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John Updike's A&P John Updike's best known, most anthologized and most frequently taught short story, "A & P, " first appeared in The New Yorker (22 July 1961: 22 - 24), a publication that assumes a reader with considerable literary and cultural knowledge. Updike, for whom literature and art have been intertwined since youth, first uses allusions to art and to art criticism to give the informed reader of "A & P" the experience of dramatic irony as a means toward constructing significance for the story. The popularity of "A & P" rests on a number of ironic ambiguities, but the reader who perceives Updike's allusions to art can take special pleasure in the plot, which leaves the nineteen-year-old narrator and protagonist, Sammy, feeling at the end both triumphant and sad, both winner and loser. (Dessner, Lawrence Jay. "Irony and Innocence in John Updike's 'A & P. '") The setting is a small town north of Boston around 1960. Sammy is trying to clarify why he has impulsively quit his job as a cashier in the local A & P supermarket. He needs a sympathetic listener (or reader), someone who will grasp the meaning he is constructing for himself as he puts his actions into narrative order. Collapsing past and present in rapid yet reflective colloquial speech, Sammy tells how three teenage girls, barefoot, in bathing suits, came into the A & P store to make a purchase.
As they move through the aisles, Sammy, from his workstation, first ogles them and then idealizes the prettiest and most confident of the three. He names her, to himself, "Queenie"; and though he jokes with his fellow cashier about the girls's express, he is quietly disgusted by the butcher's frankly lustful gaze as the girls search for what they want to buy. Worse is his manager's puritanical rebuke for their beach attire as Queenie pays Sammy for her purchase. Outraged that his manager, Level, has made "that pretty girl blush" and wanting to demonstrate his refusal of such demeaning authority, Sammy quits his job on the spot. Though the girls leave without recognizing their hero, and though his manager tries to dissuade him from disappointing his parents, Sammy feels "that once you begin a gesture, it's fatal not to go through with it" (p. 196). He acts decisively, but the girls have disappeared from the parking lot by the time he exits the store.
In practical terms, Sammy's action has gained him nothing and cost him everything, but his narrative affirms his gesture as a liberating form of dissent. 3 Sammy does not see how he could have done otherwise, though he finds himself at odds with the only society he knows, sure that "the world will be hard to me, hereafter" (p. 196). Because Updike wrote "A & P" for The New Yorker, the story assumes a reader whose response to Sammy can go far beyond what the character can articulate for himself 4 Walter Wells, calling attention to the elevated diction which concludes Sammy's highly "ambivalent" epiphany, suggests that "hereafter" points Sammy toward an indefinite future in which he may or may not find "viable alternatives" to a "defunct romanticism" (p. 133). I hope to show in this essay that Updike offers the reader a way to see that Sammy's narrative, as a completed artistic gesture, is already in the mode of one of those alternatives. Sammy does look ahead as he senses the inadequacy of available cultural forms to express his sexuality and his moral sensitivity. Sammy does not, however, renounce the source of his will to act as he did. First, the ability to respond erotically to the beauty of a young woman's body; second, to respond sympathetically and imaginatively to the individual person alive in that body; and third, to elaborate that double pleasure into expressive form.
If Sammy has learned anything at the end of his story, he has learned it via his romantic desire, which, though naive and self-dramatizing, drives the plot of "A & P. " We can think of Sammy's narrative as Updike's gesture to give Eros a form that will both ennoble and extend it as an aesthetic pleasure-while intensifying the impossibility of that desire's completing itself in anything other than art. In other words, Updike has created in Sammy a character who attains the awareness of a modern artist, but who does not know that is what he has done. (Clark, Kenneth. The Nude. A Study in Ideal Form). Largely, the aesthetic pleasure in "A & P" depends upon the reader's sensing this dramatic irony.
Sammy's words resonate and gain meaning through a larger artistic context out of which he comes (Updike's knowledge and imagination) but of which he, the fictive character, is unaware. Updike offers the reader this particular irony through a playful and highly specific allusion to a work of art and to the corresponding modern aesthetic criticism, it helped inspire. That allusion, unconscious on Sammy's part but certainly not on Updike's, is to Sandro Botticelli's fifteenth-century Neo-Platonic painting, usually referred to as The Birth of Venus (c. 1482). In design, the painting recalls a medieval triptych, but its central figure is the Greek goddess of love, nude and pensive, standing tall in her scallop shell as she is blown ashore from her sea-birth by a male figure emblematic of wind or spirit.
Venus is flanked by two female forms, one entwined with the wind and the other about to receive her on shore with a regal mantle. These two attendants have been identified as the Horae, allegorical figures for time. The painting's details are realistic, but the overall effect is ethereal, gorgeous, and sad. For all its allegory, Botticelli's Venus, in Ronald Lightbown's commentary, is "the first surviving celebration [in the history of the Renaissance] of the beauty of the female nude, represented for its own perfection rather than with erotic or moral overtones the celebration is almost impressionistic... Venus is indifferent to us" (1: 89). The Birth of Venus, c. 1485 by Sandro Botticelli (1444 / 5 - 1510) Galleria deo Uffizi, Florence, Italy/Bridgeman Art Library.
