anthropoidape's Open Salon Blog

America's credibility in the world's eye

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:02:04 -0500

A post by resident curmudgeon GordonO pointed to a quote from President Obama, that "Before that can be done, repairs have to be made to our credibility after Guantanamo and Abu Gharaib in the world's eye."

Gordon pointed out that:

The United States of America has been the most powerful force for good and freedom for at least the last 100 years.

...

But hold the phone, we have to repair our crdibility in the WORLD's eye. What has the WORLD been doing for civilization lately? I await the evidence.

I felt my comment there got a bit long, so here it is as a post of its own.

Well... if I may speak as a non-American (well, 1/4 American if you like): the first point I would make is that I would agree with anyone who said that outside perceptions of "credibility" are not the primary issues that should motivate your leaders.

That said, the world does rely on America to lead, and hopes America will always stand up for what is right: freedom, democracy, truth, etc. I hear America criticised most days, but I think this is the burden of leadership (to the extent that it is a burden at all). You probably wouldn't criticise Obama much if he were your next-door neighbour, but since he's your leader his flaws stand out. Well, the world at large fundamentally admires the American experiment and the American form of democracy and remembers that America has done much of the work of saving the world at least once. But since America is a leader, her flaws do stand out. It was awful watching ignorance and fear win out again and again over the last few years. It was sad to watch the hasty invasion of Iraq, predicated on lies about WMDs, when weapons inspectors were clearly and explicitly saying they just needed a few more months. (I should add that, as an American ally, we joined America there.)

I don't think my opinion of America should influence President Obama, or cause you to lose any sleep, but on the other hand, if you are interested, then I will tell you that I would be very happy to see the American beacon shining from a little higher up the hill, and closer to the ideals that make it a unique and important element of human history. To me, it makes a big difference to know that there is an example of a way of life that is resistant to corruption and ignorance, and a type of nation that strives to deliver equal justice for all and does not steer into thuggery, nepotism, mere expediency, totalitarianism, and the other dark alleys that governments have always been prone to.

And on the specific concept of credibility: nothing's perfect, but there was a time when, at least in a general sense, if America said something, the world could assume that it was probably true. I know that you defend Bush to a degree that I will never really be able to fathom, but even allowing for that you'd have to agree that the simple truth took a back seat more under the Bush adminstration than ever before. Despite subsequent revision, it was explicit that the invasion of Iraq was because of WMDs, even though those WMDs did not in fact exist and evidence was distorted. But leave a hot button like that aside and you still have the problem that the administration was wholly anti-science. Nothing said by the US government, for a while there, was apolitically honest. Change that and America will begin to regain her credibility. Yes, in the eyes of the world. But also, surely, in her own eyes..?

More from Victoria

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:02:05 -0500

As part of the small Australian contingent here at OS - and one who has been quiet lately - I thought I'd give an update on our dreadful bushfire situation down here. I know others have done so as well.

I live in the foothills of the Dandenongs, quite close to some of the fire-affected areas in Victoria, though not the worst ones. All is safe where I live but it's hard not to feel affected when so much devastation is occurring within 20 minutes driving distance. A very close friend of mine has lost at least one relative at Kinglake, one of the most devastated towns. And of course the sky has been filled with smoke, not chokingly thick with it but strangely distorted - the clouds seem to hang lower and the moon is orange each night. Knowing that so many lives have been lost makes the strangeness of the sky very eery.

I am old enough to remember the Ash Wednesday fires here back in 1983; a relative of mine was one of the firefighters then. The current fires are considerably worse with over 173 lives lost and almost certainly a lot more yet to be counted.

On Saturday when the temperature climbed over 46C (116F) - part of the "perfect storm" of conditions that has made the situation so deadly - I had a distressed and heat affected ring-tailed possum stumble into my house looking for some respite from the heat; I gave it water and penned it up until it had cooled and gotten dark outside, then released it. I think it had probably also been disturbed by the smell of smoke even from some miles away. Ring-tailed possums are quite timid animals and it must have been in quite a state to risk coming into my house, great big dog and all. A lot of distressed birds came very close to me as well, and I ended up providing water for them in a shady spot. It was really quite a bizarre day, as these wildlife rescue activities are not normal for us! At this time we had no idea just how many people had already been killed in the fires.

