The black Jesus: racism and redemption in John Updike's 'Rabbit Redux.'

Publication: Contemporary Literature

Publication Date: 22-MAR-98

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Rabbit Redux (1971), the second installment of John Updike's massive Rabbit tetralogy, is not only the darkest and most violent of the four Rabbit books but also the darkest and most violent novel in Updike's entire oeuvre. Through its thematizing of the NASA moonshot and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Rabbit Redux explores darkness in all its ramifications. It is surprising to discover, then, that relatively little critical attention has been focused on the novel's provocative treatment of race. Most books on Updike's work have treated the "race theme" as simply one of the novel's several thematic "motifs." Of the numerous essays published over the years on Rabbit Redux, only two have substantially foregrounded race: Robert Alter's "Updike, Malamud, and the Fire This Time" (1972) and Edward M. Jackson's "Rabbit Is Racist" (1985). Alter's article is especially interesting in this regard, for it appeared less than a year after Rabbit Redux first hit the bookstores. After exploring the novel's treatment of late-sixties racial turmoil, Alter forcefully affirms that Rabbit Redux "says something that sounds right about where we are now" (49). Yet what exactly does Rabbit Redux say? And how "right" is it?

I wish to argue that Rabbit Redux makes a significant contribution to the ongoing dialogue about race in America but expresses its concerns in so ambiguous a way as to invite misreadings. Such misreadings result from the novel's deceptive, dialectical structure. In a 1969 interview with Eric Rhode, Updike remarks that he conceives of all his books as "moral debates with the reader" in which the primary question is "usually `What is a good ma?' or `What is goodness?"' ("John Updike" 50). Updike's treatment of race in Rabbit Redux operates as a sort of moral debate: not only are the racial tensions of the sixties explored from both sides, black and white, but they are also left, in the end, unresolved. And as the title of Jackson's article suggests, it is far too easy to misinterpret this irresolution as evidence of Updike's apparent complicity in the status quo. To argue for such complicity, however, is to misread the novel, for although the debate remains unresolved, it does not exist in a vacuum; rather, Updike places his "race debate" firmly within the context of a far-reaching theological and ethical vision that in turn offers a progressive and healing program for pragmatic black-white interaction. In fact, any exploration of the novel's treatment of race is incomplete insofar as it ignores Updike's overarching theological concerns. By linking the political and the theological, we will arrive at a much clearer understanding of Updike's complex attitude toward race relations in America.

As in most of Updike's work, the neoconservative theologian Karl Barth serves as the inspiration for all things theological. Ultimately, Updike borrows three primary ideas from Barth's fiercely orthodox thinking: the theologian's dialectical vision of truth, his conception of "something and nothingness," and his insistence on a serenely unprovable God. In all three instances, Barth develops his ideas via the dialectical methodology of Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish theological philosopher who, in refuting Hegel's dialectical vision, argued for a living, existential notion of truth founded on the fluctuating tension of the either/or. Whereas Hegelian (and Marxist) dialectics move from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, Kierkegaardian dialectics do not resolve. Just as life is unfinished as long as it lasts, so, too, must truth remain unfinished, unresolved, insofar as it is deemed to be living. "Mastered irony" is the name Kierkegaard applies to this strategy of deliberate irresolution--that is, of setting thesis and antithesis against one another in a state of perpetual tension--the main purpose of which is to inspire in the reader the process of existential self-questioning. Similarly, Barth's theology balances atop an unresolved "yes" and "no": "yes" to the possibility of God's grace, "no" to the merely naturalistic, humanistic, and theological; "yes" to God's creation in all its imperfection, "no" to all those who, in the words of Ralph C. Wood, would make God into "a well-tempered university deity who must abide by the noblest dictates of human conscience" (36). Even more importantly, Karl Barth views creation itself as founded on a similarly unresolved dialectic that balances "something" with "nothing." The "something" represents all of God's willed creation; the "nothing" represents all that which God has not willed, including, for instance, evil itself. An unsettling Manichaean vision, Barth's theology nevertheless appeals to Updike for its worldliness and its intellectually elegant explanation for the presence of evil. In the end, Updike's own thematizing of "nothingness" and redemption--ideas that form the bedrock of the race debate in Rabbit Redux--draws its inspiration directly from Barth.

George Hunt, to whom the following discussion is indebted, finds helpful formulations of Updike's vision of the nothing, first, in the novelist's introduction to F. J. Sheed's Soundings in Satanism and, second, in Karl Barth's writings on what Barth calls the "divine No," theories which form the core of Updike's own thinking on these same matters. In the Soundings introduction, for instance, Updike argues that Satan, or the devil, is simply the "name" given to a "nothingness" necessarily posited by God's "something"--that is, God's creation: "A potent `nothingness' was unavoidably conjured up by God's creating something. The existence of something demands the existence of something else" (Introduction 89). The "nothing" is that something else: it is a "metaphysical possibility, if not necessity" that has a positive, even active content. The presence of a something necessarily implies the possibility of a corresponding nothing. Where there is order, there must also be disorder. God's light has a shadow, just as his will has limits beyond which lies all that he did not will.