As we know, Sammy begins his story noting the trio of girls who enter the grocery store. He describes first one and then another in detail, ranking them in their appeal. He soon concentrates on the leader: She was the queen. She did not look around, not this queen; she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs.
She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step... (p. 188) Sammy is interpreting the "queen's" movements which, recollected in his narrative, continue to give him such pleasurable sensations that he inserts some distancing irony to keep his focus on the movement of his own mind, which, after all, is the purpose of his story: You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think there is a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar? ) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight. (McFarland, Ronald E. "Updike and the Critics: Reflections on 'A & P') The girl he calls the "queen" presents so compelling an image that Sammy cannot stay distanced. As he continues describing details of her appearance, he moves from realism and mild irony to the language of poetic vision: She had on a kind of dirty-pink-beige maybe, I don't know bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it had not been there, you would not have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal titled in the light, I mean, it was more than pretty. (189) A potential writer's talent shows here and elsewhere in Sammy's metaphors (Luscher 35), as he tries to give his subjective impressions adequate expression. The girl, as close to being without clothes as she could be a public place, has sort of only hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face.
Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it is the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked somewhat stretched. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was. (189) By this point the informed reader's response to Sammy's visual imagery should be one of surprise and delight, for Sammy is describing his "queen" in terms that specifically call to mind Botticelli's Venus: the long, white legs, the bare feet with their tilting action from heel to toe, the astonishingly beautiful white body, the dark blonde hair, loosening from its bun and showing the effects of the salty sea, the prim face, and the unusually long neck that adds rather than detracts from the beauty of this ideal yet highly individualized female image. To catch this allusion, Updike's reader need not have seen Botticelli's original in the Uffizi in Florence; a reader need only have encountered reproductions, most likely in books on art with their accompanying descriptions and discussions. E. H.
Gombrich's The Story qj Art (19 51), for example, was by 1960 a classic undergraduate text. Updike, encouraged by his educated parents to go from a small town public high school to Harvard and on to study art at Oxford, had probably been one of Gombrich's readers in the 1950 s-but almost certainly not Updike's character Sammy, whose education has not prepared him for college. His working class parents have envisioned no future for him beyond the local A & P. Here is Gombrich on Botticelli's famous image: Botticelli's Venus is so beautiful that we do not notice the unnatural length of her neck, the steep fall of her shoulders and the queer way her left arm is hinged to her body. Alternatively, rather, we should say that these liberties which Botticelli took with nature in order to achieve a graceful outline add to the beauty and harmony of the design because they enhance the impression of an infinitely tender and delicate being wafted to our shores as a gift from heaven. (p. 192 - 93) With this allusion in play and sensing Sammy's saying and evoking more than he knows, the reader looks for more evidence to sustain this allusion to Botticelli and the accompanying ironic pleasure. Sammy delights in the little ripples of surprise "Queenie" sends through the other customers as she and her attendants move through the store, "against the usual traffic" (190).
You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checker-board greenland-cream-rubber die floor. Most commentaries on Botticelli's Venus call attention to the painting's chilly hues. Through the cool light of the A & P, Sammy's vision of beauty, totally indifferent to him, paddles toward him, away from him, back again, up and down the aisles, over rhythmic repetitions of green and cream, colors of ocean and foam, giving a new resonance-for the informed reader-to the story's setting. (Fleming, William. Arts and Ideas. New York: Holt, 1955) Words: 2 025 Bibliography: Clark, Kenneth. The Nude.
A Study in Ideal Form. New York: Pantheon, 1956. Dessner, Lawrence Jay. "Irony and Innocence in John Updike's 'A & P. '" Studies in Short Fiction 25 (1988): 315 - 17. Donoghue, Denis. Walter Pater. Low of Strange Souls.
New York: Knopf, 1995. Fleming, William. Arts and Ideas. New York: Holt, 1955.
Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. New York: Phaidon, 1951. Lightbown, Ronald. Sandro Botticelli.
Two vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Magic, Malcolm. "From Vermeer to Bonnard: Updike's Interartistic Mode in Marry Me. " Midwest Quarterly 33 (1992): 137 - 51.
McFarland, Ronald E. "Updike and the Critics: Reflections on 'A & P'. " Studies in Short Fiction 20 (1983): 94 - 100. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry. The 1893 Text. Ed.
Ronald L. Hill. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. Porter, M. Gilbert. "John Updike's 'A 80 ': The Establishment and an Emersonian Cashier. " English Journal 61. (1972): 1155 - 58. Shaw, Patrick W. "Checking Out Faith and Lust: Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown; and Updike's 'A & P. '" Studies in Short Fiction 23 (1986): 321 - 23.
Updike, John. "A & P. " Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1969. 197 - 96,
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