Posts Tagged John Updike

General Introduction
- New segment: Michial Farmer’s world of women’s fashion
- Thanks for not writing in
- Why Nathan is the left-leaner amongst us
- What’s on the blog?

Aesop Ipsa Loquitur
- Is the country mouse a rube?
- Other Greek notions about the polis
- Plato’s suburban pharmacy
- The importance of human contact

Contrasting the Hebrew Perspective
- Cities and corruption
- Solomon’s urban fervor
- That curséd wilderness
- Garden as Hebraic ideal
- Gilgamesh civilizes the wild man
- Moses goes out beyond the boundary of imagination

The New Testament and the Early Church
- Christ the vagrant
- Equal-opportunity parables
- Augustine and Rome
- The heretical countryside

The Middle Ages and The Renaissance
- Churches and urban centers
- The origins of pagan
- Snookering-slash-correcting the rubes
- Langland gets sympathetic
- A new kind of pastoral
- London as hell

The Romantics
- Hegel and the city
- The Romantics fight back
- The country laborer and the university Marxist
- The rise of industrialization

America!
- The errand to the wilderness
- Puritan commerce
- The early decay of Boston
- Continual westward expansion
- Sister Carrie’s ambiguous ending
- The urban pushback and the abandonment of small towns
- Make the noise stop, please

The Cynical Midcentury
- The suburbs take over the shire
- The American dream gets transplanted
- American re-creation
- The stultifying suburbs
- Farmer on On the Road
- The vanishing rural
- All God’s children are terrible

The Takeaway
- Automobile culture
- But let’s not romanticize
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aesop. Fables. Trans. Laura Gibbs. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York: Norton, 1995.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Blake, William. Poetry and Designs. Ed. John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson. New York: Norton, 2007.

Bunker, Nick. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History. New York: Knopf, 2010.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Felix. Life of Saint Guthlac. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman. Ed. Elizabeth Ann Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2006.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

—. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Picador, 2005.

Sidney, Philip. The Major Works. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Something about nineteenth-century America made great novelists shoot for immense public success by eliminating what it was about their writing that made them great. The most obvious and egregious example is Herman Melville’s follow-up to Moby-Dick, 1852′s little-loved Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities. The official story is that Melville had set out to write a sweet and light domestic novel–he referred to it, in a letter to Sofia Hawthorne, as “a bowl of milk”–then got the negative reviews for Moby-Dick, at which point Pierre became a dark Calvinist beast of a novel: ugly, misanthropic, and terribly plotted.

There is reason to doubt the official story. John Updike explains:

[T]he reviews [of Moby-Dick] weren’t all that bad. Not as bad, certainly, as those which had greeted Mardi two years before. . . . Even those with strong reservations about Moby-Dick spoke respectfully of the author’s talent, and a number of early enthusiasts for this willful and extravagant work were among the reviewers. It is true, Melville did not receive what might have been psychologically useful at this time–a fully generous public salute from a high-minded peer, such as he had given Hawthorne, or as Emerson was to give Whitman (in a private letter that became public) upon receipt of Leaves of Grass. . . . Melville’s critical and popular position after the publication of Moby-Dick was still high; he was commonly written of as a genius, and, in a London New Year’s survey of new presences in American literature, ranked with Hawthorne and the now forgotten Richard Burleigh Kimball and Sylvester Judd. There is nothing in his situation like the obscurity in which, at his age, Hawthorne and Whitman labored, or for that matter in which Joyce, Proust, and Kafka secreted their modern classics.

So much for that excuse, then. But that means we still have to figure out why Pierre took such a dark and disturbing turn. For a clue, I suggest we turn to Stephen Crane’s second follow-up to The Red Badge of Courage, the nearly forgotten The Third Violet. Crane apparently began writing this novel a mere two months after the release of Red Badge, justly one of the most-celebrated books in American literary history. The acclaim was nearly universal and immediate–the novel went through two printings in less than five months, and reviewers fell over themselves praising it on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not so The Third Violet, which flopped like a beached whale in the bookstores and which American critics, anyway, detested. British critics were substantially more positive, but I am not enough of a scholar of late-19th-century England to know why–perhaps realism and naturalism had not gripped Britain as strongly as they had America. The hatred is understandable. The Third Violet is a radical shift from The Red Badge of Courage, which anticipates Hemingway in its understated brutality and misanthropy. (Hemingway would later call Red Badge the finest war novel ever written.)

The Third Violet, on the other hand, at least flirts with every conceivable trope of romantic and domestic novels. Two young people, one (of course) an artist from a poor background, the other an heiress, meet on vacation and fall in love. Fate intervenes to keep them apart, and both return to their wildly disparate lives in New York City, until Fate intervenes once more to bring them together. It could be Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre–less favorably, it could be The Minister’s Wooing or The Wide, Wide World. Katherine Heigl and Ryan Reynolds would star in the movie adaption, which your mother would see in the theater and recommend to you for three months.

