freedom by a wolf in the clothing of a shrewd politician. At the time of Trump’s victory in 2016, the hillies would have been about sixty-five years old. Exit studies taken after the election indicate that 58 percent of white female voters and 67 percent of white male voters over the age of sixty-four voted for him. 11 In 1969 the hillies were lost children. If they hadn’t found themselves by 2016, they too might have been the victims of Trump’s demagogic appeal: his xenophobia; opposition to globalization; racism; misogyny; attack on freedom of the press; and promise of a return to a mythic past when “America will be great again.” Trump is not without precedent in American history. He follows in the tradition of such home-bred rabble-rousers as Senator Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, notorious critics of the New Deal during the Great Depres-

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sion; and Senator Joseph McCarthy, chief red baiter in the post–World War II era. Like them Trump seeks to manipulate mobs of angst-ridden people into defending emotional, superstitious and pseudo-scientific policies that are immune to appeals of reason. Like them, he characterizes criticism of these policies as part of plots orchestrated by establishment elites. Over millennia, harsh opposition to demagoguery has come from such diverse sources as Plato and Noble Prize–winning author Sinclair Lewis. As early as 380 BC, Plato predicted that during times of turbulent change figures representing themselves as secular saviors will arise in free societies asking citizens for their unquestioning support in exchange for the restoration of stability and security and the return to some supposed past era of civic pride. “By smil(ing) at and greet(ing) whomever he meets . . . deny(ing) he’s a tyrant by promis(ing) much in public and private,” Plato writes in Book VIII of his Republic, this charismatic leader persuades the people to accept his oppressive rule. 12 In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, a novel that in many regards anticipates Trump in virtually every way. Lewis’s fictional presidential candidate, Berzelius Windrip, exploits the anger and fear of American workers during the Great Depression with calls for attacks on immigrants, especially Mexicans, who are accused of raping their women and stealing their jobs. He is described by opponents as “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman.” Nevertheless, Windrip’s power to “bewitch large audiences” ushers him into office. 13 Once there he begins to methodically dismantle the principles of the United States Constitution, including freedom of the press, free speech, separation of powers, checks and balances, and states’ rights. Why have these warnings been ignored for so long? The sad truth for those who love freedom is that demagogues are endemic to democratic republics where people hold ultimate political authority. When citizens like Rabbit Angstrom and the hillies-turned-adults develop feelings of frustration, resentment and confusion borne of status anxiety and parental neglect, they are led to make irrational and self-destructive decisions. Houses and churches burn down. Marriages end in bitter divorce. People live in materially affluent, but spiritually impoverished, communities. And demagogues lurk in the shadows, waiting to take advantage of their fragile psyches. As Plato observes, “Tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy. . . . (T)he greatest and most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom.” 14 The combination of Durkheim and Fromm’s research and Updike’s fiction represents a potentially impressive resource for resisting demagogues by recognizing the sources of their attraction. Their very different styles turn out to be quite complementary. While Durkheim and Fromm theorize, Updike

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personalizes. Durkheim and Fromm explain. Updike portrays Durkheim and Fromm deal in abstractions. Updike is interested in the practical effects of demagogic rule on concrete human beings. Durkheim and Fromm seek objectivity in dry, emotionless language. Updike instead seeks to capture the underlying emotions of the characters he creates. Durkheim and Fromm take pride in the logical coherence of their analyses. The appeal of Updike’s fiction is based in no small measure on the inconsistencies he designs in the personalities of his characters and how inconsistency and unpredictability inform his plot narratives. Take, for example, Rabbit’s decision to take a runaway white girl and her African American pimp, he has just met at a downtown bar, home to live with him and his young son. This represents bizarre behavior even for a person as disoriented as Rabbit. Yet Updike makes the decision pivotal to the rest of Rabbit Redux. Everything that happens afterwards in the novel can be traced back to it. When Plato was having a difficult time communicating his views, he often would resort to illustrating their meaning with likely stories. 15 That was the purpose of such parables as the Allegory of the Cave, Myth of the Metals and Myth of Er. Perhaps Updike’s novels Rabbit Redux and Couples as well as his short story “The Hillies” can serve a similar function as modern-day Platonic likely stories that help explain the Trump phenomenon to those Americans still in shock over it. NOTES 1. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1941), 62. 2. Ibid., 134. 3. Robert Detweiler, John Updike (Boston: Twayne, 1972), 167. 4. John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1971), 163. Subsequent citations for quoted material will appear in parenthesis. 5. John Updike, Hugging the Shore (New York: Knopf, 1965), 858. 6. Richard Hofstader, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 82. 7. Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Bantam Books, 1971). 8. John Updike, Couples (New York: Knopf, 1968), 372. Subsequent citations appear in parenthesis. 9. Michael Novak, “Son of the Group,” in Critical Essays on John Updike, ed. Willam Macnaughton (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 61. 10. John Updike, “The Hillies,” in Museums and Other Women (New York: Knopf, 1972), 20. Subsequent citations appear in parenthesis. 11. Alexander Agadjanian, “How the 2016 Vote Broke Down by Race, Gender and Age,” December 14, 2017, https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/how-the-2016-vote-broke-downby-race-gender-and-age/. 12. Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 245–46. 13. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (New York: New American Library, 2005), 70. 14. Plato, The Republic, 242.

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15. Ethan Fishman, Likely Stories: Essays on Political Philosophy and Contemporary American Literature (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1989), 1.

WORKS CITED Agadjanian, Alexander. “How the 2016 Vote Broke Down by Race, Gender and Age.” December 14, 2017, https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/how the-2016-vote-broke-down-byrace-gender-and-age. Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide. Trans. John Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: Free Press, 1966. Fishman, Ethan. Likely Stories: Essays on Political Philosophy and Contemporary American Literature. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1941. Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1965. Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: New American Library, 1968. Novak, Michael. “Son of the Group.” Critical Essays on John Updike, ed. William Macnaughton. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Plato, The Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Reiner, Donald. The Other John Updike. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981. Updike, John. Couples. New York: Knopf, 1968. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1971. ———. “The Hillies.” Museums and Other Women, 18–25. New York: Knopf, 1972. ———. Hugging the Shore. New York: Knopf, 1983. Wolfe, Tom. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Part II

The American Scene

Chapter Six

“Love It or Leave It” America in Red, Gray, and Blue in Rabbit Redux Sylvie Mathé

If John Updike’s Pennsylvania quartet, spreading over four decades, aims to depict the fate of an “Everyman,” the homo americanus or “homme moyen sensuel” Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in the second half of the twentieth century, Rabbit Redux (1971), the second installment, stands out as the most openly political of the series. In this novel, considered by the author “the most violent and bizarre” 1 of the tetralogy, Updike tackles the political, social, racial, and sexual upheavals of the late 1960s and manages to encapsulate the state of the nation in a synecdochic narrative that fuses history and fiction. While the opening volume, Rabbit, Run (1960), was defined by Updike as “a novel of the 50’s rather than about the 50’s,” Rabbit Redux is unquestionably not only of the 1960s but also about the 1960s, 2 drawing its substance, rhetoric, and symbolism from the political and social unrest of the late 1960s and refracting the colors of the nation. Reconsidering the novel in 2012, Sam Tannenhaus makes a persuasive case for Redux’s historical significance: Published in 1971 and set in 1969—the year of Chappaquiddick and the moon landing, the beginning of Richard Nixon’s presidency—it remains the most illuminating and prophetic of modern political novels, though on the surface it seems not about politics at all. There are no candidates or campaigns in Rabbit Redux, no demagogues or ward bosses. It bears no resemblance to All the King’s Men or The Last Hurrah. Updike’s subject is instead the politicization of everyday life. 3

Indeed the novel, in its apocalyptic reverberations, mirrors the convulsions of an era that Updike qualifies as “the most dissentious American decade since the Civil War,” a period when the forces of destruction and self-destruction 93

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were unleashed at home as well as abroad in America’s overseas nightmare, Vietnam. 4 If the thematic background calls to mind Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam (1967), The Armies of the Night (1968) and Of a Fire on the Moon (1971), the formal stance, however, differs radically 5: Updike clearly opts for the realm of the novel, inextricably fusing history with fiction in his plot, characterization and imagery. It is on the last of these three elements that this essay will center, focusing on the chromatic values in this picture of America that emerges from the novel, and on the ways in which Updike plays with his palette to engage himself not only as historian or chronicler, but also as visionary painter. Using the original 1971 hardback dust jacket with its background of red, gray and blue stripes as a starting point of analysis, this essay will consider the semiotic use of color to transform this fictive chronicle of troubled times into a visionary happening. The dust cover is, of course, the iconic entry into the novel, and therefore a crucial element of fictional paratext, all the more so as Updike has long been renowned for lavishing great care and attention on the design of his jackets. In this case, design aptly fits purpose by pinning the novel’s colors to its mast. What the imagery of the dust jacket provides is the red thread by which to explore, first, the fading colors of the starless banner in the spectral blankness of this sublunary summer; then, the transformation of the green pastures of America into the deathly emblem of a world at war; and, finally, the crossing of the color line that inscribes the black man onto the white of the page, resulting in a gray zone of uncertainty. In the end, it is the gray tone of the central stripe that dominates in the ambiguity of the novel’s open, suspended ending, an ending that maintains the reader in a noman’s land of unstable, complex truth. 6 FOR GOD AND COUNTRY The novel opens on July 16, 1969, with Harry and his father watching TV after work in the Phoenix Bar in Brewer, Pennsylvania, as Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon, is being launched. This spaceflight will provide the novel’s central metaphor. Contrary to what might be expected, it is not the exuberance of “this unique summer, this summer of the moon” (442) that the novel depicts, but a kind of devastation, an exploration of nothingness, a “bad trip” that will wreak havoc on Rabbit’s existence and destroy his universe. 7 As if shot from the Earth to the moon, Rabbit on this very day learns with a kind of sudden gravitational loss that his wife is having an affair. No longer on the run himself, as in the preceding novel, it is now his wife, Janice, who, in an ironic reversal, becomes a liberated woman, abandoning husband and son to live it up with her lover, Charlie Stavros, a Greek American employee of her father. Rabbit is now essentially static and apa-

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thetic, frozen in his grief and resigned to his lot. As though anesthetized, he moves around a wasteland. The dynamic springs of the plot accordingly shift from the geographical zigzags and psychological vagaries of the racing hare to the political and social turmoil roiling the nation. Thus, with Rabbit Redux, Updike embarks on a new direction, probing the wider issues of the res publica, as suggested by the original cover for the 1971 hardback edition whose layout shows red, gray and blue stripes spanning the whole page, with a small black-and-white photograph of the moon in the upper-right corner. With this and other textual gestures to the conquest of space, the novel explores more earthly frontiers—women’s rights, civil rights, the counterculture and the Vietnam War. But far from dealing in an abstract manner with this revolution of mores and these political conflicts, Updike has them plainly surface in Rabbit’s living room in the form of two unlikely guests: first Jill, the runaway flower child, then Skeeter, the Black Power revolutionary, two stereotypes of the 1960s, two “necessary colors in the ideological rainbow of Rabbit Redux,” 8 who become squatters in Rabbit’s family cell. It is a cell now reduced to himself and his only son Nelson, a sensitive and withdrawn teenager. Jill, the runaway from Connecticut rebelling against the privileges of her class, a diaphanous disturbed flower child, and Skeeter, a charismatic African American revolutionary spokesman and Vietnam veteran, thus barge into Rabbit’s suburban tract house in an improbable variation on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967). 9 Together, Jill and Skeeter will turn Rabbit’s burrow into a microcosm of American society refracting the turbulences of the 1960s at large. 10 Jill settles into the role of big sister for Nelson and Lolita-like mistress for Rabbit, in a relation fraught on both sides with resignation and morbidity, while Skeeter endeavors to provide Rabbit with an education in politics and American history from the point of view of African Americans. Reliving in flashes his traumatic experiences in Vietnam, he depicts himself in exalted and prophetic rhetoric as the black Christ. This trip among extraterrestrials of sorts—a native son and a hippie—will end tragically when Rabbit’s neighbors firebomb his house in retaliation for the intrusion of an African American in their suburban sanctuary, resulting in Jill’s being burnt alive. The flag that astronaut Neil Armstrong plants on the surface of the moon, and the miniature version that Rabbit flaunts on the rear window of his aptly named Ford Falcon, emblematize a nation whose manifest destiny reaches out in the 1960s to the conquest of a new frontier—that of space—as well as to military intervention overseas. Having been born during the great Depression and come of age at the peak of the Cold War, Rabbit identifies with his country as he identifies with its flag. The garden of America is “[h]is garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist” (277). Anything that violates the flag violates his very being: while for Charlie

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Stavros, his wife’s lover, “A flag is a flag. It’s just a piece of cloth” (304), for Rabbit, “the treachery and ingratitude befouling the flag” is at the same time “befouling him” (305). Having turned into the blue-collar representative of the Silent Majority, 11 the defender of the system against those who attack it—“the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to pull it down” (307)—the former rebel has now ironically become the spokesman of the establishment: “Everybody now is like the way I used to be” (422), he bitterly broods, conscious that the system he eventually capitulated to after his aborted flight in Rabbit, Run, with its values of law and order that he now champions, has in the meantime become the enemy to bring down. Rabbit sees himself as the mirror of a country under siege, and when Jill reproaches him for his conformity and apathy—“If you loved [your country] you’d want it better,” she tells him—his answer points to his very identification with his country: “If it was better I’d have to be better” (412). His identity and his fate thus merge into those of the nation, a nation that is for him of a transcendent, mystical essence, and therefore reaches beyond the contingencies of politics to the divine, in keeping with his heavenly vision of the American Dream: “When he first heard the phrase as a kid he pictured God lying sleeping, the quiltcolored map of the U.S. coming out of his head like a cloud” (364). God has dreamed of America. God has made America this motley quilt of celestial origin that can turn into his scourge, as in Vietnam: But Rabbit is locked into his intuition that to describe any of America’s actions as a “power play” is to miss the point. America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. (306–7)

This deification of America, with its messianic and visionary clichés, stands in for political thought, making of Rabbit a rabid supporter of the war in Vietnam, though more out of instinct than reasoning: “I don’t think about politics,” Rabbit says. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics” (304), he bluntly declares. No wonder he appears as “a solid citizen” (551) in the eyes of the policeman who comes to inspect his house after his arsonist neighbors burnt it down, while to his wife and her lover, he is nothing but a “typical good-hearted imperialist racist” (306), an epitome of “[the] ugly American” (299). For Charlie Stavros, who in the novel embodies not only liberal politics but also ethnic otherness, Rabbit’s flag decal on the back window of his Falcon, far from being the emblem of American greatness, is but the symbol of a repressive, racist and imperialist power—“cops bopping hippies on the head and the Pentagon playing cowboys and Indians all over the globe. That’s what your little sticker means to me. It means screw the blacks and send the CIA into Greece” (304).

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If Rabbit, in this summer of ’69, continues to fly the colors of the nation, he is nevertheless aware that these colors no longer shine brightly. They have faded and the flag hangs limp in these times of turmoil. The episode of The Carol Burnett Show that Rabbit, at the beginning of the novel, watches on TV with his son offers a literal as well as metaphoric illustration of this tarnishing. The skit stages a parody of the famous Lone Ranger show that had been the milk of Rabbit’s childhood. It turns on a scene in which the faithful Native American companion of the masked Texas Ranger, Tonto, played here by a black actor, not a Native American one, returns at night to seduce the Lone Ranger’s wife. Not only does the skit proleptically announce the motif of seduction by an ethnic Other, Tonto functioning here as the analogue of Stavros, the Greek immigrant, and Rabbit as the deceived Pale Face. It also anticipates the process of historical revision that the novel foregrounds in terms of the exploitation of various minorities by white power: African Americans, Native Americans, women. . . . What troubles Rabbit in this Carol Burnett episode is precisely the revisionist outlook it brings to The Lone Ranger, a show that captured the American idealism of times past, one in which the white avenger and his Native American sidekick made up an untouchable heroic pair. More specifically, the skit makes Rabbit wonder about Tonto’s position: Indeed come to think of it he understands nothing about Tonto. The Lone Ranger is a white man, so law and order on the range will work to his benefit, but what about Tonto? A Judas to his race, the more disinterested and lonely and heroic figure of virtue. When did he get his pay-off? Why was he faithful to the masked stranger? In the days of the war one never asked. Tonto was simply on “the side of right.” It seemed a correct dream then, red and white together, red loving white as naturally as stripes in the flag. Where has “the side of right” gone? (286)

As Andrew S. Horton emphasizes in his essay “Ken Kesey, John Updike and the Lone Ranger,” “The Lone Ranger is the American Dream, seen in terms of an old West that never existed, the West of fiction and Hollywood where life is reduced to the readily identifiable forces of good and evil” and where the eponymous hero has “both right and might on his side.” 12 However, “right and might” are now changing sides, or at least being questioned and dislodged by the compounded assaults led in the name of social protest—the fight for civil rights, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, the women’s liberation movement, and the deconstruction of the white middle-American male. Refracted through the prism of that era, Tonto’s unconditional loyalty towards his white companion leads to Rabbit’s questioning of the ideals of the American Dream as they are semiotically inscribed in the red and white stripes of the flag: redskin and pale face side by side in an unlikely brotherly alliance, masking the red blood of the massacres and the white of the geno-

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cide, as well as the red of the revolutionary guerilla and the white of defeat. That Tonto, in the television skit, is played by a black actor and shown deceiving the Lone Ranger by seducing his wife makes of the character the synecdoche of a reversal of power and an otherness that is not only ethnic but also political and sexual. The skit comes to foreshadow the clash that will oppose Rabbit to Stavros as regards the Vietnam War, a war itself reformulated in terms of cowboys and Indians, with Rabbit being called “Pale Face” by his wife’s lover, while Janice, in Rabbit’s eyes, becomes a squaw, in other words an enemy: “He stares at Janice and she is dark and tense: an Indian squaw. He’d like to massacre her” (309). This satirical episode from The Carol Burnett Show thus inaugurates the revisionist topos that is central to the novel in terms of identity—at once social, political, sexual, and ethnic. While desperately clinging to the values on which he has based his existence, Rabbit senses that the garden of America that is so dear to him and that he defends tooth and nail is being irredeemably damaged. Throughout the novel, he is repeatedly struck by the deterioration of the tangible realities of the past and their replacement by facsimiles, including his own lawn that has become a simulacrum of grass: “The lawn looks artificial, lifeless, dry, no-color: a snapshot of grass” (525). The machine has irrevocably encroached upon the garden, and the technology that triumphs in the Apollo 11 mission has turned the Earth into a lunar desert, wasted and inhuman. No need to go to the moon: the moon is right here on Earth. The spectators watching the launching of the rocket on the TV screen in a dark barroom do not partake of the vertical momentum: “The men dark along the bar murmur among themselves. They have not been lifted, they are left here” (272). As for the destination moon, it is in terms of a void and nothingness that Rabbit perceives it: The six o’clock news is all about space, all about emptiness [. . .] They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing. (285) 13

This cosmic nothingness is but the refraction of the earthly one surrounding Rabbit, and the whole novel is patterned on this metaphorical assimilation of the Earth to a lunar desert. America has become a wasteland, and the spectral image of the astronauts on the moon echoes Rabbit’s ghostly existence on Earth. His home is an empty spacecraft, a coffin rotating in nothingness, “a long empty box in the blackness of Penn Villas, slowly spinning in the void” (89–90), the housing estate itself nothing but a set of craters that have ravaged the countryside to give rise to identical boxes; similarly, the downtown area of Brewer has been gutted out and disemboweled to make way for vacant parking lots and deserted stores. Bathed in the muggy whiteness of

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summer, “the sky is cloudless yet colorless, hovering blanched humidity in the way of these Pennsylvania summers” (269), and the spectral pallor of the town contaminates humans: to Janice, Rabbit is “a ghost, white, soft” (315), while, to Jill, he is “an enormous snowman” (489). Rabbit and Jill are described as “two bleached creatures” (389) and Jill, in particular, with her Porsche and her dress both qualified as “dirty white” (440), is consistently associated to the trope of a lifeless, sullied white. Jill, “the white, spacey, upper-middle-class drop-out type,” in the author’s words, 14 is at once ethereal and transparent, “her white dress translucent around her body” (544), “a smoky creature” (386), “a moonchild” (443), “pale and chill as ice” (513). Her white dress is her only wardrobe, “casual and dirty as smoke” (373), “boring white” (503) or “ratty old white” (533). Her attire thus muddied, she embodies the confused counterculture of the time, at once idealistic, rebellious and privileged. Enacting its “Make love not war” mantra—she urges Rabbit to let go of his Cold War reflexes: “People’ve run on fear long enough. Let’s try love for a change,” to which he retorts, “Then you better find yourself another universe. The moon is cold, baby. Cold and ugly” (412). In the end, what Jill lacks is the vital drive of militancy; she remains a lost child, destroyed by the violence around her as much as by her own deathdrive and suicidal tendencies. The imagery of whiteness is throughout the novel interwoven with that of pallor, dryness, ice, and sterility, as well as with a form of unreality, what Sally Robinson calls “the anxiety of blandness” 15: the white of entropy, the white of death, the ultimate scattering of the wavelengths of light. Black, by contrast, is associated with heat, sensuality, the organic vitality of life, as emphasized in the scene at Jimbo’s nightclub which becomes a kind of synesthetic sensorium. The ash gray of Rabbit’s world gives way to the scintillating silver of the paint-sprayed baby grand piano, echoed in the “silver sequin” pasted beside one of the eyes of the blues singer, Babe, whose red dress, “the blood-color of a rooster’s comb” (365, 366), suggests a vibrant sexuality. 16 The cold and lunar whiteness thus dissolves in the heat of the night, in a world that has maintained the basic links of solidarity and community that have elsewhere vanished, in keeping with Babe’s warm and low voice singing the words of Ecclesiastes as reprised by the Byrds—“A time to be born, a time to die”—no longer a woman’s or a man’s, but a voice “merely human” (373). GREEN PASTURES If the moon expedition plays a central role in the novel, it is presented not as the great leap forward into futuristic progress but as it reverberates in the lives of the characters. As emphasized by Updike in his preface,

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The “apple-green” villa thus becomes a sort of “refugee camp” (463), a community of dropouts in which Rabbit himself feels more and more marginal, “a stranger in his own land.” 17 His equally strange gesture of hospitality, paradoxical and unlikely on the part of a character depicted as embodying the establishment, is what gives the novel its complexity and ambiguity. For it is in the name of a kind of Christian charity, as he acknowledges towards the end of the novel, that this pillar of the silent majority finds himself embarked in a psychedelic adventure that runs counter to his ideology: —“What did I do wrong? I was a fucking Good Samaritan. I took in these orphans. Black, white, I said Hop aboard. Irregardless of color or creed. Hop aboard. Free eats. I was the fucking Statue of Liberty.” —“And it got you a burned-down house.” —“O.K. That’s other people. That’s their problem, not mine. I did what felt right.” (577)

But, of course, “what felt right” echoes one of the leitmotivs in the character’s anarchic pursuit of pleasure in Rabbit, Run. The Good Samaritan motive is therefore inextricably linked to a form of desperate flight forward and nihilistic urge. For, ten years after his aborted flight, Rabbit is without illusion about his present or future: Let’s face it. As a human being I’m about C minus. As a husband I’m about zilch. When Verity [the press where Rabbit works as a linotyper] folds I’ll fold with it and have to go on welfare. Some life. (350)

At the end of the trip, the Good Samaritan will be stripped of everything: “No house, no wife, no job. My kid hates me. My sister says I’m ridiculous” (590). Rabbit is more than ever a “has-been,” an outsider. Having lost everything, he enters a phase of withdrawal into himself and regression: back in his parents’ house in his hometown of Mount Judge, he starts wearing his old “high school athletic jacket. It carries MJ in pistachio green on an ivory shield on the back, and green sleeves emerge from V-striped shoulders” (606). The “V-striped shoulders” ring like the V of victory and the jacket will later be described as “peppermint-and-cream” (614). It is, of course, no coincidence if the team’s colors are a bright green on a creamy background. Pistachio or peppermint, Rabbit remains “the emperor of ice cream” evoked by the Reading poet Wallace Stevens 18: “It was an ice cream world he made

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his mark in” (607), the world of the 1950s in which he left the ephemeral trace of his athletic exploits, a world long bygone. The baseball game that Rabbit attends with his son and his father-in-law only confirms that this world is finished. Baseball, the quintessential American sport, is no longer what it used to be 19: But something has gone wrong. The ball game is boring. The spaced dance of the men in white fails to enchant, the code beneath the staccato spurts of distant motion refuses to yield its meaning. Though basketball was his sport, Rabbit remembers the grandeur of all that grass [. . .] There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting [. . .] a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America [. . .] Rabbit waits for this beauty to rise to him [. . .] the traditional national magic, tasting of his youth; but something is wrong. (337–38)

The Wordsworthian “hour / Of splendor in the grass” has passed, and it is on a comparison between the vanished beauty of these green pastures—“the grandeur of all that grass”—and the fading flag of the nation that this melancholy passage of reported thought concludes: “The eight-team leagues of his boyhood have vanished with the forty-eight-star flag” (338). Ubi sunt? Where have the green pastures of yore gone? The many variations on green in the novel are unambiguous. No longer are they the “green light” and the “green breast of the new world,” as nostalgically conjured up on the final page of The Great Gatsby (1925). They have become the green of disillusion and decay, as reflected in the sad, lackluster green of Jill’s eyes—“the dry tired green [. . .] of August grass” (377)—or the “sullen apple-green” (461) of Rabbit’s house, which will become at the end of the novel “an apple-green ruin” (557). Elsewhere, it is the funeral hue of the “shiny green body bags” (491) that bring back the dead soldiers from Vietnam, the victims of the “green machine, an ugly green” (491) that the army is, or else that “green rubber bag or sheet” (548) in which Jill’s charred body will be taken away. The deathly inflection of green spells the vanishing of the garden of the New World. The last frontier, the Far West, where Rabbit’s sister, Mim, has become a call girl, is no longer a dream world. It is governed by “survival rules” (578) and ruthlessness: “That’s the way to live in the desert,” she tells Rabbit. “Be a cockroach” (579). When Mim appears towards the end of the novel, with eyes so luridly made up in purple and blue that they form a kind of mask on her face, 20 sporting bell-bottom hippie pants with horizontal red stripes and Donald Duck shoes, it is as if the Lone Ranger had draped himself in the starspangled banner for a clownish performance of patriotic travesty. Cynical and worldly wise, “sexual machine and uncompromising pragmatist from Las Vegas, the gambler’s moon crater,” 21 Mim will function as the “deus ex

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machina” in the plot. By seducing Janice’s lover, she will break up the adulterous affair and send the prodigal wife back to her husband, before she herself returns to the desert of the West that she sees as prophetic of the future of mankind, a Darwinian nightmare of warlike cockroaches. As for Rabbit, strangely freed by disaster—“You like any disaster that might spring you free” (584), his sister rightly diagnoses—it is to the past and to his shipwrecked marriage that he returns, reuniting with Janice in the final paragraphs in an atmosphere of listlessness, exhaustion, and surrender. CROSSING THE COLOR LINE Before this final escape into an uncertain future, Rabbit is reduced to waiting or hoping for such a release, all the while an idle witness to the increasing disorder and galloping entropy around him. The structure of the novel thus neatly conveys the character’s trajectory: the opening section, entitled “Pop/ Mom/Moon,” launches the plot into orbit, ejecting Rabbit from his familiar burrow; the next two sections, “Jill” and “Skeeter,” chart his trip among aliens, a Walpurgisnacht that will end in the flames of destruction; as for the last section, “Mim,” it brings Rabbit back to earth, making him revisit his past. The novel, considered by its author as “a touch fantastic,” 22 thus transcends the limitations of realism and topples over into an apocalyptic realm—apocalyptic in both senses, as revelation and as end-of-world. The revelation, for Rabbit, is the intrusion of Black America into the white middle-class world of his Pennsylvania surroundings. The confrontation between black and white accordingly structures the central episode of the novel, in a Manichaean dynamic that will gradually reverse itself and become muddled. Inspired in part by Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, 23 the character of Skeeter is meant to embody black skin not only in its sensuality, vitality, and energy, but also in its African American heritage, from slavery to Black Power. From Skeeter, Rabbit learns of the Other America and discovers the irreducible otherness of a world that becomes to him a source of infinite fascination. The evenings of this “refugee camp” (463)—a strange foursome temporarily united into a family of sorts that gathers Jill, the poor little rich girl, and Skeeter, the Vietnam veteran and drug dealer on the run, around father and son—turn into teach-in sessions meant to educate Rabbit and Nelson in performances akin to happenings. Rabbit and Jill read in turn from canonical texts on slavery, such as The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass or Theodore Parker’s Slavery, on which Skeeter expatiates in a long series of diatribes at once revolutionary and mystical. The dust cover of Slavery can in fact be seen as an ironic echo of that of the novel itself: “The book is called Slavery: the letters are red, white, and blue. It seems a small carnival under Skeeter’s slim hand” (477). Rabbit listens readily to these lectures and par-

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takes in the readings, switching, to Skeeter’s delight, from white man to black: “You’re gone to be our big nigger tonight. As a white man, Chuck, you don’t amount to much but niggerwise you groove” (507). On other evenings, Skeeter turns to memories of Vietnam that he revives in a nightmarish kaleidoscope of colors and jagged fragments: Green machines, an ugly green, eating ugly green bushes. Red mud [. . .] The emerald of rice paddies, each plant set there with its reflection in the water pure as a monogram. The color of human ears a guy from another company had drying under his belt like withered apricots, yellow. The black of the ao dai pyjamas the delicate little whores wore [. . .] The red, not of blood, but of the Ace of Diamonds a guy in his company wore in his helmet for luck [. . .] the shiny green body bags tied like long mail sacks, sun on red dust, on blue smoke, sun caught in shafts between the canopies of the jungle [. . .] He knows he can never make it intelligible to these three ofays that worlds do exist beyond these paper walls. (491)

Opening vistas onto another world, “a world of hurt” (224), of chaos and nothingness, Skeeter makes of Vietnam the face of God, in an eschatological vision rife with “the second coming”: Now Skeeter does see something on the ceiling, white on white, but the whites are different and one is pouring out of a hole in the other [. . .] “It is the end. It is the beginning [. . .] It is where God is pushing through [. . .] The sun is burning through. The moon is turning red. The moon is a baby’s head bright red between his momma’s legs.” (493, 494)

The conflagration of lunar imagery and war imagery thus culminates in an apocalyptic hallucination that, in its luridness, revives the nightmarish shape in Yeats’s vision of the “rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem.” 24 These visionary messianic happenings soon give rise to a violence that is not just verbal but increasingly drug-induced, also physical, leading to sexual assaults in which the inversion of roles—master and slave—is achieved through rituals of rage and humiliation. Skeeter, the black revolutionary, plays the part of the white master, while Jill becomes the black slave before the transfixed and willing eyes of Rabbit, first a passive witness, then an accessory to this inversion of the mirror. 25 Gradually, under Skeeter’s influence, Rabbit’s apathy and listlessness become transformed into anger, an anger less directed at Skeeter than compounding his own, that of the working-class small man who has been dispossessed and disempowered 26: in the author’s words, “Rabbit is facing up to the fact that we’re all black, in a way.” 27 In a society that “continues racially divided,” Rabbit’s “reluctant crossing of the color line represents a tortured form of progress” (xvi). Rabbit’s black-and-white world has now given way to a gray shade of uncertainty.

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Thus the political lesson of the novel, paradoxical and ambiguous though it may be, is to be found in this confrontation between black and white and in this revision of Rabbit’s experience in the light of African American experience. Skeeter’s history lesson—slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Vietnam—exposes the other side of the American Dream so dear to Rabbit in a succession of apostrophes and rhetorical assaults: “Green pastures, right? Forty acres and a mule, right? Goddam green pickles, Chuck, that was the most pathetic thing, the way those poor niggers jumped for the bait [. . .] You took that greedy turn, right? You sold us out, right? You sold yourselves out.” (467, 469) “Chuck, you say America to you and you still get bugles and stars but say it to any black or yellow man and you get hate, right?” (470) “We are what has been left out of the industrial revolution, so we are the next revolution, and don’t you know it? You know it. Why else you so scared of me, Rabbit?” (470)

With his daunting rhetoric, Skeeter thus rips apart Rabbit’s system of values and debunks his belief in a “democracy” reduced to a “dollar-cracy” (468). The American dream, whose vanishing Rabbit lamented, is here exposed as having never existed; the manifest destiny of the nation, accomplished through oppression, exclusion and negation, gives way to Skeeter’s ironic wordplay and rewriting of the “United States” into the “Benighted States”: The thing about these Benighted States all around is that it was never no place like other places where this happens because that happens [. . .] no, sir, this place was never such a place it was a dream, it was a state of mind from those poor fool pilgrims on, right? Some white man see a black man he don’t see a man he sees a symbol, right? (476)

Only in war, Skeeter pursues, do blacks and whites find themselves on an equal footing: “Nam must be the only place in Uncle Sam’s world where black-white doesn’t matter. Truly” (492). In these revolutionary diatribes, what Skeeter’s apocalyptic rhetoric announces is not “The Fire Next Time” but “The Fire This Time”: “Bring down Kingdom Come, we’ll swamp the world in red-hot, real American blue-green ape shit, right?” (496). If “Bring the War Home” (504) was the slogan of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) demonstrators, for Skeeter and Rabbit, indeed “The war is come home” (556) at the end of the novel, flaring up in the firebombing perpetrated by Rabbit’s racist neighbors that will destroy the little applegreen house and take Jill’s life. Retrospectively, Rabbit’s morbid sexuality, his visions of bodies burnt by napalm while looking at Jill’s naked body (401), are but a prolepsis of this tragic ending. The orchestration of tropes—moon, war, devastation by fire— leads to the strange finale of Part III, at once cruel and resigned, in which

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Rabbit, informed that Skeeter did nothing to save Jill, will nevertheless help him escape. Driving him out of the city, he will abandon him in a field the color of scorched earth where Skeeter will vanish, near the symptomatically named village of Galilee. As Robinson writes, “Skeeter escapes relatively intact, and leaves in his wake a white male body conscious of its own impotence and even figurative deadness.” 28 Having lost his house and been laid off from his job, feeling guilty for Jill’s death, Rabbit enters a phase of regression. In the tabula rasa that follows the disaster, with Mim, his “secret weapon” (583) at work, he will end up cautiously reuniting with Janice in the last pages of the novel. Just as Rabbit, Run left the reader suspended in midcourse with Rabbit’s final run, the image of the estranged couple in the ironically named Safe Haven Motel at the end of Rabbit Redux is another suspended moment. With the two characters left to “circle back on their earlier selves” 29 like two space capsules drifting in orbit, the scene conjures up a feeling of almost Pascalian terror: He and she seem to be slowly revolving, afraid of jarring one another away [. . .] Still adjusting in space, slowly twirling [. . .] in a space of silence [. . .] he feels them drift along sideways deeper into being married. (610, 617) 30

Having survived the disaster and come through to the other side, Rabbit and Janice have laid down their arms in a costly truce, a silent moratorium. The end shows Rabbit, in a sense, rising out of his own ashes, and the title of the novel, borrowed from Dryden and Trollope, here takes on its full meaning. As underscored by Updike in his preface, it is meant to suggest a kind of recovery 31 following a perilous and painful journey, what James Schiff, summing up the arc of the novel, describes in these terms: [t]he novel is very much about a journey, one of exploration and discovery, taking Harry through wastelands and darkness, lunacy and destructiveness. During the course of this journey [. . .] Harry loses all those things that have given him his identity: wife, house, and job. The journey is one of divestment and loss, yet in the process Harry gains freedom and knowledge. 32

Like the Phoenix—the name of the bar where Rabbit and his father watch the launching of Apollo 11 in the opening scene—Rabbit will be reborn from his ashes, in keeping once again with a nation that itself “survives its chronic apocalypses” (xvii): “It is the end. It is the beginning” (494). Updike, America’s mythographer, can then proceed to pursue his saga over two more decades: “America and Harry suffered, marveled, listened and endured. Not without cost, of course. The cost of the disruption of the social fabric was paid, as in the earlier novel, by a girl. Iphigenia is sacrificed and the fleet sails on, with its quarreling crew.” 33

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Ultimately, what Rabbit, the linotyper of black letters on the white page, has gained from this journey is a new vision of the world, less Manichaean, more nuanced, and an awareness of the gray zone of uncertainty that is reflected by the central stripe on the dust jacket of the original edition. Through Jill and Skeeter, and then Mim, Rabbit has come to relinquish the linear mode of thinking characteristic of the superannuated Gutenberg man, in favor of a dialectical mode based on contradiction and inversion. Skeeter, of course, occupies pride of place in this ideological change of base, searing Rabbit’s existence to the quick before vanishing from his world. Dilvo Ristoff interestingly points out that “Skeeter, while he is able to identify Rabbit with Middle America, with the establishment, and America’s dominant text, is also able to portray himself as marginal to that text. He becomes, in Derridian language, the white of the page.” 34 In this crossing of the color line in which the black man becomes the white of the page, Rabbit symmetrically undergoes a revolution of his own—within limits, however. In the aftermath of Jill’s death, for which he blames not just himself but Skeeter as well, their final encounter, bristling with hostility, marks a cut-off point. While Rabbit agrees to give Skeeter a ride out of the city, along with a handful of dollars, and to keep quiet to the police, he concludes: “but then that’s quits” (557). The two characters part ways in a strangely haunting scene, eerily evocative of Van Gogh’s last painting, Wheatfield with Crows, that, in keeping with the use of chromatic values and color imagery throughout the novel, is testimony to Updike’s painterly art: As Harry backs Peggy’s Fury around in the strait intersection, the young black waits by a bank of brown weed stalks. In the rearview mirror, Skeeter looks oddly right, blends right in, even with the glasses and goatee, hanging emptyhanded between fields of stubble where crows settle and shift, gleaning. (558–59)

The enigmatic quality of this tableau 35 comes to underscore the uncertainty surrounding Harry’s evolution and problematic progress. Indeed, the longlasting effects on Rabbit of Skeeter’s teach-ins remain a moot point. Though he admits to having learned that “this country isn’t perfect,” Rabbit nevertheless reverts to “type” in the end, for the words on the page tell us: “Even as he says this he realizes he doesn’t believe it, any more than he believes at heart that he will die” (577)—an ambiguous conversion, therefore, at best. The ambiguity in the novel’s characterization and the sustained dialogical tension; the authorial refusal to sanction or condemn certain offensive attitudes; the violence and graphic nature of some scenes; but mostly the choice of a hero who, while previously an anarchic rebel, is now a staunch advocate of the established order and of the “love it or leave it” motto—a kind of

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counter-rebel therefore, swimming against the tide in his opinions if not his private conduct 36—all of this could not but irk the sensibility of many readers at the time of publication. More importantly, the novel, in its violence and ambiguity, can be understood to carry the weight of its author’s uneasiness and resentment during this period, a malaise that led him to seek exile with his family in London in 1968 to 1969. Written in 1970—“when the 60s pressed heavily upon me” 37—and in the present tense like its predecessor, the novel has admittedly served as the safety valve that allowed Updike to exorcise some more or less unmentionable feelings about which he eventually became more forthright in his 1989 essay “On Not Being a Dove.” 38 The open ending of the novel, monosyllabic and interrogative—“He. She. Sleeps. O.K.?” (619)—which maintains the reader in the gray zone of an unstable truth, partakes of this complexity. In the author’s words, “The question that ends the book is not meant to have an easy answer.” 39 The final question, in fact, reads like a form of appeal to the reader at the same time as it underscores Updike’s art of “the inconclusive.” As Lawrence Broer writes, “[t]he truth has no fixed place, and no permanent owner; it can be found in the text’s capacity to decentralize authority and in its contribution to an understanding of Harry and the problematic America he signifies.” 40 As we leave Rabbit and the 1960s, the final image of the protagonist sinking into sleep next to his estranged wife projects a sense at once of exhaustion and apologetic surrender before the painful challenges of the times—a moment of truth, as Updike writes in his later memoirs, that “made us stare at our bloody hands and confront the rapacious motives underneath the tricolor slogans and question our favored-nation status under God” 41—a moment of truth that, half a century later, seems more pressing than ever. NOTES 1. John Updike, Preface to Rabbit Angstrom (New York: Modern Library, 1995), xv. Subsequent page references to Rabbit Redux and the other Rabbit novels are to the 1995 omnibus edition of Rabbit Angstrom and follow quotations in parentheses. 2. “The first novel in the series provides only glimpses of subtle cracks in society’s infrastructure; in contrast, Redux abundantly foregrounds the social and political upheavals of the 1960s” (Brian Keener, John Updike’s Human Comedy [New York: Peter Lang, 2005], 65). 3. Sam Tanenhaus. “Man in the Middle,” Sunday Book Review, November 8, 2012. 4. John Updike, “Special Message” to purchasers of the Franklin Library limited edition of Rabbit Redux in 1981, reprinted in Hugging the Shore (New York: Knopf’s, 1983): “I would show them and throw in all the oppressive, distressing, overstimulating developments of the most dissentious American decade since the Civil War—anti-war protest, black power and rhetoric, teach-ins, middle-class runaways, drugs, and . . . the moonshot” (Updike, Hugging the Shore, 858). 5. The ideological stance is also different: “What differentiates Updike from Mailer is his refusal to impose any self-consciously moral or political patterns on cultural experience” (A. G. Khan, “Defiance and Acceptance: Two Modes of Cultural Response in Mailer’s American Dream and The Armies of the Night and Updike’s Rabbit Redux,” Indian Journal of American Studies 14, no. 2 [July 1984]: 107).

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6. An earlier, shorter version of this essay (in French) has appeared in the Revue Française d’Études Américaines n° 105 (September 2005): 93–109. https://www.cairn.info/revuefrancaise-d-etudes-americaines-2005-3-page-93.htm#no4. I wish to express my gratitude to Sue Norton for her help in revising this essay and for her precious advice. 7. The parallel with Swede Levov, in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), is striking: two ex-athletes, two Swedes, two representatives of Middle America, two staunch believers in the American Dream, a dream whose shattering each of the novels retraces. 8. Dilvo Ristoff, Updike’s America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy (New York: Lang, 1988), 105. 9. This may explain why this novel has been considered by most critics to be the weakest of the tetralogy. In her review of Rabbit at Rest, Michiko Kakutani thus unfavorably compares “the unfortunate Rabbit Redux [which] tried to turn Harry’s life into a timely parable by awkwardly inserting relevant people and events into the plot” to the “powerfully organic feel” of Rabbit’s adventures in the later Rabbit at Rest (Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times; Just Thirty Years Later, Updike Has a Quartet,” New York Times, September 25, 1990). 10. Schiff’s analysis considers Updike’s strategy in relation to the role played by television in American life: “Updike’s strategy with both Jill and Skeeter is to bring the headlines of the 1960s into Rabbit’s living room; as he states, ‘This was an era when we lived by television, and those two just came in off the set into Rabbit’s lap’” (James A. Schiff, John Updike Revisited [Boston: Twayne, 1998], 45). 11. The term “Silent Majority,” that Nixon popularized in a November 3, 1969, speech, is borrowed from Homer to designate the dead. 12. Andrew S. Horton, “Ken Kesey, John Updike and the Lone Ranger,” Journal of Popular Culture 8, no. 3 (Winter 1974): 571. 13. The fateful moment when Armstrong steps on the moon is described in the novel in terms of a blurred abstraction: “At last it happens. The real event. Or is it? A television camera on the leg of the module comes on: an abstraction appears on the screen. The announcer explains that the blackness in the top of the screen is the lunar night, the blackness in the lower left corner is the shadow of the spacecraft with its ladder, the whiteness is the surface of the moon.” (351) 14. James Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike (Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 1994), 225. 15. Sally Robinson,“‘Unyoung, Unpoor, Unblack’: John Updike and the Construction of Middle American Masculinity,” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 346. 16. Markle writes: “Thus the two races are contrasted in terms similar to Eldridge Cleaver’s ‘primeval mitosis’ theory: Whites have all become sterile, bodiless intellect (technology), and Blacks are the physical—fertile, sexual [. . .] By the end of the book Rabbit feels that his ejaculations, which used to resemble ‘space flight’ (White/technology) are now ‘shouts of anger’ (black militancy?). Rabbit is acquiring, it is hinted, a new identity” (Joyce B. Markle, Fighters and Lovers. Theme in the Novels of John Updike [New York: New York UP, 1973], 157, 159). 17. Donald J. Greiner, John Updike’s Novels (Athens, OH: Ohio UP), 77. 18. Fittingly, the epigraph for Rabbit Is Rich is extracted from Wallace Stevens’s poem “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.” 19. Updike’s account of Ted Williams’s last baseball game, “Hub Fans Bid Kids Adieu,” is considered the most celebrated baseball essay ever. Reprinted in countless anthologies, “Hub Fans” has recently been reissued by the Library of America, with an introduction by Updike that was among the last things he worked on before his death in January 2009 (“Hub Fans Bid Kids Adieu,” New Yorker, October 22, 1960). See also James A. Schiff, “John Updike and David Foster Wallace: Of Binaries, Sports Writing, and Transcendence,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no. 1 (2018). 20. “She appears to wear no makeup, no lipstick, except for her eyes, which are inhuman, Egyptian, drenched in peacock purple and blue, not merely outlined but re-created [. . .] These marvellously masked eyes. . .” (572). The implicit comparison between Mim, the Western girl,

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and the character of the Lone Ranger is reinforced by another metaphor: “Her eyes in their lassos of paint. . .” (593). 21. Joseph J. Waldmeir, “Rabbit Redux Reduced,” in Rabbit Tales—Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels, edited by Lawrence R. Broer (Tuscaloosa & London: U of Alabama P, 1998), 120. 22. Plath, Conversations with John Updike, 88. 23. Dilvo Ristoff notes that “Skeeter is not a mirror-image of one specific historic character, but instead he is more of a distortion than an average, formed by the agglutination of various forces of the black movement, having a little of them all” (Ristoff, Updike’s America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy, 103). 24. See Charles Berryman, “The Education of Harry Angstrom: Rabbit and the Moon,” The Literary Review 27, no. 1 (Fall 1983). Echoes of “The Second Coming” ring through the novel, in particular the obsession with collapse and shattering: “Everything is crashing” (513). 25. The terrorized Nelson will try in vain to counter this mounting violence, a trauma that he will carry into adulthood. In Rabbit at Rest, when Rabbit voices his guilty feelings to his daughter-in-law Pru: “We put him through some pretty wild scenes back there in the late Sixties . . .” Pru pragmatically retorts: “That’s what the late Sixties were for everybody, wild scenes” (1162–63). 26. “I can understand both his anger and his passivity,” Updike says in an interview; “[l]ike Harry I try to remain open [. . .] I try to love both the redneck and the flower child, the anarchist bomb thrower” (Plath, Conversations with John Updike, 62). 27. Plath, Conversations with John Updike, 225. 28. Sally Robinson, “‘Unyoung, Unpoor, Unblack’: John Updike and the Construction of Middle American Masculinity,” 349. 29. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times; Just Thirty Years Later, Updike Has a Quartet,” New York Times, September 25, 1990. 30. Updike, in his preface to Rabbit Angstrom, wittily remarks that “[t]he eventual reunion of the married couple in the Safe Haven Motel is managed with the care and gingerly vocabulary of a spacecraft docking” (xv). 31. “From the Latin reducere, ‘to bring back,’ it is defined by Webster’s as ‘led back; specif., Med., indicating return to health after disease’” (xv). 32. Schiff, John Updike Revisited, 43. 33. Updike, Hugging the Shore, 858. On the recurrent sacrifice of Iphigenia in the tetralogy, see Mary Gordon, Good Boys and Dead Girls (New York: Viking, 1991). 34. Ristoff, Updike’s America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy, 98. 35. Skeeter’s spitting into Rabbit’s hand, in lieu of shaking it, as well as his final words, add to the enigmatic nature of this farewell. 36. Marshall Boswell writes of Rabbit’s 1960’s conservatism that “whatever everyone else is for, Rabbit must be against, and whatever everyone is against, Rabbit must be for” (Marshall Boswell, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy. Mastered Irony in Motion [Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2001], 78). I am indebted to Boswell’s enlightening chapter on Rabbit Redux. 37. John Updike, Picked-Up Pieces (New York: Knopf’s, 1975), 510. 38. John Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” Commentary, March 1, 1989. This essay was reprised in Self-Consciousness (New York: Knopf’s, 1989). In his preface to the tetralogy, Updike further explains: “Unlike such estimable elders as Vonnegut, Vidal and Mailer, I have little reformist tendency and instinct for social criticism [. . .] It was the savagery, between 1965 and 1973, of the domestic attack upon the good faith and common sense of our government, especially of that would-be Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, that astonished me [. . .] Civil disobedience was antithetical to my Fifties education [. . .] Rabbit would serve as a receptacle for my disquiet and resentments, which would sit more becomingly on him than on me” (xiii, xiv, xv). 39. Updike, Hugging the Shore, 859. 40. Broer, Rabbit Tales—Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels, 5. The final note for each of the installments of the Rabbit saga remains very much Updike’s signature, summing up the tone of each volume, and marking a pause, a suspension rather than a closure.

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41. Updike, Self-Consciousness, 143. See Donald J. Greiner, “Updike, Rabbit and the Myth of American Exceptionalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, edited by Stacey Olster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006).

WORKS CITED Berryman, Charles. “The Education of Harry Angstrom: Rabbit and the Moon.” The Literary Review 27, no. 1 (Fall 1983): 117–26. Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy. Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Broer, Lawrence R. Rabbit Tales—Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels. Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Gordon, Mary. Good Boys and Dead Girls. New York: Viking, 1991. Greiner, Donald J. John Updike’s Novels. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984. ———. “Updike, Rabbit and the Myth of American Exceptionalism.” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, edited by Stacey Olster, 169–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Horton, Andrew S. “Ken Kesey, John Updike and the Lone Ranger.” Journal of Popular Culture 8, no. 3 (Winter 1974): 570–8. Kakutani, Michiko. “Books of the Times; Just Thirty Years Later, Updike Has a Quartet.” New York Times, September 25, 1990. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/25/books/books-of-thetimes-just-30-years-later-updike-has-a-quartet.html?pagewanted=all. Keener, Brian. John Updike’s Human Comedy. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Khan, A. G. “Defiance and Acceptance: Two Modes of Cultural Response in Mailer’s American Dream and The Armies of the Night and Updike’s Rabbit Redux.” Indian Journal of American Studies 14, no. 2 (July 1984): 103–9. Markle, Joyce B. Fighters and Lovers. Theme in the Novels of John Updike. New York: New York University Press, 1973. Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. Ristoff, Dilvo. Updike’s America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy. New York: Lang, 1988. Robinson, Sally. “‘Unyoung, Unpoor, Unblack’: John Updike and the Construction of Middle American Masculinity.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 331–63. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1998. ———. “John Updike and David Foster Wallace: Of Binaries, Sports Writing, and Transcendence.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no. 1 (2018): 15–26. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00111619.2017.1378611. Tanenhaus, Sam. “Man in the Middle.” Sunday Book Review, November 8, 2012. http://www. nytimes.com/2012/11/18/books/review/john-updikes-rabbit-redux-and-white-workingclass-angst.html. Updike, John. “Hub Fans Bid Kids Adieu.” New Yorker, October 22, 1960. https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/1960/10/22/hub-fans-bid-kid-adieu. ———. Hugging the Shore. New York: Knopf’s, 1983. ———. Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf’s, 1989. ———. “On Not Being a Dove.” Commentary, March 1, 1989. https://www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/on-not-being-a-dove/. ———. Rabbit Angstrom. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Waldmeir, Joseph J. “Rabbit Redux Reduced.” Rabbit Tales—Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels, edited by Lawrence R. Broer, 111–28. Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press, 1998.

