[F]iction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people do.

—John Updike, Picked-Up Pieces

The quintessentially private life that entered the novel … was, by its very nature and as opposed to public life, closed. In essence one could only spy and eavesdrop on it. The literature of private life is essentially a literature of snooping about, of overhearing “how others live.”

—Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

The 26 April 1968 Cover of Time Magazine features a picture of John Updike. The illustration, in the manner of American realist painting, depicts Updike looking candidly out at the viewer from hooded squinting eyes. A black and white banner in the top right-hand corner announces “The Adulterous Society,” and the cover implies that Updike has identified a contemporary American phenomenon: not simply occasional or isolated adulteries but an entire adulterous society. One could be alarmed or thrilled, but the evidence is indubitable: adultery's secret and private existence, the closed activity of the bedroom, has been exposed; the bedroom door has been opened.

The article itself is illustrated by Titian's “Christ & the Condemned Fallen Woman” with the accompanying comment: “The Biblical woman accused of adultery would be safe in Tarbox [the town in Couples]; here no stones are thrown, only envious glances.” This article brings together many issues central to Updike's work: adultery, aesthetics, religion, and the dialogue between aesthetic movements which have promoted and deepened religious experience and the twentieth-century aesthetic movements which have emptied art of its sacred resonance. In what follows I want to turn to Marry Me, one of Updike's less frequently discussed novels, to make a contrast between the privacy implied by infidelity and the publicity implied by contemporary American attitudes committed to confessing the “truth about sex.” In other words, after adultery has been publicly legitimated (in Couples and on the cover of Time) can it still maintain its transgressive, liberating, and, for Updike, quasi-religious status?

The issue of conjugal infidelity is much discussed by critics of Updike; but most critics read his treatment of this theme in the context of de Rougemont's elaboration of the Tristan and Iseult myth (discussed in detail by Updike) and the riddles of religion (exemplified by Kierkegaard, Barth, and Tillich, figures to whom Updike's essays and novels explicitly point). These analyses are convincing, and often illuminating, but by no means adequate to the tension between reticence and exposure, invisibility and visibility, the private and the public, which Updike's novel is concerned to address.

The crux of Marry Me is simple enough: should Jerry separate from his wife Ruth and go to live with his “mistress” Sally? Jerry cannot decide. In the Kierkegaardian context this indecision may be read as the “dread” or “anxiety” produced in the face of uncertain “possibilities” (Concept of Dread). In the context of de Rougemont this indecision is precisely what animates desire: to choose is to have and to have is to put an end to desire. But one can also locate such indecision in a sociocultural context. As Franco Moretti notes, indecision is inseparable from the modern condition. Discussing Joyce, Moretti argues that the connection between possibility and anxiety, so central to Kierkegaard, has been eroded in contemporary society. “This connection,” Moretti writes, “was still strong … in that great and pained exploration of the logic of a possible second life which was the nineteenth century novel of adultery. … In Ulysses, adultery has become a harmless pastime, and even the most extreme experiments of its Modernist imagination may well produce stupefaction but no longer evoke anything threatening.” Similarly, Tony Tanner views Updike's representation of adultery as emptied of its cognitive force. “A novel like John Updike's Couples is as little about passion as it is about marriage; the adulteries are merely formal and technical. Adultery, we may say, no longer signifies.” In Marry Me adultery is neither a harmless pastime, nor merely formal and technical; indeed, it is precisely in the contrast between an adultery replete with all the romantic dreams of “a possible second life” (an adultery, that is, which “signifies”), and an adultery which has been exposed, institutionalized, and commodified that the tension of this novel is located.

