This is part 3 of 5. The first two parts are here and here.

2. Updike's realism, Updike's naturalism

Updike's Realism  

Are defecation, tipsy bar babble, days of accumulating small defeats,and tired, compromised, smelly connubial love part of our existence? Then put them into literature alongside of Homer, says Ulysses. Has a life been ill-spent in snobbery, inaction, neurasthenia, and heartache? Then make that life into a verbal cathedral, says Remembrance of Things Past. Do pathetic and senseless-seeming murders appear daily in the newspapers? Then show the humble aspirations and good intentions and small missteps that inexorably lead to such ruin, say Tess of the D'Ubervilles and An American Tragedy.

John Updike, "The Importance of Fiction"

Despite the effective denunciation of the realist philosophy by modern science, Updike's work does retain many qualities which are reminiscent of the early realist works.There does appear to be a striving for objectivity, at least where Rabbit is concerned; we are never really allowed to pity him. This renunciation of pathos re Rabbit is, however, contrasted with the sorrow we are allowed to feel for some other characters. Declaring a passage to be emotionally charged is an activity fraught with mischief, but a sense is gotten, I think, that Rabbit's emotions are curious but not to be taken as moving - Updike tends to place Rabbit under a microscope. This is in part due to Rabbit's own view of the world; he attempts clumsily to understand rationally the world, in spite of his recurring sensation that there is some secret, some joke, to which he is not privy. Beyond this, though, Updike does seem deliberately to refrain from giving emotional magniloquence to Rabbit's feelings in a way that he does not always do for the other characters. Ruth is an excellent example:

`I'll tell you,' he says. `When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery.' The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool-water is sealed into her mouth. `If you have the guts to be yourself,' he says, `other people'll pay your price.'

This part of the text has an extraordinary force, and perhaps needless to say, this type of pathos is not a typical part of the realist repertoire, since it deviates from their ideal of objectivity.

On the other hand, the sense that Rabbit is under a microscope reminds us of the realist mode: Zola used to say that his novels were "scientific experiments." Sometimes in Rabbit the voice of the experimenter can be heard. Just from time to time, we hear it; wise, sad, rueful - "we contain chords someone else must strike" ; "How sad, how strange. We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation" ; "we are cruel enough without meaning to be." Such thoughts generally coincide with Harry's, but they are distinct from his. True, much of the text records Harry's point of view in words Harry himself would never use, but these others seem to be the authorial consciousness coming through. The voice is poetic. Authorial declaration in a realist work is certainly not unusual, but it tends to be along the lines of "it is a truth universally acknowledged..." - a statement about the material world, and hardly poetic. In interceding with so poetic and wistful a voice, Updike draws the reader away from the empirically knowable world and into a more subjective one; the statement that "a man's appetite's diminish, the world's never" is not referable to anything like objective observation; it stems from one subjective consciousness, and is verificable only in the equally subjective consciousness of a reader.

This, it must be said, differs but little from such psychologically laden realism as, say, Dostoevsky's. And indeed in one sense this is Updike's mode, a realism of the human psyche. The ordinary man. We ask what ordinary might mean. It has been said that Rabbit is Updike's conception of Updike minus his talent, and maybe this is true. The ordinary man, the talentless man, but with a past - "I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did." - that leaves him with a sense of his own uniqueness, "his sense of miracle at being himself, himself instead of somebody else, his old inkling, now fading in the energy crunch, that there was something that wanted him to find it, that he was here on earth on some kind of assignment." Perhaps Updike is doing the same thing as the old realists, enunciating a truth that has been too much neglected; the truth that the ordinary man too has a sense of his own uniqueness, that behind the world of work and days is - something.

