Philadelphia, PA—The Modern Language Association, which represents thousands of College English professors nationwide, is actually trying to understand religion in American life. Moreover, given the avowedly secular nature of the MLA, some of its members actually are making strides in doing so.
“Spirituality can mean anything from love to lust,” Stephen Webb of Wabash College pointed out in a paper he read at a panel at the MLA convention here. “This is truly disturbing when you find that it is replacing religion among the young.”
Dr. Webb spoke on a panel on “Faith and Doubt in the Fiction of John Updike.” The choice of the bard of Berks County as a guide to understanding systems of belief may represent the limiting nature of the MLA’s rapprochement with religion.
As Dr. Webb himself put it, “Updike seems so completely uninterested in spiritual practice or spiritual discipline.” Another panelist gave more than an inkling of why MLA members would find Updike’s take on religion more comprehensible than that of another writer with an affirmatively religious outlook.
“I just taught a course in southern literature in which we studied Flannery O’Connor and I came to dread the endings because I felt that the readers were being theologically hotwired to come to her conclusions,” Marshall Boswell said. “The ambiguity of Updike’s characters gives the readers a nice shelf to perch on.” Dr. Boswell teaches at Rhodes College.
Updike’s ambiguity can be selective, as Dr. Boswell seemed to acknowledge in the session at the Convention Center Marriott here. In his books, “John Updike’s heroes are mostly adulterers,” Dr. Boswell said.
Indeed, two Updike best sellers, “Couples and Marry Me, are set in a post-Pill paradise,” Dr. Boswell recalled. Readers of Updike’s novels, then, might find themselves at something of a loss to come up with religious themes after a reading of, say, the Rabbit Angstrom stories, although clerics do appear in the supporting cast of Rabbit Run.
“Updike has a moral modesty that can be seen in what is not said,” Dr. Webb pointed out. Kathleen Verduin tried to show that Updike was open to religious themes.
“In the 1940s, Updike read [James] Thurber, [Robert] Benchley and The New Yorker,” Dr. Verduin told the crowd. “He also read T. S. Eliot and [Albert] Camus.”
“His patronage of both Grove Press and Torch Books shows the struggle in Updike.” Dr. Verduin, who teaches at Hope College, attempted to draw a parallel between Updike’s love of books and interest in religion.
“Throughout his fiction, books are rivaled only by genitalia as objects worthy of Updike’s attention,” she said, adding, “Nobody laughed,” when no one did. Perhaps that line did not leave them rolling in the aisles because this latter range of interests mirrors the MLA’s own concerns.
It is probably not too surprising, then, that the MLA gave Updike a lifetime achievement award. Dr. Webb showed how the Updike touch worked for the heroine of the honoree’s 1975 novel The Killing: “She is not holding her father’s hand when he is dying but she is holding her husband’s penis when her marriage dies.”
And after that presentation, how many college students in English classes hither and yon can look forward to writing blue book essays on the moral of that story?
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
