Updike's A Month of Sundays and the Language of the Unconscious

Abstract

Evidence from John Updike's New Yorker book reviewing reveals his interest in gaining familiarity with structuralist literary criticism and encourages one to undertake a structuralist interpretation of Updike's 1975 novel A Month of Sundays. This novel has as its protagonist an irresponsible Midwestern Protestant clergyman sent by his church for a month of meditation to a Southwestern desert retreat, where he composes sermons as a form of therapy and self-analysis. The introspective writing he produces, including four full sermons as part of the novel's text, contains Freudian slips, puns, other word games, and glosses on all of these that invite an interpretation derived from Jacques Lacan's structuralist psychoanalysis. Four pairs of oppositional terms can be borrowed from Lacan and applied to A Month of Sundays: language and the unconscious, self and other, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and the penis and the phallus. Many examples of linguistic displacement and condensation appear in the novel that illustrate Lacan's theory of the correspondence between the structures of language and the unconscious, and that reveal the pastor's problems with sex and religion handled therapeutically through language. The opposition of self and other takes shape in the novel in the clergyman's failure to grow beyond the isolation and defensiveness of his childish ego state. The tension between the Imaginary and the Symbolic is shown in the pastor's inability to leave the Imaginary stage, which is characterized by the ego's need to imitate an Other, and to enter the Symbolic stage, where one learns to replace imitation with empathetic projection. As a result, he never learns to differentiate between penis and phallus, and persists in romanticizing women rather than learning that erotic relationships involving the symbolic phallus exchange do not have to be physical-sexual. This Lacanian analysis is balanced by reference to two pairs of terms from Jacques Derrida-the spoken versus the written word and absence versus presence-and the six pairs of terms are translated briefly into the