Category Archives: Scholarship & Analysis

Blogger takes exception with Selected Poems review

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On The New Yorker & Me blog, a writer posting under the moniker “Capedrifter” was bothered enough by Dan Chiasson’s New Yorker review of Updike’s Selected Poems that he penned a rebuttal.

Capedrifter thought Chiasson’s review inconsistent and questionable (and in this, he’s probably not alone). “Yes, it strongly recommends the new Selected Poems . . . And yes, it calls ‘Endpoint’ ‘a perfect sonnet sequence.’ But it also says things like, ‘The problem is that all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him, and we don’t associate cheer with great poetry,’ and ‘Updike’s poems level our intrinsic ranking of occasions’ and ‘Vocabulary is the most overrated element of good writing, or so these poems tempt us to conclude.

“These are questionable criticisms,” Capedrifter says, then proceeds to disprove all three criticisms by citing excerpts from the Selected Poems:

“In Praise of John Updike’s Poetry (Contra Dan Chiasson)”

Schlemiel Theory considers Rabbit

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unknown-1At Schlemiel Theory, subtitles “The Place Where the Laugh Laughs at the Laugh,” Menachem Feuer published a piece titled “The Rise and Fall of American Dreams: On John Updike’s ‘Rabbit, Run’.” In it, he considers the opening scene in Rabbit, Run where an older Rabbit plays basketball with young men and notices a “natural” among them. Then he realizes that his own basketball fame has faded:  “They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.”

“What Updike manages to do in this passage is to show the contradictions at the heart of the American dream. It may lift you up but at a certain point you may have to realize that you’re just one-in-a-million. But, to be sure, the struggle between being someone and being no-one is at the core of modernist art, literature, and philosophy. The question we have, as readers, is how Rabbit deals with his sinking into significance. Will he give up, will he try to be someone, or will he just . . . run away? Will he hurt people along the way?

Oates essay offers Poorhouse Fair insights

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Screen Shot 2015-08-13 at 7.51.57 AMIn a fascinating essay on “Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature” published in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, writer (and former JUS conference keynote speaker) Joyce Carol Oates spends a significant amount of time discussing Updike’s debut novel, The Poorhouse Fair, partly in relation to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and partly in the context of Toward the End of Time:

“John Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), published when the author was twenty-six, is a purposefully modest work composed in a minor key; unlike Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), also published when the author was twenty-six. Where Mailer trod onto the literary scene like an invading army, with an ambitious military plan, Updike seems almost to have wished to enter by a rear door, claiming a very small turf in rural eastern Pennsylvania and concentrating upon the near-at-hand with the meticulous eye of a poet.

“The Poorhouse Fair is in its way a bold avoidance of the quasi-autobiographical novel so common to young writers: the bildungsroman of which the author’s coming-of-age is the primary subject. Perversely, given the age of the author, The Poorhouse Fair is about the elderly, set in a future only twenty years distant and lacking the dramatic features of the typical future, dystopian work; its concerns are intrapersonal and theological. By 1959 Updike had already published many of the short stories that would be gathered into Olinger Stories, which constituted in effect a bildungsroman, freeing him to imagine an entirely other, original debut work.

“The Poorhouse Fair, as Updike was to explain in an introduction to the 1977 edition of the novel, was suggested by a visit, in 1957, to his hometown, Shillington, which included a visit to the ruins of a poorhouse near his home. The young author then decided to write a novel in celebration of the fairs held at the poorhouse during his childhood, with the intention of paying tribute to his recently deceased maternal grandfather, John Hoyer, given the name “John Hook” in the novel. In this way The Poorhouse Fair both is not, and is, an autobiographical work, as its theological concerns, described elsewhere in Updike’s work, were those of the young writer at the time.

“Appropriately, Updike wrote another novel set in the future near the end of his life, Toward the End of Time (1997), in which the elderly protagonist and his wife appear to be thinly, even ironically disguised portraits, or caricatures, of Updike and his wife in a vaguely postapocalyptic world bearing a close resemblance to the Updikes’ suburban milieu in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Is it coincidental that Updike’s first novel and his near-to-last so mirror each other? Both have theological concerns, and both are executed with the beautifully wrought, precise prose for which Updike is acclaimed; but no one could mistake Toward the End of Time, with its bitter self-chiding humor and tragically diminished perspectives, for a work of fiction by a reverent and hopeful young writer. . . .

“The confessional poets—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, to a degree Elizabeth Bishop—rendered their lives as art, as if self-hypnotized. Of our contemporaries, writers as seemingly diverse as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike created distinguished careers out of their lives, often returning to familiar subjects, lovingly and tirelessly reimagining their own pasts as if mesmerized by the wonder of ‘self.'”

Published Couples essay from 1996 now online

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220px-CouplesUpdike scholars and fans can now access a critical essay on Couples that was published in The International Fiction Review 23 (1996):

“Fire, Rain, Rooster:  John Updike’s Christian Allegory in Couples,” by Sukhbir Singh, University of Chicago, begins,

“Most critics deal with John Updike’s Couples (1969) as a book about ‘sex,’ and ‘adultery.’ They invariably argue that in Couples, Updike advocates promiscuity as an antidote to the prevalent climate of nihilism, and he thereby repudiates a cardinal dictum of Christianity: ‘Though Shalt Not Commit Adultery.’ These commentators pay scant attention to Updike’s view of the supernatural and miss his allegorical motif in the novel. Contrary to their assertions, I will argue that Couples is a novel of spiritual awakening, taking into account the symbolic significance of the burning church in the text, and that in his novels Updike upholds the Christian belief in the presence of God and the piety of love, sex, and marriage.”

Thesis on Updike and Mailer sport inferences now online

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Screen Shot 2015-05-26 at 6.30.20 AMA 1972 thesis “Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in Physical Education” is now available online.

Click here to access Kathryn Jane Upshaw’s “John Updike and Norman Mailer: Sport Inferences,” which was filed in September 1972. To navigate past the title page, click on the right center edge to move forward, and the left center edge to go backward. “Through the analysis of the lives and writings of modern contemporary American authors John Updike and Norman Mailer, the allusions to sport were studied with a view toward understanding the inferences of that phenomenon on the development of the novel’s elements of plot, character, and setting. Furthermore, sport inferences were studied in light of style.”

The author studied Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm, Couples, and Rabbit Redux, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, An American Dream, and Why Are We in Vietnam? 

Physics blog features Updike poem

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Neutrinos

Physics Central, which links to American Physical Society Sites, yesterday posted “Physics in Verse: A John Updike Poem about Neutrinos.”

“There is a long history of poets taking Nature as their muse, from the call of the sea to the draw of the wild. But poems about physics phenomena are harder to find,” Tamela Maciel writes. “Updike was not a physicist, but he did a remarkable job describing the current view of the physics community, as this article from Symmetry magazine unravels.”

Cosmic Gall
by John Updike
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.

Pictured is “The first observation of a neutrino-induced reaction in a hydrogen bubble chamber. An invisible neutrino arrives from the right and strikes a proton where the three tracks join. The proton, a muon, and a pion then fly off in different directions.”

Daily Beast writer considers Updike’s Seven Stanzas at Easter

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Screen Shot 2015-04-05 at 9.33.56 AMIn a Daily Beast think-piece titled “Did Updike Sell the Resurrection Short?” writer Matthew Sitman considers Updike’s poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”

“The poem gains new life of its own every year around this time. It inevitably flits across social media as Holy Week draws to a close, a very quotable addition to the Facebook feeds of America’s more literary Christians. Updike’s words circulate in more traditional ways, too, giving pastors and priests just the rhetorical flourish they need for their Easter nominees. This Sunday, many churchgoers who’ve never read a page of Rabbit, Run will nod along at Updike’s verse.

“The force of ‘Seven Stanzas,’ however, goes beyond its seasonal affiliation. After all, there are other poems about Easter. Perhaps Updike’s resonates because it seems attuned to the nature of belief in the modern world—or rather, it asks the modern believer what she is willing to believe. The poem forces the reader to answer for herself what really happened in that backwater of the Roman Empire in the days after Jesus was executed as a criminal. There can be, to use Updike’s word, no ‘sidestepping’ this issue. Are you ’embarrassed’ by this ‘miracle’ or not?

“This is a perennial question, the place where all quests for the historical Jesus give way to faith—or not—and Updike is wrong not to remind us of its stakes. But for all his theological sophistication, and despite my admiration for his literary gifts, Updike’s poem leaves me unsatisfied. It achieves its existential urgency by skirting the complexity and strangeness of what the Gospels actually tell us about the resurrection. The poem is a blunt instrument, jarring and powerful, but it obscures as much as it reveals.

“Updike asks us to leave aside figurative language and interrogate the Gospel accounts of the resurrection for their literal truth, if it really happened or not. When we read these passages, however, they also should interrogate us, unsettling our judgments about what we think we know and how we understand what it meant for Jesus to rise from the dead. They defy all our inevitable attempts to escape the uncertainty of real faith and reduce the resurrection to a pat story that does little more than comfort those who encounter it.”

Sitman thinks it is a “sense of wonder at the sheer perplexity of what Jesus was like after his resurrection that seems to be missing from Updike’s ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter.’ The problem is not that Updike challenges us to consider the strange idea that a man rose from the dead; it’s that what he holds before us isn’t strange enough. Whatever is going on in the Gospels, it seems to resist the efforts of those who want to assimilate the Easter story either through a literalism uncomfortable with paradox or by turning it into a somewhat embarrassing myth meant to inspire hope.”

Read the full article.

See also:  “A few minutes with Updike’s ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter,'” by Tom Grosh IV and a 2009 post recommended by Grosh, “On Easter and Updike” by David E. Anderson.

UC Observer on Begley’s bio and the Spirit of Updike

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Member John McTavish recently published a review-essay of Adam Begley’s biography that also considers Updike’s spirituality.

In “The Spirit of Updike,” which appeared in the Culture section in the online version of The United Church Observer—which, according to its masthead, is “the oldest continuously published magazine in North America and the second oldest in the English speaking world”—McTavish notes that “faith was more than a pleasurable habit for Updike. It was an antidote to ‘existential terror,’ as Begley puts it. Updike himself admitted as much in his memoir Self-Consciousness: ‘Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible.'”

“Religion is virtually omnipresent in Updike’s work,” McTavish writes. “But this doesn’t mean that Updike’s fiction forces a Christian message on the reader. On the contrary, he always believed that his basic duty to God was to write the most truthful and fullest books he could. ‘I don’t want to write tracts, to be more narrow in my fiction than the world itself is; I try not to subject the world to a kind of cartoon theology which gives predictable answers,’ he once reflected. Fallen clergy, self-centered philanderers: no one escaped Updike’s penetrating eye.

“Perhaps Updike’s finest religious story is ‘Pigeon Feathers,’ about a teenage boy’s quest for faith amid panic over mortality,” McTavish concludes. “The awesome complexity of the humble pigeon’s feathers distills Updike’s own philosophy of writing: ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due,’ as he phrased it; to celebrate reality, both human and divine.'”

Schlemiel Theory: On Cynthia Ozick’s Denunciation of Henry Bech

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They say there’s a blog about everything, and yesterday at The Home of Schlemiel Theory a writer going by the user name mfeuer2012 published a piece “On Cynthia Ozick’s Denunciation of Henry Bech: John Updike’s Literary Portrayal of the Jew as Schlemiel,” the title of which may go a long ways toward explaining.

images-3Ozick called Bech “theologically hollow” and according to the author “her reasons for choosing such a term and making such a trenchant criticism of Updike’s attempt to represent a Jew are noteworthy. They give us a sense of how Ozick—and others—might criticize many of the schlemiels we see in literature and film today. It also gives us a glimpse of her criterion for what makes for a plausible Jewish character in Jewish American fiction.”

Citing other novels as well, the author writes, “Ozick’s gloss on these ‘de-Judaicized Jewish novelists’ foreshadows her rant on what is missing not just in Bech but in most Jewish writing today: knowledge of Jewish history. But this omission is not done out of neglect so much as what Ozick calls ‘autolobotomy.’ Wondering at this caricature of the Jew, Ozick suggests we think about how this would sound if this kind of portrayal were done with respect to real African-Americans.”

Later: “Updike, argues Ozick, loves Bech most when he is ‘thoroughly de-Beched’—when ‘Bech is most openly, most shrewdly, most strategically, most lyrically Updike’ (119). And this happens when the ‘Appropriate Reference Machine’ (ARM from here on) breaks down. At these moments of failure, Updike the theologian takes over.

“And in these moments, when the ARM breaks, there is a brief exposure to a Christeological kind of epiphany. However, this doesn’t transform Beck. Rather he returns to a kind of state that is . . . comical.”

Read the entire article.