Spiritual clarity is a concept perhaps as obscure and fleeting of any of life’s elusive and rare human sentiments. That which defines the relationship between man and God, varied and esoteric as the description for this relationship may be, is often difficult assimilate into one’s personal worldview. For young Americans in particular, a surrounding incursion of material and mainstream cultural interests make this an even more difficult enterprise.Especially where generation gaps have had the impact of differentiating the ideological predisposition of children from parents, such vestiges to history as the deeply isolating tendencies of ethnic and religious traditionalism would clash pointedly with the burgeoning self-awareness and critique inquisitiveness of those coming of age in a secular cultural context.
This is largely the underlying principle of two works of distinct ideological commonality and contrasting stylistic presentation, with Phillip Roth’s The of the Jews and John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers deriving from different religious traditions, sharply different narrative impulses and, ultimately, almost identical moral impulses. Roth and Updike are alike moved by the struggle of their generation, many of whom were among the first generation of American born children of immigrants.It is herein that the religious motives of the two works emerge, setting a similar agenda through the age and conviction of their respective protagonists. Phillip Roth, born in 1933, and John Updike, born in 1932, would develop irrespective of one another as marked literary forces in the latter 20th century.
The former, a Newark-born son of a Jewish family, would pepper his work with the type of dark, modernist humor that carried with it the inherent satirical intent to puncture that which was in need of deflation.For Roth, there would always seem to be an intent, as clearly moves the narrative of Conversion, to make ridiculous such sacred subjects as family and religion. In his protagonist, however, this intent manifests differently. As critic George Seales notes of the short story in question, it “conveys an emphatic, straight-forward message, as it juxtaposes to very different approaches to religion.
Significantly, Ozzie’s position is neither profound nor radical. He seeks not really to challenge traditional belief, but to see it validated. This authentication is, of course, what [Rabbi] Binder is unable to provide. (Searles, 60)Such is to note that Ozzie is not biased to the finding, as he argues, that there is no cause in Jewish theology available to reject the teachings of Christianity and particularly the tenet that Jesus is the immaculately conceived son of God. Instead, he is truly moved by the desire toward inquiry and the wanton willingness to resist the assumptions of his ancestors.
His identification with Christianity is incidental of his resistance to the conformity and, most importantly, the apparent absence of satisfying rationality in the religious tradition which enveloped him.To this extent, Ozzie’s inquiries place in direct contrast to one another the modern ideals of secular America with those of the old world religion. Roth, in one passage notes of the protagonist that “what Ozzie wanted to know was always different. The first time he had wanted to know how Rabbi Binder could call the Jews "The Chosen People" if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to be created equal. Rabbi Binder tried to distinguish for him between political equality and spiritual legitimacy, but what Ozzie wanted to know, he insisted vehemently, was different.
That was the first time his mother had to come. ” (Roth, 1) We find in this passage an important outcome, in addition to what we are provided of the character’s personality. The sense that asking questions is particularly forbidden where the possibility of exposing the ignorance of clergy is a possibility. Naturally, this constitutes a problematic flimsiness in an all-enompassing world-view, leading to the existential crisis which sends Ozzie fleeing to the roof, blood spurting from his corporally-punished nose, shouting ‘is it me? ’This is a moment of devastating realization for one who openly and aggressively courted such.
But in David, the protagonist of Updike’s work, such revelation is come upon incidentally. Through his reading of science fiction, the generally dedicated Christian by birth and education would prove a counterpoint to Ozzie, not necessarily moved to inquiry or deconstruction more or less than his piers. By accident or by the eventuality that all most encounter such, David finds an explicit and plain-spoken refutation as to the divinity of Christ through the writings of the highly regarded H. G. Wells.
