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. What does Carter want? Less oil imports, less depreciation of the dollar. He’s too chicken to ration, so he’s hoping higher prices will do it for him” (5). This bit of political economy is lost on Rabbit, until he transforms it into a conspiracy in order to sell a young couple on a car. “Did you notice in the paper this morning,” he asks, “where Carter is taking gas from farmers and going to give it to the truckers? Shows the power of a gun, doesn’t it?” (12). Rabbit begins his sales pitch by leaning on affect, playing up contemporary fears and uncertainties around oil; he eventually succeeds in selling the car to the young couple as an investment, a way to ensure stability in a turbulent future. While on a test drive, Rabbit makes a series of paratactic statements, each intended to increase the anxiety of the couple. Evoking death through the “new industry of gas pump shrouds,” he remarks: “You know it seems gruesome to me, all these gas stations closed up like somebody has died.” He continues: “Did you see in the paper where the Hershey company has had to lay off nine hundred people because of the trucker’s strike? Next thing we’ll be in lines for Hershey bars” (17). Each statement invokes the prevailing sense of oil scarcity and systemic insecurity, and of national decline. As they drive downtown, he remarks on how businesses have been “pulling out” and says that people are afraid to go downtown Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 91 for fear of crime (in other words, he invokes white flight). Back at the dealership, Rabbit tries his final appeal: identification.

We like to help young people out. I think it’s a helluva world we’re coming to, where a young couple like yourselves can’t afford to buy a car or own a home. If you can’t get your foot on even the bottom rung of a society geared like this, people are going to lose faith in the system. The Sixties were a lark in the park compared to what we’re going to see if things don’t straighten out. (19)

Rabbit mobilizes uncertainty and risk to make his sale; his pitch highlights the growing sense of social insecurity and pulls together signs that the future will not be bright. This insecurity, this lack of faith in the system, becomes the reason to buy a new Toyota. His suggestion that the couple bet against a stable energy future is an example of the way that ambivalent sentiments are, as Paolo Virno observes, “put to work” in post-Fordism.18 Markets thrive on the disenchantments they generate (an assertion that implicates entire genres of culture, from “transgressive” apocalyptic literature to punk music). The Swiss economist Christian Marazzi connects the “existential malaise” of the late seventies to a “climate of pervasive insecurity.” For Marazzi, the “‘no future’ widely anticipated by some youth movements of the 1970s” was generated by successive oil shocks, unemployment, and restructuring of the workforce.19 In this exchange between Rabbit and the young car- buyers, then, Updike contextualizes the decade’s pervasive affective malaise. The energy crises of 1973–4 and 1979 left in their wake a horizon of diminished expectations, symbolized most prominently by media images of “Sorry, No Gas” signs, long lines of automobiles, and a nation-wide trucker strike.20 The U.S. was becoming aware of itself as a society constituted by petroleum at precisely the moment when the lack of cheap oil threatened its disintegration. Environmental scientists had projected limits to non-renewable resources early in the decade; with the acknowledgement of those limits came the recognition of a temporal horizon—a time internal to the social reproduction of the industrial world—that culminated in a late-countercultural feeling that techno- logical modernity had already seen its approaching end. The assertion that society faces an energy crisis is a challenge to its ability to reproduce itself—a temporal crisis. This is expressed by the British poet Dominic Fox: “The [end of oil] narrative declares that ‘another world’ is not only possible but inevitable, since this world cannot go on as it is (and, indeed, has in a sense already ended, inasmuch as its condition has already been diagnosed as terminal).”21 This type of statement is often dismissed as an eschatological mode of politics that supplements its call for change with the threat of catastrophe. Yet it 92 Studies in American Fiction also enunciates the antagonism that is ecological consciousness itself. When the abstract knowledge of industrial modernity’s biophysical limits is not recognized in daily life, it gives rise to an alienated consciousness specific to post-industrial society. This sentiment of alienation also pervades much of the literature of the decade. For instance, the narrator of E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) sardonically intones: “We must preserve our diminishing energies insofar as we direct them to the true objectives. A certain portion of the energy must be used for the regeneration of energy. That way you don’t just die like a bird falling, like a rock sinking, you die on a parabolic curve.”22 The narrator simultaneously evokes the figure of the resource curve and rejects the calls for discipline and austerity implied by its shape. In his encouragement to burst through barriers, Doctorow’s New Left narrator conflates the individual’s libidinal economy with the transgression of the material (and moral) economy of American Fordism. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) presents what will later be dubbed an energy crisis through the temporal figure of the addict. As if anticipating the OPEC oil embargo later that year, Pynchon writes that

the System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply [ . . . ] Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide. . . . 23

In this passage, a petrol-powered symbol of countercultural utopianism—Ken Kesey’s bus of Merry Pranksters—is converted into a symbol of narcissistic, suicidal decadence. The temporality the bus inhabits is, like that of an addict, immanent to its next fix; it is a futurity internal to the petrocultural economy. A raging mania for spatial movement is symptomatic of the inability to transcend one’s historical condition—the inability to imagine a future becoming that would change the conditions that force one to drift. Con- temporary life is constituted through its reliance on fossil fuels, and Pynchon identifies the mode of transgression particular to the system. He presents time as an endless present in which pasts and futures are the products of speculation that enable the present to sustain itself for as long as possible before crashing. A fury of present activity prevents an actual future from being constructed, and the future can thus only be imagined as apocalypse, catastrophe, or messianic revolution (e.g., Foucault’s infamous support for the Islamic Revolution): all figures that appear to come from “outside,” all figures that haunt a modernity that has yet to be rationalized. It may be tempting to read Updike’s Rabbit as one such representation of “flow” in the broader “psychosomatic economy,” as Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 93

