Conventional Realism Research Articles

Two Modernist Approaches to Linking Art and Science

The Age of Insight , Eric Kandel's masterful account of the advances of neuropsychology over the last 150 years, starts with the nineteenth-century medical-scientific ethos that geminated the University of Vienna. On its journey it refers back frequently, almost exclusively, to Viennese modernist artists, because their painted images, especially those of the expressionists, resisted conventional realism and continue to this day to serve as perceptual intermediaries to realities that cannot be seen: emotions, character, even the processes of the brain itself. This article begins by further historicizing modernist medical research in Central Europe in regard to another visual medium, film, and then turns to the work of early thinkers who posited a similar relationship between moving images and insight. They, too, often called on anti-realist art to clarify their sense of filmic realism over and against what they considered to be pre-fabricated cinema. This discourse recurs throughout the twentieth century and comes to leave traces in non-conventional filmmaking like that of the contemporary Berlin School. These theories and practices offer useful complements to The Age of Insight 's history of art and science; however, they also issue important challenges to the "common sense" conclusion that some of Kandel's readers might reach regarding cognitive hardwiring as an unambiguous model for our approach to representation and to the world. If "the image of the world that is contained within the word gives rise to a seamless, meaningful system," as Béla Balázs put it critically, then the object might be to dust off the old figure-ground image to consider what our cognitive apparatus naturally shuts off from view. This essay concludes by considering an often overlooked, material marker of a perceptual transition point, one that has accompanied film from the fin-de-siècle on down, in order to foster a more ambiguous approach to the question of how the limits of visual systems relate to the invisible realms beneath the surface of things, both in ourselves and in the world around us.

Dust to Dust : The Figure-Ground Problem of Readymade Realism in Film

The Age of Insight , Eric Kandel's masterful account of the advances of neuropsychology over the last 150 years, starts with the nineteenth-century medical-scientific ethos that geminated the University of Vienna. On its journey it refers back frequently, almost exclusively, to Viennese modernist artists, because their painted images, especially those of the expressionists, resisted conventional realism and continue to this day to serve as perceptual intermediaries to realities that cannot be seen: emotions, character, even the processes of the brain itself. This article begins by further historicizing modernist medical research in Central Europe in regard to another visual medium, film, and then turns to the work of early thinkers who posited a similar relationship between moving images and insight. They, too, often called on anti-realist art to clarify their sense of filmic realism over and against what they considered to be pre-fabricated cinema. This discourse recurs throughout the twentieth century and comes to leave traces in non-conventional filmmaking like that of the contemporary Berlin School. These theories and practices offer useful complements to The Age of Insight 's history of art and science; however, they also issue important challenges to the "common sense" conclusion that some of Kandel's readers might reach regarding cognitive hardwiring as an unambiguous model for our approach to representation and to the world. If "the image of the world that is contained within the word gives rise to a seamless, meaningful system," as Béla Balázs put it critically, then the object might be to dust off the old figure-ground image to consider what our cognitive apparatus naturally shuts off from view. This essay concludes by considering an often overlooked, material marker of a perceptual transition point, one that has accompanied film from the fin-de-siècle on down, in order to foster a more ambiguous approach to the question of how the limits of visual systems relate to the invisible realms beneath the surface of things, both in ourselves and in the world around us.

A GUERRA COMO PROBLEMA PARA OS ESTUDOS LITERÁRIOS

when we try to articulate Aesthetics and Ethics, empathy might be a veryimportant concept. In this essay, we consider how war and literature can be related, inLiterary Studies. War is not only a theme, but also a formal issue. Literary genres,realism and images of death are examined as relevant aspects in this matter. Accordingto Frankfurt School, we comment texts written by Guimarães Rosa and Sérgio Chejfec,explaining how they confront images of war coming from the tradition of classical epicand conventional realism.

