Rabbit (Un) Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s FictionPeter J. Bailey
About the Author :
Peter J. Bailey attended Kenyon College and the New School College, New School of Social Research, from which he received his BA. After earning an MA at the Writing Seminars, The Johns Hopkins University, He received a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. Since 1980, he has taught American literature and fiction writing at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York, where he is professor of English and directs the Jeffrey Campbell Graduate Fellowship program. Bailey is the author of Reading Stanley Elkin (1986) and The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2000)
Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction offers a selective reading of this prolific authors oeuvre, concentrating on Updike’s career-spanning reoccupation with issues of faith and doubt. In Bailey’s reading, at the heart o Updike’s work is the tension between affirming the continuance of the “heady wine of religious consolation” and the deepening anxiety that the best that humanity can hope for is “the bleak fare of more endurance.” Focusing on a trio of Olinger stories, the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, In the beauty of the Lilies, and “Rabbit Remembered,” Bailey locates the dialectical situation at the center of Updike’s literary career in his conflicted sense of himself as a Christian novelist and Howellsian realist. Bailey’s thematically centered study reveals a substantial stylistic component in Updike’s dilemma of belief; therefore, a significant objective of this study involves illuminating the author’s conflict between creating an eschatologically inspired mimesis reflective of a “knowing eye” behind appearances of reality, or settling for a historically based realism that, in Howellsian fashion, can do nothing more spiritually meaningful than to record (and thus literally preserve) that which is an will one day be no more. Rabbit Angstrom is Updike’s most significant fictional creation, Bailey contends, because his impulses toward religious skepticism are so inadequately possessed of the intellectual and literary buffers that provide Updike and som of his other protagonists with temporary forms of solace or compensation. Rabbit’s deepening skepticism that “goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside” finds it corollary in the evolution delineated in Updike’s work, transforming it from the “song of joy” in affirmation of creation the “The Blessed Man of Boston” narrator David Kern invokes, to the chronological reconstruction of history as attempted compensation for a relinquished belief in time’s spiritual significance in In the Beauty of the Lilies, and the world largely gutted of a transcendent presence in which Harry’s survivors live on, in “Rabbit Remembered.” Although Rabbit is the centerpiece of Bailey’s critical argument, in making his case for the critical argument, in making his case for the centrality of issues of faith to Updike’s literary production, Bailey generously cites from Midpoint; Roger’s Version; Memories of the Ford Administration; Self-Consciousness: Memoirs; Towards the End of Time; and Updike essays, reviews, and interviews, in his attempt to delineate the drama of belief and doubt he believes to be enacted so compellingly by Updike’s literary career. Without seeking to reduce Updike’s massive oeuvre to a single idea, Bailey shows how the contention between faith and doubt permeates the work, using the Rabbit tetralogy as the site where Updike hazards most in juxtaposing Rabbit’s deepening agnosticism against his own increasingly “faint faith.”
Read an Interview with the Author: Interview ISBN 0-8386-4053-2
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