The exposure of adultery involves a dual process of being brought into the common language (and the cheapening of the experience which this implies); and being brought into the community. To the extent that adultery is privileged as an activity distinct from both the common language and the community (as antithetical, in other words, to everything that “the adulterous society” implies) its space must be maintained as a realm apart in which freedom is gained only at the cost of an absolute cleavage from the social. Jerry is able to maintain this romantic image of adultery because, as he states, Americans, unlike Europeans, do not have a tradition of adultery; adultery persists as one of the last remaining pure, ironically unfallen, and decidedly uninstitutionalized activities. In a world that has been permeated by technological innovations and facile media commentaries, adultery seems to hold out the dim promise of the untouched, the immediate, even the sacred. If this understanding of adultery is clearly fanciful, it is nevertheless persuasive; and in Marry Me the tension between this romantic version of adultery and Richard's more pragmatic “philosophy of affairs” is animated in the novel's desperate translation of its organizing dilemma—Jerry's indecision—into an aesthetics of doubt which shifts the open-ended sense of possibility desired by Jerry to the level of the novel's form. The irony, however, is that this aesthetics collapses at once into the very things from which it desires to distinguish itself: religion and sexuality.

I

In Marry Me Updike's geographical terrain is suburban, that liminal space between the city proper and the country; and his thematic focus is adultery, the liminal space between monogamous marriage and complete sexual freedom. The novel focuses on the interwoven lives of Jerry and Ruth Conant, and Sally and Richard Mathias, names which themselves signal Updike's concern to explore epistemological strategies. Mathesis, derived from the Greek mathesi, a short step from Mathias, is defined as “mental discipline; learning or science, esp. mathematical science. Also personified,” and the root of Conant, “con,” means simply “to know.” Infidelity in both relationships splinters not only these marital unions of “knowledge,” but also the possibility of knowledge insofar as knowledge, traditionally understood, is the faithful reflection of the true.

The text is divided into five sections each of which ostensibly corresponds to the perspective of one of the main characters. The two framing chapters, “Warm Wine” and “Wyoming,” are told from Jerry's perspective, the inner frames, “The Wait” and “The Reacting of Richard,” are told from Sally's and Richard's perspectives respectively (although Richard's chapter is actually told, for the most part, from Jerry's perspective), and the central chapter, “The Reacting of Ruth,” is told from Ruth's perspective. The “Wyoming” chapter is itself divided into three alternative endings that entertain three possible lives for Jerry in the process of elevating aesthetics—and the novel, in particular—to the position of moral salvation for which Jerry seeks. The point to note here, however, is that the narrative structure frustrates the closed integrity of the isolated subject: first person interior monologues from Jerry's perspective are planted in Sally's and Richard's chapters; Ruth's section is tied to Jerry's (insofar as it repeats details which Jerry has already related) and to Sally's and Richard's (through the telephone which penetrates both the material boundaries between homes, and the artificial boundaries between chapters). When Ruth begs Jerry for a decision, Jerry pleads: “What I want is too tied up with how it effects everybody else. It's like one of those equations with nothing but variables. I can't solve it. I can't solve it.” Jerry's quest for an elusive ontological freedom then only finds him entangled in the mundane domestic relations of the everyday, the very relations from which he imagined release in his adulterous affair.

Most critics locate Updike's treatment of infidelity in a realm of freedom and self-affirmation (the first romantic version of adultery discredited by Moretti above). In brief, an individual is freed from social constraints and as such can authentically and autonomously affirm one's self. Marriage then is pitted against freedom. Kerry Ahearn nicely summarizes the standard argument: “Marriage is enforced by the ceremonial code and notarized by the contractual law, but confirmation of one's existence requires passion, and passion demands freedom.” And Donald Greiner writes that for Updike “[m]arriage may have the sanctity of ceremony, but adultery promises the freedom of desire.” Critics who develop this self-affirmation via adulterous freedom argument typically follow Updike's lead in grounding such sexual dynamics in de Rougemont's study, Love in the Western World, the purpose of which is to “describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage.” But the problematic is not, in fact, so simple. Does adultery, by definition, imply freedom? First, in the genre of the novel freedom is doubly exposed: the reader intrudes on the private lives of the characters, and the characters themselves expose their private lives to one another. Secondly, the concepts of freedom and adultery derive from an extensive literary tradition. The very fact that Updike situates his understanding of infidelity in the context of de Rougemont, for example, indicates his commitment to the Tristan and Iseult myth from which an enormous body of literature on infidelity has developed. Updike's equally explicit dialogue with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter further locates his exploration of infidelity in a literary context, a context which could easily be extended to other writers (like Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and Edith Wharton) and shifted to other domains (like art history.) Thirdly, and most importantly, Updike explicitly denies the necessary connection between freedom and adultery in the competing versions of adultery he represents in Marry Me; and in Jerry's dawning realization that what he took for freedom and renewal could be reduced to a dominant domestic ideology of adultery of which the label “the adulterous society” is only one indication.

