CHIRON'S FORUM: SELECTED ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
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"Chiron was one of the Centaurs, but unlike the others who were violent fierce creatures, he was known everywhere for his goodness and wisdom, so much so that the young sons of heroes were entrusted to him to train and teach."
Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1942), p. 430.
This webpage was initiated in order to encourage interest in the work of John Updike. As time has passed it became clear that the page has been of special interest to students at all levels of their education--high school, college, and graduate school. They write papers on Updike's work which are often very impressive. Further, from time to time important essays about and reviews of Updike's works have appeared which deserve the attention of the readers of this page. We have lacked a section in which regularly to display these materials and so this space will now be dedicated to these materials. We are naming it Chiron's Forum because the goal is, as for the ancient mythical figure, "to train and to teach." Whenever possible we will post essays and materials as whole texts, but space limitations may require editorial reduction. We reserve the right to make such reductions, but contributors will be informed in advance of such intentions.
In order to reduce the transcription work we request that you edit your submissions carefully for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and spacing. Normally, submissions will be transferred with the "copy and paste" technique common to most word processors. Email-ers, myself included, are notoriously careless typists, so your attention to neatness will help us to handle the submissions to this section expeditiously--and to the pleasure of us all. Contributors are asked to submit their names and location--city, state, and country. Please give complete bibliographical citation information if materials are forwarded from other publications. Where necessary, we will secure copyright permission.
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Photo: Peter MacDonald. Booksigning: Northfield Mount Hermon School, Winter 2003.
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The first section presents the publishing data on the Updike novel Terrorist, released 6 June 2006.
The second section includes several reviews of the book John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, which was published by Eerdmans November 1999.
The book John Updike and Religion was named "an elegant collection of coordinated essays" by The Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Please scroll down to Section II for The Journal of American Academy of Religion Review of the book
SECTION I--Terrorist Partial list of bibliographical notations and selected excerpts, supplemented as of July 16 by a list of 91 reviews in What's New in Updikiana .
Reviews of Terrorist
Reviewers or Sources Listed Alphabetically
Last entry here 2 June 2006
Anastas, Benjamen, BookForum, Summer, 2006; Begley, Adam, RNew York Observer, 6 June 2006; 2. Grossman, Lev, Time Magazine, 5 June 2006: 64-66; 68.Hitchens, Christopher, "No Way," The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 297, No. 5; 114ff; Hooper, Brad, Booklist, Starred Review, 15 March 2006; Hughes, Robert J., Pittsburg Post Gazette, 16 May 2006; Kirkus Reviews, Special, Spring & Summer 2006 Special Issue: 16, 18; Kirsch, Adam, New York Sun, 31 May 2006; Kirschling, Gregory, Entertainment Weekly, 19 May 2006; Klausner, Harriet, Klausner Archive, 24 April 2006 (click and go to http://harrietklausner.wwwi.com/review/terrorist_updike); Langan, Michael D., Buffalo News, 21 May 2006; Leonard, John, New York Magazine, 5 June 2006; Mack, Mehammed, Los Angles Weekly, 31 May 2006; McGrath, Charles, New York Times, 31 May 2006; Mudge, Alden, Book Page, June 2006; Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review, 10 April 2006; Salij, Marta, Detroit Free Press, 14 May, 2005: __.
Anastas, Benjamen, "Caricature Study," BookForum, Summer, 2006.
. . . Updike has veered wildly in his recent writing, from family epic to science fiction to a quasi-feminist Hamlet prequel to a collection of short stories animated by sexual nostalgia to minor curiosities like Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf. Fifteen new titles for the trophy shelf in just thirteen years-how's that for going un-gently into the good night? But in the meantime, Roth, the wily long-distance runner, has traded in the distractions of his actress for solitude and, his eyes transfixed by a finish line only he could conjure, left poor Rabbit Angstrom-dreaming up descriptions of body parts that used to tremble when he touched them, just as he trembled at the sight of every tufted godhead that blessed him and beckoned him to enter-in the dust. . . .
As the light grows crepuscular over an unstable world that eludes Updike's imaginative powers, his readers will put down Terrorist-if they ever complete it-and wonder who the devil took away their favorite author.
His name is Roth.
This review can be found online at http://www.bookforum.com/anastas.html .
Hitchens, Christopher, "No Way," The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 297, No. 5; 114ff.
The novel's conclusion is much the same as that of Updike's New Yorker essay. He looks at the quotidian crowd in Manhattan, "scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, their reason for living another day, each impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That and only that." Insects, in fact. Ahmad resents them for taking away his God, and, really, one is hard put not to empathize with the poor boy. Given some admittedly stiff competition, Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon.
Hooper, Brad,
Booklist, Starred
Review, 15 March
2006.
Updike is never static; over the course of his long career, he has not only mastered various literary forms but also tackled a wide variety of subjects as material for his fiction. His new novel, swift, sinewy, and stylish, represents another big leap. Int the hands of a lesser writer, such a risky topic and premise easily could have come across as presumptuous. . . . This marvelous novel can be accurately labeled as a 9/11 novel, but it deserves also the label of masterpiece for its carefully nuanced building up of the psychology of those who traffic in terrorism. Timely and topical, poised and passionate, it is a high mark in Updike's career.
Hughes, Robert J., "Summer Reading," Pittsburg Post Gazette, 16 May 2006.
Kirkus Reviews, Special, Spring & Summer 2006 Special Issue: 16, 18.
Terrorist, John Updike's latest novel, is a remarkable detour; the septuagenarian master has crafted a killer of a page-turner, complete with Islamic extremists, a terrorist plot and the race by a world-weary protagonist to save the day. It's gripping, it's provocative, it's frequently funny; it's a blast watching Updike work so enthusiastically in this territory. Updike the prolific art critic and Updike the dedicated religious writer are both in evidence; so is a certain self-referential wink-wink element, such as when the author of Rabbit, Run returns with this book's teenage lead character to the nostalgic recollection of a high-school track meet. Updike inhabits this boy from New Prospect. N.J.--Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an Islamic true believer--with real conviction, making his abhorrence of the Western world into which he was born palpable, and his lure into dangerous extremism believable and worrisome. . . . Updike briskly advances a plot that takes place during the summer and fall of 2004, so there's never any doubt that the threatened cataclysm must have been averted. The ending, in fact, hues close to the traditional Updike path, with a one-line off-screen revelation and a dose of paralyzing self-reflection replacing the pyrotechnic tricks most thriller writers would choose. But it's that kind of playing with the genre, along with Updike's acutely rendered riffs on the hash of contemporary American life--especially post-9/11 anxiety and its clash with 40 years of America popular culture teaching itself to relax--that give this book such a kick.
Klausner, Harriet, Klausner Archive, 24 April 2006 (click and go to http://harrietklausner.wwwi.com/review/terrorist_updike)
His Egyptian father abandoned him and his mother when he was three. Now fifteen years later in New Prospect, New Jersey high school student Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy scorns his hippie Irish-American mother turning to the Islamic teachings of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque for spiritual and emotional guidance. Shaikh advocates retribution to those supporting the Zionist American government.
Ahmad heeds the call to arms against the decadent American culture though he at times acts like a teen when he “competes†for the attention of Joryleen Grant against Tylenol Jones. Central High School Jewish near retirement guidance counselor Jack Levy tries to help Ahmad, but the student sees him as the epitome of why America is a failure. The lad is on the fast self actualization track starting with low esteem metamorphosing into a need to believe and belong to finally turning into a potential TERRORIST.
Using stereotypes to display flawed characters, John Updike is at his best with this frightening intense thriller in which he makes it clear that social strata and economics make for the breeding grounds of terrorists here (Think England), in Iraq and elsewhere. The author’s basic premise is that the West is losing the hearts of children who find physiological and psychological nourishment elsewhere while leaders posture like Panglois (Candide) that this is the best of all worlds. The TERRORIST is chilling.
Langan, Michael D., "Updike's 'Terrorist' might throw the fear of God into some readers," Buffalo News, 21 May 2006.
John Updike, in his mid-70s and author of more than 50 novels, short stories, poems, essays and criticism, gives no indication of slowing down. However, he might watch where he's going. Likely, he doesn't care much; but "Terrorist" will aggravate what Lyndon Johnson used to call "Amurrikuns." They'd call this book a load of bull.
I'd say "Terrorist" is a wake-up call to people, a bit jangly and harsh, but necessary.
Michael D. Langan was a Senior Expert for the U.N. Monitoring Group on the Taliban and al-Qaida.
This review may be found in full online at http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060521/1006466.asp .
