This is part 4 of 5. The first three parts are here, here, and here.

 I had intended to upload these over a week or so, as I have a fair amount of real work to do. However, it is unpleasantly hot here, to the point where all forms of climate control in my house (where I work) are struggling a bit! It may be our hottest week in Melbourne in over a century, depending on the next few days. As it stands, it's currently over 43 degrees celsius (that's around 110 F), was the same yesterday and Tuesday, and will be tomorrow, too.

3. Updike's "involuntary creed"

We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness.

John Updike, Self-Consciousness, p. 233

Yet the religious life within his writings does not fade but, if anything, intensifies, and the work itself invites us to search out the involuntary creed professed by his recurrent themes and artistic reflexes.

John Updike, "Hawthorne's Creed" in Hugging the Shore, p. 76

What Becker has said about the first "realism" - that it "really did constitute a fresh start because it was based on a new set of assumptions about the universe" - can also be said of Updike. This is why assertions that he is "formally retrograde" or "reactionary" are rather ludicrous, for his work is not merely "thematically up-to-date" but thematically entirely at odds with early realist and naturalist works - he is writing of a different universe.

One important strain that runs through all of the novels is heralded by Rabbit's declaration:

Well I don't know all this about theology, but I'll tell you. I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this... there's something that wants me to find it.

The notion is repeated time and again: that behind this, "the un-grandest landscape in the world" there is something greater and no less real. From one perspective, the entire tetralogy can be seen as a quest by Rabbit to find this other thing. And if Updike is mooting the existence of the unreal, then not only the realist conventions of objectivity a la empirical science are undercut, but so too are the sense of confinement and predestination which the naturalist links suggest. Moreover, this sense of the hyper-real not only renders the realist and naturalist elements almost ironic, but very directly does tackle "the supreme task and burden of literature: the appropriation and transfiguration, in one way or another, of suffering, conflict, disaster and death..." In fact, this suspected "something" leads us to Updike's conception of exactly what is wrong with the world at large.

That something is wrong is clear. We all feel it, an absence. It is not just Rabbit who speaks of "[t]he thing behind everything", and of its absence; Tothero, Rabbit's former basketball coach, mentions it in Rabbit, Run: "`Oh, Harry, you can't understand an old man's hunger, you eat and eat and it's never the right food. You can't understand that.'" ; Mr Shimada, a visiting Toyota representative, notes it some thirty years later in Rabbit at Rest: "`Young people now most interesting... Not scared of starving as through most human history. Not scared of atom bomb as until recently. But scared of something - not happy.'"

What is it, behind everything, that Harry longs to find? It seems to change from time to time, but generally he seems to thirst for what he calls "religious experience".

'I told ja. There was this thing that wasn't there.'

`What thing? Have you ever seen it? Are you sure it exists?'

Harry's two foot putt dribbles short and he picks up the ball with trembling fingers. `Well if you're not sure it exists don't ask me. It's right up your alley. If you don't know nobody does... I tell you, I know what it is.'

`What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?'

It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really does want to be told.

Soon after, Harry having shot a perfect drive, "`That's it!' he cries and, turning to Eccles with a smile of aggrandizement, repeats, `That's it.'" This is the one time that Harry makes such an explicit declaration. We are reminded of the incident when, some thirty years later, Harry reflects: "Harry couldn't argue, and couldn't say that the sound of the rain in that great beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and hitting a pure golf shot."

Sporting grace is one area where Harry seems to find some measure of this "religious experience". Another place he sometimes looks for it is in his relationships with women. These two areas - sport and the female - are the main avenues for Rabbit's questing, and they both carry with them a sense of communion with something outside Rabbit and greater than him.

