The first of a two part post on John Updike’s “Toward the End of Time” through the analysis of generic types.
Persistently undervalued, except perhaps for his Rabbit novels, because he is regarded as covering up facile meaning with an engaging writing style, the quintessential New Yorker writer, John Updike deserves more appreciation, even in one of his lesser novels : Toward the End of Time”. But in order to appreciate the novel’s achievement, step back a few steps and consider the kind of book it is, which is what I call a deficient epic. Updike is very careful about what each of her novels are, whether the saga of “In the beauty of the lilies” or the polemical politics of “Terrorist” or “Couples” as the romantic serio-comedy.
Let me explain. An epic is a story of war and family and a journey and one or more heroic protagonists and what might be an endlessly elaborated episodes that convey some deep meaning about human nature, while novels, which are another kind of deformed epics, have protagonists whose histories are never retold but made up and just trying to manage life. The Odyssey is clearly an epic. Ulysses travels for many years to get back to Ithaca so as to reunite his family and has countless adventures some of which strike very deep psychologically, such as Circe or the lotus eaters or the cyclops who like Odyseis also is what he is. Other epics follow the same pattern, whether the Aeneid, which is about love and nationality or Sir Gewain and the Green Knight which is a courtly contest of one courtier challenged to attain civility rather than barbarism without knowing that is the real test. Aren’t most real tests like that? There are also mock epics like “Tom Jones”, which parody the epic style,, and then there are distorted epics which lose one or another of their aspects but retain their tenor of awe and foreboding. The most significant version is the elimination of the hero as an assertive ingredient in the story. Is Bloom a doer or a bystander in his day’s travel across Dublin> Alice goes on a journey and is a particularly prickly observer, but is Alice at war if she only has to face a stack of cards?. Huck Finn is armed only with a conscience as he navigates down the Mississippi and there is rejoined with his family however alienated he is always from domestic life and off to Indian territory. And so to Updike’s deformed epic.
The war envisioned is a limited exchange of atomic weapons between China and the United States that takes place a few decades in the future of the time the novel was published. The people in the novel are civilians trying to cope with the aftermath, which makes sense because the war that engulfed the world in the second half of the twentieth century was the Cold War, which had hot skirmishes in Korea and Vietnam and the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan, but unlike in other wars mostly in prospect, a full out exchange never happening even if many predicted it, imaginations filled with the nuclear apocalypse just thirty minutes away from total mutual destruction. So this war is a science fiction war,and Updike’s innovation is that there is a limited exchange so that the United States has had severe but not total annihilation, which is different from apocalyptic science fiction projections as happens in Shute’s “On the Beach” (1957), or Christopher’s “No Blade of Glass” (1956) or Wyndham’s “The Day of the Triffids” (1951) or to my mind the most scary documentary style BBC production, Mick Jackson’s “Threads” which showed the reduction of England to a medieval economy and society. Rather, the United States, in Updike’s imagination, remains organized even if diminished and it is unclear whether it will recover or fall into anarchy.
Updike’s novel is no reduction of a society into Hobbesian anarchy. Seafood is shipped from the East Coast to the decimated Midwest. Commerce also continues in that protection rackets spring up and young women openly advertise their personal services in the major newspapers and a local scrip has replaced the United States dollar but there are still country clubs and Federal Express and mail service and a diminished food market in some stands around downtown Boston. What Updike retains from the apocalyptic genre, which is only somewhere in the epic mode, as is the case with “Sir Gewain and the Green Knight”, which is full of foreboding about what will be the fatal mistake of the hero, is a sense of dread and despair: that something even worse will happen and that the eventual fate cannot be avoided however people battle on to restore what was once normal life. Achieving that tone in a less than complete apocalypse is a considerable achievement for updike.
But there is much more going on than that. The protagonist narrator of this distorted epic is that he is hardly a hero but someone who observes what is going on in the world. Like other Updike protagonists, especially in “Memories of the Ford Administration” (1992), there is a correspondence between the personal lives of people and the mood and structure of a society. The protagonist has full of dread and despair long before the war. He is just reverberating with his own instincts. He left his first wife after five children with her in the revelation that the relationship was not fulfilling and he killed his second wife at a time after the war. The reason for her dread and despair, as best I can tell, is that he thinks the world is meaningless, that nature and metaphysics are relentless, and have no place for people. He buys the idea every second, every action, creates a new universe and so is a substitute for evolution as the theory that the universe has no meaning but moves along on its own way without God. How to deal with that is a continuing issue for Updike. Updike tries to imagine this problem in his early short story “Pigeon Feathers” where that image confronts H. G. Wells and Updike’s character decides that the fluttering of pigeon feathers provides an intonation of a god infused eternity. In this novel, the empty universe is answered by the sight of a doe the protagonist meets on his driveway, the doe escaping danger while still being engaged in, comfortable, being an animal within the world rather than disjointed from the world.