Beyond the Veil: Indeterminacy and Iconoclasm in the Art of Robert Hayden, Janet Kozachek, and Tom Feelings

Robert Hayden employs innovative modes of signification to unveil and expose race-based violence in United States. In Night, Death, Mississippi (1966) he defies bildverbot (1) traditions, or customary injunction against representing sacred or, in secular times, secret. This policy pertains to what must not be shown because it lies reach of representation (traditionally, God or Shoah) and also applies to what must not be shown because its portrayal undermines hegemonic ideologies that maintain and naturalize systems of oppression (as in phenomena of lynching and slavery). Some topics are designated unspeakable, beyond veil, or simply lack first-hand witnesses. Yet, this barred access or knowledge gap due to iconoclastic tendencies in culture does not inhibit a poet accustomed to poetry's mode of meaning by indirection. While we live in a time of relative freedom of speech and expression, vestiges of prohibition against depicting unrepresentable subject matter have led writers and artists to seek alternate aesthetic strategies that insist on historical and contemporary realities even as they dismantle conventional realism. Hayden's innovative portrayal of ostensibly obscene (ob scaena) matter of a death by lynching works according to ambiguous modes that depend on materiality of medium (language), rather than materiality of desecrated body itself. By treating language as a revelatory concrete substance--a clay of sounds, a stack of stanzas, a shifting web of syntax ruled and unruled--Hayden calls attention to his creative activity, and by extension, to hidden or forbidden subject matter as well. Thus, medium's material qualities anchor poem as does space/time referent: U.S.A., in mid 1960s. From this fixed point, poet then raises metaphysical questions about society and human suffering. In defiance of restrictions against using art to signify certain categories of experience, Hayden tears away rhetorical veil that falls over episodes too terrible to recount (to use a common collocation from slave narratives), employing a poetics of indeterminacy that both tempers and intensifies truth with its rhetorical power. The poet's insistence on subject matter, examining a generalized episode of a recurring event, serves as a call to witness for both those who follow his line of vision and those who avert their eyes. Dispersing perspective among at least four entities, Hayden offers a polyphony of internal and articulated voices that stage a quasi-narrative spanning past, present and future experience, both actual and imaginary. The trope of veil occupies a central position in U.S. literary history, due in part to ways W. E. B. Du Bois uses it in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a sign of mourning, an instrument of separation or concealment, and a marker of prophecy. Werner Sollors explicates Old Testament references to demonstrate metaphor's function to separate Afro-Americans from American culture at large but also [to give] them a more profound vision and higher destiny (49; qtd. in Gates and Oliver xxviii): Du Bois imaginatively adapted two biblical images of veil as a division within Temple [Exodus 26.33] and as cover that divinely inspired Moses wore when he came back from Mount Sinai and spoke to people [Exodus 34.33-35]. (49) Hayden transposes this metaphoric configuration into an aesthetic strategy as he writes Night, Death, Mississippi, using language to obscure and reveal in delicate tones of lament that ultimately solidify protest nature of his poem. Hayden twice evokes notion of iconoclasm, literally the breaking of icons, in his essays on Harlem Renaissance-era activism (Prose 46) and on later aesthetic innovations (Recent Poetry 69). According to Hayden, Harlem Renaissance artists shattered inauthentic images of Black experience, asserting their own new depictions in place of old stereotypes. …

The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

In the Wake , and: The Little Foxes (review)