A few years ago, I found myself just a few metres from a bushfire, near the northern city of Townsville. I was relatively safe, as we were in a canoe on the Ross River; the fire was burning right to the shore. While there was some danger of embers crossing the river, there wasn't much we could do about that so we took the canoe to check out the fire. It was one of those unforgettable things; even at some distance the heat was of an unbelievable intensity. Just terrible and savage. The ferocity of these fires is simply unimaginable until you have experienced it.

Meanwhile flooding in the north.

edit - photos are now below this extra bit!

Since this got front-paged, I thought I might add a bit more information.

The current spate of severe bushfires began on Saturday, when temperatures reached a historic high of 46.4 degrees C (116F) in Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, and even higher temperatures around the state. This was after a period of weather that was nearly as hot, which left the bush on the outskirts of Melbourne and beyond extremely dry. Unfortunately our trees are even more inherently flammable than some, since they contain plenty of eucalyptus oil. They sometimes burn quite explosively.

We are used to bushfires here, to a degree, and in some of the worst affected areas there had in fact been preventative burning over the last few years to reduce fuel loads (bark, dead wood, and other matter on the forest floor). Whether there had been enough is obviously debatable, and some antipathy has for a long time been directed at excessively "green" forestry policies described as "lock it up and leave it."

The official toll is currently 181 dead and 80 missing, but there are some towns where the authorities have barely begun to search. In the most recent deadly bushfires prior to these, only47 people died in Victoria, and another 28 in South Australia. Many thousands of hectares have been razed by the fires.

Exactly why loss of life has been so high will be the subject of much analysis in the coming months. In Victoria there has for some time been a policy of "leave early or stay", meaning that homeowners may elect to stay and protect their homes, but if they do then they need to know that it's not wise to get in their car and leave at the last minute. Essentially, once you can see the flames, you are not going to be able to drive out of there. Many of the affected homes had firefighting equipment and residents who were well versed in the right steps to take. The problem appears to be that these fires were simply faster and more intense than anyone was prepared for. Some firefronts reportedly travelled 50 kilometres in thirty minutes (need to confirm this though.)

Some terrible mistakes seem to have occurred. The fire station in one of the worst affected towns, Kinglake, was completely unmanned when the fires hit, as its crew was attending fires elsewhere. I don't know whether the situation would have been improved much if someone had been there to raise more of an alarm, because it seems that the fire moved too fast for any of that. Kinglake could perhaps have been evacuated on a mandatory basis earlier, but that idea is based on hindsight; it might have been some other town that was hit instead.

Just personally, my suspicion is that a number of seemingly minor policy decisions have contributed to this over some decades, including planning decisions that have increased populations in bushfire-prone areas quite drastically. A commission of inquiry is to be set up, which I hope will be independent and suitably scathing - these commissions can be defensive and political, or they can be done right. We'll see.

Since writing this post I have learned that some people I know a little, and relatives of friends, were killed in the bushfires. Thankfully - in a grim way, I know - nobody close to me has been directly affected. Having felt the heat of a bushfire myself, though in fairly safe circumstances, I just can't bring myself to imagine the last moments of those who died on the weekend.

As a hobby, I am a bit of a 4WD enthusiast. Consequently I am pretty familiar with a lot of the devastated areas. It's inspiring to see people pulling together; many people I know, who share this hobby, are travelling some distance to deliver camper-trailers, tents, and other gear to help the 5,000 or so people who have been rendered homeless for the time being. At this point, though, the logistics of volunteering help are not too well sorted out. For our part we are donating blankets, clothes, and, funny as it may sound, pet food. The blood bank has asked people to hold off donating for the moment, as they have been inundated (metaphorically speaking) with blood donations. So in a sense, there is more will to help than we can currently handle. This bodes well for the rebuilding efforts to come.

Thanks for reading!

Added 11 Feb:

From today's Age newspaper: a volunteer at one of the relief areas helps in her own way. Somehow this is one of the most moving images I've seen since this all began.

These photos are from another bulletin board I am on. None were taken by me and I don't claim credit for them, but I think they are worth sharing.

It is interesting and quite touching how otherwise timid animals will accept human help when they are desperate.

And yet it's been flooding up north, in Queensland:

Rabbit is Realistic: Part 5

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:01:01 -0500

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.

Rabbit is Realistic: Part 4

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:01:31 -0500

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

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.

Rabbit is Realistic: Part 3

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:01:13 -0500

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.