*Sightings* 2/5/09

— M. Cooper Harriss

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John Updike, who died last week at 76, has found valediction in the interim as a literary giant—a novelist and short story writer, a poet, and a critic. *Chicago Tribune *culture writer Julia Keller places him in a foursome with Norman Mailer, Phillip Roth, and Saul Bellow as the preeminent novelists of their generation—which is a fair if arguable assessment of both Updike and late-twentieth-century American letters. Yet among this group, it is Updike whose passing would most readily occasion notice from *Sightings*. All literature functions in religious modes and by necessity addresses themes and problems that we might dare call “theological,” but Updike was a writer both evident and unabashed in his willingness to engage God as narrative presence in the midst of contemporary despair.

If Updike’s unique capacity as a writer was to depict middle-class, ordinary, unremarkable folks engaged in struggles befitting literary heroism, he also, and perhaps more so, succeeded in situating the supposedly mundane existential questions and angst of these same people within the great theological problems of modernity. Updike was seized by Karl Barth’s theology as a Harvard undergraduate, and we find both substantive and stylistic reflections of this debt (in addition to Kierkegaard and others)

throughout his novels, whether in Rabbit Angstrom’s circuitous vacillations in exurban *nihilo *in the four novels for which he serves as the titular protagonist, or Dale Kohler’s attempts to prove God’s existence with a computer in *Roger’s Version* (1986).

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Beyond such purely intellectual theological debts, however, Updike was a churchman—no doubt an anomaly among his contemporary literary peers. David Lodge suggested that “If there was ever such a species as the Protestant novelist…Mr. Updike may be its last surviving example.” His preachers, as literary characters, certainly reflect the diversity and complexity of late-twentieth-century mainstream American Protestantism while continuing an American literary tradition of problematic preachers, a lineage extending at least from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale to Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry to James Baldwin’s John Grimes, to highlight but a few examples. Consider the dueling conceptions of ecclesiology and clerical authority represented in the Lutheran Fritz Kruppenbrach (a Barthian in no uncertain terms who appears in *Rabbit, Run*) and his foil, the young, personable, and disconcertingly pastoral Jack Eccles (who turns up throughout the Rabbit Tetralogy). Consider Updike’s conflicted lothario Tom Marshfield (whose own relationship to a certain “Ms. Prynne” invokes Dimmesdale and the* Scarlet Letter*) in *A Month of Sundays *(1975), or the Presbyterian preacher Clarence Wilmot from *In the Beauty of the Lillies* (1996), who undergoes a crisis of faith and yet continues to peddle both “the word” and “cosmology” as an encyclopedia salesman. Updike’s preachers are ordained to God’s service, yet continually compelled by the messy, and corporeal, limitations that confront humankind. For an author whose sexually charged narrative communicates a coherent and strident theological vision, one can’t help but find some kindred sympathy between Updike as a wordsmith and his own ministers of “the Word.”

An offhanded comment of Updike’s, from a 2006 interview in Chicago with WTTW television’s John Callaway (re-aired this past week), speaks volumes for the broader contours of Updike’s theological vision. After sharing a joke with his subject about the pitfalls of growing old, Callaway interjects a leading question: “Are you a man of faith?” Updike recounts his lifetime tour of Protestantism—his Lutheran upbringing in Pennsylvania, his marriage to the daughter of a Unitarian minister and their move to New England Congregationalism, and his final move to the Episcopal Church, where he claims to feel very much at home. Following a couple of other observations about the value of faith and a community with whom to share it, Updike, in an unacknowledged nod to Pascal’s wager in the *Pensées*, claims that there’s something to be said for belonging to a group whose members are willing to stake it all on the same “bet.” Through Updike’s theological imagination perhaps we sight our own valediction. Within routine acts, allegiances, and even (or especially) alienations, all tended by external circumstance and the hardness of the human heart, humankind engages in what Pascal called (in a phrase that Updike fittingly employed in the epigraph for *Rabbit, Run *[1960]): “the motions of grace.” By this grace does the ordinary become extraordinary. Updike, whose fiction so capably narrated these motions, lent resonance and specificity to such grace in an age characterized by tremendous ambivalence and ambiguity. Long may he run.

*For further information:*

Read Julia Keller’s retrospective in the *Chicago** Tribune:*

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0128-updike-essayjan28,0, 5772047.column

Watch WTTW’s June, 2006 interview with Updike:

http://www.wttw.com/main.taf?p=42,8,1&vid=013009b

For critical treatments of Updike’s religious dimensions, see:

James Yerkes, ed., *John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace *(Eerdman’s, 1999*).*

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M. Cooper Harriss is a junior fellow in the Martin Marty Center and a Ph.D. candidate in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

*Sightings* comes from the Martin Marty Center<http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/>at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Submissions policy

*Sightings* welcomes submissions of 500 to 750 words in length that seek to illuminate and interpret the forces of faith in a pluralist society. Previous columns <http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/>give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. The editor also encourages new approaches to issues related to religion and public life.

Attribution

Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author of the column, *Sightings*, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.