Jon Hassell, Avant-Garde Composer and Trumpet Player, Dead at 84

“Fourth World” explorer collaborated with Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and Ry Cooder

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

 

Sex, Lies, and Book Burning

a lecture on Wilhelm Reich

by science historian James Strick

(2006)

 

Book Review

Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

      Understanding who John Updike was will go a long way in helping you interpret his Novel Rabbit Redux, his sequel to Rabbit Run. Updike was an old-fashioned WASP, a middle of the road American man who advocated monogamy and a bland version of Protestantism. He believed in hard work, family values, and the status quo. He was no conservative though; he supported the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and trade unionism so politically he was a traditional Liberal but certainly not a radical. When a man like John Updike writes about the social upheavals of the 1960s, you might expect a predictable Time or Life magazine type of analysis, a readymade script for a mediocre TV movie, concluding with a statement about how, with enough effort, the great country of America will pull together and get through these troubled times. But this middle of the road author subverts our expectations and gives us something entirely different.

This story starts ten years after the end of the previous book, Rabbit Run. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom has grown up a little, learned to be responsible, and has returned to his wife Janice and their son Nelson. He works as a linotype setter in a shop with his father and his family has moved to a two-story house in the suburbs to escape from the decay of the inner city of Brewer, Pennsylvania. Harry Angstrom has turned out to be an Archie Bunker-type conservative. His views are racist and he supports the war in Vietnam while everyone around him is against it. His thoughts on these matters are shallow, poorly reasoned, uninformed, and easy to oppose. As we see later in the novel, he is more tolerant of other views than one might expect but if his opinions are superficial, in the end his redemption is too.

In Rabbit Redux, Harry has to learn that what goes around comes around. As the story opens, his wife Janice abandons him to have an affair with a Greek womanizer, leaving him and their son Nelson alone in their house. He is on his own with Nelson and has to live with the realities of being a single parent. The significance of this might be lost in our time as single-parenthood is more common and more acceptable than it once was but during the 1960s the issue of husbands who leave their wives was one issue at the forefront of the Second Wave feminist movement. Through this role reversal, Updike is making a nod in the direction of women who feel they deserve fair treatment by the men in their lives.

While the novel begins by introducing a feminist theme in the first section, it continues on to take up the issues of race relations and the hippie counter-culture in the second section. An African-American colleague named Buchanan invites Harry out to a bar after learning that his wife has gone. Buchanan offers to help set him up with a woman. Rabbit obliges and, against his nature, ends up in a predominantly Black night club, drinking with Buchanan, a lounge singer named Babe, and a young Vietnam vet named Skeeter who continuously expresses rage and hatred towards the white establishment. Surprisingly, Harry starts to have feelings for Babe and becomes fascinated by Sketter even though he represents everything Harry dislikes about Black people. Skeeter shows up later in the story but everything gets interrupted with the entry of Jill, a runaway rich hippy girl from Connecticut whose father has just died. She hates her mother and ran away to be in a better place and then ended up living with Babe and getting hooked on drugs. Jill needs a new place to stay and goes home with Harry.

So Janice gets replaced by Jill. Harry uses her for sex in exchange for rent and of course they begin growing closer together. Jill, however, gets a lot closer to Nelson. At first she acts like a substitute mother to him but as the narrative progresses she becomes more of a sister. Things start to get a bit awkward when Harry suspects that Jill is trying to seduce Nelson and he begins to think of her as a daughter as much as a lover. Jill, at one point, starts calling Harry “Daddy” and this Freudian knotwork gets more confusing if we remember that Harry and Janice’s daughter died in Rabbit Run. Jill fills some empty spaces in Harry’s life but never quite fills the space for meaningful intimacy. That probably doesn’t matter because Harry is actually aloof, selfish, and uncaring; his interest in Jill is primarily about sex, his secondary interest is housework. Rabbit does, however, help out with some chores since in the absence of Janice, he is forced to take on some characteristics of a housewife. Again, this is Updike giving a nod to a feminist issue that was widely discussed in the 1960s and the meaning is probably lost on most people today.