Mudge, Alden, Book Page, June 2006.
. . . One of the most honored writers of his generation and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Updike tells his story with the thrilling, gorgeous prose we have come to expect of him. There is, for example, a terrible beauty in his description of the lake of rubble in the hollowed-out core of downtown New Prospect. . . . Updike has often explored themes of religious faith and disillusionment. In Terrorist, he links those themes to the legacy of fanatical violence.
For the full review click and go online to http://bookpage.com/0606bp/john_updike.html .
Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review, 10 April 2006.
Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. . . . But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work-all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces-effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits-that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel. 150,000-copy announced first printing (June 12) .
Salij, Marta, "How does a terrorist think?," Detroit Free Press, 14 May, 2005: __.
Yasmina Khadra's "The Attack" concludes that if you can put yourself into the terrorist's life, such terrorism makes plenty of sense. Terrorism -- even the suicide bombing of a small child's birthday party -- is the predictable product of decisions made by governments going back generations. So, to end terrorism, change those decisions.
John Updike's "Terrorist" is darker and crueler. It describes a world in which very little can be understood, and so trying to put yourself into another person's life is a joke. Terrorism makes no sense; almost nothing does. So, to end terrorism ... well, don't look to "Terrorist" for an answer.
SECTION II--John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace Edited by James Yerkes. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999.
Reviews:
Allen, Martha Sawyer. "New book looks at John Updike's religion,"Minneapolis Star Tribune, Saturday, August 12, 2000.
Bochynski, Pegge. Magill Book Reviews, Summer 2001.
Choice. May 2000, Vol. 37: 1650
Clergy Journal, May/June 2001.
Johnston, Robert K. Christianity and Literature, 50, No. 2 Winter, 2001: 373-375.
Kretzmann, Norman D. Metro Lutheran, April 2000: ____.
Lemire, Tim. "Of God and Updike" in the [Boston] North Shore Daily, Arts and Leisure Section, 12 December 1999: 18. Access by clicking here: http://www.townonline.com/arts/books/reviews/0-9885_2_of_011400_380fdbc795.html
Martins, Jose Encoenca. "Updike's Religion: Making His God the Host of All Beings," Estudos Anglo-Americanos (Anglo-American Studies), No. 24, 2000: 309-315).
McTavish, John. Theology Today, October 2000, 57:3: 435-436.
Middleton, Darren J. N. , "A Sense of the Sacred," Christianity and the Arts, Spring 2001.
Mojtavai, A. J. The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2001, Vol. 25: 122-123.
Morey, Ann-Janine. "Hugging the Middle," The Christian Century, May 24-31, Vol. 127: 605-606.
Nearlich, Robert. "Updike's unorthodox undertones,"The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, January 1, 2000.
Price, Joseph. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 69, No. 4 (December 2001): 959-961.
Publisher's Weekly. September 13, 1999, Vol. 246: 77.
Rankin, Bill. Episcopal Life, November 2000: ____.
Reist, John S., Jr. The Journal of Religion, Vol. 85, No. 2 (April 2005): 359-361.
Spyker, Steve. Religious Studies Review, January 2001: ____.
Weathers, Stephen. "No flight from God in Updike's work," The Christian Chronicle, August 2000: ____.
The Newest Review Listing of the book of essays, John Updike and Religion
Better Late Than Never: The University of Chicago's latest issue of the Journal of Relgion describes the book John Updike and Religion as "carefully wrought analyses of what Updike's 'artistic courage' has enabled him to create"
By John L. Reist, Hillsdale College.
In his remarks upon receiving the Campion medal, John Updike, asked "to be absolved from any duty to provide orthodox morals and consolations in my fiction. Fiction holds the mirror up to the world and cannot show more than this world contains" (5); if so, the crucial question for all artists and critics is twofold: first, what does the actual empirical world contain and, second, how does the world contained in Updike's fictional world narrate the factual world? Updike further declares, "God is the God of the living, though his priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. ... What small faith I have has given me what artistic courage I have" (131). Which is to say that curates and creeds, saints and sermons are not the only ones who "mould" the world; novelists and poets do.
These essays are carefully wrought analyses of what Updike's "artistic courage" has enabled him to create. And the depth of his fiction is that, through his depictions of lifeguards, lecherous ministers, lapsed women, and tired auto dealers, he discovers "the motions of grace" that Pascal discerned. A wordsmith beyond compare, Updike understands that words not only describe reality; they determine it. Wesley Kort, in his otherwise workman-like essay on "Work as Religious Discipline in Updike's Fiction," does not realize that for Updike it is not mere work that matters. Kort declares, "Work, when it fails to give people something to live for, turns out to be only a way to die" (181). However, Rev. Clarence Wilmot in In the Beauty of the Lillies has not only lost his work; he has given up the Word, his vocation to bear the Word to church and world. Therefore, he is reduced to a huckster of encyclopedias, which, for all the words they contain, have no vision, no focus, no order except for their alphabetical order. Work without the Word produces mere wordserotic, erratic, and empty. Thus, his son becomes a postman; yet the words he delivers are regulated only by the daily, diachronic monotony of his work, not by motions of grace. No mailman, Updike employs and arranges words into new aesthetic wholes that deliver and embody the significance of the world of words without the Word. His novels are no substitute for the Word, but they describe and discover a world that, without special grace, is rendered as needful. Stephen H. Webb writes, "Nothing in the world is sacred and inviolable, although anything, seen in the right light, can be a channel of God's grace" (149). Preachers declare; Updike describes. What "right light" do Updike's works shine on the world?
There are three excellent close readings and analyses: Dilvo Ristoff's treatment of Brazil; Marshall Boswell's take on eroticism in Rabbit Is Rich; and David Malone's critique of Toward the End of Time. However, there is no sustained interpretation of Updike's magnum opus, the Rabbit tetralogy, which chronicles Rabbit Angstrom's development from high school basketball court through auto dealership to his death bed. Had there been, the problem of grace in Updike's novels would have come clearly to the fore. At the conclusion of the fourth volume, Rabbit at Rest, after his son cries, "Don't die, Dad, don't!" Rabbit on his deathbed thinks to himself, "`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" (Rabbit at Rest [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990], 512). Is it enough? Or will he turn up in some fifth Rabbit novel as "Rabbit Redivivus?" Charles Berryman has it right when he states, "Realism itself is not so much the problem as Updike's reluctance or inability to draw the pieces together into a convincing and dynamic religious challenge" (206). One would hope that a fifth novel might be entitled, at least, "Rabbit, Relent," if not "Rabbit, Repent."
Updike might disown this challenge on the grounds that the world does not contain such a possibility and thus neither can his fiction. However, Jesus's prodigal son returns, Dante reaches Paradise, Bunyan's pilgrim progresses to the heavenly city, Lord Jim atones for his impulsiveness, and Graham Greene's Sarah in The End of the Affair achieves resolution and redemption. In "Lifeguard," Updike's short story about an insecure divinity student at the beach, the young pastor-to-be muses, "The diverting production of literary flirts like Chesterton, Eliot, Auden, and Greene ... in the end all infallibly strike, despite the comic variety of gongs and mallets, the note of the rich young man who on the coast of Judea refused in dismay to sell all that he had." Updike has intentionally limited himself to the world as it is, with a sense of grace; is he therefore a "literary flirt"? This is the issue which the essayists in this insightful book provocatively raise. Is it enough?
By Joseph L. Price, Department of Religious Studies, Whittier College (CA).
The fiction of John Updike is peopled with characters who are religious through and through. Not only does he write novels about ministers on the mend (A Month of Sundays; Knopf, 1975), or clergy in faith collapse (In the Beauty of the Lilies; Knopf, 1996), or theologians with doubt about God's reality in the face of technological certainties (Roger's Version; Knopf, 1986), he also has suffused his fictive environs with ordinary religious persuasions and perplexities. Hinting at this theological substratum, he has begun several of his novels with epigraphs from the Gospels, Barth, and Tillich. But most importantly, he has acknowledged that he has thought of his "novels as illustrations for texts from Kierkegaard to Barth" and that Angstrom, as the pronunciation of his name would suggest, is intended to be "a representative Kierkegaardian man." Such a person, Updike notes, is "in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and his human intelligence, of the social contract and inner imperatives, condemned as if by otherworldly origins to perpetual restlessness" (5).