Reviewed by: In the Wake, and: The Little Foxes Theresa Smalec In the Wake. By Lisa Kron. Directed by Leigh Silverman. The Public Theater, New York City. 20 November 2010. The Little Foxes. By Lillian Hellman. Directed by Ivo van Hove. New York Theatre Workshop, New York City. 26 September 2010. After a decade of troubling proceedings that were impossible to fathom in the moment—September 11th, George W. Bush's War on Terror, and the collapse of America's financial giants, to name only a few—it makes sense that theatres across the nation are mining the historical past for clues through which to understand contemporary problems. New York's 2010 season featured two productions that used distinctive theatrical methods in order to explore the blind spots we failed to see during the decade known as the "aughts." Lisa Kron's In the Wake at the Public Theater employed conventional realism and authentic media footage from that period to transport audiences back to the contested presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Meanwhile, director Ivo van Hove took a far more surreal and anachronistic approach to characters, costumes, and sets in his revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) for the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). An interesting preface to these performances is the word "aught" itself, which can be defined as "anything at all," or as the opposite—"a cipher; zero." From anything at all to nothing is the basic trajectory of both plays. In the Wake begins near the start of the new millennium, on Thanksgiving 2000, whereas NYTW's program attributes its decision to revisit Hellman's melodrama about an entrepreneurial Southern family destroyed by greed to the deepening global financial crisis of 2008-10. As their characters slowly plummet from a world of seemingly infinite options to the brink of disorder and ruin, Kron and van Hove ask us to consider who gets hit the hardest (and who gets away with taking more) when the American system as we know it cannot hold itself together anymore. The opening scene of Kron's In the Wake set up a subtle yet ongoing tension between the domestic and political realms. On the one hand, the play's protagonist, Ellen (played by Marin Ireland), had an abundance of relational blessings for which to give thanks: her devoted boyfriend Danny (Michael Chernus), her friends Kayla and Laurie (Susan Pourfar and Danielle Skraastad), and even the tiny New York apartment she shared with Danny (designed with meticulous realism by David Korins). On the other hand, however, Ellen's own rise as a public intellectual was beginning to cause rifts in her family circle. Thanksgiving unfolded festively until Ellen ignored Laurie's well-known aversion to political talk and insisted on debating the Florida recount, until a disgusted Laurie walked out. Kayla (Laurie's female partner) sided with her upset girlfriend and left before dinner as well. This early conflict revealed a fundamental tension between Ellen's commitment to analyzing the bigger picture and her improvised family's desire to keep intrusions out; speaking one's expansive mind was pitted against keeping the household peace. The play's central question was whether or not Ellen wanted too much. Throughout act 1 we witnessed her burgeoning success, as well as the widening gyre of her desire. At a high-status conference in Boston Ellen abruptly became intimate with a filmmaker named Amy (Jenny Bacon). Director Leigh Silverman staged this blossoming romance downstage, symbolically removed from Ellen's upstage life with Danny, yet not so far away as to allow us to forget that prior and seemingly satisfying relationship. Ellen and Danny were rooted in a common past, realized onstage by their cozy yet cluttered tenement; by contrast, whenever Ellen got Click for larger view View full resolution Marin Ireland (Ellen) and Michael Chernus (Danny) in In the Wake. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) [End Page 444] together with Amy, the props that surrounded them were minimal: two chairs or a bed. This lack of baggage suggested the freedom Ellen found with Amy, at the same time as it implied their lack of history. Like Kayla and Laurie, Danny disapproved of Ellen's infidelity...

Quantum Physics and Reality

Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though intersubjectively valid, still merely refer to operations of the mind. Essentially, in fact, they are predictive of observations. On the view that SQM is universal conventional realism is thereby refuted. It is shown however that this does not rule out a broader form of realism, called here 'open realism', restoring the notion of mind-independent reality.

Obsessões e desvarios na obra de Veronica Stigger

A interpretação de alguns contos de Veronica Stigger, a partir de componentes obsessivas e destemperadas, na constituição dos personagens e das tramas simples e minimalistas, conduz a presente reflexão a constatar, no estilo da autora, uma tentativa de conciliação entre uma estética de influência expressionista e o modo melodramático. Em seus códigos enfáticos e na compartilhada tendência à forma paradoxal do "extático paroxismo", em que maneiras de expressão excessiva desembocam no silêncio e no inexprimível, a crítica aos limites do realismo convencional, inerente ao absurdo neoexpressionista da dicção, convive com a poética do melodrama e dela se reapropria.