Chapter Seven

“Mail” Chauvinism John Updike’s Postal Fetish and the Unrealizable Vision of American Democracy Yoav Fromer

In January 1986 John Updike attended the 48th International PEN Congress in New York City. Its theme: “The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State.” Invited to participate in a panel about literature and politics, he was asked to address the question of “How Does the State Imagine?” Instead of delivering a cogent response that articulated Updike’s thoughts on this fundamental question of political theory, the audience got something quite different: an ode to the United States Postal Service (USPS). As one participant in the baffled audience that day later recalled, “So here we were all waiting to hear him talk about politics and he suddenly begins to praise postmen and talk about how much he loves mailboxes. We weren’t quite sure what to make of it.” 1 Updike’s remarks did start out a bit confusing. “The place where my personal hopes and dreams and the intentions and provisions of the state intersected was the postal system. Its workers, who in my small town I knew all by name, brought to the home the printed journals—the newspapers and magazines—that represented to me a world where I wished to locate my future,” Updike said. “It is the United States mails, with the myriad routes and mechanisms that the service implies, not to mention the basic honesty and efficiency and non-interference of its thousands of employees, that enable me to live as I do, and to do what I do. I never see a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit.” For Updike, those “hollow blue monuments on street corners from here to Hawaii” revealed something 111

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important about how the government functions. “It desires, we must conclude, its citizens to be in touch with one another; the tribe seeks interconnection and consolidation,” he opined. “The state imagines solidarity, and resists succession and non-conformity, which is secession on the personal scale.” Since the state has “conservative” impulses that seek to reproduce monotony and preserve stability, Updike concluded writers must do the opposite: seek expansion, novelty and innovation. “I ask mainly that my tribal officials keep the mails operating—no small task, and one where many tribes fail—and continue to safeguard the freedom of expression that my particular state's founders rashly promised its citizens. This is plenty, and this is enough.” 2 Needless to say, his fellow panelists and many audience members weren’t impressed. While the critic Roger Kimball considered it “a charming and witty reflection on the modern American writer’s intimate relationship to the postal system, especially as epitomized by the mailbox,” others were less supportive. The author E. L. Doctorow, who chaired the panel and was apparently still simmering over the controversial invite Secretary of State George Shultz received to speak at the conference, complained that behind every one of Updike's mailboxes was a missile silo, while New York Magazine called Updike’s remarks a “fairy tale.” 3 But such critics of his performance may have overlooked the more subtle democratic vision embedded in Updike’s ostensibly confounding mail fetishism. Although his remarks revolved around the USPS, the mail was merely symbolic of the normative civic interactions that were necessary, in Updike’s eyes, to sustain a democratic polity. In America, Updike explained, the imagination of the state “is composed of the wills of thousands of its administrators, almost none of whom wishes to lose his or her job. A democracy wisely provides an electoral process whereby most of the top officials must periodically run the risk of replacement; but the numerous workers beneath them are no longer subjected to such risks.” Since the modern bureaucratic state was, according to its republican critics, in danger of abandoning genuine democratic procedure by governing from above and afar, the postal system, at least for Updike, might very well have been one of the last things linking the governed to their government. 4 Updike’s ostensibly strange apotheosis for the mail was not just another quirk. Behind it, I wish to argue, lay his republican vision of participatory politics; one that considers the role of the state to augment and magnify—but never replace—the voice of the people, and that believes active citizenship and a vibrant public sphere, facilitated by the postal service, to be the ideal means for communication and collective organization. And yet, such romanticization of social life clearly clashes with another of Updike's hallmark qualities: ardent individualism. In order to negotiate this fundamental clash at the heart of Updike's political thought, this chapter aims to sketch his unrealizable democratic vision—one that ideally aspires to republican virtues but

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tangibly dissolves under individualistic pressures of “being a self forever,” in Updike’s words. To do so, I will trace the gap between Updike the essayist, who ironically advocates an ambitious republicanism, and Updike the novelist, who offers a more sobered account conscious of the many obstacles in its way. In other words, while Updike's non-fiction presented an unrealistic vision of civic engagement, his fiction highlighted the realistic limitations of ever actualizing it. UPDIKE THE ESSAYIST: THE REPUBLICAN VISION The concept of republicanism has come to mean many things to many people in American political discourse. 5 Although it has substantially evolved and been reinvented since its initial appearance in late 1960s as a paradigmatic conceptual shift in our understanding of America's political tradition, republicanism in all of its forms has been rooted in a basic understanding that the public good supersedes the private and that collective goals matter as much as individual ones. Emanating from the classical civic traditions of Aristotle, Rousseau and Jefferson’s political thought, republicanism locates the essence of politics not in the private but rather public experience. Dedicated to terms such as virtue, community, solidarity and civic engagement—as complementary rather than subservient to liberty—it has rejected, at least partially, liberalism as America’s sole political tradition, and reimagined the nation's founding as a collective experience of direct and deliberative democracy. As historian Gordon Wood observed, “The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of their Revolution.” 6 For republicans, politics is an active rather than passive affair that demands constant participation, vigilance and personal engagement in steering the ship of state. It is this republican spirit, whether its myth or reality, that Updike’s nostalgic longings for the USPS may have wished to capture. In an early essay from 1965, he wrote a memoriam to post offices being closed around the nation: We mourn, nevertheless. It used to be that in any town from Bangor to Fresno the heartsick stranger could find honesty, industry, piety, and free reading matter in two places: the post office and the public library. Since Andrew Carnegie couldn’t be everywhere, in many hamlets the post office was the sole repository of our traditions. . . . It rises before the imagination now: the village post office, with its quant grilled windows, its ink-stained floors, its hideous orange writing shelf, its curiously nibbled blotters, its “wanted” posters for Dillinger and Aaron Burr, and its twin letter slots dividing the worlds into two great halves, “Local” and “Out of Town.” 7

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What appears intuitively as a nostalgic expression of atavistic longings for his lost childhood would gradually crystalize into a cogent political-philosophical theme in Updike’s non-fiction writings. In a mock interview with what Updike dubbed “insufficiently famous Americans” that appeared in Hugging the Shore (1983), he aptly chose to interview the mailman (along with the “neighbor’s wife,” “running mate,” and “golf course owner”). “I’ve always been interested in what you call the romance of the mails,” Updike's interviewer revealed. “It’s really a wonderful thing, to put a letter in some clanging box out at the corner of Grant and Woodbine and have it pop up in Colorado Springs two days later.” This short prose offers a clue into the political origins of Updike’s mail fetish exactly because of the public role he attributes to “the mailman.” “His cheeks are red, his eyes maniacal with merriment as, shifting his lightened sack on his shoulders, he heads down the freshly plowed sidewalk to bring the next house its parcel of joy,” Updike writes. Part jest part naivety (it is questionable if any mailman/woman would ever agree that “when it snows, that is the most fun”), Updike's interviewer tellingly labels the mailman “Santa Claus without the beard, Uncle Sam without the top hat; he is the police without the brutality . . . he goes off whistling, loving the weather. There is a secret to life, but he hasn’t delivered it yet.” Although Updike’s mailman is a clear representative of the state, he is absolved of the negative connotations associated with its coercive arms like the police. 8 Updike concludes the piece by calling the mailman “this blue thread who stitches together our weeks” and “this ebullient human shuttle of our continent—spanning social weave.” 9 While part of Updike’s appreciation for the USPS undoubtedly lies in his lonely adolescent experience growing up on the isolated farm in Plowville where the mail—and especially the coveted issue of the New Yorker—were his only interactions with the outside world, the mail gradually came to play a more significant social role in his life. 10 As he recalled in one passage describing his adolescence in his memoirs Self-Consciousness (1984): “‘Where is my public’ I used to ask my mother, coming back from the empty mailbox, by this joke conjuring a public out of the future.” 11 While some of this “public” possibly referred to a future literary audience that the precocious and ambitious young writer had already imagined for himself as a teen, it also suggests he thought of himself in republican terms as part of a larger public—a political public sphere. The fact that he described the mailman as someone who “stitches” together the vast continent betrays a genuine concern for a social fabric that can only be preserved by both physically and figuratively tying citizens together through the delivery of mail—arguably the most authentic form of interpersonal communication. The importance of active citizenship and communal ties that the mail helps sustain had long been a central, albeit latent, theme in Updike’s nonfiction. Looking back fondly on his time in Ipswich in Self-Consciousness,

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he recalled that “there was a sense of belonging—we joined committees and societies, belonged to a recorder group and a poker group, played volleyball and touch football in season, read plays aloud and went Greek-dancing and gave dinner parties and attended clambakes and concerts and costume balls, all within a rather narrow society, so that everything resonated.” In one nostalgic flashback, he described the thrill of attending town hall meetings: “I gave my name, was checked off and admitted, and stood there in the doorway of the gymnasium-auditorium in my city suit, looking in at the brightly illuminated faces of my fellow citizens. They were agitated by some thoroughly local issue on the floor; my wife and the friends we had made were somewhere in this solemn, colorful, warm civic mass, and I felt a rush of wonder that I had come to be part of this, this lively town meeting sequestered within the tall winter night.” Life in Ipswich, Updike wrote, was “eased by the cooperative nature” in which “egoistic dread faded within the shared life,” and observed that “an illusion of eternal comfort reposes in clubbiness.” 12 The centrality of public life for Updike was nicely captured by Life magazine, which noted in an early profile of the writer that “short of joining the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, in fact, he could scarcely be more enmeshed than he is in the life of the town. He is a member of the rebuilding committee of the burnt-down Congregational Church and of the town Democratic committee, a participant in golf, poker and touch football games, and plays the recorder in a group that meets on alternate Wednesday evenings. He and his wife also give and go to a fair number of parties, which he thinks are by no means the frivolous affairs most people consider them. ‘Parties are somehow deadly serious’ Updike says. ‘To say no to one is to say no to life.’” 13 The values of community instilled in Updike growing up in Pennsylvania and strengthened during his time in Ipswich crystalized in the politically charged 1960s. In 1969, just after publishing Couples (1968), he moved to London for a year with his family. His description of the experience conveys an explicit republican bent: This, surely, is a city, a civitas in the root sense, a collection of citizens whose collective life and conscience is bespoken by the wealth of parks and museums, the gracious abundance of public services. Some of the factors blighting American cities . . . do seem to have been absent or mitigated here, and London’s long primacy has made possible a kind of civic self-confidence absent or ambiguously ironical in America, except in small towns. I have moved here from a small American town, and find familiar virtues: some things are free, some are cheap, one walks among strangers without feeling menaced, the institutions of communal existence feel accessible. 14

His admiration for the “institutions of communal existence” came to inform his writing and helped shape his approach to and appreciation of literature in

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those years. In a very warm review of the Indian writer R. K. Narayan’s autobiography, for instance, Updike extolled his work for the solicitude it afforded citizenship. After quoting approvingly a passage in which Narayan recalls that in his hometown, “one could not traverse the main artery of Mysore, Sayyaji Rao Road, without stopping every few steps to talk to a friend” and notes that “Mysore is not only reminiscent of an old Greek city in its physical features, but the habits of its citizens are also very Hellenic. Vital issues, including philosophical and political analyses, were examined and settled by people (at least in those days) on the promenades of Mysore.” Updike asserts that: Narayan is one of a vanishing breed—the writer as citizen. His citizenship extends to calling up municipal officials about inadequate street lighting, to “dashing off virulent letters to newspapers about corruption and inefficiency.” Such protests do not feel, as with so much American social consciousness, forced—a covert bid for power and self-justification. . . . What a wealth of material becomes accessible to a writer who can so simply proclaim a sense of community! We have writers willing to be mayor but not many excited to be citizens. . . . An instinctive, respectful identification with the people of one’s locale comes hard now, in the menacing cities or disposable suburbs, yet without it a genuine belief in the significance of humanity, in humane significance, comes not at all. 15

In the concluding chapter of Self-Consciousness, aptly titled “On Being a Self Forever,” Updike grounds the individual experience in the communal by recalling how integral the social experience of receiving mail was to his personal quest for happiness and self-fulfillment. “I am now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather—that pathetic discovery which the old make that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience.” A few pages later he elaborates on the same point: “The other morning, a Sunday morning, around nine, walking back up my driveway in my churchgoing clothes, having retrieved the Sunday Globe from my mailbox, I experienced happiness so sharply I tried to factor it into its components.” He concludes the book, again, with a similar observation: “People are fun, but not quite serious or trustworthy in the way that nature is. We feel safe, huddled within human institutions—churches, banks, madrigal groups—but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self’s responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let’s say, the walk back from the mailbox.” 16 Beyond the spiritual and existential connotations of such an experience, the “walk back from mailbox” which Updike repeatedly describes as an ostensibly religious experience may very well be so enlightening not merely because it represents the simpler things in life, but exactly because the mail serves in Updike’s

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eyes as a vehicle through which to achieve rapport with others; if selffulfillment can only be achieved in the context of a public sphere, the mail is the medium that connects the various individuals who make it up. UPDIKE THE NOVELIST: THE REPUBLICAN REALITY Strangely, it was in his early fiction where the idealized community stitched together by his nostalgic ruminations about the postal system comes apart, and the challenges—let alone impossibilities—of actualizing Updike’s romanticized political community are illuminated. In his debut novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1958), Updike sets up a personal clash between the two main protagonists, Conner and Hook, that mirrors the broader postwar political struggle between bureaucratic government and the more traditional Jeffersonian vision of an active bottom-up republican democracy. In Conner, the poorhouse prefect, Updike has consciously constructed an embodiment of the centralized state that emerged in the wake of the New Deal and WWII: although his character suffers from what critics have rightly considered a one-dimensional layer of artificiality that lacks much depth—he is cold, mechanical, and android-like—it is important to remember that Conner is merely an archetype for the modern bureaucrat. 17 As such he personifies everything the sociologist Max Weber had admired and feared in Modernity: he is rational and efficient, cold, calculating and dull. He draws the legitimacy for his authority from legal-rational grounds—he had been appointed by the federal government to oversee the poorhouse. 18 His power to command and coerce is rooted in his control over resources (their food and medical care) and in his explicit monopoly over the legitimate means of violence in the poorhouse that is maintained, figuratively and literally, through the presence of the only firearm on the grounds located in his office (tellingly, the only time it is used is to kill a cat that we are told has “flaunted his authority”). 19 Whereas Conner is the forward-looking man of tomorrow who actively employs science, math, and the institutional tools of the federal government to reorganize society, Hook, his binary opposite, is emblematic of yesterday’s America and its “classical” republican tradition that refuses to be organized as such. The ninety-four-year-old former teacher, as the oldest resident in the poorhouse, belongs to a vanishing republican breed: he is religious, sentimental, skeptical of science, fiercely independent, committed to virtues, and an ardent Democrat of what seems to be a bygone era. It is his defiant individualism and democratic spirit that leads him to reject Conner’s authoritarian dictates about where to sit (the central plot revolves around Conner’s decision to regulate the seating by placing individual nametags on chairs). The fact that Updike chose to make William Jennings Bryan Hook’s personal hero and invest him with many of Bryan’s own attributes is germane: Bryan,

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who spearheaded populist elements of the Progressive movement and unsuccessfully ran as the Democratic nominee for president three times (1896, 1900, 1908), remains one of the last vocal remnants of a Jeffersonian-republican tradition that fiercely defended the right to self-government and espoused participatory local democracy in the face of bureaucratic planning and an active understanding of citizenship and communal sovereignty in the face of an encroaching federal government. 20 In the novel's finale, the metaphorical struggle between Hook and Conner and the political sensibilities they represent culminates in the inmates’ symbolic rebellion of stoning Conner. The act, which saw them return at least some of semblance of power to their own hands, leads the narrator to tellingly proclaim they “had shown there were rights.” 21 Interestingly enough, Updike had couched the question of the inmates’ liberty in the democratic discourse of rights—and used the mail to help make this point. The first thing we are told about Conner at the onset of the novel is that he is disturbed. When Lucas, another inmate, enters his office to speak with him early on, the narrator tells us that “his eyes glancing to the letter; help not hinder, I myself, and rights leaped from between his fingers” (16). This letter of complaint that Conner received from a resident of the nearby town periodically resurfaces to weigh heavily on his mind. Although the initial mention hints at its preoccupation with the inmates’ rights, the letter’s content fully revealed in the final pages clearly manifests this concern: Stephen Conner— Who do you think you are a Big shot? Yr duty is to help not hinder these old people on there way to there final Reward. I myself have heard bitter complaint from these old people when they come into town where I live. . . . The nature of there complaints I will discole latter, and will write the U.S. gov.ment depending. Things have not gone so far these old people have no rights no pale peenynotchin basterd can take away. (178)

Updike’s sympathetic attitude toward Hook and his republican impulses (whose character was based on his own maternal grandfather) sheds light on his democratic sensibilities: After all, Updike is careful to distinguish the poorhouse from authoritarianism and to emphasize its explicitly democratic qualities. Conner himself demonstrates this when, in response to the complaints of a resident who felt powerless, he proclaims: “That’s just the way I want no one to feel. I’m an agent of the National Internal Welfare Department and own nothing here. If it is anyone’s property it is yours. Yours and the American people’s” (43). Calling the novel “a deliberate anti-Ninety Eighty-Four” Updike sought to distance his fictional poorhouse from any Orwellian comparisons and reinforce its democratic bent. As he admitted twenty years later: “I was right where Orwell was wrong: no atom bombs

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have fallen, and the governmental forms of the major western democracies have not succumbed to Big Brother.” 22 But Hook does not prevail. For all of his deficiencies as a literary character, Conner is still remarkably sympathetic—and persuasive. Although the ambivalent finale somewhat disappointed reviewers who complained that the conflict was left unresolved, Updike the novelist could not really accept the absolute triumph of Hook and everything he represents exactly because he understood the necessity of Conner—and, as such, the limitations of an unchecked republican vision. 23 The narrator makes great effort to remind us of this sobering fact throughout the novel. For instance, when the inmates fondly reminisce about Conner’s predecessor, Mendelssohn, the narrator interjects that “The window and [fire] escape were Conner’s innovation; in Mendelssohn’s day they would have burned” (87). Conner’s response to residents’ complaints of their regimented treatment are equally revealing: “Half the country home acres were lying fallow, waste. The outbuildings were crammed with refuse and filth. The west wing was a death trap. When Hook, last autumn, ate that unwashed peach, he would have died if Mendelssohn had still been in charge” (17). The necessity of establishing some centralized technocratic and professional authority at the expense of the residents’ individual liberty and sovereignty is emphasized in the clearly metaphorical narrative surrounding Mrs. Lucas’s parakeet. Having received it from her daughter, who had tired of caring for it, the bird, which is caged in her room, is occasionally allowed to spread its wings and fly around the poorhouse corridors. “You can’t ask it to sit there like a stuffed ornament, in my daughter’s house it had great freedom. It can’t have that freedom here, but it has to have some,” Mrs. Lucas explains. “In my daughter’s house the cat caught it and took off its tail feathers—that’s the final result of all the freedom they gave it” (68). Given the various ways in which Conner’s centralized planning actually does seem salutary—even imperative—to the residents’ welfare, Updike’s debut novel leaves us with as deep an appreciation for Hook and his republican virtues of freedom, popular sovereignty and solidarity as it does with a sobered realization in the practical dangers, maybe even impossibility, of ever fully realizing them without any restraints. In Couples, the combative political community represented by Hook and his geriatric cohorts a decade earlier has now dissipated. Instead, Updike sketches a portrait of self-absorbed and politically atomized middle-class Americans in the fictional town of Tarbox, Massachusetts, who take democracy for granted and have substituted political affairs for extramarital ones. He betrays his concern with a decline of democratic community already in the epigraph: borrowing a key passage from Paul Tillich’s The Future of Religions, he notes that “There is a tendency in the average citizen, even if he has a high standing in his profession, to consider the decisions relating to the life of the society to which he belongs as a matter of fate on which he has no

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influence—like the Roman subjects all over the world in the period of the Roman empire, a mood favorable for the resurgence of religion but unfavorable for the preservation of a living democracy.” 24 The symbolic decline of democracy—implicitly alluded to in the characters’ woeful disregard of politics throughout the novel and culminating in their seemingly sacrilegious decision to attend a dinner party on the night President Kennedy was assassinated—is on full display in the key scene of the town hall meeting near the end of the novel. This supposedly democratic affair (which Angela, the wife of Piet, the main protagonist, calls “torment”) quickly proves itself to be not only a waste of time but a thoroughly antidemocratic experience. By carefully constructing this scene Updike essentially challenged the verisimilitude of Alexis de Tocqueville’s oft-quoted celebration of American republicanism when he famously observed that “To take a hand in the regulation of society and to discuss it is the biggest concern and, so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows.” 25 Updike actually suggests the exact opposite: rather than extol democratic participation, the scene demonstrates how far it has degenerated. During an innocent conversation early on in the novel, Frank Appleby casually jokes that “at the last town meeting the fire chief was voted the most neurotic” (27). By the novel’s end, what appeared initially as harmless banter has become an ominous sign of the meaninglessness of political life in Tarbox. The scene opens with a foreboding line: “Town meeting that spring smelled of whiskey. Piet noticed the odor as soon as he entered the auditorium” (386). Updike’s narrator then recalls how over the years the town meetings have degenerated. “At the first meeting Piet had attended, the town employees, a shirtsleeved bloc of ex-athletes who perched in the bleachers apart from their wives, had hooted down the elderly town attorney, Gertrude Tarbox’s brother-in-law, until the old man’s threadbare voice had torn and the microphone had amplified the whisper of a sob.” But this vocal and vibrant democratic deliberation, for which the narrator seems to long, has waned. “Now the employees, jacketed, scattered, sat mute and sullen with their wives as year after year another raise was unprotestingly voted for them” (386). The narrator goes on to lament that unlike the vibrant participants of past town meetings, the current town attorney is an “urbane junior partner” who “had taken the job as a hobby,” while the moderator was “a rabbit-eared associate professor of sociology, a maestro of parliamentary procedure” (386). The analogy is clear: the rowdy but active citizenry of the past, apparently drunk on democracy, have been replaced by a disengaged and lethargic public whose remaining participants are mostly drunk on whiskey. What has happened to the Tarbox town meetings is emblematic of what is happening to American democracy: everything is being relegated to procedure. Instead of meaningful deliberation—the sine qua non for any republican democratic process—there is bland protocol, and nothing seems to capti-

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vate let alone energize public interest anymore while “only an occasional issue evocative of the town’s rural past . . . provoked debate” (386). Echoing Updike’s own republican impulses, the narrator disapprovingly describes these proceedings: “New schools and new highways, sewer bonds and zoning by-laws all smoothly slid by, greased by federal grants. Each modernization and restriction presented itself as part of the national necessity, the overarching honor of an imperial nation.” In light of the new procedures that now seem to mechanically regulate the meetings and the plummeting public participation, it is no surprise that the town’s democratic institutions were being restructured. “There was annual talk now of representative town meeting, and the quorum had been halved.” When the event ends, the narrator informs us what by now we already know: “Politics bored Piet.” It is then further revealed that “his family had been Republican under the impression that it was the party of anarchy; they had felt government to be an illusion the governed should not encourage. The world of politics had no more substance for Piet than the film world” (387). Piet’s political apathy is pertinent since it serves as an interesting foil to Angela’s ostensible—and increasingly disingenuous—dedication. “At Piet’s side, Angela, now had to rush into Cambridge after nursery school every day and then fight the commuter traffic home, was exhausted, and kept nodding and twitching, yet as a loyal liberal insisted on staying to add her drowsy ‘Ayes’ to the others.” The narrator sardonically observes that “The selfrighteous efficiency of the meeting, hazed by booze, so irritated Piet, so threatened his instinct for freedom, that he several times left the unanimous crowd to get a drink of water.” Despite her adherence to procedure and insistence on taking part in the meeting, Angela appears to care as little as Piet does about the tedious politics of the town meeting. “In the car he asked her, ‘Are you dead?’ ‘A little. All those right-of-ways and one-foot strips of land gave me a headache. Why can’t they just do it in Town Hall and not torment us?’” (388). This is a pivotal admission, for it is not Angela who is really “dead” but the direct democratic process in which she insisted on participating. When Angela suggests “they just do it in the Town Hall and not torment us” she is signaling the broader public disengagement from participatory politics and its inevitable replacement by expanding bureaucratic government. In the final pages of Couples, Foxy, the woman for whom Piet left Angela, sends Piet a letter in which she contemplates the broader implications of the Kennedy assassination. “Forgive me, I am using my letter to you to argue with Larry in. But it made me sad, that he thought that somebody like us (if K. was) wasn’t fit to rule us, which is to say, we aren’t fit to rule ourselves, so bring on emperors, demigods, giant robots, what have you” (449). That Foxy would make such an un-republican remark in a letter is as ironic as it is revealing. Unlike Updike the essayist, who had attributed to the mail some

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kind of mythical communal function that had supposedly “stitched” together the American social fabric by facilitating a deliberative process, the underlining conclusion that Updike the novelist has reluctantly come to accept by the end of Couples is that the transformed character of middle-class life has little if any space, need or inclinations for the civic engagement and direct democracy upon which republicanism relies. As Updike admitted a few years after its release, the book “was certainly an attempt, maybe an all too deliberate ambitious attempt, to show how estranged the slightly-above middle class was in the 60s from all the institutions that had traditionally served as some kind of inspiration. Politics to these couples is unreal.” Fifteen years after the publication of Couples, Updike revealed that the characters “have lost touch with the political life of the nation” and that “We had become detached from the national life. Our private lives had become the real concern. There was a monstrous inflation of the private life as against the emerged life of the society which struck me and helped me think I should write the book.” 26 Although Updike the essayist would continue to praise America’s republican tradition and romanticize its civic institutions, Couples demonstrates that his literary imagination had already calculated the social costs of that “monstrous inflation of the private life” and offered an ominous warning as to its dire consequences on the body politic. Rabbit Redux (1971) possibly offers the most damning account of America’s deteriorating republican spirit by revealing that for many Americans, politics has long ceased to matter. On the contrary, rather than attempt to explore the nature of civic engagement, as he did indirectly in The Poorhouse Fair or head-on in Couples, by now Updike the novelist has basically conceded that politics just don’t matter anymore. This sobered, even fatalistic, conclusion surfaces at the height of a fiery debate surrounding the war in Vietnam that erupts between the chief protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and the car salesman (who is also sleeping with Rabbit’s wife, Janice) Charlie Stavros. During the exchange that occurs early in the novel, Janice turns to Stavros and quips, “He’s silent majority, but he keeps making noise,” and then goes on to remark, “See how little and tight his mouth gets when he thinks about politics.” To which Rabbit lashes out in response: “I don’t think about politics. That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.” 27 This powerful scene elucidates the fundamental challenge that Vietnam had posed to American political life by suggesting that the war had essentially forced middle-of-the-road self-described LBJ Democrats like Rabbit to do what the post-1945 elite, driven interest-group political system had never really demanded: to engage politics directly in the republican fashion. Updike further implies that this abandonment of republican politics has consequences. Whereas the hybrid model established in the 1950s upon the twin pillars of “Polyarchy” (rule by competing elites and interest groups) and deep pluralism prompted Americans like Rabbit to de-

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tach themselves from politics and effectively hand over the reign of government to technocrats in Washington, the disastrous results of such civic disengagement—as Updike seems to suggest—may very well have been the Vietnam War itself. 28 Jill, the young runaway girl who shacks up with Rabbit for a short and tumultuous period, seems to sense this and laments the passing of deliberative democracy when she scolds Rabbit for his apathy. “Your life has no reflective content; it’s all instinct, and when your instincts let you down, you have nothing to trust. That’s what makes you cynical. Cynicism, it has been said, is tired pragmatism. Pragmatism suited a certain moment here, the frontier moment, it did the work, very wastefully and ruthlessly, but it did it,” Jill tells Rabbit. “You’ve never given yourself the chance to think, except on techniques, basketball and printing, that served a self-exploitative purpose. You carry an old God with you, and an angry old patriotism. This is what we Americans think, its win or lose, all or nothing, kill or die, because we’ve never created the leisure in which to take thought. But now, you see, we must, because action is no longer enough, action without thought is violence. As we see in Vietnam” (228). If thought and reflection had been animated by a genuine debate—as direct democratic politics require, then as Jill suggested, the war itself could have been avoided. 29 Throughout the novel, Rabbit undergoes a telling transformation in the way he thinks and talks about politics. After he fails to answer his father-inlaw Fred Springer’s tirade at a baseball game about the deteriorating state of the union, Springer scolds him: “Harry, your silence disturbs me” (82). But Rabbit does not remain silent for long: after taking both Jill and Skeeter, the African American drug dealing veteran and wanted felon who Rabbit harbors, into his home, the three temporarily transform Rabbit’s suburban ranch house into a vibrant democratic arena that serves as a foil to his previous political apathy: the “teach-ins” he conducts with Jill and Skeeter during which they read Frederick Douglass and Franz Fanon aloud and discuss capitalism and imperialism could in some ways be considered a literary attempt at rejuvenating the lost public sphere of the republican ethos. What Rabbit had avoided doing in public for so many years—participating in political life—he now does in the comfort of his living room. “Politics are inescapable in this era, and his [Rabbit] are, predictably, intuitive. He has a fervent, almost religious belief in America. While the younger Rabbit ignored politics, the older one identifies himself with what he perceives as the beleaguered America of the Vietnam era,” Matthew Wilson aptly concluded. 30 While The Poorhouse Fair and Couples wrestled with the challenges to realizing or preserving genuine republican democracy, Rabbit Redux essentially concedes its impossibility by chronicling the consequences of its demise and contemplating alternative models. Unlike the earlier novels that still held hope for the perseverance of at least some republican virtues, Rabbit

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Redux, Updike’s admittedly most political book, seems to take it for granted that they are nowhere to be found and begins to look elsewhere for salvation. CONCLUSION As Updike’s fiction suggests, there are many serious challenges to the realization of any true republican vision in America. Bureaucratic technocrats like Conner, for instance, may be at times arbitrary, impersonal—even authoritarian, but they are also vital for promoting the general welfare and ensuring the health of a body politic that can't always look after its own best interests. Changing moral standards, waning public solidarity, and the reprioritization of collective values in favor of individual ones as part of the broader sociocultural inward shift toward personal self-fulfillment are equally deleterious to sustaining an active public sphere and vibrant civic engagement. A republican political model requires republican virtues; but since collective solidarity in Tarbox doesn’t really matter to Updike’s couples anymore, it’s no coincidence that the town meetings don’t either. Finally, the fact that American liberalism ever since the New Deal effectively centralized power and subsequently cultivated a disengaged public by outsourcing to Washington more and more political decisions, inevitably produced dormant citizens like Rabbit Angstrom and unleashed a pervasive apathy that dissuaded the body politic from actively taking part in the decision making process of the country. But there is hope. Although Updike’s fiction often tempered many of the romanticized republican visions his non-fiction expressed, his memoirs suggest a way to bridge the gaps separating individual from communal and combine them in a liberal-republican synthesis that could redeem at least part of the collective virtues. Criticized for being solipsistic, Self-Consciousness is far more subtle and complex exactly because it reveals the symbiotic relationship between self and society and the manner in which they mutually reinforce each other. 31 Motivated by what he called “incessant sociability,” Updike concedes that his self-consciousness and fervent individualism was ironically facilitated by his rich communal experiences growing up in Pennsylvania. “My own deepest sense of self has to do with Shillington, and (at a certain slant) the scent of breath of Christmas. I become exhilarated in Shillington, as if my self is being given a bath in its own essence,” he wrote. As a child in Shillington, he recalled that he had often sought to be “where the people are” and frequently spent his time on the street or in the post office and luncheonette in order to interact with his community. “There—in the words of the Tournier quotation—objects shine unaided, with a light of their own. This light is less strong, now, around the white Shillington house in which I was raised than around those two bulky brick houses across from the

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new movie theatre, where the luncheonette and the post office once were.” 32 This passage from the beginning of the book is not just a nostalgic lament for the disappearance of the post office and luncheonette but rather for the civic spirit they embodied. Given that Self-Consciousness opens with a chapter that extols community and concludes with a chapter that ostensibly seeks to do the opposite by celebrating the devotion to himself and justifying the necessity of “Being a self forever,” we might do well to reconsider the entire book as a synthesis of the two: Updike had become so dedicated to the self exactly because these were the virtues instilled in him by his society. In other words: it is the peculiar contradictory nature of American republicanism to believe that the public interest is best served by the promotion of the private ones. That is also why, for Updike at least, the collective values he imbibed in Shillington are also the ones that ultimately made him leave it. Updike never abandoned his republican spirit nor ceased to attempt and synthesize it with the ingrained American commitment to individual freedom. In 1992 he gave a speech at the Chicago Humanities Festival about the necessity of equality for the preservation of freedom. Besides being one of his most explicit forays into political theory, it reflected his still staunch republican credentials. After discussing Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) and approvingly repeating the Frenchman’s famous claim that “nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions among the people” and their “passion for equality,” Updike warned against the erosion of this fundamental feature of democracy. “Equality is a state of mind,” Updike said. “Our equality is a matter of rights, not circumstances. . . . Ours is an invented country, a country of written principles rather than of anciently inherited customs; the courts are the busy noisy forges wherein our theoretical equality is beaten out, again and again.” Offering a rare critique of economic inequality in the Reagan era, Updike noted that “Equal in our rights, we are free to strive to bear out the other fellow. This is the torque, the twist, the paradox, the stress that makes the explosive democratic engine go.” Tellingly, he chose to go back to his fiction and draw conclusions from The Poorhouse Fair and the Rabbit tetralogy to make his point: “Our human existence can know no absolute autonomy or social isolation,” he opined. “One man’s freedom, as in Rabbit, Run, is purchased at the price of other people’s suffering.” Updike concluded by flipping Tocqueville’s dictum and stating that “you cannot have, I believe, freedom without equality” and suggested that “an American degree of personal freedom can flourish only when the economic thrust is not forcing people apart.” 33 Having studied republican thinkers like Aristotle, Rousseau and Marx as a student at Harvard, Updike was more than familiar with their ideas and clearly appreciated the import of a vibrant public sphere and the challenges of being, as Aristotle famously put it, “social animals.” 34 That is why his perennial attention to the USPS specifically, and to community more broad-

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ly, was more than a residual of his adolescent fascinations with the outside world or merely in anticipation of an incoming paycheck. From the 1960s onwards, Updike’s recurring references to the mail in his non-fiction reveal a genuine concern with the fate of American democracy in light of increasing bureaucratization, consumerism, solipsism and political disengagement. His strange fascination with the post, therefore, should not simply be viewed as a nostalgic effort to recapture boyhood pleasures, but rather as an attempt to reclaim the political satisfaction that such activity entailed. Like sex, religion and art—even if not in the same intensity—Updike was deeply concerned with political life and the civic traditions that help animate it. Just like the USPS, in Updike’s eyes, facilitated national dialogue and provided a useful conduit for democratic deliberation in America, it’s worth considering Updike’s own fiction as striving to do much the same. NOTES 1. This anecdote was told to me by a literary critic who attended Updike’s talk. For more on the event see Salman Rushdie, “The 48th Congress of International PEN,” May 31, 2011, at: https://pen.org/the-48th-congress-of-international-pen/. 2. John Updike, Odd Jobs (New York: Knopf, 1991), 120–22. 3. Ibid., 122; Roger Kimball, “Politics, Politics, Politics—the PEN Congress in New York,” The New Criterion (March 1986), at: https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1986/3/ politics-politics-politics-a-the-pen-congress-in-new-york. 4. Ibid., 120–22. For critiques of bureaucratic overreach and the demise of direct democracy and civic engagement see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996). 5. Unlike the “Republicanism” associated with the Republican Party, I shall be referring to “republicanism” as a political persuasion. When associating Updike with republicanism, therefore, I am not suggesting in any way he supported the GOP—he didn’t, he was a lifelong Democrat—but rather that he displayed the political attributes associated with republican political theory. 6. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), viii. For more on the evolution of the term and debates surrounding republicanism in America see Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History (June 1992): 11–38. On the alternative political traditions and the Liberal Tradition see Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (September 1993): 549–66. 7. John Updike, “Postal Complaints,” in Assorted Prose (New York: Knopf, 1965), 66. 8. Compare with John Updike, “The Tarbox Police,” in Hugging the Shore (New York: Vintage, 1984), 25–30. 9. John Updike, “Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans,” in Hugging the Shore, 15–16. 10. For more on this period see Adam Begley, Updike (New York: HarperPerrenial, 2014), 1–53. 11. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 1989), 47. 12. Ibid., 52–55. 13. James Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 14.

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14. Updike, Picked-Up Pieces (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Books, 1975), 55–56. 15. Ibid., 471–72. 16. Ibid., 246–57. 17. For examples of this criticism see Marshal Boswell, “Updike, Religion, and the Novel of Moral Debate,” in Stacey Olster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 46; James Schiff, John Updike Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1998), 18. 18. Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), 182. 19. John Updike, The Poorhouse Fair (New York: Knopf, 1963), 47. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parenthesis. 20. For more on this see Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Anchor, 2007); Jeff Taylor, Where Did the Party Go? William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey and the Jeffersonian Tradition (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006). 21. For other political interpretations of the novel see Schiff, Updike Revisited, chapter 1; Judie Newman, John Updike (London: Macmillan, 1988), chapter 1. 22. John Updike, The Poorhouse Fair (New York: Knopf, 1977), viii–xiii; Plath, Conversations with Updike, 3. 23. For example see David Fitelson, “Conflict Unresolved,” Commentary (March 1959): 275. 24. John Updike, Couples (New York: Knopf, 1968). Subsequent page references follow quotations in parenthesis. 25. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1966), 249. 26. Plath, Conversations with Updike, 79, 117, 161–163. 27. John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Knopf, 1971), 44–47. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parenthesis. 28. For more on postwar liberalism’s democratic theory and interest groups politics see Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); David B. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951). 29. Although Updike had been quite hostile to the New Left, the critique of American politics voiced by Jill is quite reflective of the arguments for direct democracy put forward by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s. See James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 30. Matthew Wilson, “From Solitude to Society to Solitude Again,” in Lawrence R. Broer, ed., Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 96. 31. For examples see David Denby, “A Life of Sundays,” The New Republic, May 22, 1989; Elizabeth Hardwick, “Citizen Updike,” New York Review of Books, May 18, 1989. 32. Updike, Self-Consciousness, 220. 33. John Updike, “Matters of State,” in More Matter: Essays and Criticism (New York: Fawcett, 1999), 3–16. 34. Ibid., 211; Updike, Picked-Up Pieces, 348; On his college education see Yoav Fromer, “The Liberal Origins of John Updike’s Literary Imagination,” Modern Intellectual History, 14, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 187–216.

WORKS CITED Begley, Adam. Updike. New York: HarperPerrenial, 2014. Boswell, Marshall. “Updike, Religion, and the Novel of Moral Debate.” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, edited by Stacey Olster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 43–57.

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De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. 1835. New York: Knopf, 1966. Fitelson, David. “Conflict Unresolved.” Commentary (March 1959): 275. Fromer, Yoav. “The Liberal Origins of John Updike's Literary Imagination.” Modern Intellectual History, 14, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 187–216. Kimball, Roger. “Politics, Politics, Politics—the PEN Congress in New York,” The New Criterion. March 1986. https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1986/3/politics-politics-politicsa-the-pen-congress-in-new-york. Miller, James. Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Newman, Judie. John Updike. London: Macmillan, 1988. Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Rushdie, Salman. “The 48th Congress of International PEN.” May 31, 2011. https://pen.org/ the-48thcongress-of-international-pen/. Schiff, James. John Updike Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1998. Updike, John. Couples. New York: Knopf, 1968. ———. “Interviews with Insufficiently Famous Americans.” Hugging the Shore. New York: Knopf, 1983, 15–16. ———. “Matters of State.” More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York: Fawcett, 1999, 3–16. ———. Odd Jobs. New York: Knopf, 1991. ———. Picked-Up Pieces. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Books, 1975. ———. The Poorhouse Fair. New York: Knopf, 1963. ———. “Postal Complaints.” Assorted Prose. New York: Knopf, 1965, 66. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf, 1971. ———. Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf, 1989. ———. “The Tarbox Police.” Hugging the Shore. New York: Vintage, 1984, 25–30. Weber, Max. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner’s, 1958. Wilson, Matthew. “From Solitude to Society to Solitude Again.” Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels, edited by Lawrence R. Broer. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998, 89–110. Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.

Chapter Eight

The Failure of Moderation in Buchanan Dying and Memories of the Ford Administration Michial Farmer

John Updike’s commitment to middle spaces has been well documented. As he famously said in an interview, “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.” 1 In another interview, he said that he likes “middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” 2 And in the early autobiographical essay “The Dogwood Tree” (1962), he says that his aesthetic project is “to transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery.” 3 Critics have found evidence of this project throughout his writing. Quentin Miller, for example, connects Updike’s love of middles with his upbringing in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and says that Updike’s talent is built on his “attending to precise, unvarnished reality” and his geographically specific writing, generally located in fictionalized versions of Shillington and Ipswich, Massachusetts. 4 And his love for middles extends to his political orientation. He considered himself a liberal, telling Charles Taylor Samuels in a 1968 interview: “politically, I favor the democrats.” 5 But his liberalism was largely a cultural inheritance rather than a reasoned stance; in that same conversation, he confessed to Samuels that he found it “hard to have opinions” and explained in a later interview that he was a Democrat “because my parents were Democrats—Roosevelt Democrats—so without much reflection I’ve remained a Democrat.” 6 And yet he noted that he comes from “a conservative family” without suggesting that he had demonstrably shifted from a conservative orientation, either. 7 And in 1996, he told Eleanor Wachtel that, while he has “always seen myself kind of a liberal and a lefty,” he is “also kind of a conservative, I suppose, in that I 129

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don’t think one should rashly tear down what’s there in the confidence that you can replace it with something better, because often you can’t, really.” 8 His political views are thus not easily reducible to one side or the other of the American dichotomy. Updike’s long autobiographical essay “On Not Being a Dove,” collected in his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), demonstrates the social unpopularity of his middleness. Quentin Miller notes that many of Updike’s characters are “conscious of not-belonging,” and in fact most of the other essays in SelfConsciousness position Updike as an outsider in the upper-middle-class liberal milieu of his adopted Massachusetts home: he hails not from Boston or New York but from small-town Pennsylvania; he has psoriasis, a disease that “singl[es] you out from the happy herds of healthy, normal mankind”; his stutter makes him uncomfortable speaking; his relatively conservative Christianity makes him stand out from the Unitarians and atheists around him. 9 Likewise, “Dove” suggests that his political views did not neatly square up with other writers or with other denizens of Ipswich. He tells us from the vantage point of 1989 that, although he smoked marijuana and (rather famously) participated in the sexual revolution, he never dove headlong into the late-1960s counterculture. It was the protests of the Vietnam War that kept him away. He was patriotic, and his patriotism made him, at the very least, uncomfortable with the protests, which he saw as celebrating the collapse of “our patriotic myth of invincible virtue.” The anti-war movement offended his “Gorge-deep principles of fairness and order,” and “it greatly distressed me . . . that American liberals could so blithely disown what was clearly a typically and historically liberal cause, intervention against a Communist bully.” 10 The anti-war movement marked the American Left’s cultural shift from liberalism to radicalism; Updike remained a liberal, which, in such an environment, made him a conservative. The world, as he saw it, did not need another turning-over; the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War, and the American Revolution were quite enough for him. Thus he stood alone among major American novelists in his support, however qualified, for the Vietnam War. Updike’s personal ambivalence with the 1960s manifests in a number of his novels and stories from this era. “Marching Through Boston” (1966), for example, complicates the Civil Rights marches by inserting Richard and Joan Maple’s failing marriage into the middle of one of them. (More troublingly, Richard mocks Martin Luther King, Jr., by speaking in minstrel-show patois, an insult that Adam Begley says “is pretty much a transcription of Updike’s own behavior.”) 11 Another Maples story, “Eros Rampant” (1968), shows white men like Richard losing their grip of the country as women and people of color fight for more power. “The Hillies” (1969), set in the same Tarbox as the comparatively sunny Couples (1968), features the town’s teenagers and young adults—having been neglected by their wife-swapping parents—

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more or less taking over. And Rabbit Redux (1971) paints an apocalyptic picture of second-wave feminism, the Vietnam War protests, and the Black Power movement, even as it implicitly acknowledges that in some ways, the summer of 1969 merely represents all of society’s living the way Rabbit himself lived a decade earlier. The title of “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time” (1972), playing off the reactionary slogan “America: Love It or Leave It,” demonstrates Updike’s ambivalence about his country and its political movements. And in fact, the Updikes did briefly leave America, living in London and traveling all over Europe and north Africa in 1968 and 1969. He had his nation, and especially Pennsylvania, on his mind while he was there, researching a novel on James Buchanan, America’s fifteenth president. Failing to write this novel, he turned his research into his only fulllength play, 1974’s Buchanan Dying. The play is, to say the least, not one of his best-loved works. Very few readers have paid much critical attention to it, and for good reason: as a writer, Updike’s great strength is his narrative voice—the pointillist descriptions of every corner of the material world. 12 A play, by its very nature, has no narration and thus cannot offer such descriptions. All Updike has to work with, then, are the characters, and he does not actually create them; he has to work within the historical facts, and if any movement is possible within the biographical outlines, it is only a little movement. On top of these limitations, Buchanan Dying is a very long play—performing it as written must take three hours—and at points it is, to be frank, not particularly interesting. But Buchanan Dying is one of the clearest expressions of Updike’s political moderation, and its spiritual successor, the 1992 novel Memories of the Ford Administration (whose historian protagonist, like Updike, spends the early 1970s trying and failing to write a book about Buchanan) is another. In both the play and the novel, Updike holds the middle up as an ideal—but since the center, as it were, cannot hold, the political and social worlds of the two works come crashing down, with disastrous results for their characters. Even so, Updike comes out in favor of middleness and moderation as a counterbalance to the forces that threaten to unbalance the world of the 1850s and the 1970s alike. BUCHANAN DYING: THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL In his foreword to Buchanan Dying, Updike reveals that the play was written in the midst of the Vietnam War and was at least partially inspired by the flak he received for his support of that conflict. To him, “The questions raised in the crisis years 1965–1972 find echo in the pre–Civil War crisis, when a peaceable, compromising, legalistic President presided over a widening split no compromise of legalisms could bridge.” His goal in writing the play “was to extend sympathy to politicians, as they make their way among imperfect

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alternatives toward a hidden future.” 13 Or, as James Schiff puts it, Updike offers “a personal defense of those individuals, including the author himself as well as of certain of his ancestors, who have done their duty, exercised good sense and sound judgment, stood as a middle between extremes, and avoided violent conflict.” 14 The first edition of Memories of the Ford Administration has a split-screen cover—one half shows James Buchanan’s face, and the other half Gerald Ford’s. Likewise, we might imagine the cover or the playbill of Buchanan Dying split into thirds, one-third showing Buchanan, one-third Lyndon Johnson, and one-third Updike himself. The entire action of Buchanan Dying involves the former president’s lying on his deathbed, confronting the ghosts of his past one or two at a time. For the most part, these ghosts are accusatory, although from time to time they forgive and defend him. As Buchanan deals with them, he presents himself as a man wholeheartedly committed to moderation. The play’s major ethical question thus becomes whether Buchanan’s moderation was heroic, as he tries to paint it, or cowardly, as his adversaries do. Buchanan’s commitment to moderation even extends to his physical body; the African American servant who appears early in the first act looks into his eyes and reports that one is blue and the other is greenish brown. Buchanan’s heterochromia suggests that his moderation resembles a rational, Aristotelian calculation of the virtuous mean between two vices than it does a simultaneous holding of opposing extremes. Speaking to his servant, he uses his eyes as a metaphor for his having attained a higher sort of vision. As he explains, “The blue one is farsighted, and the other is nearsighted. When I close that one, you are blurred because you are too near, and when I close this one, you are blurred because you are too far away. But when I open them both, and tilt my head, you are in focus absolute” (10). In this way, Buchanan sees his mediation of two extremes—blue and brown, farsightedness and nearsightedness—as built into the very fabric of his being. This inward disposition becomes, in Buchanan’s hands, a political principle. He tells his niece Harriet, for example, that “Concession is the world’s walking gait. Fevers and hallucinations sweep over us, it is true; but be they permitted to infect the public body, slaughter shall result. Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude allows no shadings” (15). His initial role in the Polk administration, he explains, was to thread this very needle: “I will be delegated to argue the extreme to gain the middle” (15). Here again, moderation is not so much the absence of extremity as it is the presence of both extremes seeing things from both sides simultaneously and choosing both to choose neither. Buchanan’s job as president, as he saw it, was to stand between the abolitionists and the slaveowners; to the abolitionists he would represent the extreme of the slaveowning position, and to the slaveowners he would represent the extreme of

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abolitionism. In this, he hoped to land on a compromise that would offer something to each of them. In the early 1970s, when Updike was writing Buchanan Dying, and in the twenty-first century when we read it, Buchanan’s position seems ludicrous, because we recognize that there is no moral parallel between the slaveowners and the abolitionists. But that sort of vision is apparent only in retrospect, and Updike’s ideal of moderation depends heavily on the ambiguity of human life. Recall his annoyance at the stridency and certainties of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s. The protesters, as he saw them, believed themselves to have achieved clarity about events that were fundamentally murky. In “On Being a Dove,” Updike suggests that he supported the Vietnam War, at least in part, because his recognition of human ambiguity forced him to do so. Part of his contempt for the anti-war movement came from his faith—not because the anti-war movement was composed of sophisticated humanists hostile to Christianity but because even the religious members of the movement had misunderstood the crucial doctrine of original sin: “In all varieties of Christian faith resides a certain contempt for the world and for attempts to locate salvation and perfection here. The world is fallen.” 15 Full-bore pacifism, he argues, ignores the tragic reality of the postlapsarian world: “The Vietnam War—or any war—is ‘wrong,’ but in the sense that existence itself is wrong. To be alive is to be a killer . . . Peace is not something we are entitled to but an illusory respite we earn.” 16 This theological schema has little room for the sort of political radicalism and utopianism practiced by many in the anti-war movement. That Updike would be willing to connect his own unpopular political position with one that seems so cut-and-dry in retrospect demonstrates the extent of his willingness to embrace ambiguity. Unlike the protesters he set himself against, he is willing to entertain the idea that history will see him as a monster. Accordingly, it will not be surprising that Updike was also attracted to the anti-war movement, especially as it manifested in his first wife and her father, Unitarians whose faith he admired for “its latent spark of revolutionary will, so dampened in my German forebears.” 17 But he cannot go along with them because they ignore something fundamental to understanding human beings: “down-dirty sex and the bloody mess of war and the desperate effort of faith all belonged to a necessary underside of reality that I felt should not be merely ignored, or risen above, or disdained. These shameful things were intrinsic to life.” 18 The anti-war activists’ desire for ideological purity makes no sense in a world in which things are good and destructive in equal measure, and Updike wanted them to admit “that we had been led into the Vietnam mire plausibly step by step, that the mire was U.S., us.” 19 That word mire is significant, because Updike clearly believed the argument over Vietnam was itself a swamp from which Americans would have trouble extricating themselves. As he saw it, Vietnam was a test of American core

