Why Franny Glass Lost Her Mind: More on Religion without Belief

Every misunderstood teenager loves J.D. Salinger, and most adults find themselves drifting further and further away from him as they get older—or at least from Catcher in the Rye. Since I never much liked Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters or Nine Stories, that leaves me only with Franny and Zooey, one of the few truly great American novels about spiritual crisis.

Franny and Zooey is really a collection of one short story (“Franny”) and one novella (“Zooey”), but the two are so intimately connected that there’s not much point in reading them in the abstract. They deal, like much of Raise High and Nine Stories, with the devastatingly clever and heartbreakingly unsuccessful Glass family, the obvious inspiration for Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. When the youngest sibling, 20-year-old Franny, has a nervous breakdown in a restaurant after committing herself to The Way of the Pilgrim, a 19^th-century Russian theological volume, she returns home to the family’s New York apartment, where she is counseled, lectured, and ridiculed by her older brother Zooey.

The Way of the Pilgrim seeks to answer the question of how one prays without ceasing, one of the New Testament’s more difficult commands, and its answer is to repeat the so-called “Jesus Prayer” (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me [, a miserable sinner]” to oneself, mechanically at first, until one means it at the very depths of one’s soul. It is the act of following this advice that makes Franny faint in the restaurant and return home.

At first glance, Salinger seems like he would be a spiritual brother to James P. Carse, who recommends in his book that we divorce religion from belief and focus on the nondogmatic wonders of the universe. After all, Salinger is famously interested in nearly all religions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, and sees them all as streams leading to the same vast ocean. And indeed, according to Zooey, part of Franny’s problem is that she uses the Jesus Prayer to swap a consumerist dogma for a spiritual one:

You talk about piling up treasure—money, property, culture, knowledge, and so on and so on. In going ahead with the Jesus Prayer . . . aren’t you trying to lay up some kind of treasure? Something that’s every goddam bit as negotiable as all those other, more material things? Or does the fact that it’s a prayer make any difference? I mean by that, is there all the difference in the world, for you, in which side somebody lays up his treasure—this side, or the other?

In other words, Franny takes Jesus’ warning in Matthew 6:19-21 and makes it into an ugly and exclusionary dogma, one that she uses to separate herself from other people, putting herself inside the fold and others outside it—the very essence of belief, according to Carse. Further, Zooey prefers to remove the very notion of sin from the formulation, noting with satisfaction that “none of the adepts in either of the Pilgrim books puts any emphasis—thank God—on the miserable sinner part.” Religion becomes something malleable, something to change with the times—an orientation rather than a doctrine. Carse would be proud.

And yet the end result of the book is to suggest that Carse couldn’t be more wrong. One of the best-written parts of The Religious Case Against Belief is a long section where Carse presents us with dozens of Jesuses, that is to say, dozens of interpretations of Jesus. One can use the footnotes and play “name that Christ.” The point, though, is that, as Carse says about the results of the Protestant Reformation, “One Jesus is as authentic as the next.” He elaborates:

All of this gives the strong impression that the New Testament as we have it is a somewhat errant representation of a true text that hovers somewhere behind it, unseen, even unseeable—a precise and accurate account of what Jesus said and did. Apparently no one is granted the talent or privilege to state it exactly as it is. As a result, we remain necessarily ignorant of the “true” text. It is inconceivable that Christians will someday reach total agreement on what the text may be.

Thus, Rudolf Bultmann can give us “a mysterious Galilean preacher whose proclaimation to the world (or kerygma), although encased in mythic thinking we know now to be false, still causes us to confront our own inauthenticity” while George W. Bush gives us “a private voice guiding elected leaders responsible for America’s salvific mission to the democratic world,” and that is, to a large extent, just fine with Carse, since the “real Jesus” is undiscoverable.

Zooey disagrees. Sure, The Way of the Pilgrim has turned his sister into pious trash, into a sanctimonious twit—but that’s not her real problem:

I don’t think you understood Jesus when you were a child and I don’t think you understand him now. I think you’ve got him confused in your mind with about five or ten other religious personages, and I don’t see how you can go ahead with the Jesus Prayer till you know who’s who and what’s what.

