Thai art of 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,1 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,2 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. 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 t
In their brief exchange, Sammy's words to Lengel are totally inadequate: he utters his grandmother's dismissal of nonsense, which is nonsense itself. As Queenie responds by saying she is merely making a purchase for her mother, Sammy for the first time hears her voice. Updike's character, Sammy, possesses what Pater knew all artists and aesthetic critics possess: "the power to be deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects" (Pater xxi). Sammy is angelic in his rejection of both his manager's public policy, which ostensibly works for the common good, and the butcher's private lechery, which works against it. These two attendants have been identified as the Horae, allegorical figures for time. Botticelli was important to Pater because, as Denis Donoghue has made clear in his study of Pater's modernism, Pater believed that Botticelli responded to objects of desire as a painter just the way Pater did as a writer: objects of desire, things of beauty, were important to the degree they instigated a mood in the subject's mind; the mind, in that mood, then worked on the object in order to sust!ain the mood, even at the price of supplanting reality with a vision (Donoghue, Walter Pater 152-53). Sammy feels ashamed of Lengel and the "crummy" mentality he represents. Even her purchase is exquisite: Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold: Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49. For William Fleming, "the chief expressive interest" of Botticelli's painting is in such fluid wave-like movement, "the ballet-like choreography of dancing fines and the skillful pattern of the richly varied linear rhythms" (363). (190) Most commentaries on Botticelli's Venus call attention to the paint. Botticelli as an artist, in Pater's understanding, is not interested in good and evil or in politics, but in beauty, especially the beauty of angelic human forms in their "mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink" (43).
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Acceptance Essays