In this way Updike continues the tradition of accomplished twentieth-century novelists and poets who identified themselves as Christian~-including Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, Flannery O'Connor, Brian Moore, and W. H. Auden. Like them, he has been bold in his willingness to tell the struggle of truth from a decidedly Christian perspective. But unlike the Catholic authors from Europe who so clearly addressed the matters of faith in midcentury, Updike not only takes a distinctly American perspective (joining O'Connor in that category) but also distinguishes himself by writing from a decidedly Protestant point of view. Few major U.S. writers since Hawthorne, to whom Updike turns on repeated occasions for inspiration and direction, have imbued their fictive worlds with such a strong Protestant tone.
In John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (Eerdmans, 1999), an elegant collection of coordinated essays edited effectively by James Yerkes, fifteen scholars of religious and literary critical studies explore the ways in which Updike portrays and probes the often religious dimensions of ordinary human experience. Consistently, the essays in Yerkes's collection analyze how Updike persistently examines the fusion and confusion of individuals' desires for spiritual satisfaction and sensual gratification. And in his essay "The Pocket Nothing Else Will Fill: Updike's Domestic God," James Schiff persuasively argues that, for Updike, God is found "in the details and abundance of existence," not only in the natural world but also in human relationships (including sexual experiences), human artifacts (such as furniture design), and human activities (like the rituals and rules for games and sports). This location of the divine in the domestic world is specified in In the Beauty of the Lilies, wherein Updike affirms that God is not dead but more likely to be encountered in cinema than in sermon, in popular culture than in ecclesiastical congregations.
Following an introductory autobiographical reflection by Updike on faith and literary mission, Yerkes clusters the fifteen analytical essays into three equal and cohesive sections. In the first, "Updike and the Religious Dimension," Yerkes, a theologian, and four literary scholars study issues related to the human perception of the divine in the mundane and to their experience of the threat of the void at every turn of dawn. The second section, "Updike and the Christian Religion," features essays on Updike's connections with Kierkegaard, Barth, and his own Lutheran heritage. The final section, "Updike and American Religion," focuses on Updike's fascination with and repetition of Hawthorne's works and world~
In his formative essay, Yerkes emphasizes the religious consciousness of Updike, noting that, for Updike, ~~to be religious is also to be seized and energized, day by day, strangely, at some deeply intuited level, by something that answers to the word ~hope"' (15). And he goes onto identify Updike's understanding of "the religious dimension of human self-consciousness" as involving "a sense of ultimate, but incessantly death-threatened hope" (19). What distinguishes this profound level and experience of hope, however consistently challenged, from wishful thinking is its ontological or moral ground. In autobiographical reflections set forth in Self-Consciousness, Updike argues that even "the yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience" (227). And he avers that "religion enables us to ignore nothingness and to get on with the jobs of life" (228).
For Updike, Yerkes notes, humans are fundamentally religious because of their existential concern about the meaning and purpose of their existence. For Updike, the primary manifestation of existential yearning, which itself is a reflection of human alienation, is found not in the experience of guilt but in its secularized counterpart, anxiety. Hence, the naming of Updike's recurrent protagonist Rabbit Angstrom, whose onomatopoetic surname resounds the angst of existence itself.
Although Updike locates spiritual yearning in the nature of human experience; and although he situates the presence of God in popular culture and domestic life, he maintains a keen Protestant perspective drawn from his familiarity with the Lutheran tradition and his appreciation for the Puritan roots of New England life. Addressing some of these influences in one essay, Darrell Jodock examines the influence of Updike's Lutheran upbringing on his work, and in another Wesley Kort deals with the Protestant tones associated with daily work 'as a religious discipline. Similarly, Charles Berryman, James Path, and Judie Newman engagingly explore the multiple (re)turns that Updike makes to Hawthorne's works, ranging from references in his essays, autobiographical reflections, and the Angstrom novel to more pervasive influences manifest in The Witches of Eastwick, In the Beauty of the Lilies, S., and the science fiction of Toward the End of Time. And in a most engaging essay Stephen Webb probes the influence of Barth on Updike, musing about how the reading of Barth might have influenced Updike not to be the novelist he is not.
Of all of the fine essays in John Updike and Religion, however, the most provocative is Kyle Pasewark's perceptive contribution on paradoxical theology and American culture in Updike's fiction. Pasewark deals with arresting paradoxes in Updike's novel~-and that is perhaps why, sounding out the resonance with Kierkegaard, Pasewark's piece is so stimulating. In turning to Kierkegaard's understanding of and celebration of paradox, Pasewark gets to the marrow of Updike's fictive worlds and our attraction to them. Paradox, he asserts, "is not finally irrational or anti-rational but that which simultaneously shatters reason and makes it necessary" (104). And Pasewark creatively turns Updike's own appreciation for paradox to the existential encounter of many readers with his fiction. For Pasewark notes that "one paradox of reading Updike's fiction is that seemingly decent readers often prefer indecency itself, whereas decency itself, which we hope the worldmay embrace, seems, weak, enervated, and even impious" (107).
Deftly, Pasewark also focuses on the paradoxical interplay between the pervasive desire for freedom by Updike's characters and their acquisition and abuse of power. "What if we worshiped, with our whole mind and whole heart, at the altar of freedom?" Pasewark muses: "What would happen is precisely what does happen in Updike's work: as seekers of freedom, his major characters ask for nothing more than to be alone but still require others, and though they begin by demanding freedom, they become ugly dominators of others and ultimately self-destructive as well" (111). In the end, one of the paradoxical virtues of Updike's fiction is that it does not make claims about being true but engages readers to search for truth and to perceive its vectors. And in this regard Pasewark's essay is exemplary because it investigates what Updike's fiction has to say, not by seeking dogmatic affirmations to be extrapolated from the texts but by working and wondering through language and its disclosive possibilities.
Several of the essays (like the one dealing with Brazil) begin with references to inadequate or negative literary reviews of a specific novel rather than identifying a theological theme in Updike's work or the theoretical structure of the essay itself. Given the strength of the analyses presented by the contributors to John Updike and Religion, this orientation creates an occasional defensive tone and deflects attention away from the significance of the insights of this illuminating volume. Nonetheless, the collection respects the theological inspiration and challenges of Updike's work without trying to classify Updike himself as a theologian. By taking seriously his the9logical concerns and religious sensibility, the essays make a considerable contribution to the scholarship on Updike, who "in his forty-five year career," as Avis Hewitt notes, "has become the spokesperson for our collective private lives" (32).
From The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 69, No. 4 (December 2001): 959-961
[J. Yerkes, 1-1-02]
To coin a familiar phrase, "The Reviews That Got Away"! I had read the first review by Ann-Janine Morey, almost two years ago! I forgot to add it. The Rankin review I read a few months ago, but had forgotten to list it here, too. And so I share them now--thanks to the reminder of Ann-Janine Morey and David Lull
Excerpts from "Hugging the Middle" (The Christian Century, 24-31 May 2000: 605-606)
By Ann-Janine Morey
"Not surprisingly . . . several of these essays celebrate the way in which Updike finds God in the material elements and events of our world, in every thing from furniture, golf, and carpet fuzz to rain, light, gardens and sexual intimacy. . . . What gives [the book] unexpected depth are the places where the essayists push against the hymn to realism that has defined Updike criticism. . . . Despite those who defend Updike, the question lingers and is thoughtfully debated in the strongest of these essays: Updike's realism is indeed a lovely and lovingly drawn surface, but do we mistake his artful accumulation of meticulously rendered detail for spiritual and moral thoughtfulness?"
[J. Yerkes, 3-9-02]
Episcopal Life Selections
SELECTIONS FROM SPECIAL BOOK SECTION
An online review which may be consulted at this address: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/episcopal-life/BkUpdike.html
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Updike's theology shows a worldly soul
By Bill Rankin
This book was waiting to be written. After all, John Updike labors expressly as a Christian, and many regard his work as the gold standard for writing; his productivity is of course enormous.
The volume displays Updike's theological acuity and that of its contributors. It explores Updike's handling of life's many riddles as these are shaped in our time and culture. You have to linger over a few of its parts, take some of it in bite-sized bits, but your diligence will be rewarded.
Updike's religious sensibilities are decidedly this-worldly. The book's frontispiece sets the theme for all that follows. It is the writer's poem, "Earthworm," containing this: "Immersed in the facts, / one must worship there; / claustrophobia attacks / us even in air." No mystical theology here, nor anthropology only, but lucidly a consideration of the human predicament coram Deo, in the presence of God. Another Christian poet, William Carlos Williams ("from Jersey") once wrote, "no truth but in things" -- an incarnational emphasis congenial to the Pennsylvanian.
