Home » Updike: the trivial and the profound

Comments

Updike: the trivial and the profound — 5 Comments

  1. Updike is full of passages that are a joy to read — not only lyrical and precise but, as your quotation shows, intelligent.

    I’m afraid that what you delicately call his descriptions of the minutiae of sex seem to me more accurately described as a Masters-and-Johnson’s eye view, and they give me the creeps.

  2. Neo, thanks for the outstanding links, including your past post.

    I think the quote about the empty house is especially fine. Updike had a clear vision of reality, and the empty house shows his ability to express that vision exceptionally well.

    The Left’s postmodern curricula in its various guises–whereby students no longer learn how to read with facility, and where students never come into contact with the world’s best literature–have stolen some of the great experiences in life from the majority of the children of at least two American generations. Even those who don’t care for Updike should at least have the real chance to discover that they don’t. (Nowadays, if you want a list of the best writing, look at the works that used to be required for a degree in Literature but no longer are. And I don’t mean for just English literature.) It’s heartbreaking.

    And thank you for the link to Updike on Viet Nam. Two of my brothers fought in Viet Nam, 1967-1969, USMC. They fought during the Tet Offensive, and America won it. Updike’s ideas on it all are well worth reading, and understanding. I believe that a glance at the satellite image of North and South Korea at night, which can be found here in a particularly worthwhile link:

    http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/driveby/darkland_its_never_daylig.php

    with the profound darkness of the North, is eloquent as a visual expression of the value of America’s fight and victory in the South in the Korean War. The Viet Nam War was an attempt to bring this sort of enlightenment to at least South Viet Nam. The Left brought its usual ideological darkness to the end of that war, including the ugly efforts of a man named John Kerry; moreover, now they are trying to bring that darkness to America, with Kerry’s machinations on the world stage, including the evil of the fraud of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

    The past is prologue.

  3. Totally agree with David at 7:47 PM.

    Maybe it is natural to advanced age, but descriptions and depictions of coupling, no matter by how great a writer (and Updike is great), have become a discouraging turn-off.

    What artistically seemed so awesome and “real” a few decades ago in a Bukovski or even in the comics of R. Crumb, now just seem like tmi, an artistic floperoo.

    (Trite alert): In his short stories, De Maupassant amazingly conveyed the erotic (and a lot else) without getting into the details, and yes our culture used to be able to convey the erotic quite clearly and erotically without getting into the details (baby, it’s cold outside).

    As a matter of principle I do not use the infantile “first initial-word” convention (e.g. “the n-word”), so please forgive me the following. The word “fuck” has long since become more than tedious, and I say this as a habitual user of the word, despite my better self. And I classify the use of the word artistically with the details of coupling.

    But to get off the old geezer stuff,

    Minta Marie at 8:43 PM has a great post from beginning to end. The Left’s postmodern curricula in its various guises–whereby students no longer learn how to read with facility, and where students never come into contact with the world’s best literature–have stolen some of the great experiences in life from the majority of the children of at least two American generations.

    This identifies one of the highly successful triumphs of the Left, robbing folks of the opportunity to understand actual life better, to become more profound in their own thinking, judgment and understanding.

    What neo has done with Frost and Updike (and much more) in her posts is to gracefully, naturally, point out how they were personally outside the Saturday morning cartoon fest our culture has become, primarily because the Left controls the culture and that is what best serves their ends.

    As with Mamet, it gives one comfort in a hopeless age.

  4. I am not an Updike fan, though my Lord, the man can write — his story “Pigeon Feathers” has passages in it that are enough to make other writers throw away their pens. In spite of the beautiful words, I somehow never believed in his characters. However, tonight I reread this post, remembering it dimly from the last time Neo posted it, and was stopped in my tracks by the line, “Our house forgot us in a day.” Last year we moved away from the farm where we’d spent more than two decades and raised our children into adulthood. There was something about the pictures we took of the empty rooms after the movers left, something I couldn’t put my finger on, something that’s been nagging at me ever since — and that was it. The house forgot us, after the lives we lived and made there, a 200-year-old house that had forgotten countless lives before ours. That’s what it was. And it took Updike to show me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>