from Rabbit Redux

JOHN UPDIKE

In the film Strange Days, set on New Year’s Eve 1999, there is a device called the squid deck that can record one person’s experience onto a minidisk and then play it back for another. I saw this film in Florence, Italy, and emerged to the cobblestone streets feeling that I had seen a dramatization of the end of subjectivity in the very birthplace of Humanism. What I had always felt made humans human—the inability, ultimately, to communicate the depths of our experience and individuality—would be lost with the advent of this technological bridge. I did not see this as an advancement. For what lends poignancy to the fact of consciousness is the difficulty, the impossibility, in expressing its quiddity. Poetry most conspicuously, but all human interaction really, is constantly butting up against the fact of incommunicability. But the struggle, the exertion and friction of the asymptotic approach, is what has always given literature, and life, its meaning.

I thus imagined that the invention of the squid deck would signal the death of literature. Yet that day has not yet come and might never come. And in the meantime we beat on, aching to express and taking solace in the provisional achievements of others.

It was with this in mind that I read and marveled at John Updike’s portrayal of a conflicted wife masturbating alongside her sleeping husband in the second of his famous Rabbit books. Updike enters Janice Angstrom’s mind, as Joyce had Molly Bloom’s, and returns with the layer-on-layer imbrications of her desire for her husband and her lover, for her free and fixed lives, for her future and her past, all of which rush over as her hand moves between her legs. If the experiences of other people are truly unknowable, Updike has come as close as one can get. Her body feels tense as a harp. She wants to be touched . . . How sad it was with Harry now, they had become locked rooms to each other . . . She’d been with him so many times she could be quick in coming, sometimes asking him just to pound away and startling herself, coming, herself her toy, how strange to have to learn to play . . .

This is silly. This thinking is going nowhere, there is tomorrow to face . . . at lunch [she] can go over to Charlie’s apartment, the light used to embarrass her but she likes it best in the day now, you can see everything, men’s bottoms so innocent, even the little hole like a purse drawn tight, the hair downy and dark . . . Determined to bring herself off, Janice returns her hand and opens her eyes to look at Harry sleeping, all huddled into himself, stupid of him to keep her sex locked up all these years, his fault, all his fault, it was there all along, it was his job to call it out, she does everything for Charlie because he asks her, it feels holy, she doesn’t care, you have to live, they put you here you have to live, you were made for one thing . . . it feels like a falling, a falling away, a deep eye opening, a coming into the deep you, Harry wouldn’t know about that, he never did dare dwell on it, racing ahead, he’s too fastidious, hates sex really, she was there all along, there she is, oh: not quite. She knows he knows, she opens her eyes, she sees him lying on the edge of the bed, the edge of a precipice, they are on it together, they are about to fall off, she closes her eyes, she is about to fall off: there. Oh. Oh. The bed complains.