When Updike wrote,

I was stimulated to put down, always with some natural hesitation and distaste, these elements of an autobiography. They record what seems to me important about my own life, and try to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world. A mode of impersonal egoism was my aim: an attempt to touch honestly upon the central veins, with a scientific dispassion and curiosity

he referred not to the Rabbit novels but to his book of memoirs, Self-Consciousness. Nonetheless, his words very directly bring to mind allegations such as Charles B. Harris', that Updike is "merely" a realist - "a scientific dispassion and curiosity." But the view of an individual human life that the words suggest gives us an important clue to the creation of Rabbit. Superficially, Rabbit bares only a limited resemblance to Updike himself. It is not necessary to look too far into Updike's biography to see that Rabbit is different; Rabbit, for starters, is an athlete, or at least a former athlete, Updike was not. Though Rabbit is not unintelligent, we are certainly never persuaded that he has the kind of undeniable intellect that Updike possesses - Rabbit at Harvard is fairly inconceivable. Rabbit never suffered the skin affliction psoriasis which Updike shares with a few of his other characters; Updike's stuttering problem, which other of his characters have also been imbued with, is also absent from Rabbit's life. Marital failure is certainly not far from Rabbit, but Rabbit never divorces; Updike has, several times, and so have by far the majority of his fictional creations.

But these are non-correlations of a purely physical nature. Surely, it could be argued, there are psychological correlations. This is, I think, indeed the crux of Updike's transmutation of realism, for the important action of the tetralogy has less to do with the plot than with the meanderings of Rabbit's consciousness. The vagaries of his thought processes have a stamp of truth upon them, a frankness, let us say honesty, which is reminiscent of the physical "realism" of the realists. Of course, the "realistic" nature of Updike's presentation of Rabbit's inner self is only subjectively verificable - a reader cannot truthfully say, "this is how men think" but merely, "this reminds me of how I think." This distinction is significant. It doesn't matter whether Updike's rendition of post-fifties America is physically accurate; contemporary science has established that objectivity is impossible. Updike's approach to the Rabbit tetralogy emphasises not objective realities but subjective ones. By taking such an approach, Updike at least partially defuses the main objection to realism, the objection that there is no such thing as "scientific dispassion".

We can see an example of the shift from objectivity to subjectivity in Updike's revision of another American tradition, the tradition of listing. This tradition, or perhaps, more properly, this habit, of American writers to respond to the extraordinary wealth of the New World by merely listing diversities extends back as far as writing does in America. Captain John Smith wrote the first book about America that was actually written there, A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting of that Colony (1608). A more general text of his appeared in 1616, A Description of New England. Smith recounts what he saw on the new continent:

the herbs and fruits are of many sorts and kinds, as alkermes, currants, or a fruit like currants, mulberries, vines, raspberries, gooseberries, plums, walnuts, chestnuts, small nuts, &c, pumpkins, gourds, strawberries, beans peas, and maize; a kind or two of flax, wherewith they make nets, lines, ropes, both small and great... Oak is the chief wood... fir, pine, walnut, chestnut, birch, ash, elm, cyprus, cedar, mulberry, plum tree, hazel, sassafras, and many other sorts... Eagles, gripes, divers sorts of hawks, cranes, geese, brants, cormorants, ducks, gulls, turkeys, dive-dappers... whales, grampus, porpoises, turbot, sturgeon, cod, hake, haddock, coal[-fish], cusk or small ling, shark, mackerel, herring, mullet, bass, pinnas, cunners, perch, eels, lobsters, mussels, whelks, oysters, and divers others, &c.

The tendency to simply list as a method of conveying the natural wonderment and sense of ever-blessedness which the first colonists must have felt at the plenty which surrounded them was retained by later writers. Whitman is an obvious case of this. Updike has his own use for the tradition. The sense of plenty is retained, but the sense of joy he discards. "WINN DIXIE. PUBLIX. Eckerd Drugs. K Mart. Wal-Mart. TACO BELL. ARK PLAZA. Joy Food Store. Starvin' Marvin Discount Food Wine and Beer." Interrupting the litany of commercial plenty are Rabbit's thoughts.

