I taught Updike’s short story, “The Morning” last week and was stuck by a small moment there Id never noticed before. The protagonist, a blocked graduate student, looks out his window and, excited by the vista and possibilities of space, he feels momentarily inspired to return to his studies. But the moment of release out into a world of potentialities wanes, and the language of the paragraph slowly moves him back into his room, into his life, into his depressed incapacitation. Its because Updike’s language is so often doing more than moving characters across streets or up and down in buildings that I find him such exhilarating reading. Sentences are epiphanies, paragraphs are mini-narratives or psychological taxonomies. Its about the language, which compliments the readers attention as it creates a wonderfully dense web of signification, dense as the world as I experience it.

Why does Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom have such a strong presence in Updike’s literature?

Updike has talked about Harry as a sort of unschooled doppelganger, as what Updike himself might have become if he weren’t class valedictorian at Shillington High, Harvard grad, Pulitzer Prize winner, and exile from the Reading/Shillington territory of both men’s childhoods. Rabbit freed something in Updike, allowing him to be funnier and more misogynistic behind the Rabbit mask, but Harry’s four volume acts of attention to the world around him suggest that he, like Updike, is one on whom very little is lost.

I have read that Updike detests interviews, referring to them as “a form to be loathed; a half-form like maggots”. You mention that much of Rabbits experiences are inspired by Updike’s. Rabbit goes through “three of the four novels culminating in his desperate isolation and aloneness”, as you put it. Do you think that this desire for isolation and private-ness reflects greatly on Updike’s life and his take on interviews?

Consider the source here: I quoted from at least twelve different interviews in Rabbit (Un)Remembered, and I’m pretty sure I’ve read three times that many. Updike is generally a highly cooperative and excellent interview subject in spite of his reservations about the format, which he dislikes because interviewers so regularly seek to decipher the secrets of books he believes should remain secrets until the readers read them. Writing is Updike’s preferred way of keeping in touch, and he considers any day during which he hasn’t written wasted, so he has actually kept in touch a lot.

You mention that New Criticism has two problems. One, that it “can gravitate toward reductionism by foregrounding one major pattern or conflict in the authors work at the expense of the many others, and it also tends to isolate the writer by sealing him off in a conversation with himself rather than apprehending him more broadly in the context of the other writers of his era.” You try to resist the first problem, but found it difficult to resist the second due to John Updike’s personal characteristics. Do you believe that more critics should understand the constraints that New Criticism has and should try to resist them as best possible?

I’d say New Criticism has been subjected to enough withering assaults that few critics are likely to wield it during this era preoccupied with literary theory without being aware of how very traditional and old-fashioned their method is. At the same time, for American writers educated in mid-century, New Criticism was the method for approaching literary texts, and the most revered critics of that school were honored primarily for their ability to find alternative poems in the texts they were reading. (This is Updike’s formulation, derived from his Harvard lit classes.) The most substantial criticism written today of authors trained during the ascendancy of the New Criticism introduces new literary trends such as cultural studies, deconstruction, biographical and historical perspectives, and so on, but the attention to the synapses of language which is the New Criticisms primary legacy to literary study remains an indispensable critical method for the illumination and elucidation of writers who went to school to F.R. Leavis, Robert Penn Warren, I.A. Richards, and Cleanth Brooks. Updike is only the most obvious example of the pervasiveness of their influence on his generation of writers.

–Lorna Marie McManus