Paul’s answer to “I am not sure I will finish the book! Damn...so many good things to read and I am in a sort of pain…” > Likes and Comments
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Cool comment. Reading and memory have a very complex relationship. I tend to remember books based on the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical context in which they were written. I can't read Updike without thinking about Fear and Trembling, the single book that changed his life the most, and Rabbit, Run without thinking about the very famous road novel, Kerouac's On the Road, which was published three years previously. In my opinion, Updike constructs Rabbit as a response to Kerouac's Sal. Sal's and Dean's road is straight, easy to travel, and leads to a religious enlightenment based on a sexual liberation that's not only unavailable to women but for which women are the passive agents through which men find God. Kerouac, of course, endorses this perspective - and his prose, which is at times very sloppy (never revise, he famously advised), illustrates the belief that the enlightened writer is incapable of writing poorly once he's been enlightened. His prose and central characters operate in a Romantic or transcendental tradition, which he thinks is still possible in America in 1957. Updike, writing in 1960 and interested in Kierkegaard and existentialism, emphasizes the ramifications of choice in the individual's life and how existential decisions create a self. Rabbit chooses poorly, and begins his run with a journey that finds him in a terrible mess. He makes an ethically unsound decision that immediately sets him up as an off putting character. Updike's careful, beautiful, and highly mannered prose creates a tension between Rabbit's ugly decisions and the prose in which they're rendered. This, it seems to me, has the effect of creating the prose itself and maybe even the narrative voice of the novel as a part of Rabbit's character - the noble and eternal part - to which he doesn't have access. He has yet to make the existential choices that will potentially reveal the ethical and religious self that lies dormant. The important question for Updike as he continues to write Rabbit books is to question whether this ethical and religious self is available to Americans, who in the consumerist 50s, must have seemed impossible. Updike's prose represents the effort of making a myriad decisions about diction etc. Hence its beauty, which is a reflection of the beauty of the religious. Will Rabbit eventually make the choices that will allow him to live up to the prose which holds his being? Or, metaphorically, the God in relation to which he exists (again, my reading owes a lot to Updike's relationship with Kierkegaard and theistic existentialism)? Enlightenment, in other words, is a lot harder to attain than Kerouac and the hippies who followed him think.
Art is, any kind of artistic expression, is mainly an emtional expression. Rationalising it is for me very very dangerous... I have studied literature for many years. I understand how you can produce books that may be considered literature, or not. I inderatand the exercise of linking it with philosophy or even current events in a certain period in history. But for me art, again in any of its expressions, is about the emotions that brings you. That's how I remember
Sorry for any mistakes! Apart from not being a native speaker of English I am also writing on my smartphone. Tricky!! 😀
It is tricky! Sometimes one's education CAN get in the way of a sheer emotional experience. Believe me: I believe in emotion just as much as the next person. Ultimately, I agree with you: emotion is what truly resonates. I can only "rationalize" Updike because I don't have an emotional connection with him. In my favorite writers and musicians - e.g. Coltrane, Brian Wilson, Mahler, Lawrence, Baldwin, Genet, Beckett, Woolf - the emotional relationship is first and foremost.
I totally get it! Many of he writers I had to read only became my favourtites when Iread them because I felt like it. Now I only read for pleasure! I am a teacher of English as foreign language so...literature is a hobby. A lovely one :-)
Screw the book, reading Paul Gleason's reveiw was at least as poignant. Observing another human being with the profound ability to consume literature and process it as an entire life experience (emotionally and cognitively) providing oportunity for exponential personal growth and development. You are a genius, Paul, and a testament to how one should be experiencing our cultural legacies. You have illuminated deficiencies within myself that I had lazily forgotten and reminded me of our potential when we are committed to the experience.
Jesus you sound ridiculously pretentious. So you're saying we basically have to be familiar with Kierkegaard and know what "prosody" means? Look. It's a damned good book, as-is. The writing style is mind blowing. He describes ordinary things/moments like nobody I've ever read!
You're definitely right about the first scene. It hooked me (hoodwinked me?) into reading the rest. I did read it out loud, or at least heard it read out loud via the audiobook version, and I agree with Judite, Shaun and Caroline. Very little that's redeeming. Life is too short; I'm not wasting any more precious hours of my life on John Updike's books.