Franny’s problem is that she’s tried to turn Jesus—who, fictional not, is a real person, at least according to Zooey—into St. Francis of Assissi or their brother Seymour or God knows what else. One Jesus is not, in other words, as good as another; it matters who you pray to, and if that’s not doctrine exactly, Christians have always known that doctrine flows from one’s conception of Christ—and that that conception can be more or less accurate, something Carse doesn’t seem to recognize.

None of this in any way disproves Carse’s book, of course—Franny and Zooey are fictional characters created by a man who’s so maladjusted that the only reason we’re still sure he’s alive is that he sued someone earlier this year. And in real life, true Christians seem to be far less well-adjusted than other people—and I think that’s actually how it’s supposed to be, if neurosis is the inability to create a cohesive self; after all, Christians are all but commanded to live in two worlds at once.

But it seems important to me that it’s the loss of doctrine—in the form of a biblically accurate portrait of Christ—that causes Franny to momentarily lose her mind. If Christianity recommends a certain loss of self, I think Carse recommends an even greater and more malicious one.

Torn Curtain

I wrote my master’s thesis on the novels of Walker Percy and Frederick Buechner and tried desperately for months to find one of them commenting on the other one. Far as I can tell, Percy was completely unaware of Buechner’s existence, but I did manage to track down an interview with Buechner in which he spoke very unfavorably of Percy:

I must say he just leaves me literally cold. That’s just the right word for it. I don’t feel any excitement, any passion. It seems very cerebral and planned out and cold. I always feel that the characters sound like what I imagine Walker Percy would sound like. I have a hard time believing in them as real human beings.

Buechner actually understates it. Percy’s characters are for the most part a royal bore, and his own voice, evidenced in his nonfiction writing, is far more nuanced, elegant, and interesting. I’ve now read every word Percy has written (he’s probably the only author about whom I can reasonably be considered an expert), and I’ll shout it from the rooftops: He’s not a novelist. He’s a philosopher who wants to be a novelist. Of his seven novels, only two, Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome, have anything resembling an interesting or coherent plot; the rest are mere philosophical exercises.

Not that that’s a bad thing. At their best, Percy’s novels serve to inject his philosophy into more-or-less real-world applications, and taken on these terms, they’re pretty good. In some respects, they are more or less interchangeable—they all take some aspect of Kierkegaard’s “spheres of existence” and throw characters into them. They’re all about the sick condition of the modern world, and they all hint at the same solution for that condition. (It’s not for nothing that one of the worn-out descriptions of Percy as a philosopher is that of the dianostician.)

The problem with the modern world, for Percy, is that the human being has been completely split along Cartesian lines. On the one hand, you have a soul/mind; on the other, you have a body, and never the two shall meet. (Obviously, Percy is following his existentialist forbearers in this diagnosis; both Heidegger and Sartre describe Descartes’ sins along these lines.)

One of Percy’s main concerns in the split modern world is sex, an act which he variously portrays as splitting the self further and bringing it back together in a type of religious redemption. (This was the subject of my thesis, incidentally—if you’re interested, Buechner’s Lion Country portrays only the latter; virginity is atheism in that novel, and sex is redemption.) This concern with sex and alienation and wholeness might make you think of John Updike—by all means a reasonable connection, since Updike and Percy share similar religious views and have a similar mission in writing.

But Percy hated Updike as a theologian, as much as he might admire him in terms of sheer writing. Biographer Jay Tolson reports that Percy’s reaction to Updike’s controversial Couples was almost entirely negative, calling the novel muddled Kierkegaard and noting its treatment of “[sex] elevated to a kind of religion” (351).

Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that in The Last Gentleman Percy gives us a thinly veiled version of Updike in the novelist Mort Prince (the name, of course, suggests “prince of death” in French). Here’s one character’s description of his latest novel:

You know what that guy told me with a straight face. I asked him what thiis book was going to be about and he said quite seriously: it was about ----ing. And in a sense it is! . . . But it is a beautiful piece of work and about as pornographic as Chaucer. Indeed it is deely religious . . . It is essentially a religious book, in the sense of being a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying . . . Mort has one simple credo: saying Yes to Life wherever it is found. (Bowdlerization Percy’s)

That sounds like Updike to me. The Last Gentleman precedes Couples by two years, but this description could just as easily apply to 1961’s Rabbit, Run. Percy’s protagonist, Will Barrett, is confused by this description; he wonders, “What the devil does he mean telling me it’s about ----ing? Is ----ing a joking matter? Am I to understand that I am free to ---- his daughter? Or do we speak of ----ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of ----ing anyone in the vicinity?” Updike/Prince and his fans, then, are guilty of taking sex too seriously and simultaneously not seriously enough. It’s a type of religious rite, but at the same time it doesn’t mean anything.

Unsurprisingly, then, Percy compares Mort Prince multiple times to Descartes, suggesting that he is the product of the mind-body division that is the chief ill of the modern age. With the body split from the mind, we’re left with desire for carnal knowledge and desire for angelic knowledge—but no knowledge whatsoever of what it means to be human, between the extremes of the angelic and the bestial. That’s why Prince can see sex as simultaneously disconnected from the soul, that is, purely bodily, and as an attempt to reunite the soul and the body.

Will Barrett, however much he is offended by Mort Prince, tries to make the same connection when he sleeps with his asinine girlfriend, Kitty Vaught. (Kitty, I suspect, has the name she does because it suggests curiosity, Heidegger’s word for a sort of constantly moving stasis.) But you can’t have a real relationship with another person if your own identity is constantly in question, as it must be in a world split into mind and body. Thus, Will promises her that “I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible” (167). Of course, that’s not possible, and Will’s relationship with Kitty, like every sexual relationship in Updike’s novels, leads only to further alienation.

All of that said, I suspect Percy is slightly misreading Updike here. The latter’s reliance on sex (and his steadfast commitment to depict every nauseating detail of it) can mask the fact that sex almost always fails to produce the effect his characters would like for it to produce—that is, the reunion of soul to body. If anything, Percy has a more optimistic view of sex, as evidenced in the sequel to The Last Gentlemen, 1980’s The Second Coming.

Seeking Whom He May Devour

Existentialism is not exactly a breed of romanticism, but the two philosophies are connected by their reaction against Enlightenment thought—Descartes and Hume for romanticism, and Hegel for the existentialists. Because of these shared enemies, we should not be surprised to find certain parallels in the two movements, and one of the biggest of these parallels is a focus on uncivilized humanity.

The term noble savage is often attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but the French philosopher never actually used it. But he still—more or less—subscribed to the notion that it is civilization that corrupts human beings and that there’s something freeing about primitivism. We see this idea resurface in Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandanavian Vikings—they all shared this need. (I.11)

Notice, however, that Nietzsche strips away whatever vestiges of Enlightenment thought were lurking around in Rousseau; his blond beast is definitively not moral, is indeed marked by a complete abandonment of morality in favor of raw power. (Also note that the Nazis who took this passage and used it as an excuse for their idea of the master Aryan race are misreading Nietzsche, who loved the Jewish race and hated the Germans, as evidenced by Ecce Homo.)

Martin Heidegger doesn’t go quite as far as Nietzsche in his return to primitivism, but he is always concerned with the feelings and observations that lie at the very baseline of human consciousness—which explains why he uses the word primordial about eight thousand times in Being and Time. He is also adamant about the need for a connection to one’s body—a rejection of Cartesian dualism.

So it’s no surprise that this theme pops up with some regularity in existentialist fiction. Think of Saul Bellow’s Henderson, who is freed from the nothingness of his comfortable existence by his trip to Africa and his becoming a lion and a “rain king.” Or—less successfully—think of Rabbit Angstrom’s complete immersion into his body, be it for sex or sports or overeating. (Updike, perhaps, was critiquing this idea, though it’s always hard to tell exactly what Updike is critiquing.)