Salah el Moncef does, but this detracts from Updike’s effort to depict the realistic experience of actual people through their daily material engagements.24 “Your average American writer,” Updike tells a journalist in 1978, “is far too innocent of the actual workings of the capitalist consumerist society he is a member of.”25 In setting out to write Rabbit is Rich, Updike wanted to explore these “actual workings” along with the range of emotions and evasions that accompany them, and he does so, in part, through Rabbit’s labor. Contrary to Rabbit’s work at the linotype factory—and it is worth remembering that for Gramsci linotype work represented Fordist logic applied to communication26—Rabbit’s communicative labor rationalizes the irrational. He mobilizes cynicism, fear, and uncertainty as engines of market exchange, inviting the young couple to interpret their consumer choice as a competitive strategy within an uncertain horizon of expectation. His labor is humanistic; Rabbit builds contexts, and his customers per- form the proper interpretive acts. He has the ability to deploy a variety of contradictory discourses, as when he switches between racist and anti-racist idioms to encourage his son to buy a Toyota instead of a Ford. Rabbit believes that “the cars sell themselves,” but this is a kind of open cynicism. Admitting to himself that “the Toyota commercials on television are out there all the time, preying on people’s minds,” he takes pleasure in himself being a symbol—Chief Sales Representative—of Toyota’s community recognition. The “airiness” he feels, “standing there in his own skin, casting a shadow,” is a sensation of blissful detachment from the affects he circulates (3). The Toyota commercials evoke a similar metaphysical freedom through images of “men and women leaping, average men and women, their clothes lifted in cascading slow-motion folds like angels’ robes, like some intimate violence of chemical mating or hummingbird wing magnified and laid bare in its process, leaping and falling, grinning and then in freeze-frame hanging there, defying gravity” (318). In these advertisements, the utopian desire of cash-strapped citizens to be free from material constraints is reconciled with the drive of capital to overcome its own material barriers through finance. The aging Rabbit internalizes the emerging predominance of so-called immaterial labor. Yet oil does not circulate like other commodities. As Timothy Mitchell remarks, “since most users cannot easily switch to alternative sources of energy,” demand for oil is not wholly linked to its price.27 Because industrial economies and infrastructures have fixed demand, oil tends to have a reverse elasticity; as price goes up, demand also goes up. Angstrom and Stavros witness evidence of this in the erratic behavior of consumers in gas lines and at the dealership; at the same time that consumers pile up money, they express little hope for future generations. “I figure the oil’s going to run out about the same time I do,” Rabbit says; “Seems funny to say it, but I’m glad I lived when I did. These 94 Studies in American Fiction kids coming up, they’ll be living on table scraps. We had the meal” (7). Rabbit makes a living selling a future that he can’t imagine and doesn’t believe in. Rabbit shifts from cynical belief in the crisis (which he uses to sell cars) to cynical disbelief—acknowledging that the crisis is real, but continuing on as before despite understanding that his activity is part of the crisis. Rabbit’s ambivalence represents the “flexible” individual’s response to a seemingly inflexible situation in which no viable alternative presents itself. Energy shortages are a major source for Rabbit’s resigned attitude toward the future and his anxiety over social reproduction. He is uneasy about the role that his dealership—a foreign company whose banner reads “TOYOTA = TOTAL ECONOMY”— plays in his familial reproduction as his son, Nelson, goes to work in the showroom (390). He encourages Nelson, a college dropout who is ambivalent about his personal future, to go into solar panels, saying that “that’s where the future is” because “the party’s over” for cars; but neither he nor Nelson actually believe it (235). Melanie, who is pregnant with Nelson’s child, mouths an unconvincing green vitalism, claiming that “as long as there are growing things, there’s still a world of endless possibilities” (87). In order to produce a future within this uncertainty, Rabbit turns to monetary and housing speculation, a subjective move that prefigures the objective shifts of capitalism in the era of high finance.Rabbit is Rich is a petrofiction of the United States at a time when energy shocks were becoming the motivating force behind such political and economic restructuring— restructuring that transformed the way Americans understand their relation to the world. The novel gives a narrative form to the atmosphere of uncertainty out of which emerged neoliberalism and its speculative relation to the future.

1. From Postmodern to Petromodern

In Strange Weather, critic Andrew Ross discusses the “futurological” implications of reports like the 1972 “Limits to Growth.”28 The projection of temporal limits on the use of non-renewable resources elicited both utopian and apocalyptic responses across the political spectrum. The most hostile were those who rejected the report’s call for planning, but many simply took it as a sign that the future—imagined as a progressive increase in standard of living and resource consumption—was receding before them. The material struggles of North American workers came into conflict with a new awareness of the global resource base that made those gains possible. In a recent paper given at the Uni- versity of Bologna, titled “Life and Labor in the Era of Climate Justice,” Ross looks back at the report’s message and considers its role in the neoliberal transition, arguing that speculation was a temporal response to a condition of normalized precarity: Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 95

Not long after the Limits to Growth report was issued, the norms of public provision, which had ensured a degree of social equity in the Fordist compact, fell under attack. Tax reform, fiscal austerity, deregulation and privatization, structural adjustment, crumbling of secure work, and the general shredding of social welfare dramatically eroded most of the postwar gains for workers, and pushed them underwater. The only compensation on offer was a lottery ticket in the speculative housing market–sparking a highly unsustainable round of land development which ended in the worst global recession since the 1930s. In retrospect, it is fair to conclude that the message of Limits to Growth was not ignored.29

