 First edition | |
| Author | John Updike |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | 1964 |
| ISBN | 978-0394418810 |
The Centaur is a novel by John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Portions of the novel first appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker . [1] [2]
The French translation of the novel won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). [3]
The story concerns George Caldwell, a school teacher, and his son Peter, outside of Alton (i.e., Reading), Pennsylvania. The novel explores the relationship between the depressive Caldwell and his anxious son, loosely based on John Updike's relationship with his father, Wesley Updike, a teacher at Shillington High School. [4] George has largely given up on life; what glory he knew, as a football player and soldier in World War I, has passed. He feels put upon by the school's principal, and he views his students as hapless and uninterested in anything he has to teach them. Peter, meanwhile, is a budding aesthete who idolizes Vermeer and dreams of becoming a painter in a big city, like New York. He has no friends his age, and regularly worries that his peers might detect his psoriasis, which stains his skin and flecks his clothes every season but summer. One thing George and Peter share is the desire to get out, to escape their hometown. This masculine desire for escape appears in Updike's famed "Rabbit" novels. Similarly, the novel's image of Peter's mother alone on an untended farm is one we later see in Updike's 1965 novel Of the Farm . [5]
Describing The Centaur as “a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features” literary critic Jonathan Miller in The New York Review of Books writes:
In [a] sense it is another A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Updike’s didactic allegory suffers by contrast with the delicacy with which Joyce uses the myth of Daedalus...the book [is] damaged by the necessity which Updike makes out of his own virtue. His sly adjectival prose creates an extraordinary surface effect… [6]
Miller continues: “I say he has made a necessity out of his own virtue, but perhaps I should say virtuosity, since it is his enslavement to his own bravura skill which finally disqualifies this novel from genuine literary consideration.” [7]
Author Anthony Burgess, noting evidence of “pedantry” in Updike’s mythological parallels, praises The Centaur as “a noble attempt at adding fresh dimensions to a contemporary story by calling on ancient myth.” [8] Burgess writes:
[T]he brilliance of the language seemed no longer to be functioning in a void, unrelated to the subject matter of the book: it was appropriate to the other all complexity of the overall image; it was the true link between the story and the myth. [9]
Burgess closes with this fulsome praise for Updike: “He is one of America’s most exciting talents, but much of the excitement is still to come.” [10]
Like James Joyce in Ulysses , Updike drew on the myths of antiquity in an attempt to turn a modern and common scene into something more profound, a meditation on life and man's relationship to nature and eternity. [11] [12] George is both the Centaur Chiron and Prometheus (some readers might see George's son Peter as Prometheus), Mr. Hummel, the automobile mechanic, is Hephaestus (AKA Vulcan); and so forth. [13]
The novel's structure is unusual; the narrative shifts from present day (late 1940s) to prospective (early 1960s), from describing the characters as George, Vera, and the rest, to the Centaur, Venus, and so forth. It also is punctuated with a feverish dream scene and George's obituary. Near the end of the novel, Updike includes two untranslated Greek sentences. Their translation is as follows:
Having an incurable wound, he delivered himself into the cave. Wanting, and being unable, to have an end, because he was immortal, [then with] Prometheus offering himself to Zeus to become immortal for him, thus he died.
This quote is from Bibliotheca 2.5.4, and describes the death of Chiron.
“Updike’s willingness to assign tremendous significance to his childhood home reaches a crescendo in The Centaur, a powerful attempt to mythologize the artist’s early portrait by returning, as James Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), to ancient Greek stories.”—Author and critic Stacey Olster in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (2006) [14]
Novelist and literary critic Joyce Carol Oates reports that The Centaur represents a “balance” between “the classical-artistic-‘immoral’” aspects of Updike’s creative interests and his Calvanistic background. [15] Oates writes:
The Centaur, being a relatively early and emotionally biographical work, is valuable in its obvious statement of the dichotomy in the author’s imagination between the “pagan” and the “Christian”....surely the example of Joyce’s Ulysses was always in his mind…” [16]
Oates reports that Updike’s wished to provide his protagonist George Caldwell—and for himself—“another spiritual dimension in which they might be heroic without being heretical.” [17]
A centaur, occasionally hippocentaur, also called Ixionidae, is a creature from Greek mythology with the upper body of a human and the lower body and legs of a horse that was said to live in the mountains of Thessaly. In one version of the myth, the centaurs were named after Centaurus, and, through his brother Lapithes, were kin to the legendary tribe of the Lapiths.