The novel is as bad as the movie adaptation makes it sound. Its first half, the vacation scenes, work all right if you pretend the author is someone other than Stephen Crane, but things go south very quickly once everyone hauls it back to Manhattan. The Third Violet isn’t as fantastically bad as Pierre–but it’s much less interesting as well. As Cameron Crowe points out in Elizabethtown, a trainwreck in its own right, “There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn’t. Happen. To. Them.” (Full disclosure: While I saw that movie, I’m taking the general idea of failures vs. fiascos from Nathan Rabin’s excellent “My Year of Flops” series over at The AV Club–now available in book form!) Pierre is a fiasco. The Third Violet is merely a failure. I can’t imagine teaching it except in a class that taught everything Crane ever wrote, or perhaps one that sought to determine the real difference between realism and romanticism.

But there’s the rub. Paul Sorrentino argues (quite convincingly, I think) that The Third Violet is one of the very best places to go to find the tension between literary romanticism and literary realism–the former was mostly dead critically but remained popular among the masses for…well, to this day, and the latter was well into its ascent amongst “serious writers.” The Third Violet reflects this conflict–but not where Sorrentino thinks it does. His mistake is in identifying Crane with the main character, a painter named William Hawker; in fact, Crane’s biography echoes more strongly with the novel’s chief author character, Hollanden.

Hollanden is a distinctively American character type: the artiste who has completely sold out but is aware of it and thus maintains his charm for the reader. As he says to a group of fawning vacationing women,

Well—you must understand—I started my career—my career, you understand—with a determination to be a prophet and, although I have ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carven upon my lips a smile which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves.

The naturalist author is meant to be a prophet; he is meant to convict society of its sins. But instead he becomes a clown, doing tricks for them. Surely Crane feared that’s what was happening to him as he wrote The Third Violet, which is so different in tone from Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage.

It’s important to note, by the way, that Hollanden’s self-description echoes Crane’s interview with the godfather of American realism, William Dean Howells: “Ah, this writing merely to amuse people—why, it seems to me altogether vulgar. A man may as well blacken his face and go out and dance on the street for pennies. The author is a sort of trained bear, if you accept certain standards.” The naturalist self-critique here is quite clearly intentional and significant.

The question thus stands: If Crane was so aware of the loathesomeness of the Third Violet project–it would be like Martin Scorsese directing a movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel–why didn’t he complicate the plot? The novel has a standard romantic ending. The two leads get together and live happily ever after. The answer seems to be that Crane was interested in a more subtle problematizing of the romance genre, thus Hollanden’s bitter self-critique.

Thus also the frequent demonstrations of the difficulties of being the friend or lover of a naturalist artist. At one point, the female lead (and Hawker’s love interest), Miss Fanhall, says to Hollanden, “And yet you—really Hollie, there is something unnatural in you. You are so stupidly keen in looking at people that you do not possess common loyalty to your friends. It is because you are a writer, I suppose.” Indeed, it’s not easy to have a relationship with someone who sees himself as a prophet, much less a fallen one. Hawker seems to agree; he says to Miss Fanhall, “You know what a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows and blues.” To tell things as they really are, one apparently must see people mostly in terms of their composition.

It could be, then, that The Third Violet is Crane’s attempt to integrate with the rest of society–his attempt to move beyond ugly but prophetic naturalism and to make nice with the rest of the world. He recognizes that this attempt is selling out to the magazines and the best-seller list, but part of him obviously thinks it worth the danger. That he sold out without the result achieving either artistic or commercial success must have pushed him permanently back into the naturalist mode.

But as I said, The Third Violet is a failure, a bad novel in a rather uninteresting way. Pierre is a much worse novel in a much more interesting way. There’s an odd twist midway through the novel, which begins as a domestic fantasy and ends in death and destruction: the titular Pierre suddenly becomes a professional writer, albeit a failure. Critics have traditionally seen the point at which this subplot is introduced as the point at which Melville began to read the reviews of Moby-Dick. But if Updike is right and those reviews weren’t all that bad, we need another explanation.

Enter The Third Violet. What if, as I want to suggest, the ugly turn in Pierre has less to do with the world outside of Melville’s house than the world inside his own head? What if Melville genuinely wanted to write the sort of novel Sophia Hawthorne would have liked to read, a sunny domestic caper but part of himself wouldn’t let him? What if the Calvinist God Melville hated and feared had placed in his soul the ability only to write of the dark and angry underbelly of human existence?

My suggestion–and I’m going to have to leave it at a mere suggestion, which is why I’m glad this is a blog entry and not an academic paper–is that Melville began Pierre as a domestic fantasy but that part of him wouldn’t let himself complete it that way. The dark turn in the novel, along with the strange and ineffective authorial subplot, comes from the same place in Melville as Hollanden’s self-critique comes from in Stephen Crane. Something about these authors won’t let them write outside their milieus.

The real question is: Would we have been better off if they hadn’t tried?

Our theme music this week is Ted Leo’s “The Sons of Cain,” from 2007’s Living with the Living. Does it remind anyone else of Hey Dude for some reason?