In Marry Me adultery is represented from two different angles: the affair between Ruth and Richard; and the affair between Jerry and Sally. Toward the end of Marry Me Richard's philosophy of affairs is related by Ruth to Jerry: “He talked about the philosophy of affairs. He said the woman's responsibility was not to get pregnant and the man's was to stop it when the woman began to get emotionally dependent.” In the former case one must be wary of a woman's physical excess, her capacity to become pregnant, and in the latter it is a woman's emotional excess which demands curbing. In both cases, however, it is the woman who threatens to challenge an otherwise rational, responsible man unsusceptible to physical and emotional limitations. Neither marriage nor the family is mentioned although the implication is that affairs should not be serious, and that both parties should take every precaution against the serious affair, that is against a woman's physical or emotional desire for a serious affair. Richard's philosophy then guards against exposure; it articulates a pragmatic approach to sexuality which does not contest, but rather is accommodated by, the dominant social institutions.

But only the affair between Richard and Ruth corresponds, superficially at least, to the “rules” presented above. Following Richard's philosophy, his affair with Ruth is “successful”; Ruth becomes neither pregnant nor emotionally dependent. On the contrary, Ruth's affair is in every way subordinated to her marriage. Ruth's relationship with Richard is formed on the basis of their talks about Jerry as Richard is ostensibly helping Ruth with Jerry's problems. Updike summarizes the completed affair from Ruth's perspective as follows:

On the whole she [Ruth] was well satisfied with her affair. … She judged herself improved and deepened in about the normal amount—she had dared danger and carried wisdom away, a more complete and tolerant woman. She had had boyfriends, a husband, a lover; it seemed she could rest.

She had not quite intended Jerry never to know. She had done it, her conviction grew in retrospect, less for herself than for him; her surrender to another man came to seem a kind of martyrdom, a martyrdom without an audience. … her marriage had stood with the stupid solidity of an unattended church.

The affair is valorized as something daring from which wisdom and wholeness—the “normal” and the “complete”—are found. Updike quickly shifts, however, from Ruth's self-improvement to her marriage, and specifically her husband. Ruth is no longer a hero who “dared danger” but a “martyr” who “surrenders” herself. And later Ruth explains her affair to Jerry, Sally, and Richard: “Jerry wanted me to … I thought it would make me a better wife!” Ruth's affair, then, does not threaten, but rather reinforces (as she sees it), her marriage. If it is kept in its context (essentially the nonserious context outlined by Richard) it can be a positive event, something to be celebrated. When Jerry tells Ruth about his affair, therefore, she tries to situate it in this context of the nonserious: “I told you I had an affair because I got over it. You do get over them, Jerry. It's great, it's exquisite, it's the nicest thing there is, but it doesn't last.” Marriages are permanent; affairs are not. But marriage is also difficult to maintain because it does not generate the same excitement as the affair. Ruth thus marks a second distinction (a distinction which also parallels de Rougemont's thesis) between an affair and a marriage: “Don't you see, it's a problem any woman has, when she's a wife; there are no obstacles. So she has to make them.” Affairs are “great,” “exquisite,” “the nicest thing there is,” “wonderful”; but they are not, and they should not be confused with, marriage. Sharply demarcated from marriage, this first version of adultery understands affairs to be nonserious, short-term, and neatly terminated.