Women

We needn't look far for evidence of Rabbit's preoccupation with women; probably more of the text is devoted to this theme than to any other. Rabbit tends to invest women with rather more grace than they could reasonably be expected to sustain - women as he imagines them (and he imagines them a lot) often have an almost divine aspect, promising salvation or paradise or else reminiscent of Eden before the fall. He does this a little in Run: "A barefoot Du Pont. Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in, still lots left." ; "She wants him to be content with just her heavy body, but he wants whole women, light as feathers." But the tendency reaches its greatest level in Rabbit is Rich when Harry becomes almost obsessed with, by turns, Cindy Murkett and Annabelle, whom he suspects of being his daughter by Ruth. For the key to this obsession, though, we must turn to Rabbit at Rest. Midway through this novel Rabbit has a strange sexual encounter with his daughter-in-law, Pru. The encounter is unusual among the other sexual encounters in the tetralogy because of Rabbit's curious, uncharacteristic, sexual passivity: Rabbit is sick and unhappy at being away from his own home, when `Pru says, "Shit," jumps from the bed, slams shut the window, pulls down the shade, tears open her bathrobe and sheds it, and, reaching down, pulls her nightie up over her head.' Another notable aspect of the encounter is that it is not described in full; the narrative breaks just before the crucial act. The effect of this difference (only one other sexual scene in the tetralogy is similarly left undescribed - when Rabbit forces Ruth to fellate him) is to give the incident a dream-like quality. This quality is necessary because - perhaps - Rabbit is not merely copulating with Pru here, but, on a symbolic level, with his own female self. He thinks of Pru: "it had felt like he was seeing himself reflected, mirrored in a rangy young long-haired left-handed woman." Similarly Rabbit's fascination with the idea of having a daughter ("he tries to steal another peek at her, to see if her white skin is a mirror, and if the innocent blue in her eyes is his") may be a manifestation of his desire to find a female version of himself.

Of course, such a desire - particularly where Annabelle is concerned - may stem from his own remorse at the death of his daughter, Becky, but there seems to be more to it than just that. Rabbit consistently sees in women a largeness that is unrelated to their physical size: "It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast." ; "As he rubs her, her smallness mixes with the absolute bigness naked women have... Rabbit squats to dry her bottom, goosebumpy red. The backs of her thighs, the stray black hairs, the moss moist between... Nature is full of nests." Here, another theme is raised: nature. Rabbit generally associates the two: "Women and nature forget. No need for science since they are what science seeks to know." The idea of "absolute bigness", whilst admittedly reflecting a visual artist's conception of the female form, is also suggestive of religious experience, because it suggests a reality - the absolute bigness - which is at odds with merely sensory, physical reality - Janice's "smallness". The very use of the word "absolute" reinforces this.

Joyce Carol Oates saw something of this projection of religious significance onto mortal women even relatively early in Updike's career. She wrote:

"Nature" is scaled down, compressed, at times hardly more than a series of forms of The Female.

Museums and Women makes the point explicitly that both "museums" and "women" are mysterious structures which, once entered, once explored, somehow lose their mystery; yet they are, to use Peter Caldwell's phrase [in The Centaur] "high religious halls" that attract the artist again and again.

Rabbit, of course, is not an artist as Updike's alter-ego Peter Caldwell is, or is to become, but he shares Peter's sense of women as "high religious halls". Joyce Carol Oates points to the true nature of Updike's characters' conception of women when she writes: "Because the Venus-figure is experienced as archetypal rather than personal, she is never connected with any specific woman, but may be projected into nearly anyone." Rabbit's women, after all his elevated expectation, tend to disappoint him by being human.

The wished-for woman (the woman onto whom the archetype has been projected) is replaced, as she must be, by the real woman attained. This process is summarised symbolically in the spouse-swapping episode of Rabbit is Rich. Rabbit has ached for a tryst with Webb Murkett's latest young wife, Cindy, but the selection process lands him not with the woman he wanted, but the woman who wants him, Thelma Harrison. That Thelma is ill with the incurable disease lupus emphasises her mortality, her reality, and that she is at the time menstruating adds to her earth-bound humanity: as Joyce Carol Oates tells us, "as everyone knows, Venus is sterile." Cindy, unentered and unexplored, can continue to bear Rabbit's projection of the archetype, while Rabbit's night with Thelma becomes an extraordinary wallowing in the most basic human biology; Thelma's menstruating necessitates first their having anal sex ("Where will his come go? Nowhere but mix with her shit." ) and culminates in them urinating on one another. When, at the end of this scene, Updike writes: "Thelma and Harry fall asleep among the stripes of dawn now welling through the louvers as if not a few stolen hours but an entire married life of sanctioned intimacy stretches unto death before them" , he lends force to the idea that mundane intercourse, like that with Thelma, the earth-bound mortal woman, is an exercise in little more than basic biology. Harry is certainly physically sated by the encounter, but the only spiritual revelation to him is "That void, inside her. He can't take his mind from what he's discovered, that nothingness seen by his single eye." What Rabbit finds here - absence, void - he is doomed to find when he attempts to use real women as an avenue to the extra-real.