US Policy Toward Rogue States: Comparing the Bush Administration’s Policy Toward Iraq and North Korea

The George W. Bush administration resorted to war to respond to the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whereas it virtually ruled out the use of force to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. By utilizing various strands of realist international relations theories, we trace motivations behind the administration’s divergent foreign-policy choices toward rogue states. That the United States rushed to war against Iraq while procrastinating on North Korea presents a puzzle to conventional realism, which postulates that great powers observe changes in relative capabilities and respond accordingly. We argue that policy differences should be embedded in discussion of the administration’s foreign-policy grand strategy, which sought to sustain the hegemonic status of the United States in the world. Iraq and North Korea had different implications for Bush’s grand strategy, thereby calling for different approaches. By tracing the strategic design of the Bush administration, we attempt to provide a more complete account of policy differences toward rogue states, as well as indicate the significant changes in US policy during the George W. Bush administration and since.

Discretionary Subjects: Decision and Participation in William Gibson’s Fiction

This comparison of protagonists in William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” and Pattern Recognition tests whether plot-driven fiction can produce only one type of literary subjectivity, or whether the subject can be successfully reimagined without abandoning the familiar narrative form. Contextualizing Gibson’s fiction with Alan Turing’s work on mathematical decidability, this essay explores the possibility of affecting radical change in understandings of identity while still appealing to a typical audience. Negotiating between the anti-sentimental modernist critique of personality and the democratic reach of conventional realism, Gibson’s work culls out a positive direction for thought about the potential of posthuman ethics.

Narrating the detective: nansensu, silent film benshi performances and Tokugawa Musei's absurdist detective fiction

To better convey the effects of rapid modernization, interwar Japanese authors adopted techniques that went beyond conventional literary realism. Nonsense was integral to this exploration. Uchida Hyakken of the elite bundan circle reacted to the inexplicable aspects of everyday life in his absurdist works, while Yokomitsu Riichi created new narrative structures. Popular authors also investigated the quotidian unknown through formal experimentation. In particular, some writers subverted aspects of the flourishing detective and science fiction genres. This paper discusses how Tokugawa Musei, arguably the most famous benshi or silent film narrator/commentator, undermined conventions of detective fiction by adding aspects of benshi narration to the typical formulae of detective novels. By doing so, Musei supplemented the main narrative with a perspective external to the diegetic narrative. This supplementation resulted in a nonsensical story that overwhelmed the reader with too much contradictory information and overturned the premises of logic integral to detective fiction. To illustrate Musei's techniques, I analyze his 1927 ‘The case of obetai buruburu’, published in the magazine Shinseinen (New youth). Musei's absurdity and humor reveal the potentially deadening effects of literary formulae and show how rationalist epistemological assumptions of realist narrative fiction were too limited to depict the contradictions of urban life.

From the National to the Global: Satirical Magic Realism in Ngugi'sWizard of the Crow

Ngugi wa Thiongb s novel Wizard of the Crow demonstrates his use of satirical magic realism, where character representations stretch the limits of conventional realism. Ngugi mocks national leadership in Africa and elsewhere through manipulations of the realistic mode, which has also been quite effective in representing political issues in Africa. The novel, set in the fictitious state of Aburiria, satirizes its Ruler and his attempts to dominate the nation while seeking financial support from Western global institutions. Through the Wizard s character and Nyawira, both advocates for the people, the novel shows how national and global interests are often inseparable and can be linked to such concerns as eco-criticism and diaspora relationships.

Alphonse Daudet pluriel et singulier: rencontres de Cerisy-la-Salle (14–21 août 2002)

