IN HIS MOVING TRIBUTE to Updike, U and I, a strange metacritical, antemortem eulogy prompted by the death of a fellow writer, Donald Barthelme, Nicholson Baker (1991) writes:

Later in the book, Baker gets to the gist of what he is undertaking: “Memory criticism, understood as a form of commentary that relies entirely on what has survived in a reader's mind … is possibly a new and useful way of discussing literature” (88).

The notion of “memory criticism” may sound heretical or at least unorthodox in academia, but Baker here touches on a profound truth that has to do with the perennity of the writer—his “ticket to immortality” (Baker, 143), as Updike himself puts it. Though Baker had the foresight to write his tribute some eighteen years before Updike's death, our own lament as readers may best be given voice by Martin Amis's (2009) response in the Guardian to the news of Updike's death in 2009: “Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself, ‘How would Updike have done it?’ This is a very cold day for literature.”

As the first decade of our orphanage as readers and, perhaps, as writers is coming to a close, homage to Updike can perhaps find its natural locus in the more haunting images in his work, in particular those images that reveal a pentimento of death, despite his celebrated “yea-saying.” Diverging from the familiar readings in Updike critical studies that have tended to foreground the life-affirming, salvation-oriented aspects of his work (for example, Burchard 1971), this essay seeks to map Updike's journey into night and to sound the grief that, like a basso continuo, accompanies author and readers alike up to, in Henry James's (1909) phrase, “the point where the death comes in” (317).

GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS (2000), Updike's only novel set entirely in Europe, is dedicated to his second wife, Martha, with a passage in Occitan: “De dezir mos cors no fina / Vas selha ren qu'ieu pus am” (“The desire of my heart is endless and only devoted to her, beloved among all others” [Goldin 1973, 102]). In this poem, the troubadour poet Jaufre Rudel (ca. 1150–1200) addresses his lady as his “Amors de terra londana,” his love from a distant land. Rudel offered the most extreme example of the courtly love ideal of “amor de lonh,” a love that depends upon distance, upon not possessing the beloved. According to popular legend, he had fallen in love with the countess of Tripoli purely from reports of her virtues, never having laid eyes on her. He set off for Tripoli, only to become ill en route, and he died in the countess's arms on arrival (Goldin 1973, 100). Within the frame of Updike's novel, only Feng (later Claudius), the adulterous lover of Hamlet's mother and then her second husband, quotes from the troubadours. In the classic exposition of courtly love, love cannot exist in marriage. It depends on obstacles, whether distance, a husband, or—as in Updike's modern updating of the story of Tristan and Isolde in his 1994 novel Brazil—on the barriers of race and class. Feng deliberately absents himself from the Danish court for some thirty years, unable to bear the sight of his beloved's marriage to his brother Horwendil. But he remains devoted to his entirely virtuous lady, Gerutha (Gertrude), until she finally succumbs to his advances at the age of forty-eight.

Critics of Updike have related his interest in courtly love to Denis de Rougemont's influential thesis in Love in the Western World (1963) and its sequel Love Declared (1983). Updike reviewed the latter title and returned to its ideas in several reprises (Begley 2014; Corbellari 1999; Duffy 2016; Grimbert 2004; Schiff 1998). De Rougemont emphasizes the way in which the love relations of men and women depended on a particular historical moment, so that their affective life was conditioned by social circumstances.

IS IT POSSIBLE to read, understand, and interpret John Updike's works without making reference to the religious themes within them? Would such a reading inevitably shed one dimension of his fiction and make it flat, deprived of some of its essence, significance, and beauty?

The answers to these questions are both yes and no. The reception of Updike's works in Serbia from the mid-1960s until the 1990s, when the country was still a part of the former Yugoslavia, was certainly marked by avoidance of any discussion of their religious content and meaning. However, this critical limitation did not prevent Yugoslav readers from hailing Updike as a writer of great style who had much to tell them about the world he was describing. Whether Updike gained a good reputation in spite of these reductive readings, or thanks to them, is moot because, either way, his work allowed for literary merit to prevail over ideological import.

John Updike was introduced to Serbian readers in 1966 when a selection of his stories from The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers was translated into the language then called Serbo-Croatian (Apdajk 1966). Vera Ilić, the translator, wrote the afterword, which she began by observing that “John Updike, the American writer who is still unknown in our country, has been warmly received by American readers” (Ilić 1966, 257).

To understand how and why Updike's reputation grew in Serbia and the ways his works were read, it is necessary to understand what “our country” meant at the time. Ilić was referring to the country officially named the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, which had been founded in 1943 and which disintegrated during the wars in the 1990s. The republics of Yugoslavia were Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the principle of state sovereignty laid down by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia began to unravel and many European states slowly turned inside out—that is, institutions of social policy were projected outward across borders, contra the Westphalia provisions. The unlikely protagonists of this transformation were consuls posted to the Ottoman Empire and its successors. Their undertakings showed the limits of Great Powers’ power and facilitated small states’ entry into the international system as forces with remarkable gravity.

