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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
Ch.1 Rabbit, Run - The Quest and the Absurd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Ch.2 Rabbit is Rich -Representations of America between Idealism and
Conformism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Ch.3 In the Beauty of the Lilies - Narcissism and Simulacras of Initiation . . . . 42
Ch.4 Of the Farm - Spaces of Non Freedom . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
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INTRODUCTION

“ My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It is in the middle that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules”. Updike defines thus his literary choice in an interview to Jane Howard. He extracts his fictional power out of the conflictual energy emanating from the anxiety of a man caught in between his ideals and the reality he is forced to live in. Updike captures the restlessness and struggle of the soul on the verge of making decisive choices. His characters are middle-class individuals who are never content with their condition. They are questing heroes in the sense that they are permanently seeking to depass their condition.

In modern America the tradition of pragmatism and individualism has mostly degenerated into obscene manifestations of narcissism and egotism. The few who still dare go on a quest for meaningfulness and spirituality are more often than not bitterly disappointed and forced to accept the mutilating pattern of the general social system. This is when the misfits appear and their struggle to adapt or to fit in is the most dramatic. Updike’s characters are often social and moral misfits. He depicts their evolution towards conformity or disaster dissecting their mental and environmental triggers.

The present analysis attempts to reconcile two rather opposite critical trends that characterize Harry Angstrom, the protagonist of the Rabbit series, either as a spiritual nullity, as Robert Detweiler, Tony Tanner, Pierre Brodin, Monica Bottez, or as a modern saint, an absurd hero, such as David Galloway pictures him. Galloway spectacularly rehabilitates Harry as an absurd hero rebelling against the wasteland into which he is born. He is determined by the angst of young man striving for perfection he used to be. Harry’s quest is for that environment in which he can give his best where he can experience again the sacredness of achievement. Galloway justifies his categorizing him as a saint by his permanent struggle, not necessarily his success. He justifies Rabbit’s saintliness as being the fidelity to a standard of good by which he attempts to live, and the intensity of his loyalty to this standard, which can only be described as “religious”.

On the other hand, R. Detweiler qualifies him as “a weak-willed conformist, not a rebel”, who is “pitifully content to identify his Grail with sex, athletic success, the ambiguous praise of a friend”. However, he admits that Harry’s whole existence is a “contorted effort at discovering love”- which is his moral salvation, although he never becomes the initiate. Monica Bottez characterizes his attitude towards life as emblematic of his nickname: the skilful eschewing of setbacks spontaneously, and always driven by anxiety. Tony Tanner grasps in Harry Angstrom the underlying romance pattern of male flight from social conditioning and he reads him as one of the many Huck Finns wanting to quit society and avoid growing up, but with no “territory” to light out to.

Indeed, Updike’s characters are questing heroes from the point of view of their anxiety to find their place and a meaningful way of life.

Our attempt of reconciliation between the two trends is based on the assumption that every man is entitled to his quest for happiness, love and achievement. Being basically, naturally, a selfish creature, man uses every means he can dispose of to find them.

Therefore, we propose a European approach to America, based on Baudrillard’s essay Strategiile fatale, Girard’s Violenta si sacrul and Bachelard’s studies on the elements. We intend to argue that the quest hero is complemented by fatal strategies in Baudrillard’s definition of the term. He debunks western utopias by making use of its very cornerstones: politics, television, informational society, sexuality, which he takes to be ecstatic, excessive manifestations depassing their own boundaries of meaning through transparency and obscenity. He sees in contemporary America the forces of hazard and vertige in the ecstatic, solitary, narcissistic games with the only pleasure of pure fascination.

We also mean to show how violence, from Girard’s viewpoint affects the behaviour of the protagonists and how they attempt to make it meaningful. Due to their dimensions and superior organization, western modern societies seem to evade the law of the automatic return of violence, imagining it has never existed. Updike’s heroes are victims and perpetrators of violence that defines their existence in the spiritual void surrounding them.

With the Rabbit, Run , we see Harry Rabbit Angstrom, former star basketball player in highschool, now in his mid-20s, finding his work unfulfilling, his marriage to an alcoholic wife, moribund, trying to find happiness with another woman. But his quest for grace and order proves to be entirely futile and he is finally forced to resume the mediocre course of his life.

In Rabbit is Rich, the protagonist no longer feels the need to escape, he has been caught in middle age complacency, as Victor Lasseter remarks. He has become hostage to affluence. Margaret Gullette, in her extensive study Safe at Last in the Middle Years, finds love to be the big surprise of the book , explicitly connected with aging and the acceptance of the deaths Harry has witnessed. He is ready to be an adult at last having made peace with his life course. The novelty in this third book of the Rabbit saga is Nelson, Rabbit’s young, disappointed, restless son. We tried to interpret Nelson’s failure as the unhappy sequel of his father’s renunciation of ideals from the viewpoint expressed by Baudrillard and Girard. Baudrillard’s theory about the fetishism of consumable objects applies to Rabbit’s almost pathological attachment to things, money, property. He finds himself thus integrated into the huge consumer society, he is no longer at a loss. But he has thus lost himself in anonymity. He is now a member of monoculture, no longer a questing hero. Where there is nothing left, something redundant is due to appear. That something is in Baudrillard’s opinion ecstasy,the quality of an object revolving around itself. The main argument supporting the idea of Harry’s disappearance as a questing man is his conformity to the masses, his giving up running in the metaphorical sense. Nevertheless, he wants to continue his dream, now being unable of pursuing it himself, through Nelson. But Nelson is already tired, he is not runner, like his father, he wants his tranquillity and financial security. His deficient behaviour towards his wife and his violent behaviour towards her are actually directed towards his father, whom he cannot destroy, so he tries to use. Girard sees in the in choice of an innocent victim the inability to punish the real target of anger: the father. He argues that unsatisfied violence finds a victim in exchange and for Nelson, it is Pru, his wife. The mimetic desire described by Girard has in this case the goal of reaching social and economic safety, as well as spiritual serenity, things which Nelson sees at his father and that he envies.