When Jill movies in with Harry, she brings a lot of baggage. One major piece of this baggage is Skeeter, the African-American Vietnam vet that Harry met in the bar earlier in the story. The third section revolves around him and how he moves in with Jill, Nelson, and Harry. At first, Skeeter appears to be a representative of the Black Power movement. He rants against racism and the establishment in long, rambling monologues while smoking joints which he freely shares with Harry and Jill with Nelson present in the room to see it all. Although extremely impolite, Skeeter isn’t a bomb throwing revolutionary. He is delusional, though, and claims to be a messiah sent to them by God. It Is hard to tell how serious he is about this. He could be mentally ill or he could have distorted his thinking from all the drugs he does. He could also be making this up just to be provocative. Skeeter and Harry argue with each other but they also settle into a strange kind of friendship since Harry is especially interested in everything Skeeter has to say. One thing becomes clear: Skeeter’s bluster is a smokescreen for his fear and paranoia, the results of him being Black in America and having been in combat in Vietnam. This becomes most apparent when the four of them go out for a drive in Jill’s Porsche; when the sports car breaks down, Skeeter almost has a nervous breakdown out of fear the police will come or they will get attacked by white bigots.

In the absence of Janice, the four of them settle into a type of surrogate nuclear family.

Despite his obnoxious personality it might still be tempting to think of Skeeter as a sympathetic character, but Updike hits us with a further dilemma. Skeeter uses heroin to enslave Jill. When she goes into withdrawal, he forces her to have sex with him in exchange for the fix she needs. Skeeter gets his historical revenge because for once a white woman is a slave to an African-American man. Updike confronts us with the historical injustice of slavery and the racial problems that resulted in the long run but he also presents us with a deeper issue. Just because Skeeter is Black, should we accept everything he says and does? A lot of white people place African-Americans on a pedestal and think of them as angelic beings who can do no wrong. Any bad things African-Americans do is the result of white oppression and injustice. But this way of looking at Black people is inherently racist because it denies them their humanity just as much as degrading them and humiliating them does. Like all human beings, and like all the other characters in this novel, African-American people have flaws and sometimes do things that aren’t so good. Skeeter is not a stand-in for all African-American people; he is an individual that we can consider with both sympathy and disgust simultaneously. The same can be said for Harry, Jill, Nelson, Janice, and her Greek lover Stavros. Humans are combinations of good and evil, not one or the other and Updike successfully drives this point home in Rabbit Redux. He challenges us to judge Skeeter by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin as Martin Luther King Jr. would have said.

When Skeeter enters the story, Harry also begins to notice the racism that is all around him. He pays more attention when white people make derogatory comments about African-Americans and Nelson gets beat up by kids in his neighborhood because he has a Black man staying in his house. Harry also becomes aware of his own racism when he leaves the bar with Jill and two Black men chase after them; Harry thinks they are going to rob them but then learns their intention is to return Jill’s purse to her after she left it in the bar. Then, Harry is later forced to defend Skeeter when two white men confront him on the street and tell him if Skeeter doesn’t leave then something bad will happen. Harry doesn’t make Skeeter leave and something very bad does happen. Harry begins to see racism from an African-American point of view. His enlightenment to all this is not profound but it is a sign of hope that it happens at all.

The book ends in the fourth section with the arrival of Harry’s sister, Mim, who works out west as a high-class prostitute. She gets introduced as a representative of the Sexual Revolution but ultimately this is secondary to her literary purpose as the person who separates Stavros from Janice and makes her see the value of returning to her family.

There are some big problems with Rabbit Redux. The most significant one is that it is too stylized and contrived for its own good. The novel is too self-consciously structured around the idea of the family in crisis. The separation and reunion of Janice and Harry acts as a framing device for the treatment of the social issues concerning the late 1960s and Harry’s encounter with the dark side of the family. As well-rounded as the characters of Harry, Jill, and Skeeter are they still carry a heavy atmosphere of arbitrariness around them. Updike wanted to portray the issues of his day and simply wrote characters into the narrative to represent different facets of the times. But it does not make sense that Harry would accept these people into his home nor does it make sense that they could hold together, even temporarily as a surrogate family unit. Updike does not provide us with a plausible explanation of how this is possible other than Harry being a spineless pushover even though he does defend himself when he sees fit. Another improbability is the way that Mim returns home to her conventional blue collar family and talks freely with them about her sexual promiscuity. They do not react to this with any kind of anger or disagreement. They just accept it as it is, without controversy in a way that is hard to believe. There are times when this novel feels pretentious, fake, and too far fetched.

