CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Religion has always been concerned with morality. Indeed, the Ten
Commandments are moral commandments. Much of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are concerned with the standards of conduct by which men ought to live. At the very core of religion is the message that man must live according to the moral standards of God in order to achieve ultimate salvation.
Early philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among them, were concerned with religion and morality. The earliest dramas of medieval Europe and England were miracle and morality plays.
Khalid Latif (2008) believes that Islam is a comprehensive way of life, and morality is one of the cornerstones of Islam. Morality is one of the fundamental sources of a nation’s strength, just as immorality is one of the main causes of a nation’s decline. Islam has established some universal fundamental rights for humanity as a whole, which are to be observed in all circumstances. To uphold these rights, Islam has provided not only legal safeguards, but also a very effective moral system. Thus, in Islam, whatever leads to the welfare of the individual or the society and does not oppose any maxims of the religion is morally good, and whatever is harmful is morally bad.
John Updike and Salman Rushdie, whose short stories have been selected for this study, are concerned with morality. The society in John Updike’s ‘A&P’ is presented as a religious one that believes in morality and associates certain values with some moral
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standards. However, the writer uses the major character in the story, Sammy, a teenage boy, to protest against the belief held by the entire A&P society represented by Lengel, the manager of the supermarket and his ‘sheep’.
In the same vein, Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Prophet’s’ Hair examines the question of religion and morality and the writer uses the characters in the story to establish the theme of retributive justice for good or evil.
Religion and morality will be examined in the two short stories and the formalist theory will be adopted in the study.
1.1 Statement of Research Problem
Researches have established the role of religion for upholding religious faith and religious uprightness. The research problem encountered is the people’s perception of religion, and the belief that it is only through religion that morality can be upheld. There is also the problem of using religion to inculcate moral values, and the notion and belief that one’s mode of dressing may be a sign of moral delinquency. The notion that youths are the moral delinquent ones and the problem of religious uprightness are issues to be addressed.
These identified problems encountered in the course of the research are critically going to be addressed. The questions arrived at after identifying the problems are:-
1. What is the relationship (or the point of contact) between religion and morality?
2. How has religion been able to increase and inculcate moral values?
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3. How can we use religion to address the issue of moral delinquency?
4. What is the difference between religion and religious faith?
These questions among others are going to be addressed in the study of the two
short stories.
1.2 Purpose of The Study
The purpose of the study is to examine religion and morality in the two short stories: John Updike’s ‘A&P’ and Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Prophet’s Hair’. The study also aims at examining the narrative elements in the stories.
A short story is one of many narrative structures. Thus, the study will also focus on the definition as well as the properties of a short story.
1.3 Scope and Limitation
Religion and morality are aspect of human life that are inseparable and should be treated as a single indivisible entity. Issues of religion and morality have been addressed by John Updike and Salman Rushdie in their short stories; ‘A&P’ and ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ respectively. The study will therefore, limit itself to identifying the elements in the short stories that relate to issues of religion and morality. These issues will be addressed and examined critically in order to establish a relationship with the variables in the research topic; religion and morality.
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1.4 Justification
‘Religion and morality in John Updike’s ‘A&P’ and Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ is a topic which deserves attention. Few researches according to findings have dealt with the short story. The short story has suffered neglect in criticism. Researches deal more with the novel, the dramatic and poetic genres and shy away from the short story. This neglect may have been informed by the fact that the short story appears flimsy and can be read at one sitting. But the short story is not flimsy. It is a complex form and incorporates the features of both the novel and poetry. Poetry as we know is the most complex genre of literature.
Therefore, this research will examine how the authors have addressed the issue of religion and morality in their works and add to the literature review on the short story and the two authors: Updike and Rushdie.
Nevertheless, religious groups and the society at large will benefit from this research, because at the end of the study, the examination of issues in the stories will help to re-shape their thinking and views on religion and morality.
1.5 Methodology
The research work will adopt the formalist theory. This theory will focus on the theme of hypocrisy in the short stories selected for study. The thematic concern will incorporate sub-themes that will revolve around the major thematic focus to create unity
and establish the relationship between the various sub-themes that will be selected alongside the major thematic focus.
The formalist theory emanated in France in the 19th century, and the concern is with structure, form, and aestheticism and involves other sub-elements such as the nature of imagery, linguistic features and motif.
1.6 Authors’ Background
JOHN HOYER UPDIKE (1932-2009)
John Hoyer Updike was born on March, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He is
best known as the author of Rabbit, Run. He died on January 27th, 2009.
FAMILY AND MARRIAGES
Updike was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike and Linda Grace Hoyer in Reading, Pennsylvania and he grew up in a nearby small town-Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother’s attempts to be a published writer influenced the young Updike’s own aspirations.
John Updike married Mary Entwisted Pennington in 1953. They separated in 1974 and were divorced in 1976. They had four children: David, Michael, Miranda and Elizabeth. He later married Martha Bernhard in 1977 and they remained married until his death in 2009.
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EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
John Updike graduated from Shillington High School as a co-valedictorian and class president in 1950. He later attended Harvard after receiving a full scholarship. At Harvard, he immediately established himself as a major talent of indefatigable energy, submitting a steady stream of articles and drawings for the Harvard Lampoon, which he served as president before graduating Summa Cum Laude in 1954 with a degree in English.
