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Verisimilitude in John Updike's Rabbit Redux

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Verisimilitude in John Updike's Rabbit Redux JAST ©2017 M.U.C.Women’s College, Burdwan ISSN 2395-4353 -a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-03, Issue- 01 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).
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