But nowhere is the return to animality more clear than in the short fiction of Franz Kafka, where it’s mixed and contrasted with the life of the writer. I am generally not a big fan of critical readings that make everything in a given work of fiction about writing fiction, but it’s difficult to get around it in Kafka’s case—most of his stories either feature a literal artist or a metaphorical one, and much of his work has something to say on what it is to be a writer in a society that can’t possibly appreciate “real” art.

The animals in Kafka’s work occasionally mark dehumanization—the obvious example is poor Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis,” who turns into an insect (a better translation would apparently be vermin, as he appears to have more than six legs), a transformation that demonstrates just how dehumanized he always was, with his terrible desk job and ungrateful family. But in its way, his metamorphosis sets him free—he’s no longer forced to go to work and no longer labors under any delusions about what he really is. And when he becomes a bug, his family is forced to go to work, making the whole thing a sort of tragic grace.

Meanwhile, after the protagonist of “The Hunger Artist” starves himself to death in front of an uninterested audience, he is replaced in his circus cage by a panther, a vast improvement on its previous occupant:

Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary. The panther was all right. The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it; somewhere in its jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away.

Kafka describes this panther in artistic terms—his roaring is a type of storytelling—but the animal is superior to the man because he harbors no delusions; he is what he is, and he’s okay with that. The human artist, then, could be improved by becoming more like this wild animal, less inhibited, stronger, more noble.

Elsewhere, the mole in “The Burrow” is paranoid and neurotic precisely because he’s so much of a human being, eloquent and fastidious. But his human thoughts and emotion lead him only to a state of anxiety, constantly afraid that someone will be able to enter his perfectly constructed home. One assumes that most moles don’t live in this fear but are something closer to the panther, even if they’re less powerful.

It’s not until “Josephine the Singer” that we find an appropriate combination of the artist and the animal. The titular mouse maintains her mouse-ness but manages to create something so beautiful that no one can possibly resist it. Her singing takes her mouse brethren away from their worried lives—away from their resemblance to humanity—and brings them back to their animal natures, to the point where they cannot even look at her but “bur[y their] face[s] in [their] neighbor’s fur”—a connection both to community and to animality, the best parts of the human and bestial worlds.

It’s this expansion of Nietzschean animalism—rather than the introduction of angst into literature—that is Kafka’s true legacy to writers. It is “Josephine the Singer” that will allow Saul Bellow to bring Henderson the Rain King back to the United States, allow him to become an animal and thereby to connect to his fellow human beings and resume his—much happier—life in the suburbs.

Pascha

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
- John Updike, "Seven Stanzas at Easter"

Updike and Emerson, Pt. 2

In my last post, I argued that (a) both Updike and Emerson tend to be victims of the P.C. Age in academia; and that (b) the former has a certain understanding of and affection for the latter. In this post, I will point out similarities to Emerson's thought in Updike's most famous and most well-read book, 1961's Rabbit, Run.

I've read Rabbit, Run more times than any other book, beginning my senior year of college, although I've never been assigned the novel in a class. I didn't assign it as my Freshman Comp II class's novel, either--my students did not by and large respond positively to "A&P" (a dagger through my heart!), and I didn't want to have to defend the graphic sex in the novel, even if the sex in Rabbit, Run pales in comparison to nearly every other Updike novel. I've written two class papers on the novel--one comparing Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom to Mr. Wheelock in Dorothy Parker's "Such a Pretty Little Picture" and one tracing the history of the criticism of the novel, from the early reviews that treated Rabbit as an existential hero to more recent criticism that treats him or his author as a terrible human being.

That's one of the major debates swimming around Rabbit, Run--are we supposed to admire or condemn Rabbit Angstrom? He abandons his wife and child, not so much to find a better life as because he's just bored. His decisions wreak havoc on his family; they destroy almost everything stable in the novel, but Rabbit doesn't seem to mind. And then when he decides to return to his wife, he wreaks his mistress' life, too. Is this just the price to pay for freedom? Or is Updike, the semi-orthodox Christian, giving us an object lesson of something to avoid?

