Introduction

TWO WOMEN, both active agents in the art world, meet in Vermont on a single day in April for an interview. Kathryn D'Angelo is an aspiring twenty-seven-year-old art historian, critic, and cyberjournalist from New York. Her interviewee is Hope Chafetz, born Ouderkirk, a life-obsessed, seventy-nine-year-old widow, abstract painter, and the former wife of two famous postwar American artists and one art collector. Through their fictional encounter evolves Seek My Face. With the title of this often overlooked twentieth novel of “America's Man of Letters” (Pritchard 2000), John Updike draws on Psalm 27 from the Old Testament—“You speak in my heart and say, ‘Seek my face.’ Your face, Lord, will I seek”—which he includes as the prefatory inscription. Some critics have focused on the role of God in the ensuing 276-page interview that makes up the novel. However, as Andrew Tate (2008) rightly asserts, God “seems to be defined by his absence” (44) in this novel. And in the view of Thomas M. Dicken (2004), in Seek My Face it is art that addresses this absence, because “art—and its cousins, color and beauty—provide a way of seeking God's face that hymns life” (79). Hope herself was raised as a Quaker; her initial perception of the artist, as a category of human occupation, emphasizes this view of the artist as a seeker of divinity. In one striking passage she says: “to make art was the highest and purest of human activity, the closest approach to God, the God who creates Himself in this push and pull of colors” (38).

As the novel unfolds, though, the reader is reminded that art, despite any of its spiritual possibilities, most definitely occupies our material world. It is not just a pure and sublime pursuit. It is also part of cultural production and cultural life, and it is inevitably situated within a specific intellectual and practical context where power is symbolically created and relegitimized. As Hope's experiences have shown her, this creation and relegitimization happens through “dealers and buyers” as well as through agents, supporters, institutions, museums, and funding programs such as the Federal Arts Project (SMF, 16) in a solidly male-dominated environment.

IN HIS 1978 INTERVIEW with Charlie Reilly, John Updike (1994) refuted the idea that he was mostly a novelist. Asserting his gift for short fiction, he put the record straight, saying, “More and more I seem to be reduced to that although I persist in writing short stories…. The short story may be what I do best” (126). Indeed, just like dozens of other Updike stories, “The Music School,” “Guilt-Gems,” and “Deaths of Distant Friends” amply justify Alison Lurie's (1988) laudatory view of the American author as “the Chekhov of American suburbia” (3). Moreover, in his essay “The Short Story and I,” Updike himself offered a rough definition of the short story as “a shaped and polished fragment of life” (MM, 765), to which it could be added, specifically of moral life, and especially in relation to these three stories. In fact, “The Music School” (1966), “Guilt-Gems” (1979), and “Deaths of Distant Friends” (1987), written almost three decades apart, focus mainly on moral behavior and moral emotions, particularly guilt and its sibling, shame, which together create a narrative environment of suffering. As Richard Kraut (2013) puts it, “Our term ‘suffering,’ when used as an opposite to ‘happiness,’ names … a group of disagreeable feelings: sadness, fear, grief … guilt, shame” (681). However, Updike's reader, though immersed in the affliction pervasive in the narrative, does not necessarily come away with a sense of doom but, paradoxically, with some hope. Contrary to guilt and shame, which relate to the present and the past, hope points toward the future. In his exploration of guilt and shame, then, Updike paints the tableau of an ethical life that finally entails the possibility of some hope.

Guilt and shame, both negatively valenced, “self-conscious” emotions, imply a gap between moral standards and moral behavior, in particular behavior likely to have negative consequences for the happiness of others and for which there is widespread social censure. In “The Music School,” “Guilt-Gems,” and “Deaths of Distant Friends,” these emotion are evoked by either the narrator's or the main character's self-reflection and self-evaluation.

Emigration and the State

On October 4, 1913, the foreign minister of the Kingdom of Montenegro, P. Plamenić, dispatched a note to Labuda Gojnić, the interior minister:

Writing a month later, the foreign minister expressed his suspicion that the Austrians were facilitating Montenegrin emigration:

The Montenegrin ministers’ correspondence exemplifies the pre-1914 wave of overseas emigration from the Balkans, which became a major governmental concern across southeastern Europe. Bureaucrats from across the region felt that the movement of people across state borders constituted a problem and jeopardized salient state development goals. Governments started to worry about emigration for a number of reasons. Their main concern was that emigration would challenge one of the state's fundamental claims: that the state enjoyed sovereignty over its people. This included the expectation that citizens felt an emotional attachment to and loyalty toward their state. How could this claim be maintained if people left in order to live thousands of miles away? Was this not an embarrassment to a state that portrayed itself as the manifestation of the nation's destiny?

