Verisimilitude in John Updike's Rabbit Redux

America through Hard Times: Verisimilitude in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux

Pradipta Sengupta M.U.C.Women’s College Burdwan West Bengal; India-713104 [email protected]/[email protected]

Abstract:

In his famous Rabbit Tetralogy, comprising Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) John Updike traces the journey of his hero Harry Rabbit Angstrom through 1950s to 1990s, and offers us a recasting of contemporary America through these decades. Rabbit becomes a powerful antenna through whom Updike offers us a panoramic portrait of his contemporary America. In Rabbit Redux (1971) Updike gives us ample references to America passing through the toughest times of 1960s and was tossed and buffeted with Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Panther Movement, the ensuing Vietnam War, racial riots, the arrival of the Beatniks, the Hippie culture, sex, crime, and drug explosions, and so forth. This paper tries to illustrate how in Rabbit Redux Updike strikes a rare sense of verisimilitude in terms of negotiating with his contemporary American history, and capturing the angst of the social turbulence of 1960s, culminating in the Vietnam episode.

Keywords: John Updike, Rabbit Tetralogy, Rabbit Redux , Rabbit Angstrom, contemporary, America, history, angst, Black, Vietnam.

“It’s hard, if you live here, to see those changes”i. --Updike

In Couples (1968) when the daughters of Piet Hanema sit near the television listening news, the narrator comments: Television brought them the outer world. The little screen's icy brilliance implied a universe of profound cold beyond the warm encirclement of Tarbox, friends, and family. Mirrors established in New York and Los Angeles observed the uninhabitable surface between them and beamed reports that bathed the children's features in a poisonous, flickering blue. This poison was their national life. Not since Korea had Piet cared about the news. News happened to other people (239-240).

In fact, this shift from the inner to the outer, the focus from the inner domestic circle to whatever was happening around, becomes complete three years later along with the publication of Rabbit Redux in 1971. As Updike had said to The New York Times ii :

[Article History: Received on 24.05.2017, Accepted on 02.09.2017] [45]

America through Hard Times: Verisimilitude in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux

Author: P.Sengupta

Perhaps the time squeeze of the new book is somewhat more topical -- and you import topical material into a novel at your own peril. I am convinced that the life of a nation is reflected, or distorted, by private people and their minute concerns. While Thomas R. Edwards iii considers it a “political novel of a particular historical moment”(96), Greiner iv observes that “[t]he politics of national unrest rather than the pursuit of grace animates Redux ”(64). Charles Samuels v in his Review of Rabbit Redux strikes a point of contrast between Updike and Bellow, and while praising the book for having “far more compelling a plot and characters”, criticizes it saying that “it disappoints precisely where bellow is strong: in fathoming causes and asserting judgments”(63-64). He also suggests “the dispiriting effects of a sordid story that is told to no clear purpose”(165). While it is not necessary that every novel should have a bright, romantic plot, Samuels misses the point as to why Updike chose to portray the sordidness of his America. Updike’s contemporary America was really passing through hard times particularly because of the American foreign policies during the prolonged period of Cold War with Russia. In the opinion of Stacey Olster vi Rabbit Redux illustrates “the America that Harry Angstrom is meant to mirror is in steady decline in Updike’s novels” (46). As Updike had elsewhere vii said that it is the ineluctable social contract of a writer that makes him give vent to his commitment to the social changes veering around him. Consequently, in Rabbit Redux he gave vent to some of those changes raging within him for literary expression. The antithetical stance of Rabbit from internal ferocity to a sort of placidity, from individual microcosm to the social macrocosm strikes the keynote of Rabbit Redux. Rightly has Marshall Boswell viii pointed out: If the central thematic conflict of Rabbit, Run is freedom versus domesticity, then the corresponding conflict of Rabbit Redux is its more sociopolitical counterpart, revolution versus preservation. Rightly does Wayne Falke ix argue that “ Rabbit Redux is a curiously old-fashioned novel, dealing with America’s heightened consciousness of wrong-doing, at home in its oppressive treatment of black Americans, and abroad in its waging so futilely so brutal a war”(62). Despite having no intention of writing a sequel to Rabbit, Run , Updike ultimately wrote it for two reasons: the demanding pressures from his readers as to what happened to Rabbit after the inconclusive ending of the book, and also because of his failure to write a book on James Buchanan, as he had promised x to his publisher, Knopf. Updike’s very decision of writing a sequel to Rabbit, Run was to come to terms with “all the oppressive, distressing, overstimulating developments of the most dissentious American decade since the Civil war” xi . Set in 1969, and not immediately after the last scene of Rabbit’s running in the prequel, Rabbit, Run (1960) , this book, thus, invites the reader’s interpretive interaction in terms of filling in the gaps as to what happened after that. Interestingly, for the first time in Updike’s oeuvre , we are offered with panoramic snapshots of some socio-cultural events as the racial turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, the black shadow of ‘JAST’-2017, Vol.-03, Issue-01 [46]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-03, Issue-01 Vietnam War, racial issues, street riots, drug abuse, sexual revolution, new dimensions of American love ethic, etc. Frederick Karl xii rightly points out that in Rabbit Redux “Rabbit is caught in the middle, back in Brewer, the small Pennsylvanian town which is, apparently, a microcosm of American life. Rabbit ten years later is a ranting, warmongering, frustrated individual coming into heaviness, gloom and right-wing paranoia”(349). After a decade Rabbit, the erstwhile man of instinct, becomes somewhat sluggish and sobered by an age of a decade. But there is no reason to believe that Updike was against the seeming inaction of Rabbit in its sequel. As Updike has stated: I don't want to say that being passive, being inactive, being paralyzed, is wrong in an era when so much action is crass and murderous. I do feel that . .. there has been a perceptible loss of righteousness. But many evils are done in the name of righteousness, so perhaps one doesn't want it back. The maturity and growth of Rabbit by a passage of a decade has been wonderfully evoked in the contrast between the first words in both the books. Rabbit, Run begins with the word “boys”, and after ten years it is quite fitting that Updike, most artistically, uses the word “men”. As Rabbit celebrates the birthday of her mother, Mary Angstrom, she informs him about Janice’s having a lover. Thus Updike resorts to his popular theme of adultery by giving it a more complex dimension with Janice entering the tangle of adultery. Janice finds her liberation from an unhappy marriage by having a liaison with a man called Charlie Stavros, a Greek car salesman working at Springer Motors. Driven by the guilty feelings for her deceased daughter, and lacerated by the cold insularity of her husband who neither recognizes her feelings nor empathizes in her, Janice becomes an awfully lonely woman. Further Rabbit does not sleep with her on the pretext of avoiding having another child. Rabbit cannot cater to the needs, both physical and emotional, of Janice who therefore tries to find a cathartic outlet in Stavros. If Rabbit’s running was an insignia of his freedom and identity, Janice’s adultery is at once a means of her liberation from the asphyxia of her domesticity, a way of assuaging the pangs of her guilt, and a tacit protest against the patriarchal structure represented by the whimsical nature of her antiseptic husband. Updike casts his net wide and tries to capture the multicultural spirit of America by introducing a black character, Skeeter, also a Vietnam veteran and a drug dealer, into the novel. While visiting an Afro-American bar Rabbit meets Jill Pendleton, an eighteen years old runaway girl of some wealthy parents. Without considering the problems of others, Rabbit allows Jill and Skeeter at his house, inviting jeopardy into his own house. Jill, now a victim of drug addiction, gets sexually entangled with Skeeter. One day when Jill fellates Skeeter, they are clandestinely spied upon by the local youths who, being guided by a Vietnam veteran, and under the bout of racial prejudice, burn Rabbit’s house. While Jill succumbs to her burns, Nelson, who has had close proximity with Jill, holds Rabbit responsible for her burning xiii . Way back in 1990, Updike had said to Melvyn Bragg xiv that in Rabbit Redux “[t]he Civil Rights movement was one of the most constructive turbulent flows in all that, that little house of Harry’s becomes, in a way, America suddenly playing host to, first Jill, the white, spacey, upper-middle-class dropout type, and she brings in a black radical. And these things did happen ”(225)(Emphasis added). In an interesting article Gordon E. Slethaug xv suggests that the novel primarily examines the aspect of freedom in four different characters: Rabbit, [47] America through Hard Times: Verisimilitude in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux

Author: P.Sengupta

Janice, Jill and Skeeter. Slethaug argues that the theme of America becomes subservient to the theme of freedom which the book primarily attempts to explore: The book( Rabbit Redux ) is primarily an exploration of the effects of personal freedom from established moral, social and legal conventions; it is secondarily a consideration of how that concept of freedom underlies national beliefs and values that are at least partially detrimental both to the United States and to foreign countries(238). Updike keeps on knitting new fabrics in the plot, and brings in Rabbit’s sister Miriam, a call girl at Las Vegas, who comes to the rescue of her brother by seducing Stavros. Realizing that a prolonged sexual relationship with Janice might tell upon his weak her, Stavros gradually extricates himself from this liaison. Along with the death of Jill and the flight of Skeeter, Rabbit and Janice are eventually reconciled. The erstwhile fickle-minded, instinctive, reckless Rabbit in Rabbit, Run has turned out to be a sobered and slightly more mature man of 36years. Witnessing on the television screen, the moon shot on July 20,1969 through Apollo 11, he is thrilled and delight at the American scientific triumph of space exploration. One may note how American space research had accelerated since the founding of the NASA in 1958. As Updike had suggested to Jeff Campbell xvi in an interview: Rabbit’s adventures in this book are a kind of launching free of the very terrestrial world of Pop and Mom and Janice to a kind of no man’s land. In some way I felt the little ranch house to be a space capsule spinning in space, and the union with Janice—even their bodily jockeying were meant to be a kind of jockeying in space, like these linkups….So in some way the whole thing, the whole fantasy of thebook…is related to the true fantasy of our space invasion(88). But rather present the moon shot merely as a topical scientific event of the decade, Updike resorts to the more artistic method of relating and integrating it organically to the plot of the novel. As Updike xvii suggests: In Rabbit Redux the trip to the moon is the central metaphor. ‘Trip’ in Sixties parlance meant some inner journey of some strangeness; he little apple-green house in Penn Villas plays host to space invaders—a middle-class runaway and a black rhetorician(xiv). We cannot but notice the correspondence between Apollo 11’s flight to the alien moon with Janice’s illicit flight to Stavros’s cosmos which is equally alien to her, as it disrupts the legacy of marriage. Similarly one may relate the moon shot with the flight of the unknown runaway Jill and the black Vietnam veteran Skeeter into Rabbit’s homely territory, and Rabbit’s flight into the counter-culture. Rabbit’s interest in Afro-American culture, his reading of Frederick Douglass’s speech, his discussions with the black Vietnam veteran, Skeeter, etc. are some of the devices by means of which Updike strikes the note of American multiculturalism. ‘JAST’-2017, Vol.-03, Issue-01 [48]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-03, Issue-01 Updike xviii laments the fact that racial prejudices against the blacks continue to persist in his contemporary America, a fact that finds literary manifestation in the burning of Rabbit’s house by some local racist zealots. It is through Rabbit’s lengthy discussions with Skeeter that Updike moots some of the contemporary political issues as the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Rabbit’s deliberate attempt to cross the cultural border, and peregrinate through the black culture represented by Skeeter in Rabbit Redux may be traced to Updike’s own views xix : Throughout the entire history of America, the blacks have not been just slaves and an underclass, but they have also had something to offer which whites have coveted. They’ve made America what it is, to a great degree(225). At another level the moon shot also testifies to the American myth of the Frontier, in a revised scientific mould, in terms of space explorations. Thus Updike in Rabbit Redux tries to illustrate how “external circumstances bear nightmarishly upon my skittish pilgrim…” (xiv). One may notice the symmetry and rhythm in the plots of the first two Rabbit novels. The parallels and resemblances between the two also suggest the organic growth of the tetralogy. Further, this correspondence between the first book and the second, also illustrates an instance of role-reversal of certain characters. For example, the adulterous liaison between Rabbit and Ruth in Rabbit, Run , finds its reflection in the adulterous relationship between Janice and Stavros in Rabbit Redux , and Rabbit’s desertion of Janice finds its antithesis in the next book in Janice’s desertion of Rabbit. The hitherto recklessness, restlessness and vitality of Rabbit is approximated by the hitherto sluggish and inert Janice, while Rabbit is reduced—the idea is conveyed in the word “redux”—to a somewhat sobered counterpart of his former self. Similarly the accidental unfortunate death of Janice’s daughter by drowning in the first book is paralleled by the shocking death of Jill by burning in the second. Significantly, Rabbit is indirectly and partially responsible for both the deaths. The guilt of Janice over the drowning of her baby is imaged in the pangs of guilty feelings that Rabbit undergoes for the death of Jill. The role of the Christian mediator, Rev. Eccles, in the first book is antithetically balanced by the political mediator Skeeter. Significantly, both of them fail to convince Rabbit in accepting their respective views. Finally if in the cemetery scene in Rabbit, Run Rabbit had held Janice responsible for the death of their baby, Nelson interrogates Rabbit’s role in the death of Jill. It is mainly through his creation of Skeeter, the Vietnamese black veteran, that Updike moots such contemporary issues as drug abuse, sex abuse and the racial prejudices prevailing in America in 1960s. One cannot but notice that Rabbit’s right-winged views on the Vietnam War were no less than those of his author. In his memoir Self-Consciousness xx Updike records some of his candid political responses to some British editor: I do not believe that Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh have a moral edge over us, nor do I believe that great powers can always avoid using their power. I am for our intervention if it does some good—specially, if it enable the people of South Vietnam to seek their own political future(112-113). In fact, Updike had admitted the impact of Cold War on him to T.M. McNally and Dean Stover in a candid interview xxi : I’ve not been wounded in Italy like Hemingway and I’ve never fought marlin at sea. I’m a product of the nearly forty years of Cold [49] America through Hard Times: Verisimilitude in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux

Author: P.Sengupta

War. So naturally I’ve written about domestic, rather peaceable matters, while trying always to elicit the violence and tension that does exist beneath the surface of even the most peaceful-seeming life(192). Conclusion: In his famous interview xxii given to Charles Thomas Samuels, John Updike claims: My fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more history in it than history books, just as there is more breathing history in archeology than in a list of declared wars and changes in government(37). In the same interview he affirmed that his “aim is to witness the life of America in the second half of the century as best I can”, and therefore, wanted to give vent to both the domestic violence and the social violence of his contemporary America in a faithful way (205). Talking to the Japanese critic Iwao Iwamato xxiii in 1978 Updike had admitted that “the Vietnam episode and the oil dependency are two things that constitute a pulling in, a kind of a shrinking, a making sure of what you have and not being too ambitious—internationally, at least…. That was a very difficult time , the late sixties here , as in Rabbit Redux (119)(Emphasis added). The title of my paper—“America in Hard Times”—apart from its literal echo from Dickens, owes its origin to this comment, emphasized by myself. Rabbit Redux gives us ample references to America passing through the toughest times of 1960s with Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Panther Movement, the ensuing Vietnam War, racial riots, the arrival of the Beatniks, the Hippie culture, sex, crime, and drug explosions, and so forth. Little wonder then, in Rabbit Redux Updike strikes a rare sense of verisimilitude in terms of negotiating with his contemporary American history, and capturing the angst of the social turbulence of 1960s, culminating in the Vietnam episode.

Works Cited Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion . Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,2001.

Edwards, Thomas R. “Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy”, The Atlantic , October 1981:94-101.

Falke, Wayne. “ Rabbit Redux: Time/Order/God”, in Modern Fiction Studies 20 (Spring 1974): 59-75.

Greiner, Donald J. John Updike’s Novels . Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984. Karl, Frederick American Fiction:1940-1980 .New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Macnaughton, William R. ed. Critical Essays on John Updike . Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982.

Miller, Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain . Columbia:

‘JAST’-2017, Vol.-03, Issue-01 [50]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-03, Issue-01 University of Missouri P,2001.

Olster, Stacey “Rabbit Return: Updike’s Replay of Popular Culture in Rabbit at Rest ”, in Modern Fiction Studies (Spring 1991): 45-59.

Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike . Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Raymont, Harry. “John Updike completes a sequel to Rabbit, Run ”, in The New York Times , July 27, 1971. Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1960. ------. Couples. New York: Knopf, 1968. ------. Rabbit, Redux. New York: Knopf, 1971 ------.Hugging the Shore . New York: Knopf,1983.

------. Self-Consciousness . New York: Random House Trade paperback,1989.