On the other hand, there are some real strengths. Just like in Rabbit Run, the dialogues are strong and effectively build the characters into well-drawn representations. There is a lot of strength in the fine details too. Updike addresses gender fluidity by describing Nelson as effeminate and Harry calls him by the girls’ nickname “Nellie”. When Harry’s father complains about war protesters, Harry defends them because he understands their point of view even though he is in favor of the war. Harry’s colleague Buchanan is portrayed as a pimp but there are subtle hints that he isn’t one; he simply introduces Harry to Babe and Jill and later corners Harry, hitting him up for money in exchange for his “services”, but there aren’t any other indications that he actually is their pimp. He is just being sneaky about taking advantage of Harry. There is also a subtle implication that Harry is sexually attracted to Skeeter since when he sees him naked he feels slightly aroused and after Skeeter has sex with Jill, Harry wipes the semen off her with a handkerchief which he secretly keeps and takes out from time to time because he likes the smell.

Rabbit Redux is a transgressive novel, sometimes bizarre, sometimes disturbing. Why would an advocate of the status quo like John Updike write something like this? The simple answer is that he just wanted to write the definitive novel of the 1960s. But the more complex answer is that he is making a Marxist critique of American society. “Marxism”, in this case, does not mean it is communist propaganda or that it is about social and class conflict, even though that latter element is present. “Marxist” in the mid-century literary sense means writing a critique that shows an opponent’s point of view. Marx’s most prominent work was Capital. That tome was not a polemical attack against capitalism; instead it was an analysis of capitalism from a capitalist perspective. This older meaning of Marxism has fallen out of use since, in our time, political debate has degenerated into nothing more than a head-butting contest between tribal affiliations, shrill monologues happening simultaneously without the possibility of communication or understanding. Updike is doing something different here. His characters are not opponents in the strict sense of the term but they do represent cultural problems that threaten the stability of the norm. In the form of this novel, these elements are being brought out, and brought together, for examination, analysis, and understanding. He draws our attention to social issues by showing us what they are, as they are.

Harry, Janice, Jill, and Skeeter are depicted as symptoms of underlying social problems. They are flawed individuals but all of them display a potential to become better people. In our society we have a tendency to attack individuals for their bad behavior, and in part this is justified, but Updike is showing us that these characters, even though they have deep problems, are trying to make sense of a confusing life and end up making bad decisions because they don’t always know what to do. Society is breaking down because it doesn’t provide any resources to help these kinds of people, so they turn to other lost and naive misfits for guidance and wind up in trouble as a result. Updike is humanizing these problematic people rather than demonizing them while reminding us that, in the end, they are still responsible for their choices.

Stylistically, Rabbit Redux is an easy book to read but emotionally it can be a brutal gut punch. Its explicit depictions of sexism and racism are offensive to the intellectual weaklings of the 21^st century but any good doctor will tell you that a cancer needs to be observed in order to make a medical treatment possible. If you want to be certain of how the author felt about social issues, look at the negative portrayal he gives to Harry’s white neighbors and how they react when he chooses to allow an African-American man to stay in his house. John Updike may have been an advocate for the status quo but his critique tells us that the status quo has a lot of growing up to do when it comes to being civilized and responsible.

Updike, John. Rabbit Redux. Fawcett Crest Books, Greenwich, CT: 1972.

 

Book Review

 

Freud: A Life for Our Time

by Peter Gay

     Sigmund Freud’s theory and practice of psychoanalysis was one of the most influential intellectual trends of the modern age alongside the ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Einstein. It should be no surprise that an extensive biography of this man would be written and it also would be expected that it would be dense and heavy on analysis of the king of all analysts. Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time fulfills this necessity. It is largely a successful biography because it puts Freud’s ideas into context, showing how his theories were born from the social matrices of his family and career.