But although Ruth is able to maintain a level-headed distinction between her marriage and her affair, and hence to have a “successful” affair, Jerry is unable to recognize the difference in kind between an affair and a marriage. Clearly Jerry anticipates—the Kierkegaardian sense of possibility with its attendant dread—“a possible second life.” Sally, on the other hand, sees, where Jerry does not, the significance of being either a husband or a lover, a wife or a mistress. Sally describes herself to Jerry as “this miserable woman pretending she wanted a lover when what she really wanted was you for a husband”; and she notes, “In making me feel so loved you've convinced me being somebody's mistress is too shabby for me.” If Sally is Jerry's “mistress and momentary wife,” Jerry is Sally's “unreal lover” and “husbandly lover.” But this both/and situation quickly becomes an either/or which Sally tries to resolve with a series of quick determined moves. When Jerry is not ready to embrace marriage, for example, Sally retreats to the more certain ground of an affair: “If you can't take me as a wife, don't spoil me as a mistress.” Jerry responds to Sally as follows:

But I don't want you as a mistress; our lives just aren't built for it. Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there's no institution except marriage. Marriage and the Friday night basketball game. You can't take this indefinitely; you think you can, but I know you can't.

Richard's philosophy of affairs to which both Ruth and Sally on some levels also subscribe is inadequate. There is no institution except marriage. The title of the novel, of course, makes this point explicit: although adultery may damage local marriages, it does not in any way invalidate marriage as an institution. But what is marriage in this novel?

The marriage into which the reader gains the most insight is Ruth's and Jerry's. They meet in art school and the marriage itself is described in consistently aesthetic terms. Their marriage, referred to as a “merger,” is “aesthetic”; and Ruth and Jerry artistically complement one another. “Ruth, though her perspective was always awry and her formal definition vague … showed a rare color touch. … Her talent struck Jerry as remarkable because his lay the other way. His gift was for line, outline.” To sacrifice the marriage, Ruth sees, would be “simple, bold, pure, aesthetic,” and sex is an “aesthetic duty” to enjoy. Later Jerry bluntly states, “You married me because—I could draw. I'd make the outlines—and you'd put in the—colors.” H. H. Arnason's description of the history of art coincides with this description of the Conant's marriage: “[p]ainting from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century,” he writes, “had increasingly become a power struggle of drawing versus color.” A recurrent motif throughout the novel, moreover, is Jerry and Ruth sitting “side by side” at their easels, and although this merger seems both aesthetic and wise (insofar as it resolves a power struggle), it is this very resolution or decision against which Jerry rebels. But where marriage stresses the materials of aesthetic production—the lines and color, the easels—adultery stresses what is produced. This production may be read in the context of self-affirmation discussed above (adultery produces a self), or as a reflection without an origin in the real (in his pursuit of the real Jerry encounters only reflecting mirrors).

From the start Jerry's relationship with Sally is characterized in terms of mimesis (the first chapter recalls Plato's allegory of the cave—to which I will return later—in which the issue of mimesis is paramount). Sally's “face freckled, rapt,” for example, “seemed a mirror held inches below his own face, a misted mirror more than another person.” In one of Jerry's passages of interior monologue he says that Sally was “a territory where I went on tip-toe to steal a magic mirror.” In the magic mirror Jerry finds himself. Sally, on the other hand, finds in the mirror what Updike suggests the reader finds in a novel: “her shock at the mirrors in their [hers and Richard's] room had subsided to a level interest. This was what people did; this was what they were.” This is “what other people do,” this is “how others live”; the private activities which fiction, as a mode of spying, registers, are made public.

