Study Guide to Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux by John Updike

By Intelligent Education

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by John Updike, two-time Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction in 1982 and 1991. Titles in this study guide include Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux.

As a prominent voice of literary realism for 1970s American fiction, Updike’s Rabbit nov

• Language: English
• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Release date: Mar 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645422877

Intelligent Education

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INTRODUCTION TO JOHN UPDIKE

SOME BASIC QUESTIONS

In the Foreword to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech admits to his biographer (read creator), Withal, something Waspish, theological, scared, and insultingly ironical that derives, my wild surmise is, from you. Bech or Updike - the soft impeachment still applies. Through Bech, Updike expresses some of the envy he feels for those Jewish writers (Bellow, Malamud, Roth, others - but not Mailer!) who can write so uninhibitedly about the gut issues of life; who can philosophize with little or no self-consciousness about the eternal, spiritual problems; and who can shout out the most shocking obscenities without being labeled the hardest of pornographers. From whence (Updike would, one must wildly surmise, dispense with the from) came such a dispensation?

Critics have referred to Updike’s charming but limited gifts; to his art as essentially one of nuance and chiaroscuro; to the minor cult he now enjoys; to his vision as not only small, for all its brightness; it is even, at times, belittling; it makes people littler than they really are . . .; to the small scene that Updike continues to use as the centerpiece of his literary stage; to the despair of the daily (his own phrase) that Updike persists in elaborating upon in his petit point style; etc., etc. Why can’t a Protestant, Updike asks, who certainly knows as much about the apocalyptic, find a place among the many Bechs fiddling on the very roofs of the more-Protestant-than-Jewish critics?

Why? He was brought up in a Lutheran home, Updike says, in which everybody did a great deal of laughing and liked to examine everything for God’s fingerprints. An orthodoxy certainly equivalent to the orthodoxy that his eminent Jewish contemporaries had been exposed to. And, as they abandoned their orthodoxy, he did as much when he switched from Lutheranism to Congregationalism. Was it also necessary to have grown up in a foreign environment to achieve the proper feeling for human failure? Well, the, Shillington (Olinger) or Mt. Penn (Mt. Judge), and Reading (Brewer) were right smack in the Pennsylvania Dutch section of that state - the scene of his early formative years and the locale for many of his writings. And if he did eventually settle in Ipswich, Massachusetts, why, then, so did his Jewish contemporaries leave their childhood ghettoes for more suburban, middle-class environs, once their literary success was assured.

Did Updike suffer as much as a child? His father was a high-school teacher during the Thirties and Forties, when teachers were not quite ready to thumb their noses at the subsistence level. (See the fortunes of young Peter Caldwell in Updike’s The Centaur.) Well, yes, perhaps that sort of suffering was much too proper for the development of a gut-writer.

But sports-can Updike match Roth’s or Malamud’s skill in writing about baseball, for example? The record shows an article by Updike on golf (New York Times Book Review, 6/10/73), and First Lunar Invitational (The New Yorker, 2/27/71). True, that ain’t baseball; worse yet, Updike plays golf and touch football (and a little poker). Where can one find enough angst in golf, or in touch football?

As to the uses of (hard or otherwise) pornography, four-letter words, liberated sex, Bellow and Malamud do not qualify for consideration on that point. Roth, however, is a more formidable rival, especially in his very explicit, patently pornographic Portnoy’s Complaint. In this respect, Updike is no puny challenger. In Rabbit, Run, the sex is explicit, even if the language is still too cautious, circuitous, and euphemistic. With The Centaur, however, the pornographic situations become more frequent and more obvious, and the language becomes equally more explicit. In Couples, Updike has finally joined the vanguard of the post-1964 Berkeley Free Speech movement and the extremely articulate reporters of the wife-swappers, swingers, and bedroom athletes. It remained for Rabbit Redux for Updike to abandon forever any inhibitions about the uses and practices of pornography and explicit language. In fact, there are many critics who now feel that Updike has even surpassed Portnoy’s Complaint. Still, the accolade of completely liberated, modern writer eludes him. Why?