The Lutheran Church of Updike's early years -- he now worships as an Episcopalian -- is one source of his religious view. A later influence is the theology of Karl Barth, with whom Updike shares a respect for the infinite qualitative distinction between human and divine (direct apprehension of God is not a part of Updike's world.) Kierkegaard and other existentialists also figure in his work; his characters are more searchers than finders, sometimes exhibiting anxiety and a sense of God-forsakenness -- they seem to be, in Camus' famous phrase, wanderers in search of a lost homeland.
The Updike protagonist is a vexed soul torn between a sense of greatness before the face of God and the moral frailty that all too frequently overtakes us. Being a person of faith, to Updike's mind, is to will to carry on in the face of this ambiguity. Truthfully describing the human predicament is a solemn duty, and honoring this obligation predisposes the most that a Christian could hope for, a sense of the sacred within the mundane.
The manifold concerns with which we are preoccupied are considered in Updike's works: death, the meaning of life and work, affirmation or despair, desire vs. duty, sexual activity, body vs. mind, the sense of God's presence (and absence), courage, trust, gratitude, loving and being loved, and so on. Persevering in face of these is the raw material out of which a "good person" is formed.
The various contributors to this book come from college or university faculties. One of them, Avis Hewitt, sympathetically alludes to Updike's personal insecurities, which she believes (probably rightly) opened up his, and awaken our own, capacity for God-consciousness. Professor Hewitt gives a particularly gentle and poignant portrait of the man: The stuttering, the psoriasis, an unfortunate childhood experience or two, the asthma.
A few quibbles: Updike's well-knownrefusal to join numerous other writers in protest against the Vietnam War is briefly discussed at one point. The justification for his position on this seems weak, and one wishes the matter had been explored, consistent with Updike's value of truth-telling. Only two of the 15 contributors to this volume are women. Moreover, Updike's theological concern appears to be disproportionately upon God for me, rather than upon God for us. His middle- and upper-middle-class, mostly white characters sometimes represent all too well the class and race separations of our time. Our divisions are of course "the truth," but it appears that Updike's Christian religion fails to help him know what to do about them.
Altogether, however, this book is rich with description and analysis of Updike's version of the plight and prospects of middle-class white folks. Its subject is a prominent figure in our life and letters, a man of sound theological learning and of immense achievement. These essays impressively do him justice. |
The Rev. William W. Rankin is vice president of the United Religions Initiative, San Francisco.
Mojtabai, A. J. The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2001: 122-123.
Preachers tend to read narrative (if at all) as fable or allegory. The intricate tissue of experiential detail vital to fiction is apt to be set aside as extrinsic to meaning and treated as an attractive but disposable container for the hard nugget of moral instruction within. Happily, no such tendency mars this collection of 15 essays by religious and literary scholars. The contributors all take fiction seriously enough to engage it on its own terms. They are able to confront irresolvable tensions without forcing resolution or resorting to what Updike calls "verdict" and "directive."
Prefacing the collection is Updike's 1997 speech upon receiving the Campion Medal, awarded by the Catholic Book Club. After briefly questioning his eligibility, the author recalls his affiliation with three Protestant denominations (Lutheran, Congregational, and Episcopal) and the comfort and courage his Christian faith has given him: "For it tells us that truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession; that the reality around us is created and worth celebrating; that men and women are radically imperfect and radically valuable."
Updike notes that his first novel carried an epigraph from the Gospel of Luke, the second from Pascal, the third from Karl Barth , and the fifth from Paul Tillich. His character Harry Angstrom, he says, represents a Kierkegaardian figure: "man in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and human intelligence, of the social contract and the inner imperatives, condemned as if by otherworldly origins to perpetual restlessness." Updike, by his own admission, is not a "Christian writer." What he has said of Harry Angstrom seems to apply to him as well: "Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out." And, while gratefully receiving the Campion Award, the novelist asked "to be absolved from any duty to provide orthodox morals and consolations in my fiction."
In the thought-provoking essays that follow the Campion speech, scholars explore the influence on Updike of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth, and others, along with the impress of Updike's early Lutheranism. Most memorable, on the literary side, is Charles Berryman's essay "Faith or Fiction," which argues that the dark, tragic visions of the great naysayers Melville and Hawthorne cut closer to the nerve of living faith than do the muted affirmations of Updike.
A minor complaint: This collection suffers from an excess of civility; more dissent would have been bracing. Critics as astute as Alfred Kazin have praised Updike's dazzling prose while questioning the depth of his work. The charge of"moral passivity" has been laid upon Updike's writing more than once. His lavish depictions of sexual exploits-ostensibly a sort of hymning to the goodness of the created world - might also be viewed as evidence of the author's captivity to the mores of contemporary secular culture. These essays duly note and answer such critical comments, but why not let a few of the critics speak for themselves? Surely the case made here for the authenticity of Updike's religious search is strong enough, sufficlently supple and undoctrinaire, to permit the unconvinced their full voice.
--A. G. Mojtabai
By John McTavish. Theology Today, October 2000, 57:3: 435-436.
Interviewer: Let's talk about Barth a little more. Obviously, you do acknowledge your debt to Barth, saying that at one point in your life his theology seemed to be your whole support. Could you say something about what elements of the Barthian position particularly attracted you?
Updike: I think it was the frank supernaturalism and the particularity of his position, so unlike that of Tillich and the entire group of liberal theologians--and you scratch most ministers, at least in the East, and you find a liberal.
English professors, you do not even need to scratch. They wear their liberalism on their sleeves, eloquently smudging the question of whether, as Updike put it in his 1976 interview with Jeff Campbell, "it really was so, that there was something within us that would not die." These same scholars, however, cannot help noticing--and often appreciating--literary pyrotechnics in the fifty-one substantial books that he has written. Yet what to do with all that "frank supernaturalsim"?
Give James Yerkes credit for meeting the issue head-on. Yerkes, a professor of religion and philosophy at Moravian College, has rounded up ten English professors along with three professors of religion, and pressed them to write expressly about the role that religion plays in Updike's work. Yerkes himself contributes an essay in which he describes how the religious dimension manifests itself in the self-consciousness of Updike's characters, noting the various ways in which it becomes the locale, but not the source, of the breakthrough of faith, revelation, and God. Experiential fiction naturally mitigates against theological precision, but Updike's patented realism gives the Christian faith, when it does break through, all the more believability. "This," says Yerkes, echoing the Jack Nicholson film, "is as good as it gets."
Several contributors tackle the most religiously offbeat Updikean novels. The Brazilian scholar Dilvo I. Ristoff, for example, shows Updike exploring the Christian paradox of life in death in Brazil through the romance of a young black man (turned white) and a young white woman (turned black). And David Malone argues that the latest low of moral decreptitude registered by Updike's hero in Toward The End of Time proves that Updike "is less interested in portraying the holiness of a saint or the depravity of a sinner than he is in depicting that more-densely populated territory occupied by people pierced by longings for both extremes but wholly committed to neither."
Stephen Webb's essay, "Writing as a Reader of Karl Barth," notes the formal similarities of the two titans, how they both eschew apologetics in the hope that the truth will speak for itself:
Just as Barth rejected modern trends in theology as faddish and thought that the most radical thing a theologian could do would be to ground theology in th e church, Updike follows the apparently traditional but really radical path of a descriptive prose that exercises the human freedom of creativity without thereby negating the reality of worldly consciousness on that freedom.
James Plath, whose book, Conversations with John Updike, is often, maybe a tad too often, quoted by contributors, himself contributes an essay showing Updike implicitly conversing with Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in the demonic-riddled The Witches of Eastwick. Plath contends that evil here "is more than just a welcome diversion from the boredom and routine of everyday goodness. It's edifying." Yerkes makes the same slippery point: "One does not sin in order to produce goodness, which is what genuine antinomianism means, but one does indeed learn a lot about goodness in sinning that would not be understood without it."
The most lucid treatment of the religious dimension in Updike's fiction remains, in my judgment, Alice and Kenneth Hamilton's pioneering work, The Elements of John Updike. Still, John Updike and Religion is an important and helpful book: important because it updates criticism on the work of an author who, as the smoke clears, stands virtually alone with his bracing interaction of realistic fiction and solid theology; and helpful because the contributors, while wise in the ways of the academic world, have no unpalatable ideological axe to grind.
John McTavish, Trinity United Church, Huntsville, Ontario
Magill Book Reviews, Summer 2001
By Pegge Bochynski
Abstract: This engaging collection of essays explores the religious consciousness of Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike, demonstrating how his understanding of religion informs his art.
