Narrative as a socially symbolic act: A cultural materialist study of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy

This is a study of John Updike's Rabbit novels--Rabbit, Run (1961), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)--from a cultural materialist perspective. Applying Fredric Jameson's political interpretive model, I contend that Updike's fictional narrative of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom can and should be viewed as a socially symbolic act. Specifically, the study applies Jameson's three semantic "horizons" to the discussion of the Rabbit texts, focusing on immanent textual analysis, identification and analysis of ideologemes in the narrative text, and ideological content of literary style.; In the first horizon I perform a symptomatic analysis of the manifest text in each Rabbit novel. I try to construe the novel's structural patterns as a symbolic of the social within the formal and the aesthetic and to reveal its latent subtext in the form of social contradictions. My discussion focuses on Updike's typical Yes--But tension in each novel and suggests that it is a major ideological strategy of containment. The second horizon is an extended study of Rabbit, Run, along with Updike's early life, which shows that Updike's creation of the first Rabbit novel was inspired by, and at the same time was an expression of, the ideologeme of ressentiment. The third horizon studies the content of form in the Rabbit texts. By focusing on the two major aestheticizing strategies of image production and eroticism, I have suggested that Updike's prose style foregrounds sensory and sensual aspects of life and represses significant social and economic factors that shape human relations and are the driving forces of history.; By portraying Rabbit as an Everyman, a representative of people in the middle, Updike captures some of the major problems experienced by ordinary Americans of his time. As a self-proclaimed realist writer, Updike stresses and practices meticulously accurate recording of details in the lives of his characters, but his largely conservative political stance limits his insight into the driving forces of history. He may occasionally contest ideologies of the ruling class, but his fictions generally call for maintenance of the status quo and conciliation with the Establishment.