John Updike and the Meaning of "The Thing Itself"

Claes Oldenburg, Clothespin (1974)

What did John Updike mean by “the thing itself”? He uses the phrase in at least three pieces:

1. In “Journeyers” (The New Yorker, March 10, 1980; included in his 1983 collection Hugging the Shore), he said,

The literary problem faced by travel writers differs from that of fictionists and poets, whose material arrives mercifully thinned and pruned by the limitations of imagination and memory. A travel writer, notebook in hand, confronts the thing itself – immense, multiform, contradictory, numbing. 

I believe what Updike is referring to here is the raw ore of reality, unprocessed by memory or imagination – the thing itself. 

2. In “A Case of Monumentality” (originally published in the 1994 anthology Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, edited by Edward Hirsch; later included in Updike’s 1999 More Matter, and in his posthumous 2012 collection Always Looking, edited by Christopher Carduff), he wrote,

Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin (1975) stands in the Art Institute of Chicago’s palatial halls like a Cyclopean, ten-foot-tall security guard, his gracefully tapered legs braced apart, his spring ready to snap. But the resemblance is incidental, we feel; Oldenburg is too much the engineer and architectural draftsman to be after anything less than the Ding an sich, the thing itself. His plaster hamburgers, his canvas telephones, his giant typewriter-erasers and baseball bats and electrical switches and plugs all have an elemental solemnity that disdains anthropomorphism and beckons us into the mute, inhuman world of artifacts. Oldenburg’s sculptures look made, and concern made things.

Later, in the same piece, he said, 

The mute significance of things gives the visual arts their inexhaustible impetus; the visible world, so abundant and heedless around us, is processed by the painter’s or sculptor’s hand, and becomes understood. This act of understanding is the light that representation gives off, and that draws millions to rotate through museums, delighting in recognitions. We recognize the clothespin, even though it has been idealized in Cor-ten and stainless steel, enlarged in size, and placed upside down from the way we usually see it on the clothesline. The recognition is fringed and flavored by what art history we possess – by whatever analogies to the Eiffel Tower or Brancusi’s Kiss arise – but there is no escaping the Ding an sich. 

Here, I think, Updike uses “the thing itself” to convey the most basic, literal, unfiltered way of seeing: Oldenburg’s beautiful giant clothespin not as symbol or metaphor, but simply as itself – the thing itself.

3. In “The Thing Itself” (The New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001; included in his 2007 collection Due Considerations), a wonderful review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, he said,

These landscapes are astonishing in their breadth and intensity; though the wall commentary and the catalogue speak of Northern traditions of landscape versus Southern traditions, the viewer feels confronted with the thing itself, the Alpine landscapes first beheld, in their airy vastness and elevation of view, by a visitor from the Lowlands.

“The thing itself,” in this context, means reality, or as close to reality as painting can get. It means the Bruegel paintings seen not in terms of theory (“Northern traditions of landscape versus Southern traditions”), but as revelations of the real. How I love that “the viewer feels confronted with the thing itself.” For me, it’s realism’s ultimate compliment.