It is ironic and consistent in this context that Sally's alibi for her rendezvous with Jerry is an art appreciation course. This alibi invites a reading of the affair (like marriage) in the context of aesthetics, and aesthetics in the context of the affair. In the National Gallery, for example, Jerry rapidly shifts from paintings by Vermeer to a commentary on his relationship with Sally. “‘And this one, the light on her hands and the gold and the pearls. That touch, you know; it's a double touch—the exact color, in the exact place.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘Now you and me,’ he said, ‘are the exact color but we seem to be in the wrong place.’” This painting is likely Vermeer's “Woman Holding a Balance” which represents a woman, behind whom there is a painting of the Day of Judgment, balancing a pair of scales. If the imagery is heavy-handed in the painting, it is not so in the novel where Updike depends on his reader's familiarity with the National Gallery's painting and refrains from making an explicit identification. Norman Bryson's comments on Vermeer are strikingly appropriate to the formal complexity of Updike's narrative. Bryson argues that Vermeer complicates the position of the spectator: “the spectator is an unexpected presence, not a theatrical audience; nothing in the scene ‘View of Delft’ [by Vermeer] arranges itself around his act of inspection, or asks him, in Albertian fashion, to place his body at this particular point at which the founding perception was ‘gathered.’” Bryson continues:

The Vermeer records the perception with unprecedented accuracy, but the perception is presented to the viewer to examine from his own position—he is not being invited to move up to the viewfinder, or to step inside the perception; there is an asymmetry between the original perception, recorded in the image, and the act of viewing. Trompe l'oeil is in fact renounced: the bond with the viewer's physique is broken and the viewing subject is now proposed and assumed as a notional point, a non-empirical Gaze.

Vermeer's paintings are not designed to focus a single point of observation; Updike's Marry Me similarly frustrates the reader's efforts to stabilize the narrative's progression from a unified point of view. As such, the narrative generates the same radical doubt by which Jerry, in his failure to treat adultery as a harmless pastime, is paralyzed.

Jerry's and Sally's affair does not correspond to Richard's philosophy of affairs in the same way that Updike's novel of infidelity does not correspond to the traditional novel of infidelity. Marry Me does not accept the premise of “the adulterous society” even as it represents its pervasiveness; Updike is interested in the affair which contests the institution and refuses to submit to Richard's glib, but workable, philosophy. The irony is that the indecision, incompleteness, and paralysis which Jerry's alternative version of adultery engenders repeats, with its coda of “marry me,” the very institution from which he is ostensibly trying to escape.

II

Although critics may consider Marry Me to be “unexceptional thematically” but technically rich in “originality and unusual experimentation,” no critic actually makes a connection between this form and Updike's content (his unexceptional theme of infidelity), his literary context, or his particular sociocultural milieu. The assumed conflict between freedom and fidelity, however, is complicated through the multiple points of view, the experiments with narrative fidelity (most explicitly in the loose analogy to Plato's allegory of the cave), and the stress on double-binds and “binding.”

Marry Me exhibits a fragmentation of perspective similar to Bryson's account of Vermeer's relation to the spectator. Contrasting the novel to the epic, Bakhtin remarks that within “the genre of the novel, there is no … immanent position for the author”; the choice of point of view then is a rhetorical and a political choice, as Susan Lanser illustrates, and it inescapably structures the concerns which a narrative will engage. In Marry Me the shifting points of view disrupt the naturalist or realist view that the present tense narration encourages. But these shifts also foreground the distinction between first-person narration and limited third-person narration. Updike gains the control of an omniscient narrator—privileged access to the thoughts of three of the central characters—in the guise of what would usually be first-person narration. Such a technique recalls Henry James's development of a central character, or center of consciousness, through whom his story is told, but in Updike this center is multiplied, or, in terms of Marry Me, adulterated. The result is twofold: there is a more complete exposure of each of the main characters; and a radical instability as to both the nature of this exposure and the position from which one interprets the narrative.