Near the end of the tetralogy, the question is raised: "How can you believe how much void there is?" This void is the void of space, where the Voyager probe, its job done, is now "sailing off into the void, forever." But of course, it is not because space is physically void that "Rabbit feels faintly sickened" , but because of the possibility that "the thing behind everything" has no existence. The real void - beyond Neptune, or in Thelma Harrison's colon - raises for him the possibility of an unreal void.

Perhaps it is in the nature of the "thing behind everything" that it is transient and ungraspable, for indeed Rabbit seems to be granted only fleeting brushes with it. Even Cindy Murkett, who for a time seemed capable of sustaining Rabbit's projection had on her the intimation of mortality: "...her tits hang down pear-shaped in their weight and her legs next to Webb's appear stocky. She's getting there. She will get fatter. She will turn ugly." By the time of Thelma's funeral, she has become simply fat, no longer attractive to Harry. But then, by this time, well into Rabbit at Rest, and after Rabbit's first heart attack and after his extraordinary interlude with Pru, Rabbit has begun to see less of the "thing behind all things" in women. The sense has faded.

Women seen this way are bound to disappoint - a disappointment disturbingly evident in Tothero's words: "`Do you realise, Harry, that a young woman has hair on every part of her body?'" - and, disappointed, it is easy for a man to despise them and become cruel. Rabbit is cruel to Ruth after he learns that she has slept with Ronnie Harrison - of whom Harry reflects: "Funny, all of his life Harrison has been shadowing Harry with a fleshly mockery, a reminder of everything sweaty and effortful Rabbit hoped squeamishly to glide over and avoid." again suggesting his essential desire to transcend the earthly and know only the spiritual - forcing her to fellate him and thus ruining their relationship.

Seeing women this way also kills them. Of course it doesn't necessarily kill them literally, but disdaining their own identities and replacing these with an ideal archetypal one is an act of destruction. The process is symbolically enacted in Rabbit Redux. Not just Rabbit, but essentially all the men in Jill's life have seen her as an avenue to something beyond the real - "`You see, when I'd trip, I'd see, like, you know - God.'" It was because of this supposed visionary power that Jill's past boyfriend "tried to get [her] into heavy drugs." It is because Skeeter too believes in her power of vision - her potency as an avenue to the "thing behind everything" - that he does the same, successfully, and in doing so kills her; she is killed in the house-fire presumably because she was too doped to escape it. Curiously, Rabbit is the least guilty party where Jill's death is concerned. Jill is one of the few women he encounters on whom he doesn't really project the archetype. She is too thin, not lush enough to sustain it.

Vietnam and Apollo

And yet he does project something onto Jill, at times.

In their bedroom, Rabbit carefully closes the door and in a soft shaking voice tells Jill, "You're turning my kid into a beggar and a whore just like yourself," and, after waiting a second for her to enter a rebuttal, slaps her thin disdainful face with its prim lips and its green eyes drenched so dark in defiance their shade is as of tree leaves, a shuffling concealing multitude, a microscopic forest he wants to bomb.

