The Music School by John Updike
"The Music School" by John Updike is a short story that operates with the depth and complexity typically found in a novel. The narrative follows Alfred Schweigen, a writer grappling with the emotional turmoil of marital infidelity while waiting for his daughter to finish her piano lesson. The story blends themes of spirituality and materiality, as it juxtaposes the mundane moments of daily life with deeper moral and existential conflicts. Through a confessional lens, the narrator reflects on societal and personal shifts, including the recent murder of an acquaintance, which ties into his own feelings of guilt and longing.
Throughout the narrative, Updike employs rich metaphors, particularly around the concepts of nourishment and transubstantiation, linking religious elements like Communion and the act of eating with personal experiences of love and betrayal. Music, much like spirituality, serves as a form of nourishment for the characters, while the narrator's struggles reveal the tension between his desires and the diminishing spiritual connection in his marriage. This complexity invites readers to explore themes of guilt, sexuality, and the transformative power of music and relationships within the context of contemporary life.
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Subject Terms
The Music School by John Updike
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1964 (collected in The Music School, 1966)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“The Music School” is a short story encompassing all the materials of a novel, for what starts out as a simple first-person narration soon becomes a confession of marital infidelity. The story features themes and techniques Updike often uses, in particular complex metaphor and the tension between materiality and spirituality.
The story revolves around three brief incidents. The narrator, who identifies himself only as Alfred Schweigen, a writer, tells readers that the night before he heard a priest describe a change in “his Church’s attitude toward the Eucharistic wafer,” that what was only allowed to melt in the mouth during Communion was now to be chewed and swallowed. This anecdote is immediately followed by another, the discovery in the paper this morning that an acquaintance, a computer expert, has been murdered, shot through a window in his home as he sat at dinner with his family. The focus has already shifted, and the story is becoming increasingly confessional, as the narrator admits that he is sitting in a music school this afternoon, waiting for his eight-year-old daughter to finish her piano lesson. He loves taking her and waiting for her, he says, but he only does it “because today my wife visits her psychiatrist. She visits a psychiatrist because I am unfaithful to her,” and he admits that he is also seeing a psychiatrist, who wonders “why I need to humiliate myself. It is a habit, I suppose, of confession.” He goes on to describe the country church he attended as a child where every two months there was a public confession—which is what the story itself is becoming. He knew the man who was shot because he had once thought of writing a novel about a computer programmer that would develop into a story of love, guilt, and death, into what, in short, his own marriage is becoming. He watches his daughter coming from her lesson and her “pleased smile . . . pierces my heart, and I die (I think) at her feet.”
The story epitomizes the technique Updike uses (as in his later story “Separating”) of relating mundane events while, just beneath the surface, larger changes are going on. The writer is fixated on his daughter, not as any father might be, but in order to keep himself from thinking about the changes ahead. Like a number of Updike stories, “The Music School” is ultimately about sex and religion or, rather, how contemporary sexuality has replaced more traditional spiritual life. The two opening incidents involve “a common element of nourishment, of eating transfigured by a strange irruption,” but they also involve transubstantiation, the process by which the spiritual becomes material, through the Communion wafer and through the bullet carrying “a maniac hatred.”
This metaphorical complexity works throughout the story. The priest was playing the guitar at the party the night before, the music school is like a church, and for the daughter “the lesson has been a meal.” Music carries its meaning as the spiritual is transcribed into notes on a score or fingers on an instrument. The Communion wafer, like the daughter’s music lesson, carries nourishment, as the narrator’s marriage is, in contrast, losing its spiritual meaning through the narrator’s own material, sexual needs.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.
Greiner, Donald. John Updike’s Novels. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984.
Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
Newman, Judie. John Updike. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998.
Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Uphaus, Suzanne Henning. John Updike. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.