Epics involve long journeys. Odysseus travels for years to return to Ithaca. Don Quixote travels about Spain and even Bloom goes across Dublin in a day which seems like traversing a continent. Updike’s protagonist travels the roads in the Boston area like an explorer who knows all the routes or like a native who knows how every little town is twenty minutes away from every other little town in the vicinity. He also travels in his distorted epic up and down his driveway not sure whether he will be able to make the trip, the postman not always hazarding the journey and this late middle aged protagonist treating it as an ordeal of nature, staggering to reach the Christmas lights still there by the porch in deep winter. That is where he tried to shoot the deer who was startled and ran away. Especially in its first section the novel is unusual in its higher proportion of description to dialogue so as to make repeated textures about the qualities of the numerous experiences so that is placed within his setting and so both in accord and apposition to his setting. The prose is as turgid as poetry, each paragraph a description of a setting and the meaning to be driven from it, which indeed is the common genre of poetry.Updike includes a set piece of gravediggers three thousand years ago looking for gold within the pyramids, always in danger of being entombed, like Aida, where the situation is analogous to the war survivors picking through the social carnage to see what will survive and what might cover them all
Updike is artful in making more distasteful and dreadful the disintegration of the protagonist, who is rarely named because he is an everyman, with his relation to the hired companion he lives with than the disintegration of the society around them, which after all are the givens rather than the choices people make in their setting. She steals valued heirlooms; she only occasionally makes meals; she has sex with other men when he is away. It is similar to what happens in Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilloies”, where the woman who seduced him into a cult provides less and less satisfaction to her erstwhile lover once he has become a member of the cult. Moreover, their lovemaking is more angry and vengeful than affectionate, they avoiding full frontal intercourse which Updike, the inherent Conservative, thinks the right way to do things as opposed to thinking different forms of sex to be a kind of liberation. Updike shares with D. H. Lawrence has this same conservative view in that in “Lady Chatterley's Lover” looking at or painting naked women or Lord Chatterley regressing stages of sexual development is not as fulfilling or honorable as the conventional way of sex. “Couples”, Updike’s earlier excursion into sexual candor, did not make wife swapping as nasty as it is in “Toward the End of Time”. The people in “Couples” are only manipulative.
And then Updike pauses in the novel to look at the bigger picture, to take the perspective of St. Augustine in “The City of God” to see what has come before the catastrophe and what will come next and Updike and also anchors that in Christianity but not as St. Augustine did, to show empires come and go and so are irrelevant to Christianity but to provide a kind of proof that God is necessary by using his own preoccupations with sex and God. Updike observes that Mary Magdelaine, as a woman, weeps at the empty tomb while men move on to other things, showing once again that women experience life more fully and that may be their mystery. Then Updike remarks that Peter knew Jesus for three years and so felt comfortable with him while Paul had a single and singular encounter with an apparition and was trying to make himself whole by weaving out a tapestry of all of human history.
What is to be made of that? Remember that in “In the Beauty of the Lilies” the dissolute cult joiner calls the cult leader “the real thing”, which does not mean that he is a god but only thinks he is, and so the question of Jesus is that he thinks he is a messiah not that his metaphysical status ios ascertained, only that Paul does insist on making that leap for Jesus. And so that is why and how Paul shoehorns the self-illuminated Jesus into his divinity: by using Greek reason to show necessity, the pivotal event the atonement of the sacrifice of Jesus so as to redeem all of mankind from its original sin, completing a story of justice, however perverted from the simple goodness of Jessus. The omega has to be tied to the alpha through the intercession.
So where does Christianity deal with or enclose this near future catastrophe? Remember how audacious this association is. In most science fiction, there is no dwelling on ultimate themes. Walter M. Miller’s “A Canticle for Liebowitz” (1959) is church history in the cycle between one apocalypse and another. The adventurous Arthur C.Clark in “Childhood’s End” (1954) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) only imagines it is only a higher species will interfere in the direction and salvation of humanity. Isaac Asimov, ever the atheist, has the priests in “Foundation” (1951) make incantations over machinery that really work because they are really engineers.But Updike goes further, to plumb the meaning of life, as petty may be the mind which grapples with it. The people of the world have been consumed by their pettiness and meanness. That is true of all the characters in the novel, whether Diedre who cannot count her blessings for having tied up with her sugardaddy, or the protection racketeers who cannot understand or do understand tat they atre just sc raping through until the next disaster. So the people in the world are everywhere in their guilt and in some way deserves its fate however awful that may be and to be liberated only in the old fashioned way of people becoming kind to one another, Jesus like, but that is not likely to happen, just a flourish at best of good intentions. So Updike does not offer a new theology but the traditional Christian one so as to deal with the present and ever occurring apocalypse though with his poetic engagements of exquisite moments with his novelistic gift for assessing character.