This is part 4 of 5. The first four parts are here, 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. Even for a Melbourne summer, it's a little unusual. Yet another reason to be grateful I am not a professional tennis player :)

Conclusion

The next thing one knew, they were into novels of ideas, Freudian novels, surrealistic novels ("black comedy"), Kafkaesque novels and, more recently, the catatonic novel or novel of immobility, the sort that begins: "In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot himself." (Opening line of a Robert Coover short story)... As a result, by the '60s, about the time I came to New York, the most serious, ambitious, and, presumably, talented novelists had abandoned the richest terrain of the novel: namely, society, the social tableau, manners d morals, the whole business of "the way we live now," in Trollope's phrase. There is no novelist who will be remembered as the novelist who captured the '60s in America, or even in New York, in the sense that Thackeray was the chronicler of London in the 1840's and Balzac was the chronicler of Paris...

Tom Wolfe, from his Introduction to The New Journalism

Updike is not scientifically illiterate. Roger's Version, for example, has been criticised as too laden with technical jargon. Or consider his poem, "Cosmic Gall":

Every second, hundreds of billions of these neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during the day and below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth!
- from "An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics" by M. A. Rothman and A. H. Rosenfield, in American Scientist

Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me. Like tall
And painless guillotines they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed—you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

Even if we were to concede the possibility of an educated person of any intelligence whatever to believe wholeheartedly in the possibility of objectivity or realistic representation in any comprehensive sense, it would be difficult to believe that Updike was such a one. And yet he himself uses such phrases as "a scientific dispassion and curiosity." He follows such phrases, though, with others, like, "A life-view by the living can only be provisional. Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn't there before. A background of dark matter - all that is not said - remains, buzzing." He cannot be a realist in the sense that the first realists were, because he does not - cannot - believe what they did.

But perhaps the role he fulfils is similar. The early realists, whatever they believed themselves to be doing, achieved, essentially, a representation of the under-represented. Certainly they did not represent reality; only reality itself, incomprehensible, can truly represent reality. But by reacting against the idealistic, epic, or tragic traditions which preceded them, the realists gave a voice to the huddled, unwashed masses, to the ordinary people of the world who by and large constituted their readership. The "truths" they sought to express may have been simple, sometimes amounting to little more than a declaration that all is not as we have been told it is. If the realists expressed suffering, it was because suffering, particularly suffering of a mundane, decidedly un-grandiose sort, had been left unmentioned in all the clamourings of idealism.

What is the background against which Updike writes? There are the conjoined traditions of realism and naturalism which have shaped American, and indeed world, literature since the 1850's. There are the modernist modes of Joyce, Woolf, and so on. The post-modern forms of such writers as Thomas Pynchon. If we criticise Updike for resembling the realists and naturalists more than he resembles those that followed them, we must be criticising him on the basis of his form rather than of his content, for as I have shown, whilst his novels formally, superficially resemble the realist works, their metaphysics differ. Updike writes of a reality behind the reality we see, a reality verificable only in his readers' subjective consciousnesses.

And how much can be said of a criticism which hinges on complaints that his work is "formally retrograde"? How important, that is, is form? Is James Joyce's great innovation the difficulty of comprehending Ulysses? Surely not. Rather, it is the degree of success he has in elucidating for the reader a fictional but somehow representative mind. The capacity for sympathy is the hallmark of human maturity, and we regard Joyce highly mainly because he engages our sympathy, sympathy in the sense not of pity but of understanding, for Leopold Bloom and a few other Dubliners.

Updike, no less than Joyce, takes us within a common man. If his point is that ordinary lives are touched by a spiritual reality that for all its universality is not ordinary nor common, he can present this truth by no other means than a realistic mode, with all its metaphysical naivety. After all, when we read, say, Pynchon, we do not really feel that ordinary lives are represented, lives on a par with our own. Updike's message is that if so humble a soul as Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom can feel the "thing behind everything" then so can we all.Updike needs the realist mode because no other mode can so easily reach ordinary souls. This is why the realistic mode remains prevalent so long after its inception: its central figures, more than those of any other mode, remind us of ourselves and allow us into their shoes.

But Updike's method is not simply to rework the old realist mode with contemporary themes. Rather, his work reflects a bvroader cultural change, a more fundamental one, one that encompasses not only literature but science and indeed all areas of life. It is the shift from an illusory objecrtivity to subjectivity. Presenting a subjective faith, he touches the faith in us all.