Psychic Sexuality: Memory and Dream in John Updike’s Villages

Abstract

Only a very few writers have explored the full gamut of middle-class suburb life, warts and all, as John Updike, and even fewer have run the whole gamut of sexual experience as he has. With his avowed preoccupation with the “three secret things” of sex, religion, and art, Updike has examined the single aspect of sexuality through varied reference frames at varying stages of life: boyhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age. If A Month of Sundays and S. offer a ritualization of sexuality, Roger’s Version offers a scopophilic examination of sexuality in terms of the sexual phantasizings of Roger Lambert. Updike’s Villages (2004) reemploys the use of sexuality on different spatio-temporal parameters, chronicling the kaleidoscopic ken of the old Owen Mackenzie’s sexual encounters, reminisced and replenished through his memories and dreams, and operating on his psychic planes. Lured and intrigued by the “monstrous miracle” of sex, Owen experiences a thrill analogous to a conquest in his erotic adventures with a battalion of mistresses, and his wives. And yet his is not a case of gerontophilia, for in his present dotage he is more interested in relishing those libidinal experiences in his memories than in having further erotic advances. Updike deals with Owen’s psychic sexuality in an artistic way that dovetails into his present old age. At once a faint autobiographical projection of Updike, and a dim shadow of his early heroes turned old, Owen prefers contemplation of the carnal carnival to direct action. Applying the insights of Psychoanalysis, this paper would seek to analyse and justify the nature of these memories and dreams to suggest how Updike reckons with sexuality with greater panache evinced through the psychic lens of an aged hero who remains satisfied with erotic emotions recollected in tranquillity.