"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

The short stories of John Updike, perhaps America's premier secular "religious writer," pose the undying dilemma of whether a Christian can combine faith with literary works. Is it possible that an evangelical message can be massaged into prose without accusations of author intrusion or injuring form in the process? Since this is one of the most common complaints of Updike's detractors, it can be safely assumed that there are delicacies involved in marrying religious edification and secular realism, if only to some select sects of the literary criticism crowd.

Ironically, Updike himself could vouch for this endeavor as his dissertation centered on the Christian faith of Robert Herrick as revealed in the poet's writing (Hamilton 46-47). He invokes such influences as Kierkegaard, Barth, and Chesterton, but like a straggler crying "Lord, Lord" his dispensations are a far testimony from their immanently operative creeds. For all of his prolific status as a modern day literary martyr, Updike misrepresents and dispatches the very religion he believes he tries to defend. He rides roughshod over the Calvinism he professes, exalts daily experiences (adultery becoming perfunctory) far beyond any religious "point," and posits the artist as protagonist over the priest or layman.

In point of fact, he is instead a domestic writer, penetrating to the farthest reaches of psychology and relationships, but not the shores of any hallowed country. His interior scenes are stylistic and smooth, but never hint of anything behind the curtain. Any talk of the supernatural is confined to metaphysical dinner conversation, fraught with superficial believers and double-minded divines. "His sympathies are usually with those who doubt, who have given up hope of salvation as such, wanting instead to be transparent, artists of their own lives" (Oates 54).

I, of course, don't have the figures in my novel shouting the old, high doctrines of sola gratia, solo Christo, though it might make for a lovely scene in a future story, but those banners are still unmistakably there. It is the grounding that for all the subtext. No matter what obscenity is going on in the story, the surrounding context, the interpretive subtext, and the Christological grounding allow the dark its subservient place in the light. Updike has no palate for chiaroscuro. His color and washes all bleed together. To come to the blunt point, his faith is not a testimony of "Christ with us, the hope of glory" but rather something like "Sex rules us, the despair of oblivion."

While art, sex, and religion seem to be the three themes he lingers over, there is also a hierarchy of the three. Religion and science fade away as the props upon which the artist emerges, co-opted by the muse of copulation.

Nor is religion given a place of genuine objective transformation. This use is more of another looking glass from which to make a stay of chaos. Which, of course, depletes Christianity of any unique logoV.

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This pseudo-religiosity is seen in Updike's "Remark's Upon Receiving the Campion Medal", a Catholic award. Updike, purportedly of a Congregational, Lutheran, and Episcopalian mix, confesses his belief that "truth is holy . . . the reality around us is created and worth celebrating; that men and women are radically imperfect and radically valuable" (Yerkes 4). But these are the words of any self-help guru, the description of practically any religion but the one upheld by the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. The character Arthur defines Protestantism in the short story "Sunday Morning" as "[a] vision of attaining God with nothing but the mind" (298). However, Arthur is mistaking his recitation for a definition of Puritanism given by Chesterton, an anti-Puritan. The levels of irony that belie Arthur's ignorance are indicative of all Updike's characters. Not one is able to articulate the Protestant faith. In the renowned "Pigeon Feathers," popularized in anthologies as quickly as older stories can be edited over, the doctrine of the soul is asserted "because the Bible tells us so" (16). Religious adherence in his characters can be summed up in David Kern's thoughts, which is worth quoting at length:

"In any crowd, the fear ebbed a little; he had reasoned that somewhere in the world there must exist a few people who believed what was necessary, and the larger the crowd, the greater the chance that he was near such a soul, within calling distance . . . The sight of a clergyman cheered him; whatever they themselves thought, their collars were still a sign that somewhere, at some time, someone had recognized that we cannot, cannot, submit to death. The sermon topics posted outside churches, the flip, hurried pieties of disc jockeys, the cartoons in magazines showing angels or devils — on such scraps he kept alive the possibility of hope" (27).

It is worth noting that David trusts not in any historical or redemptive Christ, and not even in hope for its own sake, but the possibility of hope. It matters not the content of a clergyman's theology, a convenient mark for the ambiguity of the story. I have talked to many of those clergymen and understand the ghastly bleak world this is written in because there is no certainty to be attained in their theology. Were I to ask any of them for solid answers concerning the motif of mortality that hangs on each character like a knapsack, I could speak for each one at once. They have no certainty of eternal life, because they have no understanding of saving faith, since there is no clarity on what Christ's death and resurrection really means, for they are ignorant of the holiness and justice of God, being unable to grasp the magnitude of an individual's sin.