General Introduction
- A month of Christian
Humanists
- What’s on the blog?
- Nathan axe crazy
- Like us on Facebook!

Cain, the Sons of Cain, and the Lex Talionis
- Cain takes his revenge
- Cain fears his revenge
- The Mark of Cain
- The mercy of the Law
- The days of Lamech
- Orestes and the Furies
- The city of refuge

Achilles’ Revenge
- Revenge within revenge
- Humiliation atop revenge
- Plato’s Christian Bookstore
- Euripides and Seneca get ugly

Jesus Throws It All Off Balance
- But first, Paul quotes Leviticus
- Purification ritual or apocalyptic cruelty?
- Interpreting Matthew 5
- Pacifism? Law? Ignoring insults?
- What do the Anabaptists say?

Christians Breaking the Rules
- Grendel stands with the sons of Cain
- Mrs. Grendel takes revenge
- Beowulf as divine avenger and magistrate
- Stiletto heels for a proper vendetta
- Seeking revenge with Arthur’s knights
- Good revenge and bad revenge
- Explaining Monty Python

The English Renaissance
- The Seneca revival
- Shakespeare’s balancing act
- Why your high-school English teacher was wrong
- Claudius’s bedroom prayer
- F.O.B.

A New Kind of Revenge Tale
- Spoiler alert
- How Dimmesdale ruins Chillingworth’s revenge
- Who’s the protagonist?
- Updike’s twisting of the already twisted
- Captain Ahab’s quixotic revenge quest

Pop Cultural Manifestations
- Why do Christians get more uneasy about revenge in some genres?
- Dream time
- Justice vs. Achillean rage
- The racial component
- How explicit is it?
- The Biz Never Sleeps
- Where’s the critique?
- A tale of two Eastwoods

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aeschylus. The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Euminides. Ed. W.B. Stanford. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Euripides. Heracles and Other Plays. Trans. John Davie. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. New York: Book Jungle, 2007.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. New York: Norton, 2003.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Seneca. Six Tragedies. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Arden, 2006.

Updike, John. A Month of Sundays. New York: Ballantine, 1996.

—. Roger’s Version. New York: Ballantine, 1996.

—. S. New York: Knopf, 1988.

I grew up at the tail-end of the Evangelical Apologetics Explosion. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’m selecting as the apex of that movement the year 1999. (I use that date because of the publication of Josh McDowell’s New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, but that was also the year of Norman Geisler’s Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics and the year after Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.) I was seventeen in 1999 and was just starting to be disillusioned with the church I grew up in. We weren’t terribly devoted to apologetics at my church–and I don’t mean to suggest that McDowell and Geisler are in any sense responsible for my alienation from the Southern Baptist Convention–but my youth group did attend a summer camp with a Creationist theme and a very obvious apologetics influence.

(A tangent: We sang a song there that suggested that the monster in Job 40:15-24 was in fact proof that human beings and dinosaurs co-existed: “Behemoth is a dinosaur / I know creation’s true!” Subtlety, let us say, is not a hallmark of the apologist’s creed, at least not as it is presented to teenagers. It was also at this camp that I first heard the Standard Evangelical Sermon on Premarital Sex^TM, in which amorous teenagers are instructed for half an hour that OH MY GOSH SEX IS AWESOME before receiving a brief disclaimer that “it’s much better if you wait until you’re married”–as if anyone could possibly experience both waiting and not waiting and thus be in a position to judge.)

I also took a mandatory apologetics course at my Christian college, in which I angered the Bible and theology majors around me by consistently failing to see the big deal–or, indeed, the point. We read Strobel and Geisler and a book by Paul Copan that promised to “deflat[e] the slogans that leave Christians helpless”–and I found them helpful on some level. But when it came to the actual purpose of the class–training us to prove the truth of the Gospel to unbelievers–I was left in the dark. I don’t remember for sure, but I suspect my classmates responded to my disinterest by citing 1 Peter 3:15: “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you” (NAS). For reasons I will go into in a bit, I think it’s entirely possible to obey this verse without subscribing to a Geislerian view of apologetics: that is, that Christianity is imminently reasonable and that unbelievers are faulty in their rational thinking.

We must have discussed Pascal’s Wager in that class; it is, after all, a standard in apologetics and an argument which nearly everyone encounters at some point. Its premises are familiar: Either there is a God, or there isn’t. The consequences for believing in a God that doesn’t exist are not much to speak of–but the consequences for not believing in a God Who exists and Who commands faith are infinite. Therefore, we should believe in God. This argument is full of holes, as any atheist (and not a few believers) can tell you. The biggest problem is that Pascal’s Wager can make no distinction among the hundreds of religious conceptions of God, most of them mutually exclusive. What if I choose to believe in the Christian God, and it’s the Muslim Allah Who is real? Suddenly the consequences of belief are much more serious!

The Wager also results, presumably, in a rather intellectualized and cold-fish faith, a fact that Walker Percy’s character Will Barrett points out in The Second Coming:

To the best of my knowledge, only one man in history ever made a practical proposal, that is, a proposal of which the rare sane unbeliever could at least make a modicum of sense. That was the famous wager of Pascal, who was the last French intellectual who was not insane. . . . But it is after all ludicrous to reduce the question to a crapshoot at Vegas. . . . The trouble with Pascal’s wager is its frivolity.

These very legitimate objections notwithstanding, Pascal’s Wager is important to existential apologetics for at least two reasons: (a) It assumes the mutual absurdity of faith and atheism; and (b) it posits faith as primarily an act of the will, rather than of the intellect or of the emotions.

That first point is, I suspect, forgotten or ignored by apologists of the Geislerian variety. But the Wager, though it’s a logical appeal of sorts, is built on several dozen pages of absurdist theology. Most notably–and this is, in my opinion, the single most profound sentence in the Pensées–he tells us that “It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist” (¶230). The effect of this mutual absurdity is not merely to make religious belief into a leap of faith; it makes atheism into the same sort of leap. Agnosticism seems to be left as an option, but on a practical level there is no agnosticism, as you either live as if there is a God or as if there isn’t. Not only is (a)theism a leap of faith; it’s a leap of faith that everyone must take in order to exist.

The other contribution Pascalian absurdism makes to existential theology is that it makes faith into an act of the will. This, no doubt, displeases those who wish to posit Christianity as wholly reasonable and who see faith in Christ as primarily a matter of intellectual assent. But it’s not; it can’t be, not if the essence of Christian faith is a trust in Jesus Christ. St. James suggests as much when he says that “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder” (2:19, NAS). What makes the difference is an active faith (built, James says to Luther’s chagrin, on works)–an act of the will. Intellectual assent without what William James famously calls “the will to believe”–forcing oneself to behave as though one believes, even if it doesn’t make sense at times–is fairly worthless.

As for the notion that faith is built on “feeling”–that idea stems from a faulty reading of Matthew 22:37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” That heart implies emotion to the modern reader, but Christ is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5–and the seat of the emotions in the Hebrew Bible is not the heart but the bowels. If the author of Deuteronomy had wished to suggest that we ought to love God with our emotions, he would have instructed us to “Love the Lord your God with all your bowels”; as written, heart more likely refers to what we’d call the soul, and soul refers to something akin to life-breath.

Faith in Christ, then (and other religious faiths, as well), is an act of the will, that is, something we choose to trust in, even though it doesn’t always feel great or make perfect intellectual sense. For how this works, we must skip ahead several centuries from Pascal to Søren Kierkegaard. The Danish philosopher is famously resistant to attempts to force God into human understanding (which is, after all, the end results of much of modern apologetics). He remarks in his journals–and in the new beverage holder at the Christian Humanist Store, cheap at twice the price!–that “to stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going on one’s knees and thanking Him.” He takes it even further in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and suggests that attempts to prove the existence of God end up accomplishing the exact opposite purpose:

To demonstrate the existence of someone who exists is the most shameless assault, since it is an attempt to make him ludicrous, but the trouble is that one does not even suspect this, that in dead seriousness one regards it as a godly undertaking. How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that he exists unless one has allowed oneself to ignore him; and now one does it in an even more lunatic way by demonstrating his existence right under his nose?

The existence of God, strangely enough, is completely beside the point for Kierkegaard; he takes it as a given and expects from his “knight of faith” not a belief in the existence of God (after all, even the demons have that) but a painful, crushing–some might say “horrible,” and they wouldn’t be misreading Kierkegaard–trust in the invisible, perhaps unknowable, God.

His model for this is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, which he discusses in his most famous book, Fear and Trembling. Abraham is a Man of God specifically because, when the Divine approaches him, he asks neither for verification nor for a justification for the horrifying action demanded of him. Indeed, he commits himself wholly to God’s commandment–even though it contradicts both an earlier promise God made to him and every human law, including the law of logic, which is violated by the contradiction. What makes Abraham a knight of faith, in fact, is his ability simultaneously to believe God’s promise about making him into the Father of a Great Nation and to obey God’s later command for human sacrifice without active or passive rebellion of the Camusian variety. This process is the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” a Kierkegaardian phrase from which later scholars derived the concept of the “leap of faith.” The ethical sphere involves not only morality but all universal systems, most notably logic.

This is, obviously, a full-fledged attack on apologetics based on logical argument; God simply cannot be reached in this way. Karl Barth takes this bold assertion and runs with it, remarking in The Word of God and the Word of Man that “There is no way from us to God–not even a via negativa–not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way–even of this way–would not be God.” (John Updike memorably quotes this passage in Roger’s Version, a novel about the seamy underbelly of fideism.) Hence, the need for revelation–God’s reaching down to man, reliably described, for Barth, in the New Testament. Logic isn’t revelation; it is trumped by it.