Freud grew up Jewish in the Austro-Hungarian empire in a town called Pribor which translates to “silverware” in Czech and is now a part of the Moravian half of the Czech Republic. His life growing up was not especially unique in any way. However, despite being a lifelong atheist, his Jewish identity had a strong impact on his thinking. In college he studied biology and eventually went into medicine. He spent one summer in the unusual pursuit of dissecting eels in search of their genitals as part of a research project investigating the hypothesis that these sea creatures are hermaphroditic. He was unable to find their private parts. Try psychoanalyzing that. For the most part, though, Freud’s younger years and family life were ordinary but Peter Gay does draw connections between the relationship he had with his parents and his development of psychoanalytical theory.

After becoming a physician, Freud found a new father figure in a doctor named Fliess. The elder man was a bit of a quack, utilizing hypnosis since some patients often complained of ailments when there was no obvious physical cause. These psychosomatic afflictions were later classified by Freud under the diagnosis of “hysteria” although “hypochondria” would be the more acceptable term these days. Freud came to realize that hypnosis did not ever cure these hysterias but he believed that those patients were legitimately suffering from something, more specifically something that originated in the mind. From there he developed his concepts of the unconscious, neuroses, the Oedipal complex, suppression, sublimation, and all the rest of the jargon that became associated with psychoanalysis.

The practice of psychotherapy was conducted by talking sessions in which the contents of thoughts, especially dreams and fantasies, were interpreted to reveal unresolved psychological conflicts that resulted from traumatic experiences suffered during a child’s infantile sexual development.

Not all of these theories were new. As Gay points out, religious mystics, artists, and poets had been alluding to the existence of the unconscious all throughout history and in a way, saying Freud discovered the unconscious is akin to saying that Columbus discovered America. But Freud did articulate this concept in a way that makes it accessible to more than just the artistic and intellectual elite whose concepts were vague to begin with. One example is the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle that is mediated by the ego. This is a new version of the Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy but Freud’s new conceptualization of this had wide ranging effects on our interpretations of history, religion, and human nature. These applications of analysis would be taken up later in his final literary works. In his own way, Freud was a giant standing on the shoulders of giants.

After mentioning Freud’s book publications, the establishment of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, and the rapid spread of interest in psychoanalysis, Peter Gay’s biography takes a major turning point when he writes about Freud’s famous case histories. It is here that we get a sense of how the theory is applied to practice. One interesting case was the Rat Man; this poor guy was tormented by dreams of having live rats stuffed up his butt and the torment was made worse because he sometimes enjoyed these dreams. This was half a century before the urban legend of gerbling took hold of the American public’s imagination; maybe that urban legend was a product of anal-masochistic guilt expressed by adolescents who desired punishment from their fathers for having unconscious fantasies of transgression or something like that. The case of the Wolf Man was a curiosity too. This Russian aristocrat had a dream where a family of wolves were watching him from a tree and Freud interpreted it as a fantasy of sublimated sexuality. Although psychoanalysis quickly became popular, it seems that some of Freud’s interpretations were dubious at best from the start. But the psychoanalytic system had a logic of its own and the pieces all appeared to fit together. At the heart of this all is the Oedipus complex. Freud’s case histories were interesting and important but Gay could be faulted for not introducing this unconscious childhood fantasy until this section of the book. In fact, he never really explains it in detail. He just assumes that the readers know all about what it is. Older readers might get it all but younger readers may need to supplement this book with some research of their own.

Aside from Freud’s theories, practices, and publications, another major theme of this biography is the activities of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. Freud was respected by most other members of his organization but not everyone was happy. Power struggles were endemic and often manifested in the form of disagreements over theoretical concepts. The most notorious one happened between Freud and Carl Jung, who Freud had chosen to be his successor in the dissemination of psychoanalysis. But Jung had his own ideas, especially about religion and the occult, and chose to leave on unfriendly terms. Peter Gay demonstrates how how the analysts clashed and argued by analyzing each other and then Gay analyzes Freud’s analyses. If you want to analyze Gay’s interpretation of Freud’s analysis of the analysts then you will probably go crazy so it’s just best to take some of this in stride and don’t get too caught up in it.

Other topics covered are Freud’s later writings, his health problems in old age, his life during the two world wars, and his relationship with his daughter Anna who went on to become a prominent psychologist herself. And Peter Gay’s opinions about Freud are not entirely uncritical. For example, he points out some contradictions in Freud’s view of women which at times appeared favorable to the idea of sexual equality and at others not so much, especially in his rejection of the feminist movement. But that was mostly because Freud did not want psychoanalysis to become political. Another contradiction was that Freud’s ideas were subversive to bourgeois values yet psychoanalysis was used as a means of maintaining the status quo. Of course, nobody ever said that Freud did not have a complex mind.

One particular thing that left a gaping hole in this biography is an examination of Freud’s legacy. The book abruptly ends when Freud dies. The influence of this great thinker has never gone away so what does the author make of that? We never find out. A critical examination of Freud’s theories would be useful too. Psychoanalysis is now widely considered to be a pseudoscience and not many people buy the ideas of infantile fantasies in all the details Freud laid out. There is no doubt that children have ambiguous feelings about their parents and that they go through different stages in the development of their sexuality but there is no way of verifying what happens in their unconscious as these processes take place. By designing a theoretical system, Freud invented a way of shaping and molding people’s understanding of their own minds but this leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that the Oedipus complex was implanted by the analyst rather than being revealed through the process of therapy. Furthermore, Freud’s system is overtly authoritarian in nature and can be interpreted as a means of trapping and containing libidinal energy rather than liberating it from neuroses.

In the long run, we still can not be entirely sure what to make of Freud. Was he important only from a historical perspective? Can we disregard him altogether? Did he have some ideas that are worth holding on to? Answering those questions is a task for future generations. He appears to have been right about the structure of the psyche while the minute details are completely wrong. At least Peter Gay did not indulge in such details like the belief that forks and spoons are phallic symbols while shoes and windows are unconsciously thought of as your mother’s vagina. Sparing us these details was a wise editorial decision since they would distract the reader from some of the more significant issues that Freud grappled with.

Freud: A Life for Our Time is as good a biography as we could hope to get. Peter Gay’s Germanic writing style, by which I mean anal-retentive in his attention to detail, makes it a long and plodding read but at least he focused on the right things and wisely chose what parts to leave out. Freud was a pioneer in the exploration of the mind’s contents and his life is worthy of being written out in one good, responsibly written book. There is no character-assassination or yellow journalism here. If you only read one book on Freud, this one should be it.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London: 1988.

Was Bull Island the Worst Music Festival of All Time?

short documentary video

(2021)

 

Book Review

Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

     When you tell kids they are special then they grow up to be monsters. This is the problem John Updike confronts us with in his novel Rabbit Run. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was the star of his high school basketball team but after graduation he got married and stuck in a mundane, dead-end job. As the story begins he runs away from his pregnant and alcoholic wife, leaving her with their toddler son. When Rabbit drives off from his Pennsylvania town, he stops at a gas station and asks the attendant for directions. The man wants to know where he is going and Rabbit’s answer is that he doesn’t know. The attendant says something to the effect of, “Directions won’t do you any good if you don’t know where you are going.” This summarizes Rabbit’s whole problem; his life has no direction, no meaning, and, aside from sex, he doesn’t know what he wants out of life.

The first thing to note about this novel is Updike’s writing style. Large parts of the narrative are stream of consciousness prose inherited directly from Joyce and Proust. This prose hangs like a dense fog over the narrative, getting deflated when contrasted with the straightforward and deceptively plain dialogue the characters engage in. The writing works on a high and low level with the abstract prose being like a secret communication between the author and the audience since most of the characters do not possess enough intellect to be able to comprehend such lofty and abstract thought. The stronger part of the writing is contained in the dialogue and this is where most of the character development takes place. While the higher level prose churns along and moves slowly, the down to Earth dialogue moves the novel along at a faster pace. This is a dialogue-driven story and the characters come to life mostly when they speak. Each one of them is distinct and unique, clearly introduced into the story so that we get a clear picture of who they are. But the contrast between the abstract prose and the simpler, more accessible conversations serves to emphasize the ordinariness of the people in the story. If Updike is a master of anything, he is a master of building literary personas through what the characters say.