Ross describes the dismantling of the Cold War consensus politics that shaped Updike’s own “neo-Keynesian viewpoint.”30 Long-term investment, nationally “embedded” capital, and regulated financial markets gave way to short-term contracts in a service economy as companies moved manufacturing overseas, for both cheaper labor and lower levels of environmental regulation. Updike’s belief that capitalism can be harnessed by the state to provision the social good rests on the assumption that “business . . . is basically merciless,” whereas “government is ultimately a human transaction.”31 This belief is challenged by the increasing subordination of government to business, a process in which the figure of the human in the transaction is redefined ashomo economicus and the market becomes a rationality of governance.32 Where ideological neoliberalism came to power with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, institutional neoliberalism had its beginnings during the Carter administration with the deregulation of the transportation sector and with the actions of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Volcker “shocked” the economy out of stagflation by raising interest rates some twenty points in 1979, effectively replacing the Keynesian assumptions that underwrote social protections in the Fordist interlude with neoliberal speculation. Melinda Cooper describes this inversion: “Where Keynes- ian economics attempts to safeguard the productive economy against the fluctuations of financial capital,” she writes, “neoliberalism installs speculation at the very core of production.”33 Through the trading and packaging of futurity, capitalism encourages short-term behavior that disrupts a response to long-term problems like energy and ecology. This reorganization of life under the “real abstractions” of finance produces effects of temporality, but it frequently amounts to a closure of an authentic future. Cooper attributes this financial turn to speculation under neoliberalism to an “ambition to overcome the ecological and economic limits to growth associated with the end of industrial production, through a speculative reinvention of the future.”34 Speculation produces a deferred relation to a material future: it allows the present to be perpetually reorganized in the interests of accumulation. Capital accumulation stands opposed to 96 Studies in American Fiction materiality—except, of course, when it needs it. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis, for instance, planetary existence is rendered “universally fungible” by the reign of exchange value.35 The waves of inflation generated by the oil shocks of the 1970s are a harsh reminder of petroleum’s materiality. In fact, as Cooper observes, “the very stuff of Fordist mass manufacture” was comprised of petroleum in the form of “plastics, fabrics . . . fertilizers and herbicides.”36 According to Barry Bluestone, in 1979 “the average age of America’s capital stock, from sprawling factories to intricate machine tools, was 7.1 years.”37 The factories and infrastructures, as well as the manufactured products, predated the oil crises; and, like virtually all forms of industrial technology, were designed with fixed energy requirements predicated on cheap resources. This lack of flexibility contributed to the overall inelasticity of oil demand and introduced systemic bottlenecks in factories, machines, and vehicle fleets. As Rabbit complains, “Oil going up takes everything up with it; in the five years I’ve been in charge heating costs have doubled, electricity is way up, delivery costs are up, plus all these social security hikes and unemployment to pay” (237). Energy scarcity in one part of the industrial chain will have cascading effects throughout the system, which economic actors will attempt to financially game to their advantage. The immense edifice of the petrocultural economy, on which so much depends and yet puts so much at risk, often appears to operate according to quasi-natural laws, becoming a kind of second nature. The petrocultural economy has taken on the appearance of the world itself, a world which Stephanie LeMenager has named “petromodernity.”38 Petroleum-based mobility and consumer products have become an inextricable part of contemporary experience of selfhood, temporality, and the world. Petroleum has defined the infrastructural contours of nation-states and, as an object of contestation within and between them, has defined their boundaries. High levels of resource use have generated a kind of petro-normativity, in which the material satisfaction of needs and desires is surpassed by aspirational levels of consumption to produce what Matthew Huber describes as the “entrepreneurial life” of neoliberal mobility.39 The circulation of petroleum is thus linked with the imagination of historical progress as industrial development and freedom as a life beyond necessity, which is guaranteed by that development. The crisis that energy presents to the imagination of history is unique, carrying significance beyond the mere technocratic procurement of a resource. Janet Roitman’s explanation of crisis is useful:

Crisis is mobilized in narrative constructions to mark out or to designate “moments of truth”; it is taken to be a means to access historical truth, and even a means to think “history” itself. Such moments of truth are often defined as turning points in history, when Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 97

decisions are taken or events are decided, thus establishing a particular teleology. And similarly, though seemingly without recourse to teleology, crisis moments are defined as instances when normativity is laid bare.40

What has come to be called the energy crisis is, in fact, the laying bare of petromodernity’s normative features. The energy crisis calls into question the materiality out of which contemporary societies are made and through which they reproduce themselves. Moreover, it periodically calls into question the narratives through which historical experience is organized. As petromodernity is cast in doubt, individuals and societies are forced to confront the material horizon of their own subjectivity and face a decision as to how to remake themselves and the world they have known. Updike exposes the cracks in petromodernity through one of the series’ familiar tropes. Rabbit’s drive through Pennsylvanian towns offers an occasion to narrate changes in the social landscape. The free indirect style in these moments defines both the scene and Rabbit’s perspective as an agent in that scene.41 Updike doubly historicizes both the changing urban landscape and the increasingly marked consciousness of the main character as a middle-aged, middle-class, white male, in a terrain altered by deindustrialization and white flight.42 These scenes, which describe deindustrialized landscapes, evoke a melancholic acceptance of both decline and persistence that, when overlapped with the aging subjectivity and class position of the main character, enable a redemp- tive pleasure through the affirmation of decay. This trope challenges the appearance of a transhistorical objective “natural” background, giving historical specificity to both the landscape and the subjectivity of the viewer. In these scenes, Rabbit is behind the wheel of his 1978 Luxury Edition Toyota Corona, driving as much through personal memory and social history as through Brewer, Pennsylvania. His voice merges with the narration: “Railroads and coal made Brewer,” he says. “Everywhere in this city [ . . . ] structures speak of expended energy” (27). The architecture and urban space contains the material traces of an abundance of fossil fuels and the might of industrial capital. Moving past railroad yards, old textile plants, and old factories whose “shapely stacks have not issued smoke for half a century,” he finds them replaced by ophthalmologists’ offices and discount clothing outlets lined with banners announcing to customers that they are entering a place “Where a Dollar is Still a Dollar”— perhaps an expression of nostalgic (or paranoiac) pining for the stable referent which had given their lives value (28). The fixed capital—buildings and machinery—that produced the post-war abundance now lie empty and rusting, mirroring a population left precari- ous and bitter. Rabbit, who had himself once been a victim of deindustrialization—he 98 Studies in American Fiction was let go from Verity Press when the linotype industry was computerized—now looks on the scene as a “silent movie.” Trees that were originally for beautification, planted to obscure the view of the city from the suburbs, have become a shelter for muggers and the homeless, a sign that barbarism continues under the false image of nature. Updike temporalizes the experience of petro-shocked modernity by narrating it through the main character’s bodily decline. Rabbit comes to identify with a planet growing old, associating maturity with exhaustion and entropy. Rabbit is concerned about future generations, but his subjectivity is capable of becoming so inflated that it identifies its own decadence with the Earth itself. He treats the abundance of petroleum as a given, disavowing his knowledge of the industry’s transnational nature and ignoring the fact that the U.S. has built itself around a finite resource. Like the American power that sustains it, his generation’s way of life becomes newly visible and fragile in its moment of crisis. And just as petroculture naturalizes the existence of cheap, available resources, so too does it naturalize its own decline: it becomes possible to think of the decline of petroleum (and American petroculture) as the decline of nature itself. This is what Harry, now passing middle age, sees from the showroom of the Toyota dealership: “it gives him pleasure, makes Rabbit feel rich, to contemplate the world’s wasting, to know that the earth is mortal too” (9). Rabbit’s pleasure comes through the identification of his own death with the death of the world so that, paradoxically, his own (generation’s or nation’s) wasteful activity is redeemed by the world’s death. This affirmational response to the shock of the energy crisis dissolves both individual and national responsibility in an immense expenditure. Rabbit’s contemplation of “the world’s wasting” draws out both meanings of the phrase: both the active wasting of the world’s resources and the passive wasting away of the world through cosmic environmental entropy. Just as he mistakes the market scarcity of oil for “energy” in the cosmic sense, Rabbit understands the deindustrializing landscape of Brewer, Pennsylva- nia as the result of a natural process of decay and ruin rather than a symptom of capital flight. The novel’s title is a reference to this pleasure; the main character, who consciously grows rich off America’s bad news, redeems his guilty conscience by affirming the death of the world.