After graduation, he decided to become a graphic artist and attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His early ambition was to be a cartoonist. After moving to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to ‘The New Yorker’. He stayed only two years writing “Talk of the Town’ columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. During this time Updike also underwent spiritual crisis suffering from a loss of religious faith and began reading Soren Kierkeqaard and the theologian, Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. He remained a believing Christian for the rest of his life.
Updike’s subject is ‘the American small town, protestant middle - class”. He is well recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolificness. He populated his fiction with characters who frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations and marital infidelity. His fiction emphasizes on Christian theology, sexuality, and sensual details. His highly
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distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eye of ‘a wry intelligent authorial voice’ that extravagantly describes the physical world while remaining squarely in the realist tradition. He variously described his own style as ‘an attempt to give the mundane its beautiful due’.
SALMAN RUSHDIE (1947 - )
Salman Rushdie is a famous writer. He was born in 1947 in a Muslim family in Bombay. His father was a Cambridge –educated businessman. At the age of fourteen, Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England. In 1964, his parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan,
EDUCATION AND CAREER
Salman Rushdie graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, in History with Honours. After graduation, he worked for sometime in the
television Industry in Pakistan. He made a debut as a novelist with Grimus in 1975. In his writings, he uses tales from various genres – fantasy, mythology, religion and oral tradition. Though most of his books have been subject of controversies, in the year 1988, Salman Rushdie came in the eye of storm with the publication of The Satanic Verses for its alleged blasphemous remarks on Islam and the Prophet. The entire Muslim world was enraged at the publication of the novel, The Satanic Verses. This led to the declaration of
death sentence on him by Ayatollah Khomeini, the then religious sovereign of Iran. This was when Rushdie went into hiding in London. After remaining in hiding for many years, Rushdie came out recently.
Rushdie’s work, Midnight’s Children was awarded the Bookers’ Prize in 1993 and this brought him international fame. In 1996, he received the European Union Literary Award in Denmark. His other works are Shame (1983), The Wizard of Oz (1992), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), amongst others.
MARRIAGES
Salman Rushdie is known for his multiple marriages. In 1976, he married Clarissa Luard, they had a son from the marriage. Rushdie and
Luard divorced in 1987. He latemarried Marianne Wiggins in 1988, a year after his divorce with Luard. Wiggins is an American novelist. Rushdie and
Marianne Wiggins divorced in 1993. His third marriage was to Elizabeth West in the year 1997, through which she had a son. But the marriage also hit the rock in the year 2004.
Rushdie’s last marriage, which is the fourth one, is to a prominent Indian model and actress, Padmalakshmi in 2004. The marriage lasted until the year 2007.
JOHN UPDIKE, SALMAN RUSHDIE AND THE SHORT STORY
Rushdie and Updike are both radical and controversial writers. They are also writers of short stories. The short story according to Wikipedia, is a work of prose fiction that is long enough for an average reader to finish it in one sitting rather than several, as
the longer novel or novella normally takes. This usually means it would be somewhere under 10,000 words.
Edgar Allan Poe once described a short story or ‘tales’ as they were then called as a ‘short prose narrative requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal…. During the hour, the hour of Perusal, the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences resulting from weariness or interruption. This was taken from a review Poe had made in 1842 of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Twice – Told Tales’. This is why it is common to say that a short story should be read at one sitting. Poe’s comment implies the brevity of many short stories and points to the economy of management which the tightness of the form always imposes in some degree. We can say that, by and large, the short story writer introduces a very limited number of persons, cannot afford the space for the leisurely analysis and sustained development of character and cannot undertake to develop as dense and detailed social milieu as does the novelist.
The author of the short story often begins the story close to, or even on the verge of the climax, minimizes both prior exposition and the details of the setting, keeps the complication down, and clears up the denouement quickly sometimes in a few sentences. The central incident is often selected to be as revelatory as possible of the totality of the protagonist’s life and character, and the details are devised to carry maximum significance. This sparseness in the narrative often gives the artistry in a well-constructed
novel. The short story, like the novel, however, has all the elements of fiction. These are: theme, setting, plot, characterization, language, and point-of-view.
SETTING
This is the time and place or location in which a short story takes place. It is the background against which the events in the story are built. For some stories, the setting is very important, while for others it is not.
Akande and Ibrahim (2000, 53) posits that, Without setting, the story is like a building without a foundation. No matter how beautiful a building is, if it lacks a foundation, its aesthetic and structural functionality are weakened.
The setting of a short story however is usually strategically chosen and may be limited to just a few places, and the time setting may be made to run between the time space of morning, afternoon and night.
THE PLOT
This is the sequential arrangement of a series of events in the story. A story may be likened to a piece of a new cloth cut into pieces by a tailor to be sewn into a dress. The pieces are sewn together to make a dress. The complete dress is the plot. The plot may be
sub-divided into three phases-the beginning, the middle, the end and must have a unity. The short story usually have one plot so it can maintain this unity. There are five essential parts of the plot: Introduction, rising action, falling action, climax and denouement which is the resolution of the conflict generated in the climax.
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