I take the viewpoint that Updike condemns his most famous protagonist, however gently he does it. There's really nothing special about Harry; he works as a salesman in all four of the novels, and while he seems to have some talent for it, that speaks against rather than for his specialness. In Rabbit, Run, he is an emblem of the alienation of the lower-class male; with nothing to distinguish his pathetic life from the pathetic lives of those around him, he must convince himself he is special by clinging to basically four things: sex, food, gardening, and basketball. (I won't go into detail on most of these here.)

His reasoning for the flight he takes away from his wife sounds distinctly Emersonian. Emerson famously takes Socrates' command to "Know Thyself" and expands it to

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. ("Self Reliance." Essays and Lectures. Library of America, 1983.) 260.

Updike suggests this passage in Rabbit, Run; Harry receives his flight recommendation from The Mickey Mouse Club, where an adult Mousketeer named Jimmie conflates "Know Thyself" with "Be Thyself":

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent . . . And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. (Fawcett, 1996. 10).

Rabbit's spiritual advice, then, comes from Emerson by way of Walt Disney.

But Rabbit--never a great thinker--ignores the rest of Emerson's catalogue in formulating his non-plan for escape. In this way, he is a typical reader of Emerson, disgarding a 40-year career and focusing entirely on "Self-Reliance." Emerson's philosophy is not, after all, quite so simple as that essay makes it out to be. Whereas he claims there that he will follow his own impulses and that "if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil" (262), he elsewhere admonishes his readers to do the right thing, even if the right thing is not their natural impulse: "Let a man keep the law,--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions" ("Prudence" 360). It seems that you can and should trust yourself only once you've committed yourself to the spiritual laws of the universe and to Emerson's famous Oversoul, that part of the Divine that fills all of us. Freedom, for Emerson as for Kierkegaard, is twinned with responsibility, because

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. ("Compensation" 294)

I suggest that for Emerson, trusting oneself is ultimately the same thing as trusting society, providing that society consists of self-actualized individuals who are aware of their connection to one another through the Oversoul.

And so Harry Angstrom is not an emblem of Emersonian self-realization or even of self-trust. He trusts himself, but for all the wrong reasons; he trusts himself in the face of all evidence to the contrary. As another character tells him, "you worship nothing except your own worst instincts" (115). Even after he wrecks the lives of nearly everyone around him, he can't see that his compass is out of line, and the novel ends with him running off into the sunset yet again. This running strikes me as distinctly non-Emersonian in and of itself; it is the opposite of taking a bold stand on one's beliefs; it is pure cowardice.

Now, as I think that the New Yorker piece suggests that Updike was aware of the range of Emerson's material and was not interesting in pinning him down to the simplistic evaluation typical of lay readers, it cannot be a mistake that Harry's philosophy sounds like but is not Emerson's. When I first read the novel, I assumed it was a critique of Emerson, and maybe it is; maybe Updike didn't read the rest of Emerson's catalogue until he wrote that piece in 2003; or maybe it, like Pierre, it's a critique of a certain aspect of Emerson's philosophy. But since I love Updike and I'm beginning to love Emerson, I choose to believe that among other things, Rabbit, Run is a critique of misreadings of Emerson, an object lesson drawn from "Compensation" and "Prudence" rather than from "Self-Reliance."

Updike and Emerson, Pt. 1

I love John Updike. My 95-page chapter on the first two Rabbit Angstrom books was my favorite part of my master's thesis, even though it got cut because it was an "indefensible argument." (I can tell that story another time, if anyone is interested.) And I love his criticism; Updike seems like he reads for 18-20 hours per day, and his comments and evaluations are usually sharp and interesting.

So you can imagine my horror today when a visiting philosopher, Dr. Russell Goodman (who's a very nice, very approachable, and brilliant man), took a potshot at him during a lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Pragmatism. He talked about common misconceptions and oversimplifications of Emerson's message; he's often treated as though his sole message were "follow your bliss d00d," a viewpoint which ignores almost every essay other than "Self-Reliance."

