John Updike's Petrofictions

Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 87 Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions C. Parker Krieg University of Oregon The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started. John Updike, Rabbit is Rich1 n the night of April 18, 1977, Jimmy Carter addressed the American public. “Good evening,” he began, “tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem that is unprecedented in our history.”2 Carter’s “unpleas- Oant” talk, titled “The Energy Problem,” was about the present, past, and future use of fossil fuels. This speech was intended not only to set a national agenda of energy and environmental reform, but to shore up the mission of Carter’s presidency: to restore trust in American institutions after the national crises of confidence caused by the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the 1973–4 oil crisis. For Carter, oil was not just a problem of history but a problem for history—in other words, a projected shortage of non-renewable energy resources signaled a crisis in modern institutions, serving as evidence that liberal democracy and capitalism were incapable of imagining and producing a desirable future. “To stay even,” Carter claimed, “we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years.” In other words, to maintain itself in history, the United States would need to produce new spaces of oil development. Only this would prove capable of filling the “metabolic rift” between the material energy that the United States consumed and the oil it produced.3 “Staying even” with 1977 levels of consumption would mean expanding oil extraction in the United States; it would also entail some loss of national sovereignty, because increas- Studies in American Fiction 44.1 (2017): 87–112 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press 88 Studies in American Fiction ing amounts of the precious resource lay outside the immediate territorial boundaries of the United States, and oil is subject to the whims of a global market. Carter argued that if the United States did not change the way it constituted and reproduced itself through petroleum, the country would destroy both its future and its sense of history. John Updike’s 1981 novel Rabbit is Rich was written and set during the energy crisis of 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award that year and affirmed the post-Carter narrative of “malaise” and “morning in America” in real time. By linking the aging of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s with the futural anxieties provoked by the energy crisis, Updike lends an existential credence to the environmental and economic concerns of the Carter administration and exposes the short-sided speculative solutions of the Reagan era. Jonathan Yardley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism the year Rabbit is Rich was published, predicted that the novel would be “gone and quite forgotten” in “a quarter century . if not sooner.”4 If the novel remains relevant today, it is partly because the conditions that it describes continue to shape present structures of feeling. While scholars have read Rabbit is Rich in the naturalist tradition,5 or as a “novel of character” in which naturalistic motivations become central to the economic plot,6 it is in fact Updike’s realism, I argue, that articulates private emotions, using the landscape of energy and political economy that emerged in the 1980s. Melinda Cooper observes that “the operative emotions of neoliberalism are neither interest nor rational expectations, but rather the essentially speculative but nonetheless productive movements of collective belief, faith, and apprehension.”7 In Cooper’s affective reading of neoliberalism one hears the echo of Irving Howe’s remark that “the main achievement of the Reagan administration has not been institutional or programmatic,” but “has consisted of a spectacular transformation of popular attitudes, values, and styles.”8 Updike’s realism catalogues the effects of these transformations in the mundane lives of his characters, depicting a structure of feeling that is specific to that era of energy and financial instability—one that would result in the proliferation of speculative attitudes toward the future. In what follows, I read Rabbit is Rich as a petrofiction—an emerging, still ill-defined, genre, proposed by Amitav Ghosh, which describes a narrative “oil encounter” that links individual, national, and global experiences of a world energy system that is shaped by the petroleum industries.9 Just as the materiality of oil is often excluded from economic accounts of modernization, petroleum’s role in constituting contemporary subjects is also often ignored.10 In the energy crisis of 1979, the interrelated problems of energy and economy produced a foreshortened temporal horizon—recall Carter’s assertion that America’s dependence on oil would foreclose her future. It was a moment when the petrocultural life constitutive of U.S. identity appeared to be coming to an end. To Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 89 emotionally and economically overcome these uncertainties, Updike’s iconic character turns to speculation, in both the monetary and housing markets; Rabbit thus prefigures the American national practices that, engaged in on a national scale, would eventually lead to the 2008 financial collapse. Energy, as a force both material and imaginary, pro- foundly shapes this conjuncture in which speculation becomes “our zeitgeist.”11 Reading Rabbit is Rich as a petrofiction adds a new dimension to our understanding of character in Updike by marking the narrative consciousness as an expression of a petrocultural subject. Updike portrays people whose daily lives are shaped by energy regimes—regimes whose periodization, it has recently been suggested, can provide a new materialist basis for literary historiography.12 Throughout Updike’s tetralogy of novels, Rabbit associates the automobile with an imaginary of freedom that continuously fails to materialize. This failed imaginary situates the series squarely within the postwar energy boom. Rabbit, Run (1960) intro- duces the middling main character, who is beset with “everyman” anxieties about aging and feeling trapped by domestic life.13 Rabbit Redux (1971) fixes on Rabbit’s nationalist sentiment amid the Vietnam War, and on his racial resentment as his job at the linotype factory, Verity Press, becomes a casualty of deindustrialization.14 As Sally Robinson observes, Rabbit changes from a “universal” figure to a figure of white masculinity in crisis, marked by contemporary changes in economy, culture, and demographics.15 Yet deindustrialization also affects the black middle class, and their vocal dissent is represented by Skeeter. Skeeter is murdered by Philadelphia police, but he survives in Rabbit is Rich as a haunting reminder that the U.S. has never been a “pleasant place”—one that Rabbit recalls whenever he tries to align himself with a sunny narrative of progress (158). “My interest,” Updike confesses in a 1981 interview, “has been to translate the major cultural and political cataclysms that make headlines into the lives of middle-class people, people in the middle, as they do change their way of living.”16 By the end of the seventies, energy becomes an explicit problem for the country’s way of living and for the economic life of Updike’s main character; the energy crisis adds a new visibility to the narrative form of the series, as its outlook is inextricable from the petroculture that is, in the words of Michael J. Shapiro, “too ontological to fail.”17 In the third installation, Rabbit inherits a Toyota dealership, just before the 1979 energy crisis. The Toyota showroom gives Rabbit a vantage point from which to survey the post-Fordist landscape as he lives out its contradictions. Because Toyotas offer better gas mileage, Angstrom benefits from the crisis at the pumps, which was widely inter- preted as a symptom of the United States’ weakened international standing. Although Angstrom benefits from the dislocation of the U.S. as a leader in the automobile industry, 90 Studies in American Fiction he laments this development. “The fucking world is running out of gas,” Rabbit declares in the novel’s opening paragraph. The rising fuel costs and shortages in the wake of the Iranian revolution and oil embargo called consumer attention to the finitude of oil as a resource, as well as to the geopolitical relationships that make that resource possible— contingent relationships (mistaken for material certainties) on which the modernity of the industrialized world depends. In the novel, these relations are quickly naturalized. If America is running out of gas, Rabbit reasons, the world must be running out of gas. The Earth is winding down, but Rabbit is still comfortable. He is not satisfied, but he is happy that he is in a position to be happy; however, his attempts at sunny optimism are troubled with internal doubts because he knows this arrangement cannot last. The Toyota dealership’s showroom is a space where affect-driven speculation circulates parasitically on the national discourse. The novel opens one month before Carter gives his “Energy and National Goals” speech, known later as the “Crisis of Confidence” speech. The president’s ominous tone hangs over the dealership and finds its way into exchanges with coworkers and customers. Charlie Stavros, a familiar character and coworker, challenges Rabbit’s sunny view of their situation with half-digested bits of contradictory news events, anecdotes, and conjecture. When Rabbit remarks that “Mother Earth is drying up,” and that the crisis is “too big” for the oil companies, Stav- ros replies: “You know damn well Carter and the oil companies have rigged this whole mess. What does Big Oil want? Bigger profits.

Load more