The concept was immediately terrifying to the child, and in a manner which is far more somber than the rollicking sequence in Conversion, Updike nonetheless puts the reader through that same whirling sense of bewilderment. The revelation to David meant that somehow, against all that he was taught, “at a definite spot in time and space a brain black with the denial of Christ’s divinity had been suffered to exist; that the universe had not spit out this ball of tar but allowed it to continue to its blasphemy, to grow old, win honors, wear a hat, write books that, if true, collapsed everything into a jumble of horror. (Updike, 119)This is a sensation that, with so melodrama, is nonetheless fully sincere, and driven to such lengths of personal anguish by a sense that these disease do nothing less than undermine the protagonist’s belief system. He is then forced—as one often seems strangely compelled by the contradictory turmoil of adolescence—to pit his traditionally understood worldview against this new need for inquiry.
In both Conversion and Pigeon Feathers, the demand for religious inquiry precipitates a yet more devastating realization for the characters in question.Namely, the failure of figures of self-proclaimed authority to address these complex and important conceptual demands would force the revelation that the previous generation’s distinctions from secular culture were perhaps not to be treasured with the fierce defensiveness which seems to characterize their clergy here. Indeed, according the Shurr (2002), who speaks here in direct reference to the Updike parable, “adolescence. . . is characterized by the slow discovery that [one] is ignorant of what all the adult world clearly and corruptly knows.
(Shurr, 329) The implication here is that there is a conspiracy against the world’s youth, wherein the prior generations seem wholly apparent of their own inconsistency, flimsiness and ignorance and yet unwilling to relent to the insolent curiosity of the developing mind. As we approach the concept of the generation gap as, perhaps even more importantly than religion, predicating the element of conflict within and surrounding both Ozzie and David, it becomes more readily apparent that much of the rigid traditionalism found in religious doctrine is made so by its insecurity amidst secularist American doctrine.It is to this end that we are left with the particularly self-evident observation in Updike’s story, which characterizes perhaps most succinctly our current issue of conflict. As David looks at his parents library, dust, decay and a host of hopelessly outdated works help to give tangible visual concreteness to the sense of a serious generational distance. Of the books, Updike tells that “the odor of faded taste made him feel the ominous gap between himself and his parents, the insulting gulf of time that existed before he was born. (Updike, 117)It is thus that it becomes a more fully formed recognition, common to both works here discussed, that age and inevitability, not insolence or hostility, have given over the characters to their unyielding inquiry.
The defiance that is central to the parallel experiences of Ozzie and David is hardly intentional. Quite in fact, neither boy has entered into the scenario constituting his is religious epiphany with the intent of shaking up the shared sentiment.Instead, there is a rather accidental quality to their shared experience, in which the natural proclivity toward inquisitiveness has made it impossible to continue accepting abstract religious belief without subjecting it to intense rational scrutiny. For the younger generation reflected by the two protagonist’s here addressed, there is yet a greater level of importance to the revelatory refusal of one’s religion.
Apart from this seemingly more radical generational departure is the yet more historically bound commonality by which the succeeding generation comes to scrutinize, deconstruct and ultimately reject the belief system of the generation directly prior. In this regard, the stories by Roth and Update are less specifically intended as religious critique. Indeed, that these works effectively channel theological refutations through youths who instinctively turn their critical insights on their own faiths demonstrates that in such a discourse, rationality shows no religious favoritism.Instead, the young men are moved to posit positions which, if one is to take them strictly upon their theological merits, seem to oppose one another, with Ozzie approaching the rejection of his Judaism with a practical syllogism regarding the possible veracity of the Holy Trinity and David disabusing himself of Christianity’s seemingly over-simplified conceptualization of the awesomeness of divinity.
However, in both instances, the content which is rejected is merely incidental.Of greater central importance is the act of inquisitive determination which overcomes the protagonists discussed here. For any of the differences which are made clearly apparent in the stylistic representations of Roth and Updike, they share a clear derivation from a point of inflection in America’s history, where the children of immigrants and outsiders had begun to differentiate themselves in pointedly American ways from the isolating and aged traditions of those before them.
