’Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true,’ Jimmie sings, strumming his Mouseguitar, ‘proverbs tell us what to do; proverbs help us all to bee—better—Mouse-ke-teers.’Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is not a good Mousketeer. Once he was, when he was adulated for his relatively strong high-school-level basketball skills. There was certainty in heroism. He was strong and tall and handsome and ... first rate. There was a role and rewards. It was easy to be in, and still be truthful. External circumstances were easy to live with.
But, it did not carry on into burgeoning adulthood. Rabbit become normal. He becomes second-rate. External circumstances are harder, and concessions must be made to stick with them.
’Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably ... misery follows their disobedience.’He disobeys. And misery follows. But people make concessions for him, every concession; and you’ll hear many a reader rattle on about his selfishness and his narcissism, and these things are true, up to a point; but, paradoxically, he remains a hero through his demand that life be truthful, and the rejection, in the end, of the constant, needful lies of ‘rightness’ as his coach would have it. He has said that ‘we’ make them, not Rabbit, not himself, but the big awful crushing ‘we’.
"What else do you like about me?"
"... you haven’t given up. In you’re stupid way you’re still fighting."
And that’s what Rabbit runs from. Not successfully. Not well. Not to some great reward for his efforts; but his misery is his, and there is a happiness in that. What is the ‘right thing to do’ and what makes of us ‘a monster’ and how these things intersect is played with masterfully. When Rabbit does ‘the right thing’ at one point, the pivotal ‘bad thing’ could be said to happen as a result. Or not.
’Who cares? That’s the thing. Who cares what you feel?’
’I don’t know,’ he says again.Updike has Ruth emphasise what not you. It’s not really even personal. It’s complete. He abandons due to his abandonment. He lets go of that which refuses to cling. He runs because he knows he has to get away to remain real, while knowing that there’s no escape. There’s nothing else there, nowhere to run to, but maybe the act of running is enough. Maybe that’s it. He certainly doesn’t know. It’s an illusion too, the spur to run. In the end, it’s an illusion that trips him. But he knows it is. And yet, something internal happens. Something that maybe can trip Pascal.
This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own accord and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of the sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: he runs. Runs.
Something also needs to be said about Updike and his brilliance in this novel, which is heartbreakingly fantastic. Americans in particular seem to despise him, when any other country would honour him to bits. I’m convinced that haters of his work are literary-cripples, either born that way or gender-politically-handicapped; and I’m beginning to think there is only a cure for the former of the two. There’s a sickness involved in it that is much wider than his oeuvre. But, maybe, ‘...the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.’ Or they’re just after the easy and effortless one-star-review hack not too many people will complain about. When you read his actual work, all these things sort of melt into like so many wicked witches of whichever direction you’re looking He’s not James Joyce (so don’t blame him for his style) but he might be called an American-lite version. Or Joyce translated into American, from the Irish-in-English. His shifts through stream-of-consciousness are more vivid and less real at the same time, but maybe more real for it?
Keep running. Running. Even if it’s just on the inside.Wonderful, women, from such hungry to such amiable fat; he wants the heat his groin gave given back in gentle ebb, Best bedfriend, fucked woman. Bowl bellies.
No comments:
Post a Comment