Fiction and Terrorism after 9/11

A FEW WEEKS after 9/11, two essays—one by the critic James Wood and the other by the novelist Don DeLillo—discussed how writers, and in particular American novelists, would (or should) articulate what appeared to be a looming sense of cultural rupture imposed by the attacks. In “Tell me how does it feel?” Wood predicted a retreat from social realism after such a vivid demonstration of the helplessly unknowable. How, he asks, can the novelist's task still be “to go on to the street and figure out social reality” when the world has been rendered so opaque that no one “would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now?” Reading the cultural landscape immediately after 9/11 as a setting where it is no longer possible “to imagine Don DeLillo … writing his novel Mao II,” the essay forecasts the opening of a “space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something.’”

In contrast, DeLillo's (2001) “In the Ruins of the Future,” though not questioning the prevalent sense of historical caesura that Wood identified, stresses the urgency of a creative engagement with the seemingly fragmented and unreadable new realities. Insisting on the possibility of knowing “how the world works,” his essay points to the responsibility of writers to address the protocols of representation of the unaccountable, of an otherness so alien that it appears reduced to an idea, attempting to understand what forces shape the suicidal terrorist, and the “fire of aggrieved belief” that grounds his hard and tight “apartness,” dominated by a single plot of “judgment and devastation” that erases the humanity and vulnerability of the victim (34). Without that effort, DeLillo warns, “the sense of disarticulation” carried by the term “us and them” may become unbreachable (34).

FOR THREE SUMMERS at the beginning of the 1950s, after graduating from high school and on summer vacation from Harvard, John Updike worked as a “copyboy and gofer” on his local paper, the Reading Eagle (Begley 2014, 29; De Bellis 2013, 61). His job involved taking copy “over the phone,” “running copy between newsroom, composing room and courthouse; serving editors coffee and breakfast; and sometimes … the mind-numbing tasks of compiling theater and radio timetables” (Posten 2009). Thirty years later, he recalled the job fondly, telling an interviewer (at the Eagle) that working on a paper was “a better route to writing than becoming a college instructor, as so many are doing” (Zissa [1977] 2016, 35).

Updike began his literary career at the dawn of what Mark McGurl (2009) has termed the “program era,” the post–Second World War flourishing of creative writing as a college subject. The establishment of MFA programs may have been the “most significant event in post-war American literature” (ix), but it was one that bypassed Updike. Updike seemed to represent a “dying,” now almost extinct, “breed” in American fiction (Batchelor 2013, 8), as did a number of other writers, such as Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, who had “only glancingly, if at all, gotten with the program” (29) and who often expressed skepticism about the MFA's “assembly belt” (PP, 31), producing “creative-writing classfuls” for an already overcrowded market (MM, 763),

If Updike had little in common with the increasingly prevalent model of the “writer as educationalist,” he was also, he knew, at some distance from older models, including—as he put it—the “writer as hero” (PP, 30). Literary heroism can be imagined in various ways, of course, but one version that Updike knew well was that of the “energetic and ambitious, college-educated” young reporter who “was passionately attached to his job and to the novels his experience as a reporter would prepare him to write” (Schudson 1978, 69). As Jack London's (1993) Martin Eden summed it up in 1909: “hack work and income first, masterpieces afterward” (237).

The key role of geography as an instrument for national identity formation is one of the specific characteristics of Bulgaria in the nineteenth century. Geography was given a prominent place in the curriculum as soon as a Bulgarian secular education system was established. The first textbook on the subject was published in 1835. By the end of Ottoman rule, in 1878, the total number of geography textbooks for Bulgarian primary and high schools had reached 38 (54 if reprints are counted). In terms of the number of textbooks, geography was second only to Bulgarian language—69 primers (or a total of 107 with reprints)—and almost on a par with religion (31 textbooks, or a total of 58 with reprints). Considering that the Orthodox Christian religion and the Bulgarian language were the two unquestionable pillars of the emerging national identity, the fact that geography had an equal place in the curriculum with those two subjects is indicative of its importance in shaping a sense of national belonging. History was a significantly less developed discipline than geography. The educational system functioned without a textbook on the subject until 1844, and even after that the number of Bulgarian history textbooks (10; 16 with reprints) remained modest.