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
In Greek mythology, Chiron was held to be the superlative centaur amongst his brethren since he was called the "wisest and justest of all the centaurs".
Transatlantic Review was a literary journal founded in 1959 by Joseph F. McCrindle, who remained its editor until he closed the magazine in 1977. Published quarterly, at first in Rome and then in London and New York, TR was known for its eclectic mix of short stories and poetry—by both young, previously unpublished writers and prominent authors such as Samuel Beckett, Iris Murdoch, Grace Paley and John Updike—as well as drawings, essays, and interviews with writers and theater and film directors.
The Poorhouse Fair (1959) was the first novel by the American author John Updike. A second edition included an introduction by the author and was slightly revised.
Of the Farm is a 1965 novel by the American author John Updike. Of the Farm was his fourth novel. The story concerns Joey Robinson, a divorced, thirty-five-year-old Manhattan advertising executive who visits his mother on her unfarmed farm in rural Pennsylvania. He has come with his new wife, Peggy and her son, Richard, a precocious eleven-year-old. The novel explores both Joey's relationship to his widowed mother, a flinty woman who reveres her farm, and to Peggy, a kind, sensual woman. Joey feels guilt for leaving his mother, and anger at her stubborn refusal to leave the farm, and anger at her from having uprooted his late father from the suburbs to move to the farm decades ago. Joey is buffeted by doubt, angst, and anger, and is pinballed between his dueling mother and Peggy.
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories is a collection of 19 works of short fiction by John Updike. The volume is Updike's first collection of short stories, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1962. It includes the stories "Wife-Wooing" and "A&P ", which have both been anthologized.
The War Against Cliché (2001) is an anthology of essays, book reviews and literary criticism from the British author Martin Amis. The collection received the National Book Critics Circle award in 2001.
Olinger Stories: A Selection is a collection of 11 works of short fiction by John Updike published by Vintage Books in 1964.
The lime tree, or linden, (Tilia) is important in the mythology, literature, and folklore of a number of cultures.
“Pigeon Feathers” is a work of short fiction by John Updike which first appeared in The New Yorker on April 27, 1956. The story was collected in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Music School: Short Stories is a collection of 20 works of short fiction by John Updike, first appearing individually in The New Yorker. The stories were collected in this volume by Alfred A. Knopf in 1966.
Museums and Women and Other Stories is a collection of 25 works of short fiction by John Updike, first appearing individually in literary journals. The stories were collected by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972.
“The Music School” is a work of short fiction by John Updike that first appeared in The New Yorker on December 12, 1964. The story was collected in the volume of Updike's fiction The Music School: Short Stories (1966), published by Alfred A. Knopf.
"The Happiest I've Been" is a work of short fiction by John Updike, first appearing in The New Yorker on January 3, 1959. The story was collected in The Same Door (1959) published by Alfred A. Knopf.
“Giving Blood” is a work of short fiction by John Updike first appearing in The New Yorker on March 29, 1963. The story was collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (1979), published by Fawcett Publications.
“Wife-Wooing” is a work of short fiction by John Updike which first appeared in The New Yorker on March 12, 1960. The story was collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (1979), published by Fawcett Publications.
“Problems” is a work of short fiction by John Updike first appearing in The New Yorker on November 3, 1975. The story was collected in Problems and Other Stories (1979) published by Alfred A. Knopf.
“Ace in the Hole" is a work of short fiction by John Updike that first appeared in The New Yorker on April 9, 1955. The story was collected in the volume of Updike's fiction The Same Door (1959), published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Afterlife and Other Stories is a collection of 22 works of short fiction and a novella by John Updike. The volume was published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf.