The presumptuous taming of reality: John Updike

photo: micheal mundy  Enjoyed this weekend's obituaries for John Updike. Like so many novelists, he's someone I'm saving up for a later, more easeful life, after having been gripped by Rabbit, Run and wanting to know more about this Joyce of the American suburbs. But there's an Updike quote that's been barrelling through the various pieces - and it's about as eloquent a definition of playfulness as I've read in many a month. It comes from his memoir, Self-Consciousness:

So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. ... Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it -- approaches blasphemy.

Substitute "playing" for "writing", and the passage still makes beautiful sense. For me, this brings something new to the classic definition of play - as outlined by Friedrich Von Schiller, Huizinga and others as "taking reality lightly". In the Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith hazards his final definition of play as "the mimicking or mocking of reality", as a means of anticipating and thus surviving reality's unpredictable nature. S-S's further defintion of play as "the stylized performance of existential themes" would seem to sum up Updike's entire oeuvre!

But what I didn't fully realize, until reading Updike's quote, is just how much the fear of death must lie behind play's endless rehearsals and experimentations - particularly for we humans, so full of "self-consciousness". And that our play (in which I'll easily include fiction-writing) - where we loosen the grip of the world in our minds, so we can grapple with it better - could be a kind of "blasphemy". A semiotic two-fingers at the inevitable finitude of our lives. 

Play is then natal, in Hannah Arendt's term, rather than mortal. Or as Bob Dylan put it, more crisply: "he not busy bein' born is busy dyin'". Thanks for the Monday-morning stimulus, Mr. Updike. Rest in process.