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principles; Quentin Miller suggests that we think of Updike “as a Sisyphus figure, repeatedly charging the hill pushing a stone of ideals that had become, at least for liberal intellectuals and writers, too weighty to bear.” 20 To maintain ideals that he saw as intrinsic to the United States, Updike had to surrender his own moral purity, and the nation’s. From his perspective, the anti-war protesters pretended that there was a way to go through the world without being guilty—and in so doing, allowed for a false security fundamentally opposed to the Christian spirit. Updike’s support for the Vietnam War was thus “A plea . . . for the doctrine of Original Sin and its obscure consolations”—a doctrine soundly rejected by the Unitarians and their liberal heirs. 21 Updike points to ambiguity here—the universal guilt of human beings means that no action will ever be entirely right, that all of our virtues are mixed with vice, and thus that every demand for purity is an unreasonable demand. And if this is true, only moderation (in his case, support for a war that he believed to be destructive and even wrong) adequately takes stock of the world we actually live in. Even the title of the essay makes Updike’s ambiguity and guilt clear: He is not willing to call himself a hawk, even if he is not a dove. Buchanan is, in some respects, in a similar position, He is no lover of slavery, just as Updike admits that the Vietnam War is “wrong.” But as the president, his responsibilities are on a far different scale than Updike’s. His entire goal, as Updike presents it in Buchanan Dying, is to avoid war even if it means propagating a system of slavery that, at the very least, made him uncomfortable. But he orients his politics around the rule of law, which he hopes will be a moderating force among the extremists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. “I never claimed slavery was no evil,” he declares early on in the play. “I merely claimed for it the constitutional protection the framers unambiguously specified” (20). Later he will argue that “The Supreme Court of the United States have decided—what was known to us all to have been the existing state of affairs for fifty years—that slaves are property. Admit that fact, and you admit everything” (107–8). In fact, for Buchanan, the only principle that stands above the law is the perseverance of the Union. Inaction is the only route he sees to such an outcome: Firm action meant the abyss. Inaction was our one last hope. Tranquilize the wavering states, and isolate South Carolina. But Lincoln refused to talk, he stayed in Springfield. . . . Our party, then, was the sole bridge remaining between North and South; his party had become the very instrument of disunion. In a crisis of such grandeur a gesture transcending party loyalty was called for. (24)

Buchanan’s emphasis on the maintenance of the Union is a literal application of his principle of reaching moderation by reconciling the extremes; to keep the United States united will require the merger of the abolitionists—who in

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opposing the southern way of life “forced” slavery upon the South “as its very soul” (25)—and the slaveholders who would fight tooth and nail to maintain their peculiar institution. Extremes on one side create extremes on the other. Moderation is the path to unity. Buchanan’s arguing of one extreme to the other is quite different, moreover, from the extremism of the North toward the South, and vice versa—because his goal is unity, he is capable (or so he hopes) of using his adopted extremist language adeptly, as a tool rather than as an idea. Buchanan is, in his way, particularly suited to make an argument like this; he hails, after all, from neither New England nor the South. He tells Harriet not to trust men from these regions and to promise to marry someone from the “Middle States” rather than a northerner or a southerner. In fact, both Buchanan and Updike point to their home state of Pennsylvania as a breeding ground for healthy moderation: “Pennsylvania is truly the keystone of this vast confederacy, and our character and position eminently qualify us to act as a mediator between opposing extremes” (78). Dramatic irony infuses this declaration, however—in fact, Buchanan’s attempts at moderating New England and the South fail miserably, and no other Pennsylvanian has ever held the United States’s highest office, perhaps suggesting that the model of moderation offered by the Keystone State remains perpetually out of fashion. And yet we need moderation, the play suggests, because human life is messier than either extreme would like it to be. Buchanan says early on in the play that “facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is” (5). The world is round, he says, only because the scientific consensus changed; likewise, when Americans thought slavery was wrong, it was wrong. His vision of politics and ethics rests on this ambiguity. “There is, all about us,” he tells his fiancée, Anne Coleman, “an empyrean of absolute fact; but human striving agitates it hopelessly, and eventually turns the mud water, and the water mud” (39). Thus, for Buchanan, politics must begin with the notion that nothing is ever sure—even if doing so leaves us unable to say anything ultimate about the most important issues of our day. And thus Buchanan’s moderation leaves him unable to say anything about slavery: “Consider the Negro—in the eyes of his Southern possessor, a beast of burden fed and guided into usefulness by a missionary solicitude. In the eyes of the Boston anti-slaver, the Negro looms as a white man like himself, a Washington for nobility and a Jefferson for wit, which a mischievous universe has daubed with the tarbrush and hurled into chains. . . . What is he really, we shall not discover in our lifetime, nor his” (38–39). Even supposed “facts” are never certain beyond doubt. “Are we not,” Buchanan asks, “as Bishop Berkeley indicts, creatures all of one another’s eyes?” (39). Reality is essentially unknowable, and Buchanan’s knowledge of its unknowability pushes him to a radical relativism, one that

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leads to disaster when exercised, in Donald Greiner’s words, “in a time of dire crises all demanding absolute decisions.” 22 If Buchanan is right, if things are really as uncertain as he claims, moderation is the only option: extreme actions have extreme consequences, and since we ultimately cannot predict what those consequences will be, Buchanan demands that we avoid extremism. Moderation also has unpredictable consequences, but at least as Buchanan sees it, those consequences will be lesser and thus a lesser evil. Thus his moderation gives him a clear conscience—or at least as clear a conscience as can be expected in such a dire time. It also allows him to complicate the decisions of others. When Polk tells Buchanan that he shouldn’t be on his cabinet if he is considering running for president, since he would not be able to trust his advice, Buchanan asks, “What is an adviser’s duty, but to temper the necessary thrust of executive decision with a broader, more ambiguous view?” (93). Here we have moderation as a kind of anti-epistemology, in a vicious, or virtuous, circle: nothing is certain, so we must exercise moderation, which tells us that nothing is certain. Buchanan repeatedly argues—and Updike, writing from the froth and anger of the Vietnam era, seems to agree with him—that, when two sides of an argument disagree radically, like the abolitionists and the slaveowners, moderation is the only sensible route, even though history will not be kind to moderates. He attempts to maintain the Constitutional right to slavery, at least “pro tempore” (59). The same principles apply to private life. When his niece tells him that she can feel herself growing up, Buchanan recommends caution: “Life is blind; but the human brain, in the workshop of the Almighty, has forged dim eyes, with the which to foresee a few paces ahead. Look before you leap” (16). He urges the same caution on Susanna Keitt during the lead-up to secession. She repeats a rumor that “soon as Lincoln and his rascals get themselves elected, the blacks will rise up in a foaming tide of murder, rape, and pillage” (106). Buchanan cannot follow her, however: “My dear Mrs. Keitt, with all my heart I beg you to resist unreasoning panic” (106). Moderation demands caution, and caution often leads to a kind of moderation, since people are less likely to take extreme positions if they believe that the outcome is uncertain. This is Buchanan’s highest political principle, and he hopes it will hold the opposing sides of the country together. Buchanan’s interlocutors, however, tend to present his supposed moderation as a particularly ambitious kind of cowardice, and Updike himself calls Buchanan a “cautious, peaceable, evasive, even cowardly, fellow.” 23 Buchanan himself recognizes this alternate reading of his actions (or his inaction), and he points out that after the Civil War, “North and South were howling me down for a traitor” (8). As Coleman tells him, “You are a traitor to your bones. Whatever you touched in your life, you betrayed. Betrayal was your essence, as the snake’s essence is venom” (18). John Slidell, too, calls him a

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traitor: “The South made him President. They took him for one of their own. Since his first term as a watery-legged mooncalf in the lower house of Congress he played the parasite on Southern political genius. So how did this Judas expunge his debt? He turned his back when the chits were called in” (19). As the war begins, the president expresses his hope that only a few southern states will secede and that the rest will follow him. Samuel Black finds the idea ludicrous: “I fear the ground where you stand is so narrow, you cannot invite many to join you upon it.” Buchanan fires back: “The ground is narrow, as the top of a dike is narrow; it is narrow as the right path is always narrow!” (129). The coded reference to Updike’s own name here (“the top of a dike”) suggests that the author appreciates and approves of Buchanan’s moderation, no matter how disastrous it ends up being. Updike’s point is that we must be moderate in interpreting Buchanan’s moderation; we must hold both extremes at once and conclude that moderation is both foolish and heroic, and that its doomed quality does not negate its morality. Updike’s writing is always personal, even when it is not (as it usually is) directly autobiographical. In this sense, Buchanan Dying might be his most personal work on a purely political level. Standing alone, or nearly alone, in his cultural milieux in his qualified support of the Vietnam War; leaving the country he loved behind while he lived for almost a year in England; nearing (as Memories of the Ford Administration makes clear) the end of his first marriage, with all the guilt and alienation that implied, Updike pours himself into one of the least attractive historical vessels imaginable: an absurdly unpopular president who allowed slavery to continue without even the dubious justification of believing in it himself. We should take Updike at his word when he says that some of his interest in Buchanan comes from his being the only Pennsylvanian president, 24 but it is also clear that Updike finds in him an attractive political principle (moderation), one that is somehow made even more attractive when applied to an issue (slavery or Vietnam) on which consensus seems so clear and obvious. Perhaps Updike had despaired of having his views understood by Norman Mailer or Philip Roth (or, for that matter, by any of the upper-middle-class professionals in Ipswich); perhaps his exploration of Buchanan’s absurd moderation was a way of grounding his own support for Vietnam in history, as the doctrine of original sin allowed him to ground it in theology. Either way, Buchanan Dying, despite its artistic and commercial failures, thoroughly explores Updike’s feelings, good and bad, about his own principled moderation.

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MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL The themes of Buchanan Dying are, unsurprisingly, picked up by 1992’s Memories of the Ford Administration, another fragmentary work that makes use of Updike’s aborted attempt to write a novel about Buchanan. Here pieces of that failed novel appear as a failed biography of Buchanan, interspersed throughout historian Alfred “Alf” Clayton’s memoirs that reconsider his tumultuous domestic life in the mid-1970s as he contemplates leaving his wife, Norma, who he nicknames the “Queen of Disorder,” to marry his mistress, Genevieve Mueller. Alf’s erotic life would seem to be complicated by the fact that Genevieve happens to be married to Brent Mueller, a proponent of deconstruction and colleague of Alf’s at the fictional all-female Wayward Junior College. Memories is thus one of Updike’s most formally experimental novels, and along the way he ruminates on the nature of memory, history, and historiography, also taking time to explain the attractions and the failures of poststructuralism. 25 At the center of all this is Alf, who loves Buchanan and sees the biography he attempts to write during the 1970s as a chance to vindicate him from the judgmental (and worse, the forgetful) forces of history. But Buchanan’s moderation also clearly resonates with his own views, especially during this turbulent period when he has left his family in favor of his mistress without quite leaving them. 26 As we might expect, Alf’s analyses of Buchanan’s presidency are quite similar to Updike’s own. And in fact, large sections of Memories are composed of Alf’s attempts to write a biography of Buchanan. Throughout the novel, Alf argues for a historiography of deconstruction, in which fact and fiction are freely intermingled and no truth ever arrived it; he therefore feels comfortable structuring his biography like a novel, which means that we may very well be reading sections of Updike’s unpublished early 1970s Buchanan novel. If so, it is not difficult to see why Updike gave up on the earlier novel. The many Buchanan sections of Memories are exceedingly dull, even compared to Buchanan Dying; as William Pritchett says, they seem “contrived to break the back of any but the most determinedly captivated reader.” 27 Like Buchanan Dying, Memories contrasts Buchanan’s virtuous if ineffective moderation with the principled extremism of Andrew Jackson, who tells Buchanan that There are secrets I keep to myself . . . I will conceal them from the very hairs of my head! If I believed that my right hand knew what the left would do on the subject of appointments, I would cut it off and cast it into the fire! In politics as in all else, Mr. Búchanan, my guide is principle alone. If I am elected President, it shall be without intrigue and solicitation. I shall enter office perfectly free and untrammelled, at liberty to fill the offices of government with the men I believe to be the ablest and best in the country! 28

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Buchanan is subjected to these declarations when he comes to Jackson to see if Henry Clay might be made Secretary of State. When Jackson realizes the purpose of his visit, he explodes: “You may tell Mr. Clay and his friends that before I reach the Presidential chair by means of bargain and corruption I would see the earth open and swallow us all!” (184–85). These are the words of a man who is sure of his own righteousness and of the correctness of his views; as such, he has quite a bit in common with the Vietnam protestors of the late ’60s, at least in Updike’s view of them. We are, perhaps, meant to admire Jackson’s willingness to take a stand—but we are also clearly meant to be made nervous by it. His advice to Buchanan demonstrates the degree to which he simply cannot understand the younger man’s ambivalence and the ambiguous world in which they both move: “B’twist ourselves, Búchanan. Ye have a future ahead, unless ye waffle it away. The straight path is always the high road. Them that travel the byways of compromise is the ones that get lost” (185). Moderation simply has no place in Jackson’s political economy. On the other hand, Alf admires Buchanan’s moderation for its grounding in ambiguity and ambivalence: Buchanan, he says, “projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence, where Pierce had the narrowing New England mind, gloomy as an old flint arrowhead. Buchanan’s mind people complained he couldn’t make it up, and I liked that. There is a civilized heroism to indecision” (13). Alf’s admiration for Buchanan, notably, is not identical to Updike’s—it is missing the theological justification that colored Updike’s support for the Vietnam War. For Alf, caught between the Perfect Wife and the Queen of Disorder, moderation is heavily personal, and indecision is so close to second nature that it must be some sort of virtue. Buchanan sees it this way, too, unsurprisingly: “I am a Federalist to the bone,” he says, “in the conservative and balanced style of the deathless Washington. Property rights, but not rule by the rich. Personal rights, but not radical mobocracy and incessant revolution” (43). Buchanan’s language here suggests Updike’s own artistic principle, the “yes, but” quality of his work that he points out to Charles Taylor Samuels: “Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our inner urgent whispers, but—the social fabric collapses murderously. Yes, in The Centaur, to self-sacrifice and duty, but—what of man’s private agony and dwindling? No, in The Poorhouse Fair, to social homogenization and loss of faith, but—listen to the voices, the joy of persistent existence.” 29 Buchanan, too, insists on seeing both sides of any given issue, and holding onto both of them to the best of his ability. This is, he suggests, the American way: “Washington’s noble example and the beautifully wrought balances of the Constitution indicate the same middle path between impractical extremes, and if for following this path—sometimes broad and sometimes painfully narrow—I must be the object of calumny and cheap ridicule from all sides, from men of iron as well as men of straw, so be it” (43–44). Such moderation does indeed make Buchanan suspect in the eyes of his neighbors.

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“Your father,” he explains to Ann Coleman, 30 “thinks I bend too much” (43). The elder Coleman, it turns out, thought one of Buchanan’s speeches too Democratic and another not Democratic enough. He understandably reads this discrepancy as vacillation—but Buchanan would reply that, to the immoderate, moderation is likely to be seen as a lack of firm principle. Likewise, as in Buchanan Dying, the future president’s moderate position on slavery horrifies Grace Hubley, who says she would like to kill slaveowners and send them to hell. But Buchanan predictably attempts to walk her back to the middle ground: “Come now, the peculiar institution presents more sides than that. You speak as a soldier’s daughter, Miss Hubley, but here in peaceable Pennsylvania we take a less absolute view” (65). The tragic irony of this statement is that it is given to the woman who will (completely innocently) come between Buchanan and Ann, leading to the latter’s suicide. In some ways, Buchanan is attempting to hold both sides in his personal life as well as his political life. He wants to maintain his (platonic) relationship with Grace even as he develops his (romantic) relationship with Ann, just as he wants to maintain the Constitutional right to slavery even as he placates the demands of the abolitionists. Moderation, again, means holding both extremes at once. He has this approach in common with Alf, who, at the time of the action of the novel, has left his wife, Norma, for his mistress, Genevieve—without actually leaving her. They no longer live together, but he talks to her constantly and is frequently at the house they once shared. At one point in the novel, brought together by the illness of one of their children, they even sleep together. Like Buchanan, Alf views moderation as the attempt to reconcile opposites. But the person who attempts such a balance will, likely as not, be torn in two. As Buchanan puts it, “Our American problem is, we have land and climate enough for a number of nations, and seek to be only one” (44). Likewise, Alf tells us that he often goes home to his bachelor’s apartment, “there to field a harrowing and hard-to-terminate phone call from either Genevieve or Norma, both sopranos . . . Singing, subtextually, the same aria: Perchè devo dormire solo? Why wasn’t I with, both voices asked without asking, her or her?” (196). To be moderate is to have both—or neither, or and neither. This is as true for personal relationships as it is for political ones. It’s no surprise that, as Quentin Miller points out, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, divorce became a metaphor for the Vietnam debates in Updike’s fiction, and vice versa: “While Vietnam cannot be said to cause divorce in Updike’s writings, it can be seen as a recurrent metaphor for the breakdown of the same type of consensus that determines the success of marriage.” 31 To borrow a slogan from the feminist movement also ascendant during this period, the personal is political. Buchanan’s failure to hold his relationship with Ann Coleman together goes together naturally with his failure to hold the country together, just as Alf’s failure to choose between Norma and

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Genevieve goes together with Updike’s ambivalence about the Vietnam War. The costs of moderation become clear when the situation is formulated this way. 32 Moderation fails, for Buchanan, when he cannot control the South’s secession, when he cannot hold the nation together after all. “The South has been a friend of mine,” he says, “and I have long sought to preserve for it and its institutions those guarantees which our wise founders wrote into the Constitution. I have leaned over backwards to keep the balance between it and the North in these fearful and unsettled times. But I cannot give away national property and my right to defend it” (315). Historians have called Buchanan the worst president in United States history, and much of the reason for this ranking is his failure to prevent the Civil War; 33 since, at least in Updike’s work, Buchanan’s strategy for maintaining the union was a principled moderation, these historians implicitly condemn moderation. Likewise, moderation fails for Alf when Genevieve discovers the multiple infidelities within Alf’s infidelity to Norma—in addition to Norma, he has slept with Wendy Wadleigh, Ann Ardolf, and several other women whom he cannot even remember. Alf has expressed a certain moderation in trying to maintain both Norma and Genevieve—the addition of these other women is further evidence of his desire to have it all, to moderate among them rather than giving himself fully to what he might call the extremism of monogamy. When she leaves him, he cannot stop her, just as Buchanan cannot stop the events at Fort Sumter. Moderation has failed, and Alf returns to Norma. As Alf points out, moderation—in the Ford years he writes about and the Bush years from which he writes—is largely discredited as a virtue: Present-day students, adolescents thrust from the jingling nursery of television into the bewildering forest of texts, have no patience with their ancestors and little interest in the erratic half-steps whereby a people effects moral change and whereby well-intentioned men of substance might seek amid agitation and a long stasis of contending equal interests the path of least general harm. (243)

Our rush to judge, in other words, means that moderation is the enemy and ambivalence an impediment. Alf’s language here, however, suggests the reason why moderation is still the proper path, even or especially when it fails: Ambivalence is unavoidable because human life is made up of “a long stasis of contending equal interests,” a “bewildering forest of texts” (247) through which there is no clear route. As George Diamond puts it, “Buchanan’s ability to foresee and manage the future was severely limited, and that, it is made clear to us, is the true nature of the human condition.” 34 If this ambiguity is truly at the heart of what it means to be human, however, we must follow Buchanan’s example, and Alf’s, and hold onto as many options as we can in an attempt to find “the path of least general harm”—while understand-

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ing that the middle path is also going to lead to pain for the world. Moderation, in other words, is condemned by the ambiguity that guides its path, and yet that same ambiguity demands the moderation it condemns. We have returned to the “yes, but” quality that Updike identifies in his own writing. The very principle of moderation demands us to recognize the flaws in the principle of moderation. Yes, we must live moderately, preserving as much as we can—but we are doomed, in extreme circumstances (like the Civil War or the sexual nihilism of the Ford administration) to failure. Yes, we live in the forest of ambiguity, never able to see more than a few feet in front of us at any given time—but future generations, with the benefit of hindsight, will have few reservations about condemning us for the future we couldn’t predict. Buchanan is Updike’s patron saint, not just because they shared a home state, but because he serves as an object lesson for the good and the evil that can come from the sort of principled moderation that Updike holds to. And the books Updike dedicated to Buchanan may moderate some readers’ stridency in thinking they understand the past as well as the present—the situation in Vietnam, for example, seems obvious now, but “On Not Being a Dove” asks us to slow down before judging Updike’s complicity in the war. NOTES 1. John Updike, “The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike,” interview by Charles Thomas Samuels, in Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 25. 2. John Updike, “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” interview by Jane Howard, in Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 11. 3. John Updike, “The Dogwood Tree,” in Assorted Prose (New York: Random House, 2012), 147. 4. Quentin Miller, “Updike, Middles, and the Spell of ‘Subjective Geography,’” in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 15. 5. Updike, “Art of Fiction,” 31. 6. Updike, “Art of Fiction,” 31; John Updike, “A Timeout to Talk About Words,” interview by Paul Galloway, in Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 242. 7. Updike, “Timeout,” 242. 8. John Updike, interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers and Company, CBC, 1996. 9. Miller, “Updike, Middles,” 17; John Updike, “At War with My Skin,” in Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1989), 42. 10. John Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” in Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1989), 124, 125, 129. 11. Adam Begley, Updike (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 275. 12. Critical attention to the play has been very slight. Donald J. Greiner devotes an entire chapter of The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play (Athens: Ohio UP, 1981) to it; James A. Schiff discusses it briefly in John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998); and Edward Vargo spends a few paragraphs on it in his essay on Updike’s historiography (“Updike, American History, and Historical Methodology,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006]). But even critics who

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spend a substantial amount of time with Memories of the Ford Administration tend to give Buchanan Dying, which is intimately connected with it, rather short shrift—including, I must admit, my own Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017). 13. John Updike, Buchanan Dying (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2000), viii, ix. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 14. James A. Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998), 132. 15. Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” 130. 16. Ibid., 131. 17. Ibid., 134. 18. Ibid., 135. 19. Ibid., 135. 20. D. Quentin Miller, John Updike and the Cold War (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001), 75. 21. Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” 136. 22. Donald J. Greiner, The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1981), 246. 23. John Updike, “A Conversation with John Updike,” interview by Charlie Reilly, in Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 137–38. 24. John Updike, “Buchanan’s Obscurity Inspired Updike Play,” interview by Charles R. Shaw, in John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews, ed. James Plath (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP, 2016), 24. 25. These topics are outside the purview of this paper, but they have been covered well by John N. Duvall in “U(pdike) & P(ostmodernism)” and by Edward P. Vargo in “Updike, American History, and Historical Methodology,” both available in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. See also my own Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. 26. As is typical for Updike’s work, there is a heavily autobiographical tinge to Memories of the Ford Administration. As Adam Begley points out, the novel’s frame narrative “is all about his own domestic dithering, circa 1975,” when Updike was leaving his first wife, Mary, for his second, Martha (Begley, Updike, 442). 27. William H. Pritchett, Updike: America’s Man of Letters (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2005), 306. 28. John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (New York: Knopf, 1992), 184. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 29. Updike, “Art of Fiction,” 33. 30. Confusingly, her first name is spelled without the terminal e in Memories of the Ford Administration and with it in Buchanan Dying. 31. Miller, John Updike and the Cold War, 84. 32. Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration, 44, 196. 33. The academic evaluation of Buchanan as the worst president is not new, but it continues. Most recently, in 2013, the statistician Nate Silver compiled a list based on four surveys of historians; Buchanan came in last. Likewise, it’s no surprise that Abraham Lincoln, Buchanan’s successor, is generally considered one of the best presidents. Lincoln ran for the president claiming that he was not trying to eliminate slavery but to contain it—very similar to Buchanan’s position—but the Civil War forced him into what must have seemed like extremism at the time. 34. George Diamond, “Chaos and Society: Religion and the Idea of Civil Order in Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration,” in John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, ed. James Yerkes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 247.

WORKS CITED Begley, Adam. Updike. New York: HarperCollins, 2014.

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Diamond, George. “Chaos and Society: Religion and the Idea of Civil Order in Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration.” John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, ed. James Yerkes. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999, 243–56. Duvall, John N. “U(pdike) & P(ostmodernism).” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 162–77. Galloway, Paul. “A Timeout to Talk About Words.” Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994, 237–43. Greiner, Donald. The Other John Updike: Poems/Short Stories/Prose/Play. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981. Howard, Jane. “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994, 9–17. Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. ———. “Updike, Middles, and the Spell of ‘Subjective Geography.’” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 15–28. Pritchett, William. Updike: America’s Man of Letters. Amherst: Univeristy of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Reilly, Charlie. “A Conversation with John Updike.” Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994, 124–50. Samuels, Charles Thomas. “The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike.” Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994, 22–45. Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. Shaw, Charles. “Buchanan’s Obscurity Inspired Updike Play.” John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews, ed. James Plath. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2016, 23–27. Updike, John. “At War with My Skin.” Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989, 42–78. ———. Buchanan Dying. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2000. ———. “The Dogwood Tree.” Assorted Prose. New York: Random House, 2012, 121–48. ———. interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers and Company, CBC, 1996. ———. Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Knopf, 1992. ———. “On Not Being a Dove.” Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989, 112–63. Vargo, Edward P. “Updike, American History, and Historical Methodology.” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 107–21.

Chapter Nine

Inside Reagan’s “Placid, Uncluttered Head” Roger’s Version and the Rise of Neoliberalism Matthew Shipe

Toward the conclusion of Roger’s Version (1986), the second installment in John Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, Roger Lambert, the brilliant, but perverse divinity professor who serves as the novel’s narrator, hosts a gathering to commemorate the end of the academic year. “In a stable society, traditions accumulate,” Roger wryly observes of the impetus behind the annual event. 1 The irony here, of course, is that very little appears to be “stable” in Updike’s twelfth novel, a book that William Pritchard has described as “not only the strangest but the most ambitious book Updike had written, indeed would go on to write, and as an achievement—the Rabbit books aside—it strikes me as his best novel since The Centaur.” 2 Taking place in an unnamed, but clearly recognizable Boston, the novel follows Lambert (who takes on the Roger Chillingworth role from The Scarlet Letter) as he spars with Dale Kohler, an idealistic computer science graduate student striving to design a program that will offer definitive proof of God’s existence. While attempting to convince Roger of the usefulness of his project, Dale also rather haplessly falls into a torrid affair with Roger’s second wife, Esther. Roger, who seemingly has the power to witness and then describe Esther and Dale’s lovemaking sessions, dwells on his wife’s sexual escapades while he pursues an incestuous affair with his niece, Verna, who has moved to Boston after being thrown out of her home for getting pregnant by her African American boyfriend. All told, a rather strange rewriting of Hawthorne— the phrase “with stern helpfulness [she] gives a downward tug at the base of his engorged phallus” does not, in my knowledge, appear anywhere in Hawthorne (156). 145

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Interweaving the particulars of ecclesiology and particle physics along with more than a dash of pornography, Roger’s Version remains one of Updike’s more successful post-realist novels, continuing the Nabokovian narrative experiments that had characterized A Month of Sundays (1975) and The Coup (1978). In his “Special Message” for the Franklin First Edition of the novel, Updike hints at the ambition that propels the book, noting how it “as a whole, in its novelistic life as an assembly of images, concerns information itself: the intersection of systems of erudition, and the strain of the demands that modern man makes upon his own brain.” 3 Beneath the layers of dense debate regarding first-century heretics and theories of how the universe came into being, Roger’s Version also marks Updike’s most sustained (and troubling) exploration of the shifting nature of American life during the 1980s. 4 Of the novels that Updike produced during that decade, it appears the most immersed in capturing the texture of those years, in particular in its exploration of the troubling class and racial divides that deepened in America’s major cities during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. As James Schiff argues, “Much as The Scarlet Letter offers a commentary upon the history and culture of mid-seventeenth-century America, Roger’s Version offers an amended and updated picture of America, specifically Boston of 1984.” 5 The portrait of the nation that materializes in Roger’s Version, however, comes from the slanted and frequently perverse perspective of Roger Lambert. At fifty-three and remarried to the younger (by fourteen years) Esther, Roger is a self-admitted “depressive” who also is an obsessive watcher of others, and, like many of Updike’s aging protagonists—Harry Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest (1990), Ben Turnbull in Toward the End of Time (1997), Jack Levy in Terrorist (2006)—he appears somewhat exhausted, maintaining a carefully preserved detachment that only partially masks a cynicism that verges on nihilism (4). That Updike should recast the cold villain from Hawthorne’s classic novel as the primary lens through which we perceive American life during the Reagan years is indicative of the knotty and at times problematic political sensibility that pervades Roger’s Version. Set against the backdrop of the 1984 presidential election, Roger’s narrative yields a rather bleak (but not quite Orwellian) view of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Indeed, Reagan’s presence lingers throughout the novel, perhaps most memorably in the poster for Bedtime for Bonzo, the 1951 film in which the future president shared the silver screen with a chimpanzee, that Dale keeps aloft in his apartment (195). Such details are vital for appreciating the political arguments that bubble beneath the novel’s surface, in particular the ways in which the book engages with the consequences of the neoliberal economic policies that the Reagan administration ushered in. While not directly a critique of neoliberalism, a term that would come into greater vogue during the 1990s, Roger’s Version nevertheless captures the social and cultural costs of

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the economic policies that would shape the United States for the next three decades. Emerging from the late 1970s and promoted by the economic policies of Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Deng Xiaoping in China, neoliberalism put an emphasis on such things as lower taxes and reduced government intervention and regulation. According to David Harvey, neoliberalism can perhaps be best understood as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” 6 Even as it has been used as a catchall for a variety of economic and political practices, from the expansion of free trade to the erosion of the social safety net, neoliberalism has over the past forty years “become hegemonic as a mode of discourse,” making “pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.” 7 In her study of how neoliberalism has shaped recent American fiction, Rachel Greenwald Smith illustrates its long lasting impact, noting that by the “end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Clinton presidency, neoliberalism began to look as if it could exist in perpetuity, uncontested from superpowers abroad or political parties at home.” 8 Indeed, neoliberalism’s ascendency hangs over the last thirty years of Updike’s career, and his novels, beginning with Roger’s Version, chart out the social and political consequences of these policy shifts. Published the same year as the pivotal Tax Reform Act of 1986, one of the central components of the Reagan administration’s economic agenda, Roger’s Version fixates on the economic disparity and urban decline that were the unintended byproducts of such policies. 9 By thinking about how Updike’s novel illuminates the consequences of Reagan’s neoliberal policies, particularly those policies’ effect on marginalized communities, I hope to come to a clearer view of how the book engages its political moment, one that was crucial in the creation of the neoliberal world that we now inhabit. More broadly, in considering how the consequences of neoliberal policy can be felt in Roger’s narrative, I hope to expand our notion of Updike as a chronicler of postwar American life and as a political writer. In particular, I want to contend how neoliberalism fosters a profound sense of alienation within Updike’s largely white male protagonists, an alienation that shapes their sense of themselves and their nation. The neoliberal state’s attempt to dissolve the social safety net that had been ushered in with the New Deal and then expanded under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society remains central to the alienation that so many of Updike’s later protagonists espouse toward their nation. If Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom mourns the certainties of the Cold War—in many ways, Harry’s observation in Rabbit at Rest that the Cold War “gave you a reason to get up in the morning” could serve as an apt epigraph for the last twenty years of Updike’s career—his other aging male protago-

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nists lament all that has seemingly been lost in the wake of neoliberalism’s emergence. 10 The aging characters who populate Updike’s later novels and short fiction experience what can best be described as a premature belatedness that colors their view of their social and political horizons. It is a belatedness that not only defines the depressed Roger Lambert but can also be felt in the sense of lost identity espoused by many of the retired male characters featured in collections such as Trust Me (1988), The Afterlife (1994), and Licks of Love (2000). “[Carter Billings] was going through the motions, and all the younger people around him knew it,” Updike writes of the protagonist of “The Afterlife,” the title story of his 1994 collection. “When he spoke, his voice sounded dubbed, not quite his own. There were, it had recently come to him, vast areas of the world that he no longer cared about—Henry James, for example, and professional ice hockey, and nuclear disarmament.” 11 A similar sense of belatedness (or even ghostliness) haunts Harry Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest; talking politics with the younger people who now work at Springer Motors, he feels his “words drift away like the speech of old people on the porches when he was a boy. Not for the first time since returning to the lot does he feel he is not really there, but is a ghost being humored. His words are just noises” (406). While Roger Lambert doesn’t yet perceive himself to be a ghost, he lurks throughout the novel, feeling estranged from the comfortable upper-middle-class existence that he has secured through Esther’s family’s money. “These rabid views of mine—where do they come from?” Roger asks toward the end of the novel. “They seem quite sincere as I spout them” (326). The question here seems to be a genuine one. Much like Updike’s own defensiveness regarding his initial limited support for the Vietnam War, a position that put him at odds with many of his friends and literary contemporaries, Roger appears acutely aware and possessive of his unpopular positions, yet he seems somewhat puzzled by their origins and the vehemence with which he holds them. Like the majority of Updike’s fiction, however, Roger’s Version eschews an easily digestible political agenda—while a lifelong Democrat, Updike in his fiction consistently avoided being dogmatic or didactic. In an interview with Jane Howard from 1966, Updike noted how there exists a “‘yes—but’ quality about my writing that evades entirely pleasing anybody. It seems to me that critics get increasingly querulous and impatient for madder music and stronger wine, when what we need is a greater respect for reality, its secrecy, its music.” 12 Recognizing this “‘yes-but’ quality” is necessary for not only appreciating the unique music that Updike’s fiction provides, but also for understanding how it provides an evolving and deepening portrait of his nation. Departing from the more journalistic approach that had characterized the final two Rabbit novels, Roger’s Version expends little energy reporting on the large events of 1984, but instead turns a sort of funhouse mirror to Ronald Reagan’s America, suggesting a nation in a state of disrepair that is also

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teeming with an energy (sexual, intellectual, financial) that might possibly prove redemptive. In characteristic fashion, Updike does not resolve the dialectical tension that he establishes, but instead indicates how both impressions can be held together—the United States can be in a state of decline while also be perpetually renewing itself. The knottiness of this diagnosis is apparent in a sequence early in the novel where Roger goes to visit Verna, who lives with her mixed-race toddler in one of the more blighted parts of Boston. Walking through the impoverished neighborhood, Roger spies a young African American man carrying on top of his shaved head “one of those padded semi-chairs, having a back and arms but no legs” (56). “Was this exotic black man, demographic studies to the contrary, a compulsive nighttime reader? Or was he dutifully taking this prop to an aged grandmother or great-uncle,” Roger muses as he watches the man balance the “bright peach” piece of furniture on the top of his head. “The black family, though statistically in shambles, still has its sinews of connection; facts in summary never quite match facts in the concrete; every new generation gives America a chance to renew its promises. These hopeful, patriotic thoughts entered my mind straight from Dale’s naïve soul” (56). Roger’s impressions here are problematic—he tends to see the denizens of the city’s poor regions as “exotic,” a term that has more than a whiff of paternalism and racism attached to it—while also, strangely, uplifting. The African American man would seem to offer proof of the nation’s ability to revive itself, an optimistic diagnosis that Roger quickly disavows to Dale’s overly sunny perspective. Despite Roger’s fleeting moments of optimism, I would argue that Roger’s Version nonetheless marks an important transition for Updike, helping introduce a more pessimistic vision of our national prospects—a critique of US culture as bloated and exhausted—that propels much of his later fiction, perhaps most notably the dystopian Toward the End of Time and his consideration of our post-9/11 condition, Terrorist. In the former, Updike imagines a near future where life in United States limps onward in the wake of a disastrous war with China. “Few of the Chinese missiles made it this far,” Ben Turnbull, the novel’s aging narrator, reports of life in Boston in the year 2020, “but there were pro-Chinese riots, and the collapse of the national economy has taken a cumulative physical toll.” 13 The national outlook would seem even bleaker in Terrorist; much like Roger Lambert and Ben Turnbull, Jack Levy, the sixty-three-year-old guidance counselor who ultimately sways the teenaged Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy from going through with a jihadist attack, seems overwhelmed by a depression that shapes his sense of contemporary American culture. “As Jack Levy sees it,” Updike writes in the novel’s opening section, “America is paved solid with fat and tar. . . . Even our vaunted freedom is nothing much to be proud about, with the Commies out of the running; it just makes it easier for terrorists to move about, renting airplanes and vans and setting up Web sites.” 14

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Although elements of this critique can certainly be seen in Updike’s earlier work, a more pronounced sense of alienation colors Roger’s depiction of his fellow citizens and his community, an estrangement that can also be felt in many of the aging male protagonists who populate Updike’s subsequent fiction. 15 The notion that the United States had been transformed under Reagan into a disposable nation—Roger at one point laments how it’s now “a throwaway world, all service industries and bubble wrap”—remains central to the political and cultural critique that Updike pursues throughout the novel (89). The world outside of Roger’s upper-middle-class enclave seems either to be deteriorating or largely superfluous. Both Richie and Verna are addicted to the ephemeral entertainments they constantly consume. When we first encounter Richie he is mindlessly watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island while struggling to do his math homework, and Verna is introduced singing along to Cyndi Lauper’s ode to female masturbation, “She Bop” (43; 63). By the end of the novel, Verna informs Roger that Lauper is now “passé” and has been supplanted by Madonna, who is “tough” and “knows what she wants and goes for it” (317). That said, Roger’s Version is not so much a lament for a bygone America but instead a darkly comic portrait of a society brimming with chaotic energies that have the capacity to either renew the nation or rip it asunder. As he stalks the aforementioned cocktail party that occurs toward the conclusion of the novel, Roger sardonically notes how his colleagues all had “some claim, via beauty or brains or birth, to be considered exceptional, to be among what in an earlier New England would have been called the elect” (290). Not surprisingly, the party moves to the subject of politics, the conversation turning to the then recent topic of Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to Bitburg, Germany, where he had controversially selected a cemetery populated by mostly SS soldiers to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a misstep famously memorialized in the Ramones’s song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” In a passage that one could easily imagine coming from the lips of Harry Angstrom, Roger thinks: The party munched, munched, munched upon Reagan’s absent body; each President in turn is offered up to the vigorous though untested conviction of the university personnel that they could run the country better than the elected authorities that do. And yet it seemed to me that we all existed inside Reagan’s placid, uncluttered head as inside a giant bubble, and that the day might come when the bubble burst, and those of us who survived would look back upon this present America as a paradise. (290–91)

For longtime Updike readers such sentiments seem familiar as Roger’s words echo the defensiveness that many of his characters have articulated and that Updike himself confessed to having felt for LBJ during the late 1960s. “I felt obliged to defend Johnson and Rusk and Rostow, and Nixon and Kissinger,

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as they maneuvered, with many a solemn bluff and thunderous air raid, our quagmirish involvement and long extrication [from Vietnam],” Updike recalls of his feelings toward the antiwar movement in “On Not Being a Dove,” the fourth chapter in his memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989). “My face would become hot, my voice high and tense and wildly stuttery; I could feel my heart race in a kind of panic whenever the subject came up, and my excitement threatened to suffocate me.” “I wanted to keep quiet, but could not,” he writes a little later in the essay. “Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socio-economic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of. . . . In my mind, I was beset, defending an underdog, my back to the wall in a world of rabid anti-establishment militants.” 16 Updike’s discomfort over the fairly moderate position he took on Vietnam—as he makes clear in the essay his views on the war were far from hawkish—would seem to shape the political outlook that emerged in his subsequent fiction, and it’s not surprising that he would include it among the other ailments (his stuttering, psoriasis, religious belief) that he explores in the aptly titled Self-Consciousness. The ambivalence that Updike expresses towards his own political views in “On Not Being a Dove” can be felt throughout Roger’s Version, as the depressed divinity professor would seem to give Updike a useful conduit for amplifying the contrarian impulse that had partially informed his Vietnam position. Moreover, that Roger would imagine Reagan as a sort of Eucharist to be blithely consumed by his more liberal colleagues remains consistent with how he envisions the president throughout the novel as a sort of divine figure. Remarking on Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale, Roger begins to make this connection explicit: All that December the weather held warm, as if the skies were bestowing their benediction upon our national choice, our re-election. God shone through the President, it seemed to many, and to the rest he was a force of nature it was idle to resist. Many who voted for his opponent were secretly pleased that he won; he asked so little, and promised so much. No, that is not quite true, for the promises, when examined, were ever sparser and vaguer: he was relieving the electorate of even the burden of expectation, and in this was perfecting his imitation of that Heavenly Presider whose inactivity has held our loyalty for two millennia . . . (128)

Even as the passage delves into the arcane particulars of how to calculate the age of God’s existence, Roger’s reading of Reagan here is compelling, casting the fortieth president as a product of an exhausted electorate still wounded by the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. As Rick Perlstein recently has observed, Reagan’s critics tended to view his political ascendency as a phenomenon that would seem to limit, if not outright exclude, the possibility of a mature

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patriotism, “one built upon questioning authority and unsettling ossified norms” that the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s had seemingly opened up. “Then along came Ronald Reagan,” Perlstein writes of how Reagan’s critics responded to the brand of sunny optimism that was central to his political persona, “encouraging citizens to think like children, waiting for a man on horseback to rescue them: a tragedy.” 17 Roger would seem to view Reagan’s political victory as less a tragedy, and more consistent with a citizenry who desire reassurance of American goodness without being asked for anything in return. His detached amusement at Reagan’s re-election remains wholly consistent with both his overall aloof demeanor—as James Schiff has pointed out Roger “knows the world not through emotional involvement or palpability, but through watching”—and his contrarian political sensibility as he delights in (silently) skewering the genteel liberalism that characterizes his privileged Boston neighborhood. 18 While Roger maintains the patriotic defensiveness that is espoused by so many of Updike’s post-Vietnam protagonists, his reading of Reagan emphasizes, in a wonderfully elliptical fashion, the ways in which the social and economic policies enacted by the Reagan administration have left a society teetering on the abyss (which would be whatever exists outside of Reagan’s head). Such moments within the novel suggest how Updike grapples with the transformation that Reagonomics had on the nation, the book vividly capturing the widening class divisions that have characterized American life for the past thirty-five years. Indeed, Roger’s sentiments toward Reagan neatly anticipate Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s feelings towards the then-former president in Rabbit at Rest. Playing golf with a group of Jewish retirees who he has befriended in Florida, Harry feels embarrassed to say that he voted for George H. W. Bush and that he had also supported his predecessor: Rabbit liked Reagan. He liked the foggy voice, the smile, the big shoulders, the way his head kept wagging during the long pauses, the way he floated above the facts, knowing there was more to government than facts, and the way he could change direction, while saying he was going straight ahead, pulling out of Beirut, getting cozy with Gorby, running up the national debt. The strange thing was, except for the hopeless down-and-outers, the world became a better place under him. The Communists fell apart, except for in Nicaragua, and even there he had them on the defensive. The guy had the magic touch. He was a dream man. Harry dares to say, “Under Reagan, you know, it was like anesthesia.” (71)

Later in the novel, Harry notes how he “misses Reagan slightly, at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself” (339). Reagan, with his sunny confidence and his vision of a seemingly simpler

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American past, offers a vision that both Harry and Roger—two characters who are otherwise worlds apart in their interests and intellectual capacity— find appealing, albeit perhaps for different reasons: Harry because Reagan appeals to his desire to preserve a past that now feels more substantial than the seemingly more disposable present that he finds himself in and Roger because Reagan’s presidency would seem to confirm his cynical suspicion that his fellow citizens enjoy the comfort of Reagan’s assurance of national greatness while not being asked to sacrifice anything for their nation or community. After comparing life under Reagan to the experience of being put under for surgery, Harry’s golf partner, Bernie, informs him that coming out of anesthesia “hurts like hell.” “You can’t believe you can live with such pain,” the older Jewish man tells Rabbit. “To get at your heart, they split your whole rib cage open. They crack you open like a coconut” (72). Bernie’s reminder of the reality of what it feels like to come out of surgery—the immense pain that anesthesia only briefly obscures—reinforces the notion that Reagan’s comforting, yet inscrutable (or perhaps meaningless) promises provide only a thin layer of protection over the consequences of the widening class divisions that Reagan’s social and economic policies would seem to be triggering. In a later essay entitled “The State of the Union, as of March 1992”—written in response to a question posed by Forbes Magazine “Why, when Americans have it so good, do we feel so bad?”— Updike uses the occasion of his sixtieth birthday to consider the trajectory his nation has taken during his adult life, while also musing on the consequences of the neoliberal policies that had shaped the United States during the Reagan/Bush years. And while the essay’s prompt in many ways determines its dour tone, it remains a revealing document as Updike traces the dwindling support for the public institutions that had nourished him as a child in Shillington, Pennsylvania. “The years began in a small Pennsylvania town where I was made to feel, threadbare and Depression-bound through the world around me was, cherished—cherished by a polity that erected schools for my education, playgrounds for my recreation, libraries for my edification, police stations for my protection,” Updike writes near the opening of the piece. “Perhaps my sensation was a trick of egocentric perspective—a child cannot but help feel himself the center of the universe—but certain architectural remains corroborate it.” 19 At the start of the Clinton years, however, Updike finds the public institutions that had sheltered him during childhood to be deteriorating—“the high schools no longer look like castles but like secondrate airports, low-slung and cut-rate.” 20 “We feel bad,” Updike writes a little later in the essay, “because a oncesinewy nation, exultant in the resourcefulness that freedom brings, now seems bloated and zombified, pillaged and crumbling, all around us. Enough of our Puritanism remains to generate self-disgust.” 21 The blame for this national decline, it should be noted, is to be shared between a federal govern-

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ment that has abandoned the sense of purpose and community that had informed its actions during the decades following the Depression and the Second World War and a citizenry who remain too apathetic—“zombified” to use Updike’s language—to desire a government that requires any sacrifice from them. Musing on the headlines of the day (Gorbachev, Noriega in Panama, the failure of a tax reform bill in Pennsylvania) while recovering from his heart procedure, Harry muses, somewhat hypocritically, how “if there’s anything you can count on Americans to be these last ten years it’s selfish” (356). While he mourns a sense of national decline in “The State of the Union,” Updike more fully grapples with the consequences of the neoliberal policies that would seem to be the driving force behind that decline in Roger’s Version. The potential implication of Reagan’s neoliberal agenda can be most keenly felt in the meticulous and mischievous depictions of Boston that Roger offers throughout his narrative. He holds the distinction of being the only one of Updike’s protagonists who could be labeled a flâneur, as much of his narrative remains devoted to mapping out the city he inhabits. Walking Sumner Boulevard—a street that he gleefully recounts was named “in honor of that fanatic Yankee abolitionist now best remembered for having been beaten on his bald head by an equally self-righteous, if oppositely persuaded, Congressman” (51)—Roger meticulously captures the urban blight that has spread throughout the city as he presents the random images, “a pattern of nude Japanese women, drawn, disappointingly, without pubic hair or nipples” on a toilet seat placed in the “dusty window” of a plumbing supply store (53). “As the avenue gradually slanted downward toward the river, its tone worsened, its liveliness increased,” Roger notes as he surveys his surroundings. “Kung-fu. Locks: Master Protection. Santo Cisto Center. Todo Para Casa. The Irish and Italians in this section had been supplanted by Portuguese and Hispanics, who now were yielding to Vietnamese, who were taking over the little food marts and had opened up several restaurants offering their spicy, insinuating cuisine” (53). Roger’s narrative suggests a city and nation teeming with uncontrollable energy, an energy that can be viewed as a source of hope or as a symptom of a society that is teetering on collapse. In particular, Roger’s sexual fixation with his teenaged niece Verna becomes the vehicle through which he delves into the growing class divide that defines contemporary urban life. “Even the trees here,” he remarks of his first visit to Verna and her baby daughter, Paula, in the projects, “weed ailanthus between the houses and a few spindly locusts staked along the curb, looked frightened, their lower branches broken and their bark aimlessly slashed” (58). The evidence of urban squalor makes Roger feel self-conscious about his own privilege—visiting Verna he acutely becomes aware of “my gray suede gloves, my Harris-tweed coats with leather-patched elbows, my gray cashmere muffler”—but he also relishes in being

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exposed to a life that he feels is more vivid than his rather staid existence in his upper-middle-class enclave (62). Indeed, it is through Roger’s liaison with his niece, more so than his religious debates with Dale Kohler, that the novel’s political sensibility comes into sharpest relief. A high school dropout, Verna remains the most cartoonish character within the novel. “Like the young generally now,” Roger notes when first meeting her, “she had a vocabulary that already incorporates and neutralizes all possible discipline” (62). His description here is telling, suggesting how her speech is not so much infantile banter—Verna’s habit of calling Roger “Nunc” throughout the novel gives her dialogue a childish aurora—but an outward rejection of the order that is failing to constrain all of the chaos that exists within the world. Her language, then, could be seen as evidence of both societal decline and youth’s ability to shrug off older forms that are designed to constrain their energies. Despite her neglect and abuse of Paula, Verna in many ways seems like a more chipper and benign version of the female embodiment of sexual and social chaos 22 that Philip Roth imagines in the character of Rita Cohen in American Pastoral (1997), a character whose child-like looks and explicit sexuality stand in for the broader confusion of the late 1960s. 23 “I sensed in Verna a dangerous edge that in my half-sister had been sheathed by middle-class caution,” Roger observes of the girl. “Edna had talked a tough and naughty game but ended by obeying the rules. This girl had been pushed beyond the rules” (60). Countering this rather dire description, Verna turns out to be a rather benign force; by the end of novel, after her new counselor has encouraged her to move back to Ohio and pursue her education and reconcile with her family, she realizes she “just want[s] to be normal” and that she needs “structure” in her life (318), a desire that makes the “Barthian” in Roger bristle. In many ways, Roger’s desire to fashion Verna into a hypersexual form of chaos fails, as she rather heroically resists his attempt to shape her and instead pluckily departs back home. Verna’s return home at the novel’s conclusion, however, does not dampen the significance of her and Roger’s sexual union, an act that occurs the night that they have to leave Paula in the hospital to be observed after Verna has abused the toddler. “This was my proof of [God’s] existence,” Roger thinks in the moments after he has committed incest with his niece, “I saw— the distance to the impalpable ceiling, the immense distance measuring our abasement. So great a fall proves great heights. Sweet certainty invaded me” (281). This admission, in many ways, seems like a perverse amplification of the religious sentiment that runs throughout much of Updike’s fiction, but it is also central to the novel’s darkly comic, pessimistic reading of life under Reagan and the future of the United States. Reassurance of grace, for Roger, would only seem to materialize through acts of extreme degradation, a belief that would seem to correspond to his grim view of his nation’s prospects.

