“Ah: Runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Pradipta Sengupta M.U.C

JAST ©2015 M.U.C.Women’s College, Burdwan ISSN 2395-4353 -a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue- 01 “Ah: runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Pradipta Sengupta M.U.C. Women’s College, Burdwan West Bengal, India-713104 [email protected]/ [email protected] Abstract: Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the ingenious American icon created by Updike has captured the American literary sensibility since his inception in Rabbit, Run(1960) till his death at the end of his Tetralogy in Rabbit at Rest (1990). The final enigmatic run of Rabbit at the end of Rabbit, Run, leading to the open-endedness of the book, has baffled readers and critics alike. This paper attempts to shed some light on this enigma, with particular focus on his seemingly inexplicable character, and tries to interpret his run as a typically American literary phenomenon subsuming him within the tradition of great runners in American Literature. Keywords: Rabbit, American, icon, Updike, literary, sensibility, Rabbit, Run, enigmatic, character, open-endedness, tradition, literature. A few characters in the entire gamut of American Literature have achieved the status of American icon: Natty Bumppo in Fennimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales”, Huckleberry Finn in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, Santiago in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and recently, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom in John Updike’s “Rabbit Tetralogy” comprising Rabbit, Run(1960), Rabbit Redux(1971), Rabbit Is Rich(1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). While the list could be easily extended, it is worth considering the character of Rabbit who has acquired the rare status of being hailed as an ‘American Everyman’ by criticsi. Furthermore, Rabbit may also be subsumed under the broad category of the fugitive travelling American heroes: Natty Bumppo’s travels across the American frontiers, Huck Finn’s peregrinations on the raft on the Mississippi, Captain Ahab’s monomaniac whale- chase into the wilderness of the ocean, Santiago’s monomaniac frantic search for the great marlin fish in the sea, Sal Paradise’s journey across the American continent, Captain Yossarian’s final flight from the battlefield to avert the catch of ‘catch 22’ in Heller’s Catch 22, and Rabbit’s indefinite travel in his ford, and his final enigmatic run at the end of Rabbit, Run.. This paper attempts to explore the enigma embedded in the indefinite run of Rabbit, and to illustrate that Rabbit belongs to the paradigm of the great American running heroes. Only a few American novels have been so widely discussed, read, criticized and reviewed as Updike’s Rabbit, Run(1960) which continues to stimulate the interest of the readers and critics alike even after five decades of its publication. Gerry Brenneri argues that in this book “Updike's philosophical conservatism conceives of the romantic dream of returning to nature, in its worst sense, as the ultimate extension of the loss of traditional values, ideals, laws. Set into a society that persists in adhering to some prescriptive mores, Rabbit, as a [Article History: Received on 25.03.2015 , Accepted on 12.05.2015] [1] Ah: runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Author: P. Sengupta ‘noble’ urban savage, images modern man's traditionless character and portends his concomitant problems. And the effectiveness of the novel resides in Updike's projection of this statement through the use of the tacky social setting and a line-up of only moderately sympathetic characters”. J.M.Edelsteinii conceives of Rabbit as a person possessed with a “bitter, almost vicious, hatred, and a humorless lack of pity”. Kyle A.Pasewarkiii, on the other hand, feels that the ‘religiocultural elements’ that bound him together comprise “a specific type of guilt, the need for social recognition, the identification of freedom and ecstasy with redemption, a growing ambivalence toward myths of labor, a desire to consume, and an assumption of the essential innocence of nature”(2). In his excellent study on Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogyiv, Marshall Boswell rightly argues that “the Rabbit novels serve as a fictionalized time line of the postwar American experience”(1). Having affirmed that Updike had his solace in John Barth’s dogmatic theology, Boswell tries to extend it to Rabbit’s own theological sensibility: “What’s more it serves as the bedrock for Rabbit’s own theological vision”(18). In yet another interesting reading Edward Vargov argues that Rabbit does not fall under the stereotypes of heroes or antiheroes, and suggests that he is “basically an ambivalent middle- class American Christian in a similarly ambivalent world”(73). Vargo’s