Textes réunis et présentés par Christian Chelebourg. (Écritures XIX, 1). Paris — Caen, Lettres Modernes Minard, 2003. 338 pp. Pb €26.00. This collection of papers emerges from the activities of scholars clustered around Roger Ripoll and Anne-Simone Dufief within the Amis d'Alphonse Daudet. Annual colloquia usually take place in the shadow of Daudet's mill in Fontvieille, in the heart of the tourist Provence defined by Daudet's early writings. The 2002 meeting at Cerisy self-consciously attempted a wider rehabilitation. Chelebourg's introduction sees the collection's coherence as an attempt to show the range of Daudet's œuvre, often considered merely as children's literature. The nineteen contributions cover his diversity of genre, his range of themes and his poetics. There is a useful index of works. Papers on genre include the novel and stage adaptations (A.-S. Dufief), operetta libretto (H. Rossi), poetry (S. Le Couëdic) and irony/satire (F. Court-Pérez), plus his reception in Catalonia via translations (A. Ribes). A missing genre, not confined to his early work, is the short story. Daudet's key themes emerge as illusion, self-delusion and the role of the imagination (R. Ripoll), pain and suffering (J. Solal), death (J.-P. Colin), family and divorce (N. White), the stage (H. Rossi), satire of modern tourism and terrorism in Tartarin sur les Alpes (M. Kissel) and the doomed politics of royalism (H. Guineret). Taken together, they suggest a uniformly pessimistic outlook on life, from someone who admittedly endured much illness and physical pain in the second half of his writing life. But there is the joie de vivre in many of his works. The section on aesthetics covers sentimentalism (P. Dufief), ‘le style artiste’ (S. Meitinger), naturalism (M. Petit), narrative and space in Sapho (B. Urbani), travel and thresholds in Le Petit Chose (A. Not), imagery of the senses (P. Ortel) and the poetics of truth (C. Chelebourg). While several papers deserve further comment, for instance, those by Ripoll and A.-S. Dufief, space permits only a few words on two, both of interest to those with interests wider than Daudet. Ortel challenges two common criticisms of Daudet: his style as petit-bourgeois taste for the ‘bien écrit’ and his world view as merely conventional realism. Bringing out Daudet's psychological insights as if through the lens of a photographer, Ortel sees him as closer in sensibility and technique to Proust than to Zola. Chelebourg's study also looks, in contrast to Zola's use of ‘documents humains’, at the quality of Daudet's imagination, his imagery, his perception as someone increasingly myopic, the combination of this on his particular sensibility and its expression in the written word. Taken together, the two papers suggest a line of enquiry that would examine Daudet's style and sensibility as a photographer manqué with a penchant for the close-up and the psychological drama, ‘close up and personal’. Indeed, Daudet's work would appear to lend itself to more cinematographic adaptations than have been essayed so far.

‘That dog won’t hunt’: the cottage industry of realist criticism, or must you play that Waltz again?

Debates over realism seem endless. The neoliberal tenor of the decade ending with September 2001 has given way to another popular revival of conventional realism, as if that paradigm were once again the only true reflection of world politics. This resurgence, however, is best considered within the context of longer-term debates over realism and its spin-off, neorealism: their accuracy, applicability, and — some would say — morality. This article asks how and why a paradigm that has been incessantly attacked has survived. It argues that, to answer these questions, one must look beyond issues of internal theoretical consistency to the historical context within which structural realism has unfolded. In addition, one must entertain the possibility that the incessant focus on internal theoretical debates downplays both the results of empirical research and the personal prejudices or worldviews that ultimately may underlie preferences for models. Much of the discussion revolves around Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (TIP), a central focus of the debate, but also assesses implications from other studies thought to be extensions of neorealism and TIP. We conclude that progress in international relations (IR) and IR theory ultimately requires less energy being spent on the broad paradigmatic debates, and more effort being dedicated to evaluating what empirical investigations can contribute as well as recognizing what lies outside their domain.

