The Construction of Mennonite/Amish Character in Novels by John Updike and Denis Johnson

Abstract: Mennonite and Amish characters play small bur crucial roles in the best-known novels of John Updike and Denis Johnson, two celebrated contemporary writers in the United States. At their best, both Updike and Johnson manage to break through the sort of stereotypical depictions that characterize much writing about Mennonites and Amish by non-Anabaptist fiction writers. In part because of their gift narrative irony, a relative complexity emerges in the Anabaptist characters drawn by Updike and Johnson, even though both novelists seem capable of writing about these characters only at arm's length. Yet, a careful reader can detect an almost palpable yearning on the part of the novelists' protagonists the power that Mennonite and Amish belief and practice might offer a broken people in a broken world. ********** Outside of Churchtown he passes an Amish buggy in the dark and catches a glimpse of a bearded man and a woman in black in this horsedrawn shadow glaring like devils.... They never appeared in his rear-view mirror. He passed them and there was nothing. It was just that one sideways glance; the woman's face a hatchet of smoke in the square shadow. Tall coffin lined with hair clopping along to the tune of a dying horse. --John Updike in Rabbit Run She was dressed in a long skirt and wore a white cloth over the crown of her head, something like a skullcap. Before they ate, they dipped their faces and prayed three or four full minutes. It had struck me that the husband looked very somber, very old-fashioned, with his dark suit and big shoes, his Lincoln beard and shiny head. Now that I saw the wife in the same kind of getup, I understood: they were Amish, or more likely Mennonites. I knew the Mennonites did missionary work overseas, works of lonely charity in strange worlds where nobody spoke their language. --Denis Johnson in Jesus' Son Burgeoning critical interest in Mennonite literature in Canada and the United States primarily has focused on works written by authors more or less associated with the Anabaptist community--either those writers directly affiliated with the church or those on the fringes of the Mennonite/Amish diaspora. Meanwhile, the critical consideration of Anabaptist characters and themes in literary fiction written by outsiders has been missing from recent scholarly writing about Anabaptists and literature-perhaps because we are too eager to discover what it is that we are saying to worry much about what others say about us. (1) Yet Mennonites and Amish emerge as thematically significant characters in the best-known novels of two important American writers--John Updike, arguably the most prolific and seriously studied U.S. fiction writer of the post-World War II era, and Denis Johnson, a highly respected postmodern novelist who emerged in the 1990s. (2) This paper's epigrams from Updike and Johnson not only introduce their Anabaptist themes but also reveal a tendency either to see Mennonites and Amish as primitive bumpkins or as idealized simple, peaceful people. This intertwined attraction and repulsion mirrors how dominant culture often construes subcultures--blending contempt the otherness represented by the subculture as well as betraying a longing its sense of community. As historian David Weaver-Zercher reminds us in The Amish in the American Imagination, outside culture fashions the representation of sectarians for their own purposes, to mark boundaries, express fears, support causes, and, in many cases, make a profit. (3) What has traditionally attracted artists to Mennonites and Amish, of course, has been the exoticism of plain dress and quaint practices (best exemplified in popular culture by the 1985 film Witness). Singularity of character normally confers both literary and economic value to the literary text. In a universe of cookie-cutter characters, those who stand out the uniqueness of their style and actions will be compelling and memorable. …

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