Updike has been celebrated as a consummate stylist and an acute observer of realistic detail. The question of the “real” and the language in which it is represented finds a parallel in Plato's exploration of mimesis in his allegory of the cave. The parable is well known: Plato contrasts the world of the cave in which the inhabitants see only shadow images reflected on a wall to the real world, epitomized by the sun, where things are seen directly. To be in the cave is to be a prisoner, and to be able to view the sun is to be free. I discussed a similar opposition earlier with respect to the two versions of adultery: in one version adultery is philosophized and institutionalized; in the other, it denotes an originary freedom, pure and unmediated access to what exists. Not surprisingly, Jerry's and Sally's affair is understood both in the context of the sun (as freedom from the cave and the false commodified social world which it suggests) and originality (they are “the original man and woman”). During Sally's and Jerry's meeting on the beach, for example, there are twelve explicit references to the sun in a short chapter of eighteen pages. But whereas Sally is explicitly associated with the sun—“You're the sun,” Jerry says to her—this sun is not kind. The sun's “tyranny” is nowhere more clear than in Jerry's dramatic paraphrase of Marvell. In despair Jerry cries, “‘It won't stand still.’ He gestured upwards and stared as if to blind himself. ‘The fucking sun won't stand still.’” For Jerry the sun itself is seen through the prism of poetry and as such it frustrates the promise of an unmediated reality (Plato's sun) as Sally herself is represented through the myth of Tristan and Iseult. In this context it is apt that Sally, in the second chapter, is reading Camus's The Stranger: “She concentrated into the Camus. The gun in his hand, the blinding light. The Arab in dungarees. The whiplike gunshot. The unreality.” In a review Updike notes Camus's “obsession with that harsh wonder the sun” (Picked-Up Pieces) and here the sun does not sharpen but rather obscures, or blinds, “the real.” This first chapter, in which Jerry repeatedly closes his eyes against the sun or impotently curses the sun, prefigures his exposure while it at the same time casts this exposure in terms of the opposition between the imitation (the shadow-world) and the real (the sun). In the same way that the opposition between marriage and adultery (upon which both versions of adultery depend) is rendered untenable in its anti-institutional cast, so the opposition between the sun, tellingly described through Marvell and Camus, and the cave is not as discrete as Plato (or Jerry) may wish. If Sally is the sun, she is also a mirror, as I noted above. And where Plato describes a “release from chains, and turning away from the shadows to images and the light, and an upward passage from underground to the sun” (Book VII), Sally “had looked into the mirrors in Paris and seen the truth of it; people were animals, white animals twisting toward the light.” But to see the truth in a mirror is, of course, exactly what Plato denies.

It seems no coincidence that the climactic meeting between the Conants and the Mathiases occurs when they go Greek dancing in a basement hall, a twentieth-century version of Plato's cave. The “frosted basement windows of the hall were aglow with a milky fire, of a tumultuous cavern within; music penetrated the walls.” But the distinctions have by this time been so eroded that they parody the fastidious integrity of Plato's distinction between the shadow images and the real. The sun is itself underground, in the cave. Sally, dressed tellingly in a bright orange dress, tempts Jerry to a truth to which he cannot help but succumb: the truth of infidelity. In front of Ruth, Jerry and Sally dance flagrantly and Jerry believes finally that he experiences the revelation for which he has been waiting. He will leave Ruth. But insofar as the truth embraces infidelity, it is not a faithful truth. And indeed, even after his “revelation,” Jerry continues to oscillate between Sally and Ruth.