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Cool comment. Reading and memory have a very complex relationship. I tend to remember books based on the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical context in which they were written. I can't read Updike without thinking about Fear and Trembling, the single book that changed his life the most, and Rabbit, Run without thinking about the very famous road novel, Kerouac's On the Road, which was published three years previously. In my opinion, Updike constructs Rabbit as a response to Kerouac's Sal. Sal's and Dean's road is straight, easy to travel, and leads to a religious enlightenment based on a sexual liberation that's not only unavailable to women but for which women are the passive agents through which men find God. Kerouac, of course, endorses this perspective - and his prose, which is at times very sloppy (never revise, he famously advised), illustrates the belief that the enlightened writer is incapable of writing poorly once he's been enlightened. His prose and central characters operate in a Romantic or transcendental tradition, which he thinks is still possible in America in 1957. Updike, writing in 1960 and interested in Kierkegaard and existentialism, emphasizes the ramifications of choice in the individual's life and how existential decisions create a self. Rabbit chooses poorly, and begins his run with a journey that finds him in a terrible mess. He makes an ethically unsound decision that immediately sets him up as an off putting character. Updike's careful, beautiful, and highly mannered prose creates a tension between Rabbit's ugly decisions and the prose in which they're rendered. This, it seems to me, has the effect of creating the prose itself and maybe even the narrative voice of the novel as a part of Rabbit's character - the noble and eternal part - to which he doesn't have access. He has yet to make the existential choices that will potentially reveal the ethical and religious self that lies dormant. The important question for Updike as he continues to write Rabbit books is to question whether this ethical and religious self is available to Americans, who in the consumerist 50s, must have seemed impossible. Updike's prose represents the effort of making a myriad decisions about diction etc. Hence its beauty, which is a reflection of the beauty of the religious. Will Rabbit eventually make the choices that will allow him to live up to the prose which holds his being? Or, metaphorically, the God in relation to which he exists (again, my reading owes a lot to Updike's relationship with Kierkegaard and theistic existentialism)? Enlightenment, in other words, is a lot harder to attain than Kerouac and the hippies who followed him think.
Art is, any kind of artistic expression, is mainly an emtional expression. Rationalising it is for me very very dangerous... I have studied literature for many years. I understand how you can produce books that may be considered literature, or not. I inderatand the exercise of linking it with philosophy or even current events in a certain period in history. But for me art, again in any of its expressions, is about the emotions that brings you. That's how I remember
Sorry for any mistakes! Apart from not being a native speaker of English I am also writing on my smartphone. Tricky!! 😀
It is tricky! Sometimes one's education CAN get in the way of a sheer emotional experience. Believe me: I believe in emotion just as much as the next person. Ultimately, I agree with you: emotion is what truly resonates. I can only "rationalize" Updike because I don't have an emotional connection with him. In my favorite writers and musicians - e.g. Coltrane, Brian Wilson, Mahler, Lawrence, Baldwin, Genet, Beckett, Woolf - the emotional relationship is first and foremost.
I totally get it! Many of he writers I had to read only became my favourtites when Iread them because I felt like it. Now I only read for pleasure! I am a teacher of English as foreign language so...literature is a hobby. A lovely one :-)
Screw the book, reading Paul Gleason's reveiw was at least as poignant. Observing another human being with the profound ability to consume literature and process it as an entire life experience (emotionally and cognitively) providing oportunity for exponential personal growth and development. You are a genius, Paul, and a testament to how one should be experiencing our cultural legacies. You have illuminated deficiencies within myself that I had lazily forgotten and reminded me of our potential when we are committed to the experience.
Jesus you sound ridiculously pretentious. So you're saying we basically have to be familiar with Kierkegaard and know what "prosody" means? Look. It's a damned good book, as-is. The writing style is mind blowing. He describes ordinary things/moments like nobody I've ever read!
You're definitely right about the first scene. It hooked me (hoodwinked me?) into reading the rest. I did read it out loud, or at least heard it read out loud via the audiobook version, and I agree with Judite, Shaun and Caroline. Very little that's redeeming. Life is too short; I'm not wasting any more precious hours of my life on John Updike's books.
As a writer that probably wants to provoke emotions Updike was very successful. As a reader the emotions were mostly negative. And that is in the end what you remember