2. “A Dead Man Reborn”

The question of character has remained a consistent theme in Updike scholarship as well as a point of criticism from other authors. The characters in the Rabbit series have been read as bestial in the “naturalistic tradition,” as rhetorical agents, and as embodi- Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 99 ments of flow in the “fuzzy topology” of the “psychosomatic economy.”43 But “one of the novelist’s tasks,” Updike observes in a 2002 interview, “is not so much to reinvent humanity as to represent human beings as they actually exist.”44 As Amanda Anderson suggests, this effort to depict people as they actually exist in the world is linked to the “fate of liberalism within the literary wing of the academic left.”45 When the humanism of Cold War liberals and New York intellectuals, which Updike shares, is displaced by the antihumanism of the New Left, the depiction and recognition of characters becomes an ideological tool, and even the effort to create traditionally realistic characters is seen as politically suspect. Davis Smith-Brecheisen’s recent criticism of Updike’s Rabbit as a character of financial markets follows in this vein. Validating complaints by Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace that Updike’s focus on character is evidence of the author’s narcissism, Smith-Brecheisen situates Rabbit is Rich within the conservative rhetoric of the period, which held that individual character (e.g., homo economicus) deter- mines market outcomes. However, his conclusion—that in Rabbit is Rich, “the economy is shaken by the individual”46 and that “‘there is nothing outside’ the self at all”47—is contradicted by the fact that the economy in the novel is shaken, not by an individual, but by a material energy crisis and by inflation; similarly, his reading does not account for the fact that Rabbit’s response to instability is shaped by numerous external forces and intersubjective encounters. Rabbit is not solely a character of financial markets; indeed, in these novels, we find that the realistic lives of these characters are overdetermined by material history in general, and the circulation of petroleum in particular. Although I reject the conservative argument that character is the basis of the economy, one cannot ignore what Randy Martin calls “the financialization of daily life,” the process by which a speculative logic of economic risk-management pervades other spheres of life.48 For instance, Rabbit’s exchanges with others often repeat the structure of his own salesroom pitch: in the drive to overcome material instability, they instrumental- ize uncertainties about the near future. These appeals take the form of an authoritative statement followed by a dubious reference to world events that portends something significant. This structure creates a sense that the speaker knows something that the listener does not. It generates a perceived lack of knowledge in the listener—what we might call, following Marazzi, a “structural information deficit.”49 The purpose is to instill a sense of uncertainty in the listener, who is then encouraged to profit in some way by recognizing and acting on this knowledge gap. Rabbit himself falls prey to these appeals when Webb Murkett, a character whose name evokes the web-like image of the market, convinces him to “get into” gold. 100 Studies in American Fiction

It’s up over sixty per cent in less than a year and I see no reason for it not to appreciate at the same rate as long as the world energy situation holds. The dollar is bound to keep leaking, Harry, until they figure out how to get gasoline cheap out of grain alcohol, which’ll put us back in the driver’s seat. Grain we’ve got. (157)

In this passage, oil, metals, and wheat are presented as stable; it is the dollar that is “leaking” value. This echoes a thought Rabbit has earlier: “Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner [stored] there, it begins to drip” (21). Since the dollar has been delinked from the gold standard, there is no longer a stable referent to contain the value of money, and no global supranational currency that can serve to stabilize that value. For the characters to produce value—that is, to make money—money itself must be called into question. In speculation, what is at stake is not the fundamental value of any particular thing, but rather the movement, or fluctuation, of value across things. Here, staying “ahead of the curve”—a phrase that takes on new meaning when one considers resource curves—means exploiting any perceived lack in knowledge in others’ activity. We see how this lack is produced when Webb convinces Harry to sell gold for silver:

The little man in America has caught the fever and when the little man climbs on the bandwagon the smart money gets off. Silver, now that’s another story: the Hunt brothers down in Texas are buying up silver futures at the rate of millions a day, and big boys like that must know something. (329)