The priority of geography over history was an exception to the norm followed by European educational systems in this period. In Europe, geography was regarded as an auxiliary discipline and usually was taught as part of other compulsory subjects. For example, the pedagogical concept of Jesuit colleges was that history could not be understood without some geography, while geography could not be understood without some cosmography. In France in the era of the revolution, geography became an elective subject that could be taught by the teachers of natural history or ancient languages, or by the librarian. Still, geography was most often taught as part of history courses. This was true even for the German Realgymnasien—secondary schools that focused on modern languages and the natural sciences—although their curricula included more classes in geography than those at the humanistische Gymnasien. The most popular definition of geography was that along with chronology, it was “one of the two eyes of history,” which explains why, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the most commonly used cartographic genre in the educational systems in France, Britain, and Germany was the historical atlas.

Introduction

IN HIS TWENTY-SECOND NOVEL, Terrorist (2006), John Updike portrays an American high-school boy who grows up in New Prospect, New Jersey, converts himself to Islam at age eleven, and a few years later nearly sacrifices his life for the jihad by planning to detonate a suicide bomb in the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting New Jersey and Manhattan. When almost at the end of the novel, Ahmad's Jewish high-school guidance counselor, Jack Levy, manages to enter the bomb truck and tries to prevent Ahmad from pressing the detonation button, Jack says, “Hey, come on, we're all Americans here. That's the idea, didn't they tell you that at Central High? Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans; there are even Arab-Americans” (T, 301).

Despite the obvious irony of this statement, Levy is touching upon one of the key issues of the novel: the different cultural backgrounds of the people surrounding Ahmad, who himself embodies both East and West and tries to come to terms with his hybridity. Focusing on Ahmad (Ashmawy) Mulloy and the way he relates to his multicultural environment, this chapter attempts an analysis of the fictional representation of Muslim-American identity, for which John Updike has been heavily criticized.

Terrorist appeared five years after September 11, 2001, and references the tragic World Trade Center attacks like more than one hundred other American novels that have come out since 9/11 (cf. Däwes 2010, 495). The title itself not only points to the protagonist's destiny but also refers to a problem of increasing importance: ever since 9/11 people perceived as Muslim or Arab run an even higher risk of being associated with terrorism. As Mike Davis (2001) points out, “The real burden of the new urban fear—the part that is not hallucinatory or hyperbolized—is borne by those who fit the racial problem of white anxiety: Arab and Muslim Americans…. For those caught squarely in the middle of this paranoid gestalt … there is the threat of violence” (48).

IF JOHN UPDIKE's STATUS as a writer were to be assessed on the basis of the nine novels he wrote after Rabbit at Rest (1990), it is unlikely that he would be considered, as he is, one of the most important American novelists of the half-century period in which he wrote. Few are willing to claim greatness on Updike's behalf on the evidence of such novels as Brazil (1994), Toward the End of Time (1997), Terrorist (2006), or The Widows of Eastwick (2008). To this list one could add Villages (2004), a novel that received an unenthusiastic response from critics and that has generated relatively little academic interest, lending credibility to the prevalent view that the imaginative and literary powers of writers of fiction decrease as they age. To that inevitable impediment of nature, Updike (2004a) added an impediment of his own: although sensing that Villages “might be a bad idea,” he stuck with it, he said, out of “the habit of writing,” adding that “finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it.”

Despite its perfunctory composition, and whatever its literary merits, Villages offers one unique source of interest in the assessment of the overall Updike oeuvre: it is its author's final lengthy fictional exploration of his great subject, middle-class American adultery in the second half of the twentieth century. And although Updike was drawn to the sexual escapades of the adulterous middle classes in several novels and countless short stories, it is with his 1968 novel Couples that Villages has the greatest affinity: both novels are set in small New England towns, both examine the sexual affairs of the inhabitants of these micro societies, and both have as the protagonist an adulterous male. The two novels, moreover, act as markers and—published thirty-five or so years apart—almost as bookends in Updike's writing on American adultery. Couples, then, will be a necessary and valuable point of reference for this essay on Updike's portrayal of women in Villages. But one cannot consider this topic without first referring to the vast and varied critical response to the representation of women in Updike's fiction from Rabbit, Run (1960) onward.