For one, Updike delimits himself. My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class, he says. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules . . . So, it is the little Wasps, rather than the big Wasps, that he favors (John O’Hara, on the other hand, favored the big Wasps of Pennsylvania, and thereby gained many more readers, both big and little ones.) Then, too, Updike is definitely theologically oriented, something which is bound to confuse, annoy, exasperate, if not totally embarrass, many an average reader, especially the type that helps make up the best-buyer as well as the best-seller list. Furthermore, Updike’s genuine flair for irony is too often obscured by his crystalline, well-honed style. Finally, any writer who publicly avers that An old milk carton is worth a rose must be suspect. He is too prone to make the tragic trivial and the insignificant heroic. To paraphrase an eminent Elizabethan, Updike believes too often in parvum in multo (too little in a large area).

BACKGROUND AND BIOGRAPHY

John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in the general area of Reading. His father was Wesley Russell Updike, a teacher; his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, an author. He was graduated from Harvard College, A.B. (summa cum laude) in 1954, then spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (Oxford, England) and the two years following as a Talk of the Town reporter for The New Yorker magazine. Since 1958, he has spent some of his time doing book reviews for that magazine, and most of his time writing light verse, short stories, and novels. He resides in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with his wife, Mary Entwistle Pennington Updike, and their four children: Elizabeth Pennington, David Hoyer, Michael John, and Miranda. He works at a studio on Labor-in-Vain Road in Ipswich, votes Democratic, worships Congregationalist. In 1973 he was working on a play, Buchanan’s Dying.

Updike has rejected any attempt to associate his life and family with whatever he writes. However in answer to a statement that his parents seem to turn up quite often in his writing, he insists that his parents should not be equated with any of the fathers and mothers in fiction, and then adds, paradoxically, "But I don’t mind admitting that George Caldwell [in The Centaur] was assembled from certain vivid gestures and plights characteristic of Wesley Updike . . . His mother, unlike some of the very middle-class mothers in his stories, is very unmiddle-class, and an ideally permissive writer’s mother."

Harvard was both a happy and a successful experience for Updike. He worked on the staff of the Lampoon, doing cartoons, writing light verse, and miscellaneous prose. The Lampoon was as ideally permissive as any future ideally permissive writer wanted it to be. At Harvard, he also met Mary Pennington, whom he married in 1953.

Updike’s connection with The New Yorker may be said to have begun with the subscription he received to that magazine at the age of twelve. He decided then that he wanted to write for that magazine, an ambition that was realized when a poem and a story of his were accepted in June 1954. After graduation from Harvard, he became a staff writer for The New Yorker, serving both as a legman and reporter for the Talk of the Town section. Such writing, however, had to remain unsigned. (Even E.B. White’s many contributions to that department over a period of more than thirty years remained unsigned.) After two years of such writing, Updike left the magazine to become a freelance writer, but maintaining an unofficial connection with it by contributing occasional Notes and Comments, book reviews, and affording the magazine first call on his poems, short stories, and sundry articles.

CHRONOLOGY OF JOHN UPDIKE

1932

Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania

1945

Family moves to farm near Plowville, Pa.

1950

Enters Harvard College

1951

Begins to draw cartoons and write for the Lampoon

1953

Marries Mary Pennington

1954

Is graduated summa cum laude in English

1954-55

At Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts (Oxford, England)

1954

First short story (Friends from Philadelphia) published in The New Yorker

Three poems (Duet with Muffled Drums, Player Piano, The Clan) published in The New Yorker

1955-57

On the staff of The New Yorker

1957

Moves to Ipswich, Massachusetts

1958

The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (poetry)

1959

The Poorhouse Fair (novel)

The Same Door (short stories)

1959

Guggenheim fellowship in poetry

1960

Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of National Institute of Arts and Letters for The Poorhouse Fair

1960

Rabbit, Run (novel)

1962

The Magic Flute, with Warren Chappell (Mozart libretto)

Pigeon Feathers (short stories)

1963

Telephone Poles and Other Poems

The Centaur (novel)