Both the varied points of view and the loose analogy to Plato's allegory of the cave indicate Updike's interest in spying on private life and exposing (in both senses of the word) the real. The real, however, is not a thing but a method. Indecision and paralysis are most evident in Jerry's understanding of his bind, a bind which parallels not simply the formal structure of the text, but also the unresolved tension at work in the understanding of adultery in an Anglo-American context. Updike describes the novel's structure as follows: “Marry Me was always a book in my mind, not a collection, or collage, and was written pretty much in a piece, with the five chapters symmetrically alliterative as I have them, and their lengths in the proportion of a diadem” (Hugging). These symmetrically alliterative chapters recall Updike's notes for Couples: “I drew in ballpoint pen a square, with corners labelled M, M, W, W and with dotted diagonal lines connecting opposite corners.” The “W, W” of “Warm Wine” thus inverts the “M, M” of Marry Me in the same way that the Williamses invert the Morrises in Couples. And the repeated “W” and “R” in the chapter headings hints at the constant oscillation between wrong and right with which this book is concerned. Moreover, the text as “diadem” signifies a central difficulty in the narrative; the root of diadem is “to bind,” a short step from the double bind in which Jerry finds himself, a double bind which in fact makes it impossible “to bind.” “Bind” means both to fasten, attach, and connect (the sense in which diadem is used above to indicate an intertwined connecting of the text), and to prevent such fastening, attaching, connecting: to be “in a bind.” Bind is further related both to band (as in wedding band—it is not surprising that one definition of bind is. “To engage or unite in matrimony” [OED]) and to be bound. A process of binding in the connective sense, moreover, signifies the way in which the novel itself is read and, following Lukács, is specific to the novel genre. Bernstein writes:

In their discursive [that is discourse/sjuzhet (the way in which the story is told) as opposed to story/fabula] presentation events are bound together as parts of a whole; initially, or at its lowest level, this binding occurs at the level of plot where earlier events generate later events, and later events fulfil or complete earlier events. Progressive binding ties together the action-consequence-action pattern of human action with our epistemic capacity to follow stories in their movement through time. Retrospective binding ties together the recollective ordering of the past into interpretive sequences with our capacity to have followed a story.

Several theorists specify a “problem of time” as unique to the novel genre. Lukács writes, however, that “[t]ime can become constitutive only when the bond with the transcendental home has been severed” (Theory of the Novel); and the novel is, provocatively, “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Updike shifts the transcendental home to the mundane level of the marital home, but in Jerry he creates a character who longs for a spiritual or metaphysical home. When Jerry says to Sally, for example, “I was never home except when I was with you,” he is referring to this transcendental home which the harried pulse of time in the novel ultimately displaces.

Binding is also closely related to the possibility of thinking itself. Thus Heidegger describes logical behavior as “binding together” and astutely notes of Kant:

“I think” means “I bind together.” All binding together is an “I bind together.” In any taking-together or relating, the “I” always underlies—the [subjectum]. The subjectum is therefore “consciousness in itself,” not a representation but rather the “form” of representation.

The “I” finds its form in relations, and relations demand a binding together. When this binding is thwarted (as in the case of Jerry and Sally caught interminably between an either/or), then a sense of paralysis stalls domestic relations. But binding has an even more significant position in Heidegger's thought. It is a necessary component of mimesis as aletheia, as “letting something be seen in its togetherness with something—letting it be seen as something.” It is not a “manipulation of physical occurrences where the ‘problem’ arises of how these bindings, as something inside, agree with something outside.” It is not then a truth of correspondence. Jerry wants an immediate vision of truth—aletheia—to resolve his difficulty in deciding between Ruth and Sally. Again most of Updike's critics interpret this desire for aletheia in the religious context of revelation or incarnation. But following Heidegger's interpretation of Plato, mimesis implies both imitation or adequatio (a faithful reflection of things) and revelation or aletheia (a sudden illumination, or uncovering of things). Updike's novel as diadem then would aim to bind the narrative together in a thoughtful manner such that the ultimate binding of thought in aletheia may arise.

But the novel is also explicitly about a man who is in a double bind. Not surprisingly, Gregory Bateson's theory of double binds leads to exactly the opposite problem the person in a double bind is unable to accurately or appropriately put things together. One of Kierkegaard's double binds, for example, is that to maintain one's existence one must “arrive at a decision” and “renew it.” Jerry's constant affirmation and then renewal of his decision to marry Sally unavoidably subscribes to this structure.