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Recalling the act, Roger realizes that he “was guilty of heresy, the heresy of which the Cathars and Fraticelli were long ago accused amid the thunders of anathema—that of committing deliberate abominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God’s forgiveness can magnificently play” (289). In his consideration of the novel, Frederick Crews notes, “At the base of Updike’s supernaturalism we seem to discern, not [Karl] Barth’s general vision, but the logic of the cowering Neanderthal: if I make my heart as hard as that of the lightening hurler, perhaps he will acknowledge me and spare me from destruction.” 24 This verdict seems largely accurate—indeed, Roger himself appears painfully aware of the limitations of the theological gymnastics it has taken for him to justify the act of incest as a way of achieving grace. Taken more broadly, Roger’s need to degrade himself to achieve a momentary feeling of grace would seem to be symptomatic of a nation and a culture in decline. If Reagan’s America might look like “paradise” in a few years as Roger suggests at the end of the novel, a “bubble” that’s on the verge of exploding, then his desperate need for a grace that cannot be realized would seem to paint a similarly bleak forecast for the future (291). Beyond Roger’s desperate attempt to fashion Verna as the vessel through which he might experience spiritual replenishment, she also becomes the means through which he experiences the life of the economically disenfranchised as she introduces him to the machinations of government bureaucracy: first in the abortion that he helps her secure after she gets pregnant again and later when Social Services investigates her for abusing Paula, who is injured after Verna hits her and she falls, fracturing her leg on a bookcase (261–62). What’s striking here, beyond the horrific nature of Verna’s abuse, is how ineffective the social safety net—whether it is the hospital where Paula is admitted or the Department of Social Services that investigates the case—is in protecting Paula or dealing with Verna. When the hospital threatens to get the Department of Social Services involved after Verna contradicts her story of how Paula was injured, she retorts by lashing out at the “fucking dumb DSS” as “a bunch of non-persons freeloading on the taxpayers, they couldn’t get a real job if they tried,” an argument that would seem to mirror, in a grossly comic way, the neoliberal critique of the welfare state (270). Comforting Verna that DSS is unlikely to take custody away from her, Roger pursues a similar line of thinking. “The state isn’t that anxious to become a massive orphanage,” he tells her as they leave the hospital that night. “If you listen to what Reagan and the others are saying they’re begging the family to resurrect itself, to take some of all this responsibility back out of their hands” (273). The reasoning here is revealing as it depicts a federal government that is desperate to shed off the responsibility of taking care of its citizens; if Reagan is the product of a citizenry that feels relieved by having a president who “asked for so little” from them, Roger’s remarks suggest that Reagan, in many ways, is asking for similar treatment in fashioning a government that

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wants to mitigate its responsibilities (128). Moreover, the notion that the family might “resurrect itself” is an amusing notion as it not only parrots the rhetoric of cultural conservatives who decried the need for familial power to be restored—Allan Bloom would make a variation of this argument in his The Closing of the American Mind (1987)—but also teases that it would take a miracle to restore the family. 25 What Roger’s Version reveals, as it captures the beginning consequences of Reagan’s attempt to restrict the social safety net, is how neoliberal economic policies transformed our expectations for what government should offer its citizens while also widening the class divides within our nation. For while both Verna and Roger fear the state’s intrusion into their lives, the government largely seems uninterested in doing much to intervene—as Roger and Esther’s wealth shields Verna from the harsher consequences that someone with less resources would face. “Messy depths had opened under me, where poverty and government merged,” Roger muses after DSS gets involved in Verna and Paula’s welfare. “You sleep with somebody in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly” (286). Yet Roger’s own desire to eschew his “obligations” to his niece and grandniece would seem to be an ironic reflection of a government and a citizenry that both want to be liberated from the responsibilities that are crucial to maintaining the health and well-being of the republic. That being said, the novel reaches a rather unexpected gentle denouement as Verna returns to Ohio, her affair with Roger having gone undetected, with the notion that she will soon send for her daughter, whom Roger and Esther have temporary guardianship of until Verna gets re-established back home. Even Dale’s loss of faith, a loss that would seem to be the dual product of his affair with Esther and Roger’s machinations against his hopeful spirit, is depicted as sadly comic, rather than tragic. “We all laughed,” Roger notes of his interactions with Dale and Esther near the novel’s conclusion, “loving one another in our sorry way” (309). The book concludes with a pregnant Esther, the result of her affair with Dale, headed off to church, an act that she does simply to “annoy” her husband (329). The chaos that the novel continually warns of never fully materializes, and life simply seems to continue on. Much like the end of the latter Terrorist, where the imminent disaster is narrowly averted as Jack Levy convinces the teenaged Ahmad to abort his mission to blow-up the Lincoln Tunnel, Roger’s Version fails to follow through with its pessimistic vision of American life. Such benign endings, however, are not so much a failure of artistic nerve, but are reflective of the ambivalence that characterized Updike’s treatment of his nation in the age of neoliberalism. “We move on, don’t we,” the protagonist of “Varieties or Religious Experience” (2002) ruefully observes to his adult daughter and granddaughter as they stand on her apartment looking at the open space where the Twin Towers had once dominated the skyline. “As a nation. We

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try to learn from our mistakes. Those towers were taller than they needed to be. The Arabs weren’t wrong to feel them as a boast.” 26 In many ways, Updike’s later work would seem to be striving for the lost sense of idealism that the realities of American life have dissipated. Yet the pessimism that haunts these novels—and which pervades Roger’s Version— would seem to offer a pointed critique of how neoliberal policies have eroded the nation that Updike experienced and cherished during his childhood and adolescence. “But all is not well with the neoliberal state, and it is for this reason that it appears to be either a transitional or an unstable political form,” David Harvey argues in his history of neoliberalism. “At the heart of the problem lies a burgeoning disparity between the declared public aims of neoliberalism—the well-being of all—and its consequences—the restoration of class power.” 27 Roger’s Version does not so much offer a solution to the problems created by neoliberalism, but instead illuminates the fissures opened up by the ways in which neoliberal polices have transformed the American economic and political landscape, as well as transforming citizens’ expectations of their government and each other. While it might be easier to dismiss characters such as Roger Lambert as perverse “village crank[s],” their expressions of political and cultural alienation voice a vital critique of the changes neoliberal policies have occasioned. 28 Roger’s notion that “we all existed inside Reagan’s placid, uncluttered head as inside a giant bubble” stands as a troubling reminder of how tenuous our current comfort remains. More broadly, by highlighting how Updike’s fiction, beginning with Roger’s Version, responds to the changes wrought by neoliberalism’s ascendency, we can more fully appreciate how his late work responds to, and pushes back against, its political moment. Later novels such as In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), Toward the End of Time, and Terrorist all chart out the ways in which notions of citizenship and collective responsibility have been reduced to meaningless talking points, these works ultimately mourning a nation that would seem to have lost a crucial energy. For despite Henry Bech’s claim in his Nobel address that his “life has been spent attending to my inner weather and my immediate vicinity,” Updike’s fiction remained deeply interested in the world that it was trying to reflect, his characters’ brittle and at times troubling responses to the nation that they encounter is not so much a symptom of exhaustion but instead exposes the tenuous nature of American life at the end of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the next one. 29 NOTES 1. John Updike, Roger’s Version (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 285. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parenthesis. 2. William H. Pritchard, Updike: America’s Man of Letters (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2000), 223.

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3. John Updike, “A ‘Special Message’ for the Franklin Library’s First Edition Society printing of Roger’s Version (1986),” in Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 857. 4. In hindsight, it’s striking how Updike’s novels of the 1980s largely avoid delving into the particulars of that era. Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) bracket the Reagan years, with the former capturing the malaise of the Carter years and the later poised as George H. W. Bush is about to take office. Updike’s other two novels of the decade offer little commentary on the Reagan years: The Witches of Eastwick (1984) takes place during the Vietnam era while the fairly slight S. (1988) offers little in the way of political commentary. 5. James A. Schiff, Updike’s Version: Rewriting The Scarlet Letter (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 81. 6. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. While neoliberalism can be a difficult concept, Harvey’s definition here concisely explicates its central tenets and is also the one used by Rachel Greenwald Smith in her oft-cited study Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, one of the first major studies of how contemporary American literature has responded to the forces of neoliberalism. See Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, 4–5. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 9. In their history of neoliberalism, Manfred B. Stegner and Ravi K. Roy single out the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as being central to Reagan’s neoliberal economic agenda. Reducing the number of tax brackets and the “average individual income tax rate by about 6 percent,” the Tax Reform Act “amounted to nothing less than a full-blown assault on state-led redistribution of private wealth.” Manfred B. Stegner and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27. 10. John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 406. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parenthesis. 11. John Updike, The Afterlife and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 15. 12. Jane Howard, “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” in Conversations with John Updike, edited by James Plath (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 16. 13. John Updike, Toward the End of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 40. 14. John Updike, Terrorist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 27. 15. A sense of national decline can be felt as early as Rabbit Redux (1971); in the opening page of that novel, the town of Brewer is described as having “torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the oncepacked streets, exposing church facades never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half-alleys and intensifying the cruel breadth of the light.” Toward the end of the The Coup, Candy, the American ex-wife of the novel’s narrator, Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, makes a more political point, reminding the depressed dictator that “The Cold War is over, Nixon’s over. All that’s left is picking up the pieces and things like kissing OPEC’s ass. You’d be depressed. It turns out the Fifties were when all the fun was, though nobody knew it at the time.” See John Updike, Rabbit Redux, 3; and John Updike, The Coup (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 271–72. 16. John Updike, Self-Consciousness: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 124, 126. 17. Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), xviii. 18. Schiff, Updike’s Version, 57. 19. John Updike, “The State of the Union, as of March 1992,” in More Matter: Essays and Criticism (New York: Fawcett Books, 1991), 17. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. Ibid., 19. 22. Judie Newman’s essay in this collection offers a thoughtful reading of how Updike in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) imagines forms of female chaos. 23. “Her dark child’s eyes,” Roth writes of Rita after she has tried to force the Swede to acknowledge her exposed vagina. “Full of excitement and fun. Full of unreasonableness. Full

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of oddness. Full of Rita. And only half of it was performance. To agitate. To infuriate. To arouse. She was in an altered state. The imp of upheaval. The genie of disaster. As though being his tormentor and wrecking his family she had found the malicious meaning for her own existence. Kid Mayhem.” Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 146. 24. Fredrick Crews, “Mr. Updike’s Planet,” in The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (New York: Random House, 1992), 175. 25. “The decomposition of this [familial] bond is surely America’s most urgent social problem,” Bloom writes in his most famous book. “But nobody even tries to do anything about it. The tide seems to be irresistible.” See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: The 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012), 119. 26. John Updike, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 112. 27. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 78–9. 28. Crews, “Mr. Updike’s Planet,” 175. 29. John Updike, Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 239.

WORKS CITED Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: The 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012. Crews, Fredrick. “Mr. Updike’s Planet.” The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy. New York: Random House, 1992, 168–86. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Howard, Jane. “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” Conversations with John Updike, edited by James Plath. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994, 9–17. Perlstein, Rick. The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Pritchard, William. Updike: America’s Man of Letters. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2000. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Schiff, James. Updike’s Version: Rewriting The Scarlet Letter. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Smith, Rachel Greenwald. Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Stegner, Manfred B., and Ravi K. Roy. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Updike, John. The Afterlife and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. ———. Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. ———. The Coup. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. ———. My Father’s Tears and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ———. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. ———. Rabbit, Run. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. ———. Roger’s Version. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. ———. Self-Consciousness: A Memoir. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. ———. “A ‘Special Message’ for the Franklin Library’s First Edition Society printing of Roger’s Version (1986).” Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, 856–58. ———. “The State of the Union, as of March 1992.” More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York: Fawcett Books, 1999, 16–21. ———. Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. ———. Toward the End of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Chapter Ten

The Politics of Vulnerability in The Afterlife and Other Stories Biljana Dojčinović

In this essay, I will try to indicate various forms of vulnerability in three stories from John Updike’s 1994 collection, The Afterlife and Other Stories. 1 As an author focused predominantly on everyday life and non-spectacular decisions made by common people, Updike represented human vulnerability in all his works. Vulnerability is indeed a part of human lives: sickness, neglect, aging, violence of any kind, are some of its manifestations. In the past decades, vulnerability has also become a political term, as its many forms are caused by social and political conditions. Vulnerability is here defined as a lack of capacity, agency, resistance. It implies oppression, marginality, inability to control forces that influence one’s life, passivity, and the need for care, nurture and networking in human relations. This need for care probably explains the feminist interest in the topic—the emergence of this concept into political discourse has paralleled Carol Gilligan’s pioneering discussion of the ethics of care, 2 while recent analyses of vulnerability are aimed at pointing to its potential rather than disadvantages. Thus, American philosopher Erinn Gilson perceives vulnerability as openness to affecting and being affected in ways beyond our control. For Gilson, vulnerability is inherent in human lives, yet she “argues for a non-reductive understanding of vulnerability that allows us to perceive it as an ambiguous state that is not necessarily tied to loss and harm, but which grounds various ties between people, and for the cultivation of specifically epistemic vulnerability, openness to having our views, attitudes and even conception of the self challenged and altered.” 3 Similarly, Judith Butler tries to imagine vulnerability as a possibility and resource for resistance. She argues that life is precarious and that precariousness is a fundamental state that emphasizes the fragility of our 161

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existence, but simultaneously calls our attention to the fact that this fragility is shared by all, which represents the ground for positive social obligations. 4 More than any other works by Updike, The Afterlife and Other Stories seems to focus on the fragility of human lives. The collection of twenty-two stories was published in 1994. The stories had been published in various magazines mostly in the order they appear in the book. 5 In these stories, the characters are aging, getting sick, dying, and being forced to face their past from unexpected angles. The ways the protagonists cope with their fragility often present ironic images of society. As the aforementioned recent theoretical discourse struggles to provide more positive views of vulnerability, Updike tells us about the human need for care, bonding and love, for which his characters indeed yearn, but, at the same time, often fail to provide for others. This is especially important because Updike has been accused of misogyny and almost as many times defended as an author who was a close observer of the American society in the second half of the twentieth century. Authors such as Margaret Atwood and Mary O’Connell have defended Updike’s intentions and his artistic merits from these accusations. A close and unbiased reading reveals that Updike followed the changes and evolution of the status of women in society, the political discourse of this process, as well as the changes concerning his male protagonists, providing material for understanding the issues of femininity, feminism, and masculinities in context. In my analysis of the stories from this collection, I will try to show how his close depictions of various male and female characters reveal how gender and age shape experiences of vulnerability as well as their capacity to struggle with it. The notion of vulnerability includes the topics such as corporeality, freedom, displacement, power, and brings into relief several aspects of gender, class, age and other (dis)balances. In addition, focusing on vulnerability sheds light on Updike’s narrative strategies. Whether a character is a reflector (the protagonist through whose mind the events are rendered) andor a narrator, as well as the context of the statements and actions of characters and narrator, are each expressions of the issues of passivity or activity, power or powerlessness, in the politics of real life. I will discuss three stories from the collection, representative of the different forms of vulnerability and the various textual ways of presenting and coping with it. These are “Tristan and Iseult,” read as a paradigmatic story of physical vulnerability; the title story, “The Afterlife,” in which aging is presented as making the male protagonist vulnerable both physically and emotionally and contrasted to the women of his age; and “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” the story about mother-son relations, aging, dying, and coping with the loss of a mother. What makes these stories interesting is not only the vulnerability they present, but also the ways characters are trying to revert to previous invulnerabilities or to gain from their new vulnerability. Very often it is not what theoretical discourse now sees as the positive sides of vulner-

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ability; yet the goal is more or less the same: to reach whatever there is “beyond” vulnerability. THE WOMAN WAS ALWAYS A STRANGER “Tristan and Iseult” is the story set in the center of the collection. It is also the shortest of all the stories in this book, which underlines its role of a parable. 6 The story describes a trivial situation—an oral hygiene session at the dentist—under a mythical, archetypal title. It reminds us of a seemingly banal fact that we are vulnerable because of our corporeality, because we are bodies. These bodies are emotional, physical, social and political entities, as understood in feminist theory from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. In 1995 Elizabeth Grosz summed up how feminist theories had understood corporeality: the earliest theories, which she names “egalitarian,” thought about the body as a passive entity, while the majority of those in second-wave feminism saw it as a social construction. 7 The third, and according to Grosz, the most effective, group were feminists from Luce Irigaray to Judith Butler, who understood the body as a “concrete, material, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, and skeletal structure, which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and form through the psychical and social inscription of the body’s surface. The body is, so to speak, organically, biologically ‘incomplete’; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term administration.” 8 Such uncoordinated potentialities include vulnerability. As the origin of the word tells us (vulnerabilis in Late Latin, as equivalent to Latin vulnerare, which means to wound), vulnerability should be understood as the possibility that a wound can be inflicted on our flesh and blood, as well as on our mind and emotions. The focus of the corporeal experience in this story, which happens in the dentist’s office are, naturally, the mouth and teeth. The mouth is the place in our body in which the material and the spiritual meet, entering and exiting—both food and words; it is also the only part of our body where our skeleton is visible: our teeth, which may be wounds in themselves, are a gate to our inner structure. Updike used his personal history of the pain he experienced during the visits to the dentist in this story. 9 The theme appears in his fiction much before this story, for instance in the famous novel Couples from 1968, where both mouth and teeth are the sites of revelations for different characters. For Piet, the lover and builder, mouths are the places of sexual epiphanies. In oral sex with Foxy, Piet feels her inner side as a gate to the universe: “kissing her here, as she unfolded from gateway into chamber, from chamber into universe, was a blind pleasure tasting of infinity” (Couples 456). The very act is for him more “noble” than genital sex: “Mouths, it came to Piet, are noble. They move in the brain’s court. We

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set our genitals mating down below like peasants, but when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry. To eat another is sacred” (456). For Freddy Thorne, the cynical commentator, the connection between the female body and the universe is completely mundane. He is a dentist, so the ladies, members of their “circle,” come to him for a treatment. One of them has a big mouth: “Her tongue is as big as a bed. Everytime I work on her molars I want to curl up in there and go to sleep” (157). The image evokes the episode of the world in Pantagruel’s mouth in the novel by Rabelais. It is a carnevalesque corporeality which has its other side—the decay, and Freddy also warns the others that we are dying all the time as every meal breaks down the enamel. The protagonist of the story “Tristan and Iseult” actually repeats Freddy’s revelation twice. The first time, with his mouth wide open for the cleansing procedure by the oral hygienist, he feels as if in a confession where nothing can be concealed: “Sinking beyond the reach of shame, he relaxed into her exploration and scarification of lower molars, corrupt wrecks just barely salvaged from the ruin of his years of heedless, sugar-oriented consumption” (156). Later, toward the story’s conclusion, fishing for a compliment, he asks: “How did I look, overall?” The hygienist said he had a lot of stains and asked him if he smoked or drank a lot of tea. He denies it and himself gives a diagnosis: “Maybe that’s my age. Normal deterioration” (158). But she has the answer to this, too—improvement can be bought, and to think of “normal deterioration” is a heresy: “‘There’s a bleaching process that’s pretty safe and effective,’ she said, with a lilt reined in just short of ardor” (159). Both of these passages are comparable to the cynical sermons Freddy Thorne performs in Couples. During one of the social games the couples play, Freddy announces that the most wonderful thing for him is the human capacity for self-deception (253). His explanation matches the feeling of the reflector in the story “Tristan and Iseult.” When the hygienist tells him that his position is perfect, his thoughts are all about imperfection: “Perfect. Would that he were. She more than anyone knew how imperfect he was. How rotten, in a word. Sinking beyond” (156). This actually sounds like a mirror to Freddy Thorne’s grim revelation about humankind: People come to me all the time with teeth past saving, with abscesses they’ve been telling themselves are neuralgia. The pain has clearly been terrific. They’ve been going around with it for months [. . .] I tell ’em it looks better than ever, and they fall all over me believing it. It’s horseshit. (Couples 254–55)

Even more important is the connection of “Tristan and Iseult” to another work by Updike, the novel Brazil, published in 1994, and probably com-

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posed around the same time as the story. 10 The novel is a remake of the same myth, in which Tristao, a black and poor young man, and Isabel, a blond daughter of a wealthy man, meet at Copacabana. The protagonists of the novel are deeply marked by both racial and class differences that are deconstructed in the course of the novel. It begins by a statement aimed at leveling the racial difference: “Black is a shade of brown. So is white, if you look.” When there is no social demarcation, as it may look like at the beach, the protagonists are equal: “as they were equal in having bodies—four limbs, two eyes, one continuous skin” (Brazil 9). Brazil is focused on the cultural construction of race and gender, and in line with the body theories that had reached their peak exactly about that time. 11 Updike’s novel was focused exactly on the social administration of bodies and played with the possibilities in it. In “Tristan and Iseult,” however, Updike seemingly focuses on the physical aspect of body, the literal flesh and blood only. “She worked around his lower gum line” (155); “Blood, his blood, appeared in the ecru bowl animated by centripetal water” (156). Yet the protagonist was sure that the hygienist knew that mouth “was connected to nerves and a soul—to an ego inside a thing. A sensitive, self–solicitous thing” (155). The protagonists of the story are not named; they are anonymous characters marked only by the roles assigned to them via the title. At one point in the story “their bodies became mere metaphors” (157–8). What lies between them are multiple barriers. Physically, they get very close to each other but the furthest it could go erotically is to use “his chest as a table, resting their tools on his paper bib,” while the nun-like hygienist “would never so trespass” (155). The “relation” between the reflector and the hygienist is only a parody of a sexual encounter. The erotic tension is strong, as is its resemblance, in his rendition of the story, to visits to prostitutes. The story ends in this tone, with the wording that is perfectly applicable to a description of a brothel experience: “The woman was always a stranger. You never had the same one twice. The principle lay between the two of them like a sword. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be sublime. It wouldn’t be hygiene” (159). 12 Behind this is hidden the process of continuous alienation which this short story describes. Namely, the protagonist is in the passive position, he is the one who is physically vulnerable here and his indirect stream of thought and association is his own defense. The strategy to resist this passivity is to turn the other into other, to alienate from her. It is not difficult because, as we learn at the beginning, the woman is always a stranger: “Today’s (a total stranger, as was always the case)” (154), and until the end she must stay so. The narrator describes these relations in terms of possession: “Some women he had had” (155). The main danger for disrupting the distance comes from the pain: “The threat of pain was the mystical spice to these liaisons, the

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Heaven-sent menace that on both sides of the relationship concentrated the attention” (154). In this sexually charged discourse, “concentrating the attention” can easily be a description of the ultimate closeness such as in orgasm. 13 Anyway, the pain cannot get them closer. It is prevented, at the first place, by the professional circumstances which include physical barriers such as goggles, gloves and surgical masks, as well as what the reflector calls in the end “the principle” which lays between them like a sword. Getting close is not the way to reverse the situation in which the reflector is stuck in the passive role. What he actually does in the process, to relieve the fear of his position, is objectification, which includes orientalization. At one point, he compares her to a woven hut and yurt—the first one referring to the homes in Africa and the latter is the name for an Oriental (Mongolian) tent. In this way the reflector marks the dental hygienist as something (not someone) that he can colonize, while at the same time taking the active role in their situation. No matter what happens in reality, in the story he is the reflector and what we hear is told from his point of view. This is not, however, the vulnerability turned into an advantage, but its disavowal; an explicit appropriation of the subject position. In fact, this story makes it obvious that the one who narrates is, in the end, the one who rules the situation. This could also be a starting point for a feminist critique of the story, but only if we neglect the power dynamics of the narration. There is another dimension to this story, however, one closely connected to its suppressed eroticism—the religious one. The hygienist takes him to the room with a “nunnish severity” (154); he is silently “in prayer’s shouting inner voice” (155) trying to make himself brave. Finally, the undertone of his thoughts regarding mouth inspection is that of a confession, revealed in the final exclamation of the reflector, after naming the “series of sins”: “Doughnuts, candied peanuts, Snickers bars, licorice sticks, chocolate-coated raisins . . . Mea culpa, domina!” (156). Domina has at least two meanings, one religious and another sexual. It could be a female version of Lord, Dominus, and, more catchy and colloquial, domina in a sadomasochist sexual act, to which the whole encounter strongly refers, due to its passive-active constellations. At the very beginning of the story, the religious space (Heaven up, Hell down) is set up: “Heaven here was a ceiling of acoustical tiles, perforated irregularly in order to entertain trapped eyes like his. The angelic music was from an ‘easy listening’ station” (154). The Heaven and the cheap angelic music that he finds in these rooms point to two things: parody and the fact that the concept of afterlife is religious. In this small masterpiece, many associations and meanings are tightly compressed, and so is the idea of the transcendental space, projected on the ceiling. This is quite in line with the tone of the story and its parody of love and sexual encounter, as well as with the collection as a whole.

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A COSMIC JOKE BENEATH MUNDANE APPEARANCES Updike is often ironic, yet always benevolent toward his characters. “The Afterlife,” the first and the title story of the collection, sets this tone for the whole book. Carter and his wife, Jane Billings, a couple in their fifties, are visiting friends Frank and Lucy, who moved to England three years ago. The narrator uses Carter’s (who is the reflector of the story) expression “transplanted” (“Afterlife” 2), which is quite telling about the resistance the character feels about this move by his friends. Once in England, he finds that Frank and Lucy seem to be different people in the new environment—both have acquired a British accent; Frank rides horses and Lucy, with her flat shoes and overall appearance, fits better in the English village than into her prior, American context. Moreover, Carter feels that Frank and Lucy are not interested at all in the stories about the other American friends and the changes they have gone through, which means that the “transplantation” has been completely successful. On the very first night of their visit, he wakes up to go to the bathroom and, not remembering his whereabouts, falls down the staircase, gets bruised and scared. The next day, the pain in his chest gives him the sensation that he has entered some new realm, that he and his friends are “beyond all that now” (18). Beyond what? To answer this question is to grasp the story’s core. For Carter, the fall and the fear are the outcome of his anxiety, which is, in turn, the result of his realization that not only did his friends move to a different continent, but also that all of them moved to another stage of their lives. The story touches upon the main topics of the collection: the constant change that life represents; its corporeal vulnerability; the value of memories; miscommunication; the fear of death and vain ways of coping with that fear. The “international theme” of leaving America for Europe and finding a better home there becomes a displacement theme. 14 Yet the displacement is also the change in time, as the title suggests. Time and place are interchangeable in “The Afterlife,” where spatial coordinates speak for the life stages in terms of the difference between life “here” and “at home” (3). The afterlife is not only “life after life,” it is the life one has at a place other than home. Vice versa, the spatial terms can be replaced by temporal ones, and the opposite side of the road may be the other side of time, of life as Carter knew it. The entrance into the “afterlife” for Carter happens due to the spatial confusion. At night, without turning the light on and thinking he remembered where to go, he steps into emptiness: “there was nothing but air beneath his foot” (5). In the accident, he most probably hits the post of the staircase, which brings him back into upward position. The next morning, he has the feeling that he is in some other world. While sitting in the backseat of the car Lucy is driving the next day, Carter feels the difference between England and America exactly in spatial terms:

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“Jane occupied what in America would have been the driver’s seat, so that Carter felt startled and imperiled when she turned her head aside or gestured with both hands. Lucy seemed quite accustomed to the wrong side of the road” (9). An important detail is the wording of Carter’s thoughts. He does not say the left side, nor the other side, but the wrong side. In the psychological sense, this is an expression of Carter’s conservatism and egocentrism, as he thinks he is the one to decide what is right and what is wrong. On the symbolic level, it is the indication of the connection between time and space: the title of the story implies the religious concept of an existence after death, and this is what turns the fall at the staircase into a mystical experience. In the long scene of Carter’s fall and his return to the bedroom, the darkness, the sound of wind, his own reflection in the mirror, whiteness of the bowl and basin in the toilet, a row of doors, a streak of light and his fear if he would find the right one, all turn the “excursion” into a transcendental experience. In the morning he concludes that he was probably saved by a “miracle” (7), and he feels that the “Big Guy is getting our range,” (8) as he exclaims during breakfast. The others are taken aback by “this outburst of theology,” but Carter does not worry about that because he feels “supernaturally serene” (8): in that moment everything looks to him like children’s books “he had read over fifty years ago,” and which “had the charm of the timeless” (8). Wings become the inevitable symbol of transcendence, the “transplantation” into another world. Carter feels “weightless, as if, in that moment of flight headlong down the stairs, he had put on the wings” (9). Sometime later, he will be awarded by the majestic image of a winged creature. Lucy, Jane and Carter go searching for a heron’s nest, but give up after a while. Some moments later, he feels that he should look behind him: “And there was the heron, sailing out of the woods toward them, against the wind, [. . .] standing in midair with his six-foot wing-spread—an angel” (11). That Carter is the only one to see the bird transforms this scene into a kind of message for him and for the reader. We see what he sees and therefore we are both privileged, especially because the scene represents something as archetypal as an angel. Later on, he will see a row of power-line towers that will look like a “band of angels” (17). Carter’s “theological” perspective is important for more than one reason. The surprise of the other three characters at his mentioning God shows that religion is not a prevalent part of their everyday life; this further makes the ideas of timelessness, afterlife and angels, which are all Carter’s, ironic. He sees that death is everywhere around—the tree trunks fallen after the storm look like corpses, with their “limbs” scattered around, and one of them fell over a church wall.

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The protagonists of the story are focused on the mundane life mostly, especially the women. While Carter is sitting at the backseat in the car, Lucy and Jane are chatting. Carter’s wife, Jane, talks about her future: her wish, now that the children were out of the house, to get out herself and to be of some service, not exactly jump into the ghetto with wild-eyed good intentions but do something useful, something with people [. . .] Carter had been nodding off, and the emphasized words pierced his doze. He felt he had been useful enough, in his life, and had seen enough people. (13)

This paragraph describes a phenomenon that Simone de Beauvoir writes about in The Second Sex: the capacity of older women, who, as they age, become liberated from social pressures incumbent upon the image of femininity and its duties. She argues that the elderly woman becomes a different being, asexual, but complete. This is, indeed, an ambivalent gain, if we are to accept this opinion at all. In this story neither Lucy nor Jane show their (a)sexuality. As the story is built around Carter’s anxiety, rational Jane represents a sharp contrast to it, while Lucy’s calmness adds to the feeling that both are very much at ease with the circumstances. They are the characters representing the female ability to adjust and to accept what life brings them. There is also a sharp contrast between the man and two women in this scene. While they are talking about the future, he is dozing, rather tired of the world and his active, public participation. This is the moment of truth, in which we understand that, at work, Carter feels he is aging and that the others feel that, too. The change is revealed in a tiny delay of reaction, “a curios lag”: “Just two or three seconds, between challenge and response, between achievement and gratification, but enough to tell him that something was out sync” (13–14). The change did not come abruptly, rather through the small, almost unnoticeable moments, but it turned his professional life into roleplaying: “He was going through the motions. . . . When he spoke, his voice sounded dubbed” (14). And only recently he realized that there were “vast areas of the world he no longer cared about” (14). Carter’s fall at the staircase was thus a manifestation of what had been happening for some time, of the aging he finally became aware of. The visit to England, with old friends turned into new personalities, is a displacement from home and from the life of youth and early middle age. He knows that what comes as the next stage is afterlife, but a mundane one, if you are lucky enough to survive accidents like his fall at the staircase. While going out with Frank the next morning, the details of nature seem so new to him that he feels there is “a cosmic joke beneath mundane appearances” (8). And this is what the story’s title plays with: a neo-platonic search for deeper meaning of the world and trivial things surrounding us.

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In the book Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir claims that old people are the other of society, but that it is more difficult for men to cope with this status. Namely, old age is influenced by sexual and class differences; it manifests itself differently in men and women, as well as in the rich and the poor. As Penelope Deutscher sums up Beauvoir’s thoughts about aging men, “They were returned from the public realm to a private sphere that was the traditional domain of their wives” (Deutscher 444). This basically means that “women in old age had, as compared to men, less to lose,” and explains why Updike’s male character appears more vulnerable than the female ones (444). Some of the passages in the story seem to be like illustrations of De Beauvoir’s thoughts. The first one tells us what Carter sees and hears from the back seat: “The two wives sounded as stirred up and twittery as if their lives had just begun—as if courtship and husbands and childbearing were a preamble to some triumphant menopausal ministry among the disenfranchised and incestuous” (14). The other one explains why he makes a spectacle in the inn they enter when the storm begins. First, he pays for the food “over Lucy’s protests” (15) and then buys an expensive piece of furniture to be sent to America: “The women’s conversation in the car had obligated him to make a show of power, male power” (15). When Carter decides to take initiative, he is actually sending a message both to others and to himself. For Jane and Lucy, it is a message that means “I am still alive and I still have agency.” The bureau will be shipped to their address in America, to become a message for him from another world. It is also a kind of psychological guarantee for Carter that the home, where his prior life has been, still exists. A question concerning these passages may be if they are an illustration of the discourse of the time they were written, the last decades of the twentieth century? Is Updike using “a topic of the day” to make his story more attractive for some larger audience? These lines seem to be just too much in accordance with the revelations of the 1980s, the time when the story was conceived. In the story “Tristan and Iseult,” the narrator plays (via the reflector) with the most popular discourse of the time, deconstruction. 15 It is quite clear that Updike was always aware of what these discourses were, as he was an educated and well-informed author. Another question, posed by feminist critics, may be, is Updike using these discourses to create his misogynist characters? If we take a closer look to the character of Carter, we can for sure see some misogynist traits. But do we trust him completely? Of course, that his position is not trustworthy: he is an aging male in the competitive world which makes him an “unreliable reflector,” to paraphrase Wayne Booth’s famous idiom, unreliable narrator. In other words, his position as an aging male, temporarily displaced in England or, more precisely, at the gate to his afterlife, means that everything told from his angle must be read through the prism of his vulnerability: the fact that he has been slowing down and is not only aware of that, but also of

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the fact that his younger colleagues are also aware of it; that his wife is ready to make her turn in the wide world, while he would rather be passively driven around; and that he is still vain enough to make a spectacle of his male “power.” Updike, as every good writer, goes beyond the abstract claims that make up the theoretical discourse addressing the politics of vulnerability. Even if his characters have misogynic thoughts, in the new context they gain other meanings. In reading this story the most productive way would be to follow the line of vulnerability: who is, and why, the vulnerable side? It turns out that Carter is. SHE HAD TRIED TO BE A PERSON, SHE HAD LIVED “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” the longest story in the collection that stands as its own novella, represents a further development of the motifs from the novel Of the Farm (1965) and is a kind of an epilogue to that earlier work. Even by its length, the novella comes close to the short novel; the narrator of the novel and the protagonist of the story share the same name, Joey. The nearby city is named Alton, and their life stories are the same; only Joey from the story is older than the one from the novel, which is also natural, given the plot. 16 In the story, Joey comes to the farm after his mother’s death, and during the course of several weekends, cleans up the house. His mother had spent the last seventeen years of her life at the farm alone, burying first her own parents, then her husband, Joey’s father. Buying back the farm where she was born and where she spent her childhood was the project of her life. For Joey, moving from the city of Alton to the farm was a major trauma, and he felt that five years he spent there before going to college and further to his own life were a much longer period of time. His first memories of the farmhouse are hazy, as of a place somewhere in a depressing landscape where telephone poles are the only sign of civilization. 17 Not only was he, as a young boy, cut off from the “modern life,” but he felt betrayed by his mother’s love for the farm and its sandstone farmhouse (134). Years later, Joey’s visits with his own children and three wives, in succession, gave him new perspectives on this place. However, the definite one comes after his mother’s death, when he is faced not only with his childhood memories, but also with his mother’s memories and with the unknown identity of the most important woman in his life. Going through the house, Joey faces the past. Although there are no spectacular revelations in the story, there is a surprise. When he finds his mother’s financial calculations he understands that her decision to buy back the farm was motivated by the need to survive the Depression. The least poetical piece of paper makes him the most emotional. The mother who

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emerges from Joey’s memories is a strong, determined, and at the same time feminine woman, whom he can only reconstruct from memories and her own photos. In his memory, she is both young, strong and able, as well as a dying old woman. It is Updike’s masterful narration that allows constant mingling of these personalities: the story is structured as a series of flashbacks from different periods of time, out of chronological order. That enables his “young mother” from various periods to keep reappearing, by which the vulnerable old woman and the strong young woman stand next to each other. One of the most striking traits of the mother in this story is her personal capacity in the historically difficult times of the Great Depression and World War II. Hers is the struggle of a single individual against the economy, for her family, and foremost for the life she envisions for her son. It was a time of collective vulnerability during which her private world was endangered. What could her agency, her initiative, be in such a time? Joey never thought of moving to the farm as a way of surviving the difficult years: By her calculations, their reduced costs in the little sandstone house, and the projected rentals of their eighty acres to the neighboring farmers, would save them five hundred dollars—a third of her husband’s salary. It had never really occurred to Joey that their move here had had a practical side. When he came to sheets showing how the money for his college education could be squeezed out among their other expenses, he couldn’t bear to keep reading. (138–39)

Finding the paper with her calculations for Joey is a message of ultimate love and struggle, which makes him see the relations and structures of his own life in a different light. For readers, the message does not only have a sentimental, but also a strong, political meaning for the woman’s ability to lead the family and overcome even the harshest historical periods. In the end, Joey realizes, “His mother had made a shrewd investment, buying back paradise” (140). There are many stories in this collection, and even more in Updike’s opus, including novels, with similar mother figures. 18 In all of them, the mother is a determined, tough, stubborn and strong woman. However, their economic ability is not at all visible in other pieces. In that aspect, this story is reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Widow’s Might,” where a widowed mother surprises her children by the economic autonomy she created for herself. Instead of depending on them after their father’s death, she found a way to earn money herself: while taking care of her sick husband, she actually formed a small hospital for elderly people. The widow’s decision to finally live her life as she always wanted to seems to be an illustration of a thought Gilman presented earlier, in her famous book Women and Economics from 1898: “A human female, healthy, sound, has twenty-five years of life before she is a mother, and should have twenty-five years more after the period of such maternal service as is expected of her has been given.” 19

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The echoes of the patriarchal society Gilman fought against are still very much present in Updike’s story. In “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” we see a working mother who is fighting against the economic disasters of the Depression and the Second World War. We learn that her mother, too, had been a money-maker. Then comes Joey’s generation and their experience of economic abundance where women spend their lives as housewives, whose primary task is child-bearing and child-rearing. Joey’s mother seems to be of different material and with clear goals—she wanted to come back to the farm, and wanted her son to become a poet. In her decisiveness, she did not care much about other members of the family, but in the end it turns out that her decision was rational. “A Sandstone Farmhouse” is, of course, an elegy, as are all stories in this collection. Yet it is the only one in which we see an old person nearing death. Joey goes to the hospital to visit his sick mother, and discovers her feminine and even coquettish side there, the side that he had been protected from by his father and later by his three marriages. Looking at the face of death, she is young again: “She was sitting on the bed with her hair wild and one shoulder bared by a loose tie in the hospital johnny. Her facial expression girlish, womanhood’s acquired composure all dissolved” (126). This may indeed look like an image of a parody of youth, if there were no other nuances in it: first, the narrative strategy of the story was to mix the young and old character of mother, and second, Joey talks with her about the suggested medical intervention, and they visually suggest a completely different meaning: Their intermittently shared life was being lifted into new octaves, and mother and son seemed in these moments of hospital conference simply a man and a woman, both with more white hairs than dark, taking counsel because no one else whose advice would count was left on earth. (126)

To the supposed viewer, they look like two aged human beings, alone in the world, with death approaching one of them. She rejects the open-heart surgery, thus “sparing him the trouble, the expense, the tests, the trips to Philadelphia” because of which Joey “tried to suppress his relief” (126). This is a moment in which the protagonist swerves from the socially and theoretically expected ethics of care. This is Updike’s honesty as a writer and observer of human lives, and it is also the privilege of a literary discourse: it is not judgmental, not prescriptive, nor does it give role models, it only describes what is there. Even his mother’s opinion of the medical system as aimed at making money only is a literary device. 20 In any case, what we are seeing as readers (the supposed observers) are human beings confronting death, the basic image of vulnerability. It is, of course, the body that makes us vulnerable. While visiting his mother in the hospital, Joey felt “her body arching over his life like a firma-

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ment, and he would leave the hospital building and find relief in the body of the city” (124–25). He even realizes at one point that his mother in a way loved him as her own extension: “Joey suddenly saw that this his own self, which he had imagined she cherished for qualities all his own, was lovable to her above all as a piece of her body, as a living proof of her womanhood” (124). Searching for some plumbing materials to repair the toilet in his mother’s house while she is in hospital, Joey comes to a final conclusion expressed in the form of a rhetorical question: “What was life at bottom but plumbing?” (125). This is his own ironic way of coping with the fear of dying, as accumulation and clogging appear as metaphors for life through the whole story. Joey has, as his mother used to, a problem with throwing things away. She collected everything, from store bags to old newspapers, and the house was, as her own heart, “clogging up” (118). Joey read it as an outcome of the belief that everything had a certain value and “that one’s own life was infinitely precious” (119). After her death, the papers and bottles must be thrown away as nobody was collecting them: “nothing was precious any more, there was too much of everything” (129). These contrasting images reveal the change in a society turning to consumerism, but there is a more archetypal meaning for it. The accumulation of things (and capital, as well) leads to overabundance. But there is a reverse side: one of the Joey’s early memories about the farmhouse is helping his father and grandfather tear down the old fireplace and chimney. His duty was to clear the huge pile of stones left after this operation, and that summer, at the age of fourteen, he learns that even if he removed stones one by one, in the end the entire mountain would be taken away. This becomes his early metaphor of life passing away: “On the same principle, an invisible giant, removing only one day at a time, will eventually dispose of an entire life” (109). 21 At the end, Joey feels that the empty house, which he had cleared in detail, is calling out to him, that he cares about it as if it were a living thing. It is a turn in the self-understanding of the protagonist: Joey sees the story of his life in a new light. Even though this is a kind of reward, there is a bit of anxiety, too: Did he see his relation to his mother and the farm in the wrong light before, was he wrong in his understanding of his own life? The story does not solve these contradictions. The concluding sentences are the expression of Joey’s pain of the loss of the most important person in his life and everything she meant for him, as she comes to be represented by her beloved house: “He felt guilty, anxious, displaced. He had always wanted to be where the action was, and what action there was, it turned out, had been back there” (140). Joey does not only feel grief for the loss of his mother: she represents the time when he felt protected and the world, like in 1930s, was “shabby and solid around her” (132). Thinking of his mother as a young person striving for the life she had once projected for her family is the only moment when

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Joey cries at the funeral. But he also comes to a comforting thought: “She had tried to be a person, she had lived” (132). CONCLUSION The reading of these three representative stories from Updike’s collection The Afterlife and Other Stories is done from my own feminist perspective. In opposition to the early feminist critique and its idea of the resisting reader, which was intelligent and necessary, but also reductive, this reading is based on the inclusive notion of vulnerability. As humans of all genders and ages are vulnerable, it is a good focal point for various issues; and, as we are discussing literature, and not life, it also enables us to take into account the narrative strategies which are at the center of a literary work. The reading of Updike from this point of view is indeed political, as any reading and every theory is political. As Updike was always well informed of theoretical discourse and updated in theories and topics of the moment—I would say often inspired by them—it seemed fair enough to connect his stories to some of their contemporary theoretical discourses. Reading them via the more recent theoretical notion of vulnerability was meant to show how interesting and important they still are. NOTES 1. This article has been written within the framework of the research project 178029 of the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia. 2. See, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Introduction in The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2015). 3. Dunja Begović, “Vulnerability as a Basis for a Critical Feminist Ethics,” Knjiženstvo 5, http://www.knjizenstvo.rs/magazine.php?text=148 (July 27, 2018). 4. Ibid. 5. These are the following stories: “The Afterlife”; “Wildlife”; “Brother Grasshopper”; “The Journey to the Dead”; “Conjunction”; “The Man Who Became Soprano”; “Short Easter”; “A Sandstone Farmhouse”; “The Other Side of the Street”; “Tristan and Iseult”; “George and Vivien” (which consists of two stories—“Aperto, Chiuso” and “Bluebeard in Ireland”); “Farrell’s Caddie”; “The Rumor”; “Falling Asleep Up North”; “The Brown Chest”; “His Mother Inside Him”; “Baby’s First Step”; “Playing with the Dynamite”; “The Black Room”; “Cruise” and “Grandparenting.” Seventeen were published in the New Yorker, and the rest in Esquire, Playboy and Atlantic Monthly. 6. Ruthmarie Mitsch reads it as a story about pain and pleasure. See Ruthmarie Mitsch, “Updike’s ‘Tristan and Iseult,’” Explicator, Summer 96, vol. 54 Issue 4, 247–49. 7. Elizabeth Grosz, “Refiguring Bodies,” in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 1–23. 8. Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies–Cities,” in Space, Time and Perversion (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 103–10; 104. 9. See “On Not Being A Dove,” in Self-Consciousness, 1990, 161–69. 10. Updike’s interest in that myth dates from earlier, at least from the text about Dennis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, entitled “More Love in the Western World” (in Assorted Prose [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990], 283–300).

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11. The connection with the novel is also underlined by the musical background of the story: “Now another mangy pet of the easy-listening stations slid into the room, an arrangement of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ shorn of the troubling, too rapid lyrics, which he had once been told were much more suggestive in Brazilian Portuguese.” (157). 12. Similar is the principle of Mim Angstrom, Rabbit’s sister, who, in Rabbit Redux (1971), is a high-class prostitute in the West Coast: “Years ago, I made it a rule never to be with a guy more than three times. Unless there was some percentage in getting involved” (Rabbit Redux, 320). 13. There is also a distant echo of the story “The Bulgarian Poetess” from 1965. Bech asks Vera Glavanakova, whose English is not perfect, if she knows the word orgasm. She answers by paraphrasing a French author: ‘There is a French poet, a young one, who has written of this. He says that else do we, do we so gather up, collect into ourselves, oh----’ Vexed, she spoke to Petrov in rapid Bulgarian. / He shrugged and said, ‘Concentrate our attention’” (“The Bulgarian Poetess,” in Bech: A Book, 68). Even without this reference, the orgasmic quality of the expression to “concentrate the attention” in this story is clear. 14. Ironically, even Henry James, the “father” of the Anglo-American international theme, is mentioned in the story, as one of the “vast areas” of life which do not interest Carter any more. 15. “Sometimes his roving eyes flicked into her own, then leaped away, overwhelmed by their glory, their—as the deconstructionists say—presence” (155). 16. William Prichard reads this story as the sequel to the novel. See Pritchard, Updike: America’s Man of Letters, 326. I agree with him. 17. Telephone poles are one of important Updike’s symbols. In the poem of the same title he writes, “They have been with us a long time. // They will outlast the elms.” Updike, Collected Poems 1953–1993, 16–17. The poem first appears in the collection of the same title, published in 1963. 18. In this collection, the stories with the similar mother figure and the background are: “The Other Side of the Street”; “The Brown Chest”; “His Mother Inside Him”; “The Black Room.” Of the many other stories, the first one that comes to mind is “Pigeon Feathers.” The novels with this mother figure are in the first place The Centaur and Of the Farm, although some of her traits must be in Rabbit Run’s Mary Angstrom, too. 19. Perkins-Gilman, Women and Economics, 21. 20. Even the mother’s opinion on the medical system is a literary device, not a case of antiSemitism to be discussed. “She could not see the predominantly Jewish doctors as saviors and allies but only as opportunists and exploiters” (Updike, “A Sandstone Farmhouse” 126). For Joey, it is confusing, as his third wife, whom his mother seemed to like, was Jewish: “as he imagined now his mother’s unspoken feelings in those years it was like silverfish tumble out of old books” (127). 21. There is a children’s poem “A Little by Little” by Jovan Jovanović Zmaj (1833–1904), a Serbian Romantic poet, which uses the same parallelism: “Leaf by leaf—a little forest; ... Brick by brick—a palace; Word by word—a quarrel ... And an hour by hour—a year ... Day by day—the life is gone.” The same motif, but as an accumulation, not dissipation, appears in the ancient Chinese fairy tale “The Foolish Old Man Moves the Mountain,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ Foolish_Old_Man_Removes_the_Mountains.

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WORKS CITED Begović, Dunja. “Vulnerability as a Basis for a Critical Feminist Ethics.” Knjiženstvo, Journal for Studies in Literature, Gender and Culture 5, 2015. http://www.knjizenstvo.rs/magazine. php?text=148 (link July 27, 2018). Deutscher, Penelope. “Afterlives: Beauvoir’s Old Age and the Intersections of The Second Sex.” A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, 438–48. UK: John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2017. Duffy, Brian. “Motifs of Loss in The Afterlife.” The John Updike Review, No. 1 (Fall 2012), 31–49. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2015. Gilman Perkins, Charlotte. Women and Economics. A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, edited by Carl N. Degler. New York: Harper & Row. 1966. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Refiguring Bodies.” Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 1–23. ———. “Bodies–Cities.” Space, Time and Perversion. New York and London: Routledge, 1995, 103–10. Kirkpatrick, Kate. Review of Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age: Gender, Ethics, Time. Hypatia, 2016. http://hypatiareviews.org/reviews/content/57 (link July 27, 2018). Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “Introduction” (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985). Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 463–77. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Mitsch, Ruthmarie H. “Updike’s ‘Tristan and Iseult,’” Explicator, Summer 96, vol. 54 Issue 4 (2010), 247–49. Pritchard, William H. Updike: America s Man of Letters, South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press, 2000. Updike, John. Couples. New York: A Fawcett Crest Book. 1969. ———. “The Bulgarian Poetess.” Bech: A Book. New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1970, 49–70. ———. “More Love in the Western World.” Assorted Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 283–300. ———. “On Not Being a Dove.” Self-Consciousness. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1990, 116–17. ———. The Afterlife and Other Stories. New York: Fawcett Crest, Ballantine Books. 1995. ———. Collected Poems 1953–1993. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1995. ———. Brazil. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996. ———. Rabbit Is Rich. New York: Fawcett Columbine. 1996. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Fawcett Columbine. 1996.