criticism, while providing some illuminating flashes into some of the theological scenes, is, after all, warped by his notions of theology and rituals, so much so that he interprets the fire set on Rabbit’s house in Rabbit Redux(1971) to be a handiwork of God or whom Vargo calls “a primitive, fierce, terrible God…”(84) Far from being tenable, this discussion takes us away from Updike’s sense of verisimilitude to his contemporary America in 1960s which did not certainly hold such numinous views for natural and social things. While Richard Fostervi considers Rabbit to be “the dangerous force of utter selfhood”, David Boroffvii compares Rabbit with Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. But while Caulfield’s search was for immaculate innocence in the tangle of experience, Rabbit’s search is for retaining his first- ratedness, a yearning for freedom from the morass of exasperating domesticity and the miasma of second-rate existence. Seen form this angle, Rabbit is more akin to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt than to Caulfield, for both Babbitt and Rabbit are possessed with ‘great expectations’, like Dickens’s Pip, aspiring to rise above their respective middle-class social moorings. In a thorough and penetrating analysis of Rabbit’s character Greienerviii rightly pinpoints the problems that most of the readers face in coping with this character’s actions. As Greiner so rightly points out: In Rabbit, Run Updike poses a dilemma that results in the ambiguity he aspires to: should Rabbit define himself by social convention, or should he indulge his yearning toward individual belief?(50) Greiner supports his argument with what Updikeix called the “yes-but” trait of his fiction: “Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our inner urgent whispers, but—the social fabric collapses murderously (33). In an interesting reading Gerry Brennerx argues that in Rabbit, Run “Updike’s philosophical conservatism conceives of the romantic dream of returning to ǮJASTǯ-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [2] JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 nature, in its worst sense, as the ultimate extension of the loss of traditional ideals, values, laws. Set into a society that persists in adhering to some perspective mores, Rabbit, as a ‘noble’ urbane savage, images modern man’s traditionless character and portends his concomitant problems. And the effectiveness of the novel resides in Updike’s project of this statement through the use of the tacky social setting and a line-up of only moderately sympathetic characters”(103-104). Originally subtitled “A Movie”, Rabbit, Run was meant to appropriate the “cinematic mode of narration.”xi The idea of resorting to the present tense also afforded him with greater flexibility to “move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense” (CU 41). Significantly, Updike’s use of the present tense in all the four Rabbit novels also reinforces the sense of contemporaneity in his Tetralogy. The novel is supposed to be an extension of Updike’s short story “An Ace in the Hole”xii which veers around the life of a basketball player Fred “Ace” Anderson who finds it difficult to reconcile between his past glory and his present grimness. One may also refer to Updike’s poem “Ex-basketball Player”xiii which dwells on the vacuity of a man (“Flick” Webb) working at a gas station. Furthermore, if a basketball player has to run to and fro throughout the court, Rabbit does the same in the court of his life, oscillating between two women, his wife Janice, and his mistress Ruth, and finally running away from both. If like a player again he dodges the problems of life, unlike a player, he does not have the sportsman-like mettle to reckon with these problems. Updike’s very choice of a basketball player as his hero may be traced to what he said to Malvyn Bragg in an interview: You write about characters often because you wish to be them, and as a high school boy I admired and really adored the good basketball players…I wanted Rabbit, Run to be about an American predicament, the predicament of the ex-high-school athlete. Basketball is very much a thing here, as it is in Indiana, and indeed throughout much of so-called Middle America(CU 222-223). Jack de Bellisxiv similarly points out that “Updike makes the social fabric concrete through a vivid use of Americana—songs, films, jokes and, above all, basketball, which, as Updike remarked, embodied for him the meaning of what it is to be an American”(370). Thus, Rabbit as an ex-basketball champion perfectly fits into the American culture. Another genesis of the novel may be traced to Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit xv, a story for children updated in the mould of an adult fiction in Rabbit, Run. The name of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, too, is significant.

Load more