But there’s more to the story. Some people could do what God commanded of Abraham, Kierkegaard says, but they couldn’t do it in the spirit of faith:

If–in the guise of tragic hero, for higher than that I cannot come–I were summoned to such an extraordinary royal progress as that to the mountain in Moriah I know very well what I would have done. . . . I am fairly certain I would have been there on the dot, with everything arranged–I might even have come too early instead, so as to have it done quickly. But I also know what else I would have done. The moment I mounted the horse I would have said to myself: “Now everything is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him, and with him all my joy–yet God is love and continues to be so.” . . . And yet this is the greatest falsehood, for my immense resignation would be a substitute for faith.

The distinction Kierkegaard draws here between faith and resignation is helpful in uncovering the role of reason in the religious life. It’s important that he does not recommend a “teleological negation of the ethical,” but rather a suspension.

It may be helpful to go back to another familiar image here. Dante has Virgil, a virtuous pagan, lead him through Hell and Purgatory, but they must part ways. In like fashion, Dante seems to suggest (and Kierkegaard would surely agree), the believer must leave her reason behind the instant she believes. But there’s a third act: in Heaven, in the realm of belief, Dante receives a new and more perfect guide, Beatrice. In like manner, Abraham begins to sacrifice Isaac but “believe[s] that God would not demand Isaac of him”–and receives Isaac back. The believer suspends the ethical and the logical in order to receive a higher ethic, a higher reason, on the other side of faith. One believes in order to understand, in other words, and despite the apologists of the ’80s and ’90s, one does not understand in order to believe.

That’s not to say there’s no place for Strobel and Geisler and other apologists. Their arguments and books can help to bolster faith once a person has already made the leap–but they can’t lead people to God, at least not to any God worth believing in (that is, a God far beyond the limits of the human mind and its commitment to the Kierkegaardian ethical). Strobel’s book The Case for Faith thus has a nonsensical title: no case can be made for faith except the case made in and to faith.

Welcome to Season 2.5. The theme music this week is “Rock and Roll Dixie,” from the soundtrack to the video game The Neverhood. We also have a special guest host, Nathan Gilmour’s brother Ryan.

General Introduction
- Welcome to Season 2.5
- David Grubbs, our reporter from the field
- We get the dirt on Nathan
- What’s on the blog?
- Listener feedback

Ryan’s Story
- Mr. Gallops, Talking Horse Comedian
- Second City
- Birds on Life
- The life of a working comedian
- Dog hotel
- Our first bleep

Medieval Comedy
- Where have all the jesters gone?
- The handicapped, the short, and the studied
- Insulting the powerful
- Reading Shakespeare into the Middle Ages
- How universal are jesters?

Vaudeville and Minstrelsy
- American literary humor
- Medicine shows
- The complicated politics of blackface
- Racism and Disney cartoons

- A New Kind of Comedy
- Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor
- Taking comedy personally
- The Second City
- Saturday Night Live

Radio, Television, and the Internet
- Censorship
- Increased sophistication and multiplying clichés
- Why Second City is funnier than Saturday Night Live
- How the Internet changed it all
- We talk about joke stealing for ten minutes
- Faking it
- Effusive praise for Dave Chappelle

Mean and Amoral Comedy
- How prudish is Nathan?
- Why the absurd requires the congruous
- The difference between mean and amoral
- Easy targets
- Please excuse our technical issues
- The Celebrity Roast

What we need to know about comedy
- Mean, mean Grandma Gilmour
- The future of the entertainment industry

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Harrison, Jim. The Farmer’s Daughter. New York: Grove, 2009.

Montgomery, Marion. With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: In Company with Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009.

Otto, Beatrice K. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

Ruhl, Sarah. Dead Man’s Cell Phone. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.

That’s the end of Season 2, folks. We’ve had a great time doing the show, and we’re glad you listen. We explain our summer plans in the show itself. Keep listening, and keep reading!

General Introduction
- So long, Season 2
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog?
- Our summer plans and our love for decimal places

Beginning Apophatically
- Literary criticism vs. critical theory
- The Academy and the newspaper
- The professor and the amateur
- The unconscious and the conscious
- Literary criticism vs. book reviews
- Why age is more than a number
- The bleeding edge of criticism

Auden Makes the Rules
- Historical context
- Overcome evil with good
- Subjectivity
- How to tell if a critic is any good
- Development of taste
- The pleasures of the text

Old Stuff
- The extreme POETIX! of  Chuck “Ham-Bone” Aristotle
- Dorothy Sayers’s internalization of Aristotle
- The gaping hole of the Anglo-Saxon period
- Boethius and his epic, tragic harlots
- Philip Sidney to the rescue!
- Milton’s dismissal of fiction
- The Calvinist aesthetic defense of Scripture

The Aesthetes and Decadents
- The critic as artist and the artist as critic
- Creation vs. criticism
- Rules for independent critics
- Why Wilde would like Lester Bangs
- Complicating, not explaining
- What does “art for art’s sake” actually mean?