Chapter Eleven

John Updike’s Terrorist and the Politics of Hygiene Aleksandra Vukotić

On its publication, Terrorist (2006) was widely disparaged as an artistic failure, or at the very least one of imagination. Updike’s late novel, which follows an eighteen-year-old Arab American, one Ahmad Ashmawy Molloy who is gradually radicalized and ultimately joins a terrorist cell, was deemed a lesser work, even one he should not have written at all. In his scathing review of Terrorist, for example, James Wood wrote that “John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject,” while in Michiko Kakutani’s opinion, Updike’s twenty-second novel was “shopworn,” with “none of the metaphysical depth of classic novelistic musings on revolutionaries.” Kakutani and Wood both found the protagonist a “one-dimensional stereotype,” with no personality or will of his own, and Wood finally concluded that “[i]t is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book,” mainly due to Updike’s “peculiar clumsiness” and ineptness at writing plausible fiction about a subject he apparently failed to tackle in all its complexity. 1 While most critics agree that Terrorist is simply not one of Updike’s best works, Kakutani’s and Wood’s denunciations feel exaggerated, especially if we consider Updike’s craftsmanship in such acclaimed novels as The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), the Rabbit Tetralogy (1960, 1971, 1981, 1990), etc., including those in which Updike also engages with Otherness, such as The Coup (1978) and Brazil (1994). We may even wonder whether the blatant stereotypes and clichés, which are unquestionably present in Terrorist, could be part of the author’s strategy in a novel whose poetics seem almost wholly in the function of informing a particular politics. In other words, whether or not it is a deliberate strategy or mere “clumsiness,” Updike’s refusal or failure to familiarize the Other, especially the young Ahmad 179

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and his mentor, the Yemeni imam Shaikh Rashid, carries some political overtones: Ahmad feels that he is “an outsider among outsiders,” and that, more broadly, Arab Americans remain “an underclass, alien in a nation that persists in thinking of itself as light-skinned, English-speaking, and Christian” (Terrorist 244). As such, they remain on the distant margins even after we have come to the end of the novel, perhaps reflecting a general trend which one character recognizes in US politics—its inability to see past the myth of national innocence (185). In fact, US politics appears to be a central problem in Terrorist—the painful subject of 9/11 and its violent aftermath, which, according to James Wood, Updike should never have tackled. Wood’s comment, however, is not surprising, given the predominantly hostile, or at best lukewarm, critical reception of post-9/11 fiction. 2 Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, and Frédéric Beigbeder, whom Aaron DeRosa has called “the usual suspects in 9/11 literary studies,” 3 also received largely negative reviews on publishing their post-9/11 works: Falling Man (2007), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), and Windows on the World (2003). Critics and reviewers mainly found fault in the novelists’ “emphasis on the preliminary stages of trauma,” and insufficient “mediation,” and “domestication” of the crisis, 4 while Martin Randall even questioned the capacity of textual narratives to deal with this subject, favoring instead films, operas, fine art, performance art, and particularly hybrid art forms. 5 Arguing for a more complex treatment of the subject of 9/11 and its profound impact, Kristiaan Versluys and Richard Gray suggested that novelists move away from exploring the trauma and the domestic sphere in order to more fully investigate the public and political realm, and focus on the “confrontation with the Other.” 6 In this sense Richard Gray praised the novels such as Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), and Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days (2008), as well as Deborah Eisenberg’s collection of stories Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), which, as he argued, “respond to the bigger picture” in their “encounters with strangeness.” 7 On the other hand, Gray identified a curious “imaginative paralysis” in John Updike’s Terrorist and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, which in his opinion “hardly seem to scratch the surface.” 8 More specifically, what Gray recognized in Terrorist was insufficient “imaginative involvement” and weak “argumentative mediation, the witnessing or explanatory piecing together of personal or cultural motive,” which is why he concluded that Updike’s “brave attempt to imagine the other never really fits together as a meaningful story.” 9 As can be seen, Gray categorized Terrorist as a 9/11 novel and reduced his observation to this aspect alone, but I contend that Updike’s work extends the boundaries set by such novels and their critics alike. 10 Terrorist is cer-

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tainly a post-9/11 novel, both historically and thematically (as recognized by Gray, DeRosa, Versluys, Hartnell, Randall, and Herman, among others), 11 and yet, there is no sense of trauma or that the world has greatly changed after the September attacks, which has been recognized as a distinctive feature of 9/11 fiction. On the contrary, in Terrorist the world is very much the same as it ever was, and the politics of the third millennium are informed by familiar, deeply rooted religious convictions and mythological archetypes. Events like 9/11 trigger what is only “lulled” and “dozing” in our civilization, 12 like the myth of religious, racial, national and sexual purity, whose latent terror suddenly assumes an overwhelming presence. Updike therefore looks inward rather than outward in order to examine this “terrorist” within, and I will argue that it is in this sense that he in fact succeeds in imagining both the Other and, more importantly, the Self, by analyzing the American, as well as global, culture and politics. At first glance, however, the choice of the novel’s protagonist, an American-born Muslim teenager who was self-converted at the age of eleven, seems at odds with the hypothesis about Updike’s inward look. But, as Updike explains, Ahmad “is American, and that’s the key.” 13 Ahmad himself, however, feels he is neither American nor Muslim (enough). At home he feels curiously distant from his Irish American mother Teresa “Terry” Mulloy, a nurse’s aide and amateur painter who raised him single-handedly after being deserted by the boy’s Egyptian father, while at school he is bullied by one Tylenol Jones, an African American who constantly reminds him of his “hybrid” identity, and with whom he vies for the attention of sensuous Joryleen Grant, another African American schoolmate. Even Ahmad’s high school guidance counselor Jack Levy, who takes special interest in Ahmad after the boy’s decision to abandon academic studies and become a truck driver, has to be reminded that Ahmad is not a foreigner, and that he can speak English as well as other students. On the other hand, to Shaikh Rashid, the imam who preaches on the Quran in an abandoned dance studio converted into a mosque, Ahmad is not Muslim but American, and, as rightfully argued by Peter C. Herman, the boy’s decision to join the terrorist plot is partly motivated by his “desire to belong.” 14 The story about Ahmad’s gradual radicalization in the fictional New Jersey suburb of New Prospect is a catalyst for a parallel one, largely taking place in Washington D.C. It involves heads of state and secret agents: the Secretary of Homeland Security and his assistant Hermione Fogel (Jack Levy’s sister-in-law with a secret infatuation with her boss), as well as Charlie Chehab, an undercover CIA agent who poses as Ahmad’s partner at Excellency Home Furnishings, where Ahmad drives a truck and delivers furniture. In the post-9/11 climate of paranoia and fear, the US government employs a series of strategies to prevent the envisaged terrorist threats, including the one that involves the terrorist cell Ahmad joins, and the scenes

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with the Secretary and his assistant primarily explore the impact of the enhanced security measures on the American society in the first decade of the new millennium. Surprisingly enough, though, as we follow Ahmad’s trucking path and plans to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York City, we are inclined to feel sympathy rather than judgment for this terrorist “wanna-be.” According to Charles McGrath, Ahmad is “in many ways the most moral and thoughtful character in the entire book,” he is “lovable, or at least appealing.” 15 Scene after scene, we are reminded of Ahmad’s kindness and compassion, be that the tragedy of 9/11 or the plight of “the vast insect population” (74). Ahmad is simply unable to derive pleasure from the suffering of others, and as the novel progresses it becomes abundantly clear that a boy who “does not wish to contemplate any such organic horror” over the prospect of killing a beetle (249) will not become the “life-destroyer that a terrorist must be,” as imagined by Joseph Bottum, one of Updike’s most unsympathetic reviewers. 16 By choosing the standpoint of a terrorist, however, John Updike, much like Don DeLillo in Falling Man, acts as a “bad citizen”—or so it would appear from some of the reviews. 17 As Peter C. Herman notes, Terrorist breaks the “taboo” of considering terrorists as “anything other than subhuman monsters” 18 in presenting Ahmad as a respectful and compassionate boy. Even his clothes, the “strikingly clean white T-shirt” whose whiteness “assaults Jack Levy’s eyes” (31), highlight Ahmad’s innocence, implying that the word “terrorist” from the novel’s title might not solely refer to its protagonist. The reader may, however, want to repeat the question that Jack, the high school counselor, asks Ahmad’s mother, “How did he get to be so—so good?” (83)—the query echoed by a number of Updike’s reviewers. Unquestionably, in the “cartoonish,” simplified world of the novel, whose language and structure mirror the post-9/11 atmosphere and political discourse promoting religious, racial, ethnic and national stereotypes, a world divided into patriots and “enemies of state,” “pure Americans” and “poor shitheads,” true believers and “filthy infidels,” Ahmad gets to be “so good” for a reason. It would appear that in this manner Updike invites his readers to seek terrorists and forms of terror elsewhere in the novel. And we find them almost everywhere we look, from Ahmad’s superior, Shaikh Rashid, who instills ideas of terror into Ahmad’s mind, to the Secretary of Homeland Security and the US media that terrorize the citizens by announcing security alerts of varying degree. What seems most striking, though, is the terror of cleanliness, “a concern with purity almost religious” (73), which largely shapes the novel’s language and discourse. Updike’s post-9/11 America seems as obsessed by the ideas of cleanliness and pollution as the young and inexperienced Ahmad, who is preoccupied with thoughts of maintaining his personal and

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mental hygiene. As it appears, it is this ubiquitous myth of purity that gives rise to misogyny, racism and nationalism, and which ultimately drives Ahmad to join the terrorist plot in which he believes he is to “cleanse” the world of “infidels” with the purgatory fire of a suicide bombing. What underlies this obsession with cleanliness and sanitation is the all too familiar fear of contamination of the Self with the Other, and Updike’s Terrorist gives an insight into the very mechanisms that create the atmosphere of sterility and closedness in today’s world. Ahmad is certainly not the only character fascinated by cleanliness in John Updike’s oeuvre, as a preoccupation with hygiene is evident in some of his other works. Rabbit Armstrong, for example, is frequently obsessed by it, and Updike’s story “Tristan and Iseult” (1990), in which the narrator imagines his visit to a dental hygienist as a romantic encounter, closes with the actual word “hygiene.” Some of Updike’s concerns with cleanliness and dirt are discussed in Marshall Boswell’s masterful study John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy, though the examples analyzed there would not be sufficient to identify a poetics of hygiene in the quartet. 19 Yet unlike in these other works, in Terrorist fascination with cleanliness assumes such absurd proportions that it largely shapes and colors its very language and diction, as well as the overall atmosphere in the novel. More importantly, it is through this poetics of hygiene that Updike presents his readers with a thriving politics of hygiene, showing that religious ideologies, identity politics, and global politics, including American foreign policy, are somewhat anachronistically underpinned by the notions of purity and contamination. In his critique of post-9/ 11 rhetoric, Updike explores the political implications of purity beliefs and practices, demonstrating that, surprisingly enough, these notions are not obsolete, but as relevant as they ever were. In fact, according to Amy Mullin, one of the few scholars who have tackled the subject of cleanliness and pollution in contemporary philosophy, “the rhetoric and concerns of purity continue today in modified secular form.” 20 After discussing some of the most influential philosophical takes on the matter, from Plato to Mary Douglas, Mullin provides a concise summary of certain enduring definitions—that “[p]urity most basically is about order, both social and personal,” about “control of boundaries, social and bodily,” and about “fears of social disorder.” 21 Finally, Mullin argues that, while purity matters are generally believed to be of no importance in the contemporary world, “this concern often arises in periods of social disorder,” as “the rhetoric and practices of purity often emerge in times of social uncertainty, and threats to the community often increase its emphasis on purity.” 22 This implies that the discourse of purity in fact reflects an underlying purity politics that periodically gains momentum at particular times in history when a community feels vulnerable and open to attack. Threats to the community, whether real or imaginary, trigger its immune response that should defend the

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system against its possible invaders. Still, as Amy Mullin further notes, it is important to bear in mind that such fears of pollution “reflect an ideal of order,” 23 and in the face of a perceived crisis the community tries to preserve the system which is otherwise believed to be pristine and immaculate. Updike’s Terrorist reflects these beliefs and practices, showing the continuing relevance of the discourse and politics of hygiene in the twenty-firstcentury United States. 24 After the 9/11 attacks, America becomes “a land of multiplying security gates” where “the gatekeepers multiply also” (43) in order to preserve its safety and security, as well as its distinctive values and lifestyles. At the same time, Updike shows that the communities typically viewed as the Other, especially the Islamic ones, also become increasingly concerned with keeping their own identity pure and unsullied by the corrupting influence of the West. What Anna Hartnell has termed “the specter of exceptionalism” 25 is haunting Terrorist, and it appears that Updike primarily identifies it in a renewed surge of interest in the talks and practices of purity on all sides. In order to discuss the dominant politics of hygiene in Updike’s Terrorist, we need to take a closer look at the novel’s language, which is strongly marked by what could be defined as hygienic discourse. Ahmad, for example, repeats throughout the novel that he “[does] not desire uncleanliness” (182), and this idea motivates most of his actions in the novel—from his refusal to be “devirginated,” and “polluted” by the woman (214), through quitting school and fleeing from its “corrupting influence” (35), to isolating himself inside a truck, the only place where he feels “clean and free,” “cut off from the base world” (154). Finally, this very same idea drives him to a terrorist plot, the planned suicide bombing which is to (symbolically) take place under water, inside the Lincoln tunnel, with fire and water bringing the “great cleansing” (277). Ahmad’s preoccupation with cleanliness, reflected both in his diction and beliefs, is probably the result of his religious indoctrination. As previously stated, Ahmad spends tremendous time studying the Quran in an improvised mosque, with the imam Shaikh Rashid providing close reading and spiritual guidance. Ahmad evidently adopts the formal register and diction from the books and sermons he is exposed to, and his high-school counselor infers that “he is imitating [. . .] some adult he knows, a smooth and formal talker” (32). Furthermore, on leaving school and pursuing the career of a truck driver, Ahmad derives immense pleasure from studying and observing the sanitation regulations for the transportation of goods, which points to a fascination that is not to be taken for granted. Updike devotes several pages to describing Ahmad’s newly found “religion” of purity in the trucking regulations: All across this land, Ahmad now realizes, hazardous materials are hurtling, spilling, burning, eating roadways and truck beds—a chemical deviltry making

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manifest materialism’s spiritual poison. [. . .] Transportation is full of dangers that Ahmad has never before contemplated. It excites him, however, to see himself—like the pilot of a 727 or the captain of a supertanker or the tiny brain of a brontosaurus—steering a great vehicle through the maze of dire possibilities to safety. He is pleased to find in the trucking regulations a concern with purity almost religious in quality. (72–73)

What can immediately be recognized here is the familiar dichotomy between purity and danger. For Ahmad purity is safety, and the “dire possibilities” of contamination signal imminent danger. Our attention is drawn to the choice of words that describe hazardous materials as a “chemical deviltry”—they are “hurtling, spilling, burning,” but what is also noteworthy is Ahmad’s tremendous excitement at the thought of performing such an important task which he elevates to a symbolic level, that of a religious mission. For Ahmad chemical pollutants stand for the “spiritual poison” of the American consumer society that is “eating” the souls of true believers, and he uses the categories of purity and pollution primarily as metaphors for a fallen world that he idealistically sets out to save. A few pages later readers are given an insight into the probable causes of Ahmad’s love of purity. Ahmad appears to be accustomed, even conditioned, to a certain narrative of hygiene, as Shaikh Rashid, his mentor and “surrogate father” (10), almost exclusively uses the categories of purity and impurity in his talks about jihad. For example, in the scene in which Ahmad questions the violent, “sadistic” nature of the “holy war,” asking if God’s purpose should perhaps be to show mercy to the “infidels,” Rashid readily answers: “The cockroaches that slither out from the baseboard and from beneath the sink—do you pity them? The flies that buzz around the food on the table, walking on it with the dirty feet that have just danced on feces and carrion—do you pity them?” [. . .] “No,” [. . .] “You want to destroy them. They are vexing you with their uncleanness. They would take over your table, your kitchen; they will settle into the very food as it passes into your mouth if you do not destroy them.” (74–75)

In other words, those who are not “us” are impure (“vexing you with their uncleanliness”), and are therefore viewed as a threat to the established order, they are imagined as an invasion, a contagion which needs to be contained and eradicated—non-believers no less than cockroaches. Shaikh Rashid’s talk reflects the previously discussed rhetorical and political emphasis on purity and pollution in the face of an imagined danger—the corrupting influence of the dominant Western values which supposedly threaten to disrupt, or even “take over” an otherwise stable, self-contained system. Furthermore, Rashid’s images of the Other as dirty and dangerous convey what Amy Mullin has described as “hostility to heterogeneity,” 26 and in Terrorist we

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witness its arousal and dissemination. While Ahmad initially feels pity for “the vast insect population” (74) which evokes the opening scene where he muses on the “deaths of insects and worms” (3), by the end of the novel— after continued exposure to Rashid’s purity sermons—he burns with a reforming zeal. The talks of cleanliness and contamination strengthen Ahmad’s convictions about jihad, and we can follow the process of his gradual radicalization in the name of purity. However, we can see in the novel that this “hostility to heterogeneity” and fear of contamination are not limited to the rhetoric or practices of Updike’s Muslim characters, and the character of Hermione Fogel, a public official in the White House and a pious Lutheran, is of particular interest in this respect. Earlier in the novel, Hermione uses similar metaphors in her conversation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, discussing the probable reasons behind the terrorist attacks. When the Secretary asks, “Why do they want to do these horrible things? Why do they hate us? What’s to hate?” Hermione confidently answers, “They hate the light. [. . .] Like cockroaches. Like bats. The light shone in darkness,” she quotes, knowing that Pennsylvania piety is a way to his heart, “and the darkness comprehended it not.” (46)

It is noteworthy that both Shaikh Rashid and Hermione resort to religious discourse in their attempts to define and vilify the other. While Rashid quotes from the Quran throughout the novel to support his arguments in favor of jihad, Hermione quotes from the Bible to reinforce the idea of white Christian supremacy as “light” against the “darkness,” which signifies the “backwardness,” but also the “blackness,” of Islam and the Muslim world in general. Coupling Rashid and Hermione’s racist diction of clean vs. dirty and white vs. black with the high rhetoric of religious passages contrasting light and darkness, Updike points to the power of words and a strong connection between the poetics of hygiene and the politics of exception and exclusion. Once revived, the hygienic discourse “stir[s] anew” the “dozing giant of American racism” (43), threatening the democratic values and hard-won human rights. As the national sentiment grows and spreads in the wake of 9/11, prejudices are encouraged and fueled by inflammatory language, now “liberated” from political correctness and respect, and in Terrorist we witness some immediate consequences of such rhetoric and politics. The scene in which Ahmad’s mother mentions “more than one or two” anti-Muslim hate calls as the reason for having their phone number disconnected and unlisted following the 9/11 attacks (76–77) is particularly unsettling in this respect. The Secretary’s question about the reasons of the radicals’ hatred of the West is no less important in this sense. According to Peter Herman, it “echoes much of the rhetoric, both governmental and popular, after 9/11.”

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Herman reminds us that President George Bush used exactly the same words in his address to the Congress immediately after 9/11, “Americans are asking, why do they hate us?” 27 Updike, who may or may not have been referring to this occasion, brilliantly captures the atmosphere of what Baudrillard has described as a “lack of imagination” on both sides: “How can the Other, unless he is an idiot, a psychopath or a crank, want to be different, irremediably different, without even a desire to sign up to our universal gospel?” 28 It is evident in the novel that the Secretary and Hermione are no more able to assume the perspective of the other and question the narrative of American exceptionalism and innocence than Rashid and Ahmad can stray from the “Straight Path” of jihad. 29 This inability to imagine the other as a “fully fledged adversary,” as Baudrillard put it, 30 or more simply, as a human being, is particularly pronounced in the parallels with dirty cockroaches slithering “at the feet of godlike men.” The discourse of purity and pollution is, of course, inextricably linked to religious discourse. As Updike attempts to show, purity and impurity are at the heart not only of Islamic, but also Christian and Jewish discourse, and Rashid’s fervent “hygienic” speeches in which he quotes, and more often misquotes, from the Quran can be recognized as our common heritage. In other words, obsession with hygiene is global and wide-reaching, as Updike shows in various instances in the novel—perhaps most literally in an early scene focalized through Ahmad’s high-school counselor Jack Levy, a nonpracticing Jew: He had encouraged the world to make “Jack” of “Jacob” and had argued against his son’s circumcision, though a slick Wasp doctor at the hospital talked Beth into it, for “purely hygienic” reasons, claiming that studies showed it would lower the risk of venereal disease for Mark and of cervical cancer for Mark’s partners. (22)

The phrase “for purely hygienic reasons,” which is used here in a rather straightforward manner to signify the prevention of venereal diseases, however, assumes metaphorical and symbolic proportions as the novel progresses, building its poetics of hygiene. It continues to resonate in the novel until its very end, when an impersonal narrative voice mentions “that injunction of all religions to keep clean” (277) as a universal, yet dubious governing principle across the world. What the novel particularly stresses in this respect is the power of the discourse of purity and pollution as our civilizational heritage that transcends ethnic, religious and racial borders. However, Updike shows that this is an “injunction” that can still be defied, and Terrorist sets out to identify and expose the hidden ideology behind such talk of hygiene. In one scene, for example, Ahmad goes to a Black Christian church to hear his schoolmate Joryleen sing, where much to his dismay, he is forced to

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hear a sermon peppered with talk of modern-day politics. As expected, the sermon delivered by an African American preacher is also given in the discursive mode of purity and impurity. Ahmad insightfully perceives the preacher’s hygienic diction as something common to all the congregants, the “cleanscrubbed” assembly in a “soot-stained” church (47), as he describes them, apparently unable to abandon this “hygienic” mode of thinking himself. The preacher’s mention of the word “impure” in his talk of Moses and Aaron’s lack of faith immediately strikes a chord with the crowd, and soon enough we learn that “Ahmad finds himself getting excited along with the rest of the congregation, which is stirring and murmuring” (57). And yet, the preacher’s talk also makes the somewhat too perceptive Ahmad suspicious of certain shady practices that he suddenly starts noticing—some “impure” purposes for which the discourse on “purity of heart and mind” is used: They expect money to be placed in the plates, which have red felt bottoms to soften the rattle of coins. The unexpected word “impure” returns from the sermon; Ahmad’s insides tremble with the impure trespass of his witnessing these black unbelievers at worship of their non-God, their three-headed idol. (59)

It would appear that Ahmad perceives money donations as dirty and antithetical to the spiritual practices of the church. His reaction is not surprising, though, given what Marshall Boswell has recognized as an “intricate triad of money, dirt, and shit” in Updike’s works. As Boswell notes, Updike makes ample use of the archetypal connection between money and filth in the novel Rabbit Is Rich (1981), like when Rabbit Angstrom looks at his spilled coins and thinks, “It’s all dirt anyway.” 31 Ahmad reacts in a similar manner at the sight and sound of the muffled rattle of coins, but with a religious fervor of a fanatic who suddenly perceives idolatry and corruption both in the worship service and the gathered congregants. And yet, Updike seems particularly keen on presenting the sermon as enthralling, almost bewitching, as Ahmad in the end succumbs to its power: Ahmad himself loves prayer, the sensation of pouring the silent voice in his head into a silence waiting at his side, an invisible extension of himself into a dimension purer than the three dimensions of this world. (61)

In Terrorist, purity sermons and speeches are invariably presented as seductive, reflecting the tremendous power of the clean/dirty archetype and its enduring hold over human imagination. In rare flashes of (somewhat confused) insight, as in the previous passage in which he doubts the preacher’s pure intentions, Ahmad is aware of the manipulation, but he fails to resist it. During one of Rashid’s sermons, for example, Ahmad takes note of his mentor’s “sinuously long” fingers, which, among other things, evoke the

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snake form of Satan, and he nevertheless finds himself unable to oppose Rashid’s eloquence—he “knows he is being manipulated, yet accedes to the manipulation” (234). 32 Thus, even though the sermon, prayer and angelic voices of the choir arouse contradictory feelings in Ahmad, he finally decides to focus on spiritual purity. The “purer dimension” from the quote is, of course, the spiritual dimension, and Ahmad’s central concern in the novel appears to be the purity of mind. “Purity is its own end [. . .] it is both being good and feeling good,” he explains (69), presumably echoing Kierkegaard’s beliefs about purity as “willing the Good.” 33 Yet, as we read on, we become increasingly aware that in Terrorist there is more than Kierkegaardian “purity of heart” at play. Updike attunes his readers (if not his characters) to recognizing both the paradox and the latent ideology behind the centuries-old narrative of purity, which is still very much alive at the beginning of the third millennium. Moreover, in Updike’s Terrorist it transcends the religious discourse it was traditionally connected to and becomes a question of politics. As has been noted earlier, the hygienic discourse reflects the politics of system control and containment of the “enemy”—what Maria Lugones has defined as “[t]he urge to control the multiplicity of people and things” on the part of purity lovers and preachers. 34 In Updike’s novel we encounter this strong desire to control and contain through the narrative of hygiene on all levels of society, in secular America and religious communities alike. Hermione, for example, laments that “[a]n open society is so defenseless” (130), revealing to her sister the Secretary’s tremendous fear of ports as the most fragile area of the US territory that cannot be granted full protection. Now “a land of multiplying security gates,” Updike’s America is nostalgic for its Edenic past with “the escalators and the toy department at the top floor,” which, Hermione sighs, is all “gone” and “[w]e can never be happy again— we Americans” (129). What “seemed a paradise” is now threatened by those who “can’t even speak English properly” (43), endangering even the purity of language. Yet as we read on, it becomes clear that the narrative of purity is the ultimate fiction that has helped sustain totalizing and totalitarian systems through centuries. Racism and nationalism are both underpinned by the ideas of other religions and nationalities as a threat to a pure identity, a potential contamination and disruption of an otherwise clean and orderly system. Likewise, misogyny, another important subject explored in the novel, rests on the premise of women as pollution and disruption, as Terrorist highlights in a number of places. In one such scene readers are given an insight into Ahmad’s tormented soul as he is struggling to control his sexual urges (sex is, of course, imagined as contamination, an invasion of bodily boundaries): 35

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Aleksandra Vukotić He had consulted the Qur’an for sexual advice in vain. It talked of uncleanness but only in regard to women, their menstruation, their suckling of infants. In the second sura, he found the mysterious words, Your wives are your field: go in, therefore, to your field as ye will; but do first some act for your souls’ good: and fear ye God, and know that ye must meet Him. In the verse before that, he read that women are a pollution. Separate yourselves therefore from women and approach them not, until they be cleansed. But when they are cleansed, go in unto them as God hath ordained for you. Verily God loveth those who turn to Him, and loveth those who seek to be clean. (153–54)

While the idea of woman as pollution, especially during menstruation and breastfeeding, has been identified in most communities at a particular stage of development, 36 it feels curiously out of place in the twenty-first-century United States. Yet Ahmad, an American born and raised, sees both Joryleen and his mother Terry, two sexually active women in the novel, as “impure,” with a possibly corrupting influence. Moreover, Ahmad’s perception, based on these sacred words, and reinforced by Rashid’s literal interpretation of the Quran, according to which women are a distraction, “earthly baggage” and “unclean hostages to fortune” (106), also extends to other characters, including women themselves. At one point Joryleen says half-ironically, “I’m just a woman, dirty anyway” (223), and Terry feels that to Rashid she is “a piece of meat—unclean meat” (163). Perhaps not so surprisingly, even Jack Levy perceives a certain “light-hearted whorishness” and “teeny-slut look” in Terry’s outfit (160). In fact, the reader can follow Terry’s transition “from whore to mother” and back in Jack’s mind, as he lies in her bed, and “his hard-on is growing back.” While he is “trying to think of Terry as a mother and a professional person,” and “an intelligent many-sided individual” (160), her silk underclothes and “careless way” remind him of “all that experience, all those boyfriends accumulated in the fifteen years since Ahmad’s father [. . .] fled,” and her “shaking up with a raghhead, a Mussulman” (160–61). Finally, when Terry abruptly decides to end her affair with Jack, he becomes furious and thinks of her as a “cunt” whose attitude he “begins to resent and resist” (205). A woman’s “uncleanliness” appears to be particularly unsettling to Updike’s male characters, especially to Ahmad, who gets excited at the mere thought of dirt and impurity, which presumably carry a subversive potential in the novel. Indeed, Updike presents the “unclean” and the “impure” as possible forms of defiance in Terrorist. It is a strategy reminiscent of Mary Douglas’s seminal study Purity and Danger, as according to Douglas, power resides in impurity and pollution, which may cause disorder in an otherwise immaculate system. 37 Updike explores this idea further through some of his female characters, most notably Terry. As her lover Jack repeats, “Terry” can stand for “Terri-ble,” or “Terri-fy,” and at one point he thinks of her as a “holy Terr-or” (161). By stressing these possible derivatives, Updike makes

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us wonder—what is so terrible and terrifying about Terry, but also, perhaps, Terr-ific—something that never occurs to Jack? Terry is a “wild one, a rulebreaker” (161), a woman who violates the idea of purity of race by marrying an Egyptian, “what her harp brothers and father would have called a nigger” (84), and the ideal of a pure woman, by refusing to be confined to the role of a single mother—she is the “embarrassing mother” who wears tight jeans and skimpy dresses. Finally, she even chooses her own name, Terry rather than Teresa, which “sounds like a boy,” “like a male painter” (84), thus violating the idea of a pure gender. Both Joryleen and Terry, as the impure, are terrifying to Ahmad, Rashid and Jack, as they disrupt the archetypal ideal of female chastity. Their open sexuality blurs the boundaries between what has traditionally been considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and in this manner they challenge the idea of an orderly, controllable system. As has been noted, what is particularly disturbing to Jack is Terry’s “careless way,” the fact that she absolutely refuses to acknowledge his authority. Interestingly enough, Updike again raises this concern to the level of US politics, showing that women in general are somewhat frightening to the heads of state. In a particularly humorous scene, Terrorist presents readers with the government’s lingering fear of the powers and dangers of women’s purses: The problem was real enough: women’s purses were sinkholes of confusion and sedimented depths in whose any number of compact terrorist weapons— retractable box-cutters, exploding sarin pellets, lipstick-shaped stun guns— could be secreted. It was Hermione who had helped develop the search protocols for this crucial area of darkness including the simple wooden stick with which security guards at entrances could probe the depths and not give offense with the rummaging touch of their naked hands. (42–43)

Women and their purses as “the uncontrollable” in the novel signal the need for such bizarre positions as the “Undersecretary for Women’s Purses,” which is “an informal title” given to Hermione (42). Apparently, women, like US territory, also need to be controlled with a “simple wooden stick” so as not to disrupt the system. Moreover, in his description of purses as “sinkholes of confusion” and “sedimented depths” that can accommodate “any number of terrorist weapons,” Updike appears to be alluding to that part of female anatomy which has traditionally been connected with power. Indeed, “purse” was for some time English slang for vagina, and Updike yet again reveals that at a time of a national crisis US politics returns to its puritan past and the archetypes concerning the suppression of sexuality and control of the body. While the use of a wooden stick is primarily supposed to prevent racial mingling, as yet another practice stemming from the politics of hygiene (to avoid the “rummaging touch” of racial and ethnic minorities typically hired as security guards), it also points to the enduring myth of a woman’s chastity,

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which is to be preserved at all costs. In Updike’s America a woman’s cleanliness is a matter of state concern, and therefore the items that can be carried in her purse must be strictly regulated. However, most of the female characters in Terrorist resist such regulations—not only Terry and Joryleen, but also Jack’s wife, Beth, whose “laziness” can be interpreted as a form of protest against the pervasive politics of hygiene (“she doesn’t vacuum the way she once did” 119). What is more, they expose the artificial nature of the narratives of cleanliness and purity, questioning the established truths and myths. For example, when Ahmad tells Joryleen that a woman’s “virginity and purity are central to her value,” she challenges his theory by asking, “Oh, my, [. . .] In whose eyes? I mean, who’s doing this valuing?” (68). Her question is probably central in the novel, as Updike ultimately invites the reader to think about those who create and sustain the narratives of purity. The hygienic discourse is a controlling grand narrative, with a particular author, or, in the case of Terrorist, authorities, and Updike sets out to expose the constructed, yet oppressive nature of purity politics, which proves to be alarmingly misogynistic. Moreover, it is through this myth of chastity and moral purity that Updike reveals the mechanisms that operate beneath some other, similar myths of a pure race and nation. They can be recognized both in Rashid’s talks of jihad and in the US “war on terror,” as the Secretary of Homeland Security also delivers speeches that could be characterized as “sermons:” “You may expect to see,” he tells the lens of the television camera, which is like a gun-colored, lens-covered porthole on whose other side presses an ocean of trusting, anxious citizens, “special buffer zones to secure the perimeters of buildings from unauthorized cars and trucks; restrictions to affected underground parking; security personnel using identification badges and digital photos to keep track of people entering and exiting buildings; increased law-enforcement presence; and robust screening of vehicles, packages, and deliveries.” (41)

We may note, however, that in his talk about buffer zones, screenings and restrictions, the Secretary addresses a much wider audience than Rashid, as he speaks to an “ocean” of citizens. The text nevertheless reveals rather sinister overtones: the Secretary speaks directly to the camera lens whose color is that of a gun, symbolizing fiery rhetoric and dangerous intentions both on the part of the speaker and the media machinery itself. The citizens, on the other hand, are “anxious” and “trusting,” which again signals manipulation and malpractice. Updike thus provides his readers with an insight into the discourse of the American media, which also concerns the control of boundaries and containment of the “enemies of freedom,” in the words of the Secretary (41). Perceived in this light, Ahmad’s remark, “I do not find that television encourages clean thoughts” (169) seems like a gross understatement. On the contrary, while spreading the narrative and politics of purity and containment, television itself is,

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in the words of the CIA mole Charlie Chehab, “crap, the same crap that kept the masses zombified in the Depression” (170). After 9/11, however, masses are spurred into action to keep their country safe and pure. While characters like Hermione and Beth applaud the “elevation of the level of police and military watchfulness” (44), discussing among themselves “worst case scenarios,” Charlie recognizes certain “insidious intentions” on the part of authorities and media moguls (170). The word “In-sid-i-ous” rankles in Ahmad’s mind, like the word “impure” from the preacher’s sermon, as Charlie explains that television is “reality without being real” (170)—artfully crafted fiction, with unresolved authorial intention. However, Terrorist is far from bleak. Updike shows in his novel that the myth of purity is hardly sustainable by pointing to some obvious paradoxes behind the narrative of hygiene. Some of the general problems and incoherence of the purity narrative are perhaps most succinctly defined by Maria Lugones in her essay “Purity, Impurity and Separation,” in which she proposes that: [. . .] the lover of purity is also constituted as incoherent, as contradictory in his attitude toward his own and others’ gender, culture. He must at once emphasize them and ignore them. He is radically self-deceiving in this respect. [. . .] He is a fiction of his own imagination. [. . .] He shuns impurity, ambiguity, multiplicity as they threaten his own fiction. 38

Apparently, Updike was acutely aware of these problems and contradictions while working on Terrorist. In one scene Ahmad tells Joryleen that his friend Charlie (a Lebanese whom she describes as a “shifty Arab”) has been raised “pure American” (215). At the same time, however, Ahmad does not see himself in the same way, even though he was born and raised in the United States. On the contrary, Ahmad as the “lover of purity” is the product of Terry’s “impurity”: Ahmad himself is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by ancestry, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the muddy rice and flax fields of the overflowing Nile. (10)

This incoherent attitude is likewise evident in other characters, like Tylenol, his African American schoolmate who bullies Ahmad on account of his racial “impurity”—not being black enough (“Black Muslims I don’t diss, but you not black” 14). However, while Tylenol emphasizes Ahmad’s hyphenated heritage, he ignores his own, which clearly illustrates the “self-deception” Lugones recognizes in purity preachers. Another paradox concerns some problems with hygiene maintenance, on both literal and symbolic levels. As previously mentioned, Ahmad feels clean

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and safe in his truck, isolated from the dirt and danger that the outer world brings. Nevertheless, Ahmad’s obsession with hygiene and sanitation soon turns into frustration at not being able to maintain cleanliness (neither in his truck, nor in the world), as he realizes that the windshield he wipes every morning “becomes dirty anyway by the end of the day” (247). 39 The messiness of everyday life intrudes, proving his high cleanliness standards and ideals unattainable. This brings us to what is perhaps the most important aspect of the novel regarding the poetics and politics of hygiene. While the narrative of purity and pollution is supposed to convey ideals of order and control, in Terrorist there is a sense that cleanliness is death—that the ubiquitous quest for purity carries in itself a death wish, of which the planned suicide attack is a powerful symbol. During one of Ahmad’s conversations with Charlie in which he repeats that he “does not desire uncleanliness,” Charlie suddenly retorts, “Well, what the hell do you desire, Ahmad? [. . .] What about just being alive? Breathing the air, seeing the clouds? Doesn’t that beat being dead?” (182). Through Charlie’s words, Updike’s Terrorist ultimately reveals that there is an eerie finality to a fully sanitized world, in which concerns about purity and hygiene paradoxically lead to a society purged of differences, which is tightly closed, uniform, and lifeless. To return to the beginning of this essay, we may agree with Richard Gray that Updike “hardly seems to scratch the surface” with Terrorist—but so do all the other authors who attempt to make sense of the horrors of 9/11 and its aftermath, the bizarrely named “war on terror.” Whereas it might be argued that Updike’s attempt never really “fits together as a meaningful story,” it would seem that he does not even try to engage in the “explanatory piecing together of personal or cultural motive,” as Gray formulated it. Any author who tries to create a coherent and meaningful story on terrorism is doomed to failure, which is partly due to the fact that “no ideology, no cause—not even the Islamic cause—can account for the energy which fuels terror,” as Baudrillard explained in The Spirit of Terrorism. 40 John Updike is acutely aware of our inability to comprehend acts of terrorism and assume the perspective of a terrorist, which, in Baudrillard’s words, remains “foreign” and “unimaginable,” and therefore in Terrorist he focuses on what we just might be able to understand, addressing some more general political challenges of the contemporary world. Terrorist thus moves away from “writing the event” toward writing the culture and, finally, the poetics informing its politics. NOTES *I would like to express my immense gratitude to the editors Scott Dill and Matthew Shipe, whose insightful comments and suggestions helped improve this essay.

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1. Michiko Kakutani, “John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’ Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security,” review of Terrorist, by John Updike, New York Times, June 6, 2006. James Wood, “Jihad and the Novel,” review of Terrorist, by John Updike, New Republic, July 3, 2006. 2. The terms “9/11 fiction,” “fiction after 9/11” and “literature of terror” are used by Kristiaan Versluys, Richard Gray and Martin Randall respectively. However, as rightfully noted by Aaron DeRosa, Gray’s term “fiction after 9/11” appears to be the most accommodating, as it can also refer to the novels which do not tackle the September 11 attacks directly, and yet need to be considered in this light. Aaron DeRosa, “Analyzing Literature after 9/11,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 612. 3. DeRosa, “Analyzing Literature after 9/11,” 609. 4. Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 24, 34, 37. 5. Martin Randall, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 15. For further discussion on this subject also see DeRosa, “Analyzing Literature After 9/11,” 615–17. 6. Versluys qtd. in DeRosa, “Analyzing Literature After 9/11,” 611. 7. Gray, After the Fall, 32. 8. Ibid., 32–33. 9. Ibid., 34. 10. Richard Gray even prescribes the right way to respond to 9/11: “What the writer has to do in the face of all this, surely, is to pursue some form of mimesis that dips above and below the discourses of nationalism, combining closeness and distance, registering at once the communal tragedy [. . .] and the structural connections to tragic experiences elsewhere [. . .].” Gray, After the Fall, 83. Michael Rothberg further argues that, “[i]n addition to Gray’s model of critical multiculturalism, we need a fiction of international relations and extraterritorial citizenship,” as “[t]he failure Gray diagnoses is not simply a formal one, but also ultimately a political one.” Michael Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 153. 11. See DeRosa, “Analyzing Literature after 9/11,” 609–10; Anna Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful in Post-9/11 America: Updike’s Terrorist, Islam, and the Specter of Exceptionalism,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 478; Peter C. Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture: John Updike’s Terrorist,” Modern Philology, vol. 112, no. 4, (May 2015): 692. 12. John Updike, Terrorist (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 43. Subsequent page references follow quotations in parentheses. 13. As qtd. in Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture,” 712. 14. Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture,” 711. 15. John Updike, “In ‘Terrorist,’ a Cautious Novelist Takes On a New Fear,” interview by Charles McGrath, New York Times, May 31, 2006. 16. Joseph Bottum, “A Jihadist Grows in Jersey,” review of Terrorist, by John Updike, Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2006. 17. This is how George Will characterized Don DeLillo in his review of Libra, which he described as an “unhistorical” account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.” George Will, “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin,” Washington Post, review of Libra, by Don DeLillo, September 22, 1988. Both DeLillo and Updike were later condemned for presenting terrorists in a sympathetic manner in Falling Man and Terrorist. (See, for example, Peter C. Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture,” 699.) 18. Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture,” 698–99. 19. Some of the examples Boswell selects are Harry’s perception of himself as a “thing so dirty and small” which the universe should “erase” in Rabbit, Run (1960), Jill’s concern with an “absolutely clean” universe, and Skeeter’s beliefs about “white uncleanliness” and uncleanliness as a “racist label” in Rabbit Redux (1971), as well as the connection between money and dirt in Rabbit Is Rich (1981). Marshall Boswell, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered

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Irony in Motion (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 71, 102–3, 110, 174–76. 20. Amy Mullin, “Purity and Pollution: Resisting the Rehabilitation of a Virtue,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57, no. 3 (July 1996): 511. 21. Mullin, “Purity and Pollution,” 510–11. 22. Ibid., 509, 520. 23. Ibid., 513. 24. I will be using the terms “poetics of hygiene” and “politics of hygiene” as almost synonymous with “purity rhetoric” and “purity politics,” but more appropriate for Terrorist, where Updike appears to emphasize the characters’ obsession with cleanliness and sanitation, and the importance of hygiene maintenance on both literal and symbolic levels. 25. Hartnell, “Violence and the Faithful in Post-9/11 America,” 477. 26. Mullin, “Purity and Pollution,” 520. 27. Herman, “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture,” 703. 28. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 66, 63. 29. Updike’s Rashid is quick to reassure Ahmad that others deserve no pity, just like DeLillo’s Mohammed Atta easily convinces Hammad that “[t]here are no others,” explaining that “[t]he others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them.” Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), 176. 30. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 66. 31. Boswell, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy, 174–76. 32. Ahmad “has this conformist streak” (114), as his mother explains, and this could partly account for his unwillingness to resist both Rashid and the preacher’s influence. 33. For example, “[. . .] if you genuinely will the Good, if you hold fast to God, then you are in unity with all men.” Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row, 1948), 206. 34. Maria Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” Signs, vol. 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 464. 35. See, for example, Mullin, “Purity and Pollution,” 513, 519, and Anne Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt and Desire,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990): 158–59. 36. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), 35. 37. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2. 38. Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” 467. 39. Similarly, the scene where Ahmad tries to rescue a beetle already in its “death throes” also proves “his merciful intervention in the natural order” futile (250). 40. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 9–10.

WORKS CITED Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 2003. Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Bottum, Joseph. “A Jihadist Grows in Jersey.” Review of Terrorist, by John Updike. Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2006, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114981793871275776? mod%C2%BC2_1167_1. Carson, Anne. “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt and Desire.” Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, 135–70. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. DeLillo, Don, Falling Man, New York: Scribner, 2007.

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DeRosa, Aaron. “Analyzing Literature after 9/11.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 607–18, https://doi: 10.1353/mfs.2011.0063. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, 1984. Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Malden and Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2011. Hartnell, Anna. “Violence and the Faithful in Post-9/11 America: Updike’s Terrorist, Islam, and the Specter of Exceptionalism.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57, no 3 (Fall 2011): 477–502, https://doi:10.1353/mfs.2011.0066. Herman, Peter C. “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture: John Updike’s Terrorist.” Modern Philology, 112, no. 4 (May 2015): 691–712, https://doi: 10.1086/679599. Kakutani, Michiko. “John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’ Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security.” Review of Terrorist, by John Updike. New York Times, June 6, 2006, https:// www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/books/06kaku.html. Kierkegaard, Soren. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. Translated by Douglas V. Steere. New York: Harper & Row, 1948. Lugones, Maria. “Purity, Impurity, and Separation.” Signs, vol. 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 458–79, www.jstor.org/stable/3174808. Mullin, Amy. “Purity and Pollution: Resisting the Rehabilitation of a Virtue.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57, no. 3 (July 1996): 509–24, www.jstor.org/stable/3653952. Randall, Martin. 9/11 and the Literature of Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Rothberg, Michael. “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray.” American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 152–58, https://michaelrothberg.weebly.com/uploads/5/4/6/8/5468139/rothberg_response_to_gray.pdf. Updike, John. “In ‘Terrorist,’ a Cautious Novelist Takes On a New Fear.” Interview by Charles McGrath. New York Times, May 31, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/books/31updi.html. ———. Terrorist. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007. Will, George. “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin.” Washington Post, Review of Libra, by Don DeLillo. September 22, 1988, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/09/ 22/shallow-look-at-the-mind-of-an-assassin/f8a4c3c6-8355-43c3-8a04-03d6588688e6/ ?utm_term=.60cf89c840ea. Wood, James. “Jihad and the Novel.” Review of Terrorist, by John Updike. New Republic, July 3, 2006. https://newrepublic.com/article/64175/jihad-and-the-novel.

Part III

Updike Abroad

Chapter Twelve

Updike’s Middle East A Neoliberal Approach to Conflict Resolution Louis Gordon

John Updike is so intertwined with post-1945 American literature that it can be hard to view him as a political theorist whose work frequently articulated a pragmatic approach to contemporary political problems. His writing, in more than one place, reveals nuanced thinking on political issues that provides formidable insights for understanding and resolving conflict. In particular, Updike’s fiction and criticism offer an original formulation of the International Relations theory of Neoliberalism as a solution to political conflict, one that is particularly applicable to how we might view our current political relationship with the Middle East. This essay will consider Updike’s 2006 novel Terrorist, the short story “The Holy Land,” from Bech Is Back (1982), as well as Updike’s reviews of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock (1993), as literary works that all examine the proposition that individuals and institutions can mitigate crises in an anarchic world. While Terrorist notably anticipates a number of recent domestic terrorist attacks perpetrated in the name of political Islam, the novel also provides a political framework that the United States might employ as way of responding to such attacks. More broadly, Terrorist extends many of the political concerns that Updike had been espousing since the late 1960s when, in contrast to many of his literary contemporaries, he had supported Lyndon Johnson’s presidency as the most pragmatic way to deal with the conflict in Vietnam. 1 Similarly, Updike’s story “The Holy Land” and his reviews of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, the two novels of Roth’s that center on Israel, offer unique insights towards mitigating the Arab-Israeli conflict. “The Holy Land” anticipates many of the issues surrounding the state of Israel that Roth would raise a few years later, but unlike 201

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Roth’s work, the Bech story seems to offer a definite political prescription toward a resolution of the enduring conflict, which again illustrates Updike’s neoliberal thinking. By considering these works together, this essay hopes to uncover the neoliberal thinking that was central to Updike’s view of US foreign relations. UPDIKE AS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORIST While International Relations theory may not often be used to interpret literature, the idea of Neoliberalism, one of the two most important strains of modern International Relations theory, offers some interesting insights into John Updike’s work. 2 Neoliberalism, in its International Relations context, is something different than the idea of political liberalism or left-wing thinking in contemporary American society. As a theory of International Relations, it stands for the proposition that individuals and institutions, promoting good will, can mitigate the crisis presented by the state of “anarchy” or an international system with no central authority. This faith in the intersection of individuals and institutions is in contrast with the competing theory of Realism/ Neorealism that views the state as the only force of significance in an anarchic international system. Neoliberal Internationalism argues that when states respect each other, individuals can create private international ties that lead to agreements between businessmen and academic interactions among scholars, which help create an atmosphere of “public respect.” 3 Neoliberalism also includes a belief that bold and concerned statesmen could affect treaties and that diplomacy can solve political problems. Terrorist’s Jack Levy—the high school guidance counselor who sways Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy from going through with his terrorist attack—is ultimately an educator of good will, and his actions in the novel can be viewed as an example of the belief in individuals and institutions that Neoliberal Internationalism espouses. However, Levy’s success in preventing the attack is but one example of neoliberal thinking within the novel. Another type of neoliberalism, also employed by Updike in Terrorist, is known as Neoliberal Institutionalism. Propounded by the political scientist Robert Keohane, Neoliberal Institutionalism argues that nongovernmental organizations and “individual networks” can help maintain world order and lead to the resolution of international conflict. 4 In Terrorist, Updike actually extends neoliberal theory, illustrating that (in addition to non-governmental organizations) a well-functioning government institution—in this case the Department of Homeland Security—can, in concert with diplomatic good will, help mitigate a substantial crisis.