So Rabbit ends up returning to his home town and meeting up with his high school basketball coach, Tothero, who gives him a temporary place to stay. Tothero personifies the two end points of a continuum on which Rabbit runs back and forth, kind of like the baskets on either side of a basketball court. On one hand, Tothero counsels Rabbit to return to Janice, his wife. On the other hand, Tothero later takes him to meet his prostitute date and introduces him to another woman named Ruth. Tothero, who is married himself, knows what the right thing to do is but chooses to do the wrong thing anyways. He appears in two key turning points in the story, once when he introduces Rabbit to Ruth and later when he is in the same hospital where Janice is having her second child. In this second appearance he again counsels Rabbit to stay with Janice and support his family.

Rabbit is immediately enamored with Ruth. She is sexually uninhibited and promiscuous. Sometimes she prostitutes herself to make money. This is how Rabbit ends up at her apartment where they sleep together, only Rabbit decides to hang around and be her new boyfriend.

The other major character is Eccles, a well-meaning Methodist minister who tries to steer Rabbit back to his family responsibilities. It is through Eccles that we see how charming Rabbit can be. The minister is taken in by his self-confidence and the two become close friends and golf partners. Eccles eventually convinces Rabbit to return to Janice but his desire to see good in Rabbit blinds him to the reality of what Rabbit is all about. Eccles can not see that his wife might be easily seduced by Rabbit and he also does not address how Rabbit should handle his newfound relationship with Ruth.

Rabbit is not only charming to Eccles, he also has an easy time getting along with most everyone else. When Rabbit decides to return to Janice, she welcomes him with open arms and her family is willing to forgive him. As the other characters rally to his side, the reader can feel inspired by his desire to make amends, do the right thing, and redeem himself. Just when you feel comfortable about rooting for him, big problems arise and Rabbit lets us all down by doing what is entirely wrong. The way that Updike builds up our expectations for his redemption is what makes Rabbit such an infuriating character in the end. After finishing the book, if you don’t hate Rabbit you’ve entirely missed the whole point. Even worse, if you hate the book because you hate Rabbit then you aren’t being honest about the power of John Updike’s writing and have also entirely missed the point.

In the end, you aren’t supposed to like Rabbit because he represents everything Updike sees as being wrong in America in the post-World War II generation. He not only lacks maturity and direction but also his concepts of freedom and hedonism are driven by a lack of responsibility. What makes Rabbit even more tragic is that he is capable of living like an adult but in the end he is a coward and runs from his difficulties rather than confronting them. Just like a timid rabbit in the wild. His self-confidence is nothing but a cover for his shallowness.

But Updike doesn’t just condemn Rabbit. This novel is a portrait of a soulless American society as well, a society that is collectively failing its own citizens. Rabbit inhabits a world where work is meaningless and his marriage is like a prison. His wife is not very smart and their parents are shortsighted and lack wisdom themselves. The church is a bastion of dullness and senility, a mild entertainment for feeble-minded old ladies. We can feel an ounce of sympathy for Rabbit because he is like a drowning man who is nowhere near a life preserver so he indulges in sex because he isn’t intellectual enough to come up with any better solutions. Family, school, and church did not prepare him for life in the real world; you have to wonder why this star basketball player did not purse a career as a professional athlete. He got a job demonstrating vegetable peelers in a department store instead. So Rabbit went amok by thinking with the wrong head like so many other men throughout the ages. Though he really doesn’t have any problems that can’t be worked through with the proper amount of effort.

In writing Rabbit Run, John Updike is telling us that America, at the end of the 1950s, has gone astray. It is a country that is spiritually and psychologically dead. For people who are blindly patriotic or unwilling to confront the types of problems our nation has had and does face now, this story can be a bitter pill to swallow. There might be times when it feels like Updike is kicking you in the stomach. If you feel like you’ve been assaulted in such a way then he has succeeded in getting his point across.

Updike, John. Rabbit Run. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1982.