Among the repeating franchises selling gasoline and groceries and liquor and drugs all mixed together in that peculiar lawless way they have down here, low pale buildings cater especially to illness and age. Arthritic Rehabilitation Center. Nursefinder, Inc. Cardiac Rehabilitation Center. Chiropractix. Legal Offices - Medicare and Malpractice Cases a Speciality. Hearing Aids and Contact Lenses. West Coast Knee Center. Universal Prosthetics. National Cremation Society. On the telephone wires, instead of the sparrows and starlings you see in Pennsylvania, lone hawks and buzzards sit. Banks, stylish big structures in smoked glass, rise higher than the wires with their glossy self advertisements. First Federal. Southeast. Barnett Bank with its Superteller. C & S proclaiming All Services, servicing the millions and billions in money people bring down here along with their decrepit bodies, the loot of all those lifetimes flooding the sandy low land, floating these big smoked-glass superliners... Banyan trees fascinate Harry, the way they spread by dropping down vines that take root, they look to him like enormous chewing gum on your shoe... Development! We're being developed to death.

Rabbit's interceding reflections are probably more significant than the objects listed, and in any case the objects of the list tend to correspond to Rabbit's prevailing preoccupations - death, old age, the decline of America into soulless commercialism. Thus, where Smith with his listings aimed at a "description of New England", Updike aims at an enunciation of Rabbit's mood.

Updike's "scientific dispassion" is of a curious sort; it is not the scientific dispassion of Emile Zola who treated his novels as "scientific experiments" and sought to subject his characters to circumstances to see (and show) how they would act. Where the realists sought to show what they saw around them, Updike seeks to show what he sees within himself. This is why even though Rabbit's life has little in common with Updike's, there is nonetheless a sense of autobiography conveyed. The inner reality is as much Updike's as Rabbit's. `In Rabbit, Run, we are told, he acted out Updike's unfulfilled desire to have been a six-foot-three basketball hero. In Rabbit Redux, he reflected Updike's own "conflicted" conservatism. In Rabbit is Rich, his own happiness. In Rabbit at Rest, his mixed feelings of being worn-out and ill-at-ease and yet still in love with his country.'




Updike's Naturalism

 

Because whoever seeks this in it, to set down man's being as a clear outcome of animal instinct, as the mechanical logic of crass egoism - is guilty of the same sin of untruthfulness as the unfeeling server-up of soothing-syrup and the phrase-mongering `Idealist.' Man is neither a machine nor an animal; rather he has a mysterious fatal being in which aspiration of the soul and physical instincts are at odds until death and to the death.

Carl Bleibtrau, Revolution der Literatur

"It might be said, indeed, that men are no more than rabbits in a rabbit run."

Thus the title of John Updike's novel suggests the naturalist preoccupation with human futility. There are many good reasons to think Rabbit belongs to the naturalist tradition, which was particularly virulent in the United States, and remained so long after it had died on the European continent.

We find some of the language of naturalism in Rabbit, Run - "He feels hemmed in" ; "`I can. I can but I don't want to, it's not the thing, the thing is how I feel. And I feel like getting out.'" - some sense that Rabbit feels trapped, but, after all, the book ends with a quintessence of freedom (which may, of course, be ironic - Rabbit finds himself, after all, in a situation much the same, if not bleaker, at the opening of Rabbit Redux):

His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.

In the second novel, though, the sensation of entrapment becomes very much stronger - "The world is quicksand"; "`Fucking Christ you think you're going to make the world over and you don't have a fucking clue what makes people run. Fear. That's what makes us poor bastards run.'" ; "`Dad, don't.' The kid's face is tense. Mom was right, too delicate, too nervous. Thinks the world is going to hurt him, so it will. The universal instinct to exterminate the weak." - and it remains so throughout the last two: "There is no getting away; our sins, our seed, coil back." ; "Harry says, `I never understood what was so bad about Chappaquiddick. He tried to get her out.' Water, flames, the tongues of God, a man is helpless." ; "`I just don't like seeing you caught,' he blurts out to Nelson. `You're too much me.'/Nelson gets loud. `I'm not you! I'm not caught!'/`Nellie, you're caught.'" ;"`We ought to be grateful. But it's hard, being grateful. It seems like from the start you're put here in a kind of fix, hungry and scared, and the only way out is no good either.'" - the list goes on. Add to this language of confinement the regular intimations of hereditary characteristics ("those little Springer hands"), and the tetralogy begins to look very much as though it belongs in the naturalistic tradition.