Experimente und Sackgassen in Mednyánszkys Schaffen um 1890-1895

Summary László Mednyánszky's work during his whole period of artistic activity developed, in essence, independently from the then contemporary styles and current trends. This statement, however, does not exclude the fact that his work is marked by various deflections in both his personal style and the quality of paintings, and is interwoven with several experiments. So far a relatively clear picture of Mednyánszky's work and its development has been created, especially from the perspective of his major periods; however, almost all of his artistic activity is accompanied by experiments, deflections from the stream, returns to memories and moods of previous periods. That's why Mednyánszky's entire artwork is characterized by the plurality of style and motives. Since the late 70's, we have known from the painter's own diaries that he also intensively and theoretically studied the more clearly formal problems of painting. We study the art of Mednyánszky in the first half of the 1890's from the viewpoint of these experiments: e.g. the range of problems relating to allegoric representation, where we proved that Mednyánszky did not start dealing with the themes of death and its allegoric representation in a direct relation to the illness of his father, as it has so far been stated by a number of researchers, it culminated in this time. However, a grave, a cemetery, death, illness, bad luck, a dying person, a dead child, etc. are constantly repeated motives in his artwork. We try to find examples of paintings, which could have been marked by the painter as spiritual, pictures that he might consider imaginations between unrealistic and realistic, and also to discover what the painter was referring to as “conventional realism”or “a totally free form”and so on. Mednyánszky, in the second half of the 90's, did not continue these experiments; however, he used the previously obtained experiences, consisting mostly of his awareness of a painter's freedom and the determination of possible limits of representation, as these proved most convenient for the painter. Mednyánszky certainly made experiments of this nature, and in that period of time, i.e. around 1895, he made a particularly high number of them. It is obvious, that he was looking for new manners and outlets of expression, as well as for new themes, and, in parallel with pictures created in a proven way, he discovered some possibilities that can be considered extreme in the context of his artwork. These experiments, however, definitely did not satisfy him. However, a further step in the development of his artwork came about after his third stay in France in 1896–97.

Realist Hypotheses on Regional Peace

This is primarily a theoretical article. It aspires to fill the void left by realist neglect of regional analysis. The article starts with a presentation of a power-based analysis of the interaction between systemic and regional level actors, and of basic patterns of regional stability, conflict and peace. Next, it offers two amendments to the conventional realist analysis of regions. The first amendment discusses regional order in terms of unit-types; the second discusses regional order while referring to conventional realism, the English School and constructivist principles. The article concludes with a brief discussion of different realist visions of regional order and their analyses of the prospects of Middle Eastern peace.

Townships sud-africains et Littérature : le sémantisme de l'ambivalence

ENG: This article addresses the issue of the semanticism of the city as represented in black South African fiction written in English from the 30s to the present day. It first examines how, over half a century of literary of prose writing, black writers have transformed the townships into literary representations. Through narrative patterns and the use of rhetoric and metaphorical devices the township is constructed as a locus of ambivalence thus articulating the mixed feelings with which the inhabitants relate to their place of residence. The focus is then placed on métaphorisation and on how the shift in the choice of literary devices -moving from conventional realism to a transgression of generic paradigms through the introduction of categories belonging to oral literature -have renewed the vision of urban life.

Nonoalco-Tlatelolco : images d’un quartier détruit dans l’œuvre de Fernando del Paso

Images of a Destroyed Neighborhood in Fernando del Paso’s Work Most of the action of del Paso’s novel José Trigo (1966) takes place in the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco neighborhood. This old part of the center of Mexico City was entirely renovated in the early 1960s. This is where between the end of 1958 and the beginning of I960 railroad men organized a powerful strike which was crushed by the use of force. The novel is thus firmly rooted in reality. However del Paso’s writing goes beyond the technique of conventional realism, as its focus is rather on the concepts of Mexican space and time. The paper attempts to show how the history of this vanished neighborhood becomes a symbolic place for the emergence of an art of writing which from the first novel marks Fernando del Paso's entire work.

The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films

In this revealing series of interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Anthony N. Fragola and Roch C. Smith provide an intimate, perceptive profile of the artist. Known primarily as a writer whose experimental novels have had a major influence on the writing of fiction in the twentieth century, Robbe-Grillet is also a highly acclaimed filmmaker whose works include Last Year at Marienbad, L'Immortelle, Trans-Europ-Express, and The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure. Robbe-Grillet is a visionary who seeks to discover unfamiliar ways of seeing and interpreting. His films, like his novels, challenge the limits of expected narrative structures and question the comfortable assumptions of conventional realism. In the interviews, conducted from 1982 until 1991, Fragola and Smith examine all nine of the films that Robbe-Grillet has created, specifically exploring the cultural milieu to which they are so closely and problematically related. This is the first such work in which Robbe-Grillet comprehensively discusses his views on aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, and literature as well as on filmmaking. The reader is encouraged to view him from a variety of perspectives: as the auteur who probes various stylistic techniques and devices, especially the use of eroticism as a structural metaphor; as the international artist who discusses the complex structures, allusions, and thematic intentions that occur in his films; as the detached observer exploring his own use of stereotypes and myths; and as the impassioned creator who defends and explains his position concerning the controversial depiction of sado-eroticism in his films. This book conveys a wide awareness and keen appreciation of Robbe-Grillet'sfilms, especially to American audiences where they are least known. Certain to be a lasting tribute to Robbe-Grillet's cinematic work, it will encourage informed discussion among students and scholars. The book includes a gallery of illustrations from Robbe-Grillet's films as well a

