I lived and breathed John Updike for a year,when I chose his Rabbit novels as the subjects of my undergraduate Honours thesis. I think it must have been around 1994, when I was 22. Uncertain about whether I really wanted to be a lawyer, I deferred my law studies to spend a year in the English faculty. (As it happened, I did finish my law degree... but I'm not a lawyer.)

 Anyway, without taking the time to read it closely, to find and edit out those elements that I would probably find embarrassing a decade and a half later, I thought I might post my thesis (it's rather long) over a few days. I'm sure it's not of interest to everyone, and perhaps it's not of interest to anyone! It is, after all, an academic paper - therefore, it is intentionally boring, and has undergraduate literary theory shoe-horned into it. But John Updike died today, and he meant a lot to me. I learned a great deal from him. And so, for what little it's worth, as my little piece of remembrance, I thought this thesis might as well be in a public place, rather than just in a filing cabinet somewhere at my old University!

I think it will end up being in five parts; this introductory chapter, three main ones, and a concluding one.

On a technical note: I apologise in advance if some footnoting has not worked as well as it should. I am not sure that I've converted the word document into HTML well enough for that.

I will add forward and backward links to the other parts as I post them up!

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A self-portrait

Eddie Pritchard seemed to be taunting me when my first books met the criticism that I wrote all too well but had nothing to say: I, who seemed to myself full of things to say, who had all of Shillington to say, Shillington and Pennsylvania and the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say, and who had seen and heard things in my two childhood homes, as my parents' giant faces revolved and spoke, achieving utterance under some terrible pressure of American disappointment, that would take a lifetime to sort out, particularize, and extol with the proper dark beauty. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea - this odd and uplifting line from among the many odd lines of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" seemed to me, as I set out, to summarize what I had to say about America, to offer itself as the title of a continental magnum opus of which all my books, no matter how many, would be mere instalments, mere starts at the hymn of this great roughly rectangular country severed from Christ by the breadth of the sea.

John Updike, Self-Consciousness, pp. 97-8

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Introduction

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. Psychology and X-rays bring up some portentous shadows, and demographics and stroboscopic photography do some fine breakdowns, but for the full parfum and effluvia of being human, for feathery ambiguity and rank facticity, for the air and iron, fire and spit of our daily mortal adventure there is nothing like fiction... the inner lives of the obscure... have been, from the New Testament on, the peculiar and precious burden of the Western narrative imagination.

John Updike, "The Importance of Fiction"

He writes copiously, and always has. "As a student at Shillington High, he became the mainstay of its weekly Chatterbox, first as a sports cartoonist, then as its editor, contributing countless drawings, articles, and poems. In his senior year, topping off his straight-A career as class president, he found time to write forty-five poems for his newspaper." His time at Shillington High was followed by an equally, if not more, productive period at Harvard, where, as well as managing a fairly distinguished academic career, he furnished the University's magazine, Lampoon, with "seven color illustrations for the magazine's cover, over 100 cartoons and occasional drawings, 60 poems, and 25 articles and short stories."

And professionally, John Updike has written a stupendous volume of work: some twelve novels, a play, ten collections of short stories, several collections of poetry, and a few collections of criticism, memoirs and other essays, plus some children's books and numerous uncollected stories, essays, articles, and reviews. His first novel, A Poorhouse Fair (1959), was well received both critically and by the public, but it was for his second that a really warm reception was reserved. This was Rabbit, Run (1960, revised and reprinted 1965). It tells the story of Harry 'Rabbit` Angstrom, former high-school basket ball hero, now steadily declining and not too happy about it father of one, married, and feeling trapped.

The sheer bulk of Updike's output makes a comprehensive examination of his work a rather arduous; the full length treatises of his work which began appearing earlier in his career have ceased to do so as his literary corpus has expanded, with a greater emphasis on more focussed essays the apparently preferred means of tackling his work. For my part, I propose to focus on his Rabbit tetralogy: Rabbit Run and its three sequels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1982), and Rabbit at Rest (1990).

While the public response to Updike's work has been, with only a few exceptions, very positive, there has smouldered a mild critical controversy about its value. The controversy is pointed to by Robert S. Gingher in his article "Has John Updike anything to say?"; too many critics, Gingher argues, have dismissed Updike as "a remarkably skilled writer, but... hardly an author at all" (as D. J. Enright put it). What these adverse critics believe, essentially, is that Updike's formidable stylistic skill conceals an "avoidance, accomplished with a scrupulous cunning and high-wire grace... of the supreme task and burden of literature: the appropriation and transfiguration, in one way or another, of suffering, conflict, disaster and death..." Because there is little dispute, even amongst his harshest critics, that Updike is very skilled indeed. "One appreciates Updike's... skillful manipulation of the familiar conventions of realism much as one appreciates an Olympic diver's perfectly executed jack-knife. Sheer competence counts for something", one critic has written. And Gingher reports, 'A few examples of critics who recognise his stylistic talent are Mary McCarthy, who praises and defends his style; Arthur Mizener, who considers him to be today's "dazzlingly talented young man" in prose fiction; and Richard H. Rupp, who remarks that Updike "probably has more sheer talent than any other writer of our time."'

What the critics seem to be objecting to is the traditional nature of Updike's work. Charles B. Harris, such a critic, has written:

Such observations are not intended to disparage writers who continue to offer what George J. Searles in Philip Roth and John Updike calls "the novel's traditional pleasures"... But in literature, as in athletics, virtuosity advances the state of the art. In exhausting the conventions of the epic, Milton brought that genre to a kind of conclusion. Similarly, it might be argued that Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, et al., brought the conventional realistic novel to a kind of conclusion, obligating the next generation of writers, the Joyces, Kafkas, and Woolfs, to scale new heights of formal virtuosity in order to prevent the novel from going the way of the epic. By ignoring modernist modes, Updike and Roth write novels that are formally retrograde - no matter how thematically up-to-date - whose effect on the historical development of the genre is negligible. In an era of triple gainers, the limitations of the jackknife, no matter how competently performed, become increasingly apparent.

As Harris himself indicates, though, Updike's books "continue to be published, praised... purchased... read... and analyzed". In his view, this is in spite of their "reactionary approach to fictional form". It may be, though, that Updike's popular success, so far from being despite his "reactionary approach", is caused by it. "A small-town tragedy... convincing, vivid and awful" is the praise recorded on the rear cover of my paperback edition of John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Convincing: doubtless the Times Literary Supplement critic who wrote these words found the novel realistic, and this, I expect, would be a typical response to all of the Rabbit novels: they are realistic. But what does the term "realistic" mean? In the context of literature, this question becomes exceedingly difficult to answer, and our instinctive appraisal, "Rabbit is realistic", quickly forces us to confront a thorny problem indeed.