Hildegard Hoeller, Babson College Gold, Post-Modernity, and Realism in John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich

This question is raised by John Updike's realist 1981 novel Rabbit is Rich, which climaxes in an extraordinary elaborate gold sceneÑa scene clearly in the tradition of the gold scene in Frank Norris's naturalist 1899 novel McTeague in which the miser Trina rather ecstatically bathes herself in gold coins than earn interest from them by reducing them to mere signs. The immediacy of the gold standard debate gives a context to this scene, as Walter Benn Michaels has shown in Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Updike's scene, a scene that connects gold coins and sex even more explicitly, obviously lacks such a context. Updike's hero Harry Angstrom, a Toyota car dealer who is both comfortable in his well-off middle class life and dissatisfied with its limitations, decides to convert his money into South African Krugerrands. He fantasizes that the Krugerrands might be an anchor, a security, even a triumph in a world and life that is heading for an (economic and personal midlife) crisis, that is "running out of gas" (Updike 2). Both as economic and sexual investment, Harry brings the coins home and literally uses them to have sex with his wife. In this climactic scene Updike explores the inner life of his rather inarticulate everyman hero and the possibility for expression, symbolization, and meaning in Harry's existence. While the novel and its author profess to a rather untheorized realism¹, this key scene negotiates the very nature of Harry's reality and the possibility for its representation. In this gold scene, we can find Updike's post-modern sense of the world, the nature of his realism, and thus the central role gold still plays in "the issue of representation." Gold money now, rather than being a reliable standard, an anchor for meaning and value, has become a dazzling and anxiety producing discursive site that engages Harry Angstrom in "an indefinite play of referrals that forever postpones the possibility of an actual value that would be anything more than writing"--as Goux describes it (119-120).

Describing Harry's purchase of South African gold coins, Updike immediately reveals that Harry enters into a number of discourses surrounding gold.

Gold letters rimmed in black and very small simply say FISCAL ALTERNATIVES and below that, smaller yet, Old Coins, Silver and Gold Bought and Sold. [...] [Harry] comes out of Fiscal Alternatives with thirty Krugerrands purchased for $377.14 each, including commission and sales tax, coming to $11,314.20. [...] The coins come in cunning plastic cylinders of fifteen each, with round blue-tinted lids that suggested dollhouse toilet seats; indeed, bits of what seemed toilet paper were stuffed in the hole of this lid to make the fit tight and to conceal even a glimmer of the sacred metal.(188)

Updike's description suggests the various discourses within which gold can be understood: first, gold is seen as a discourse itself; the relation of gold to writingÑthe way in which the gold letters are rimmed in black and "simply say" makes clear that gold never speaks itself but always is a sign, many signs indeed as it writes in different sizes and speaks both the language of current "fiscal alternatives" and reminds us of "old coins" which are now no longer in use as coins but bought and sold as commodities and speculations. Second, the relation of gold to a market and the current exact price and market value of goldÑwhich equates it with stock and with profits for those who deal with it (sales and commissions); Harry, of course, despite a longing for a more stable universe (an older alternative) is buying gold as currency speculation. Third, the relation to phallic power (the cylinder shape with the blue top); this power seems questioned (the cylinders are "cunning" after all) by the way in which the "penis" is held up and sealed by the cylinderÑboth artificially shaped into its erect state and deprived of part of its reproductive power through this condom like shield. There is further anxiety that the power of gold is not big enough for the cylinder shape and thus needs to be artificially "inflated" and padded by the toilet paper. The reference to toilet paper, on the other hand, also links gold to excrement (the toilet seat); yet, as with the condom like wrapper around the penis, the hole/anus is stuffed with toilet paper preventing exchange or discharge, as it also hides potential dirtiness.² Finally, there is the "sacredness" of the metal, which is concealed so much by all these "wrappings" that not even a "glimmer" can shine through. Each of the meanings of the gold is muffled yet present, complicated by competing meaningsÑthere are traces of meaning that play with the gold cylinders' various possibilities for significations. The "cunnning" cylinders become both a liberation and a burden to Harry; they are "so heavy, [that they] threaten to tear the pockets off his coat as Harry hops up Ma Springer's front steps to face his family"(188). Harry's own body movement (hopping), which designates anticipation and liberation, finds an almost destructive and contradictory resistance in the gold's literal weight which feels like "bull's balls"(190), threatening his dignity and the triumphant entrance as a "golden man"(193). Harry's climax and the climax of the book need to be seen within these various traces of gold's meaningÑall simultaneously creating, challenging, referring to, and deferring meanings.