In citing his own criteria for being a believer, Updike exclaims, "I do tend to see the world as layered, and as there being something up here" (qtd. in Schiff 51). Lest we be quick to pull out the Unitarian-Universality card (the same practical atheism, by the way, of his ex-wife) and be done with it, that would make this essay too short and do injustice to his major talent. He goes on to say that "style as it builds through an accumulation of details and images, works to replicate the abundance of God's world" (Schiff 53). Whether one sees Updike's wordage as "magnificent or self-indulgent" (Schiff 53), it cannot be doubted that his aesthetic command is almost worshipful in its effulgence. As far as his content, so often bogged down in sordid tales of suburban infidelity, the commonplace of psychiatric therapy in New Englander life, or unassuming visits to the doctor's office, there remains a sense that Updike expresses his religious message by the via negativa, the medieval practice of describing God by what humans are not. Acknowledging the deficiency of words to reach God, one can better intuit Him indirectly to how finite and depraved man is. "It's true that I don't go out of my way to show lives that are edifying," he addressed the 1995 Trinity Institute conference, but "[y]ou can write a depressing story that nevertheless . . . has a redemptive quality." (Christian Century 1). This bears considering in light of his other two foibles: the blatant immorality and the supreme place of the creator-artist.

Updike also subverts his faith by blurring the sacred and profane in his fiction, the literary equivalent to copulating in public. Now there is a blurring to the point where contrasts and highlights are made, and there is a blurring to where only a smudge remains. It is the latter I make reference to. In on place, he compares taking a bowel movement to divine revelation.

John Cheever has asked of Updike and sex scene in general, "I can't think, in the whole history of literature, of an explicit sex scene that was memorable" (qtd. in Hunt 7). Writer George Hunt might disagree. He claims that Updike's female characters are generally the most keenly observed, the most perspicacious, practical, and mature (8-9). Mary Allen makes the better-supported case that nearly all of Updike's women are prized chiefly for their sexuality, which is enhanced only by their stupidity (79). Characters are loved for their dumb faces and low intellectual stature: "What? The head? The head of every man. What does ‘the head' mean exactly? I'm sorry, I just don't understand" (Updike 296). At one point in The Centaur, George Caldwell gives a girl the answers to a test and she still gets them wrong.

The American adultery Updike depicts is ascribed a certain formal weight of dignity due to the import the exultant language he reserved for it. "The Persistence of Desire" and "Eros Rampant" are but two stories that portray adultery as carefree without consequences. Indeed, at the end of "The Persistence of Desire", Clyde's liaison is akin to being reborn, "a child again . . . where life was a distant adventure, a rumor, an always immanent joy" (90). It is never marriage or intimacy with God that brings on such catharsis.

Perhaps it is the case that he uses sex as a common context from which to tell the world of religion? In "Dentistry and Doubt", it is the clergyman's doubt that is expressed without any bridge established in the end; the symbolic wrens and starlings are still indistinguishably mixed (189). It would have been a great moment to comment on true and false converts that run through almost all of Jesus' parables, but that would entail the orthodoxy needed to first critique oneself. "Pigeon Feathers" has already been reviewed. "The Deacon", "Lifeguard", and "Believers", rely on irony and hypocrisy to show the superficiality of that unfortunate creature, the modern day churchgoer. To the evangelical eye, the character was never in the confines of biblical Christianity, but the stark difference is effaced in each case just as it is in pews across America. It really is a more truthful biography that it purports to be.

In "The Deacon", Miles is an electrician who is too much at home in a church (building), though "he wonders why he is here so often . . . where hours churn by in irrelevant argument and prayerful silences that produce nothing" (609). The deacon side of his life that threatens to overrun the rest of his time includes responsibilities for committee work and ushering that inevitably give him headaches over church politics and fiscal policy. It is no different, one should observe, from a modern office environment. What appeals to him about the church the building is the ambience of the varnished tables, linoleum, and bulletin board, not the church the body with the evangelists, Spirit-indwelling, and the fellowship of the firstborn. (It may be incidental to point out that the Biblical diakonoV is more of a servant and errand-runner than any administrative position.) He moves from Reformed church to Reformed church, avoiding the pomp and circumstance of platitudinous ceremony, though never quite escaping it. As an electrician, he sees the human mind merely as a jumble of synapses and chemical interactions with no hint of the divine spark. The resurrection of the dead, one of the most elementary of doctrines (Heb. 6:2), holds no allure for Miles. His wife is hardly mentioned in the story, but to prod him to go to church since "It's no sin." To which he replies, "I'll be damned if I join" (611). Inside he thinks, "Nothing but waste in this operation, salvage and waste. And weariness" (612). Miles must read a lot of Updike.