In this passage, the urge to stay ahead of the “little man” is a fear of becoming the little man—a “fear of falling” out of the middle class.50 Rabbit finds himself positioned against the “big boys” who know more than he does. As the Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Shiller argues, “Many individual investors think that institutional investors dominate the market and that these ‘smart money’ investors have sophisticated models to understand prices, superior knowledge.”51 In this instance, the Hunt brothers represent the power that comes with knowledge of both the market and the behavior of its individual agents. Yet, as Marazzi argues, “financialization . . . depends on mimetic rationality, a kind of herd behavior based on the information deficit of individual investors.”52 In other words, individual investors submit to what they believe to be “nature itself” in the form of market forces when, in actuality, they are submitting to a dynamic they help create. Rabbit may believe he is outsmarting the “little man,” but he is playing into the Hunt brothers’ attempt to corner the market on silver. The Hunt brothers’ historical effort to corner the silver and silver futures market in 1979 led to the “Silver Thursday” collapse (and subsequent bailout) in March of 1980; the narrative reference to the Hunt Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 101 brothers appears in December, which falls during the five-month bubble in which silver went from nineteen dollars an ounce to a peak price of more than fifty dollars an ounce in January.53 After causing the collapse of the silver market, the Hunt brothers were bailed out by Paul Volcker in exchange for their offshore oil rights in Alaska.54 Updike embeds his characters’ actions and imaginations within the real-life empirical networks of the petro-economy. According to Jodi Dean, the reflexivity of a “critical” subject is built into neoliberal exchange, because prices rise and fall on the basis of what investors think other investors are thinking.55 Instead of acting in response to information, economic actors respond on the basis of how they expect others to respond. The rational kernel of speculative behavior comes from the self-referential nature of value in the post-Fordist reality: money, as the value-form, is no longer founded on a stable material referent, but rather on the circulation of information and belief. As each individual believes they are acting against the collective, they are collectively individuated as competing subjects. In similar fashion, the Toyota showroom is parasitic on the national discourse in that it relies on an imagined collectivity in order to encourage individuals to act in their perceived self-interest. In Rabbit Is Rich, the information deficit expands to geopolitics at the novel’s aptly named metal store, Fiscal Alternatives, when the clerk persuades Rabbit to make a trade from gold to silver. “Precious metals aren’t a bubble,” she tells him; “Precious metals are the ultimate security. I myself think what’s brought the Arab money into gold was not so much Iran as the occupation of the Great Mosque. When the Saudis are in trouble, then it’s really a new ballgame” (332). Here, the mention of the Saudis performs the same function as the previous mention of the Hunt brothers: an additional (perhaps meaningless) piece of information that upsets the listener’s previously held social interpretations. Each new piece of information can signal that the game has changed, and one does not want to play by an obsolete set of rules and assumptions. Metals are again posited as a secure foundation beneath and beyond the flexible constructions of contemporary life. As John-Paul Colgan puts it, “Harry has essentially become wealthy by betting against America,” that is, by profiting off the country’s “bad news.”56 Rabbit retreats from identification with the country and with the national future that he can no longer imagine. He is an actor in an economy of information, but not the knowledge economy anticipated by sociologists like Daniel Bell; these exchanges instru- mentalize communication in order to generate a sense of uncertainty that then becomes the affective condition for economic activity—a form of hedging against a future over which one has no claim except as a competitive individual in a naturalized market. Speculation—a word whose root means “to look”—orients the viewer towards the world as a spectator. 102 Studies in American Fiction

The world becomes reified as something against which one competes through submitting to larger forces rather than something that one participates in creating. By moving their money out of savings and into markets, Rabbit’s household reflects the broader trend in which the “financing of the economy” shifts “from the banking sector to the securities sector.”57 Harry and Janice use the new money to put a down payment on a house. If inflation continues, this would become their “lottery ticket,” to recall Ross’ memorable de- scription.58 And Harry and Janice’s “post-productive” sex life, too, is rejuvenated through these speculative endeavors, an example of Cooper’s observation that the “speculative reinvention of the future” contains within it an “ambition to overcome” material limits associated with both industrial and familial reproduction.59 The futural imagination is no longer grounded in the bodily labor of making babies—reproducing the family unit—nor in the national future. Instead of saving and investing, which implies belief in a stable and growing U.S. economy, the Angstroms’ financial future is wageredagainst stability. In a famous passage that has drawn comparisons to Frank Norris’ McTeague, Harry and Janice become mutually aroused and have sex on a pile of gold Krugerrands. Where “McTeague’s wife,” Lasseter argues, “needs to convert money to a tactile form so that the sexual passion can be transferred to the material world,”60 Smith-Brecheisen’s character-driven moral analysis argues that, in Updike, gold becomes the proxy object of sexual desire in that “it will make you rich and it will get you laid.”61 However, Up- dike’s passage suggests neither a simple materialization of the erotic nor the eroticizing of gold as an object; rather, it suggests the financialization of desire. Rabbit presents the coins to Janice as “a dead man reborn”; with gold as a guarantor of value against dollar depreciation, he again has a future. “No coffin dark greets his open eyes”—as it will with his granddaughter—“just his wife’s out-of-focus face.” “The beauty of gold is, it loves bad news,” he tells her; “as the dollar sinks, gold goes up. All the Arabs are turning their dollars into gold.” Rabbit here combines the image of alchemy with a hint of lavish orientalism. In contrast, their bodies are described in ugly and comical terms. Janice’s body is breakable, old, fragile, while his body is “massive and bearing down.” The sheer weight of their bodies is foregrounded—“the depressions their interlocked weights make in the mattress”—against the bodiless promise of value contained (though not exhausted by) the gold coins, which move about the bed. “A kind of interest compounds,” as they command each other not to orgasm; their activity is sustained for as long as Rabbit is able to think about “the recent hike in the factory base price of Corollas” (195). It is incorrect, then, to say that the financial economy is “non-productive” or “fictitious.” It enables real accumulation and produces tangible effects, such as the house they purchase: Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 103

“That’s the beauty of inflation,” he says seductively to Janice. “The more you owe, the better you do . . . You pay off in shrunken dollars, and the interest Uncle Sam picks up as an income tax deduction. Even after buying the Krugerrands and paying the September taxes we have too much money in the bank, money in the bank is for dummies now. Sock it into the down payment for a house, we’d be letting the bank worry about the dollar going down and have the house appreciating ten, twenty per cent a year at the same time.” Her cunt is moistening, its lips growing loose. (320)

Rabbit is willing to risk his down payment on a house against the chances that inflation will continue (which will cause the dollar value of the house to increase); the bank will assume the risk of loaning money at fixed interest rates against the unstable value of the dollar. This process is commonly referred to as leveraging. Like the gold and silver that increase in value against the dollar when there is “bad news,” and like his Toyota dealership that profits from U.S. energy instability, Rabbit gets rich through speculation. The incorporation of speculation into the couple’s erotic desire gives a new meaning to the “post-material” economy, in which value is created as people exploit information defi- cits during a period of contested material energy. This subjective response is at the root of the “real” neoliberal economy. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “desire is part of the infrastructure.”62 To the extent that the novel has often posed “biographical solutions to systemic contradictions,” Rabbit is Rich depicts an energy encounter specific to the United States at a time when the global energy system was under duress.