1964

National Book Award for The Centaur

Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters

1964

Visits the U.S.S.A. on State Department cultural exchange

Olinger Stories (a selection)

The Ring, with Warren Chappell (Wagner libretto for children)

1965

Assorted Prose (essays)

Of the Farm (novel)

A Child’s Calendar (juvenile)

Dog’s Death

1966

The Music School (short stories)

Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger Award for The Centaur

1968

Couples (novel)

Bath After Sailing

1969

Midpoint, and Other Poems

Film rights for Couples purchased by David Wolper

1970

Bech: a Book (novel)

1971

Rabbit Redux (novel)

1973

At work on a play

Publishes long experimental poem in New York Quarterly No. 15

LITERARY INFLUENCES

John Updike has been called a maker of fables and parables, but not a philosopher, psychologist, theologian (except by Bech), or organizer of metaphysical systems. Still, he has rarely, if ever, been called a pure storyteller, master of the narrative style, or literary experimenter. Moreover, in referring to his work as meditation, not pontification, he leaves much doubt that the influences upon him have been generally secular and literary. The writers he favors represent a very mixed bag; Salinger, Henry Green, John O’Hara, Nathalie Sarraute, Dante, and Kafka; but also Aristotle, Pascal, Belloc, Kierkegaard, Freud, de Rougemont, Karl Barth, and Niebuhr. His early exposure to Lutheranism had a surprisingly permanent effect on him. How did the patently vapid and drearily business-like teachings to which I was lightly exposed, he asks, succeed in branding me with a Cross? We also don’t know how; but the fact is that Christian imagery does run through much of his writing. He is intrigued by the mystery-laden universe, and is taken in by a wonder that is more than childlike. It is also highly significant that between the modern theology expressed by the mod Episcopalian minister, Jack Eccles, and the fire-and-brimstone theology expressed by the Lutheran minister, Fritz Kruppenbusch (in Rabbit, Run), he seems to prefer the latter’s concept of sin and grace.

Updike has very little in common with those contemporary authors (Robert Penn Warren, John Barth, Saul Bellow, for example) who seem to share his willingness as an author to signal above the heads of the characters directly to the reader. Warren he can’t comment on. Barth seems to be too detached from this planet for his tastes. Bellow he finds too didactic. As for the later Salinger and Norman Mailer, he considers them too omnipresent, too self-celebrating.

But Salinger and Nabokov he accepts as mentors, to some extent. Salinger’s short stories, by liberating the genre from the wise-guy, slice-of-life narrative of the Thirties and Forties, made new room for shapelessness, for life as it is lived, for the kind of milieu in which Updike finds himself most comfortable. Paradoxically, he also has great admiration for Nabokov’s ability to create books that are carefully structured.

He envies Henry Green’s sheer transparence of eye and ear, something which he wishes he were able to achieve. The same can be said for some of O’Hara’s short stories. (Whether this admiration extends to O’Hara’s Pal Joey stories may be doubtful, although in Rabbit Angstrom Updike may have created a consummate heel patently equal to Joey). He also admires the cool surface of some of the contemporary French novels, especially those by Nathalie Sarraute. In fact, The Poorhouse Fair was intended as an anti-novel, but that may have been a singular exception, in that Updike prefers to describe things not because their muteness mocks our subjectivity but because they seem to be masks for God.

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES

I think of my books not as sermons or directives in a war of ideas, says Updike, but as objects, with different shapes and textures and the mysteriousness of anything that exists. Be that as it may, there are many sections in Updike’s books that are fairly recognizable as lay sermons or sermonettes. The very use of the Pascal pensee as an epigraph for Rabbit, Run may be construed as the text for the series of sermonettes strewn throughout the novel. Sex and religion can be found in almost all of Updike’s writings, and usually in a dialectial relationship. For example, whether it be in Couples or in the two Rabbit novels to be discussed, the problem that seems to concern Updike most is the nature of marriage and the demands made upon it by the social, ethical, and religious dimensions of sex. Marriage is a sacrament, Jack Eccles, the Episcopal minister in Rabbit, Run, declares, and then proceeds to do all he can to bring Janice and Rabbit back together again at