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PRAGMATIC CLAIRVOYANCE AS POLITICAL THEORY On the morning of December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan Forook and Tashfeen Malik, a young American man of Pakistani descent and his Pakistani-born wife, left fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded in an attack in San Bernardino, California. In a striking similarity with the main character of Updike’s Terrorist, the perpetrators, both affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS), apparently struggled navigating the gap between American values and lifestyle and strict Islamic beliefs. The shooter himself had difficulty dealing with a co-worker who was a Messianic Jew, while the shooter’s brother had served in the Navy and had drifted far from his family’s religious beliefs. 5 The attacks were particularly shocking to me, as I taught Middle East Politics at California State University at San Bernardino since 2007, a campus with a large Arab population and the school from which the shooter had graduated. One student in my class at the time of the attack had attended the mosque with the attacker, noting that he had left the mainstream house of worship to join an extremist fringe. The question that haunted the faculty at San Bernardino is what, if anything, could have been done to prevent this attack by a homegrown terrorist caught between American and fundamentalist Islamic values. Was this a new situation that had not been addressed in any meaningful way by US writers and scholars, or was there guidance on the topic—like George Antonius’s 1938 discussion of the importance of mastering the tribes in Iraq—that had been overlooked by the US government? 6 The issue is of great significance as the pattern of a young man trapped between the liberal culture of the West, and the strict mores of the East, seemed to repeat itself in other attacks that were perpetrated in recent years in Orlando, Florida; Paris, France; and Elizabeth, New Jersey. In retrospect, the answer to the question of whether American writers had offered prior guidance on the issue of domestic terrorism was largely answered by Updike’s Terrorist. The novel was particularly clairvoyant in both anticipating the nature of the San Bernardino, Orlando, and Elizabeth attacks as it depicted many of the same themes that had seemingly motivated the perpetrators of these attacks. 7 Updike’s main character, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, is the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father. Mulloy studies with Shaikh Rashid, an imam who indoctrinates him into the faith and later subtly convinces him to serve as the driver of a truck that will be blown up in the Lincoln Tunnel, which runs between New Jersey and New York. While many aspects of the fictional story parallel the attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando, there is one striking difference between the terrorist plot imagined in the novel and the actual homegrown attacks. Indeed, all the actual incidents ended with senseless violence and the loss of life. In Terrorist, however, Updike peacefully resolves his plot through the combined ef-

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forts of the Department of Homeland Security and Jack Levy, whose artful persuasion ultimately convinces Mulloy to abandon his plan to blow up the truck. Updike’s ending is particularly striking because a neoliberal solution was not the only plot resolution available to him. One can think of several far more suspenseful and exciting endings in which Homeland Security would have killed Mulloy and the entire terrorist organization before the tunnel was blown up. Or, the bomb could have been detonated inside the tunnel with Homeland Security catching the imam on the run. Or Levy could have been killed in a vain effort to stop Mulloy, offering a literary homage to John O’Neill, the legendary and controversial former FBI agent who perished in the 9/11 attacks. 8 In contrast to these more perhaps page-turning resolutions to the plot, Updike chose a resolution that makes sense both as a literary device and as a way to co-opt would-be terrorists in the United States into abandoning their deadly behavior. A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS Though created nearly a decade before these attacks, Updike’s Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy’s core issues are strikingly similar to those found in the profiles of recent terrorists who have been caught between Western sexual and social freedoms and the strict mores of fundamentalist Islam. In an effort to learn more about the Egyptian father who abandoned him when he was a young child, Molloy studies with Shaikh Rashid, who preaches to Ahmad a strict Islamic fundamentalism that propounds ideas—such as the idea that women, like animals, are led easily—that clash with Western notions and values. Initially, Ahmad appears tortured by his confusion between Rashid’s teachings and his feelings for Joryleen Grant, an African American girl at his high school. But Ahmad’s faith keeps him from falling prey to the temptations of the secular world. An intelligent young man, with good scores in Chemistry and English, Ahmad has been directed to the school’s vocational track by the imam, who believes that the Western influences of literature and philosophy studied in the school’s college track are detrimental. Ahmad spouts the imam’s views that the high school teaches a colonialist version of US history and that Christianity perpetrated horrors, including genocide on the Native Americans and disasters in Africa and Asia. Ahmad also repeats the Rashid’s polemics that the Jews ran “everything in Palestine” so they could stay in Palestine. 9 Thus, we have the first part of the conflict that rips at the hearts of Ahmad and many other young men in the West. The other half of the conflict is largely manifested in the character of the aging Jack Levy, who serves as the school guidance counselor. Levy challenges the imam’s strident teachings, telling Ahmad that a boy with his intelligence should confront a “variety of viewpoints” in a “diverse and toler-

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ant” society (39). But Ahmad responds that his imam “feels that such a relativist approach trivializes religion, implying that it doesn’t much matter. “You believe this, I believe that, we all get along—that’s the American way” (39). When Levy asks, “And he doesn’t like the American way?” Ahmad responds, “He hates it,” setting up a complete dichotomy between political Islam and American values (39), and in many ways reiterating the argument first broached by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations (1997) that the West and Islam were on a collision course. Updike’s Levy is a secular Jew from a socialist background, and a man who is not proud of his religious heritage. “Not that the Jewish God had ever been big on promises,” Jack muses early in the novel, “a shattered glass at your wedding, a quick burial in a shroud when you die, no saints, no afterlife, just a lifetime of drudging loyalty to the tyrant who asked Abraham to make a burnt offering of his only son” (24). 10 While Updike allows the guidance counselor more interest in Jewish persecution than what might be expected from a man with no use for religion, he nevertheless provides enough of a description of Levy for the reader to understand his rational, if cynical, thinking. Married to a gentile woman whose sister works for the Secretary of Homeland Security, Levy begins an affair with Ahmad’s mother, Terry, after visiting her to follow-up on the young man. Perhaps in an effort to cover his tracks, Levy tells his wife about the young Muslim boy he is helping, and she passes this information on to her sister. It is thus through the actions of the institution of Homeland Security that Updike formulates his own form of neoliberalism, incorporating elements of both Neoliberal Internationalism and Neoliberal Institutionalism to create his own hybrid formula for conflict resolution. While Updike’s depiction of the Department of Homeland Security is not wholly positive, it is striking that the agency nevertheless remains a necessary force in bringing the novel to a peaceful conclusion as it provides Jack with the tip that alerts him to Ahmad’s involvement in a terror cell. Updike’s Homeland Security is an amalgam of its unnamed religious Christian Secretary, Hermione, and Charlie Chehab, a strapping thirty-something scion of an American-Lebanese family who is actually an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. While it is Charlie who helps recruit Ahmad to participate in the massive suicide bombing as part of the counterterrorism operation he is engaged in, his arguments and recounting of George Washington’s fight against the British more accurately reveal his political sensibilities. When Ahmad says that Washington’s conduct against the British seemed cruel, Charlie responds, “Not really. War is cruel, but not the men who wage it necessarily” (180). Testing Ahmad’s American sensibilities, Charlie compares George Washington to contemporary revolutionaries: “We were like Hamas. We were Al-Qaida” (181). Charlie points out that when a colonized population engages in a war with a superpower, the colonized nation will eventually prevail. The sentiments expressed by Charlie seem to

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encapsulate many of the arguments made by Third World political movements in countries from Latin America to the Middle East, including those made by Iranian radicals prior to the 1979 revolution. But something is not quite right in Charlie’s recitation of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine. After Charlie posits how the Western countries have taken Muslim land and stolen oil, Ahmad responds, “They take our God” (188). Charlie in turn says, “they take from Muslims their traditions and a sense of themselves, the pride in themselves that all men are entitled to” (188). But this is not quite what Ahmad said, and to him it sounds incorrect and “far removed” from his own interpretation of the divine. Ahmad’s God demands sacrifice, and when Charlie asks, “Would you give your life?” the boy replies, “If God wills it” (189). Another aspect of Charlie’s behavior demonstrates the conflict between the West and political Islam. Knowing that he may be sending Ahmad to his death, Charlie arranges for Ahmad an encounter with a prostitute who, by coincidence, turns out to be his friend, Joryleen. In many respects, Ahmad’s ejaculation without intercourse—Joryleen makes him climax by rubbing herself against his pants so that he may maintain his virginity—nicely captures Ahmad’s struggle to negotiate between the values of two very different cultures through which he defines himself (226). With this semi-denouement behind him, Ahmad is now ready for Shaikh Rashid, who tells him that a blow can be delivered to Islam’s enemies through the martyrdom of “a shahid whose love of god is unqualified” (234). When Rashid asks him if he is the one, Ahmad answers “I believe I am” (234). Later, when the imam assures him that he will have a place in Paradise and that his family will be compensated, Ahmad surprisingly asks that the compensation be delivered to Joryleen in order to help her “achieve freedom” (235). He reflects that while he is destined for Jannah or heaven, she is headed for Jahannan or Hell. “She is the only bride he will enjoy on Earth” (238). The clash between civilizations seems inevitable. UPDIKE’S HYBRID NEOLIBERALISM Updike’s unique form of neoliberalism begins to reveal itself as Charlie teases Ahmad, pushing him to see the other side. Rationalizing the events of September 11, 2001, Charlie notes, “Those people worked in finance, furthering the interests of the American empire, the empire that sustains Israel and inflicts death every day on the Palestinians and Chechnyans, Afghans and Iraqis” (187). Ahmad’s response that “many were merely guards and waitresses,” indicates that his worldview is beginning to expand and that dialogue and persuasion can be effective tools in negotiating seemingly impossible problems (187). Though Ahmad is now ready to become a martyr by

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driving a truck carrying a bomb, and detonating it in the tunnel between New Jersey and New York, a seed has been planted in him questioning his course of action. If we view this crisis of conscience by the would-be terrorist as a manifestation of Updike’s neoliberal thought, it is not surprising then that, unlike the later acts of Islamist-inspired domestic terrorism, Ahmad’s mission to detonate the bomb is frustrated before it can be carried out. Charlie’s undercover role is discovered, and after he is beheaded, his body is dumped in a canal near Giants Stadium in the only act of violence to actually take place in the novel. Though Homeland Security knows that a young boy will be driving a truck into the tunnel between New Jersey and New York with the intent to cause a major catastrophe, they do not know how to find him. It is here that the plot resolution—as well as Updike’s contribution to neoliberal thought— are fully realized. As Homeland Security wages a desperate attempt to find the driver, a hunch by Jack’s sister-in-law that the Arab boy Jack is helping is the same boy who is driving the truck pays off, and Jack is told of the imminent situation. The guidance counselor winds up flagging down the truck driven by Ahmad, and through artful persuasive dialogue and good will—neoliberal thought in action—he simply talks the moment away. The dialogue inside the cab proceeds like a session in diplomacy. Jack asks Ahmad, “I can’t believe you’re seriously intending to kill hundreds of innocent people.” The boy challenges him in response: “Who says unbelief is innocent? Unbelievers say that. God says, in the Qur’an, Be ruthless to unbelievers. Burn them, crush them, because they have forgotten God. They think to be themselves is sufficient. They love this present life more than the next” (294). But Jack calmly responds that killing them now is “pretty severe” (294). His response is not one of antagonism, but rather the reason of an educator. When Ahmad answers, “It would to you, of course. You are a lapsed Jew, I believe. You believe nothing,” (294). Jack responds that the Torah also contains a lot of offensive ideas. As Jack explains that he never had religion, Ahmad enters into the dialogue by noting how “it is good for us to seek agreement,” as prior to the creation of Israel, Jews and Muslim were both marginalized in the Christian world. Levy’s response is “that’s some ‘us’ you’ve worked up Ahmad” (295). The stakes involved in the failure of pragmatic diplomacy would not have been lost on Updike, who felt obliged to defend the Lyndon Johnson administration against “rabid anti-establishment militants” during the US involvement in the Vietnam War. 11 The victory of militant extremism, whether radical left or Islamist, is an existential threat to the America so much loved by Updike. As Ahmad pulls into the tunnel, the implications of what he is about to do to America is manifested in the appearance of two children in the car behind who try to get Ahmad’s attention. But not long before he is to detonate the bomb, Levy tells Ahmad that he slept with his mother, and that

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she became “the world to him” (301). Perhaps in response to this revelation of American-style decadence, Ahmad tells Levy about the Islamist-Egyptian political theorist Sayyid Qutub, who came to the United States “and was struck by the racial discrimination and the open wantonness between the sexes” (302). Though a discussion of Qutub, who was executed by Gamal Nasser in 1966, could have pushed Ahmad over the line, Levy continues to talk, and at the moment Ahmad is supposed to detonate the bomb, he is suddenly struck by the thought that Allah does not “want us to desecrate his creation by willing death. He wills life” (306). Updike thus uses the peaceful tradition within Islam—alongside American government action on the part of Homeland Security and Levy’s ability to engage Ahmad in dialogue—as the mechanisms that ultimately defuse what could have easily been a tragic situation. While Updike’s resolution of the novel’s plot stands on its own as a literary device, it is also a manifestation of Updike’s mix of Neoliberal Idealism and Institutionalism as a solution to the serious contemporary political problem of the homegrown American-Islamic terrorist. Updike’s work here posits a new hybrid form of Neoliberalism in which diplomacy in concert with a government institution can mitigate crisis. ISLAMIST CRITIQUES OF TERRORIST Despite its clear neoliberal approach for peacefully resolving a terrorist plot, Terrorist has been the subject of some severe criticism by Muslim scholars who have analyzed the novel. Mubarak Altwaiji, an English professor at Northern Bordered University, Arar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, argues how Terrorist “illustrates the aggressive merger between political strategy and the social anxiety from the growing threat within the American society.” 12 Altwaiji perceives the novel as “a frontal response to 9/11,” and one that “underlies the American current obsession with national security, which unites together to face Arab terrorism.” Altwaiji further asserts that Updike’s work was “Orientalist” in its depiction of Muslims. 13 The criticism of Terrorist has not been limited to Sunni Muslims. Maryam Salehnia, at the University of Isfahan, Iran, also charges Updike with Orientalism, evoking Edward Said’s argument that “the inferiority that the West attributes to the East simultaneously serves to construct the West’s superiority.” 14 But Salehnia goes much further than Altwaiji, arguing that Terrorist “is an example of the writer’s attempt at participating in the literary terrorism which was practiced as a direct result of the terror attack of September 11,” and that Updike moved toward an American worldview in the aftermath of 9/11 that pitted the East against the West. 15 Incredibly, Salehnia argues that Updike’s novel uses “its Jewish character, Jack Levy to represent both American and Zionist colonial values.” 16 In Salehnia’s view, Levy’s similarities and differences from Ah-

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mad “both legitimize the colonial motives of political Zionism and question the motives of fundamentalists for committing terrorist crimes.” 17 While some of the Iranian scholar’s more extreme attitudes can be attributed to the more virulently anti-American posture of Iran toward the United States than Saudi Arabia, the characterization of Levy is inaccurate. Early in the novel, Updike notes how “Jack Levy took stiff-necked pleasure in being one of Judaism’s stiff-necked naysayers” (24). Later, it is noted that Levy’s initial good will toward the imam who helps deliver the invocation at Ahmad’s high school graduation disappears when he thinks of the few remaining synagogues in Europe or “embattled Israel” (111–12). While Updike’s knowledge of Judaism or Jewishness is not particularly impressive—he has Levy’s mother lighting Passover (instead of Hannukah) candles—aside from the single comment about embattled Israel, the guidance counselor’s secularism is devoid of any substantive Jewish sentiment and has no connection to any form of Zionism. 18 Thus, the charge that Terrorist is a work of “Zionist political fiction” is not only demonstrably false but also a perfect example of how anti-Zionist thought can easily morph into anti-Semitism as it projects Zionism onto Jack Levy, a character who is not a Zionist. To be sure, Updike’s sense of religion was largely shaped by his experience as a child attending a Lutheran church and then his grappling with Christian theologians—in particular Karl Barth—as a young man. However, Updike’s theology tempered his emotions, allowing for a nuanced and evolutionary approach to political problems. In “Varieties of Religious Experience,” a short story written not long after the events of September 11, 2001, Updike (in a play on William James) explores the ways in which the different actors in the event—the perpetrators, two victims, and a witness of the Towers’ collapse—experience their faith. 19 The story charts the perversion of religion by the Muslim perpetrators of 9/11, who had spent time at strip clubs while planning the terrorist attack, and contrasts their sense of religion with Dan Kellogg’s emerging sense of disbelief, as he momentarily loses his Christian faith after witnessing the fall of the South Tower at the World Trade Center (753). If the reader emerges from “Varieties of Religious Experience” with anger and resignation—the story ends with Kellogg musing on the nature of the attack with his daughter and granddaughter (776)—she takes away a different feeling from Terrorist as it offers hope that such tragedies might be averted in the future. Again, this is largely due to the neoliberal or pragmatic aspects of the novel that present a solution to the burning anger that surrounds both the perpetrators and the victims of the attacks committed on behalf of political Islam. In contrast to the above cited critics, Updike’s novel is not a work of Orientalist or Zionist polemic, but rather posits a hybrid form of neoliberal faith that propounds that a combination of goodwill among people—working in conjunction with government institutions—can resolve crises.

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UPDIKE AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT While Updike’s use of neoliberal political theory may be fairly unique in literature, it is not limited to Terrorist, as it can also be felt in his story “The Holy Land,” the fourth piece included in Bech Is Back. Bech, like Terrorist’s Levy, is a secular Jew for whom Israel has no sentimental significance: “[Bech’s] father, a Marxist of a theoretical and unenrolled sort, had lumped the Zionists with all the Luftmenschen who imagined that mollifying exceptions might be stitched into the world’s cruel and necessary patchwork of rapine and exploitation.” 20 Hence Bech and Levy are not that far apart in their thinking, despite their very different stations in life. But in “The Holy Land,” Updike’s topic is not domestic terrorism in the United States, but rather the relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Here Updike’s discussion of post-1967 Jerusalem is as nuanced as Philip Roth’s later writings on Israel in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. Indeed, “The Holy Land” would seem to anticipate Roth’s later works as Updike presents a multitude of seemingly contradictory viewpoints on the Israeli/Palestinian crises during a meeting Bech has with Israeli writers. In Updike’s story, a poet who notes that the slum that was cleared to make way for the Western Wall Plaza had replaced many homes, “grimaced” as he observes how “the people were relocated and compensated” (84). Another novelist, however, complicates this perspective by recalling the construction of a hotel on the Mount of Olives by Jordanians, who had occupied the holy city between 1948 and 1967, that had used old tombstones to build barracks for the soldiers (84). 21 Yet another writer says that the idea of Israel was “Not Freud and Einstein, but not Auschwitz, either. Something . . . in between,” as Bech observes that their waiter is an Arab (85). Updike here acknowledges classic Zionist thought while also suggesting that a Palestinian Arab point of view needed to be considered in order to achieve an appropriate resolution to the enduring conflict. As Updike’s story appeared a number of years before the publication of The Counterlife, the first full-scale book in which Roth considered the reality of a Jewish state, it was like Terrorist, ahead of its time in its succinct, yet literary evaluation of the rift between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Updike’s Bech, who perhaps in contrast to Updike, feels no religious stirring in Jerusalem, but who like Zuckerman and the character Philip Roth in Operation Shylock, can’t quite extract himself from what he perceives are his ethical obligations towards a Jewish state. In this vein, Updike’s later reviews of The Counterlife and Operation Shylock in the New Yorker are neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist, though they offer considerable insights on Roth’s work. Reviewing The Counterlife, Updike wrote, “The Israel sections are interesting but perhaps in too journalistic a way; the variety of possible opinions is paraded past almost as brutally as the standpoints on communist

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Czechoslovakia, from anti through antic and anarchic to stolidly pro, were marshaled in The Prague Orgy.” 22 Updike’s criticism is neoliberal in its assertion that Roth offers so many opinions, but no solution. Updike’s insight on Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, also reveals an important insight with neoliberal implications. Updike writes regarding the end of The Counterlife where Zuckerman reveals that he would circumcise his son, “that a narrator so scornful of church and synagogue ends by praising ritual mutilation is a strange twist, in a tale of strange twists. Perhaps the author who has faithfully managed to offend Jewish sensibilities, set out in his last chapter, ‘Christendom’ to give Gentiles a taste of his abrasive style.” 23 But then maybe Updike is judging Zuckerman through the prism of a prototype Jack Levy, who tried hard not to circumcise his own child. While Updike acknowledged British anti-Semitism, he says it’s too “bald and savage” here, criticizing Roth for “dread and revulsion” during a service featuring Christmas carols, which Updike says is “Christianity’s absolute sweetest!” 24 Updike’s statement again sets forth a neoliberal position that good will and diplomacy could really cut through the historical problem of antiSemitism as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict. In explaining why Roth has misunderstood some aspects of Christianity rather than chastising Roth for his own prejudices, Updike engages in a neoliberal action. Updike writing some years later in his review of Operation Shylock again cuts a middle road. While he notes that though Roth’s Zionist critics will not forgive him for the arguments of his characters who argue for the “deIsraelization of the Jews” or that “the embattled and therefore combative state of Israel has poisoned the Jewishness of the Diaspora,” he also points out the weakness of Roth’s inability to consider biblical influence on the topic. Updike writes, it’s “notable that Roth’s most extended consideration of Jewishness takes as its reference points not God’s covenant with Abraham or the epic of Moses, but affectionate memories of the Diaspora Jews of his boyhood Newark. The myths of personal history have replaced those of a people’s history.” 25 The analysis was a gentle prod to Roth that his inability to create a sympathetic religious-minded character, or at least one with sympathies far from his own, was a serious literary flaw that needed correction, and Updike’s balanced analysis shows again his willingness to use reason over polemic, and one consistent with Updike’s own six rules for reviewing, which in admonishing reviewers not to think of themselves “as warriors in any ideological battle,” also fit into his overall Neoliberalism. 26 Updike concludes this important review with the admonition that the novel should be read by anyone who is concerned with “1) Israel and its repercussions, 2) the postmodern novel, 3) Philip Roth.” 27 Once again, in contrast to Roth’s anguish over varying Jewish positions, Updike dispassionately pursues the middle path offering a neoliberal alternative to another Middle East dilemma.

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CONCLUSION This essay, drawing on insights from both Updike’s fiction and non-fiction, argues that Updike’s work ultimately provides a compelling roadmap for neoliberalism as a solution to the varying Middle East–related conflicts, including the problem of the homegrown terrorist and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The chapter further demonstrates that in contrast to some writers who view Terrorist as a work of Orientalist or Zionist polemic, Updike has advanced a hybrid form of Neoliberal thought in which right-minded individuals in conjunction with well-functioning government institutions can mitigate crisis and the problem of the crisis between the West and Islam in particular. NOTES 1. John Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” Self-Consciousness, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 124–26. 2. The two main competing theories that have captured the attention of International Relations scholars in the post–World War II era are Realism and Liberalism and their latter derivations, Neo-realism and Neoliberalism. Classical Realism held that a sovereign state is unrestrained by individual national rights, and thus able to delineate “its own scope of authority.” See Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs,” in Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis, eds. International Politics, Enduring Concept and Contemporary Issues (10th ed). (Boston: Longman, 2011), 117. 3. Doyle, 116. 4. Robert O. Keohane, “International Institutions: Can Interdependence Work?” in Foreign Policy 110 (Spring 1998): 82–94 in Art and Jervis, 150–57. 5. Richard Winton, “Arrested Brother of San Bernardino Shooter Is Decorated Navy Veteran,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lnbrother-of-san-bernardino-shooter-navy-veteran-20160428-story.html. 6. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Norwich: Jarrold and Sons, Ltd., 1955), 248. Also see the discussion on this point in Louis A. Gordon and Ian M. Oxnevad, Middle East Politics for the New Millennium (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), 97. 7. See Edgar Sandoval, Celsia Rose Marcius and Ginger Adams Otis, “Orlando Shooter Was Regular at Pulse Gay Club; Former Classmate Says Omar Mateen Was Homosexual,” New York Daily News, June 13, 2016, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/orlandoshooter-reported-pulse-club-regular-patrons-article-1.2672445; Kim Barker, Pir Zubair Shah, Joseph Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Journey from Class Clown to Suspect in Chelsea Bombing,” New York Times, September 24, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/ 25/nyregion/journey-from-class-clown-to-suspect-in-chelsea-bombing.html. 8. O’Neill had tracked Bin Laden for in the 1990s and early 2000s, but his flamboyant conduct, which included an extra-marital affair, fell into conflict with the Bureau and left to take a new position as head of security for the World Trade Center beginning September 11, 2001. O’Neill’s body was found in the rubble of the South Tower. See “The Man Who Knew,” Frontline, October 3, 2002, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/showsknew/. 9. John Updike, Terrorist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 38. Subsequent citations appear in parenthesis. 10. While some socialists may not believe in an afterlife, the “World to Come” is very much a part of traditional Judaism, and the furnaces of Jahannan recounted by Shaikh Rashid are the Arabic version of the Jewish Gehenom (6). 11. Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” 124.

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12. Mubarak Altwaiji, “Political Rhetoric, Fictional Narrative, and Construction of Arab Muslim in the United States: A Critique of Updike’s Terrorist,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 2(4), 328–38, 332, 2015, DOI: 10.1 177/2327798915610045. 13. Ibid., 335. 14. Maryam Salehnia, “Political Zionism and Fiction: A Study of John Updike’s Terrorist,” Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 3(3), 484–88, May 2012, doi: 10.4304/ jltr.3.3484-488 15. Ibid., 486. 16. Ibid., 488. 17. Ibid., 486. 18. While Levy’s concern for synagogues and Israel is out of character for such an assimilated Jew, it is consistent that some of the later views of Philip Roth, whose work as will be seen later in this chapter, was quite familiar to Updike. 19. John Updike, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” in Christopher Carduff, ed., John Updike, Collected Stories (New York: The Library of America, 2013), 753–76. Subsequent citations appear in parenthesis. 20. John Updike, Bech Is Back (New York: Knopf, 1982), 69. 21. I am a great proponent of the idea that scholars, not unlike attorneys, be required to set forth potential biases so their readers can make independent judgments. To this end I note that my great-grandfather’s tombstone was apparently among those upended by the Jordanians. 22. John Updike, “Wrestling to Be Born,” New Yorker, March 2, 1987, 108. 23. Ibid., 109. 24. Ibid., 109. 25. John Updike, “Recruiting Raw Nerves,” New Yorker, March 15, 1993, 111. 26. John Updike, “Picked-Up-Pieces” (New York: Knopf, 1975). Updike’s six rules included the admonition, “Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind.” 27. Updike, “Recruiting Raw Nerves,” 112.

WORKS CITED Altwaiji, Mubarak. “Political Rhetoric, Fictional Narrative, and Construction of Arab Muslim in the United States: A Critique of Updike’s Terrorist.” Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 2(4) 328–38, 332, 2015, DOI: 10.1 177/2327798915610045. Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening. Norwich: Jarrold and Sons, Ltd., 1955. Barker, Kim, Pir Zubair Shah, Joseph Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. “Journey from Class Clown to Suspect in Chelsea Bombing.” New York Times. September 24, 2016. https:/ /www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/nyregion/journey-from-class-clown-to-suspect-in-chelseabombing.html. Doyle, Michael. “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs.” International Politics, Enduring Concept and Contemporary Issues (10th ed), edited by Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis. Boston: Longman, 2011. Gordon, Louis A. and Ian M. Oxnevad. Middle East Politics for the New Millennium. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016. Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Keohane, Robert O. “International Institutions: Can Interdependence Work?” Foreign Policy 110 (Spring 1998): 82–94 in Art and Jervis, 150–57. “The Man Who Knew.” Frontline, October 3, 2002. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/ showsknew/. Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. ———. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Salehnia, Maryam. “Political Zionism and Fiction: A Study of John Updike’s Terrorist.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 3(3), 484–88, May 2012, doi: 10.4304/jltr.3.3484488.

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Sandoval, Edgar, Celsia Rose Marcius and Ginger Adams Otis. “Orlando Shooter Was Regular at Pulse Gay Club; Former Classmate Says Omar Mateen Was Homosexual.” New York Daily News. June 13, 2016, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/orlando-shooterreported-pulse-club-regular-patrons-article-1.2672445. Updike, John. Bech Is Back. New York: Knopf, 1982. ———. “On Not Being a Dove.” Self-Consciousness, Memoirs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. ———. Picked-Up-Pieces. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. ———. “Recruiting Raw Nerves.” New Yorker. March 15, 1993, 107–9. ———. Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. ———. “Varieties of Religious Experience.” John Updike, Collected Later Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff. New York: The Library of America, 2013, 753–76. ———. “Wrestling to Be Born.” New Yorker. March 2, 1987, 109–12. Winton, Richard. “Arrested Brother of San Bernardino Shooter Is Decorated Navy Veteran.” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-brotherof-san-bernardino-shooter-navy-veteran-20160428-story.html.

Chapter Thirteen

Updike “Third-Worlds It” Staging The Coup as Political Satire Kirk Curnutt

Set in a fictional African nation called Kush, John Updike’s The Coup (1978) dramatizes the rise and fall of a Nixon-era Islamo-Marxist dictator, Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû. 1 Lamenting his inability to end the drought crippling his sub-Saharan homeland and railing at Cold War interventions in his nation’s sovereignty, Ellelloû recounts a United States–backed overthrow that exiles him to Nice where he writes his memoirs. Debates surrounding this ninth and most atypical of Updike’s twenty-three novels center largely upon whether it is appropriate for a white Protestant author known for adultery intrigues in affluent First World suburbs to fictionalize a predominantly black, Third World, multi-theistic continent, or whether doing so is cultural appropriation. 2 Comparatively neglected is the influence of genre on deciding this question. As Quentin D. Miller argues, The Coup “is undeniably Updike’s most political book,” yet it is not merely a political novel—it is a political satire. Most obviously, it skewers the 1970s’ American and Soviet superpower competition for global influence and the imperialism of aid to developing countries. If, as Miller writes, “It is clear that the reader is to learn something about the current state of the world from Ellelloû’s tale,” then by the logic of satire, readers should discern that “something” by recognizing how comedic exaggeration, whether through parody, caricature, or irony, distorts the “state of the world.” 3 The reception history of The Coup reveals, though, that Updike’s satire is not self-evident. In staking their position on the appropriate/appropriation divide, critics often clash over whether Kush is a “realistic” portrait of Africa, a criterion seemingly contradictory to the amplification or overstatement 215

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of topical humor. Proponents insist that Colonel Ellelloû “is like Africans I have known except that Updike knows him better than ever I knew an African and I knew them for years,” while detractors assert that “nothing in the novel . . . is authentically African. The customs are not African, the language is not African, and the characters certainly are not African.” 4 The issue of accuracy arises because of a troubling interpretive uncertainty: while The Coup mocks Updike’s countrymen as grossly ethnocentric and materialistic (“There isn’t an American—white American, at any rate—who isn’t obtuse or smug or bigoted or coarse . . . or fat or ‘pink’ like an overstuffed pig,” observed Commentary 5), its regard for Africa is less clear. Is Updike lampooning the postcolonial political instability that in the 1960s and 1970s occasioned some fifty successful coups d’état across the continent, with an equal number of failed attempts? 6 Is Ellelloû a tragic figure or a risible caricature? Most worrisome for post-9-11 audiences sensitive to Muslim stereotyping, does The Coup burlesque Islam, Kush’s state religion? Recognizing satire in The Coup requires appreciating intricacies of 1970s’ geopolitics that are mostly lost on contemporary readers. In particular, assessing Colonel Ellelloû’s portrayal for any parodic slant requires comparing him to contemporaneous First World depictions of African dictators. Today these military strongmen are remembered through generic references to kleptocracy and genocide, with negligible attention to their politics. Foremost among these under-examined ideologies is the curious fusion of Mohammed and Marx that Ellelloû professes. Identifying satire demands reconstructing the “horizon of expectations” by which readers would have judged these constituent aspects of The Coup. 7 Determining whether Updike parodies Colonel Ellelloû’s faith, his politics, or some combination thereof entails knowing what Islamic socialism connoted to audiences in 1978–1979. Very simply, reader expectations provide the baseline necessary to measure any farcical embellishment of these elements. A preliminary American example illustrates how audience expectations affect satire. The Coup’s most cartoonish character is Ed Klipspringer, a smarmy, glad-handing diplomat widely interpreted as a sendup of Henry M. Kissinger. Shortly after the novel’s publication, journalist Helen Dudar asked Richard Nixon’s former secretary of state how he felt about being spoofed by Updike and Joseph Heller in Good as Gold (1979): In neutral tones, he said he admired Updike’s fiction and was a fan of Heller’s Catch-22. While he seemed a trifle regretful about these unflattering portraits, he did not say he was sorry; being Kissinger, I guess, means never having to say you’re sorry. He did say he had never met either author, but both are the sort of people he likes to associate with, certainly not men he thinks of as his enemies. 8

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Calling Klipspringer a “portrait,” though, is a stretch. The fictional diplomat is not a roman-à-clef caricature: Klipspringer neither physically approximates the portly Kissinger, nor speaks with Kissinger’s oft-mimicked German accent. When Klipspringer is introduced via a cable demanding information on the disappearance of Donald Gibbs—a USAID coordinator whom Colonel Ellelloû burns alive on a pyre of drought-relief supplies—he is specifically identified as an “UNDRSCTRY” of state, making him a Kissinger underling. 9 Moreover, none of Klipspringer’s machinations in Kush parallels specific Kissinger initiatives in Africa during the novel’s 1973–74 setting. 10 Unlike Good as Gold, The Coup never even mentions Kissinger’s name. The closest reference comes when the Colonel denounces “the slime of Realpolitik” (115), the philosophy of political pragmatism Kissinger practiced. The inexactitude is why Dudar qualifies her association between the two, describing Kissinger as inspiring “at least the outlines for Klipspringer” (117, emphasis added). Why then did the perception arise that the fictional diplomat travesties the controversial architect of 1970s’ American foreign policy? Simply stated, by 1978 readers expected contemporary political satires to savage the man for whom “being second only to Nixon in the government meant being second only to him as a target—in every medium.” 11 Kissinger parodies had already appeared in Philip Roth’s Our Gang (1972), Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated cartoon Fritz the Cat (1972), and countless other works. To Dudar, Klipspringer was proof that “one of the striking things about Kissinger’s impact is the rapidity with which unloving reflections of him have found their way into contemporary literature” (17). Sometimes readers even projected Kissinger into texts: 1970s’ viewers often assumed the titular warmonger Peter Sellers portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) lampooned him, even though the movie debuted five years before Kissinger joined the Nixon administration. 12 Throughout The Coup, Updike uses Klipspringer both to entice and deflect expectations for a Kissinger proxy. Thanks to alliteration, cadence, and a shared German ancestry, his name alone, according to The John Updike Encyclopedia, is “strongly reminiscent” of Kissinger’s. 13 Yet the name also alludes to an entirely unrelated text that clouds this association—Klipspringer, after all, is the piano-playing houseguest in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). 14 Employing a literary allusion to evoke a historical figure provides Updike the creative space to make his political point without tying himself to Kissinger’s actual record: he invites readers to equate the American largesse that Klipspringer promises Kush if it embraces Western capitalism instead of Marxism, not with any specific historical action but with the broader evils of foreign intervention during Nixon’s presidency. In particular, Klipspringer’s ambiguous role in toppling Ellelloû hints at the most notorious coup d’état the American government surreptitiously backed during the novel’s timeframe: the September 11, 1973, overthrow of

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the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. Ellelloû is not assassinated as the democratically elected Allende was, nor does a right-wing military leader like Augusto Pinochet succeed him. Yet an implicit parallel is drawn when the cabinet member who non-violently ousts the Colonel, Ellelloû’s obsequiously pro-American nemesis Michaelis Ezana, congratulates Klipspringer on the United States’ success in “creat[ing] trustworthy governments in Chile and in Greece” (227). In effect, The Coup equates Klipspringer’s aid with Kissingerian influence mongering: “The thing about indebtedness,” the diplomat tells Ezana, “is it’s the best insurance policy you can buy. The deeper in debt the debtor gets, the more the creditor will invest to keep him from going under. You guys were taking an incredible risk, not owing us a thing all those years” (267). As Updike suggests, Western subvention is a cultural coup d’état just as insidious as outright regime change, both reducing Third World nations to de facto puppet states. Invoking reader antipathy toward Kissinger, however subtly, is meant to make that equivalence persuasive. Colonel Ellelloû’s characterization presents a more complex example of how audience expectations shape perceptions of satire. Throughout the 1970s, First World media mocked African dictators for their delusions of deific grandeur, their military pomposity, and their hyper-masculinity, parodying them as deranged and animalistic through “the exploitation of . . . racist clichés” and “negative stereotypes of Africa.” 15 Most often lampooned was Uganda’s Idi Amin, who, despite horrific human-rights abuses during his 1971–79 reign, “inspired what amounts,” as Time Magazine wrote, “to a budding literary subgenre” of parodies. 16 The most popular takeoffs were two UK bestsellers and an LP by humorist Alan Coren, who in faux Punch Magazine “bulletins” exaggerated Amin’s bellicose style to bombastic extremes. 17 These and similar parodies so conditioned readers’ expectations of a political satire of Africa that The Coup’s reviewers expressed surprise that Colonel Ellelloû did not overtly resemble “Big Daddy.” As the Chicago Tribune wrote, “The narrator of The Coup is a kind of lovable buffoon usually not given to the violent excesses of his real-life counterpart, Idi Amin. . . . It is perhaps more accurate to call Updike’s narrator . . . a benevolent dictator.” 18 Although Amin was routinely declared a “buffoon,” describing him as Ellelloû’s “real-life counterpart” is an even greater stretch than calling Klipspringer an “unflattering portrait” of Kissinger. Purifying Kush of Western influence may drive the Colonel to deploy soldiers to “search the hovels” of his people for “transistor radios, cassette players, four-track hi-fi rigs, and any [non-African] musical instrument” (84), but he does not dine on the bodies of his enemies, as parodies insisted Amin did. Ellelloû does commit two murders, burning Donald Gibbs alive, as previously noted, and later beheading his corrupt colonial-era predecessor, King Edumu, in a gruesome public ceremony. The murders are not moral, but they have dramatic logic:

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they are products of the Colonel’s fatal flaws, his “wish to create a nation as a pedestal for [his] self, [his] pathetic self” (186) and his concomitant desire to ensure Kush’s independence from superpower domination. Suffice to say, satirists did not attribute Amin’s brutalities to hamartia. More importantly, Ellelloû’s denunciations of the West bear little resemblance to Amin’s. “The people of Kush reject capitalist intervention in all its guises!” the Colonel rails before incinerating Gibbs. “They have no place in their stomachs for the table scraps of a society both godless and oppressive. Offer your own blacks freedom before you pile boxes of carcinogenic trash on the holy soil of Kush!” (41). Amin, by contrast, preferred to needle the West with personal taunts rather than ideological declarations. On Fourth of July 1973, for example, he cabled Nixon best wishes for a “speedy recovery” from Watergate. 19 Yet however greatly Ellelloû and Amin differ, post-1970s’ critics often equate them. In a virulent 1991 postcolonial critique of The Coup, Malini Schueller casually describes the Colonel as governing Kush “Idi Amin–style” while insisting that Updike intends his anti-American harangues as parodic because they sound like “mere invectives in keeping with mass media versions of insane African rulers.” 20 Ellelloû’s “invectives” not only do not sound like Amin—they do not sound like Amin parodies. For starters, Updike avoids the racist dialect (“dipplomeracy,” “Chrissermus”) that rendered Coren’s mock-dispatches unpublishable in the United States. More importantly, parodies did not caricature “Big Daddy” as an Islamic fundamentalist. (Although he was Muslim, Amin’s loyalties were to his ethnic Kakwa tribe.) Ellelloû, on the other hand, routinely cites the Koran in his fiery condemnations of Western capitalism. Schueller overlooks these differences for a very simple reason: her interpretation of The Coup was conditioned by a different “horizon of expectations” than original readers’ were. Although the Iranian Revolution fomented throughout the same year Updike’s novel was published, most Americans were not exposed to the rhetoric of fundamentalist Islam until 1979, after the February 11 toppling of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and the 444-day hostage crisis that began on November 4 and stretched into early 1981. A decade later, however, Middle Eastern dictators such as Ayatollah Khomeini and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi had thoroughly supplanted Amin as targets of Western satire, leading audiences to associate “Third World political rhetoric” not with sub-Saharan strongmen but with Persian Gulf clerics and Arab revolutionaries. In fact, a rhetorical tic in Schueller’s staging of her argument makes her conflation of Amin with Khomeini readily apparent. Just as Colonel Ellelloû rules Kush “Amin-style,” she writes, his “attacks on Western domination seem like hysterical rantings, Ayatollah style” (124). Reconstructing original readers’ expectations is even more necessary for determining whether Updike satirizes the most historically remote aspect of

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Colonel Ellelloû’s politics: his Islamo-Marxism. As the Colonel declares, he governs by fusing “the transcendent models” of “the pure and final socialism envisioned by Marx” with the “theocratic populism of Islam’s periodic reform movements” (7). His political party, the Suprême Counseil Révolutionnaire et Militaire pour l’Emergence (SCRME, or “scream”), is a takeoff on the abbreviation-heavy juntas that overthrew first-wave postcolonial governments in Libya (1969), Niger (1974), Ethiopia (1974), and Chad (1975). (L’Emergence is the revolution that brings Ellelloû to power.) Initially, Westerners feared Islamic Socialism would meld what they misinterpreted as “one of the six fundamental duties of the Muslim faith, the Holy War” (jihad) with Soviet expansionism to create an unstoppable revolutionary force in the Third World. 21 Almost immediately, though, parallels between religion and government proved neither seamless nor, across different countries, uninform. In general, Islam provided the cohesive glue for unifying still coalescing national identities among tribal factions, even when the Muslim population was non-majority. Yet the degree to which regimes instituted specifically Islamic beliefs varied widely. Basic contradictions also required resolving: while Marxism bans private property, for example, Islam declares it a fundamental right. Odd schisms thus arose in these nations’ syncretization of Islam and Marxism that First World commentators seized upon when assessing African socialism’s threat to the West. 22 Gaddafi offers a useful illustration of such schisms given that shortly before his death in 2009 Updike claimed he modeled Ellelloû’s politics on the Libyan colonel’s. 23 Throughout the 1970s, the dictator’s devotion to Islam confounded editorialists. One year he would institute the Koranic decree to cut off the hands of thieves; the next, he would ban the ulama or clergy from discussing politics and urge his citizenry to interpret the Koran on its own, a double dose of disempowerment that violated literal interpretations of the holy text. 24 By the time he declaimed his “Third International Theory” in his Mao-styled The Green Book (1976–1979), he denounced Marxism as vociferously as he previously had capitalism. About the only thing Western, Middle Eastern, and Soviet observers agreed upon was that Gaddafi’s ever-transforming brand of Islamic socialism seemed an improvisational scramble to retain power. Somalia’s Siad Barre offers another informative example. In 1969, his Supreme Revolutionary Council seized power declaring that only a strict separation of state and religion would prevent the corruption that had festered under the preceding Islamic republic established upon the country’s 1960 independence. His “scientific socialism”—a term that King Edumu hurls as a barb at Ellelloû (70)—denied clergy influence in civic affairs, often through violence. In January 1975, Barre summarily executed ten imams for opposing reforms in family law that allowed women to inherit property. The paradox of a dictatorship advancing equality for women by murdering political

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opposition from a state-sanctioned religion did not go unnoticed. Comparable abuses by leaders who, unlike Barre, overtly professed their Muslim faith (such as Niger’s Seyni Kountché) led to the widespread belief—some might call it wishful thinking—that Islam and Marxism were irreconcilable. As one Associated Press headline declared in early 1978, ISLAMIC FAITH STALLS SOCIALISM. “About 99 percent of Somalia’s people are devout Muslems,” the account insisted, “and privately shun socialism as incompatible with their Islamic faith.” 25 The Coup dramatizes this presumed incompatibility of Islam and Marxism, albeit inherently instead of overtly, by placing Colonel Ellelloû in the throes of a spiritual quest that undermines his ability to rule. The relationship between religion and politics is three-fold and mediated by literary convention: 1) Ellelloû seeks in Islam theological escape from the pressures of governing Kush; 2) when threatened he invokes the Koran to justify state violence—a violence that, regardless of theological rationale, readers in 1978–79 would have equated more with oppressive African dictators and Soviet-backed socialist regimes rather than Islamic fundamentalism; 3) these assertions of power prove comically self-defeating, demonstrating the Western literary conceit that a hero’s fatal flaws determine his fate. In this way, Updike de-politicizes Islam, satirizes political rather than religious repression, and creates a character whose foibles make him more empathetic to Western audiences than an Amin-manqué would be. Recognizing that Updike does not satirize Islam begins with noting how thoroughly The Coup elides the social world of religion. Colonel Ellelloû is a devout Muslim with an encyclopedic recall of Koranic verses, yet he often seems very alone in his faith. Beyond a passing reference to a “senile” imam (113), clergy are invisible. Some Kushites are outright hostile to Islam. Ellelloû’s first wife, Kadongolimi, an animist, claims the “God of Mohammet” appeals only to “the empty half, the cruel half” of the population and declares Allah “a no-God, an eraser of gods; He cannot be believed in, for He has no attributes and is nowhere” (97). Another spouse, the American-born Candy, greets her husband’s “Islamic courtesies” with a curt, “Don’t give me any of this Kismet crap” (122). Later, as Ellelloû treks through a remote region called the Balak to investigate rumors of Soviet and American installations in Kush’s northernmost territories, his shifty guide, Sidi Mukhtar, abandons him to the elements with “not water in our zemzimayas [canteens] but wine, which our religion forbade us to drink” (184). To survive, he and his fourth wife, Sheba, must blasphemy. For an Islamic state, Kush contains a great deal of hostility toward Islam. Ellelloû’s fellow Muslims, meanwhile, are either apostates or opportunists. Michaelis Ezana dresses in silk “expressly forbidden to men by all the accreted authority of Islam” (55). Dorfû, the police spy who guards King Edumu in captivity, may be a “superb student of the Koran,” but his cunning

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study of power, the “trick[s] of leadership” that the Colonel “fail[s] to master,” not his piety, is what elevates him to head of state by the novel’s end (210, 293). Of the supporting cast, King Edumu proves the most cynical regarding religion. During his five-year incarceration since SCRME’s revolution, the deposed ruler converts to Islam, “perhaps to curry the favor of his fanatic captor,” but mostly “to relieve the boredom of his captivity” (12). What Edumu most admires about Islam is its supposed justification of the violence he once freely rained upon his people. Ellelloû attributes Edumu’s bloodlust to his animist past, but the king counters with a term that within a year of The Coup’s publication would grow extremely loaded to Western ears: “But as to cruelty, the rain forest beyond the river [the realm of animist spirits] holds none as rigorous as the fury of a jihad. I am blind, but not so blind as those righteous whose eyes roll upward, who kill and are killed to gain a Paradise of shade trees, as I hear in the Book” (18). Updike is not condemning Islam for condoning violence, though—he is satirizing Edumu’s self-serving embrace of the Prophet. That irony combines with the absence of clergy, Kadongolimi’s dismissive view, and Ezana’s materialism to confine Islam within the colonel’s personal crisis of faith. This crisis only tangentially involves how Ellelloû may ply Muslim precepts into Marxist practice to save Kush; from the beginning he seems defeated by his nation’s long drought and offers few answers for its recovery. The drama instead revolves around whether Ellelloû can reconcile his yearning for spiritual purity with the demands of governing. Although the colonel refers to himself as a “fanatic,” he is far from a zealot. 26 He argues that “ethical, numinous brooding” (55) is the hallmark of a great leader, but his pervasive self-doubt is inimical to his ideological militancy. Indeed, his most philosophical moments reveal a fatalistic, devolving view of humankind rather than Islam’s prophesized paradise or Marxism’s evolutionary praxis. Debating Ezana, Ellelloû describes a “new religion” forming “in the indistinct hearts of men, a religion without a God,” one whose only “rite is the exercise of energy, and in which exhausted forms like the quest, the vow, the expiation, and the attainment through suffering of wisdom are, emptied of content, put in the service of a pervasive expenditure whose ultimate purpose is entropy, whose immediate reward is fatigue, a blameless confusion, and sleep” (92). This vision of decay—nearly Pynchonian thanks to that “entropy”—has haunted the colonel long before he rose to power. As early as college he believed that the battle between “EuroAmerican consumerism” and the “groping upwards of the dusky [socialist] underdog” masks a third, all-encompassing motion: “As the poor man reaches upwards, the ground is sinking beneath his feet,” and this “sinking in the spreading poverty” minimizes politics’ ability to realize change, leaving only gestures of action: “So these gestures of economics are like the reaching

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gestures on Géricault’s painting of the raft of the Medusa, gestures that will never grasp their objects, because the raft is sinking” (178). Against this erosion, Islam provides reassurance of “a peace beyond understanding” (296). Colonel Ellelloû’s sole solace comes at the Mosque of the Clots of Blood, where he prostrates himself to repeat “the rakʽa thrice,” allowing “the meditative backwash of prayer” to “purify” him (113). Worship consoles him because “[n]o fervor overtops that which arises from the Absolute, though the contact be all one way.” This “repose,” a “silence never heard in the lands of doubt and mockery,” does not exist in the material world, trapping the colonel between the “actual” and the Absolute (114). As Tony Hilfer notes, Ellelloû’s spiritual crisis is a classic Updikean dilemma: his “quest for purity founders on the obduracies of matter.” 27 Stranded on that Géricault-like sinking raft, he confesses to Kadongolimi, “A state such as Kush is too thin to be administered except by gestures” (99). In the political realm he can only pantomime Koranic beliefs, not deliver the relief a literal application of them supposedly promises. The profundity of Ellelloû’s theological grappling precludes satirizing, but the same is not so of his militarism. Whenever the dictator calls upon Islamic precepts to enforce social policy, his “transcendent models” prove comically inefficacious. After beheading King Edumu, for example, the colonel is wracked with self-doubt, knowing his politically ambitious concubine, Kutunda, manipulated him by insisting he “make a show . . . so Allah will notice us all”: “Cut off [the king’s] testicles!” she urged him (53). To regain surety, Ellelloû orders his army to “vigorously prosecute” the “cause of cultural, ethical, and political purity.” Among other abuses, “any man caught urinating in a standing position, instead of squatting in the manner of Mohamet and his followers, was detained and interrogated until the offender could prove he was a pagan [an animist] and not a Christian” (84). Often cited as proof that Updike mocks Islam, 28 the passage satirizes, rather, the inability to enforce militarily the “purity” of religion: amid this campaign, no less than Ezana sports in his leader’s presence “powder-blue or even salmonpink leisure suits” with “a knit shirt open at the neck and cuffless trousers of tremendous flair.” Meanwhile, Ellelloû suspects women in Kush’s capital of Istiqlal who are “obediently thronged with loose boubous and kangas” hide beneath these “traditional wrappings” Western lingerie, “spicy brands called Lollypop and Spanky” (85). The crackdown fails to relieve Ellelloû’s powerlessness: “his will had not averted congestion—rather, had become an element within it, this derivative congestion of the actual” (89–90). In his frustration, the colonel can only pine privately for the “searing simplicity” of the Absolute. This passage on his impotent will foreshadows two farcical confrontations that end the colonel’s reign. After crossing the Balak region, Ellelloû discovers a Soviet cave in which his supposed Russian allies have wired King Edumu’s

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severed head into a bizarre tourist attraction. As if parodying Disney’s animatronic Hall of Presidents, the head denounces the colonel as an “American at heart” and calls for Kush to “Overthrow Ellelloû!” The Soviet commander, colonel Sirin, admits his troops hatched this practical joke partly out of boredom but partly, too, to lure Ellelloû to the remote region to warn him that a “ThirdWorld stab at [a Western] industrial settlement” has been established in a farther outpost known as the Ippi Rift (238). Furious, Ellelloû orders his troops to pummel and rape the international visitors flooding in to see the display. In a contemporary thriller set in Africa, the scene would explode in bloodshed, dramatizing the outrages against foreigners Western newspapers breathlessly reported as proof of the continent’s instability. 29 Instead, the satire emphasizes Ellelloû’s crumbling authority, for “the beatings were feeble and the objects of rape, withered and twittery in their long-sleeved English gardening dresses and rose-gathering hats, were unappetizing” (224). Shortly afterward, upon “recall[ing] that he had never heard machine-gun fire, though he had ordered some” (227), the colonel realizes his once-loyal bodyguards, Opuku and Mtesa, shrugged off his command to slaughter the crowd. His flailing leadership inverts the appeal by which dictators like Amin controlled their troops by claiming to embody Africa’s tribal warrior tradition: instead of exhibiting valor and dispassionate ruthlessness, the colonel is so distraught he breaks down weeping (224). 30 Ellelloû’s humiliation is a mere prelude to the satirical indignity he suffers on the Ippi Rift. Unbeknownst to him, Ezana and Kutunda have built, with Klipspringer’s assistance, a stereotypical American suburb replete with gas stations, lawn sprinklers, and a McDonald’s—a franchise that would actually not arrive in Africa until 1992. Adding insult to injury, the oasis has been named after him. (In a further irony, Ellelloû means “freedom,” though the town is soon redubbed Gibbsville to honor the colonel’s American victim.) The settlement’s industrial raison d’être is an American hydrocarbon refinery that has licensed drilling rights from the conspirators. Infuriated, the colonel tries to rouse local Kushites into destroying the oil wells, which will lift their fortunes but subjugate them to Western interests. Inveighing against the “follies of a race that scorns both Marx and Allah,” Ellelloû insists that suffering is divine, as “the drought is a form of the Manifest Radiance, and our unhappiness within it is blasphemy” (259). Kush’s poverty reflects “the beauty of minimal, the changeless, the unpolluted” Allah intended when he promised to free “the heart . . . from the tyranny of matter” (258). (It goes without saying that not even Gaddafi advocated destroying oil wells.) Ellelloû pines again for the purity of spiritual transcendence, but his apocalyptic fury fails to incite his countrymen. The joke is not simply that given a choice between creed and consumer pleasures most people will opt for the latter. Rather, Ellelloû’s belief that “the earth, misconstrued as a provider of petty comforts and artificial excitements, cannot but collapse into a cinder,