------.Rabbit Angstrom .New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995.

Notes & References i Iwao Iwamato, “A Visit to Mr. Updike”(1978), in James Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 1994)p.119. All further references to this book have been cited as CU. ii Harry Raymont, “John Updike completes a sequel to Rabbit, Run ”, in The New York Times , July 27, 1971. iii Thomas R. Edwards, “Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy”, The Atlantic , October 1981:94-101. iv Donald J.Greiner, John Updike’s Novels (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984). v Charles Samuels, Rev. of Rabbit Redux , “Updike on the Present” from The New Republic 165 (November 20, 1971), 29-30, reprinted in William R. Macnaughton, ed., Critical Essays on John Updike (Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982)pp.63-67. vi Stacey Olster, “Rabbit Return: Updike’s Replay of Popular Culture in Rabbit at Rest ”, in Modern Fiction Studies (Spring 1991): 45-59. vii As Updike had said to Michael Sragow: You’re born into political contract or another, whose terms, though they sit very lightly at first, in form of the draft or taxes, eventually begin to make very real demands on you. The general social contract—living with other people, driving cars on highways—all this is difficult, it’s painful. It’s a kind of agony really—the agony vents itself in ulcers internally, rage externally…”(61).From Michael Sragow “Updike Redux”(1971), form The Harvard Crimson , 2 February 1972, 3-4,6.Reprinted in CU ,pp.59-66. viii Marshall Boswell, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,2001)p.76.

[51] America through Hard Times: Verisimilitude in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux

Author: P.Sengupta

ix Wayne Falke “ Rabbit Redux: Time/Order/God”, in Modern Fiction Studies 20 (Spring 1974): 59-75.

x Updike had said to Jeff Campbell in an interview: “I wrote the book rather rapidly. I was trying to work on the long Buchanan thing at the time, and I’ve kind of forgotten the kind of composition of Rabbit Redux except that as I was witnessing these events as they unfolded, they seemed real enough to me. I was trying to let out my own anxieties and doubts, puzzlement over the issues that are raised”(90- 91). In Jeff Campbell, “Interview with John Updike”(1976), in CU ,pp.84-104. xi John Updike, Hugging the Shore (New York: Knopf,1983)p.858. xii Frederick Karl, American Fiction:1940-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983). xiii One may note that Updike refers to the burning of a biracial couple in Self-Consciousness (New York: Random House Trade paperback,1989): “A single Negro family, the Johnsons, attended Shillington High, and were admired for their singing( the girl) and athletic skill( the boys). When one Johnson boy, however took a white bride, his house somehow burned down”(65). All further references to this book will be cited as SC. xiv Melvyn Bragg, “Forty years of Middle America with John Updike”, in CU ,pp.221-228. xv Gordon E.Slethaug, “ Rabbit Redux: ‘Freedom is Made of Brambles’”, in Critical Essays on John Updike , ed. Willam R. Macnaughton, General ed.James Nagel(Boston,Mass.: G.K.Hall & Co.,1982),pp.237-253.

xvi Jeff Campbell, “Interview with John Updike”(1976), in CU ,pp.84-104. xvii John Updike, “Introduction” to Rabbit Angstrom (New York: Knopf/ Everyman’s Library, 1995)pp. v-xxii. xviii As Updike notes in his “Introduction” to Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy : “The United States is more than a tenth black; black music, black sorrow, black jubilation, black English, black style permeate the culture and have contributed much to what makes American music, especially, so globally potent. Yet the society continues racially divided, in the main, and Rabbit’s reluctant crossing of the color line represents a tortured form of progress”(xiv).

xix Melvyn Bragg, “Forty years of Middle America with John Updike”, in CU ,pp.221-228. xx For a detailed understanding of Updike’s political views over America’s cold war, one may go through Quentin Miller’s John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: University of Missouri P, 2001); also see John Updike, “On Not being a Dove”, in SC ,pp.112-163. xxi T.M. McNally and Dean Stover, “An Interview with John Updike”(1987), in CU ,pp.192-206. xxii Charles Thomas Samuels, “The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike”, CU , pp. 22-45. xxiii Iwao Iwamato, “A Visit to Mr. Updike”(1978), in CU ,pp.115-123.

‘JAST’-2017, Vol.-03, Issue-01 [52]