"Christianity gave me something to write about," states John Updike in his memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989). So it seems, considering that he has dealt with religious themes in over fifty books. Although critics have long recognized the theological dimension of Updike's work, it has never been thoroughly explored until now. Editor James Yerkes brings together a diverse group of theologians, philosophers, and literary critics who examine various facets of Updike's fiction in light of his Christian faith. The magnificent result is John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace.
Fifteen essays, divided into three sections, offer in-depth discussion of Updike's spiritual sensibility. The first section, "Updike and the Religious Dimension," features a fine introductory essay by Yerkes exploring the way in which Updike's religious consciousness has shaped his art. The second section examines "Updike and the Christian Religion" and includes essays on Lutheran and Barthian elements underlying Updike's prose. Finally, "Updike and American Religion" looks at how certain literary and cultural influences have informed Updike's work, including the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The collection also includes essays on less acclaimed works by Updike such as Memories of the Ford Administration (1996), as well as an opening poem and essay by the author himself.
Scholarly without being stuffy, the essays in John Updike and Religion offer an accessible introduction to general readers who possess only a passing familiarity with Updike's work. The anthology also provides academics with a wealth of new insights into the writings of one of the most distinguished authors of our time, and is sure to become a benchmark reference for all current and future Updike enthusiasts.
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Christianity and the Arts, Spring 2001
A Sense of the Sacred
Reviewed by Darren J. N. Middleton
A professor of religion and philosophy at Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, James Yerkes has edited the first in-depth examination of John Updike's profoundly religious vision. Making use of several nationally and internationally renowned scholars of literature, Yerkes has compiled a first-rate analysis of the depth and breadth of Updike's work.
This anthology of essays is divided into three main sections featuring fifteen original essays, and includes a poem and an introductory essay by Updike himself. All of the essayists are united, for the most part, by a belief that "a sense of the sacred" forms the backbone of Updike's prolific and award-winning work.
In the first section, five scholars offer their views on the religious dimensions of Updike's Self-Consciousness, Brazil, and Toward the End of Time. While scholars not associated with Yerkes's anthology have often dismissed Brazil and Toward the End of Time, Yerkes's essayists indicate why these Updike texts repay the closest attention.
A second section in John Updike and Religion--one that ought to be of special interest to our readers--probes the relationship between Updike and Christianity. In particular, it delineates Updike's dependence on two famous makers and remakers of Christian doctrine, namely, Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth. Emphatic fideism, traceable to both Kierkegaard and Barth, show up in Updike's Rabbit [tetralogy] and his Roger's Version. The five scholars associated with this section do a commendable job of showing how Updike offers literary meditations on this and other Christian themes.
A final section examines Updike's connection to American religion, drawing on The Witches of Eastwick, S., and Memories of the Ford Administration. Unquestionably, John Updike is America's premier man of letters, and Yerkes has done an excellent job of taking one--the central?--aspect of Updike's work, his religious vision, and commissioning fifteen essayists to take us deeper into the center of this vision.
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Darren Middleton is a frequent contributor to Christianity and the Arts. He may be reached at d.middleton2@tcu.edu
Clergy Journal, May/June 2001
James Yerkes, the editor of John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, is professor of religion and philosophy at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Yerkes has collected essays from sixteen contributors who explore the vast literary field of John Updike. A Pulitzer Prize winning author who has penned over fifty books, Updike is a large figure in contemporary American literature. This collection of essays inquires into Updike's religious themes. Updike's genres include novels, short stories, poetry, and critical essays.
Yerkes divides these essays into three sections. The first component is titled "Updike and the Religious Dimension." While the second part Yerkes titles "Updike and the Christian Religion," the final third of the book bears the title "Updike and American Religion."
Almost without exception the volume's contributing writers are professors in either English or theology and philosophy. One of the things that these essays brought to my attention is Updike's predilection for leaning on the theology of Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth. If a reader is familiar with Updike's writing, then this book will be a joy to consider. If a reader is not familiar with Updike's work, it may entice one to become familiar with Updike's writing.
An international review comes from the Portuguese academic journal Estudos Anglo-Americanos (Anglo-American Studies, No. 24, 2000: 309-315). It is written by Jose Encoenca Martins and titled, "Updike's Religion: Making His God the Host of All Beings." His concluding paragraph reads:
"It does not seem too much to repeat here again the idea that Updike's God, in the ways He has been discussed throughout the book, is Himself the Sacramental Host of all religiosities: literary, theological, personal, social, Lutheran, Christian, and American. These religiosities were disguised or made explicit in the multitude of his works, both fictional and non-fictional, realistic and mythic, satirical and laudatory. The essays in their varieties, interests, and expositions, have become spoken witnesses of Updike's vitalizing of American literature with this theological and literary artistry. Because of the theological concerns they express, the essays have turned into the host and bread that allow the Holy Communion between Updike's fictional energy and his audience's responses to literature--responses both illuminating and transforming" (p. 315). [J. Yerkes, 8-20-00]
These four reviews, two from newspapers and two from academic reviewing agencies, have been published over several months. I share them with a great deal of personal satisfaction, as you can imagine. The book's description and table of contents may be found by scrolling down this page section. [J. Yerkes, 30 July 200]
The longest review to date comes from Christianity and Literature, the April 2001 issue. Thanks to editor Robert Snyder for sending it along.
John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Edited by James Yerkes. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999. lSBN 0-8028-3873-1. pp. xiii + 200. $24.00.
James Yerkes has edited a splendid volume on John Updike and religion. Divided into three sections, the essays explore (1) the religious dimension of Updike's literary vision, (2) his connection to the Christian tradition, and (3) his relation to American religion and cultural values. Also included is a helpful bibliography of Up- dike criticism related to the topic. Worth noting is the book's concentration on Updike's fiction from the 1980s and 90's. Essayists spend little time on the early fiction, exploring instead the fictive worlds of Roger's Version (1986), Trust Me (1987), Brazil (1994), and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996). In addition, The Witches of Eastwick (1984), S. (1988), Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), Toward the End of Time (1997), and Updike's memoirs, Self-Consciousness (1989), all come in for significant analysis. One wonders at first at the selection of such novels. Some are minor footnotes in the Updike corpus, but focusing upon the later corpus brings certain themes and emphases to the fore that shed a clearer light on Updike's religious interests. In particular, readers are helped to move beyond the initial assessment of Updike as an "early Barthian" and to understand better his Lutheran roots that have taken on an increasingly Tillichian perspective. As Yerkes comments in a footnote, Updike's "understanding of human religious consciousness follows Luther more directly than Barth" (28).
After this reviewer wrote an article for The Christian Century in 1977 on "John Updike's Theological World," Martin Marty, one of the editors, sent me a postcard from Updike himself commenting on the piece: "He is right to look at the Pascal pensee as the key riddle, as I see the riddle. Like many theological writers, he didn't take the theology quite seriously enough--A Month of Sundays, for instance, is meant to be a critique of Barth, from one mellowing into middle age and Tillichism." Yerkes makes no such mistake.
There is no denying Karl Barth's early influence. Updike himself comments in his "Remarks upon Receiving the Campion Medal," an award to a "distinguished Christian person of letters": "I thought of my novels as illustrations for texts from Kierkegaard and Barth; the hero of Rabbit Run was meant to be a representative Kierkegaardian man, as his name, Angstrom, hints." Darrell Jodock is nonetheless correct in noting that "with Barth's help [Updike) renewed his faith but continued to understand it in a Lutheran way" (132). Jodock's chapter, "What Is Goodness? The Influence of Updike's Lutheran Roots," explores how the reader can find in Updike's fiction a religious orientation that, like Lutheranism, is comparatively world-accepting, centered in trusting relationships and free in the grace of God. His fictive world is aware of the presence and activity of God in the world yet cognizant of the ambiguity of the moral life. It is thus both fond of unresolved paradox and prone to an ironic sense of humor (121-24). Updike is even quoted by Jodock as saying in Self-Consciousness that his Lutheran faith gave him the artistic courage "to describe life as accurately as I could, with special attention to human erosions and betrayals," knowing that "truth, however harsh, is holy" (131).