The end of the conflict is ambiguous because Nelson seems to have decided to make his own life course, going back to college and Rabbit seems to have had a cruel revelation-satisfaction that his son is no better than him. He is disappointed but at the same time he no longer feels threatened.

The same pervading feeling of disappointment, of spiritual death and loss of meaning emanates from Updike’s recent novel In the Beauty of the Lilies. At the opening of the novel, reverend Clarence Wilmot loses his faith on the very stairs of his New Jersey rectory. Updike traces the seismic, escalating impact of this counter-revelation through Clarence’s own life and through those of the next three generations of Wilmots: Teddy, Clarence’s oversensitive, agnostic son, Essie, who inherits Clarence’s fanatical, otherwordly devotion to the movies and becomes a movie star; and Clark, Essie’s son, alienated by his mother’s neglect, desperate for a spiritual center. The novel becomes an extended metaphor for the secularization of religion and the concomitant infatuation with movies as a substitute for religion.

In this chapter we aim at exhibiting the simulacras of initiation that the characters undergo and the way they integrate in a society where meaning seems to have disappeared. We have followed Baudrillard’s argumentation in Strategiile fatale, according to which society has entered the stage of the transpolitical which is the transparency and obscenity of all structures in a destructured universe, a place of catastrophe, no longer of crisis. It is still Baudrillard’s thesis that there is no longer any end, that history itself has become interminable and everything will continue to take place in a show, fastidious, recurring hysterical manner. Clarence has the intuition of this loss of meaning and arbitrariness of the world. He sees destructive violence to rule all over and he understands that religion has lost its strength and meaningful point of reference. Movies and television, ubiquitous in the novel, are the expression of the ecstatic quality of life, that of narcissistic self-reflection. Teddy is a resigned conformist who is content “ to sleep in his own element” as Bachelard said. Essie is the winner on the outside, the winner that uses and is used by the world. Her totally egotistical attitude is interpreted in the spirit of Baudrillard’s thesis that we are all gamblers, ready to pay any price for the seduction of the others, for the ecstatic quality of our life. Her son Clark refuses to be a victim the way Girard defined it: innocent, weak, ignorant. He takes up an active role when joining a sect he didn’t really believe in . He wants to make himself visible, to make a point. His killing Jesse Smith, the paranoid leader of the Temple, completes the circuit of violence, since he is victim and victimizer at the same time, performing ritual sacrifice of purification.

In Of the Farm, the identity quest is over. There remains only the necessity to reconcile with the guilty feeling for having had the courage to abandon a wrong direction. One may say that the protagonist’s quest is for reconciliation between past ant present. The fact that he turned his literary talent into an advertising consultant job seems like a betrayal for his mother. We mean to defend his choice, motivating like Bachelard that literary reverie always continues a normal dream. Only that for Joey’s mother it is a dream of ambition literature continues, while for Joey, literary reverie is his basis for professional success. Joey has the courage to assert himself and his character such as Bachelard defined it: an individual defense system against society, a process of opposition to society, which is mainly confirmed in solitude, that is to say, away from the overwhelming atmosphere of home land. Joey is what Bachelard defined in Apa si visele, as an active man: his reveries are constructive, they are not the reveries of a dreamer who flees society like Rabbit, but meaningful ones, born out of challenge and the reveries of power. Joey Robinson and Essie in In the Beauty of Lilies, are the only ones who managed to adapt themselves to the spiritual and conceptual motions of the modern world. The others failed to play the right game or they were too different and weak to play it, like Rabbit, Nelson, Clark, Teddy, Clarence.

In all these quests, achieved by radically different means, faith, success, glamour, passivity or illegality, the characters are basically performing simulacras of initiation into a world that has gone beyond meaning and is now obscene, living in the superfluous extension of its spiritual boundary. The things the characters look for are no longer there, or they are alienated, degenerated, in a state of stagnation due to the impulse of imitation. The characters are all basically engaged in a narcissistic endeavour of self definition, which cannot succeed but partially because of the loss of purpose and the relativity of things. Baudrillard gives a possible solution in his L’illusion de la fin where he clames that the violence is a way of redefining our meaning, of re-opening the space of war, of a founding violence to usher in new world order. The important thing for man is to keep looking for a new meaning for a justification of his existence, be it selfless or narcissistic. They exist as meaningful individuals as long as they attempt to find this meaning. When they give this up they melt into anonymity, they cease to exist, spiritually speaking.

Our paper’s purpose is to see to what extent the social system’s reaching a dead point and entering an ecstatic stage, influences the lives of the individuals and how are they willing or not to submit to its new requirements. We will rely as we have mentioned earlier, mainly on Jean Baudrillard’s Strategiile fatale and René Girard’s Violenta si sacrul as well as on the same of G. Bachelard’s studies on the elements and their symbolism. We must mentioned that this is a mainly defensive analysis, trying to justify, not to judge its subjects for their choices.