3. “The Cheerful Plane of Dwindling Energy”

Beyond the emphasis on characters’ investment strategies, the novel contains many refer- ences to the energy crisis of the 1970s. The language of Carter’s speeches appears in the speech of the characters; for instance, Rabbit describes his marriage as being in “a real crisis of confidence” (43). The phrase comes from Carter’s most famous speech, “Energy and National Goals,” given in 1979 (commonly remembered as the “malaise” speech).63 In the novel, the official energy narrative, delivered by Carter, is simultaneously affirmed, challenged, and mocked in the exchanges at the Toyota dealership. It is joked about: “you can’t beat Christopher Columbus for mileage,” Rabbit says; “look how far he got on three galleons” (9). And the “cheerful plane of dwindling energy” (9) becomes a frame for Rabbit’s reinterpretation of older narratives of North American and U.S. history. He continues, recapitulating Carter’s periodizing lesson of the 1977 speech, beginning with wood and moving to coal, marking the centuries “like a football field” (9). However, almost as soon as it is raised, the topic feels exhausted to him. Discussions of energy, we 104 Studies in American Fiction are told, “in private conversation and even on the television where they’re paid to talk it up, run dry, exhaust themselves, as if everything’s been said in this hemisphere” (9). For Rabbit, both the form of energy (oil) and the narrative of its crisis are both geographically specific and temporally worn out. A different hemispheric perspective is what is missing from his local conversations. Yet Rabbit’s anxieties are not assuaged by examining the relations between the U.S. and the Middle East. Against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution and the American hostage crisis, Rabbit feels a strange affinity with the Ayatollah Khomeini. He sees in Khomeini the mirror of Carter. Both are “trapped by a pack of kids who need a shave and don’t know shit” (321); he muses that “if you could get the idiotic kids out of the world it might settle down to being a sensible place” (321). This one-way solidarity is better understood as a displacement of his own frustrations as he attempts to dampen the younger generation’s utopian imaginations. Rabbit’s attitude eventually boils over as he mocks protesting students on television: “‘Energy is people,’ they sing. ‘People are en-er-gy!’ Who needs Khomeini and his oil? Who needs Afghanistan? Fuck the Russkis. Fuck the Japs, for that matter. We’ll go it alone, from sea to shining sea” (422). This sarcasm is directed at those who do not appreciate the interconnectedness of global oil markets and the transnational economy, which includes his Toyota dealership. He interprets the younger generation’s countercultural dream of instinctual and individual sovereignty as a naïve insult to those of the older generation who must negotiate a world of fraught relationships, contradictions, and responsibilities. Rabbit thinks about energy in precisely the terms Amitav Ghosh uses to describe the way Americans “smell” oil: “unavoidable overseas entanglements, a worrisome foreign dependency, [and] economic uncertainty.”64 In his mockery, Rabbit both anticipates and criticizes the sovereign fantasies that animate post-9/11 rhetoric of what might be called “energy independence in one country.” The “energy is people” attitude is echoed by Melanie, who expresses a viewpoint representative of the younger generation’s: “I believe the things we’re running out of we can learn to do without,” she says. “I don’t need electric carving knives and all that. I’m more upset about the snail darters and the whales than about iron ore and oil . . . as long as there are growing things, there’s still a world with endless possibilities” (87). Melanie’s vitalism reframes the industrial economy so that priority is given to its ecological underpinnings, but in doing so she writes off the immense social disruptions that would accompany a sharp decline in readily available petroleum. Like Rabbit, she is not optimistic about the future of industrial economies and nation states, but unlike him, she anticipates a contingent world of vibrant freedoms in place of the confining world that Rabbit has throughout his life tried to escape. Melanie presents no genuine Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 105 alternative and no historical subject that might bring it about, and she can therefore only speculate about a world of negative freedoms, a world in which “growing things” (much like commodities) will offer themselves—seemingly of their own agency, with every appearance of freedom. When his granddaughter is presented to him in the novel’s final paragraph, Rabbit sees in her the innocent and terrible future whose arrival puts the “nails in his coffin” (423). Rather than locating his future in and through the baby, Rabbit sees the baby as a positive sign of the absence of a future. If, indeed, “energy is people,” it is an energy future that does not include him. Although he desires “the new” in the form of new products and appetites, Rabbit’s anxieties over social reproduction represent a fear of the authentically new. The baby’s arrival is the narrative culmination of Rabbit’s earlier showroom observation that “the world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started” (78). As the fictional embodiment of national sentiment, Rabbit recognizes the finitude of the world that oil has produced—and even recognizes himself as part of that world—yet he is fearful of a genuine alternative. Within the horizon of the present, his own death is much easier for him to accept than Carter’s promise of a different national future through a project of eco-modernization, or than the utopian aspirations of the younger generation.

4. Facing Nature

He loves Nature, though he can name almost nothing in it. Are those pines, or spruces, or firs? He loves money, though he doesn’t understand how it flows to him, or how it leaks away.65