These latter ideas Updike derives directly from Barth; indeed, a great portion of the introduction is occupied by a lengthy quotation from Barth's Church Dogmatics, a useful gloss of which is provided by Hunt. For my purposes, however, I will turn to the Dogmatics in Outline. Succinctly, Barth affirms that "creaturely reality" is always a "creatio ex nihilo, a creation out of nothing." Why? Because the world is not a mere pantheistic manifestation of God but rather a distinct creation, summoned into existence by God. If God "alone is real and essential and free," then "heaven and earth, man and the universe are something else, and this something else is not God, though it exists through God" (Barth, Dogmatics 55). In other words, when God creates "something," there must originally have been a "nothing" beforehand. The problem of evil gets dealt with in the same teasing, paradoxical way. In a metaphor Updike calls "frightening," Barth describes evil as "the reality behind God's back" (Dogmatics 57).(1) It is an "excluded and repudiated thing" that nevertheless exists by the necessity of God's will. Barth's argument runs as follows: if God's will represents all that God has made--the whole of which, as Genesis insists, is "good"--then evil represents all that God "did not will." Or to quote Barth directly, "[T]his whole realm that we term evil--death, sin, the Devil and hell--is not God's creation, but rather what was excluded by God's creation, that to which God has said `No."' The "being" of evil--that is, of nothingness--has definite ontological validity, but only insofar as it is "the power of the being which arises out of the weight of the divine `No"' (Barth, Dogmatics 57). Thus does Barth allow evil to exist as part of God's creation without making it a positive part of God's will. Rather, it is the necessary "something else."

In Rabbit, Run, Harry has a dream of "lovely life eclipsed by lovely death" that articulates this Barthian conception of the divine "yes" and "no," of the "something" and the "nothing." In the dream, Rabbit sees "two perfect disks, identical in size but the one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly" (281-82/242).(2) The bright disk symbolizes the sun and life, while the transparent disk symbolizes the moon and death. Though the "sun" is "stronger," the "moon" manages to cover the "sun" so that "just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure" (282/242). Life, the dream suggests, is an eclipsing of death-and vice versa. For every something, a nothing. Both life and death, however, are characterized by Rabbit as "lovely," just as Updike insists, in the Soundings introduction, that the nothing "thrives in proportion" with God's something: "The world always topples. A century of progressivism bears the fruit of Hitler; our own supertechnology breeds witches and warlocks from the loins of engineers" (Introduction 90). This dialectical vision represents what Updike elsewhere in Rabbit, Run calls "the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out" (237/203). The nothing is there, to be sure, but it is redeemed by the something that lies at its back. Thus redeemed it becomes part of God's creation, though not of his will. And although, as the narrator observes, Rabbit "has no taste" for this aspect of Christianity, he nevertheless has to confront it head-on.

Finally, by thus positing a creatio ex nihilo, Updike and Barth also argue for what Barth resoundingly calls a "Wholly Other" God. For Barth, God is and must remain totaliter aliter, or Wholly Other: a Creation that contained him would be perfect as is and hence in no need of a Savior, whereas, in the "unhappy separation" that characterizes our earthbound condition, we can hold out hope of deliverance from above. In The Word of God and the Word of Man, a text dear to Updike, the emphatic Barth thunders: "There is no way from us to God--not even a via negativa--not even a via dialectica, nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way--even of this way--would not be God" (177).(3) The God of the modern liberal church, the God of earthbound ethical precepts, and the God of Good Works are all, for Barth and Updike, merely figures for the "Patron Saint of our human righteousness, morality, state, civilization or religion" (Barth, Word of God 22). Whatever they are, they are not God. God, rather, is the creator who made the world from nothing and yet who must remain entirely separate from that creation. The world follows its own course, and God does not intervene.

Still, does such a radical theology totally absolve God of responsibility for evil, or at any rate for natural disasters, if not for Hitler as well? Similarly, does Updike's Barthian insistence upon a Wholly Other God prevent him from interpreting human actions within a transcendent, God-centered ethical frame? Many of Updike's critics have answered these questions in the affirmative. The most famous attack in this regard comes from Frederick Crews who, in a blistering pan of Roger's Version, argues that Updike has long since "taken comfort" in Barth's downgrading of ethics, which in turn has justified the reprehensible behavior of the novelist's "libertines," if not, Crews implies, that of the novelist as well (173). "In Barth," Crews opines, "Updike has found a means of talking back to a prickly conscience and a set of reasons for believing that, regardless of his conduct, he may yet be counted among the saved" (174). Along similar lines, Ralph C. Wood interprets this aspect of Updike's vision as "moral passivity," as "his reluctance to find fault and to assess blame, his conviction that our lives are shaped by forces too vast for mere mortals to master" (190).

Forceful though these arguments are, they nevertheless overlook Updike's tricky dialectical method, for, in the end, Updike does clearly "find fault and ... assess blame"--just not in the way most people might expect. Roger's Version itself provides a lucid articulation of Updike's approach. In this 1986 novel, Updike conducts a series of Socratic dialogues between a Barthian divinity professor and a young computer programmer who thinks he can prove the existence of God on a computer. Dale, the computer programmer, argues for a divine plan through the sheer improbability of the mathematical conditions necessary for creation to have occurred at all. Roger, the professor, counters that God must remain grandly aloof from, and eternally unseen by, his creation so...

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