Perhaps the finest of the essays in this volume is the one by Yerkes himself, who argues that Updike's religious sensibility is best captured by the title of the 1998 movie As Good As It Gets. In his fiction Updike writes that there is "an unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable Sacred Presence" (10). Quoting Ralph C. Wood, Yerkes understands this Presence to be detected "not so much by sight as by scent and footprint" (18). Given this sense of the numinous, Updike (1) asserts, as Tillich did, the gratuitous priority of being over non-being. (In an interview, for example, Updike says that in his fiction he was Just trying to announce with a sense of wonder the surprise that I'm here at all" [25-26]). (2) He believes that we can take courage, even as we are assaulted by tragedy and chaos. (3) He portrays ours to be a death-threatened hope, but it is still a hope. (4) And he understands that, as we live "under God's gaze," we have an unrelieved and deeply conflicted moral obligation, as well as a profound sense of gratitude. As Updike comments in his memoirs, "Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the Jobs of life."
Getting on "with the jobs of life" is the focus of Wesley A. Kort's excellent "Learning to Die: Work as Religious Discipline in Updike's Fiction." Kort understands that for Updike work is a religious discipline. Thus, when it "fails to give people something to live for," it "turns out to be only a way to die" (181). In support of his thesis, Kort offers a helpful analysis of In the Beauty of the Lilies. In this novel work no longer relates people to something beyond their own interests-that is, work no longer is vocation, having become self-referential and self-serving. Kort finds the problem central to Updike's other novels as well. Rabbit" is resigned merely to "earning his paycheck, filling his slot in the big picture." (Rabbit at Rest [190]). Kort also recalls Peter Caldwell's question concerning his vocation as an artist: "Was it for this that my father gave up his life?" (The Centaur [184]). Updike is uncomfortable with both the traditional Protestant notion of vocation and with our culture's narcissistic alternative. Thus, reminiscent of his study in Shriven Selves: Religious Problems in Recent American Fiction (1972), Kort finds Updike struggling to portray a third way, a compound that while unsteady still works.
Two other contributions to John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace are deserving of particular mention. James A. Schiff writes helpfully on Updike's notion of God. Though removed and hidden, the novelist's "domestic" God reveals Himself by leaving traces "in the furniture." For Updike, the blankness is never emptiness. Thus, he would have us "'examine everything for God's fingerprints'" (51). (Recall David Kern's description of cat-plus-baby daughter as "supernatural mail" in "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car." David says that it "had the signature: decisive but illegible.") In Updike's fiction God's presence is not constant or absolute. It might more likely be experienced in a movie theater than in a church, but "God is beneath the surface, pushing through, as when as above the world, providing light and hope" (63). Schiff's analysis echoes Updike's poem "Earthworm," which Updike has described as "perhaps my best-felt statement on religion" (xiii). The poem, which is included at the front of the book, begins: "We pattern our Heaven / on bright butterflies, but it must be that even / in earth Heaven lies."
Yerkes concludes his collection with Donald J. Greiner's "The World as Host: John Updike and the Cultural Affirmation of Faith," Greiner, like the others, finds Updike's canon to have "a distinctive signature expressed through his ruminations on belief' (258). He rightly argues that Updike never gives up on faith, despite our culture's social faltering, our busyness, the diminishment of mystery, and our loss of aspiration. Instead, writes Greiner, "Updike avoids the flashily dramatic to feature the drably mundane, the little moments-the grace notes, as it were-that frame faith in an era of disquiet" (262). Life itself is sacramental; as with the host, however, efficacy comes in the chewing.
The collection's subtitle refers to part of Blaise Pascal's Pensee 507 that serves as the epigraph for Rabbit Run. The text reads, "The motions of Grace, the hardness of heart; external circumstances." It is, as the authors of this volume realize, the motions of grace that provide us with our bearing and our hope, but we experience such grace ambiguously, sheathed within our hardness of heart and external circumstances. There is no other way.
Yerkes finds a cinematic parallel for Updike's creation-rooted religious wisdom in the movie As Good As It Gets . Perhaps a more powerful analogue is the Academy Award-winning movie American Beauty, Despite the perceived vanity of life that has sterilized the heart, Lester and Ricky both find in the image of the plastic bag blowing in the wind a symbol of hope and life that is gratuitous yet brings courage and praise. The image is one Updike might admire, for it is through such motions of grace that we are provided with our sense of place.
Robert K. Johnston
Fuller Theological Seminary
Published in the April 2001 issue of the journal Christianity and Literature.
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Published Saturday, August 12, 2000
New book looks at John Updike's religion
Martha Sawyer Allen / Minneapolis Star Tribune
John Updike has dissected our modern culture for decades now, and almost every time he leaves us almost breathless with the clarity of his vision and his strength in the face of desperation.
As he writes in a poem at the start of a new scholarly review of his life's work: "We pattern our Heaven on bright butterflies, but it must be that even in earth Heaven lies."
See, there he goes again, bringing us back to Earth, to reality, and finding such power and redemption in this moment, while living with the unknowable nature of God.
A new book, "John Updike and Religion, The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace," sets out to examine the religious vision of this American author. Essays from 15 scholars, including the book's editor, James Yerkes, delve into Updike's contributions to understandings of faith in modern America.
Updike's words also have been included. In an opening essay, based on a speech he'd given, he outlines a thoroughly fascinating look at Christianity in this century. As he says, he came of age in the 1950s, when there was a "mild religious revival." But he goes on to wonder if he would call himself a Christian if he had grown up in "an atheist Communist state, or [call himself] a literary man in the days when Menckenesque mockery was the dominant fashion."
His view of Christianity is that it can accept the world in all its ugliness, pain and sorrow, because "the bad news can be told full out, for it is not the only news." He continues, "To be a Christian in this day and age, as in the time of imperial Rome, is to be unorthodox, and readers should look elsewhere for the consolations of conventional sentiment and popular, necessary religion of optimism."
Yerkes, who assembled the essays and contributed his own insights as well, agreed to an e-mail interview about the new book:
QWhat would you say is the most surprising thing you learned from the new understandings of Updike's faith?
AThe consistency and constancy of his views. He has pretty much stayed with earlier religious convictions, except that he has become more sophisticated about the modern objections to religious faith in general and Christian faith in particular -- post-modernism, relativism, biblical criticism. There is a strong Lutheran orientation which he has never abandoned, and [Darrell] Jodock's essay makes this point clearly. [Updike] mentioned to me that he thought Jodock's essay was accurate and he said in my own general interpretation in the opening essay he thought I had "got it just right."
QSay a little more about your assertion that Updike's religious consciousness can be described as "a sense of an unavoidable, unbearable and unbelievable sacred presence."
AWell, this needs to be coupled with the idea of Rudolf Otto's view (Otto was a Lutheran) of the Sacred awareness in humans as both frightening and fascinating (to use psychological categories), as a sense of worry and a sense of hope (to use everyday categories), and a sense of judgment and a sense of grace (to use moral and religious categories). Updike thinks all humans have this "sense of the sacred" and have an ambivalent attitude about it.
So, the awareness has a compounded double sense always. It is unavoidable, meaning it comes unbidden, at different times and yet always at the same time, with both negative and positive sensations; it is unbearable, meaning it brings a sense of fear and judgment and a sense of hope and grace, at different times and yet always at the same time; it is unbelievable, meaning it combines a sense of uncertainty and incredibility, and a sense of amazement and astonishment at the gratuity and surprise, at different times and yet always at the same time. In other words, the awareness of the sacred is always ambivalent and so always paradoxical.
QYou say that several contributors used Updike works that have not been well accepted critically. Why were they chosen and what new insights come from them?
AThree essays, I think, fit this point: The [Judie] Newman essay, ["Guru Industries, Ltd. Red-Letter Religion in Updike's 'S',"] the [Dilvo] Ristoff essay, ["When Earth Speaks of Heaven: The Future of Race and Faith in Updike's 'Brazil'"] and the [George] Diamond essay, ["Chaos and Society, Religion and the Idea of Civil Order in Updike's 'Memories of the Ford Administration.'"]. They were chosen individually and submitted without my prompting.
However, those three books look a bit more important and revelatory in the Updike corpus than most critics recognized. It gives them more power to speak for Updike's authorial perspective. It is a question of critical literary balance, not a judgment that these three books are among his best. Frankly, though, I personally think Memories of the Ford Administration is a sleeper among his works. I think it is a very good book.
QWhat did you hope this book would accomplish?
AMy fondest hope is that it would serve the interests of both students and general readers, and not only academics. I wanted this religious dimension of Updike's work to be recognized and explored by his readers -- admirers and detractors alike. No one else had focused solely on this aspect of Updike's authorial perspective, and I felt it was time something was presented from this point of interest. In contrast to the many Jewish and Roman Catholic writers, how many other Protestant writers of stature have stayed with their religious commitment in this last half-century -- have read key Christian theologians for some orientation and guidance, and have attended church on a fairly regular basis? To me, this was ample reason to ponder the religious dimension in Updike's oeuvre.