Not long after the publication of Rabbit is Rich, Updike released a collection of poetry on nature and natural processes titled Facing Nature (1985). One of the poems, “Energy: A Villanelle,” first published in 1981, speaks to the same concerns of the novel.66 Closely associated with the pastoral genre, the villanelle’s fixed patterns and refrains evoke rus- tic folk songs and the timeless reproduction of nature. In this poem, Updike contrasts the natural cycles of solar energy in wood fires with the linear, inflationary economy of petroleum energy. By the end of the poem, the linear accumulation of the petrocultural economy appears to be the result of modernity’s apocalyptic convergence with the mythic repetition of the pastoral solar/wood economy. The juxtaposition of solar fire in the refrain—“the logs give back, in burning, solar fire”67—with the alternate refrain—“nothing is lost but, still, the cost grows higher”68— 106 Studies in American Fiction draws out the contradictions between energy as it exists materially, and energy as it is mediated through the economy. Each stanza addresses a different, contradictory, aspect of energy. “Solar fire”69 is released by the most primordial form of human energy use, fire; the logs give off the solar energy “processed”70 by the green leaves of the tree’s branches. This is followed by the prospect of lunar-powered wave energy: “The ocean’s tons of tide, to turn, require / no more than time and moon.”71 These examples are contrasted with “the oil rigs in Bahrain”72 that “imply a buyer”73 (i.e., the United States) and a “Good Gulf”74 that “gives it faster; every tire.”75 The cost of this energy continues to grow higher even though the sun and the moon continue to serve as a practically inexhaustible source for plant and animal life. The final stanza evokes a dark future that disrupts the perpetual energy cycle. “So guzzle gas,”76 the poem contemptuously invites the reader, “the leaden night draws nigher / when cinders mark where stood the blazing sun.”77 The sun, as a transcendent source of energy, is by the end of the poem blacked out, replaced by earthly cinders and “microörganisms,”78 “quite a few”79 of which “became petroleum.”80 The naturalization of energy commonly obscures the understanding of how our lives are materially bound up with it. While the poem’s emphasis on price continuously interrupts the all-too-common leap from the material specificity of energy to energy in the cosmic sense, the poem’s fatalism ultimately frames gas guzzling in a way that is unhelpfully metaphysical. Jacques Lacan exposes these idealist formulations in the talk about energy while making a larger point about the material circulation of libidinal desire:

To say that the energy was in some way already there in a virtual state in the current of the river is properly speaking to say something that has no meaning, for the energy begins to be of interest to us in this instance only beginning with the moment in which it is accumulated, and it is accumulated only beginning with the moment when machines are put to work in a certain way.81

The image of machines being “put to work in a certain way” denaturalizes discourses of energy. We commonly imagine stores of energy existing in the universe because machines have been organized to capture and make use of specific, material concentrations and processes of accumulation. And when people talk about an energy crisis, they not only refer to the technical and social infrastructures of accumulation, organization, and dis- tribution; they also implicate the imaginaries predicated on those machines—machines that are “put to work” in a historically specific way. Alongside these energy imaginaries exist the temporalities, expectations, and anticipations associated with the “real abstractions” of the cultural economy. Sunlight and waves may be free, but the infrastructural Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 107 concentrations of knowledge (labor) necessary to transform and organize sunlight from virtual to actual “energy” are historically mediated. An authentic materialism recognizes this abstract dimension of the real—a dimension that literature can provide. The social character of American petroculture was organized by Fordist invest- ments in social reproduction—fixed capital in the forms of factories, schools, and hospi- tals—as well as the expanding production and satisfaction of needs through consumerism. The energy crisis, which has in our time been subsumed by the climate crisis (and post- poned by fracking), calls the material basis of this arrangement into question. Given the tremendous energy required to transform the presently existing material infrastructures in the United States, let alone other societies, we find ourselves wondering, with Doctorow, how best to expend our energies so that we at least die “on a parabolic curve.”82 Like the river in Lacan’s example, energy in the abstract “meaningless” sense of the term is not an issue; putting machines to work in a new way is. The prefix “petro-” serves to make newly visible the material energies through which modernity is organized, opening the possibility of a future transformation that includes both ecological modernization and new rationalities that will have overcome neoliberal speculation. Imre Szeman suggests that “the disaster of oil is already prefigured in the temporal shift of the capitalist economy,” in that the “inward” temporal shift of the subject is an indicator of the broader economic restructuring: “subjectivity announces . . . a temporal recalibration away from the future to the present.”83 This “temporal recalibration” is the effect of machines being put to work in a way that reorganizes desire according to the rhythm and moods of neoliberalism. It represents the “overcoming” of the temporalities associated with industrial production in the wake of Fordism precisely by turning its back toward the future. Against this tendency, LeMenager argues, narrative arts can help reconstitute long-term horizons beyond petromodernity.84 Literatures can become machines that produce new virtualities capable of being harnessed and put to work organizing yet more machines. However, efforts at implementing large-scale projects of energy reform in the political sphere, even modest ones like Carter’s, find themselves overdetermined and undermined by the speculative temporality of neoliberalism. Here, even literary criticism is implicated. At its best, literary and cultural theory is the first to acknowledge its complicity with the world it critiques, and yet, as Jeffrey T. Nealon argues, much contemporary criticism also participates in the production of speculative moods and outlooks:

As postmodernism reoriented the disciplines of economics, art, or architecture around speculation, and not knowing (more specifically, about not-knowing what really counts 108 Studies in American Fiction

as value, art, or good design), so too has “theory” remade literary and cultural studies as that thing dedicated to the open-endedness of interpretation, undecidability, and living primarily through the wages or wagers of futurity.85

Not-knowing and uncertainty have become the motivating affects in economic behavior; does theory now resemble the information deficit in its instrumentalized deferral? Instead of a future, we are left with futurity—the vague feeling of openness and contingency that substitutes not knowing for a revolutionary potential. What it actually signifies is a refusal to make claims on the future because it associates such claims with a totalitarian closure of possibility. More often than not, however, this attitude—illustrated by Updike’s iconic character Rabbit Angstrom—affirms a position of virtuous powerlessness as if it were a choice. Or, as with the Angstroms’ rejuvenated sex life, deferral itself becomes the object of desire. In an era defined by the conjunctural crisis of energy, finance, and climate, it is worth questioning whether the cultural left can continue to sustain its energies through sublime moments at the limits of knowledge, or whether it must derive its pleasure from an oscillation between the euphoria of affirmation and the melancholy of spectatorship.86 Thirty-five years have passed sinceRabbit is Rich was published. Its depiction of middle-class experience and sentiment during the 1979 energy crisis articulates individual experience within the national and global conjuncture of the petro-economy. Moreover, it anticipates an emergent structure of feeling specific to the United States at the dawn of Reagan-era neoliberalism, one characterized by chronic contingency and uncertain temporal horizons. Rabbit’s failed response—the affirmation of his own death and the death of the petrocultural economy—prefigures Fredric Jameson’s often quoted observation that “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”87 In a period when apocalyptic assertions of finitude are met with speculative promises of transcendence, the realism of the social novel can still help us locate historical experience—and the experience of temporality—within its material contexts.

Notes

1. John Updike, Rabbit is Rich (New York: Fawcett, 1981), 78. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 2. Jimmy Carter, “The Energy Problem,” Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, ed. Daniel Horowitz (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 36–42. 3. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review, 2011); and John Urry, “Consuming the Planet to Excess,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2–3 (2010): 191–212. Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 109

4. Jonathan Yardley, “Rabbit Isn’t Rich.” The Washington Post, April 26 1982, https://www.wash- ingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1982/04/26/rabbit-isnt-rich/3a7ef866–3d40–4a8b-a93d- 883a7a2a2ec1/?utm_term=.75b930935b19 (accessed February 11 2016). 5. Victor K. Lasseter, “Rabbit is Rich as a Naturalistic Novel,” American Literature 61, no. 3 (1989): 429–45. 6. Davis Smith-Brecheisen, “Deficit Seduction: John Updike and the Character of Financial Markets,” Studies in American Fiction 43, no. 1 (2016): 97–113. 7. Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington, 2008), 10. 8. Irving Howe, “Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times,” Selected Writings: 1950–1990 (New York: Har- vest/HBJ, 1990) 410–423, 411. 9. Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,”The New Republic, March 2, 1992, 29–34. 10. See Stephanie LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, after Oil!” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 59–86, and Matthew Huber, “Refined Politics: Petroleum Products, Neoliberalism, and the Ecology of Entrepreneurial Life,” Journal of American Studies 45, no. 2 (2012): 295–312. 11. Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). Kindle. 12. Patricia Yaeger, et al., “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA 126, no. 2 (2011): 305–326. 13. John Updike, Rabbit, Run (New York: Knopf, 1960). 14. John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Knopf, 1971). 15. Sally Robinson, “Marking Men, Embodying America: John Updike and the Reconstruction of Middle American Masculinity,” Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia, 2000), 23–51. 16. Philip Seib, “A Lovely Way Through Life: Conversation with John Updike,” Southwest Review 66, no. 4 (1981): 341–350, 341. 17. Michael J Shapiro, “The Moralized Economy in Hard Times,” Theory & Event 14, no. 4 (2011): Web. 18. Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” Radical Thought in Italy, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996). 19. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy,trans. Giuseppina Mec- chia (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2011), 67. 20. Mark Fiege, “It’s a Gas: The United States and the Oil Shock of 1973–1974,” The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington, 2012), 358–402. 21. Dominic Fox, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria (London: Zero Books, 2009), 8. 22. E.L Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York: Random House, 2007), 210. 23. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 2006), 419; ellipsis in original. 24. Salah el Moncef, “Sounding the Black Box: Linear Reproduction and Chance Bifurcations in Rabbit at Rest,” Arizona Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1995): 69–108, 70. 110 Studies in American Fiction

25. Adam Begley, Updike (New York: Harper, 2014), 392. 26. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Hoare and Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 308–310. 27. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011), 176. 28. Andrew Ross, “Getting the Future We Deserve,” Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), 169–192. 29. Andrew Ross, “Life and Labor in the Era of Climate Justice,” June 12, 2010, http://www.unino- made.org/life-and-labor-in-the-era-of-climate-justice (accessed March 3, 2014). 30. D. Quentin Miller, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2001), 64. 31. John Updike, “Laissez-Fare is More,” The New Yorker, July 2 2007, http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2007/07/02/laissez-faire-is-more (accessed January 10, 2017). 32. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–9, ed. Michael Senellart (New York: Picador, 2008), 267–289. 33. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 10. 34. Ibid., 11. 35. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 7. 36. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 21. 37. Barry Bluestone, “Forward,” Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, eds. Cowie and Heathcott (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2003), viii. 38. LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum,” 60. 39. Huber, “Refined Politics,” 302. 40. Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 3. 41. Dilvo Ristoff,Updike’s America: The Presence of American History in John Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). 42. Robinson, Marked Men, 32. 43. Lasseter, “Rabbit is Rich as Naturalistic Novel;” Ristoff,Updike’s America; Salah el Moncef, “Sound- ing the Black Box.” 44. Charlie Reilly, “An Interview with John Updike,” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 2 (2002): 217–248, 234. 45. Amanda Anderson, “Character and Ideology: The Case of Cold War Liberalism,” New Literary History 42, no. 2 (2011): 209–229, 215. 46. Smith-Brecheisen, “Deficit Seduction,” 109. 47. Ibid., 110. 48. Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 49. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, trans. Gregory Conti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 23. 50. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions 111

51. Robert J. Schiller, Irrational Exhuberance, 3rd Edition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), xxviii. 52. Marazzi, Capital and Language, 21. 53. Jerry Markham, A Financial History of the United States, Volume III: From the Age of Derivatives into the New Millennium (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 61–4. 54. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (New York: Verso, 2013), 396–7. 55. Jodi Dean, “Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism and the Loop of Drive,” New Formations no. 80–81 (2013): 138–154, 141. 56. John-Paul Colgan, “Going it Alone but Running out of Gas: America’s Borders in John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Novels,” Irish Journal of American Studies 11/12 (2002/2003): 73–86, 78. 57. Marazzi, Capital and Language, 21. 58. Ross, “Life and Labor.” 59. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 11. 60. Lasseter, “Rabbit is Rich as a Naturalistic Novel,” 433. 61. Smith-Brecheisen, “Deficit Seduction,” 100. 62. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), 104. 63. Jimmy Carter, “Energy and National Goals,” Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, ed. Daniel Horowitz (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 108–119. 64. Ghosh, “Petrofiction,” 30. 65. Updike, Rabbit is Rich, 124. 66. John Updike, “Energy: A Villanelle,” Facing Nature (New York: Knopf, 1985), 102. 67. Updike, “Energy: A Villanelle,” 102. 68. Ibid., 102. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Qtd. in Teresa Brennan, History After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993), 48. 82. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel, 210. 83. Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (2007): 805–823, 817. 112 Studies in American Fiction

84. LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum,” 60. 85. Jeffrey T. Nealon,Post-Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Just in Time Capitalism (Durham, Duke University Press, 2013), 173. 86. See Wendy Brown “Resisting Left Melancholia” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 19–27, and Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 87. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (2003), web (accessed November 1, 2016).