A New Kind of Criticism
- Connection to the Southern Agrarians
- Reaction to the Old Historicism
- Text as self-contained and unified
- Why the New Critics overreacted
- New Criticism as all-consuming blob

Mythological Criticism
- Deeper into Tolkien
- The Mythography Project
- Finding patterns in mythology
- Frye’s embrace of archetype
- The Gospel’s role in myth criticism

Heroic Criticism and American Studies
- The Heroic Critic as true believer
- Defining the newly emergent America
- Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination
- The difference in seriousness
- Intellectual decline
- [] you, you bourgeoisie pig!
- Defining Americanism(s)

Jiving Criticism and Art
- Why poets can’t write well about poetry
- Historical moments
- The need for critical distance
- A fist-fight breaks out!!
- Artists who do great criticism
- Is this a difference in eras?
- The problem with self-accounts
- Michial prepares for hate mail from creative-writing students
- Does scholarship create better writing?

Getting Personal
- To what extent is our academic output literary criticism?
- Auden makes David self-aware
- Nathan’s Hegelian synthesis
- Michial tries to complicate, not simplify

Post-Theory Criticism
- The Emmanuel Laboratory
- Nathan as the singular Voice of Criticism
- David fights to stay in the middle
- The non-academic return to Auden’s world

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Mariner, 1956.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeill. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Two volumes.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco: New World Library, 2008.

Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. 47-59.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Frazier, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frye, Northrop. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.

Jung, Carl. Jung on Mythology. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Two volumes.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 619-669.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Three volumes.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: Greenwood, 1979.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 212-251.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 5-48.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Waking Lion, 2008.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 241-297.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin, 1996.

The music this week, at Nathan Gilmour’s request, is John Fogerty’s “Center Field.” What squadron is Fogerty’s favorite?

General Introduction
- A tribute to the Internet Monk
- What’s on the blog?
- Buy our merchandise!

Our Experiences
- Nathan’s seminary basketball league
- The saddest story you’ve ever heard
- What do we like now?
- Why we miss Dennis Miller

Why Do People Like Sports?
- Defining our terms
- Baseline aesthetic pleasure
- Sports and youth
- Having it either way

Sports vs. Art
- Is it right to call sports an art form?
- Active life vs. contemplative life
- English-department disdain
- A glimpse into the Grubbs marriage
- Sports as a cure for melancholy

Is It More Noble to Play Than to Watch?
- Second-hand transcendence
- Looking for narratives
- David waxes poetic
- Why Nathan doesn’t watch sports

Let’s Talk Walter Benjamin
- Stage acting vs. screen acting
- How producers control the narrative
- Why do people go to games?
- The intellectual detachment of minor-league baseball

A New Kind of Battlefield
- Wrestling and boxing
- The line between a race and a fight
- Olympics as sabre-rattling
- Competition without hatred

Music and Sports
- The long heritage of baseball songs
- Old man baseball
- Ease of translation
- “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request”
- Leisurely pace
- What do you call a three-voice rant?
- Self-selecting stereotyping

Sports and Literature
- Chivalric romances
- Icelandic sagas and their football/baseball blend
- Homer and sports
- Jewish-American fiction
- Robert Coover kills imaginary imaginary characters
- Rabbit, Run’s groping for transcendence

Hometown Pride
- Loyalty, rivalry, and why New York, California, and Texas are evil
- Sports as regional definition
- Why we need detachment
- Hereditary rivalries
- David roots for the referees
- Your Zemeckis bash of the week
- Oh, those sophisticated Brits!

Closing Thoughts
- David makes his peace with sports
- Nathan hates sports video games
- (Michial plays Ken Griffey Jr. Major League Baseball while editing this show.)
- Take it more seriously. Or less seriously.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Fairford, U.K.: Echo, 2007. Two volumes.

Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York: Minerva, 1992.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Peter Jones. New York: Penguin, 2003.

—. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike

I have more questions than answers in today’s post, I’m afraid, so I’m counting on your comments to help move me through this topic. It came about through a simultaneous reading of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt and the late stages of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy (1961-1990). The attitude these two authors take toward their characters could not be more different. Babbitt is a pretty funny book, but it leaves a rather bitter taste in my mouth because of Lewis’s clear disdain for his characters. The novel’s moral center, it seems, exists outside the novel itself, in Sinclair Lewis’s head–which may in the final analysis be the same thing as saying that Babbitt has no character because of its status as a satire.

That same result, this lack of a moral center, comes from different means in Updike’s work. He said in 1968 that he was not “conscious of any piece of fiction of mine which has even the slightest taint of satirical attempt. You can’t be satirical at the expense of fictional characters, because they’re your creatures. You must only love them.” This certainly explains my distaste for Babbitt, which is a satire through and through, but the problem is that Updike’s own refusal to “be satirical at the expense of fictional characters”–really, perhaps, a refusal to judge them in any way–accounts for what many critics deem Updike’s moral or ethical quietism, a charge with which I largely sympathize. One combs through the Rabbit Angstrom books starving for a moral judgment of any sort, some kind of guidepost. Obviously, Updike’s refusal to erect one creates an artistically useful dialectical tension–but the effectiveness of this technique is worn to a nub after reading Updike in any substantial quantity. One wants more; one wants cosmos made from the ethical chaos of his fiction. One wants satire–or at least judgment.

