Revisiting the A&P
The first time I read the A & P by John Updike, as a 9th grader beginning high school, I thought Sammy was kind of lame. Even writing his name now — Sammy is an affectionate childhood name, isn’t it — recalls and reinforces the judgment.
It was his unremarkableness, his inert and unimportant position that led to this oversight. He was someone that easily faded to the background, omitted from attention like the introverted friend at a social gathering. The preciseness of his observations and mechanical actions was barely a note above notice; it provoked the slightest of interest. Naturally, whether through the designs of the author or the nature of the reader, the ninth grade adolescent focused acutely on the alluring voluptuous girl in the bathing suit before jumping, like lightning to a metal rod, to Queenie. Doubtless due to Updike’s artful grace, not a thought was given in that young boy’s mind to the way Sammy’s descriptions transformed effortlessly into images and wonder of these three feminine idols, which grew ever more fanciful the more reflected upon. The brutal descriptive comparison of their world to his only enhanced, like a properly applied photo filter, my earlier self’s apathy toward the squalid A&P cashier. If Sammy’s idealizations invoke a tiredness, if the setting of the romantic man worshipping the woman touching his affections is languid, if the artifice he draws upon yields merely disinterest in majority of others, it remarks, I say with sadness, on the ostensible uselessness of the male poet in society.
So then the ninth grader’s narrow mindset overlooked the narrator. Sammy works as an expendable employee and hails from an unknown family. He has no plan nor aim for money or status. His most consequential action is pathetic, and its attempt at achieving its aim is utterly unsuccessful. These were the hallmark American items, the stereotypical buttons that when punched would elicit fascination; the absence of which leaving no feelings but disinterest and derision.
It’s quite interesting to me now how generally the observer only picks up detail at his or her own level; what would a world look like where the observer perceives from the level of the creator, and what massive amount of information is lost (and related statistics, like info lost per piece, per reader) in translation? And how do changes in perception (“growth” in the somewhat gross context of “levels”) occur?
Maybe it’s one part reading, analyzing, and relating texts, but more curious is how merely living, merely accumulating the plethora of experiences no matter how seemingly ritual or mundane, brings out a unique new stance to analyze fiction, one that shifts per person, per point in time. What new stance provokes this post? He’s a young man, on the cusp of adulthood. Good at his job, single, bored and unsettled. His observations flow effortlessly and endlessly through the text, constrained neither to the idiosyncrasies of the profession he has mastered and which is beneath his abilities nor the confines of the religious sermons or figureheads attempting to control him. He notices the differences between the three women, and the regular shoppers, he notices the monotony and stagnation of his world; the Protestant’s spell — the one of contentment and salvation for fulfilling one’s role — which has translated roughly through American ideological history into that of the sheer pride in merely working to earn one’s keep fails to charm or placate him. He redirects the Christian rhetoric fed to him into attacks upon itself and the mindless who unquestionably accept and adhere to it. Static with energy, coursing with vigor, the A&P walls and the costume (or strait-jacket) of the cashier are too restrictive and too weak a container to place him. One taste of youth, one taste of the feminine, one taste of the unknown and of life outside the poorly constructed society — which collapses like the cardboard facades of a movie set to reveal the world, the real, outside of it — and Sammy seizes his destiny as a man, unbinding those loose shackles (made of what?) to become an independent agent of that superset of all individuals: the universal society.
Part or most or all of the intrigue at the end is its openness and lack of resolution. What would Sammy’s success look like? What will his next steps be? What would his failure look like? The infinite storylines condense to but a few to the conception; he navigate to a ‘higher’ position commensurate with Queenie, perhaps he shortcuts or earnestly works his way via his talents into a prominent white-collar position like Horatio Algiers. He might walk down the road towards Boston and never look back. Fatalistically, Sammy could fail completely, beg forgiveness from his parents and Lengel, and live in shame, punching the buttons of the same register at the A&P forever, his humanity subjugated and his assimilation into the machine complete. The amount of interest and suspense the ending holds is directly proportional to the capacity of the reader’s imagination.
The story of the A&P emblazons well onto 21st century American society, or at least to the one I live in. It grapples with the internal archetypal conflict between man and beast, logic and instinct. For what is taking our hot-blooded core, the passions of sexual desire, the hunger and will to survive, the ability to kill predators and drive the spear through the guts of our sworn adversary, and packing it into mass-produced white-collar cotton straitjackets, punishing and shaming it when it lashes out, pigeonholing it into mechanized tasks for most of its waking life but subjugation. What is it but a grand laboratory experiment of 300 million rats in a glass enclosure, the researchers observing with perverse fascination, peering in close with clipboards to take notes and record what strikes their interest. Sammy sees the world, painfully, for what it is; his untainted perception of his surroundings adds a grossness which perhaps exists unconditionally in human existence. His imagination leads him to flights of fancy, images of a better life, a different story, a transformation of self and most importantly a heroic seizure of his narrative; we root for him to achieve those dreams he creates and to conceive a beautiful one we have not yet imagined. We the unfulfilled — we the subjugated — wish for his happy ending no matter how unlikely it is to manifest in order to prove that greener pastures do exist, to bask in their radiant never-ending Elysium splendor, and to know that it’s possible to reach them merely by self-agency.
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