Admitting this, we do find in the novels a gradual constriction of Harry's options, of his existence, a steadily more restrictive railroading of his life - in the first novel, he at first runs but ultimately has to tell Janice's father, "I promise I'll keep my end of the bargain" while asking himself, "What made him say bargain?" ; in the second he seems slave of, by turns, his glands and a kind of moral indolence; in the third and fourth he makes hardly any conscious choices. This is particularly true of Rabbit at Rest, where "Rabbit is rich" has become "Janice is rich" and where Rabbit's acquired gluttony is only the first generational form of a propensity for addiction that in Nelson manifests as a cocaine habit, and in Judy as a "gluttony for images".

Indeed, we rarely see Rabbit driven by any impulse much more complex than blunt lust. But it is not really the case - as a naturalistic mode would have it - that Rabbit is unable to make choices of his own. Rabbit is hemmed in, but not quite as naturalistic "protagonists" were. From time to time Rabbit is free to make decisions. He could have chosen to stay with Ruth, and not return to Janice. He is able, with Janice, to move from the old Springer home into a luxurious Penn Villas home. Most importantly, he is able, at the end, to run once again, completing in Rabbit at Rest the flight which was abortively begun in Rabbit, Run. And Rabbit's life is not exactly the miserable one - at least, not in a material sense - which might have been expected to emerge from his beginnings: from being Magi-peel salesman Rabbit has gone on to become a successful businessman with a summer apartment in Florida. Rabbit's life is not really schematically patterned as naturalistic fictional lives generally are.

The naturalistic writers wrote to an end, broadly speaking; as Stephen Crane wrote of his novel Maggie: "It is inevitable that this book will greatly shock you, but continue, pray, with great courage to the end, for it tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing and often shapes lives regardlessly." Updike does not precisely reject the naturalist notion that lives are greatly restricted; after all, although Rabbit appears to make a good deal of progress through the tetralogy, it is often sadly amusing how little his own decisions have to do with this - his wealth would more properly be called his wife's wealth, the home he ultimately acquires is lost through the prodigality of his son, his instinctive running generally ends with him back in his original circumstances. Updike's suggestion, though, seems to be that this constriction, far from being a property of natural laws, is an artificial, societal construct. Thus, Rabbit declares: `Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.'"

Saying that at the heart of our modern physics is an unpredictability is not the same as saying that man has free will. It merely replaces a predictable mechanism with an unpredictable one - and saying that our decisions are made as a result of random electromagnetic fluctuations rather than mechanistically predictable ones is hardly any more heartwarming.

Rabbit's life does not - at least not in any obvious way - roll on mechanically, but it is constrained by his environment, and he does often act merely in concert with his underlying instincts. "A favorite theme in naturalistic fiction is that of the beast within," writes Malcolm Cowley. For Rabbit, the "beast within" is, well, a rabbit. And his principle instinct is not `"the primal instinct of the brute struggling for its life and for the life of its young"' but the dual instincts to procreate and to flee danger. For neither of these need we delve to deeply into the text: it is very plain that Rabbit runs, and equally so that he ruts.

But Rabbit's instinctive (naturalistic) behaviour, ultimately, fails to bring him satisfaction, and from time to time, when he is at his most spiritual, he has little regard for it: "Couldn't stomach it, frankly. It wasn't her, she was great. But all this fucking, everybody fucking, I don't know, it just makes me too sad," Rabbit declares at the end of Rabbit Redux. Let us remember that just as physicists began to state with certitude that nothing could be predicted, that classical mechanics (and hence naturalism) was fatally flawed, our first psychologists began to declare, quite as loudly, that human behaviour was fundamentally and strictly ruled by experience and purely physiological elements of a person's make up; Updike, of course, writes after both of these views have been taken on board by popular consciousness. Updike seems to accept that while on the material level of life naturalism has a good deal to say - Rabbit is in many ways trapped - the life of the soul is only as constrained as we make it. Giving in to the basic impulses only ("all this fucking, everybody fucking") can make us very sad indeed, since it empties human life of its peculiar, human, joy. The soul requires more. This becomes, I think, the prevailing attitude of the Rabbit tetralogy: the contemporary focus on the material leaves the soul dissatisfied. The naturalistic writers, seeking to depict "victims of nature," depicted the materially poor, but there is at large a spiritual poverty which is at least as grievous.