So on the one hand, you have Lewis, who seems to detest his characters and put himself far above them; on the other, you have Updike, who arguably loves them too much or at least too uncritically. One side’s humor becomes rigid, even vicious; the other side’s is too forgiving to be satire. This dichotomy got me thinking about the function and methods of satire itself. Is there a spot in the middle? Can we possibly formulate a Christian theory of satire? Or–to operate from an even broader base–is there room in the Christian worldview for humor at the expense of others?

I should note that I haven’t read Jonathan Swift since high school (and then only “A Modest Proposal” and small portions of Gulliver’s Travels). I know that Swift may be, for many of you, the Christian satirist extraordinaire, but I need you to tell me how such a thing as “Christian satire” works. How can you write something that cuts like a knife while still obeying the Christian commitment to forgiveness, gentleness, and humility?

There’s a reason, I think, that the Christian music industry never really had its own version of Randy Newman. (Before he wrote mostly film scores and children’s music, Newman was once the best satirist pop music had ever known. His song “Rednecks” [NSFW] is a perfect piece of satire because it ends up cutting everyone who listens to it–the Southern bigots from whose mouth he claims to speak, and the Northern liberals who would dare to look down on them.) There was Steve Taylor for most of the 1980s, and he did indeed attempt satire, but I’m not sure there was much that was particularly Christian about it–the angrier and uglier he gets, particularly on his first few records, the harder they are to listen to today. (Exhibit A: “Whatever Happened to Sin?”) In the 1990s, he turned his finger in on himself and got much more interesting. (Exhibit B: “Jesus Is for Losers.”)

If we’re talking about literature–and particularly literature in my field–I can think of two Christian satirists, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. But Percy is attractive as a satirist to the same degree that his satire seems internal as much as external–once he devolves into mere demagoguery, he’s hard to get behind, even if he’s fun to read. I haven’t figured out what to do with O’Connor; there’s been a push in the last several years to read her as an essentially hateful author, someone who doesn’t care very much about her characters. I agree with Updike to the extent that the Christian author must love his or her characters, just as he or she has been commanded to love all of mankind. My question is: Is there room in that love for biting satire?

As I said before, I don’t have an answer yet, and anything you readers come up with will be helpful.

On the Road slid into the American canon like a little boy under a garage door, running on pure energy and speed and getting there without anyone really thinking about it. Like Catcher in the Rye, it’s the sort of book one used to be assigned in high school but now reads on one’s own—a classic of blindly rebellious youth that loses its luster as one gets older and joins the establishment. Unlike Catcher, it’s a remarkably positive book, in that the rebellion enacted by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and the rest of them is not a tearing-down of society but a sort of cosmic yea-saying to life itself:

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other, “so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,” and “so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!”—and off we’d rush to eat.

Dean can protest against society merely by living apart from it; there’s no need to throw potato salad at CCNY lecturers, which makes him a far more attractive figure than many counter-culture icons. And yet even Sal Paradise, his hagiographer, notices from time to time that he is a “mindless cad,” remarkably self-centered and unconcerned with the harm he inflicts on those around him—particularly the women who worship him for his animal magnetism. One’s disgust at Dean grows each time the novel is read.

And yet the novel itself, to say nothing of the myth it relives, maintains its Benzedrine edge. You can’t help but be swept up into the flow—the only other option is to be left behind, adrift in Kerouac’s dislocated and disembodied words. The critic finds himself by necessity swept up and left behind. He must examine the novel critically and thus with an outside eye, and yet to see the novel for what it is, he must hop in that ’49 Hudson along with the characters. (This is, of course, true of all novels and all criticism, but it’s much more evident when you’re attempting to say something about On the Road—odds are it’s all going to fall flat like a joke that was only funny after fifteen hours of driving.)

John Updike said of his Rabbit, Run that he wished it to be read as a response of sorts to On the Road:

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, had just come out and made a great stir. As an even younger American writer, I was, of course, jealous of any stir that was being made, and I read the book with some antagonism because it seemed to me to be so very unreal, so very evasive—about these more or less privileged people zipping back and forth across the country with no visible means of support. And I was trying to make the good Protestant point that we’re all involved with our fellow man, and we’re all members of families, and so the basic image of [Rabbit, Run] is of a man running or leaving or going on the road and disrupting his own family.

Rabbit, Run, however, is unnecessary as a response to On the Road—the tension that Updike wrote into his own novel is already present to a lesser degree in Kerouac’s. (Note: There are many other, better reasons to read Rabbit, Run, and to a lesser extent the other three Rabbit novels, which are almost certainly better and more successful books than On the Road.) Indeed, there is a dialectic in On the Road between home and the road, one in which the former gets a larger slice of the pie than you might have anticipated.