IN A RATHER ANTAGONISTIC ESSAY, “John Updike's Complacent God,” James Wood (1999) laments what he perceives as the absence of intensity from his subject's fiction. The creator of Rabbit Angstrom, he suggests, shares with his most famous protagonist a fondness for rest and tranquility that precludes both fervent belief and anguished doubt. “The result,” concludes Wood, “is a mild gratitude for reality rather than an irritable searching after metaphysics” (235). This is, to be sure, a curious allegation to level at a writer who is rare among major twentiethcentury authors in his dedication to an openly theological wrestling with questions of devotion, revelation, and ethics. Indeed, a wealth of criticism already engages with the rich range of religious ideas that animate the immense, fifty-year canon of Updike's collected fiction, poetry, memoir, and criticism. An entire edited collection has been dedicated to the subject of Updike's relationship with religion and, to borrow James Yerkes's (1999) subtitle, the writer's “sense of the sacred and the motions of grace.” Marshall Boswell is one of a number of scholars to address the significance of Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, who, he notes, were not only fundamental to saving faith for Updike but “also provided him with a model for his own theological and aesthetic vision” (Boswell 2006, 43). A plethora of other critics have read Updike's work in relation to a variety of concepts and practices associated with belief including, for example, heresy (Duvall 1991; Tate 2008), redemption (Ralph Wood 1988), and sermons (Detweiler 1989). James Wood's apparent antipathy for Updike's fiction might suggest a disapproval of his unusual willingness to profess Christian belief, though the critic is clear that he is not proposing a conversion to atheism as a route to improving the work (235). More telling, however, is Wood's dismissal of what he terms “mild gratitude” as it implies an incomprehension regarding the primacy of thankfulness in Updike's writing and worldview.

Other critics, in contrast, take the writer's appreciative eye much more seriously.

The Balkans played a sensational—if not always fully understood—part in the outbreak of the First World War. When, in June 1914, a Bosnian Serb nationalist shot and killed the Habsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg, he also delivered to Austria- Hungary a casus belli against its regional rival, Serbia. But the consequent diplomatic crisis turned this Balkan imbroglio between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into a Europe-wide concern. During the “July days” that followed the assassination, Europe's leaders activated a series of interlocking military mobilizations and counter-mobilizations, thereby triggering, in the space of barely a month, a global conflict unprecedented in its destructive capacities, the first war to be called a “world war. The rival armies dashing toward the Belgian coast in August 1914, the static sinews of trenches cut into the soil of Flanders, the besieged fortresses of Galicia, the Battles of the Marne, Verdun, Tannenberg, Caparetto, and Gallipoli—Princip is often presented as the hapless “trigger” of all this, a mere pretext for the warring rivalries of the European great powers to break out into hostilities. Thus are the Balkans relegated to the periphery of Europe once again.

Explosive events garner more attention than slow-burning historical processes. The history of the prewar era in Europe was pockmarked with minor eruptions from the Balkan “powder keg.” The region was the Gordian knot of that taxing diplomatic entanglement of the late nineteenth century, the great Eastern Question, which begged an answer from the European powers as to how best to manage the obvious decline of the Ottoman Empire. Informed observers in 1914 would also have recalled an earlier sensational regicide in these parts: that of Aleksandar Obrenović, the ruling Serbian monarch, in a palace coup in Belgrade in 1903. The grisly details of this killing had shocked Europeans. So, too, had the atrocities carried out by the national armies of the Balkan alliance (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria) in the Balkan wars of 1912–13. (These conflicts were soon eclipsed by the First World War itself, but for a brief time they were front-page news throughout much of Europe, and were the subject of a detailed and assiduously compiled report commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.) Few Europeans, however, properly understood Balkan affairs in the years before 1914.

In this chapter I explore the correlation between the notion of liberation and attitudes to the economy in late nineteenth-century Bulgaria. The concept of “liberation in progress” is meant to imply that the reestablishment of the Bulgarian state as a result of the interrelationship of the Bulgarian national liberation movement, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and the decisions of the European Great Powers at the Berlin Congress in 1878 was not taken for granted. It was a prolonged process, not a straightforward and easy one. The enormous changes in social life included but were not limited to the establishment of a state apparatus, of new local administration, of a legal framework, as well as of economic, educational, healthcare, and cultural institutions that did not exist under Ottoman rule.

Bulgaria, like the other Balkan countries, experienced economic difficulties after emancipation from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the Berlin Congress in 1878. The Balkan countries have various but equally compelling explanations: disconnection from the large market of the Ottoman Empire, unfavorable trends in international trade, foreign competition, insufficient investments in productive spheres, lack of entrepreneurship, and so forth. I draw attention to some related yet distinct aspects of this issue. First I consider how independence—the autonomy to implement a national policy—affected attitudes to economic development and what the human, ideological, and institutional resources that informed these strategies were. A further question to be explored is how the economy was embedded in political discourse and in developmental strategies.