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into a gnawed bone whirling in space” consoles a private theological anxiety about existence by submitting to divine authority (253). The colonel’s call to “Hasten that Day of Disaster!” (254) contradicts his own faith, though, for he has insisted throughout his story that humans have no power to “hasten”— only futile “gestures.” “This is treason,” he declares when his people fail to rise up, but this “last official utterance” goes unheard. The crowd has already erupted in “murderous jubilation” when the refinery’s PR man announces a more appealing offer: “Any of you folks thirsty, you can have one free beer each at the commissary” (257). One might suggest that choosing “one free beer each” over colonial rebellion is the ultimate insult to both Islam’s prohibition against alcohol and Marxism’s promise to redistribute resources. Yet the larger point is the rejection of religious will to power: for Updike, politics cannot effectuate “divine momentum” (296). The fantastical nature of this climactic scene overshadows the fact that Updike dramatizes in fuller detail elsewhere why the conjunction of Islam and Marxism will not stop the proverbial raft from sinking. The reason is explained in flashbacks that satirize Ellelloû’s peculiar religious training nearly two decades before his fall. As the colonel acknowledges, he was not raised a Muslim. Nor did he convert to Islam in his homeland (even though he reminds his animist wife, Kadongolimi, that half of Kush was already Muslim when he did). His conversion did not even occur in Africa. The Coup eschews the rich backstory of how Islam migrated to Africa from Southwest Asia in the seventh century, settling in present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia before moving north as the Caliph Umar conquered Egypt and Libya and subsequently spreading westward and south via traders and proselytizers travelling the interior. Updike certainly knew this history; among the sources cited in his acknowledgments is the work of J. Spencer Trimingham (1904–1987), then the foremost Western scholar of African Islam. 31 Yet instead of depicting the religion’s presence in the colonel’s fictional homeland up through the twentieth century when it was called Wanjiji, or during the period of French colonial rule when it was known as Noire, or even during King Edumu’s reign, he introduces Ellelloû to his faith in—of all places—a Wisconsin college town called Franchise. The flashbacks to the colonel’s mid-1950s college years in America are generally considered the weakest parts of The Coup, especially when the young African, then humbly known as Hakim Félix al-Bini, becomes entangled in a romantic triangle with his eventual second wife, Candy, and their condescending history professor, Dr. Craven. Yet Ellelloû’s American education is a dramatic necessity: arriving in Wisconsin via Toronto after deserting the Troupes coloniales when ordered to fight fellow Africans in Algiers (he initially fought for France in Indochina), the future dictator experiences firsthand the rampant consumerism he grows to despise (typified by the drug store where he meets Candy Cunningham) as well as America’s animus

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towards people of color (typified by Candy’s blatantly racist father). He also meets an intellectual circle of fellow students, one of whom is responsible for his conversion. Known only as “Oscar X,” this racial separatist from Chicago belongs to the Nation of Islam. Notably, none of the newspaper clippings Updike gathered on Africa while researching the novel describes its dictators becoming “Muslimized” (137) through this uniquely American sect. Crediting the colonel’s faith to the NOI is the most historically significant element of the treatment of Islamic Marxism. At the time The Coup was written, the NOI for all intents and purposes did not exist. Upon the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, recast the organization into the World Community of Islam in the West (later known as the American Society of Muslims). Mohammed both disavowed the deification of Wallace Fard Muhammad, who founded the NOI in 1930 and who mysteriously disappeared three years later, and rejected his father’s controversial black nationalism. His goal was to bring American Islam into the global mainstream and unite non-radical Muslim communities. Although Mohammed’s rival Louis Farrakhan began plans to reestablish the NOI as a separate entity in September 1977, not until 1981 could he officially “reconvene” it. Updike thus credits Ellelloû’s faith to a “radical” group whose linkage of theological and political power would have been considered to most readers in 1978–79 a moribund failure. As the colonel confesses, what he most learned from the NOI was not a theology but a reverence for force: “I realized that, in this era when the magic wand is hollow and all wizards, chiefs, and Pharaohs went tumbling under the gun’s miraculous bark, the army is the sole serious institution left” (163). In other words, he discovered through the NOI and Oscar X the gestures of military might that later prove ineffective when he tries to police Islamic purity in Kush. As Ellelloû admits, the lure of power instilled a sense of radical agency in Elijah Muhammad’s followers. Yet the practice of Islam also “had a flavor of charade” to it, a “purposeful earnest charade” but one whose final effect nevertheless was not a spiritual love of Allah. Black nationalism merely let him “feel more exalted” (163). Ellelloû’s other African American friends in Franchise ridicule Oscar X’s separatist agenda as “horseshit” and dismiss Felix’s commitment when he violates the NOI’s strict prohibition against interracial relationships by sleeping with Candy (153). Updike is no kinder to their ideological allegiances. Ellelloû becomes a Marxist only after bedding the local black Communist, Esmeralda Miller (who herself opposes the NOI, further emphasizing the disparity between Islam and Marxism). The couple first makes love under the glaring eye of a “giant red poster of Lenin, goateed and pince-nezed, staring upwards with the prophetic fury of a scholar who has just found his name misspelled in a footnote” (182). Despite such sardonicism, the NOI remains the main target of Updike’s satire of “prophetic fury.” The Coup twice re-

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counts how the sect fell into disarray when scandals over Elijah Muhammad’s extramarital dalliances with his secretaries became public. As Ellelloû informs us, the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, to which Muhammad was linked, caused Oscar X to abandon the NOI. What he did not abandon was his relish for violence. At roughly the same time Ellelloû was in Kush “fomenting” the coup that overthrew King Edumu, “Oscar became a trainee with the Chicago police, and with unfeigned enthusiasm helped bop longhaired protestor heads at the 1968 Democratic Convention” (197). If Oscar’s conversion to an institution known for harassing the NOI seems farfetched, the plot twist makes Updike’s satirical point: when an ideology fails to satisfy a propensity for violence, that propensity will simply find a new outlet to vent itself, belief system be damned. The major aporia in The Coup is how Ellelloû, upon returning to Kush in the late 1950s, assimilated his NOI beliefs into African Islam. Such a reconciliation would not have been easy: African Muslims by and large regarded the NOI as heretical, even as they recognized the political parallels between black nationalism and postcolonial liberation. But in a sense Updike did not need to address how the Colonel’s faith would have transformed. By naming a character Oscar X, he links The Coup to the numerous American satires that since the late 1950s had depicted various “—— X’s either as tricksters or outright frauds and that had caricatured black nationalists as exploiting Islam to gain political power. 32 In this way, the aporia allows Updike to delegitimate politicized religion as a false front without impugning Islam itself when describing Ellelloû’s spiritual pining for the Absolute. What guarantees that the comedy of the colonel’s hapless militarism does not infect the treatment of his devotion is the mediating presence of the literary tradition employed to depict the former as erroneous. Specifically, Updike calls upon Western notions of fate so readers interpret Ellelloû’s downfall through the familiar matrix of the fatal flaw. Throughout The Coup, Ellelloû repeatedly invokes the concept of fate: he notes he survived the war in Indochina by having “faith that the pull of fate would rescue him” (9); when he resolves to investigate rumors about King Edumu’s stolen head, Ezana cautions him that he is “putting [him]self at the mercy of fate” (92); as he prepares to depart for the Balak region, he tells Candy he is “about to walk the edge of [his] fate, and may fall off” (122); and later, when inviting Sittina, the only wife who has not rejected him, to join his imminent exile to France, he describes “the numbness” he felt “in the course of this narrative, at most of its critical turns” as “Livingstone’s [faith] in the mouth of the lion, the pious man’s in the grip of his fate” (301). 33 In keeping with the Western hero tradition, though, Ellelloû’s fate is determined by hamartia. The Coup’s supporting cast is never shy about cautioning him against the failings that eventuate his fall from power. King Edumu insists that Ellelloû’s “hatred of the world” is responsible for Kush’s drought (18);

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Ezana tells Klipspringer that the colonel is too much of an idealist, “too inspired for our imperfect world” (271); and Dorfû, Ellelloû’s successor, tells him he has been “a captive . . . of [his] demons” (295). Not surprisingly, Klipspringer offers the bluntest, most ethnocentric diagnosis: “A nation hates America because it hates itself” (270). As regards the divide between theological Islam and political IslamoMarxism, Ellelloû’s specific flaw is his desire for purity in both the Absolute and the actual. As Updike implies, only in the former is purity possible, and only then because the self is sublimated within the godhead, finding relief in relinquishing oneself to a higher power. Politics, meanwhile, is always compromised by human motive; as the colonel confesses after his ouster, a “tyrant takes everything personally” (285). Once out of power, Ellelloû indeed experiences a great sense of contentment—of happiness even—by trusting that the “tendrilous chains of contingency” responsible for his rise and fall are logical in a divine scheme that he will never fathom. As the final passage of the Koran the novel cites states, “Those who have gone before them also plotted, but Allah is the master of every plot: He knows the deserts of every soul” (305). Numerous critics complain that in favoring theology over politics The Coup promotes escapism over engaging real-world problems. As Schueller argues, the novel’s ending seems to reassure Updike’s audience that political chaos in Africa will not upset the West’s geopolitical dominance: “The Third World, with its revolutions and upheavals, its incessant questioning of the apparatuses of power both internal and external, disturbs the omnipresence of capitalist dominance and the inherent morality of a simplified, homogenized, melting pot America. The Coup contains this threat and deflects all such ideological questionings so as to stabilize the moral balance of middle class America” (127). There are historical ways for contemporary readers to render the novel’s ending ironic, however—for example, by noting that during the near quarter century that Idi Amin spent in exile before his 2003 death, first in Libya then in Saudi Arabia, he, too, became a more studious Muslim, eschewing politics for devotion. In 1978, though, among The Coup’s many immediate tasks was a cultural need to render Islam comprehensible to an audience largely ignorant of it. By satirizing its political reification as a coeval of socialism, Updike insulated it as a religion from readers’ suspicions that it urged “holy war.” Dramatizing Ellelloû’s spiritual yearning to submit to Allah allowed him to at least open the door to depicting its humanism, which non-NOI American Muslims were beginning to articulate. 34 The ending is neither neatly nor fully resolved, though—The Coup remains, after all, a satire, complicating its plot twists with winks of humor. In his final dialogue with Kutunda, the colonel avows the happiness he experiences in abandoning his quest to realize purity in all aspects of Kushian life while still employing fundamentalist rhetoric: “I now

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think that the natural condition of men is one of happiness … and that the Koran was right to de-emphasize the tragic, except as it applies to nonbelievers, who are vermin and shadows in any case” (287). Such is the sound of Updike inflicting irony upon his main character. At least none of the supporting cast is exempt from it either as they exit the novel. Having successfully purchased Kush’s loyalty, Klipspringer celebrates his imminent return to Washington by donning a dashiki he bought in Georgetown before coming to Africa (270). Tossed from office by Kush’s post-Ellelloû regime, Ezana becomes an OPEC delegate and ends up taken hostage by Marxist revolutionaries who smash his prized wristwatch (304), a symbol of his affection for the West (an incident inspired by a real-life 1975 OPEC siege led by the infamous Carlos the Jackal). Dorfû and Kutunda, meanwhile, commit to lead Kush by a form of Islamic Marxism purer than even Ellelloû’s, one “stripped of irresponsible adventurism and romantic individualism,” though that purity seems rather dubious given their intention to transform the country into “The Canada of Africa,” a motto they plan to stamp on the nation’s license plates (288). In the end, though, the richest ironies are reserved for Colonel Ellelloû. Enjoying a comfortably middleclass existence in Nice thanks to a pension from Kush, Ellelloû spends his retirement writing, watching Sittina paint, and taking her children to music lessons, his newfound paradise troubled only occasionally by the thought that his heirs “may fall, civilian casualties in the war of muchness that is certain to overtake the planet” (303)—one war he finally does not have to fight. The Coup is a significant example of how, because of their topical humor, political satires require a deeper historical awareness than most literary genres. Even readers familiar with the foreign policy of the Nixon administration likely have at best remote knowledge of Islamo-Marxism in Africa. Only by exploring how the novel’s political issues were discussed in their own time can we decide whether the novel exaggerates them for humorous purposes. Unlike Colonel Ellelloû, we need not feel as if our reading is a mere gesture that fails to grasp its object: historical context provides the buoyancy that keeps the raft of interpretation from sinking. NOTES 1. My title alludes to Updike’s first fictional treatment of Africa, “Bech Third-Worlds It,” a Harry Bech story inspired by the author’s 1973 African lecture tour that appeared in Playboy in 1975. See Bech Is Back (New York: Knopf, 1982), 26–42 and Adam Begley, Updike (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 310–13, for background. 2. For a defense, see James A. Schiff, John Updike Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1998), 158–65; for a critique, see Irving Leonard Markovitz, “John Updike’s Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 14, no. 3 (1980): 536–45. 3. Quentin D. Miller, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 152. One could argue that Terrorist (2006) is Updike’s most political work given its post-9-11 treatment of a radical Islamic sleeper cell plotting

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to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. I would counter that because The Coup concerns governing a nation it still retains the title. 4. See, respectively, John Thompson, “Updike le Noir,” New York Review of Books, December 21, 1978, 3. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/12/21/updike-le-noir/; Barry Amos, quoted in Joyce Markle, “The Coup: Illusions and Insubstantial Impressions,” Critical Essays on John Updike, ed. William R. Macnaughton (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 298. 5. Pearl K. Bell, “Imaginings of Africa,” Commentary, April 1, 1979, 75. https://www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/imaginings-of-africa/. 6. Alex Thompson, An Introduction to African Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 132–33. 7. I borrow this term from reception theory, where “horizon” refers to the skein of rhetorical conventions and codes readers are trained to expect from texts. Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” trans. Elizabeth Benzinger. New Literary History 2, no. 1 (1970): 7–37. 8. Helen Dudar, “The Importance of Being Kissinger,” Montreal Gazette, July 17, 1979, 17. Subsequent references cited parenthetically. To be specific, Kissinger served as Nixon’s National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975, assuming the duties of Secretary of State in September 1973 and maintaining it past Nixon’s resignation through the end of Gerald R. Ford’s administration in early 1977. 9. John Updike, The Coup (New York: Knopf, 1978), 87. Subsequent references cited parenthetically. 10. See Hanes Walton Jr., Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Bernard Rosser, Sr., eds., The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). As this essay collection documents, Kissinger was indifferent to Africa until the 1975 Angolan Civil War erupted and Soviet/Cuban forces prevented the United States from influencing the outcome. Kissinger did not actually visit Africa until 1976, however. 11. Niall Ferguson, Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist (New York: Penguin, 2005), 4. 12. George Case, Calling Dr. Strangelove: The Anatomy and Influence of the Kubrick Masterpiece (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 26. 13. Jack De Bellis, The John Updike Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 120. 14. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50, 71–74, 149. The Coup includes a second Gatsby allusion: Michaelis Ezana shares the name of the Greek immigrant who witnesses the hit-and-run accident that kills Myrtle Wilson. 15. Cecile Bishop, Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 45. 16. “Big Daddy in Books,” Time Magazine, September 19, 1977, http://content.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,915481,00.html. 17. Alan Coren, The Collected Bulletins of President Idi Amin (London: Robson, 1975) and The Further Bulletins of President Idi Amin (London: Salamander Books, 1975). Both are currently available online at https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/corena/index.htm. 18. Charles R. Larson, “A Light-Hearted African Fable,” Chicago Tribune, November 26, 1978, sec. 7, 1. 19. “U. S. Irked by Ugandan Message,” Jet, July 26, 1973, 24. 20. Malini Schueller, “Containing the Third World: John Updike’s The Coup,” Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 1 (1991): 119. Subsequent references cited parenthetically. 21. “The Holy War,” Indianapolis Star, December 27, 1971, 20. 22. For an introduction to these conflicts, see Donald Westerlund, From Socialism to Islam? Notes on Islam as a Political Factor in Contemporary Africa (Uppsala: Scandinavia Institute of African Studies, 1982). It should be noted that not all 1970s’ discussions of “Moslem militancy” discussed the Marxist influence; some simply emphasized the “revolutionary” fervor without referencing socialism at all. See “Islam Swaying Black Africa’s Politics,” Green Bay PressGazette, March 25, 1973, 52.

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23. Peter Conrad, “Did I Actually Write a Soliloquy for a Hamster?” The Guardian, October 25, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/26/john-updike. 24. David Hirst, “Libya Returning to Harsh Koranic Law,” Indianapolis News, October 20, 1972, 13; A. J. P. VanRensburg, Africa’s Men of Destiny (Pretoria: De Jager-HAUM, 1981), 197–200. 25. Richard Tomkins, “Islamic Faith Stalls Socialism,” The Tennessean, January 1, 1978, 21-A. For the execution of the imams, see Angel Rabasa, Radical Islam in East Africa (Santa Monica: Rand, 2013), 30. 26. For an example of how the Western press depicted Islamic zealotry before the Iranian Revolution, see “To Judge Libya,” Boston Globe, August 17, 1976, 14: “Colonel Qaddafi is a religious zealot who justifies the most brazen international subversion with scripture from the Koran.” Updike clipped this editorial from the Globe and included it in a file of secondary sources about various African dictators and coups in 1976–1978. See Box 31, Item 574, John Updike Papers, 1940–2009, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 27. Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since 1940 (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 177. 28. See Layla F. Abadeen and Muna M. Abd-Rabbo, “Orientalist Discourse in John Updike’s The Coup: A Saidian/Focauldian Perspective,” Dirasat 45, no. 2 (2018): 315–26. 29. The July 4, 1976, Raid on Entebbe, in which Israeli forces swept into Uganda to liberate Westerners hijacked by Palestinian terrorists who diverted a transatlantic airliner to Africa, led directly to a humiliated Amin ordering the murder of a seventy-four-year-old Israeli-British citizen who had been taken to a Kampala hospital during the crisis. For a more comical version of Western tourists’ encounters with the dictator, see Brian Jeffries, “‘Gee, I Hope It Won’t Hurt Very Much’: U.S. Tourist, Detained in Uganda, Tells of Fears of Being ‘Bumped Off,’” Salem Statesman Journal, March 3, 1977, 3D. 30. For a discussion of this tradition in 1970s’ regimes, see Ali A. Mazrui, “The Resurrection of the Warrior Tradition in African Political Culture,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 13, no. 1 (1975): 67–84. 31. See, for example, J. Spencer Trimingham, The Influence of Islam upon Africa (London: Longmans, 1968). 32. For trickster-style satires, see Chester Himes’s treatment of “Michael X” in Blind Man with a Pistol (New York: Morrow, 1969); for the fraud, see Leon Forrest, The Bloodworth Orphans (New York: Random House, 1977). 33. Updike also signals that fate is a Western concept by beginning chapter 7 with an epigraph from Sahair El-Calamway (1976): “The struggle between man and fate is a totally alien concept to Arab culture” (261). 34. See, for example, the editorial “Peaceful Islam,” Des Moines Tribune, March 29, 1977, 18.

WORKS CITED Abadeen, Layla F., and Muna M. Abd-Rabbo. “Orientalist Discourse in John Updike’s The Coup: A Saidian/Focauldian Perspective.” Dirasat 45, no. 2 (2018): 315–26. Begley, Adam. Updike. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. Bell, Pearl K. “Imaginings of Africa.” Commentary, April 1, 1979, 75. https://www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/imaginings-of-africa/. “Big Daddy in Books.” Time Magazine, September 19, 1977. http://content.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,915481,00.html. Bishop, Cecile. Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Case, George. Calling Dr. Strangelove: The Anatomy and Influence of the Kubrick Masterpiece. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Conrad, Peter. “Did I Actually Write a Soliloquy for a Hamster?” The Guardian, October 25, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/26/john-updike. Coren, Alan. The Collected Bulletins of President Idi Amin. London: Robson, 1975. https:// www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/corena/index.htm.

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———. The Further Bulletins of President Idi Amin. London: Salamander Books, 1975. https:/ /www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/corena/index.htm. De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964. Dudar, Helen. “The Importance of Being Kissinger.” Montreal Gazette, July 17, 1979, 17. Ferguson, Niall. Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist. New York: Penguin, 2005. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Forrest, Leon. The Bloodworth Orphans. New York: Random House, 1977. Fritz the Cat. Dir. Ralph Bakshi. New York: Cinematron, 1972. Gaddafi, Muammar. The Green Book. London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1976–79. Heller, Joseph. Good as Gold. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Hilfer, Tony. American Fiction Since 1940. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Himes, Chester. Blind Man with a Pistol. New York: Morrow, 1969. Hirst, David. “Libya Returning to Harsh Koranic Law.” Indianapolis News, October 20, 1972, 13. “The Holy War.” Indianapolis Star, December 27, 1971, 20. “Islam Swaying Black Africa’s Politics.” Green Bay Press-Gazette, March 25, 1973, 52. Jauss, Hans Robert. “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” Trans. Elizabeth Benzinger. New Literary History 2, no. 1 (1970): 7–37. Jeffries, Brian. “‘Gee, I Hope It Won’t Hurt Very Much’: U.S. Tourist, Detained in Uganda, Tells of Fears of Being ‘Bumped Off.’” Salem Statesman Journal, March 3, 1977, 3D. Larson, Charles R. “A Light-Hearted African Fable.” Chicago Tribune, November 26, 1978, sec.7, 1. Markle, Joyce. “The Coup: Illusions and Insubstantial Impressions.” Critical Essays on John Updike, ed. William R. Macnaughton. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982, 281–301. Markovitz, Irving Leonard. “John Updike’s Africa.” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 14, no. 3 (1980): 536–45. Mazrui, Ali A. “The Resurrection of the Warrior Tradition in African Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 13, no. 1 (1975): 67–84. Miller, Quentin D. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. “Peaceful Islam.” Des Moines Tribune, March 29, 1977, 18. Rabasa, Angel. Radical Islam in East Africa. Santa Monica: Rand, 2013. Roth, Philip. Our Gang. New York: Random House, 1971. Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1998. Schueller, Malini. “Containing the Third World: John Updike’s The Coup.” Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 1 (1991): 113–28. Thompson, Alex. An Introduction to African Politics. New York: Routledge, 2016. Thompson, John. “Updike le Noir.” New York Review of Books, December 21, 1978, 3–4. http:/ /www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/12/21/updike-le-noir/. “To Judge Libya.” Boston Globe, August 17, 1976, 14. Tomkins, Richard. “Islamic Faith Stalls Socialism.” The Tennessean, January 1, 1978, 21-A. Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Influence of Islam upon Africa. London: Longmans, 1968. Updike, John. “Bech Third-Worlds It.” Bech Is Back. New York: Knopf, 1982, 26–42. ———. The Coup. New York: Knopf, 1978. ———. The Coup Manuscripts, Box 31, Item 574, John Updike Papers, 1940–2009, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ———. Terrorist. New York: Knopf, 2006. “U. S. Irked by Ugandan Message.” Jet, July 26, 1973, 24. VanRensburg, A. J. P. Africa’s Men of Destiny. Pretonia: De Jager-HAUM, 1981. Walton, Hanes, Jr., Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Bernard Rosser, Sr., eds. The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Westerlund, Donald. From Socialism to Islam? Notes on Islam as a Political Factor in Contemporary Africa. Uppsala: Scandinavia Institute of African Studies, 1982.

Chapter Fourteen

The Three Mile Island Accident and “the Man from Toyota” Looking Back on the Cultural Politics of the Cold War in Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest Takashi Nakatani

The third novel of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, Rabbit Is Rich (1981), begins with Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the former high school basketball star turned Toyota salesman, as he contemplates the ongoing energy crisis and his belief that he is somehow immune from the economic and political troubles that face the United States (and the world) at the end of the 1970s. 1 “The fucking world is running out of gas,” Harry thinks in the novel’s opening paragraph, “[b]ut they won’t catch him, not yet, because there’s isn’t a piece of junk on the road gets better mileage than his Toyotas, with lower service costs. Read Consumer Reports, April issue. That’s all he has to do when people come in. And come in they do, the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending.” 2 Indeed, Rabbit Is Rich depicts a nation in a critical situation, as the United States’ sense of itself as an economic superpower has been seriously undermined by recent events: namely, the economic emergence of OPEC and Japan and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the 1979 incident at a nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that raised serious concerns regarding the safety of nuclear power. Dependent on availability of inexpensive energy to fuel its lavish consumer culture, the United States would seem to be exhausted as the last decade of the Cold War opened, a time when, ironically, the Western bloc was achieving superiority over Soviet Russia. As D. Quentin Miller points out, “the Cold War in 1979 resembles the old Cold War only on the surface,” and Rabbit Is Rich captures the changing 233

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socio-economic conditions in the final phase of the Cold War as the United States would seem to be “running out of gas.” 3 Indeed, Updike’s depiction of the shifting realities that the Cold War imposed on American life culminates in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel of the tetralogy that takes places as the Eastern bloc is on the verge of falling apart. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the ways in which Updike neatly structured the tetralogy, Rabbit at Rest reverses the opening of Rabbit Is Rich: Harry’s Toyota dealership is now faltering while the national economy is on the upswing as the United States emerges as the “victor” of the Cold War. 4 Nevertheless, Harry laments the end of the conflict twice in Rabbit at Rest. Contrary to the optimism of the era, he refers to the coming end of the Cold War with weariness and suspicion, “It’s like nobody’s in charge of the other side any more. I miss it! . . . The cold war. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning.” 5 Mourning the dissolution of the Eastern bloc, a seemingly strange position for an American of his era, Rabbit later thinks about his experience in the army as a young man, lamenting, “War is a relief in many ways. Without the cold war, what’s the point of being an American?” (442–43). 6 This essay will discuss the relevance of Updike’s reconsideration of the Cold War in Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. In both books, Updike reassesses the cultural politics of the Cold War by introducing, to the apparently domestic Rabbit novels, viewpoints of foreign powers. In Rabbit Is Rich, characters muse on the rise of OPEC and Japan while Rabbit at Rest features the “man from Toyota,” Mr. Shimada, who comes from Japan to strip the Angstroms of their Toyota dealership. In his study on the tetralogy, Marshall Boswell extensively discusses Mr. Shimada, saying that he is “one of Updike’s unlikely mouthpieces as he proposes a psychological explanation for America’s widespread malaise” and that “Updike intends us to read Mr. Shimada’s statement along Kierkegaardian lines.” 7 Though Boswell does not explicitly use the term, I would contend that Updike’s construction of Mr. Shimada embodies Kierkegaard’s notion of “ressentiment.” 8 Deploying my positionality as someone who grew up and was educated in Japan’s socio-cultural environment, I read this apparently stereotypical character as representing the ressentiment of the Japanese, i.e., the ambivalence toward the dominance of the United States, as America’s double. Consequently, Shimada’s presence in the novel appears otherworldly and, to use Sigmund Freud’s terminology, “uncanny.” 9 Freud draws on the etymology of the German word for the uncanny, unheimlich, 10 and then on the literary convention of the double, 11 contending that “[the] uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” 12 Freud’s notion of the “uncanny” offers a lens through which we might understand Updike’s depiction of Shimada and, more broadly, helps

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illuminate the ways in which the later two Rabbit novels imagine the ramifications of the Cold War’s conclusion. THE SPECTER OF THREE MILE ISLAND AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE COLD WAR Mentioned four times in Rabbit Is Rich, the Three Mile Island accident is not merely one of the details of the many crises that the United States endured as the 1970s came to an end. Instead, Updike treats the episode as an incident that represents the critical moment in the late 1970s, when the double-bind of the Cold War cultural politics turned against the United States itself. The accident is first briefly mentioned in the news on the radio Harry listens to in his car (36), a moment that recalls the first Rabbit novel when Harry listens to his car radio as he tries to escape from his married life. 13 A little later in Rabbit Is Rich, Updike returns to the accident, juxtaposing it with the burgeoning fuel shortage that is consuming America in 1979: On the news, there is rioting in Levittown over gasoline, people are throwing beer bottles full of gasoline; they explode, it looks like old films of Vietnam or Budapest but is Levittown right down the road, north of Philadelphia. A striking trucker is shown holding up a sign saying TO HELL WITH SHELL. And Three Mile Island leaking radioactive neutrons just down the road in the other direction. The weather for tomorrow looks good, as a massive high continues to dominate from the Rocky Mountain region eastward all the way from Maine. (49)

Located to the northeast of Philadelphia, Levittown is close to Reading (the Rabbit novels all take place in fictional Brewer, which is a stand-in for Reading) and is even closer to Trenton, New Jersey, where Updike’s father had been born. 14 That is to say, the riot, like Three Mile Island (which is only fifty miles from the novel’s setting), occurred in an area with which Updike was extremely familiar. The situation of the Three Mile Island accident, on the other hand, happens to be threatening other areas just by chance due to the direction of the wind, which means that it can also threaten Harry’s home. Consequently, Updike’s depiction of the news report begins to represent the mixed feelings of immunity—the reassurance that the “weather for tomorrow looks good”—and vulnerability that Harry experiences at the outset of the novel. The riot over gasoline in Levittown, however, is also not as reasoned or reasonable as it first seems: shortage of fuel is certainly a serious matter for a truck driver, but throwing a bottle filled with gasoline to get gasoline sounds farcical, probably more so in a text than in a visual image or in reality. Besides, fuel vendors are not the fundamental reason of the shortage: they do

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not have enough gasoline from the Middle East at a price that satisfies the “consumers.” 15 Indeed, Updike unites Harry and the striking truck driver, suggesting how both have virtually proclaimed themselves as powerless and insignificant in the society in which they live. Harry has acquired his wealth and social status in Rabbit Is Rich only by chance and luck thanks to his wife’s family owning the Toyota dealership; similarly, the safety of his home is also left up to chance, the direction of the wind. The threat posed by Three Mile Island reemerges later in the novel when Charles Stavros, an employee at Springer Motors and former lover of Harry’s wife, Janice, mentions a young man who had come into the dealership to buy a snowmobile: Next day, yesterday, kid came in here in a GMC pick-up and said he’d heard we had a snowmobile for sale. It took us a while to find it out back but when we did he got that light in his eyes so I began by asking twelve hundred and we settled at nine seventy-five. I said to him, There isn’t any snow, and he said, That’s all right, he was moving up to Vermont, to wait out the nuclear holocaust. Said Three-Mile Accident really blew his mind. (433)

The young man’s reaction to the threat of the nuclear power plant accident is, at least to some extent, understandable as everyone has the right to escape a potential crisis. At the same time, Vermont is a strange place to choose as a refuge from the threat of radioactivity in Pennsylvania. As Stavros justly says, there is going to be no or little snow because the accident took place in late March, and the boy’s desire for a snowmobile simply reinforces the impression that he is not serious enough about the accident, as if he were half thinking about taking a vacation on the pretext of the fear of a “nuclear holocaust.” The “nuclear holocaust” anticipated by the boy wanting to escape to Vermont in many ways would seem to be the inevitable outcome both of the American lifestyle and of the nation’s policies on the nuclear power. While the specter of nuclear annihilation haunts the novel, Updike’s sense of the contradictions that defined American Cold War politics perhaps emerge most clearly in the arguments that Harry and his son Nelson have over what kind of cars they should be selling, debates that occur throughout both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. Although Harry believes in selling and driving Toyotas in Rabbit at Rest, Nelson considers cars with big engines and convertibles, popular in the 1950s and 1960s, as more suitable for American consumers, and pejoratively talks about the new models of Japanese cars: “They’re still giving us cars that look like gas-misers when there’s been a gas glut for ten years. Americans want to go back to fins and convertibles and the limo look and these Japs are still trying to sell these tidy boxes. And not cheap, either” (36). Behind Nelson’s comment are the assumptions, unquestioned until the energy crises of the 1970s, that economizing on fossil fuel is

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a senselessly miserly thing to do that should be avoided whenever possible and that the value of cars, or merchandise in general, lies in the power they represent, not in their efficiency. He thinks in terms of symbolism nurtured by the old-fashioned cultural politics of the Cold War era, and equates affluence and wastefulness with power. Just after this scornful comment, Nelson refers to Japanese money and nuclear weapons: “Some television show I was watching, they already own all of Hawaii and half of L. A. and Nevada. They’re buying thousands of acres of desert in Nevada! What’re they going to do with it? Set off Japanese atom bombs?” (Rest 37). The mental image of the explosion of the atomic bomb, reminiscent of those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and preceding experiments in Nevada that are repeatedly broadcast in Japan to represent how World War II ended, suggests that he bears in his mind a mirror image of the ressentiment of the Japanese. 16 In Rabbit Is Rich, Buddy Inglefinger, Harry’s acquaintance at the country club, also talks about destroying the economic power and the control over oil of the “Arabs,” as if wealth and resources should naturally belong to Americans like themselves (171, 175). Nelson and Buddy’s shared irritation over Americans’ power and affluence being impinged upon by Japan and OPEC may be idle talk, not worth serious consideration, but their remarks still reveal things about themselves and the culture they live in. Their casual mention of the use of nuclear weapons reveals their lack of imagination over the realities of the danger posed by weapons of mass destruction and of sympathy toward other people. As a result, their view of the world, imbued with the ressentiment similar to that of those who bear grudge against the ways of the Americans, remains too inflexible to allow them to adapt to the new conditions of the world. In the final phase of the Cold War depicted in Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, foreign powers that Americans like Nelson and Buddy had not considered their equal now claim the same kind of rights the Americans had been promoting since the American Revolution, and especially during the Cold War era. The double-bind of Cold War cultural politics, consequently, turns against mainstream Americans. In both novels, Updike represents this shift by the frequent use of mirror-like reversals, such as the aforementioned mental image of American/Japanese atom bombs and the man from Toyota as an uncanny double, which I will discuss in the following section. THE MAN FROM TOYOTA AS AN UNCANNY DOUBLE Natsume Shimada, the representative of Toyota who ends up stripping the Angstroms of their Toyota dealership in Rabbit at Rest, at first appears to be a product of mixed stereotypes. With a conspicuously stereotyped Japanese

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accent, unable to distinguish between “l” and “r,” Shimada criticizes Harry, and Americans more broadly, for having lost their work ethic: Nevertheless, these years of postwar, Japanese, man and woman, have great respect for United States. Rike big brother. But in recent times big brother act rike rittle brother, always cry and comprain. Want many favors in trade, saying Japanese unfair competition. Why unfair? Make something, cheaper even with duty and transportation costs, people rike, people buy. American way in old times, But in new times America make nothing, just do mergers, do acquisitions, rower taxes, raise national debt. (390)

Updike’s characterization of Shimada initially seems stereotypically exaggerated, incongruous with the Updikean style, in which even minor characters are realistically drawn, and unworthy of an author with the international experience and views of the world that Updike possessed. The Rabbit tetralogy’s popularity seems to have bolstered the popular impression that Harry is “a picture of John, if he had been a better basketball player and had married a home-town girl,” 17 but it is the kind of life Updike’s mother, Linda Grace, persistently compelled him to transcend. 18 Harry Angstrom may partly be Updike’s alter ego, but then there are Updike’s other Pennsylvania selves. There is little ground to privilege Harry as being representative of Updike’s views when more intellectually curious and artistically inclined protagonists such as Peter Caldwell or David Kern would seem to be closer to Updike’s own temperament and sensibility. Shimada’s presence in the text, together with his conversations that sound patterned, would more properly be construed as a symbolic nemesis personified as he arrives to hold Harry accountable for Springer Motors going under. The character appears “uncannily” artificial in contrast with other much more realistically portrayed characters in Rabbit at Rest. A Japanese of Shimada’s generation was expected not only to have a good command of English but also to be able to speak like an American in the socio-cultural mainstream. Learning English instead of German and French, which had higher prestige as the foreign languages for higher education, became a norm after World War II, as a part of democratic reform of the country. 19 For the bulk of the novel, however, Shimada is only a signature on the letters from Toyota sales headquarters in California, but he suddenly comes to Harry’s door alone, representing an ominous decision of the corporation. From the perspective of realism, Toyota would have more likely have sent a team of experts, instead of just one representative, first to inspect the flaws of the local dealer’s business and consider possibilities for improvements before making a final decision. To jump to the grim conclusion that the Angstroms should lose the dealership would do harm to the impression of the foreign enterprise among the local population and therefore harm their own business

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in the still rancorous atmosphere concerning the increasing share of imported cars. Such a decision would even hurt Shimada’s own career. While Updike’s depiction of Shimada could be read as a sort of deus ex machina to propel the plot forward—in much the same way that Harry’s sister, Mim, appears in Rabbit Redux to seduce Charlie Stavros to help resolve the plot of that novel—a closer examination of Updike’s depiction of Shimada suggests that he remains central to the novel’s political sensibility. Shimada’s Japanese accent would appear to be a symbolic failure on his part in the post–World War II norm of his home country. It seems suggestive that he sounds complacently didactic, at the same time saying that the United States after World War II was “[l]ike big brother.” In a written text uppercase and lowercase letters are inevitably distinguished, but in a spoken language there can hardly be a clear distinction and much is left for the context. A reader of literature would be reminded of the “Big Brother,” in capital letters, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The association and his ambivalently contradictory attitude toward the United States imply that, having grown up and been educated immediately after the defeat of Japan in World War II and under the Cold War régime of the Western bloc, he collectively represents the repressive experience of being forced to accept the values of his former enemy. In that sense, Shimada’s one-sidedly didactic attitude is a mirror image of the Americans who had once occupied Japan to instill democratic values, a process that had encouraged Japan to accept the American lifestyle and to behave like an American, or become a lesser mirror image of one. Updike’s treatment of Shimada becomes even more complex when we consider how his name is constructed. Symbolically, his name consists of two family names and no given names. Updike may have had Sōseki Natsume (1867–1916), one of the most famous modern Japanese novelists, in his mind when creating the character, for he had recently done a review of his works along with that of Junichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), another major Japanese writer. 20 It is also possible that Updike just took “Natsume” for a given name when he did the review, incorrectly treating “Sōseki,” the writer’s pseudonym standing for a given name, as a family name, as the index of Hugging the Shore suggests. 21 Moreover, it is hard to determine whether or not Updike had realized his error when he created Mr. Shimada, but he could possibly have been informed by the New Yorker, known for its scrupulous fact check, or by his Japanese friends. Whatever the historical fact may have been, from a text-centered perspective, the name of this uncanny character is reminiscent of “William Wilson” of the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Before Joseph Nye proposed the notion of the “soft power” and criticized its relative neglect in recent American politics, the United States government fairly successfully used it in the Cold War policies. Former members of the Axis, especially Japan and West Germany in the Western bloc, had little

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choice other than accepting the American values as prescribed by the Allied occupation forces after losing World War II, and, without Nye’s terminology, the United States was aware that it was better to provide the peoples of former enemies, especially their influential intellectuals, with chances to have access to Anglo-American culture and realize its desirability rather than to force the American way upon the people of the occupied country. 22 The ambivalence of Shimada, however, implies another aspect of the apparently successful socio-cultural policies of the United States on Japan, and, by inference, on other countries of the Western bloc, especially those belonging to the “First World.” Mirroring notions of the Freudian superego, the Japanese of the postwar generation were virtually forced to accept and internalize American values for the country’s survival while also having to convince themselves that it was their choice. Their anti-American sentiments, or ressentiments, were “repressed” in the Freudian psychoanalytic sense. We can see these ressentiments come back in Rabbit at Rest as an uncanny double, a mirror image of the United States at the conclusion of the Cold War era, in the form of Mr. Shimada. They are the products of the double standard, or contradictory norms, of the American way, according to which one is expected to follow the model of the Americans but, at the same time, is prohibited from being fully successful at the attempt, as in the Freudian scheme of the father figure. There is little chance, from the perspective of biographical “facts” concerning the “author,” that Updike was aware of all these cultural facts and repressed ambivalence of the other member of the Western bloc. Updike even says in an interview that his specialty at Harvard Lampoon was Chinese jokes, such as a “little birthday party [in which] the children [and the mother with stereotypically slanted eyes] [are] singing to the center of attention, ‘Happy Birthday, Tu Yu’” and “coolies listening to an agitator and asking each other, ‘Why shouldn’t we work for coolie wages?’” 23 They would have been impermissible today, especially in such an intellectual environment as Harvard, and he would have been too embarrassed to publish them. At the same time, it would also be reasonable to presume that, travelling as a cultural ambassador in the Eastern bloc including the Soviet Union in the mid1960s and then, after the publication of his best-selling novel Couples (1968), living with his family in England and travelling through Europe, he gradually obtained a much wider view of the world through heterogeneous experiences outside the United States. 24 After such experiences abroad, Updike, with a broader understanding of the world outside his own country, gave expression to the ressentiments of the people of the Western bloc outside his country, views that were hardly recognized by the majority of the Americans. Such sentiments themselves may appear “irrational” and unworthy of logical arguments of philosophical thinking, but they nevertheless retain their

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relevance and are suggestive of the political anxieties that permeate the final Rabbit novels. The model of mass consumerism, as propagated by the United States during the early years of the Cold War, had tacitly presupposed the situation that had existed at the end of the Second World War, where the rest of the world could only strive for the economic lifestyle that was available to the average American. In the aftermath of the war, the United States was able to monopolize wealth and natural resources as the rest of the world suffered from the damage incurred during the war, and in many ways the nation’s political perspective on the rest of the world was based on this assumption. If the rest of the world, most of them consisting of the non-white population, were able to imitate successfully the American lifestyle and fully enjoy American-style affluence, as the man from Toyota believes Japan has achieved by the end of the 1980s, then the world we must share is going to be unsustainable. So Updike gives the rest of the world a place in literature, and describes how they are going to come to the affluent Americans’ door as an uncanny double. 25 In this way, Shimada’s appearance in Rabbit at Rest not only serves as a warning to Harry that the United States has lost its competitive edge—that Harry’s beloved nation is as tired and bloated as his body— but it also reflects the changing political realities of the post–Cold War world, where resources will become even more scarce and the United States no longer possesses the power to monopolize them. CONCLUSION While we might assume that American society became divided through the widening economic inequality of the twenty-first century, germs of the negative changes—the ways in which neoliberal economic policies have weakened the middle class that Harry Angstrom belonged to and that was the subject of much of Updike’s fictions—can be felt in Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest as Updike began to address the ramifications of the Cold War’s conclusion. Harry’s ironic comment in Rabbit at Rest on the bliss of having no decisions to make among the “faceless” Americans in the land of the free, then, is not just a cynical paradox but an inarticulate, but instinctively apt, understanding of the sense of national unity that had covered up a fundamental disregard of social inequality, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War (442–43). Although Americans frequently desired a wasteful lifestyle that would either be practically unattainable to other members of the world outside or destined to make the environment unsustainable, they also had to affect the appearance of good citizens willing to pay taxes, both literal and figurative, to support the less fortunate and sustain the social structure as long as the others shared the values of the American way and of the Western

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bloc to keep them on their side. When they victoriously faced the end of the Cold War and lost the enemy needed for the solidarity, they no longer had the use of the double standard or the need to be the Big Brother, or the Freudian father figure, of the “Free World” to convince those on the outside the efficacy of the American consumerism. Nelson’s change in “Rabbit Remembered” (2000), the only text of the Rabbit series set in the aftermath of the Cold War, suggests an alternative for future generations, one that would seem to reject the pressures of neoliberalism. It is a novella, instead of another full-length novel, in which Harry only retains his existence through the shared memories of his two children born of different mothers, i.e., through “intersubjectivity,” the notion Edmund Husserl proposed in the early twentieth century to supplant the solipsistic Cartesian “cogito.” 26 Nelson, a college dropout, former abusive husband and drugaddict, has by the time of “Rabbit Remembered” become a decent person. Although his job as a mental health counselor is not as profitable as his former role at Springer Motors, he is now a “caregiver,” as his half-sister Annabelle calls it, comparing his position with her own job as a nurse. 27 He accepts Annabelle as his sister, though she could have been an intruder into the affluent family environment of the Springers, consistently richer than the Angstroms throughout the Rabbit series, and together they share their memories of Harry, who was not a good father when alive. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Nelson seems to realize that there always are people who need care and social tie, a sharp rejoinder to the emphasis on the individual wealth and responsibility that neoliberal economic and political thought emphasizes. NOTES 1. I also mention Harry’s pessimism regarding the end of the Cold War as the starting point for my essay “Reisen-shūketsu to John Updike-teki Chūsan-kaikyū-no Henshitsu” [“End of the Cold War and Changes of the Quality of the John Updikean Middle Class”], Yureugoku “Hoshu”: America-bungaku to Shakai [The Wavering “Conservative”: American Literature and the Society], ed. Kazuhiko Yamaguchi and Takashi Nakatani (Yokohama: Shunpū-sha, 2018), 214–16. The arguments in the essay in Japanese will supplement this study, in which I discuss Updike’s attempts to look back at and sum up the Cold War socio-cultural politics of his own country. 2. John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich (New York: Knopf, 1981), 3. Subsequent quotations appear in parenthesis. 3. D. Quentin Miller, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 67. 4. Springer Motors, once owned by Harry’s father-in-law, is mentioned just as the source of a relative economic advantage of the Springers over the Angstroms in Rabbit, Run (1960). In Rabbit Redux (1971), it remains a bourgeois environment, at least for the daughter of the owner of the business, where Harry’s wife, Janice, has an affair with Charles Stavros, who also works at the lot. In Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, on the other hand, Updike seems to have hit upon another literary use for it resulting from the passing mentions of Toyotas in Rabbit Redux and the energy crisis of the late 1970s, which he apparently could not have anticipated when he was working on the first two novels of the series. The rise and fall of its business point both to

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disparity between the situation of a nation or a society and that of an individual and to their mutual correspondence, and this reminds the reader of the contrast between the successful Apollo mission and Harry and his father losing their jobs, the son paying little attention to the national “victory.” 5. John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 353. Subsequent quotations in parenthesis. 6. In Rabbit Angstrom (1995), the anthology of the Rabbit Tetralogy published five years after Rabbit at Rest, the text of the latter scene is substantially revised and a neoliberalist axiom “Dog eat dog” is added after Harry’s question. His comment, “It becomes hard now to find stations on the radio that are not country music or religion” (Rest 443; Angstrom 1452), immediately follows. The native son of southeastern Pennsylvania’s pessimism shown in the quote above can be regarded as a prediction of the emergence of neoliberalism in the United States after the Cold War era, and the textual revisions in the anthology emphasize the point. See John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (New York and Toronto: Everyman’s LibraryKnopf, 1995), 1452. 7. Marshall Boswell, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 220–22. 8. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 20–24. 9. See Sigmind Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 217–56. 10. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 220–26. 11. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 234, 36. 12. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 241, 46. 13. Updike, Rabbit, Run, 30–31. 14. Adam Begley, John Updike (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 42. 15. In this study I will not go into a politico-economic analysis of the fuel shortage other than what we can see from perusal of the texts of the latter two Rabbit novels. 16. Updike could hardly have been informed of the images of the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki repeatedly broadcast in Japan but, as we can see in the mentions of the image of John F. Kennedy’s assassination persistently shown on television in Couples, he was undoubtedly aware of the power of the images disseminated through media. 17. “View from the Catacombs,” Time (April 26, 1968): 74. 18. Begley, John Updike, 47–48. 19. See Matsuda, Taibei-Ilzon-no Kigen, 86–88, 129–34. He asserts that, in the US cultural policies, Japanese cultural élites’ preference of German and French to English, representing materialistic American culture, was associated with the influence of Marxism among them. 20. John Updike, “Spent Arrows and First Buddings,” in Hugging the Shore (New York: Knopf, 1983), 723–30. 21. Updike, Hugging the Shore, 913. 22. Matsuda emphasizes the role John D. Rockfeller III played in convincing Japan to embody the American values with a variety of cultural policies that primarily aimed at the intellectuals, who were more influential in Japan’s socio-cultural context, and implies that it was more significant than that of Douglas MacArthur and the power under his command, which was, in spite of the general’s symbolical “dominance” during the country’s occupation, even harmful to the US cultural politics of the Cold War era (71–73). I will not go into detailed discussions of the US cultural politics concerning Japan and East Asia both during the occupation of Japan and in the interwar periods. They deserve separate studies, which I am planning to undertake. 23. Charles Thomas Samuels, “The Art of Fiction,” in Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 23; emphasis original. The first cartoon is reprinted in Frank Gabo, ed., A Conversation with John Updike, The Idol, Special Ed. 47 (Spring 1971): 28. 24. Begley, John Updike, 251, 257, 263–65, 294–318.

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25. Ironically, Japan and the Japanese are suffering problems similar to those represented in Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, with the accident at Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant and manufacturers of electric and electronic devices such as the television losing superiority in the market to manufacturers in South Korea and China: Japan’s present crises are mirror images of the Americans in the late 1970s and 1980s. 26. Updike’s use of Husserlian “intersubjectivity” to counteract loss, death, and “nothingness” is to be seen, for example, in his short story “The Witnesses,” in Museums and Women and Other Stories (New York: Knopf, 1972), 70–77: the main character at the end suggests, “. . . I wanted you and Jeanne to see us before [our relationship] went bad . . . [s]o it wouldn’t be totally lost” (77). 27. John Updike, “Rabbit Remembered,” in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, “Rabbit Remembered” (New York: Knopf, 2001), 247.

WORKS CITED Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001, 217–56. Gabo, Frank, ed. A Conversation with John Updike, The Idol, Special Ed. 47 (Spring 1971). Kierkegaard, Søren. The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion. Translated by Alexander Dru. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Matsuda, Takeshi. Taibei-Iszon-no Kigen: America-no Soft Power Senryaku [The Origins of Japan’s Reliance on the United States: America’s Soft-Power Strategies]. Tokyo: IwanamiShoten, 2015. Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Nakatani, Takashi. “Reisen-shūketsu to John Updike-teki Chūsan-kaikyū-no Henshitsu” [“End of the Cold War and Changes of the Quality of the John Updikean Middle Class”], Yureugoku “Hoshu”: America-bungaku to Shakai [The Wavering “Conservative”: American Literature and the Society], ed. Kazuhiko Yamaguchi and Takashi Nakatani (Yokohama: Shunpūsha, 2018), 213–41. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 2013). Samuels, Charles Thomas. “The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike.” Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1994, 22–45. Updike, John. “On Not Being a Dove.” Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989. ———. Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. New York: Everyman’s Library-Knopf, 1995. ———. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Knopf, 1990. ———. Rabbit Is Rich. New York: Knopf, 1981. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf, 1971. ———. “Rabbit Remembered.” Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel.New York: Knopf, 2000, 177–359. ———. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1960. ———. “Spent Arrows and First Buddings.” Hugging the Shore. New York: Knopf, 1983, 723–33. ———. “The Witnesses.” Museums and Women and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1972, 70–77. ———. “View from the Catacombs.” Time. April 26, 1968: 66–75.