The war in Vietnam is a major symbol in Rabbit Redux. Rabbit, as Updike was, is in favour of the American involvement, for some indistinct reasons. The extraordinary image of his current sexual partner as the landscape of a grubby war deserves investigation. To begin with, it is notable that the desire to bomb the female forest has little to do with the enemy within - Rabbit wants to bomb the forest itself, not what it contains. A connection between the Female, the Other, and a kind of teeming vegetable fecundity is not new - consider Mann's Death in Venice, for example:

Desire projected itself visually: his fancy, not quite yet lulled since morning, imaged the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth. He saw. He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank - a kind of primeval wilderness-world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. Hairy palm trunks rose near and far out of lush brakes of fern, out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible blooms.

The masculine desire to know, to lay bare the "shuffling concealing multitude", is related, in Rabbit Redux to the U.S. presence in Vietnam, suggesting that it stems from a kind of masculine distaste for the uncontrollably fertile (and hence feminine) South-East Asian jungle. Rabbit is rather patriotic in this novel, more gung ho than usual, perhaps; his car sports a decal of the U.S. flag on the rear window at a time when American patriotism is at its least fashionable. Interestingly, Rabbit himself denies this spiritual significance of the war: `Rabbit's voice explodes. "Shit. It's just a dirty little war that has to be fought. You can't make something religious out of it just because you happened to be there."'

The Apollo moon landing which occurs during the course of Rabbit Redux is another example of this masculine desire to know. The moon, of course, is a time-worn symbol for the female, and so equally a symbol for Rabbit's quest. And yet, the singularly Apollonic desire to know by analysis, calculation, sheer power, is always doomed to fail. Reaching the moon did not really enable men to touch the feminine - "`I don't know, Mom... I know it's happened, but I don't feel anything yet.'" Rabbit says of the moon landing. The always striving higher fails. Indeed mere striving fails. It is only when Rabbit loses himself, his ego, that he finally meets the feminine. He doesn't do this until Rabbit at Rest, first taking a passive role in his sexual encounter with Pru and ultimately in abandoning himself to earth and sky in his last basketball game. But even at the end of Rabbit Redux we get a sense of what is needed:

`The kid really hates me now.'

Janice says,`No he doesn't.' She contradicts herself promptly, by adding, `He'll get over it.' Feminine logic: smother and outlast what won't be wished away. Maybe the only way. He touches her low and there is moss, it doesn't excite him, but it is reassuring, to have that patch there, something to hide in.

Sport

Even if by the time of Thelma's funeral Rabbit has more or less ceased to see women as a principle avenue to "the thing behind everything" that he seeks, he has not ceased to see this thing as feminine. Rabbit's quest for grace begins and ends with basketball, kills himself with it, and in between is connected with golf. But the sport is often associated with the female, particularly at the beginning of the tetralogy:

He has broken through the barrier of fatigue and come into a calm flat world where nothing matters much. The last quarter of a basketball game used to carry him into this world; you ran not as the crowd thought for the sake of the score but for yourself, in a kind of idleness. There was you and sometimes the ball and then the hole, the high perfect hole with its pretty skirt of net."

Similarly, on the first page of the text of Rabbit, Run, Rabbit's throw "drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. `Hey!' he shouts in pride." The "Hey!" he shouts here is echoed later in the novel: "From her high smooth shoulders down she is one long under-belly erect in light above him; he says in praise softly, `Hey.'" But more important than the connection between sport and sexual experience, and women, is the notion of loss of self, of ego, that emerges in the passage above. It is in this loss of self that Harry ultimately finds completion.

Ronnie Harrison

A stark contrast can be discerned between Harry and Harrison - and the relationship of their names, as well as Harrison's unchanging presence through the tetralogy, invites a comparison. Harry reflects: "Funny, all of his life Harrison has been shadowing Harry with a fleshly mockery, a reminder of everything sweaty and effortful Rabbit hoped squeamishly to glide over and avoid." Harrison is emblematic of the mundane, animal side of man - notably, he is Thelma's husband and is disgruntled when, during the spouse swapping episode, he has to sleep with Cindy instead of his own wife; furthermore, the largeness of Harrison's penis is mentioned more than once in the tetralogy , emphasising the basic nature of his masculinity - and Rabbit's relationship with him parallels the transition from rejection of the earthly to embrace of it. In the first novel Rabbit takes pleasure in mocking Harrison, who, we learn, was not the graceful basketballer Rabbit was, but a bruiser, a mediocre player used by the coach to dispose of dangerous opposition. Ronnie is capable of a simpler, frankly more commendable, love than is Harry - at Thelma's funeral he says: `"I don't give a fuck you banged her, what kills me is you did it without giving a shit... She wasted herself on you..." Ronnie takes a breath to go on, but tears block his throat.' At the same funeral though, we begin to see a reconciliation between the two:

A nice thing happens. Ronnie and Harry, Harrison and Angstrom, with a precision as if practiced, execute a crisscross. They smile, despite their pink eyelids and raw throats, at the little watching crowd and neatly cross paths... Once teammates, always teammates.

A little later, Rabbit, even though at the funeral he "can't feel sorry for the guy at all", arranges a golf round with him:

Harry feels that Ronnie has always been with him, a presence he couldn't avoid, an aspect of himself he didn't want to face but now does. That clublike cock, those slimy jokes, the blue eyes looking up his ass, what the hell, we're all just human, bodies with brains at one end and the rest just plumbing.

This reconciliation is a part of a broader process of letting go, of acceptance, that Rabbit undergoes in the final novel. All his life, he has pursued a sense of completion, of "religious experience", through various external avenues. When he attains it, though, it is by accepting "aspect[s] of himself he didn't want to face but now does" - not through an outward movement of his spirit, the means by which he tried in the past (movement of which the Apollo program is symbolic) but by a sinking of it into the wholeness below.

The Other

The one quality that all those potential avenues - sport, women, nature, the murky associations of Vietnam - share is that, for Rabbit, they are other. When Rabbit finally seems to find a sense of completion, on his death bed - `"Well, Nelson," he says, "all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad." Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.' - it is because he has surrendered his self:

The nature of his exertion is to mix him with earth and sky: earth, the packed pink-tan glaring dust printed over and over with the fanned bars of his Nikes and the cagelike grid of Tiger's black sneakers, stamped earth in the rim of his vision as he dribbles; and sky, wide white sky when he looks up to follow his shot or the other's. The clouds have gathered in an agitated silvery arena around the blinding sun, a blue bullring. Rabbit accidentally in one twist of upward effort stares straight into the sun and can't for a minute brush away its blinking red moon of an afterimage.

This, Rabbit's final, fatal, basketball game is surely the greatest of his spiritual experiences and the one for which he has always quested. Now, mixed with earth and sky, blinded by not just sun but with it red moon, Rabbit experiences the wholeness and unity of all things and learns, perhaps, that the feminine "thing behind everything" he has ached for is within himself, as the sun's after-image is the moon. No longer driven by the Apollonic desire to lay bare to scrutiny that underlay his support for the American role in Vietnam, Rabbit has learned that while to know the feminine one must kill it, it can be embraced and accepted while still living. Rabbit surrenders, wonderfully. This is why Rabbit attempts, at the last, to tell his son "Nelson... you have a sister." Of course he may be speaking of Annabelle; the matter was never settled. But he tries to say it because "he wants to put the kid out of his misery", and although Nelson has occasionally mentioned his dead sister, we do not really get a sense from the novels that Nelson is miserable because he has none. Surely the misery Rabbit wishes to alleviate is the misery that has so often plagued himself - the sense that there is nothing behind what he sees. In mixing with earth and sky, Rabbit learns that there is more than the eye can see, that he can be a part of something enormous. Thus, enough.

And yet the extraordinary dryness of this final basketball game is curious, since the feminine is generally associated with a fertile wetness: "Moist, she is so moist her cunt startles him, touching it, like a slug underneath a leaf in the garden." Perhaps what is significant is that in the midst of all this dryness, echo of the spiritual dryness of much of Rabbit's world, he sees the red moon (indisputably symbolic of the female, surely). The very dryness lends, perhaps, a greater strength to the spiritual moisture Rabbit discovers.