On several occasions Jerry straightforwardly defines the form of the double bind in which he finds himself. He says to Sally, “You need me and I can't give myself to you. I want you and I can't have you. You're like a set of golden stairs I can never finish climbing. I look down, and the earth is a little blue mist. I look up, and there's this radiance I can never reach. It gives you incredible beauty, and if I marry you I'll destroy it.” For Jerry then, to possess what he wants is to destroy it. His repetition of “I can't” and “I can never” marks his undeniable preference for doubt over decision. Jerry persists, “What we have, sweet Sally, is an ideal love. It's ideal because it can't be realized. As far as the world goes, we don't exist. We've never made love, we haven't been in Washington together; we're nothing. And any attempt to start existing, to move out of this pain, will kill us.” To exist—to come into the light, the common language, the community—is, ironically, to die. Jerry finally recognizes that his valorization of adultery as a space apart is untenable: the public domain makes a difference.

III

“The whole town knows we're in trouble,” Ruth informs Jerry. Ruth, more careless of communal knowledge than Jerry, thinks about her affair with Richard: “Did everybody know? Let them.” And with respect to Jerry's affair with Sally, Updike writes: “Everybody knew. All their friends, as July slipped by, came to know. Ruth … felt the fine net of knowing that enclosed her.” But Jerry's passion for Sally cannot withstand such visibility. In the first chapter Jerry can assure Sally, “There's nobody around, we're really quite hidden.” But in the last three chapters everybody is around, and Jerry and Sally are increasingly exposed. Jerry's response to this exposure is to desire obscurity; “he was hunted” and he felt that “he must hide.”

Jerry goes sheepishly over to Sally's, aware finally that his love for her lay precisely in its impossibility and invisibility—in its avoidance of spying eyes. This knowledge is underlined by his aversion to Sally's implicit suggestion that they make love in her home, a suggestion which Jerry can only view as an invitation to publicity: “Was she offering, incredibly, to make love, here, with all the world watching?” Jerry realizes that “Richard's knowing had swept through things and left them bare; the trees were stripped, the house was polished and sterile like a shop window.” In this shop window stand Jerry and Sally, exposed: the adulterous affair commodified. Updike at this point emphasizes the sunlight in the kitchen, a sunlight which implies their own exposure: “She stood; he stood; they seemed, the two of them, bombarded by light perilously. He wanted to hush her brilliance, for it cried out, declared, through the miraculous transparence around them, their position, when they most needed to hide.” But can the novel also be seen as a shop window through which the reader curiously peers at the small details of domestic life? As Jerry desperately searches for a freedom which he, in error, associates with Sally (as sun and mirror), it becomes clear that there is no place for Jerry's version of infidelity; Sally and Jerry, as Jerry says with respect to the Vermeer, are always in the “wrong place.”

In Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, Archer says to his desired lover Ellen: “‘I want—I want to somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that [mistress]—categories like that [mistress versus wife]—will not exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other; and nothing else will matter.’ She [Ellen] drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. ‘Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?’” In Marry Me Updike attempts to create this country, not as a real place, but as a reading experience, an experience which the reader, in fact, is invited to “marry.” The final words of the novel are as follows: “This was the place, it tasted right. He had always told her there was a place, and now he had found it, made good his promise, and brought them here. … The existence of this place satisfied him that there was a dimension in which he did go, as was right, at that party, or the next, and stand, timid and exultant, above the downcast eyes of her gracious, sorrowing face, and say to Sally, Marry Me.” The “place” to which Jerry refers, of course, is a romantic fiction. But in a twentieth-century suburban America keen to confer labels like “the adulterous society,” there is no place where “words like that—categories like that” do not exist. If the “truth about sex” is the truth of infidelity and the narrative is destabilized accordingly, then it will always be infidelity which is quite literally publicized in the shop window, on the cover of Time, and even in a novel which both calls itself Marry Me and disavows its claims to fidelity to add the qualifier: A Romance.