Chapter Fifteen

John Updike and the World The Politics of Identity in Brazil Pradipta Sengupta

Of all relations the most universal is that of identity, being common to every being whose existence has any duration. —David Hume, 1739

Any great writer possesses the capacity to telescope the regional and the national, the national and the international, and of course, the temporal and the universal. John Updike has successfully struck a balance among all these qualities throughout his prolific career. In his memoir “A Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” (1965), Updike recalls how his rural Pennsylvania “boyhood was spent in a world made tranquil by two invisible catastrophes: the Depression and World War II.” 1 These two geopolitical catastrophes went a long way to condition the sensibility of Updike, which accommodated the social and political changes in the world around him. Similarly in his later memoir SelfConsciousness (1989), Updike gives vent to the changes that were taking place in American culture, changes that also conditioned his literary sensibility in terms of the social, religious, cultural, political and historical evolution of America amply reflected in most of his novels: If there was one lesson my upbringing has instilled it was our earthly insecurity: a Depression, a disease, a swindler smarter than we can come along and take everything from us. My father was a patriot: he had been in 1918 to board the troop ship in World War I; when McCarthyism had imposed a loyalty oath on public-school teachers in Pennsylvania, he had taken it without demur. [. . .] He was loyal, and so was I. I would rather live under Diem (or Ky or Thieu) 245

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Updike had a sense of his nation’s relation to the rest of the world, and betrayed no qualms over his undiluted loyalty. Moreover, Updike’s preoccupation with national politics may be attested by the consistent presence of American presidents in his works. 3 It is particularly toward the second half of his literary career that we notice a growing penchant for moving his fiction outside of the United States, as exemplified by The Coup (1978), Brazil (1994), Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and The Widows of Eastwick (2008). Another hallmark of a great writer lies in the variety and complexity of his work’s themes and preoccupations. While Updike was incontestably one of the major American writers to portray middle-class American suburban domesticity from its very center, and while he on his own admission refers to his preoccupation with the three secret things, namely sex, religion, and art, Updike was too expansive as to be put within the straitjacket of some rigid, stereotyped rules and formulas. Other preoccupations emerged, such as computer technology in Roger’s Version (1986) and Villages (2004); political issue as in The Coup; racial issues as in Brazil; and even global terrorism as in Terrorist (2006). To pigeon-hole Updike as a regional writer, or to confine his potential to just a few thematic concerns, would be unjust. Especially since Updike used the very cosmos of domesticity to explore and debate the chaos of politics, race, gender, technology, and even global terrorism. While in the first half of his literary career Updike remains faithful to realism, in terms of his faithful and comprehensive representation of middleclass white Americans, toward the second half of his career he casts his net wide to conflate fantasy with realism on the one hand, and to accommodate the alien with the American on the other. Thus, despite his continued regard for realism, Updike seems to be somewhat inauthentic in his depiction of foreign culture and its people, as we find in The Coup and Brazil. Updike’s “undovish” stance to the Vietnam War proved instrumental in chiselling out the second half of his career. 4 The ongoing tension of the Vietnam War that pervaded America also percolated through Updike’s writing, particularly in these novels which accommodated racial, cultural, and political issues in addition the problems of domesticity. In The Coup, for example, the underlying political conflict becomes more important than the East-West encounter. In this novel Updike examines American whiteness through a black perspective by setting his novel in a fictional African space called Kush. Furthermore, it is in these novels that Updike also deals with black foreigners, and in so doing, these texts broach more complex issues of race and identity than his previous work.

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This essay attempts to show how identity politics plays a vital role in John Updike’s Brazil. Criticism on Brazil has tended to focus on the novel’s mythological references. Jack De Bellis, for example, considers its relocation of the Tristan and Iseult myth crucial to the novel’s structure: “The novel is more than an updating of the legendary lovers, though, for the violence and manners of Rio and the mysterious folkways of Brazil’s interior are crucial determinants in the tragedy.” 5 Following the same line, James Schiff considers it as a re-enactment of the Tristan and Iseult myth, and offers us the similarities between them, but rightly points out, “Updike’s crucial addition to the story is the introduction of race; his lovers are separated not by laws of adultery and loyalty, but by class and race.” 6 In fact, Updike himself admits, “Brazil retells the story of Tristan and Iseult if their romance is allowed to age into marriage.” 7 Michiko Kakutani, in her review of Brazil, is scathing: “Couched as a retelling of the Tristan and Iseult legend, Brazil begins as an arch fairy tale and ends as a modern-day soap opera full of racial and sexual clichés.” 8 In her ultimate analysis, Kakutani condemns it as an “ugly” and “repellent” novel incapable of anything noteworthy. But she fails to realize one of the basic concerns of this novel: Updike’s preoccupation with race couched in a wonderful interplay of colors, and the oft-used symbolic black and white colors in particular. Kakutani argues, “To make matters even worse, the characters are defined almost entirely in terms of the color of their skins.” In fact, one prominent aspect of this novel is how Updike presents race not only socially and culturally, but through the lens of a visual artist and through the symbolic use of colors (about which I shall discuss later). William Pritchard considers it Updike’s “least successful, certainly least humorous novel.” 9 In reference to both Updike’s The Coup and Brazil, Jay Prosser argues: “These novels are illuminating less of Africa and Brazil than of America’s ideals and failures. Inside a racial unconscious Updike has replicated otherness but also fictionalized solidarity.” 10 What most critics have failed to notice is the rankling politics of identity that emanates out of this racial difference, and which pervades the novel with a disturbing, sombre effect. To understand the quality of Updike’s engagement with the politics of identity, it is imperative to have a nodding acquaintance with some of the research carried out in this area. While race and ethnicity are symptomatic of collective identities related to larger political differences, in Brazil racial difference is evinced through singular characters rather than a collective group. And yet this focus on the individual does not exclude the locus of discrimination, deprivation, oppression and exclusion experienced by a marginalized ethnic community. Jane Davis, in The White Image in the Black Mind, argues that the basic premise of “whiteness study” should be “an examination of how assumptions about identity are at the foundations of white privilege and bigotry.” 11 In her

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research she has identified four traits as being the dominant stereotypes of whites in the black mind: the overt white supremacist, the hypocrite, the good-looking weakling, and the liberal. 12 In her essay “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” bell hooks argues that the study of whiteness by the black people in the United States was “to help black folks cope and survive in a white supremacist society.” 13 Both Jane Davis and bell hooks assume white supremacy as a prerequisite for what is known as “whiteness study.” But while this research deals with an examination of whiteness from the black perspective, as examined usually by a black character set created by a black writer, in Updike’s The Coup and Brazil we find how a black character created by a white writer examines and interrogates the whiteness from a black perspective, and in a non-native setting outside America. Suffice it to say, for any attempt at examining the white through the lens of the black, or vice versa, raises problems for a genuine politics of identity. Updike’s Brazil, with its black hero and white heroine, provides a good case for such a study. Recent scholars have contributed to understanding the subtle distinctions that exist within the broad umbrella of race. Michael Banton has argued that race presupposes differences between people, and is the premise for disempowerment and discrimination. Banton makes an elaborate attempt to distinguish between the subtle differences of what race means as descent, as type, and as subspecies. 14 In his poststructuralist research, Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues, “The sense of difference defined in popular usages of the term ‘race’ has both described and inscribed differences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, and gene pool, as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes such as rhythm, athletic ability, celebration, usury, fidelity, and so forth.” 15 Couze Venn offers another way to distinguish between identity and subjectivity, implying that subjectivity is a matter of positionality. According to Venn, “The term subjectivity refers to the entity constituted as a position with regard to real processes and mechanisms of constitution of subjects generally.” 16 Identity, on the other hand, “refers to the relational aspects that qualify subjects in terms of categories such as race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, work and occupation, and thus in terms of acknowledged social relations and affiliations to groups.” 17 Venn further suggests the correlation between identity and subjectivity: “Subjectivity and identity are necessarily interrelated. [. . .] Together they institute subjects as specific selves.” 18 Identity, Venn claims, “is guided by the recognition that in the background of the problem of identity one finds quite basic questions about the ‘who’—of action, of agency, of lived experience, the one who answers the call to responsibility—about belonging and ontological security, questions that are as old as the emergence of human self-consciousness.” 19 Helen Scott, however, argues, “The ideology of race served to justify the denial of rights to slaves

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[as] defenders of slavery categorized blacks as a ‘subhuman’ group consequently undeserving of bourgeois rights” (173). In a “Special Message” for the Franklin Library, Updike recorded how certain racial stereotypes accompanied the genesis of Brazil: In my youth [. . .] I had a dream of exceptional penetration and power. I dreamed of a medieval knight who spied a dusky lady at a joust or castle feast and pursued her all the way across the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and Southeast Asia, until at last dying, he saw her, from behind a screen of tropical growth, disrobing and bathing in the sea that lapped one of the Polynesian islands. She was home, and he was far from home. I awoke, and told myself with amazement that I had dreamed a novel. This adolescent feat of subconscious imagination, which I have never forgotten, contributes to Brazil its yearnings for distances and its vision of an undeviating fidelity. 20

And despite having a sort of Coleridgean genesis of “Kubla Khan,” supposed to have been originated in a dream, Updike’s Brazil is steeped in reality rather than in exotic fantasy, for as Updike comments, “I refuse to disown my Brazil as unrealistic.” 21 Adam Begley in his biography of Updike reports that Updike visited Brazil for a tour for a week in March 1992, and that it provided him with the direct impetus for the book. As regards the genesis of the novel, Updike’s sources were eclectic: apart from the Medieval Tristan and Iseult legend, Updike relied on Tristes Tropiques, by Claude LeviStrauss; The Masters and the Slaves, by Gilberto Freyre; Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha; Through the Brazilian Wilderness, by Theodore Roosevelt; Elizabeth Bishop and the editors of Life, among others. A cursory glance at these sources may well hint at Updike’s preoccupations in this novel: re-enactment of the myth of Tristan and Isabel, class consciousness, power politics, defiance of power, etc. But as we go through the novel we realize how other preoccupations like racial consciousness and politics of identity predominate. Brazil broadly retells the myth of Tristan and Iseult with an altogether different spatio-temporal and socio-cultural parameter. On the Copacabana beach Tristao Raposo, the black hero, is attracted toward the beauty of a white girl, Isabel Leme, the daughter of an affluent father who remains absent from the family because of his business. Updike thus infuses the racial difference into the novel by selecting a black hero and a white heroine. The exotic setting of the novel and its shift from Medieval Ireland to contemporary Brazil accounts for its universal appeal. Due to the absence of her father and the early death of her mother, Isabel is brought up by her Uncle Donaciano, who embodies white culture and white supremacy in the book. While Tristao initiates Isabel into sex, it is the racial difference that proves the greatest impediment to their marriage. Their marriage is initially resented by Uncle Donaciano, and later more vehemently by Isabel’s father. Unable to

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negotiate with the claims of her white family, Isabel ultimately elopes with Tristao. The novel offers us faithful portraits of the exotic landscape of Brazil, and is suffused with ample references to folklore and myths typical of Brazil. As the lovers flee to the jungle, they are being pursued by Uncle Domiciano’s henchman, and the novel offers us spine-chilling accounts of their adventurous escapades and Tristao’s occasional bouts of violent bravadoes. Although he initially manages to slay his pursuers and ekes out a living by mining gold, he gets thoroughly disenchanted with his encounter with the grim reality. To cope with their grinding poverty and particularly to bring up her children, Isabel resorts to prostitution. Later Isabel is forced to marry a white master who virtually turns Tristao into one of his slaves. He also puts chains on Tristao’s legs so as to avert his further escape. In order to stave off the pursuit of her uncle and to ensure Tristao’s freedom as a black slave, Isabel changes her color from white to black through the magical feat of an Indian shaman, a change which also eventually leads to the change of Tristao’s color from black to white. And yet, despite this perfect disguise they cannot avert their tragedy upon their return to Rio. Ironically, Tristao is killed by the same black boy toward whom he feels a kindredness, but who takes him to be a white man because of his present white skin. But my stake in this article is that Brazil turns out to be a book about racial prejudice and politics of racial identity camouflaged as a romance. The white-black double helix with all its contrastive binaries is nothing new to Updike. Both in life and in fiction Updike has happily accommodated both black and white together. Thus in Rabbit Redux Skeeter easily enters Rabbit’s family, and it is through the correspondence between Rabbit and Skeeter that one comes to know about the black perspective on war. Jack de Bellis rightly claims that Rabbit Angstrom “depicts the American evolution during 1959–90 from racial distrust and violence toward accommodation.” 22 One of Updike’s daughters (Elizabeth) married a Ghanaian husband, and he dedicates Self-Consciousness to their children and his grandsons, John Anoff Cobblah and Michael Kwame Ntiri Cobblah. Updike was happy about this interracial marriage and the changes it betokened for him: “When I think of my own unconscious attitudes toward blacks, and my children’s attitudes, and what their children’s attitudes will likely be, I can’t help feeling that there has been a general improvement.” 23 The most conspicuous presence of the black in Updike’s fiction is incontestably Skeeter in Rabbit Redux. Possibly modeled on the black Marxist Stokely Carmichael, Skeeter is the most eloquent of black presences in Updike. This binary appears in The Coup, too, when the Black Muslim Oscar X detests Col. Hakim Felix Ellelou’s proximity to the white Candace Cunningham. The black/white binary may also be found in Updike’s short stories “A Gift from the City” (The Same Door) and “The Doctor’s Wife” (Pigeon Feathers). And in Brazil the black Tristao is promoted to the status of the hero.

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Under the ostensible veneer of a romance between a black man and a white woman, Brazil is splintered with political issues. The novel opens with Tristao and his half-brother Euclides on the Copacabana beach. Lured by the beauty of the white Isabel, Tristao offers his ring which he had stolen from a wife to Isabel. When her friend Eudoxia requests Isabel not to accept the ring as it might be stolen, Euclides makes a dig at the colonial enterprise, and sardonically retorts: “The world itself is stolen goods. All property is theft, and those who have stolen most of it make the laws for the rest of us” (8). Later Uncle Donaciano makes a cryptic reference to ineffectual student politics to Isabel: “I expect, you will entertain leftist fantasies and engage in antigovernment protests, demanding land reform and the cessation of atrocities against the Amazonian Indians” (25). In Ursula’s shanty Euclides in his characteristic cheek offers a scathing criticism of the politics of class-consciousness: “Beasts such as we are generally safe from the operations of bourgeois guilt. Marx says that sickly philanthropy is worse than blunt, healthy oppression, which at least alerts the working class to the war that exists” (41). Similarly, there are sporadic references to random political discussions made by Isabel’s friends at their rendezvous, an ice-cream parlor, the Sorveteria Janio Quadros, supposed to have been named after a Brazilian president. One could find posters of Brigitte Bardot and Fidel Castro on the walls of the parlor (97). Isabel’s friends like Nester Villar and Sylvio make ample references to global politics. For example, Nester Villar critiques Socialism: “If Socialism were to take on a human face, it would vanish—bup, poof! The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot afford to have its subjects to be human—it must have robots on the bottom, and monsters on top” (98). One may be tempted to argue that Villar here acts as Updike’s political spokesman to give vent to his anti-Marxist mentality, something that may also be attested by Updike’s support for the American participation in the Vietnam episode. These overt political issues in Brazil also hint at the covert politics of identity evinced through the race relations permeated through the novel. For example, we find the first inkling of the politics of racial identity at the very outset when the black Tristao is head over heels with the white Isabel during their first meeting on the Copacabana beach. Isabel’s acceptance of Tristao as her lover and husband initiates the cultural and racial polarity that ultimately precipitates the politics of identity in the novel. The fact that Isabel’s white family abhors and rejects the black Tristao fuels his identity crisis, which is further aggravated when, after his elopement with Isabel, her uncle sends a henchman to trace them. Brazil strikes us at the outset as a novel of colors. With his intrinsic knowledge of an artist and his penchant for the visual, Updike has presented the racial difference through a wonderful use of colors. As Schiff so cogently argues, “Brazil attempts to de-emphasize racial difference and suggest that we are all connected with one another as mixed combination of colors.” 24 At

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the outset we find how on Copacabana beach “all colors merge into one joyous, sun-stunned flesh-color, coating the sand with a second living skin” (3). Isabel is in “a black straw hat,” while Tristao wears “a sun-faded orange” T-shirt (4, 5). The merging of colors may be interpreted in postcolonial terms, a blurring of identities or a random conflation of cultural identities or what has been broadly described as hybridity, syncretism, liminality, and so forth, although these terms are certainly loaded with much more connotations and meanings than this broad generalization. In a culturally plural land as Brazil it is quite natural that Updike creates interplay of various colors, the most prominent of them being black and white. After having a shower in Isabel’s bathroom, Tristao “saw himself cut into slices of white and black” in the mirrors of the room (16). The Manichean duality of Tristao’s identity is symbolically evoked through the duality of colors. The bifurcated reflection of Tristao into black and white may simultaneously hint at the racial bifurcation, Tristao’s fissiparous identity, a denial of his unified identity, the duality of his position in an alien land, and so forth. The white Isabel, too, experiences a double consciousness after her liaison with the black Tristao, and Updike presents this duality of her consciousness in artistic terms: “Isabel saw her whiteness wedged between brown and black, a human bridge receiving traffic in two directions” (49). And it is this duality of their consciousness that also triggers off the duality of their identity which in this novel is always in a state of flux rather than being a monolithic construct. In spite of their love equation, both Tristao and Isabel become increasingly aware of their distinct cultural identity evoked through the use of black and white. Racial difference presupposes cultural difference which in turn precipitates difference of their identity status. And whenever there is a difference, there is the implicit or explicit play of politics in terms of contestation and/or appropriation of power. Thus, Tristao’s invective at Isabel borders on this politics of identity: “You think because I am black and come from the favela I have no shame, no civilization” (50). Any perceptive reader cannot but notice how this comment betrays Tristao’s intrinsic inferiority complex. It also captures the psychological drive of a black man to cling to his civilization and his cultural roots. Hounded and pounded by the precariousness of his marginalized racial identity, Tristao finds it almost impossible to find any room for himself in a land which, despite its vastness, is alien to him. As he says: “I see no place for us, vast as this land is” (113). Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony” has turned out to be a useful vehicle for articulating how power relations work through such acts of marginalization. Rather than kowtow to the supremacy of an autocratic rule, hegemony operates through concord which ultimately leads to an acceptance of the ideals of the dominant group by the subaltern or minority groups. And yet, it does admit the possibilities of conflict and contestation in the very process of its modus operandi. Shortly after meeting Isabel’s uncle Donacia-

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no, Tristao cannot but realize how he becomes subservient to her uncle who virtually rules the roost in her life. Thus Donaciano assumes the role of a hegemonic center, while Tristao is relegated to a peripheral, marginal status. Later Isabel’s father Salomao assumes a hegemonic role and tries his best to counsel his daughter in shedding his black suitor: “You will not throw away your life on a black slum boy. You will not see Tristao again” (73). When Isabel broaches the possibility of eloping with Tristao, pat comes her father’s threat to kill him: “Then this Tristao, whom we can now identify and trace, may painlessly disappear” (74). If a hegemonic relation manifests through striving toward concord through acceptance, much later Isabel has no other choice but to accept Antonio as her husband. Applying the insights of Gramscian hegemonic relations, Arjuna Parakrama advocates the possibility of constructing counter-hegemony and varied versions of hegemony. Parakrama argues that “counter-hegemony or alternative hegemony has been explained only in terms of organized and systematic, even class-based, resistance.” 25 Tristao’s attempts to resist the attempts of Isabel’s uncle may be interpreted in terms of his construction of a counter-hegemony. The way in which Isabel defies the claims of her, and elopes with her black suitor, is indisputably an attempt to defy the apparatus of hegemonic power assumed by her father and her uncle. Knowing the full consequences of her act, Isabel extricates herself, as it were, from the dominance of her guardian, and by accepting a black man as her husband, creates a counter-hegemony. Homi Bhabha and John Comaroff advocate what they call minoritarian agency, which is “‘genuinely protective’ in the sense that its identifications are open to historical contingency and its affiliations are genuinely open to the agnostic and antagonistic process unleashed in the search for solidarity.” 26 Perhaps the most conspicuous articulation of black /white identity binary has been made by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon argues that every black man is haunted by a desire to appropriate the whiteness of the white. Colors, for Fanon, are codes of cultural constructs. “I will say,” Fanon contends, “that the black is not a man.” He continues: “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell.” 27 Fanon thus relates the virtually non-existent status of a black man in terms of negation, nullity and absence. Interestingly, both Fanon and Updike hint at a sense of freedom through a flight from authority. In fact, this image of flight—be it Rabbit’s flight from his family in Rabbit, Run or the physical flight of Apollo 11 in Rabbit Redux or the flight of Sarah Worth from her husband Charles in S.—attests to the quest for freedom in Updikean characters. Fanon, on the other hand, advocates a need for bridging the cultural hiatus pre-existing among heterogeneous cultural groups, so as to strike a sense of evenness and equality. Fanon’s

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reaction against the pre-existing notion of white supremacy also reinforces a sense of freedom from the reign of a predominant culture. The insights of Fanon may thus help interpret the problematic of racial unevenness in a new angle. Tristao’s shift of color from black to white is possibly the most crucial and controversial point of identity crisis in this novel. After their color swapping both Isabel and Tristao have a slightly different experience of sexuality. Isabel contemplates on his previous erotic encounters and compares them with the present: “Being a white woman fucked by a black man is more delicious [. . .] than a black woman being fucked by a white man” (204). Interestingly, this contrast between the past and the present experience of sexuality has been conceived of in political terms: “The former, to a descendent of the masters of colonial Brazil, had the exaltation of blasphemy, the excitement of political defiance; the latter transaction savoured of mundane business” (204). While at the physical level Tristao may have been compelled to resort to such a color swapping to avert the pursuit of his followers and to ensure his safety, he has been psychologically impelled, as it were, to appropriate the status and power symbolized by the color white. As Fanon describes this psychological drive in the black to assume and approximate the power symbolized in white, and vice versa: “The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level.” 28 But Fanon categorically condemns this act of shifting and transformation, and maintains a neutral objective stance: “To us, the man who adores the Negro is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him,” and conversely, “the black man who wants to turn his race white is as miserable as he who preaches hatred for the whites.” 29 Fanon’s theoretical assumption proves true for Tristao who becomes a miserable victim through his death because of this color swapping. Tristao’s death may also be interpreted in terms of the erasure of a marginal ethnic cultural group (here, an individual) by a predominant hegemonic group. In other words, a black man’s frantic effort to ensure security and power in a predominantly white culture through a desperate attempt of appropriating the cultural and social norms of the latter is denied and thwarted, and his sense of cultural identity is reduced to nothingness through his death. One may also take note of Updike’s use of language in Brazil. As Jack De Bellis comments, “Updike writes the story in an approximation of the courtly language of the medieval tale of the lovers. Consequently, it gives the impression of being translated from another language.” 30 Brazil bristles with typically local words and phrases: farinha, senhorita, acaraje, malagueta, caruru, dende, boite, garimpeiro, camarada, favela, bandeirantes, pardovasco, to name only a few. They invest the novel with a distinct cultural aura induced by such words and phrases, because words offer us the snatches of a culture. The use of language can be at once utilitarian and strategic. “To speak a language,” Fanon argues, “is to take on a world, a culture.” 31 To

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substantiate his point, Fanon continues: “Historically, it must be understood that the Negro wants to speak French because it is the key that can open doors which were still barred to him fifty years ago.” 32 Before assuming his office as an ambassador in Afghanistan, Isabel’s father began to learn Persian and Pashto languages (75). While this is prompted by his utilitarian necessity, given the cultural plurality to which Brazil is exposed, this may be interpreted as another attempt at cultural appropriation through linguistic appropriation, or just another political imperialistic strategy to rule over a nation and her people in a better and more comfortable way. Tristao’s marriage to Isabel may also be interpreted in Fanonian terms as a black man’s desire to possess and enjoy the white woman, the very embodiment of white civilization. In his chapter “The Man of Color and the White Woman”—a chapter whose very title dovetails into the Tristao-Isabel love story—Fanon subjectively relates the experience of a black man who desires for a white woman: “I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine” (63). For Fanon, the blackness of a black man has ontological implications: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. [. . .] The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other.” 33 Going by Fanon’s line of argument, we may say that Tristao realizes that he is incapable of offering a resistance to the hegemonic white culture. Rather than register a resistance, Tristao adopts the more enviable process of appropriating the whiteness of the white culture, both literally and mentally, so as to approximate to the same status of power and authority, as it were. Perhaps the most controversial and telling event in the novel is this change of color of Tristao and Isabel through the magical manoeuvrings of a shaman. 34 Fanon further points out how “[i]n the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” 35 White being the color of privilege, power, and affluence, Tristan’s change of color may be interpreted in political terms as his (and the third world’s) attempt to appropriate the hegemony of the privileged power structures in a postcolonial scenario. Suffice it to say, in an alien land with a culturally alien wife Tristao, too, feels precarious, or what Fanon calls “certain uncertainty.” Throughout the novel, we find Tristao to be a fugitive lover, courting his white beloved rather unsteadily, and flying from one place to another to avoid the formidable pursuit of Isabel’s father and uncle. Furthermore, in a predominantly white culture, Tristao finds his cultural identity at stake, and to avoid the total erasure of his identity, he resorts to switch over to the powerful camp of the

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white identity by changing his color. Although ironically this precisely leads to his unfortunate death, it also attests to the fact that Tristao, the black protagonist, fails to reconstruct his identity at his own sweet will in a predominantly white culture. 36 Significantly enough, the change of their colors leads to attitudinal and even positional change. Tristao, with his physical change from black to white, assumes all the concomitants and associations connoted by the color white. This external change punctuated with their inner change leads to a reversal of their roles and identities. As the narrator puts it: Who were they, these psychic shapes each to be defined by the invasion of the other? With different skins came different glands, different smells, different hair, different self-images, different histories. (203)

Much to his surprise Tristao realized that Isabel “was no longer the color of something he was travelling toward, but of something he had left behind” (203). There was also an inversion in their sexual experience, “He had been ‘top’ before; now it was she who dominated and demanded” (204). In their reversed colors and roles, both become the reflectors of their previous selves and identities. Tristao can see his former self-image, as it were, through Isabel’s present form, and vice versa. This shift of colors, along with the switching over of their identities, also gives them the scope of self-analysis, introspection and self-criticism. As the narrator puts it: He, too, had felt the something brutish in his former appeal to her. He had not been insensitive to the burden her loss of social position has placed on his shoulders—the flattering wreath of martyrdom it enabled her to wear—or to the indignities of her whoredom at the mine and her concubinage at the camp. Had he not been black, would she have been so easily and serenely unfaithful? (205)

Similarly, in this reversed role, he “descended, to accept a nigger wench as his mate; it was he who now tasted the thrill of sexual release when the loved one is not a social and spiritual equal but a thing of flesh, imported from afar” (205). Thus Tristao’s former self gets mirrored through Isabel’s present self, and in this process he can reconstruct his former self-identity through the present image of Isabel. In Brazil Updike constructs, shuffles, reverses and reconstructs the identity status of the hero and the heroine in a dizzyingly plural world chiselled as much by political derivatives as by cultural derivatives. Tristao may embody the essence of a liminal border-crossing experience recorded in mestizo theory. Gloria Anzaldúa in her famous book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza describes the Mexican American border as a contested liminal site “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third

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country—a border culture.” 37 The black Tristao’s love and sexual experiences with a culturally different white girl in a culturally plural land as Brazil may be well akin to Anzaldúa’s description of a border culture, permeating the perpetual politics of identity inherent in this typical black-white doublehelix experience. What Alfred Arteaga talks about Chicano writing and the mestizo body may well be the case of Tristao with his heterosexual experiences in a new land: “The mestizo body is made through sexual intercourse, specifically through biologic interplay of different sexes through heterosexual reproduction.” 38 Along with their reversal of attitudes and roles, both Tristao and Isabel experience in the other a replica of their own identity. Thus, in present Isabel Tristao finds an imposition of his former self-image, and conversely, in present Tristao Isabel finds an overlapping of her former self-image. Seen from this angle, both may be said to have experienced what Arteaga calls the “mestizo body.” This complex blurring of identities leads to a sort of liminality of identity which complicates their intrinsic politics of identity. NOTES 1. John Updike, Assorted Prose (New York: Knopf, 1965), 153. 2. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 1989), 126. 3. One may refer to the debate between John Hook and Stephen Connor over the issues of President Lincoln, President Buchanan, the welfare state and the sordidness of slavery in The Poorhouse Fair. Updike reverts to the central character of President Buchanan in his novel Memories of the Ford Administration, and also in his only play Buchanan Dying which wonderfully dramatizes the guilty pangs of Buchanan over the death of his beloved Ann Coleman. In Memories of the Ford Administration Updike dwells on the agonies of civil distress and its concomitant effect on President Gerald Ford. Similarly, Couples has a reference to President J. F. Kennedy’s assassination. But Updike’s presentation of these political issues was essentially from the perspective of a writer, and not that of a politician. “Generally speaking, I try to be useful to my society by telling the truth in fiction without being a politician,” he had said to Willi Winker, and thus his novels try to maintain the objective stance of a writer whose very sensibility is wrought by the things happening around his contemporary America (Plath, Conversations 173). Similarly, Updike’s growing concern over Vietnam finds vivid manifestation in the character of the black Vietnam veteran, Skeeter, in Rabbit Redux. The Vietnam War is also alluded to in The Witches of Eastwick in which Ed Parsley, the Unitarian minister, shows his antipathy to war and speaks against it. 4. Self-Consciouness, 117. 5. Jack De Bellis, The John Updike Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), 75. 6. James Schiff, John Updike Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1998), 168. 7. John Updike, More Matter (New York: Knopf, 1999), 829. 8. Michiko Kakutani, “Tristan and Iseult as Latin Lovers,” New York Times, January 25, 1994, C19. 9. William Pritchard, Updike: America’s Man of Letters (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 301. 10. Jay Prosser, “Updike, Race, and the Postcolonial Project,” 76. 11. Jane Davis, The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), xiii. 12. Davis, 3–4.

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13. bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination” in Killing Rage (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 33. 14. Michael Banton, “The Idiom of Race: A Critique of Presentism,” in Theories of Race and Racism, eds. Les Back and John Solomos (New York: Routledge, 2000), 61. 15. Henry Louis Gates, “Writing ‘Race’ and Difference It Makes,” in Race, Writing, and Difference, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5. 16. Couze Venn, Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity (London: SAGE Pub., 2000), 79. 17. Venn, 79. 18. Venn, 78. 19. Venn, 78. 20. Updike, More Matter, 827–28. 21. Updike, More Matter, 829. 22. De Bellis, Encyclopedia, 8. 23. Adam Begley quoting Updike, “Romancing Mr. Updike,” Mirabella (February 1994): 72. 24. Schiff, John Updike Revisited, 169. 25. Arjuna Parakrama, De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)Colonial Englishes about “English” (London: McMillan, 1995), 60. 26. Homi Bhabha and John Comaroff, “Speaking in Postcoloniality, in the Continuous Present: A Conversation,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, eds. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002), 17. 27. Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 8. 28. Fanon, 9. 29. Fanon, 8–9. 30. De Bellis, 76. 31. Fanon, 38. 32. Fanon, 38. 33. Fanon, 110. 34. The desire to change one’s color is more than physical, and is indisputably driven by cultural and social derivatives. As Fanon notes, “For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for ‘denegrification’; with all the earnestness in the world laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction. Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historicracial schema” (111). 35. Fanon, 110–11. 36. In this context one may refer to the anonymous black narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In a predominantly white American society he feels so slighted and neglected as to render him metaphorically invisible. Similarly, Yank, the black character in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, cannot establish a meaningful communication in the posh 5th Avenue society, pervaded by the white, and finds his kindredness in the caged gorilla that ultimately kills Yank. 37. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute, 1994/1987), 2. 38. Anzaldúa, 25.

WORKS CITED Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1994/1987. Arteaga, Alfred. Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Banton, Michael. “The Idiom of Race: A Critique of Presentism.” Theories of Race and Racism, eds. Back and Solomons. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000, 51–63. Begley, Adam. “Romancing Mr. Updike,” Mirabella (February 1994): 72. Bhabha, Homi, and John Comaroff. “Speaking in Postcoloniality, in the Continuous Present: A Conversation.” Relocating Postcolonialsim, eds. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002), 15–46. Burns, Allen. Colour Prejudice. London: Allen & Unwin, 1948. Davis, Jane. The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. Fanon, Franz. Black Skins, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and Difference It Makes.” Race, Writing, and Difference, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 1–20 Gramsci, Antonio. “The Formation of Intellectuals.” Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. 5–13. Greiner, Donald J. Adultery in the American Novel: Updike, James, and Hawthorne. Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Hooks, Bell. “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Killing Rage. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Kakutani, Michiko. “Tristan and Iseult as Latin Lovers.” New York Times, January 25, 1994. Kingsolver, Barbara. “Desire under the Palms.” New York Times Book Review, February 6, 1994: 1, 26. Novak, Michael. Review of Couples, from The Critic, June/July 26, 1968, 72–74. Parakrama, Arjuna. De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)Colonial Englishes about ‘English.’” London: McMillan, 1995. Plath, James. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Pritchard, William H. Updike: America’s Man of Letters. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Prosser, Jay.“Updike, Race, and the Postcolonial Project.” The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, ed. Stacey Olster. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1998. Scott, Helen. “Was There a Time before Race? Capitalist Modernity and the Origins of Racism.” Margins: Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 167–84. Updike, John. The Poorhouse Fair. New York: Knopf, 1959. ———. The Same Door. New York: Knopf, 1959. ———. Pigeon Feathers. New York: Knopf, 1962. ———. Assorted Prose. New York: Knopf, 1965. ———. Couples. New York: Knopf, 1968. ———. Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf, 1971. ———. Buchanan Dying. New York: Knopf, 1974. ———. The Coup. New York: Knopf, 1978. ———. The Witches of Eastwick. New York: Knopf, 1984. ———. Roger’s Version. New York: Knopf, 1986. ———. S. New York: Knopf, 1988. ———. Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf, 1989. ———. Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Knopf, 1992. ———. Brazil. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. More Matter. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. Terrorist. New York: Knopf, 2006. ———. The Widows of Eastwick. New York: Knopf, 2008. Venn, Couze. Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity. London, SAGE Pub., 2000.

Index

“The Afterlife,” 162, 167–171 The Afterlife and Other Stories, 6, 148, 161, 162 Allende, Salvador, 218 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 256–257 Amin, Idi, 218–219, 224, 231n29 Americana, 5, 61, 66–70 American exceptionalism, 2 Apollo 11, 31, 94, 100, 105 Apollonian vs. Dionysian, 43, 53, 55 Aristotle, 125 Armstrong, Neil, 95, 108n13 Arteaga, Alfred, 257 Atwood, Margaret, 11, 162 Auden, W. H., 62, 76 Bakshi, Ralph, 217 Baldwin, James, 17 Banton, Michael, 248 Bardot, Brigitte, 251 Barre, Siad, 220–221 Barth, Karl, 32, 155, 209 Baudrillard, Jean, 72, 187, 194 de Beauvoir, Simone, 169, 170 Bech is Back, 201, 210 Beerbohm, Max, 62 Begley, Adam, 27, 31, 40n19, 130, 143n26, 249 Beigbeder, Frédéric, 180 Bernstein, Carl, 31 Bhabha, Homi, 253

Bishop, Elizabeth, 249 Bloom, Alan, 157, 160n25 Booth, Wayne, 170 Brazil, 6, 164–165, 179, 246–257 Bryan, William Jennings, 117–118 Buchanan Dying, 3, 16, 19, 27, 28, 43, 131–137 Buchanan, James, 16, 17, 19–20, 27, 28–29, 30, 35–38, 43–58, 131–142, 143n33, 257n3 “The Bulgarian Poetess,” 6, 176n13 Bush, George H. W., 4, 12, 14, 17, 152, 153 Bush, George W., 14, 71, 187 Butler, Judith, 161 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 50, 57 Carmichael, Stokley, 102 The Carol Burnett Show, 97, 98 The Carpentered Hen, 2, 61, 62 Carson, Rachel, 63 Castro, Fidel, 65, 251 The Centaur, 2, 28, 44, 139, 145, 179 Civil Rights Movement, 130 Civil War, 19, 28, 36–37, 43–44, 47, 57, 69, 83, 93, 104 Cixous, Hélène, 52 Cleaver, Eldridge, 102 Clément, Catherine, 52 Clinton, Bill, 17, 21–22, 69, 153

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Index

Cold War, 2, 3, 23n1, 62, 65, 95, 99, 147, 159n15, 233–242, 243n22 Conrad, Joseph, 66–67 Coover, Robert, 22 The Coup, 19, 146, 159n15, 179, 215–229, 246, 247, 250 Couples, 5, 17, 28, 82, 85, 115, 119–122, 163, 164, 179, 240, 257n3 Cunha, Euclides, 249 Davis, Jane, 247–248 DeLillo, Don, 180, 195n17, 196n29 Deng Xiaoping, 147 Dickinson, Emily, 54–55 Didion, Joan, 1 Doctorow, E. L., 112 “The Doctor’s Wife,” 250 “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” 129 Douglas, Mary, 183, 190 Douglass, Frederick, 123 Dubus, Andre, III, 180 Durkheim, Emile, 81–82, 87–88 The Early Stories 1953–1975, 2 Eisenberg, Deborah, 180 Endpoint, 61–62, 70–76 “Eros Rampant,” 130 Facing Nature, 65 Fanon, Franz, 123, 253–255, 258n34 Farrakhan, Louis, 84, 226 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 180 Ford, Gerald, 16, 29–30, 43–44, 47–48, 132, 141, 257n3 Freud, Sigmund, 234 Freyre, Gilberto, 249 Fromm, Erich, 81–82, 87–88 Fukushima, 7, 244n25 Gaddafi, Muammar, 219, 220, 224 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 248 Gertrude and Claudius, 246 “A Gift from the City,” 250 Gilligan, Carol, 161 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 172 Gilson, Erinn, 161 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 12 Gramsci, Antonio, 252 Grosz, Elizabeth, 163

Gulf Wars, 62, 72 Haas, Richard N., 3, 4 Hamid, Mohsin, 180 Harvard Lampoon, 240 Harvey, David, 147, 158, 159n6 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 58, 145, 146 Heller, Joseph, 216 Hemingway, Ernest, 65 “The Hillies,” 82, 85, 86, 130 Hofstadter, Richard, 83 “The Holy Land,” 201, 210 hooks, bell, 248 “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time,” 3, 131 Hugging the Shore, 114, 239 Humphrey, Hubert, 15, 33 Huntington, Samuel, 205 Husserl, Edmund, 242, 244n26 hygiene, 182–194 identity politics, 6 individualism, 2–3 In the Beauty of the Lilies, 158 International Relations theory, 202 Irigaray, Luce, 163 Jackson, Andrew, 13, 44, 53–54, 57, 58, 138–139 Jefferson, Thomas, 113 Johnson, Andrew, 13 Johnson, Lyndon B., 15, 19, 33–34, 109n38, 132, 147, 150–151, 201, 207 Kakutani, Michiko, 108n9, 179, 247 Kennedy, Edward, 31 Kennedy, John F., 13, 17–18, 28, 62, 120, 121, 195n17 Keohane, Robert, 202 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 219 Kierkegaard, Søren, 189, 234 Kimball, Roger, 112 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 130 Kissinger, Henry M., 216–218, 230n8, 230n10 Korean War, 56 Kubrick, Stanley, 217 Kutler, Stanley, 28, 37

Index liberal world order, 3–4 Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, 148 Lincoln, Abraham, 13, 22, 134, 143n33 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 249 Lewinsky, Monica, 13 Lewis, Sinclair, 87 Long, Huey, 86 Lysistrata, 44, 55–56 Mailer, Norman, 11, 22, 94, 137 Malcolm X, 84, 227 “Marching Through Boston,” 130 Marx, Karl, 125, 216, 224, 251 Marxism, 217, 220, 222, 228 McCann, Sean, 13 McCarthy, Joseph, 87 McGovern, George, 15, 33 McKinley, William, 54 McPherson, James M., 44 Memories of the Ford Administration, 1, 11, 16, 19–20, 22, 27–39, 43–58, 131, 132, 138–142 Midpoint, 61, 65 Miller, D. Quentin, 3, 11, 18, 23n1, 129, 130, 134, 140, 215, 233 Minh, Ho Chi, 246 Mohammed, Warith Deen, 226 A Month of Sundays, 19, 27–31, 146 Morrison, Toni, 1, 17 Muhammad, Elijah, 226 Muhammad, Wallace Fard, 226 Mullin, Amy, 183–184, 185 Narayan, R. K., 116 NATO, 4 neoliberalism, 6, 146–158, 201, 202 New Deal, 117, 124, 147 Nixon, Richard, 11, 13, 19, 27–28, 30, 32, 35, 37–39, 93, 108n11, 216 Noriega, Manuel, 154 Nye, Joseph, 239–240 Obama, Barak, 13, 14, 22, 74–76 O’Connell, Mary, 162 Of the Farm, 171, 176n18 O’Neill, John, 204, 212n8 O’Neill, Joseph, 180

263

“On Not Being a Dove,” 15, 32, 37, 107, 130, 142, 151 Orwell, George, 239 Paglia, Camille, 43–47, 53, 55 Parakrama, Arjuna, 253 Paris agreement, 3 Pigeon Feathers, 38 Pinochet, Augusto, 218 Poe, Edgar Allan, 239 The Poorhouse Fair, 11, 28, 44, 61, 117–119, 123, 139, 257n3 Qutub, Sayyid, 208 Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy, 250 Rabbit at Rest, 2, 12, 14, 17, 19, 108n9, 109n25, 146, 148, 152, 159n4, 234, 237–240, 242n4 Rabbit is Rich, 2, 16, 19, 159n4, 188, 233, 235–237, 242n4 Rabbit Redux, 19, 28–29, 31, 33–34, 81–88, 93–107, 107n4, 122, 123, 131, 159n15, 176n12, 195n19, 239, 242n4, 250, 253 “Rabbit Remembered,” 17, 20, 242 Rabbit, Run, 28, 44, 61, 96, 100, 105, 125, 139, 195n19, 242n4, 253 Rabelais, 164 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 12–13, 146–147, 148, 150, 151–158 Roger’s Version, 145–158 Roosevelt Democrats, 129 Roosevelt, Theodore, 13, 249 Roth, Philip, 1, 11, 108n7, 137, 155, 159n23, 201–202, 210–211, 217 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 113 San Bernardino shooting, 203 Sanders, Bernie, 14 “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” 162, 171, 173–175, 176n20 Scarlet Letter trilogy, 27, 29, 145 Schlesinger, Arthur, 2 Scott, Helen, 248 Self-Consciousness, 3, 32, 114, 116, 124–125, 130, 151, 245, 250 “Separating,” 34 sexual politics, 4

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Index

Shultz, George, 112 Sōseki, Natsume, 239 Spiegelman, Art, 180 Steele dossier, 12 Strand, Mark, 67 Stevenson, Adlai, 15 Tanizaki, Junichirō, 239 Tannenhaus, Sam, 93 Tax Reform Act of 1986, 147, 159n9 Telephone Poles, 61, 63 Terrorist, 68, 146, 149, 157, 179–194, 201–212 Thatcher, Margaret, 147 Tiananmen Square, 12 Tillich, Paul, 119 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 50, 57, 120, 125 Tossing and Turning, 65 Toward the End of Time, 146, 149, 158 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 3 “Tristan and Iseult,” 162, 163–166, 170, 183 Trump, Donald, 3–4, 12–15, 81, 82, 86–87 Trust Me, 148 US Postal Service, 111–126

“Varieties of Religious Experience,” 209 Venn, Couze, 248 Vidal, Gore, 11 Vietnam War, 2, 11, 15, 19, 28, 32, 33, 65, 94, 95–96, 98, 101, 103, 122–123, 130, 131, 133–134, 137, 141, 148, 151, 201, 207, 246 vital center, 2 voting, 2 vulnerability, 6 Washington, George, 53, 139, 205 Watergate, 28, 34, 37, 151 Weber, Max, 117 Whitman, Walt, 13 The Widows of Eastwick, 2, 246 “Wife-Wooing,” 38 Winkler, Willi, 2 The Witches of Eastwick, 19 Wolfe, Tom, 83–84 Wood, Gordon, 113 Wood, James, 179, 180 Woodward, Bob, 31–32 World War II, 1, 3, 69, 72, 87, 150, 154, 172, 173, 237, 238–240, 245

Contributors

Marshall Boswell is professor of English at Rhodes College. He is the author of two works of literary scholarship: John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (2001) and Understanding David Foster Wallace (2004). He is also the author of two works of fiction, Trouble with Girls (2003) and Alternative Atlanta (2005). With Stephen Burn, he is the coeditor of A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (2013) and the editor of David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels (2015). Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at Troy University. He is the author of Reading Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not: Glossary and Commentary (The Kent State University Press, 2017) and is the editor of the American Literature in Transition: 1970–1980. His most recent book is William Faulkner (2018). Scott Dill is a lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University. His work has appeared in Boundary 2, Christianity & Literature, Critique, Literature and Theology, Religion and Literature, The John Updike Review, and essay collections on John Steinbeck and Don DeLillo. He is the author of A Theology of Sense: John Updike, Embodiment, and Late Twentieth-Century American Literature (Ohio State, 2018). Biljana Dojčinović is professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology, Belgrade University in Serbia. She was one of the founders of the Women’s Studies Center in Belgrade, as well as the Indoc Center in Association for Women’s Initiative. She is the director of the national project Кnjiženstvo—theory and history of women’s writing in 265

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Contributors

Serbian until 1915 and editor-in-chief of Knjiženstvo, A Journal in Literature, Gender and Culture. She has been a member of the John Updike Society since its founding, one of the editors of The John Updike Review since 2010, and one of the JUS directors since 2014. She has been publishing on John Updike since 1984, and her PhD thesis on John Updike’s narrative strategies was published as a book The Cartographer of the Modern World (in Serbian) in 2007. Dojčinović has published numerous articles in Serbian and in English on Updike, modernism, women’s writing, as well as six other books. Michial Farmer is assistant professor of English and the director of the honors program at Crown College. His book Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Work was published in 2017 by Camden House Press. He lives in Minneapolis. Ethan Fishman was a retired professor of political science at the University of South Alabama. Among his numerous publications are Likely Stories: Essays on Political Philosophy and Contemporary American Literature (University of Florida Press, 1989) as well as The Prudential Presidency: An Aristotelian Approach to Presidential Leadership (Praeger, 2000). Yoav Fromer is a fellow and a visiting lecturer at Tel Aviv University. He teaches American Studies, Literature and Politics. He is the author of several articles that explore the relationship between literature and political thought and have been published (among other places) in Modern Intellectual History and The Journal of American Studies. He is currently working on a book examining how literature influenced the policies of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Yoav also writes about politics and culture for the Washington Post and Tablet Magazine. Jo Gill is associate dean and professor of twentieth-century and American literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics (University Press of Florida, 2007), The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (2008), and The Poetics of the American Suburbs (Palgrave, 2013) and has published essays on a number of other modern poets. She is currently completing a book on Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination. Louis Gordon holds a master’s in Professional Writing (Fiction) and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Southern California. He teaches Middle East Politics in the Department of Political Science at California State University at San Bernardino, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His work has appeared in such publications as The Forward, International Journal of Comic Art, Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Report, The

Contributors

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Journal of Israeli History/Studies in Zionism, Midstream, Middle East Quarterly, New York Sun, Pasadena Star-News, Tikkun, and Times of Israel. He has a chapter in Claudia Bruehwiler’s and Lee Trepanier’s recently published Political Companion to Philip Roth (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) and is the co-author with Ian Oxnevad of the recently released Middle East Politics for the New Millennium (Lexington Books, 2016). Sylvie Mathé is professor emerita of American Literature at Aix Marseille Univ, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France. She is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and she has previously taught at Oxford University, Yale University, Wellesley College and MIT. She wrote her PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne on “The Daily and the Sacred in John Updike's Fiction.” She is the author of various articles on Updike in French and in English as well as of the only monograph written in French on Updike, John Updike: La Nostalgie de l’Amérique (Paris: Belin, 2002). She is a member of the editorial board of The John Updike Review and is a founding member of the John Updike Society. From 2008 to 2014 she was editor in chief of the online journal E-Rea. Though Updike is not her only center of interest and she has published on a wide range of American writers, he remains the “Midpoint” of her academic geography. Takashi Nakatani is associate professor of English at Yokohama City University, Japan, where he teaches American literature, literary theory, and film studies. He received undergraduate and postgraduate education at the University of Tokyo. His publications include “Metamorphosis of Yoknapatawpha Leading to Absalom, Absalom! What the ‘Water’ and the ‘Mask’ Explored in Faulkner’s Experiences in New Orleans,” Faulkner no. 19 (2017) in Japanese, whose English version is to follow at the website of the William Faulkner Society of Japan. Judie Newman is emeritus professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham. Her recent publications include Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge, 2013), Public Art, Memorials, and Atlantic Slavery (with C-M Bernier, Routledge, 2009) and Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire (Routledge, 2007). Together with CelesteMarie Bernier and Matthew Pethers she edited the Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She has published a book (John Updike, Macmillan, 1988) and ten subsequent critical essays on John Updike and was a founding director of the John Updike Society. Her awards include the Arthur Miller Prize in American Studies and the OBE.

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Contributors

James Schiff is professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and has published five books on contemporary American fiction, including John Updike Revisited and Understanding Reynolds Price. His work has appeared in American Literature, The Southern Review, Tin House, Critique, Studies in American Fiction, and elsewhere. In 2016 he was named by the John H. Updike Literary Trust to edit a volume of Updike’s letters. He also serves as editor of the John Updike Review and as a consulting editor of Critique and Philip Roth Studies. Pradipta Sengupta is an associate professor of English at M.U.C. Women’s College, Burdwan, West Bengal, India. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on “The ‘Hawthorne Novels’ of John Updike” from the University of Burdwan. He also completed a postdoctoral research project on “Recasting Contemporary America: A Study of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Tetralogy’” as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow from Osmania University Center for International Program, Hyderabad, during September–October 2013. He has published national and international articles on Keats, Hawthorne, Tagore, Dickens, Robert Frost, Peter Carey, Joseph Heller, W. B. Yeats, Emerson and Updike, including publications in such journals as The Belgrade BELLS and The John Updike Review. Sengupta has prepared study materials on the select poetry of W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost for M. A. students of Directorate of Distant Education, The University of Burdwan. Matthew Shipe is a senior lecturer and the director of Advanced Writing in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote his dissertation on John Updike’s collected short fiction, and his work has appeared in The John Updike Review, Philip Roth Studies, A Political Companion to Philip Roth (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), Critical Insights: Raymond Carver (Salem Press, 2013), Roth and Celebrity (Lexington Books, 2013), and Perspectives on Barry Hannah (University Press of Mississippi, 2007). In 2015, Shipe won the John Updike Review’s Emerging Writers Prize for his essay “The Long Goodbye: The Role of Memory in John Updike’s Short Fiction.” He currently serves as president of the Philip Roth Society and is on the executive board of the John Updike Society. He is also on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies and is a consulting editor for Critique. Aleksandra Vukotić is assistant professor of American Literature in the English Department at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. She has taught courses in English, Irish and American Literature, from Shakespeare’s major tragedies to contemporary American fiction. She is the author of Don DeLillo and the Poetics of History, a monograph written in Serbian (Akademska knjiga, 2018). Her current research focuses on the interfaces between contemporary anglophone literature and film, media and technology.