QSince an Updike essay begins the book, I assume he approved of the study.
AI did tell him I intended to produce such a book and asked if he would consider writing a foreword or afterword. He declined to do either, so as to make clear the essays have no "official" sanction in the range of views expressed there, but he did very kindly offer to allow me to publish the Campion Medal acceptance speech [as an essay at the beginning of the book].
QSay a little more about Marshall Boswell's assertion that in Rabbit is Rich John Updike "boldly conceives theology from the belly of blasphemy."
AMarshall, who will have a full-length study of the Rabbit novels published shortly by the University of Missouri Press, thinks that Updike explores in a profound, even disturbing manner the dark side of God, the sacred presence experienced as frightening and aloof to our suffering in human awareness. His reading may not be shared by many, but Updike is very clear -- and Boswell highlights -- the fact that there is a "cloud of unknowing" that renders God unfathomable and even unapproachable rationally. Boswell thinks this is a heritage from Updike's reading of theologian Karl Barth, and I think there is significant continuity there. It is my understanding that grace is the final word from God in Updike's view, but I believe Updike would second Dostoyevsky's sentiment, "My hosannas have come through whirlwinds of doubt."
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This review may be found online at the following address and by typing "Updike" into the Search box: http://www.startribune.com/ . It appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune 12 August 2000.
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The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, January 1, 2000
Updike's unorthodox undertones
By Robert Neralich / Special to the Democrat-Gazette
Literary works that are categorized as "religious fiction" can include anything from the most overtly didactic fable to the most subtle and refined expressions of human creativity. The novels of John Updike present special challenges to anyone who wishes to interpret them in traditional Christian ways, for their author has written that he feels himself "to be absolves" from presenting "any orthodox morals and consolations" in his fiction.
We live in a relentlessly secular culture, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Updike has declared that "'Fiction holds the mirror up to the world and cannot show more than this world contains." In consequence, readers seeking a manifestly sacred dimension in Updike's writing might become frustrated by the difficulties inherent in the literary strategies that the author employs to articulate his artistic vision.
Happily, a guide to these aesthetic and spiritual complexities is now available in a collection of first-rate essays edited by James Yerkes--John Updike and religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company).
In addition to presenting excellent critical discussions of the religious character of Updike's fiction, this anthology also provides an informative overview of Christian theology, including the thought of Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Kierkegaard and Barth, as well as thoughtful examinations of Updike's literary predecessors, especially Hawthorne and Melville. Thus, the essays furnish a religious and cultural context within and against which the complex nature of Updike's spiritual sensibility becomes clear.
Updike has declared that his books are "all meant to be moral debates with the reader," and he has frequently mentioned the importance of his Lutheran upbringing in the development of his literary career. But the apparent simplicity of such statements can be misleading.
The moral debates in which Updike engages his readers are more like implied theological interrogations, and their presence is difficulty to detect because Updike frequently presents them not in the form of grand philosophical debates but in unadorned descriptions of humble objects.
It is common to find passages in Updike's works in which the authors seems to suggest that God's presence can best be detected in everyday, almost domestic things: "There is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm."
On the other hand, as these essays reveal, Updike's religious affirmations are not usually so straightforward. His mirror to the world is an hones one that does not distort what it reflects. The moral and religious struggles of his characters embody, albeit in indirect form, some of the difficulties that Christians face in mustering the courage to sustain their faith amid the provocations and temptations of the modern world.
For Updike, to be a Christian today means, as it did in the days of the Roman Empire, "to be unorthodox" and, at the same time, "to be freed from certain secular illusions and monochromatic tyrannies of hopeful thought." Therefore, in a sense, the good news of the Gospel is also the bad news--the world is equally wonderful and terrible, and the only appropriate response to it is awe in its genuine sense--am ambivalence about life and creation and God.
As a contemporary Christian author, Updike feels compelled to render this ambiguity with unflinching courage, hence his practice of writing in a characteristically ironic and paradoxical way. Thus, reading Updike is to encounter the mystery that is at the heart of modern faith--Christians experience God as simultaneously present and and absent from their lives.
This is the nature of Updike's "sacred vision," and it is in general accord with the theological orientations of Augustine and Luther as much as it is indebted to the psychological insights and creative explorations of Hawthorne and Melville. But Hawthorne and Melville lived in a time when they could expect their readers to be acquainted enough with the nature of tragedy and Christian theology to appreciate the emotional and religious torments of the characters in their novels.
Updike has no such luxury. Consequently, he must approach his craft with the understanding that Christendom's appreciation of theology and tragedy has been eroded by the secular imperatives of an American culture within which right and wrong have been relativized and personal responsibility so diminished that any religious writer has brace difficulties finding a vocabulary through which to communicate the dramas of personal salvation and individual catastrophe.
Updike therefore resorts to other means by which to reflect the glories and follies of the human condition, including his penchant for brilliantly ironic tragi-comedy. The nature of these literary strategies might not be satisfying for readers who demand clear religious messages in their fiction, but, as one critic shrewdly observes, "Updike's fiction does not deliver a claim to be true; rather, it engages us in the demand to think truly," even and especially if that thinking leads us to unhappy or morally ambiguous conclusions about human nature and the world.
One of the most admirable facts about the essays James Yerkes has collected in John Updike and Religion is that the authors devote a great deal of long-overdue attention to Updike's less-acclaimed works, including S, Brazil and Toward the End of Time. These discussions help bring balance to Updike criticism, and they illuminate the consistency as well as the evolution of Updike's religious preoccupations.
Many readers might not accept Updike's Christian views, and others might not admire his literary work, but after reading Yerkes' splendid anthology, there is something about which nearly everyone will agree: In the fiction of John Updike we encounter an artist, a man, and a Christian who does not just think truly but to the best of h is understanding and ability writes truly, as well.
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Robert Neralich has a Ph.D. in English and teaches Asian studies at Fayetteville High School. Write to him c/o Northwest Religion Editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, P.O. Box 5105, Springdale, Ark, 72765, or email: rneralich@aol.com.
Choice, May 2000
Though John Updike's writings have attracted much scholarly and critical attention over the years, a topic little treated in literary studies has been the role of religion in his works. Yerkes (religion and philosophy, Moravian College) has edited a well-conceived collection of essays to address this weakness in Updike scholarship. After an introduction and an initial essay by Updike himself, the remaining 15 essays explore three separate areas of religion. The fist five essays examine the religious dimensions of Updike's fiction, with an eye to the universal religious elements in human culture. They see the general "sense of the sacred" that is an important part of many of his books. The second five essays examine Updike's relation to Christianity, his own religious roots, and the interconnections between his work and the categories of Christina theology. The final five look at the relation between Updike and particular forms of religion in the American context, especially how his religious vision plays out in the religious world of the US. A wonderful, unified collection of essays on a infrequently discussed topic. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates and above, and general readers and practitioners interest in Updike and/or religious studies.
M. A. Granquist, St. Olaf College
12 December 1999
Community Newspaper Company, [Boston] North Shore Sunday, Arts and Leisure Section, Page 13.
Of God and Updike
By TIM LEMIRE
CNC STAFF WRITER
A religion professor at Boston College once told me how to classify original and secondary texts: if the original text made for great reading, (e.g., The Bible, Aristotle, Nietzsche), you could be sure, he said, the secondary text, the critical analysis of the original, would be a horrible read; conversely, if the original was a nightmare to get through (e.g., Heidegger), the secondary text would be a delight.
A happy refutation of this theory is a new body of critical essays on John Updike called, straightforwardly, John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and The Motions of Grace (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), edited by James Yerkes, professor of religion and philosophy at Moravian College in Updike's native state of Pennsylvania.
Far from being a dry, jargon-heavy tome on the religious aspects and subjects in John Updike's fiction, Yerkes' book is, instead, intellectually challenging without being recondite and consistently approachable (in places, mainstream) in style, tone and tenor. Sixteen essays here take essential questions of theology - Does God exist? If so, what is God like? What is humankind's relationship to God? What is sin? - and direct them toward and through Updike's work.
Perhaps the most salient feature of this collection is the serious attention it gives to Updike novels that are typically not considered the author's best work (perhaps this is where the B.C. professor's theory applies): Dilvo I. Ristoff, a Brazilian professor who has written two volumes on Updike, analyzes Updike's novel "Brazil"; Yerkes' Moravian colleague George S. Diamond tackles the relationship between religion and civil order in "Memories of the Ford Administration"; and, in what it perhaps the volume's most revisionist piece, David Malone re-evaluates the much-panned Updike novel "Toward the End of Time." One leaves Malone's arguments convinced he is the only one who got it right.