Nevertheless, Miles sees the church as a type of pyramidal preparation for death (which does not fall in the storm like the one in Couples) and sighs that he has kept the faith (613). For all his years, he has never learned that the Church is made up of those who have already died in Christ. Death is but a token formality, a serpent de-fanged sent to guide us to heaven. One wonders though why Updike never tears away the veil of the everyday American to reveal the Church in its bridal splendor. His talent is wasted on the miniscule, the domestic and mundane and he misses the chance to share with Hopkins of how charged the world is with God's glory like shook foil.

"The Lifeguard" is set along similar lines, the half-life of the churchgoer. There are odd analogies, however, in the mind of the divinity student/summer lifeguard. His missionology among the swelter of young bodies is direct: "I execute the duties of a student of divinity", replete with throne and vestment imagery (602). He does not have sex, per se, but endures intercourse (605). His discourse on the link between sexual immorality and the Christian duty is remarkable for its parallels; our fellow has obviously had a while to reflect on things from up on his pinnacled temple: "Women are an alien race of pagans sent among us. Every seduction is a conversion." (605). And humanity is a tangle, plague, clot, breeding swarm, others, and ants (606). Our protagonist comes across as the high and mighty, though lustful, pseudo-Calvinist God that despises the world He wishes in vain to save. Though many of his points ring true (why does no one compare God to the ocean anymore?), our anonymous hero is less than likeable for all his "suave table talk" (602). Here again is a larger than life print, but without any caption or setting for contrast. If this is all we are left with, the world it portrays suffers.

"Believers" is perhaps the most double-minded narrative yet for its Everyman slate of cultural Christianity. Credo is the typical "believer" who, in moving heavy pews, thinks of the giants of faith, equating strong faith to strong muscles. In conversing with his minister, his economic prowess arises, but no belief. He evens falls short of the glory of Augustine, putting aside old tomes for another day when, presumably, his spiritual mind is more mature. Updike's syntax flows with religious language, as old ladies divide the basement furniture like sheep and goats and later Credo seduces a woman with a line from Augustine. The physical structure of the church is just as slippery as Credo's faith as he figures and refigures whether it portends all things. "And yet. . . And yet. . . And yet" (641) reads as inconclusively as the closing line: "Or, it may be, as some extreme saints have implied, that, crushed beneath the majesty of the Infinite, believers and non-believers are exactly alike" (644). Despite his namesake, Credo is not one for doctrines, but second-hand hearsay, guesswork, and metaphysical double-speak. These sketches betray the same level of intimacy he shares with women as well. His religious life and secular life cohabitate like estranged bedfellows.

Finally, to touch on Updike's elevation of the artist type, the inertia lifts off his religious tropes and one can see him actually rooting for the hero when he deals with artists. In The Centaur, each character is symbolic of a mythological counterpart. George Caldwell (Centaur) accepts his teaching career (death) at Olinger (Olympus) so Peter (Prometheus) can live. Peter is hampered by his adolescent sexuality (Pandora's box), but eventually is freed to form his life out of his own creativity and expressionist artwork (crap). The whole work is multi-faceted, a literary equivalent to cubism and surrealism, but the solid chain of narrative is caught when viewing the novel as a movement through Updike's hierarchy of values. The lowest base is 1) the blind submission to worship Zeus' religion and sex, which rises to 2) the scientific, sexless studying represented in Caldwell's ascetic life, until one achieves denouement with (3) the creator-artist of Prometheus uniting religion, sex, and art (Detweiler 93). This evolutionary progression from beast to half-beast to man is laid out in miniature in the first chapter, just before a student takes a nymph forcibly from behind in the classroom.