The relevance of these questions stems from the statements of several nineteenth-century Bulgarian politicians that society-level transformations during the crucial post-liberation era had to confront widespread illusions connected to a certain type of economic culture. The term “economic culture”— described as behaviors or attitudes toward a national economy— includes knowledge, information, and their application in the management of economic activities. Emotions and sentiments also play a key role. Since economic culture allows for different approaches to a great number of sources, it would be impossible to discuss all of them in one chapter. This examination is based mainly on texts that are relevant to specific economic problems such as statistics, parliamentary proceedings, published programs and program documents of political parties, protocols, reports, documents of professional organizations, petitions, memoranda, economic journals, and monographs from the era.

Over the last two centuries, historians have committed themselves to the task of defining Europe, of defining what it is and what made (or makes) it. Scholars have adopted various approaches, from longue duree models tracing environmental, philosophical, and religious factors, to courte duree models narrating military, diplomatic, and economic developments. What all of these histories share is a view that it was in Europe's power centers—Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vienna, Rome, and, yes, even London—that Europe originated. Constantine, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Marx, Metternich, Bismarck, Mazzini, and Monnet are just some of the usual figures who leap from the pages of treatises on the creation of a European order or a European consciousness. But were all the Euro-architects wielders of prestige? Were the centers of scientific innovation, religious hegemony, capital accumulation, or military might the preordained subjects in consolidating Europe's object peripheries into something grander, something European? My goal in this chapter is to show how the object of expansion, the periphery—in this case the Balkan periphery—could and did envision itself as a willing subject in making Europe, instead of just an object of the process. I do this through the example of two very different mid-nineteenth-century Dalmatian elites and their two very different plans for ways the Balkan maritime province of Dalmatia could serve as a model for Europeanization.

These elites saw Dalmatia not just as intrinsic to a Europeanizing project because the region connected western European commerce and intellectual movements through its eastern Adriatic caravan routes to the core Balkan lands that crossed over into the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. They also saw Dalmatia as a microcosm of where much of the population diversity politics increasingly plaguing European communities was being played out. Dalmatia's population in the mid-nineteenth century counted about 5 percent who identified as Catholic Italian speakers (many of whom controlled local government and trade), 75 percent Catholic Slavic speakers, 20 percent Serb Orthodox Slavic speakers, with some influential micro-Sephardic Jewish and Albanian communities in some of its port towns. If Dalmatia could progress in its global outreach while peacefully negotiating its internal differences, should Europe not look to it as a useful test case for resolving similar issues throughout its many lands?

SINCE 1957, EUROPEAN READERS, reviewers, and critics have enjoyed an ongoing relationship—perhaps best described as a love-hate relationship— with John Updike's fiction, poetry, and essays. Updike was one of the writers fortunate enough to be noticed on both sides of the Atlantic early in his career. His inaugural publication, a collection of poems titled by his British publisher Hoping for a Hoopoe, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Notices of his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, appeared in TLS, the Spectator, and New Statesman. One might attribute such early notoriety to Updike's having been affiliated with major American publishing houses (first Harper, then Knopf) that had standing agreements with European partners. It's unlikely, though, that he would have continued to receive such wide attention had Europeans found his work lacking in either style or substance. In fact, for the next half-century, his novels, short story collections, and even volumes of collected essays generated extensive commentary in major UK newspapers and journals. Additionally, while one might expect to find a large number of reviews in English, Irish, and Scottish publications, Updike's work was reviewed regularly in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Austria. Updike also developed a loyal readership in Eastern Europe; reviews and scholarly critiques appeared in Romania, Czechoslovakia (later in the Czech Republic), Hungary, Yugoslavia, and (later) Serbia.

Almost as quickly, European critics were contributing to the fastgrowing body of Updike scholarship. For example, Updike's 1963 novel The Centaur became the subject of articles published in Germany (Haas 1967, Seelbach 1970, Heuermann 1988), France (Terrier 1975), Czechoslovakia (Stehlikova 1978), and Portugal (Funck 1986). The Rabbit novels generated even more interest. Between 1957 and 2009, Updike's writing was the subject of dozens of articles and chapters by European scholars publishing in European and American journals. Among the more notable studies, the British scholar Judie Newman's 1988) monograph John Updike in Macmillan's Modern Novelists series has become an indispensable guide to the early fiction.