Yerkes secures permission to reprint Updike's acceptance speech "Remarks Upon Receiving the Campion Medal" (an award from the Catholic book club) and follows with an essay of clear conclusions about how Updike's characters live their fictive lives in relation to the divine.
Yerkes maintains The Centaurian, what may well be the ultimate John Updike tribute page on the entire Web (http://www.users.fast.net/~joyerkes/), complete with monthly Updike discussions and the latest in Updike news. The care and attention Prof. Yerkes has given to Updike through both ventures amounts to what used to be called corporeal works of goodness and what we, more plainly, would call a gift.
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Looking at Updike and Religion
by Robert L. Powers
January 2000
John Updike, whose 50th book was published a few months ago, always has been one of those triple-threat writers. Across his long career, the native of Shillington, Pa. has published novels, essays or reviews, and poetry. To those writers who have trouble getting publishing in one genre, the fact that Updike has published so much, and to almost unerring acclaim is nearly enough to make the ordinary scribbler snap all his pencils and apply for a job at McDonald's.
Although over his career Updike has dealt with sexuality in a frankness that caused whispers and head-shaking, the average reader may not have thought about how faith and religion have played an often dominant role in his writing, especially his fiction.
My friend James Yerkes is the editor of a wonderful collection of essays dealing with the topic of faith in a delightfully down-to-earth manner. John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (Eerdmans, $24). That longwinded title may scare away Updike admirers who fear wading in the dark waters of academic posturing. They need not worry, for the book is a relatively breezy read, with only a semi-occasional wandering into verbosity. For instance, Yerkes (who teaches religion at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa.) writes about Updike in the light of having watched and enjoyed the Jack Nicholson film, "As Good As It Gets." Nothing stuffy here.
James A. Schiff writes that for Updike, "God permeates every aspect of human life so that his presence is felt in and around households. Updike doesn't state his beliefs in so many words, preferring--as most artists--to "suggest that the possibility of there being something greater beneath the physical surface." As Updike wrote in Assorted Prose, "Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else."
Schiff sees God's presence in Updike's writing, although "beneath the surface, pushing through, as well as above the world, providing light and hope." Schiff sees such an ambiguity as clearly attesting "to the artist's artistic achievement since God, in life and in fiction, is never easily or clearly found."
If you share an enthusiasm for Updike, be sure to check out editor Yerkes' excellent Web page called The Centaurian devoted to Updike. The URL is www.users.fast.net/~joyerkes.
Bob Powers, a freelance writer and editor now living in Marietta, Ohio, spent more than 17 years in Columbus. During that period, he served as entertainment editor of The Columbus Dispatch, managing editor of The Columbus Free Press, stringer for weekly Variety, and entertainment critic for the old WCOL-AM. He proclaims that show business is his life. He also writes about books for five web sites, including Generator 21World Wide (www.g21.net), Suite 101 (www.suite101.com), The Columbus FreePress (www.freepress.org), and Arts Window (www.artswindow.org).
This review was taken from his page innerart.bits A Few Words and is used with his permission. The site link is http://innerart.com/powers/index.html . Copyright 2000 by Bob Powers.
A Review of John Updike and Religion by Larry Randen
This is in response to your request inviting me to share some of my impressions about your book and the contents of its contributors. My first impression is that I liked it very much over all and found it most enriching. I appreciated its scholarly composition as good literary criticism. I liked the subjects chosen by each essayist, many of the issues selected and the original commentary I haven't read elsewhere. Yet the book is very readable and not academically above the common person, who, in its accessibility, should find in the enthusiasm of yourself and the other contributors an encouragement to read more of Updike's work as well as interpretations of it by other critics. I suppose one could say the book is biased toward uncritical support of Updike and one-sided apology about making the point that he is a Protestant Christian novelist (a point, I think, to which Updike himself might take exception). In this respect it's a little too "evangelical" for my taste even though I respect the book's appeal to the Christian market and the reinforcing of conservative Christian values and beliefs.
I thought it curious that Updike didn't write an introduction himself (perhaps he was not approached and invited) but instead he (or his agents) granted permission to publish a poem ("Earthworm") and his "Remarks upon Receiving the Campion Medal." The poem expresses the groundedness of his spirituality that affirms his Heaven "in earth." And like the worm (a favorite metaphor of Martin Luther, too) Updike roots and uproots the sordid dirt around us as he aerates the human soul/soil: "Immersed in the facts, / one must worship there;" because panic attacks him, like the fear of flying, because he's phobic uncomfortable reaching for a higher sublime beyond the facts of here and now.
Updike in his more recent writing and commentary omits any mention of the divine. As always he writes and reports about religion rather than confessing or promoting any particular belief system. As I said in my response to "The Future of Faith" discussion, he prosecutes and interrogates religious responses in Christian tradition, in changing American culture, and in himself. It's one thing to have been born into a faith family (which he respects and has mined) but quite another thing to hold or discard its beliefs, practices, and creeds after questioning and testing them. The fact that Updike continues to attend church worship services and belong to a Protestant congregation only serves to say he gets something out of them he can't get anywhere else as he searches for his own personal insights into his own spiritual identity. It doesn't mean he embraces the theology of Barth or the divinity of Jesus or the belief in the resurrection of the body in an afterlife, or even an affirmation of God that is more than the invention of the poets. My reading of Updike is that he is much moved by the reality of existential fear of human inconsequentiality in the universe. He makes art into a more personal myth to cope with that phobia of meaninglessness, to satisfy and amuse his playful nature that is endlessly creative, prolific and witty.
I agree with Donald J. Greiner in your book who wrote the chapter entitled "The World as Host," who observes: ". . . his real achievement is that he has detailed the decline of the social structure since he began writing for 'The New Yorker' in 1954 and yet has never given up on faith . . . . not simply religious faith, though that is an issue too, but the more general faith in society that is necessary to get things done." [Ibid., p. 259] Updike realizes how non-rational yet necessary faith is to humanity. What is attractive to me about him is his refusal to give in to apathy, absurdity, or anomie. In Greiner's words: "Updike refuses to accept the end of man" even after he has stared into the void of existential nothingness and its frightening sense of cosmic loneliness. [Ibid., p. 262] Updike knows the score and the reality of non-theism. He talks about the choice of faith being like living over "seventy thousand fathoms of uncertainty" (as you quoted him). But I'm not persuaded that he "leaps" to a faith in Kierkegaard's God. He risks rather faith in the possibilities of life 'shored-up from the slow slide" by art, work, caring and committed relationships with others from which one gains hope, joy, gratitude and satisfaction without the need for a divine referent.
I suspect the title and intention of your book made Updike a little nervous, wondering what you and the others might do with him and his work. He needn't have worried; you treated him with great respect. I got many things of personal value out of each chapter - too many to enumerate here and any criticisms I might have about shortcomings are very few and not worth mentioning. I suppose it all distills down to a story I heard back in seminary about the difference between a philosopher and a theologian that Walter Kauffman, professor of philosophy at Harvard, spelled out when introducing Paul Tillich: "I am a philosopher and Paul Tillich is a theologian. Here is the difference between the two: a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there; a theologian is a man in the same circumstance - but he finds a black cat!"
So I ask: Does Updike find the "black cat" or not? My reading of the shy and honest and very talented author is his admission that he doesn't know any more about the "black cat" than anyone else whose ever responded to this Mystery that seems to have left a hunger for the divine encoded in our genes. But he's searched for it with more eloquence than any other writer I've read. And in so doing he has left us a legacy of literary art that startles, reveals, and helps us explore the question in an open-ended way in our own spirituality. And maybe all we can say about Updike is what he said about Hawthorne, that his prose too is haunted by a "vivid ghost of Christianity" (as Charles Berryman writes on page 196 of your book). What does Updike believe? He offers us an art myth and the warning "religious beliefs [are] an elusive and volatile part of a man" and attempts to pin them down may be "impudent" as well as "impossible." The tradition of Christianity is part of his identity as it is of many of us. Like Hawthorne, Updike knows that his audience would not welcome a bold challenge to their faith. So he's spent a career of forty-plus years exquisitely and ambiguously "beating around the bush" in a most delightful way, leaving the "black cat" matter unresolved so he can continue to milk it. But in the process, trying also to rescue us from our inconsequentiality while conferring great dignity upon his profession and relevant authenticity on the rest of humanity.
Respectfully, Larry C. Randen // Lranden@aol.com
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