© 1977 by American Academy of Religion
Abstracts of Articles |
John Updike: "the rubble of footnotes bound into Kierkegaard"
Sue Mitchell Crowley is Lecturer in Religion and Literature at The Missouri School of Religion, Columbia, Missouri. She is currently purusing graduate studies at The School of Religion, The University of Iowa, Iowa City.
Not only are some of the "sources" of John Updike's fiction to be found in the works of Søren Kierkegaard: much of that fiction itself is no less than a dramatic recapitulation in story of the Kierkegaardian method. At least one such abiding similarity is to be found in Kierkeggard's considerations of the self as a synthesis of finitude and infinitude in The Sickness Unto Death. Updike would have us understand that "The Astronomer," the source for the title for this paper, and many of his other fictions are glosses upon—skillfully arranged sets of footnotes to—this central idea in Kierkegaardian thought.
By way of introduction to this thesis, the essay recapitulates the nonfictional Updike statements which identify him as a deeply Kierkegaardian Lutheran as well as a Barthian. Then the article offers close readings of three early stories of fear and faith, "The Astronomer," "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car," and the title story of the 1959 volume in which all three appear, "Pigeon Feathers." Each story involves a highly subjective quest, such as Kierkegaard describes in his Continuing Unscientific Postscript, for an existential certitude. And in each the hero moves from the despair of finitude or infinitude to the rediscovery of his "self" in the sythesis of those factors. There is also evidence that certain journal entries not only offer Updike his metaphors but confirm his personal experience.
Further, the purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that not only does Updike discover his meanings, his questions and his answers—when the latter are possible—in Kierkegaard, but the very method of his fiction as well. The intricate warp and woof of his literary style can, in short, be said to be "the rubble of footnotes bound into Kierkegaard." Kierkegaard's synthesis at once enables Updike's characters to move from the various forms of despair to hope, and permits Updike himself, since he is so obviously autobiographical, to ponder his own religious problems. It grants him the chance to form, that is, an artistic theory in which art and belief are integrated. For the medium of Kierkegaard's process of infinitizing is imagination, which is the possibility of all reflection, and the intensity of this medium, he tells us, is the possibility of the intensity of the self. And for the artist, for Updike, the creative imagination is the mode of reflection by which he elicits the synthesis of finite and infinite, of metaphor and abstraction, and discovers the poem or the fiction which embodies the synthesis.