"The New Yorker, for example," he said in a voice dripping with irony, "had John Updike"--he pronounced that name with the sneer that I'm used to hearing from academics--"write a condescending piece on Emerson. And then, 25 years later, they couldn't find anyone new, so they had Updike write another one." Goodman suggested that Updike subscribes to the popular view on Emerson's thought and condemns him for his own misreading. I was upset at first, but I rethought my opinion; I'd read the second piece, from 2003, but at that point I hadn't read all that much Emerson and my own opinion followed those oversimplifications pretty closely. Maybe Updike dropped the ball on this one. I mean, the man's not perfect.

I own two books of Updike's criticism--Picked-Up Pieces and Hugging the Shore--but that's not even half of his critical output, and I couldn't find his original (1970s?) essay on Emerson in them. But he makes offhand references to the Sage of Concord from time to time, always in either neutral or positive terms. Here's an example, from an essay called "Whitman's Egotheism":

Like many of his radiant literary generation, he borrowed courage from Emerson; but Whitman's brave advice bears no accent of the lectern, and small flavor of the stoic.

Updike may privilege Whitman here, as he privileges Melville elsewhere, but this is hardly a condemnation of Emerson; he gives the latter credit for the former's existence. Elsewhere, he claims that Emerson began a new tradition in American prose style, "cranky, granular, impulsive, confessional." This description is a positive for Updike--he uses it to contrast John Cheever's "taut and mordant" older style with his newer, more satisfactory one.

In an essay on Knut Hamson, Updike actually takes the author to task for criticizing Emerson, and it is by means of the conventional misreading of Emerson that Hamson is able to criticize him: "Emerson's major failings are 'his undeveloped psychological sense and thereafter his overdeveloped moral sense.' Reverse the proportions, and you have Hamsun." Updike does not in this essay directly combat the myth of Emerson--after all, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend--but he hints at it.

It's not until "Big Dead White Male: Emerson Turns 200" in 2003 that Updike directly rejects the Emersonian myth. I am not sure how Goodman found the article condescending; Updike has clearly read nearly everything that Emerson produced, and his tribute to him reads a bit like a hagiography. He praises him for his antinomianism (usually a positive quality in Updike's brand of Christianity), and says that only Poe equalled him"as a homegrown critical and creative mind." (I have my own, anti-Updike opinions of Poe, but nevermind for now.)

I wonder if Goodman does not mistake Updike's attack on Lawrence Buell for an attack on Emerson. He is indeed harsh to Buell--a major scholar of the American Renaissance and, though I cannot find the evidence, a man who I am certain has written some major essay or another on Updike--whom he accuses of ivory-tower intellectualism and defensiveness. I think these are critiques that Emerson would get behind, at least in principle; after all, John Dewey argues that he is the "philosopher of democracy," always privileging the pragmatic over the abstract, and Emerson himself never bowed to or defended the past.

Besides that, I think that Updike is in actuality defending Emerson against Buell and other ivory-tower types:

A hundred years after Emerson's centennial was declared a school holiday in Concord and marked by an oration by William James and a public prayer that the spirit of Emerson inspire all present, he is put forward gingerly, apologetically, as a devalued stock on which we might still want to take a flyer . . . The endorsement seems excessively hedged, linking the sage's value to a presumed madness in society. Emerson was too much a realist, I think, to dismiss the workings of a society as mad, even a society like his own, passionately riven antebellum America. He pitched his palace of the Ideal on the particularities and rationale of what existed.

Updike's problem is with the political correctness that attempts to "prove" that Emerson was a racist or a classist and that discards his work because of it. These concerns are beside the point; and Emerson still has a lot to say, particularly in the essays which people don't usually read. Updike views Emerson as a consummate humanist, speaking directly to the human condition and offering concrete advice for it.

If this whole debate sounds familiar, it's because it's the same one that rages around Updike himself. Is he a racist? Is he a sexist? Maybe--that's not really my call to make. But his novels manage to speak to me, and they speak to many others as well, even if the Academy treats him as damaged goods. I've been at three different schools now, and I'm still the only academic I know who deals with him. And I don't get why that's the case.

Part 2 of this post will involve an Emersonian reading of Rabbit, Run, but give me a few days.