Peter recalls this priest-teacher-artist chain explicitly when asking, "Was it for this that my father gave up his life?" Just as "nature acted upon by art (the idealizing pastoral norm) is preferable to raw nature (the realistic and anti-pastoral form), the artist is superior to the bland old forms of religion science" (Taylor 129). Without the artistic imagination, nature is not trusted on its own merit, but called Janus-faced. This comes from Caldwell's Pop Kramer (Father Father). It is not that these two are useless bygones of darker epochs, but they are too dependent on art to transform it, unable to achieve greatness on their own ground.

Some have claimed it is hard to gauge contemporary work, like cataloging a butterfly in flight and that Updike's "secular baroque" style doesn't stand still long enough to be properly observed (Yerke 7). But his canon is fairly constant in theme and message for forty years. "A minor novelist with a major style . . . he does not create dynamic or colorful or deeply meaningful characters. He does not confront the reader with dramatic situations" (Bloom 7-9). His choice of middle-class experiences over the grandiose plots of pop fiction and movie scripts is lauded on the one hand, though critics like Aldridge may declaim he has nothing to say (Bloom 13) and Rupp remarks "we remember the voice for longer than the story" (Rupp 16). One wonders in vain for someone who doesn't attend chic parties with their indifferent spouse, which invariably leaves the aftertaste of intellectual sophistry. It is unfortunate that realism is taken to mean expressionism, "disarmed of perspective." But the real tragedy is that many continue to read him as a Protestant, even (gag) evangelical writer because those terms are held so fluidly. A Review of John Updike and Religion by Larry Randen is case in point: "It doesn't mean he embraces the theology of Barth or the divinity of Jesus or the belief in the resurrection of the body in an afterlife, or even an affirmation that God is more than the invention of the poets. My reading of Updike is that he is much moved by the reality of existential fear of human inconsequentiality in the universe. He makes art into a more personal myth to cope with that phobia of meaninglessness, to satisfy and amuse his playful nature that is endlessly creative, prolific and witty . . . [he does know any more about "God" than anyone else but] he has left a legacy of literary art that startles, reveals, and helps us explore the question in an open-ended way in our own spirituality" (Randen). The faith he defends is "not simply religious faith, though that is an issue too, but the more general faith in society that is necessary to get things done" (Greiner). It pains me to write about such men and go to the length of quoting them because of their astounding futility, which paints me as a provincial diatribist. It should be apparent though that what Randen and Greiner reveal is precisely nothing. Updike has written for forty years in arrogance to plant only questions, but no signposts to truth. After a time one's patience wears thing wandering in the desert of "witty" ambiguity and must in the end simply say shut up.

In closing, the inability to speak meaningfully of life points to an unhealthy, if unconscious and uninformed, concentration on death while living. There are helpful categories to consider the world here. Only two types of men pedestal sex and death: the magician and the materialist. Both necessarily use (or misuse) the language of symbols. For the magician, it is the practicioner. For the materialist, the artist. Mr. Yeats has written beautifully on the subjects, quite affirmative of his own philosophical systems. Mr. Updike has the equally unfortunate position of heralding copulation and the sterility of non-life without a mind for the truly spiritual, without a ghost of the life that must be lost to be found.

Works Cited

Adler, Renata. "Arcadia, PA." Critical Essays on John Updike. Ed. William R. Macnaughton. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982. 48-52.

Allen, Mary. "John Updike's Love of ‘Dull Bovine Beauty'." Modern Critical Views: John Updike. Ed. and Introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 69-96.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: John Updike. New York: Chelsea House Publishers,1987.

Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1972.

Hamilton, Alice and Kenneth. The Elements of John Updike. William B. Eerdmans, 1970.

Hunt, George W., S.J. John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980.

Updike, John. John Updike: The Early Stories, 1953-1975. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Updike's American Comedies." John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. David Thorburn and Howard Eiland. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1979. 53-68.

Rupp, Richard H. "John Updike: Style in Search of a Center." Modern Critical Views: John Updike. Ed. and Introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 15-28.

Schiff, James A. "The Pocket Nothing Else Will Fill: Updike's Domestic God." John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Ed. James Yerkes. Grand Rapids, M.I.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. 50-63.

Taylor, Larry. "The Centaur: Epic Paean and Pastoral Lament." John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. David Thorburn and Howard Eiland. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1979. 117-131.

Yerkes, James, ed. John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Grand Rapids, M.I.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.

Yerkes, James. "As Good as It Gets: The Religious Consciousness in John Updike's Literary Vision." John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Grand Rapids, M.I.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. 9-30.

"John Updike's literary via negative." The Christian Century. 24 May 1995: 1.

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