Harry's own sense of the coins, or better the cylinders which they fill, is overwhelmingly sexual. The connections between gold and phallic power is well-documented and seen to lie precisely in their potential ability to setÑor better be--the standard. In conversation with Marx, Goux writes about gold:

Gold dazzles the eyes with its orange rays, or reflects "only the color of highest intensity, viz. red light." It is in these "values people take out on holidays," in these products "representing pure and simple superabundance," that what Marx elsewhere calls the world of "profane commodities" converge as if toward the universal form that gives them their value. In short society "acclaims gold, its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its inmost vital principle." Now let us consider the penis. The homology is clear, profound, coherent. Here again, qualities that are both contingent (or apparently so) and yet necessary make the penis the organ ideally suited for selection as the material prop of a function that elevates it to the rank of phallus, signifier of pleasure and desireÑjust as gold metal, for its natural qualities, gets promoted to the position of "material representative of general wealth." [...] "The turgid penis," writes Lacan, gives us "an image of vital flux." In fact, it is the site of unproductive expenditure, that which surpasses immediate needs; it is the site of the superfluous (and deferrable) expenditure on which is based the sexual version of the exception of the "values people take out on holidays." [...] The structural, genetic, functional connection between gold and the penis is pertinent in every respect, down to their similarly arbitrary election. 28-29.

This sense of the structural connection between gold and penis is overt in Updike's scene. Through the gold and its connection to the penis, Harry tries to find a climax in his life, a moment of supreme pleasure, importance, self-expression. He wants to be a "golden man," a man "above them all,"(193) a man of unquestionable value and meaning, a standardÑprecisely all those things he isn't throughout the book. But once in the possession of the gold, Harry's thoughts turn to his familyÑand to both excrement and phallic power. He anxiously thinks of his son with his "big, brutal, man-sized prick, heavy and oval" (191) perhaps having anal intercourse (192); and then his thoughts wander to his father with his "white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day" (191). But he tries to give the gold a more isolated meaning. When he wants to go upstairs with his wife to live out his fantasy of the golden man he tries to forget about his family; "Rabbit has decided to live for himself, selfishly at last"(193). He wants to see himself at the center, as the source of vitality and potency. As he takes the gold cylinders out of the drawer (a place where they have replaced the condoms that used to lie there 190), he is startled that they are "still there," "still upright" (193). They are marvelous, in other words, both for being present and for being erectÑboth states Harry ardently desires and conflates. In the gold coins he sees his possibility for being both.

But, as much as he tries, the gold coins cannot be made into an extension of his body, nor can they be made into steady symbols. Their multivalence is uncontrollable. At first they do indeed dazzle.

He removes the wad of tissue paper and spills out upon the quilted bedspread³ the fifteen Krugerrands. Their color is redder than gold in his mind had been. 'Gold,' he whispers, holding up close to her face, paired in his palm, two coins, showing the two sides, the profile of some old Boer on one and a kind of antelope on the other. 'Each of these is worth about three hundred sixty dollars,' he tells her. 'Don't tell your mother or Nelson or anybody.' She does seem bewitched. [...] Her brown eyes pick up flecks of yellow. 'Is it all right?' Janice asks. 'Where on earth did you get them?'. (194)

The meaning of the gold immediately within a few lines slips and shifts. There is the color of gold (its dazzling orange, its most intrinsic physical quality as well as a quality that links it to the worship of the Sun God from which gold derives its power⁴). The first is reflected in "Janice's eyes," she is "bewitched" after all and wonders where "on earth" he got these coins, as if they had indeed fallen into his lap from another world. But then the attention shifts to the two pictures it depicts as a coin (the Boer and the antelope, both South African Imperial civilization and nature, in other words its function as symbol). This symbolic meaning is twofold (and Harry shows her two coins, each revealing one side of the coin) and creates throughout the scene both associations with nature and with a regime that it troubling and objectionable. Mistaking the antelope for a buck, Harry calls the Krugerrands "just the bucks, just the fucking bucks"(194)Ñmaking both a connection to nature and to the dollar, his 'natural' currency, of course. The Krugerrands take on the almost archetypal function here of connecting money and sex in nature. But Janice sees the political dimension of the coin's symbolism: "It's pretty [...] should you be supporting the South Africans though?" she asks (195). This coin, as any coin, truly has two (symbolic) sides, and we can never see it without its double-tongued nature even if we use the coinsÑas Harry does in this momentÑto cover and replace our eyes. Thirdly, there is gold's market value of roughly $360; now the gold coin has become merely a sign of an unstable and arbitrary value, another sign within finance capitalism's semiotic system. And then there is the personal symbolic value Harry wants to claim for the coin; he wants it to be his own gold standard, his magic instrument to make him the "golden man"Ña sun god of kinds for Janice, his "wonder woman"(194). But Janice misunderstands Harry once again and considers the institutional aspects of gold, it being the money of governments but not of common man. He is not the sun god for her; on the contrary, the gold money dwarfs rather than elevates him. Gold money makes her see his smallness as a common man.⁵ Janice wonders whether it is legal for Harry to possess such coins. "My God. I thought only the government could have gold. Don't you need a license or anything?"(194). Janice here not only misunderstands Harry, but her remark furthermore links gold (not him) at once to the sun god (gold is god) and to the government, who replaces god after the gold-standard. After all the dollar bill says "In God we Trust" only after the gold standard had been revoked, and its slogan really refers to a trust we should put in the government and the treasury who now give the dollar bill value. Janice's response also echoes the gold standard debate of the last century in which the populists objected to gold money precisely because it was not available to the common man. All these meanings exist simultaneously, slipping into and deferring each other, making gold both the central signifier and the parody of a standard. They deny any transcendental signified.

Harry's dream of becoming the "golden man" constantly slips away from him.

His frustrations throughout the book lie largely in his discomfort with and sense of alienation within language; the novel exhibits Harry's difficulties in speaking his own words and ideas rather than repeating words of media and friends. So, behind the gold scene lies the ardent desire to express himself, to find a language that makes him golden, that is meaningful and valuable. And one might say that nowhere in the book is Harry more expressive and poetic than in this scene. As a poet of sorts, he rewrites the garden of Eden when he makes Janice his snake by "placing a number of [Krugerrands] on her pussy, enough to mask the hair with a triangle of unsteady coins overlapping like snake scales"(196); he alludes to ancient funeral rites when he puts the gold coins on his eyes (194, 195); and he perhaps creates the ultimate metaphor for his life when he tries to insert a coin in Janice's "slot" (196) as she has the golden snake image on her belly. After all, Harry married Janice because of her money; in that sense she always held his phallic power and was his purse. In trying to penetrate her with the coins now, Harry could be seen as a poetic visionary capturing the complexities of the (untraceable) sources of power in his life. Yet, Janice abruptly and loudly says "no," rejecting this final gesture as if it was a form of rape and reducing his snake portraiture on her belly to a chaotic spillage of coins. After all, the image of her as a snake depended, as Updike told us, on her physical silence and compliance: "if she laughs or her belly moves the whole construction will collapse"(196). Indeed, Harry's "constructions" (his manly presence and erection, which paradoxically depend on an image that transfers phallic power to Janice) collapse in many pivotal moments of the novel precisely because Janice laughs. One might say then, that Harry is trying to write his world around his wealth transformed into gold and phallic power, by acknowledging their connection, by fantasizing about their identityand centrality. But Janice, the source of his power, deconstructs, deflates his narrative and its overt phallologocentrismÑthis last word seems literally implied by the scene and its reflection on gold and the phallus. Her laughter is the laughter of the post-modern world in which all meanings are volatile, fragile constructions, parodic and unstable, little more than chaotic spillages of signifiers.

Perhaps one might surmise that the climax is a final test for our reality. As Harry and Janice uneasily move towards a climax, their "compounding interest" always remains confusing in its multiple meanings.