Serbia sent its fist diplomatic mission abroad in 1804, with the outbreak of the First Serbian Uprising. It took the three-man deputation consisting of a priest, a tradesman, and a cavalryman a month to get to St. Petersburg. The Serbs were seeking support for their uprising, and one of the three men, Petar Čardaklija, was married to a Russian and so thought to give Russia a try. In his memoirs of the journey, the priest, Matija Nenadović, wrote: “Thus Columbus had set out with his band on the open sea to find America and make Europe known to her; and today we set out on the quiet Danube to find Russia— though we haven't a clue where it is, but only that we had heard about its existence from songs—to make Serbia known to Russia!”

The journey was marked by broken-down wagons, blowing sand, a shortage of money, occasional gleeful encounters with expatriate Serbian tavern owners, and frequent reminders of their own inferior clothing, manners, and diplomatic skills as they met with Russian consuls along the way and statesmen in St. Petersburg. Once arrived in the Russian capital, for several days the delegation were too timid to leave the rooms where they were staying. Finally they had an audience with the tsarist foreign minister, the illustrious Polish nobleman Adam Czartoryski, who advised them to form a government, “because neither Russia nor any other state will communicate with a person, but only with a nation and a governing council [sinod].”

Over a century later, after the collapse of the continental empires—the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and the Russian—one Austrian diplomat of South Slavic origin, Alexander Musulin von Gomirje, wrote with grudging admiration of the tenacity of Serbia's diplomacy over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

The Balkans are commonly associated with backwardness. Why not with forwardness? There are good reasons to see the region and its constituent states as precursors of events in western Europe. Although the region, in the modern period, was less industrialized than much of the rest of Europe, the politicians and publics of the Balkans contemplated and even anticipated larger political trends.

Although the honor of being the first nation-state is usually accorded to France, it is perhaps more just to treat Serbia and Greece as the first genuine nation-states. The political ideas of the early Balkan nation builders, especially among the Serbs, were not diluted by enlightened imperialism of the Napoleonic variety. The nation-states that emerged in the Balkans in the 1820s were a model for Europe, and then for the world, precisely because they were inherently adaptable and pluralistic. For example, Serbs did not propose that Serbian ideas were right for Europe and the world, but rather that what Serbs had done, others might do. The Greek model associated national revolution with both Romanticism and classicism, so that Europeans who supported Greeks against the Ottoman Empire could believe they were taking part in a universal project of liberation. These first Balkan unifications preceded the Italian and German ones by roughly half a century—hence our proposition that the historian studying European nation-states must start first with the Balkans and only then seek echoes farther west. The Italian unification, like the Greek, involved a confusion of the individual and the collective: The liberation of the nation was conceived as the liberation of a national person, principled and worthy of emulation. The German unification was more like the Serbian, its claims generally limited to those of power and folk, not universal principles. Later, in the 1920s, the Balkan model of statehood was applied throughout eastern Europe as a result of the settlements made following the First World War.

The national revolutions in the Balkans did not prejudge which nations were coherent and which would gain statehood, but they did provide a model, one that is known in other, non-European, historical settings as anti-imperial or anticolonial. The integration of Balkan nation-states, a process that began in the early nineteenth century, had to and did involve the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

HISTORY WAS IMPORTANT to Flannery O'Connor, but she tended to see almost all historical events, developments, and figures from the perspective of her Christian faith. To her, the most important historical events were Christ's birth and, especially, his Crucifixion. In the first event, God became human; in the second, he suffered and died to redeem people from their sins and win them eternal life. It was in the light of these two transformative interventions by God into human history that O'Connor saw and understood every other historical occurrence and personality. She cared deeply about the history of the world, her nation, and her region, and she was often greatly troubled by historical developments, especially modern ones. Her faith in God, however, allowed her to view history, including her own, with a certain inner peace. She trusted that all would ultimately be right, and she particularly trusted that her own physical suffering was neither pointless nor cruel. She seems to have had little fear of death. She suspected that for her it would come early, but she seemed at peace with the prospect.

A great deal of commentary on O'Connor deals with how she thought about history, about existence in time. But much scholarship also tries to situate her in time, viewing her in various historical contexts. Some of those contexts—especially those of region, race, and gender—are not necessarily the ones O'Connor herself most emphasized. In any case, they will be discussed more fully later in this book. Instead, one purpose of the present chapter is to survey some other historical approaches to O'Connor and her writings. Another purpose is to explore how O'Connor herself understood history and particularly how she understood the history of her own era.

Robert E. Golden's bibliography of early O'Connor studies gives some sense of how commentators situated O'Connor in history during her career's first decade.