Mapless Motion: Form and Space in Updike's Rabbit, Run

Mapless Motion:Form and Space in Updike's Rabbit, Run Derek Wright (bio) Twenty years ago the english critic Tony Tanner maintained, as the central thesis of his book City of Words (1971), that the fictional imagination of postwar America was as much troubled by the postmodernist novel's dissolution of form as by the constrictive, overdefinitive forms of conventional realism. Tanner linked the erosion of formal distinctions with fears of an entropic universe in which energy was always running down: the abiding anxiety of 1960s writers who discussed entropy (Pynchon, Burroughs) was its homogenizing effect on the universe where all things dwindled to nothing, all things became alike. The waste-making process resulted in a confusion and merging of identities and an eventual dissolving of all things into a blank, formless waste, a perfect homogeneity of nothingness. John Updike was never of this experimental school of writers but, as Tanner observed, the characters of his early novels discussed these same processes, and the landscapes they inhabited were afflicted by the same cosmic entropy or universal wasting. Conner, in The Poorhouse Fair (1959), theorizes about "entropia," and George Caldwell, in The Centaur (1963), sees Nature as "garbage and confusion." Harry Angstrom, a tidy man who dislikes waste in his domestic affairs if not in his sexual ones, moves [End Page 35] in Rabbit, Run (1960) across a terrain of junk heaps, treeless wastes, and derelict houses which become part of a single integrated and indistinct mass (or mess). Even childbirth is seen by Rabbit as an entropic reduction of the universe to the one monochromatic filth: "Janice's babyish black nostrils [widen] to take in the antiseptic smell he smells, the smell running everywhere along the whitewashed walls, of being washed, washed, blood washed, retching washed until every surface smells like the inside of a bucket but it will never become clean because we will always fill it up again with our filth" (159). According to Tanner, doubleness was in Updike's early novels the ultimate defence against entropy and its wasting homogenization of the world (290), and love was crucial in this defence because love involves two in everything: "She was double everywhere but in her mouths. All things double. Without duality, entropy. The universe God's mirror," reflects Piet on Georgene in Couples (1968), a novel depicting a complex "universe of twos" (63). Coupledom has continued to be the dynamo of Updike's fictional universe—the chopping and changing of his twosomes in their tireless pursuit of novelty and their adoption of new mirror positions is what keeps their world in motion—and the theoretic importance of love is that it resists the assimilation, the entropic merging, of one identity into another. The idea had some literary currency in the Sixties on both sides of the Atlantic—"What will survive of us is love," Philip Larkin concluded the last poem of The Whitsun Weddings (46)—but in the form in which it has come down to contemporary writing it is fraught with fears that love is itself but another feature of the world's entropy, its every particle inscribed with the process of decay. Here, for example, is Julian Barnes in the "Parenthesis" to his recent A History of the World in Ten-and-a-Half Chapters (1989): It will go wrong, this love; it probably will. . . . Our current model for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up. But when love fails us, we must still go on believing in it. Is it encoded in every molecule that things fuck up, that love will fail? Perhaps it is. Still we must believe in love, just as we must believe in free will and objective truth. And when love fails, we should blame the history of the world. (246) Moreover, within the context of Updike's fiction, the whole theory of love as an oppositional, antientropic force has always begged the question of whether his female characters are ever allowed sufficiently well-defined and distinct identities to resist being merged into and annihilated by the wills of their dominant males (feminist critics such as Mary Allen have expressed reservations about the bland...