John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art by George Hunt (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

312ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW informative and scholarly response to that. In addition to critical evaluation of Ostrovsky's works, much reference is made to the great socio-literary critics, other great Russian and European writers of the time, and their overall effect on Ostrovsky and his works. Alexander Ostrovsky is both concise and informative not only in text, but in footnotes and bibliography as well. For those who wish to investigate further, the bibliography, although not extensive and much is available only in Russian, is an excellent guide to hard-to-find information. MARY JO SMITH University of Arizona George Hunt. John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1980. 232p. Professor Hunt has provided an interesting thematic study of the writings of John Updike. Using the category distinctions of E. D. Hirsch, Hunt conceives of his work as one of interpretation rather than criticism. He wants to examine Updike's fiction in order to describe what it is that Updike meant; he does not intend to evaluate the significance of the work. Hunt's essay is both theological and religiological. That is, he demonstrates the manner in which Updike's art dramatizes a Christian intellectualism, derived primarily from the religious thought of Kierkegaard and the theology of Karl Barth. But the essay is also religiological in the sense that it shows us how Updike's novels and short stories portray homo religiosus at work on the integration ofexistence in a seemingly desacralized society and culture. To accomplish this latter task Prof. Hunt analyzes the significance of Jungian insights and motifs in Updike's fiction. To search for the individuation of one's life is to encounter the "powers of nothingness." "Just as the opposite of goodness is nothingness, so too the opposite of a good man is a nothing-man. The nothing-man is one who is fascinated with nothingness or who confuses creation with nothingness or who mimics and thus distorts goodness: Rabbit Angstrom." (p. 46). The only way that psychic balance can be restored and meaningfulness affirmed is by way of discovering, as Barth says, that the "dread of nothingness can, in fact, be a 'motion of grace'. . ." Rabbit knows no such "motion." In this way we are shown how a religiological dilemma, understood in psychological fashion, is resolved by way of a theological possibility — which, in the case of Rabbit, is not affirmed. The author is convinced that religious, erotic, and aesthetic elements mingle in a way that gives Updike's work a distinctive character. For Updike as a boy there was a fascination with the "Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art." That fascination shaped his existence and provided a thematic pattern for his fiction, says George Hunt. What Hunt does not say is that the manner in which the "Three Great Secret Things" come out of the closet provides the theme for every human existence, and becomes the content of the struggle for meaning (the religiological task). With Updike it is metaphor that serves heuristically to hold together the disparate forces of experience, according to Hunt. One gets the feeling that metaphor does even more than this for Updike: it somehow incarnates the moments of crucifixion and resurrection that are present in the mingling of sex, religion, and art. At any rate, Updike is a master of metaphor, and, as George Hunt shows us, plot and character are subservient in his fiction. The author divides his essay into chapters dealing chronologically with Updike's BOOK REVIEWS313 published works. Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit Run are used to demonstrate the influence of Kierkegaard and Barth. Subsequent chapters tend to describe how each of the "Three Great Secret Things" has its turn at dominating Updike's fiction. This part of the argument does not stick too well; it seems forced. Nevertheless, the book is well done. The theological and religiological analyses make it a rich source for understanding Updike. Like all such works, the reasoning tends to be quite close and sometimes tedious — especially in the latter chapters. RICHARD E. WENTZ Arizona State University Richard Kostelanetz, ed. The Yale Gertrude Stein. New Haven and London: Yale University Press...