The most famous passage in On the Road is probably this one, from the first chapter:

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

This “insanity as a spiritual virtue” theme is very common among the Beat writers, of course. Kerouac wrote On the Road in 1951, though it wasn’t published until six years later. In between came Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which probably gives you a better idea of what beatnik insanity was really like. “I’m with you in Rockland,” he tells Carl Solomon, “where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void.” Those roman candles aren’t so pretty up close.

But that’s beside the point. You’ll notice that Sal Paradise has put himself outside of the insanity equation—he is more or a less a journalist who follows Dean Moriarty and the other loony saints across the country. That’s why the guiding image of On the Road is not the bursting roman candle at all, but rather something that comes along not too long after it. Sal and Carlo Marx (Ginsberg, if you’re keeping score) are saying good-bye to Dean as he leaves for Chicago:

Carlo and I saw him off at the 34^th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs they had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and looked sinister. Dean made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who’d kill anybody who said anything against his mother. This picture Carlo and Dean neatly cut down the middle with a razor and saved a half each in their wallets.

Kerouac doesn’t note specifically that Sal is in the middle of this picture, but that is the obvious implication. As such, the straight razor cuts directly down the center of his face. Half of it goes to Dean, boarding a Greyhound—and half of it stays with Carlo back at home. This is the essence of Sal Paradise and thus the essence of On the Road (which is always his book, Dean’s charisma notwithstanding): Half of him goes on the road, and half of him stays at home.

An example: In the following chapter, Dean wants to go to San Francisco to visit his friend Remi Boncoeur. (It will, of course, take him nearly two weeks to make the three-day trip.) He lives with his aunt, though, and though he is a grown man, he seems to need her permission to do so. She, like all the other women in On the Road, is a grand old obliging gal who understands that boys will be boys and thinks only of his mental health: “[S]he said it would do me good. . . . All she wanted was for me to come back in one piece.” For the road to exist, home—with its self-sacrificing matrons concerned only with the well-being of their traveling men—must exist. For the one leg of the conference to make the circle, the other must stay as John Donne’s “fixed foot.” For Sal Paradise to stay an eternal child on the road, his aunt must be a grown-up at home.

And Sal is a child. Absent his aunt’s watchful eye, he is apparently incapable of taking care of himself. The only thing he eats for the three weeks it takes him to get to California is apple pie, one after another, always topped with ice cream. “I knew it was nutritious,” he tells us, as if we didn’t know that it’s not. This is the sort of diet a nine-year-old boy dreams of having when he grows up. On the road, one either doesn’t eat, or one eats the wrong foods entirely. It’s no coincidence that the first thing Sal does when he arrives back at his aunt’s house is “eat everything in the icebox.” His aunt, as always, is indulgent: “Poor little Salvatore . . . You’re thin, you’re thin. Where have you been all this time?”

Sal’s sexual relationships with women are just as basic and just as dependent on the road-home dichotomy. The most notable of these is with Terry, a chicana mother and migrant farm worker. Sal sees her son, Johnny, as an enemy, someone to get between him and Terry in bed (though Johnny’s presence in the room doesn’t keep him from making love to her). Eventually, it’s time for Sal to hitchhike back to New York:

“See you in New York, Terry,” I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with her brother. But we both knew she wouldn’t make it. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. She just walked on back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head and watched her. Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.

Terry has supported Sal emotionally and to some extent financially for several months—he is content to leave her and her baby forever with the childish expression “lackadaddy” and an eye turned back to the freedom of the road. (The nonsense word also reminds the reader that Johnny will now “lack a daddy,” as so many children in this novel do.)

That Sal’s last glimpse of Terry includes his breakfast plate that she must clean is perfect—it only cements the relationship between women, home, and food. So does the girl he “necks” with on the way home from his second trip. He’s blown all his money on the sort of things beatniks blew their money on, and so she buys his food for him. Kerouac doesn’t even bother giving her a name, just a paragraph’s worth of identity wrapped up in sex and food.

However bad Sal is in this regard, however, Dean is a million times worse. Sal needs to be at home from time to time; it is his relationship with Dean that pulls him back out on the frantic and unstable road. Dean only goes home when his friends, tired of traveling, have deserted him. He goes through a series of women in the novel, women who only rarely join him on his escapades—most of the time he leaves them behind to know that he is cheating on them with anyone who will let him. At one point, Dean is sleeping with his first wife and his second wife, along with any number of women Sal doesn’t know about.

On Sal’s left stand his aunt, Terry, the woman on the Greyhound, etc., etc. On his right stands Dean Moriarty, debased but somehow innocent saint of the road. Sal belongs to both sides simultaneously—though it must be said that Dean clearly exerts the stronger pull on him most of the time. If there were no left side, there wouldn’t be four parts to the novel, only one, long, Benzedrine fantasy, no doubt ending in Sal’s and Dean’s deaths; if there were no right side, there would be no novel at all.

The dialectic is thus absolutely necessary for Kerouac’s artistic success. Updike’s innovation in this regard is that he devotes several sections of Rabbit, Run, to the thoughts of the women his Pennsylvanian Sal Paradise leaves behind, thoughts we’re not privy to in On the Road, mostly because Sal needs these women more than he desires them.