The pennant race, the recent hike in the factory base price of Corollas, he fondles her underside's defenseless slack flesh [...] coins jingle, slithering in towards their kness, into the depressions their interlocked weights make in the mattress [...] she picks up a stray coin and places it glinting in her eye, as a monocle [...] bivalve to tuber [...] 'don't come' [...] Gods bedded among stars, he gasps in her ear, then she in his After this payoff, regaining their breaths, they count in the semi-dark only twenty-nine Krugerrands on the rumpled bedspread, its landscape of ridged green patches. He turns on the overhead light. It hurts their eyes. By its harshness their naked skins seem also rumpled. Panic encrusts Harry's drained body; he does not rest until, naked on his knees on the rug, a late strand of spunk looping from his reddened glans, he finds, caught in the crack between the mattress and the bed side-rail, the precious thirtieth. 197

At the end, gold is reduced to a mere sign, a number, "the thirtieth." And Updike's allusion to the great depression is his final comment on Harry's reality. When the light goes on and the "panic encrusts Harry's drained body" he is in search again, in search of the loss of meaning/semen/gold. Trying to recover the loss of expenditure, gold has become reduced to a number and Harry to an accountant. "Crumpled" like a used bank note, Harry's life and reality is indeed emptied of any hope of either "superfluidity" and "abundance" or of a standard. It is nothing but "an infinite play of referrals that forever postpones the possibilities of an actual value that would be anything more than writing" (Goux 120). Gold is reduced to the writing of capitalism; even more arbitrarily it gains its meaning only in its arbitrary relation to 29 others. It induces panic only through its loss as the thirtieth out of thirtyÑa meaning assigned to it only by counting it as the last of 30, a form of differance. Harry finds this microscopic and temporal meaning of gold tellingly at the margins of his bed (not in its phallic center) and as a reflection of the stock market and its endless deferrals of meanings, its inflations and deflations, its panic when it needs to face its own meaninglessness. Thus, Updike's 'realism' as Harry's dreams of being the golden man are tested through gold. In that sense gold remains central to the novel's vision, even a standard of sorts; it becomes the standard of standardlessness. The glimmer of its "sacredness" underneath all the wrappings is part of the nostalgia that lets us recognize, or better misrecognize, loss. Gold reveals Updike to be a post-modern writer and his Harry a post-modern man. There is no America to depict, no American to portray. It is all "writings about writing with no assignable term or end" (Goux 120).

Notes

¹ In an interview Updike discusses that he, a "very provincial, even parochial man" used the Rabbit novels to discover that America was not quite as great as he thought it was. He aligns himself very much with his inarticulate hero and his limited vision of the world. The implication is one of realism: that the novels are a way for Updike to discover how America really is.

² The relation of gold to both phallic power and excrement is well-documented. See Goux pages 28-30. Goux returns to this subject and discusses Jones's exposition on the connection of gold to excrement and to phallic power (116-121). For a discussion of the relation between gold and excrement see also Norman Brown's book Life Against Death. Of particular interest is Part V "Studies in Anality," which contains "The Excremental Vision," "The Protestant Era," and "Filthy Lucre." Clearly, Updike, who probably is familiar with Brown's book, alludes here to the gold coins as 'filthy lucre.' The novel also later culminates in a scene of anal intercourse with ThelmaÑa dying woman who surprises Harry as much as the reader with her passion for Harry and who provides Harry with a climax.

³ This image marvelously juxtaposes saving (in the form of the quilt and its tradition of American frugality) and spendingÑa central libidinal issue alluding to an economy of pleasure ,which the scene takes up from here.

⁴ For this insight I am grateful to J.S.G.Boggs who mentioned it to me several times and lectured about it to my classes. Boggs maintains that the power of gold comes from the fact that people understood it originally not as a symbol but as a part of God, the Sun God they worshipped. In that sense its value is intrinsic; people believed that they held a piece of God. If this is so, then our memory of this must be in the realm of the archetypal, I assume.

⁵ This incongruity of size can also be seen in the absurd contrast between the "bull's balls" and the "dollhouse toilet seat" in the earlier example.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.

Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. 2^nd. Ed. Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP, 1985.

Goux, Jean Joseph. Symbolic Economies After Marx and Freud. Transl. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

---. "Cash, Check, or Charge?." The New Economic Criticism. Eds. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 1999. 114-128.

Jones, Ernest. "The Theory of Symbolism." Papers on Psychology. New York: Wood, 1919.

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Shell, Marc. "The Issue of Representation." The New Economic Criticism. Eds. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 1999. 53-74.

Updike, John. Rabbit is Rich. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1981.