IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO Bruno Schulz's Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, Updike muses: “From the mother, perhaps, men derive their sense of their bodies; from the father, their sense of the world.” His language here places him in a masculine idealist tradition dating back to Descartes, who famously splits the human experience into body and mind. In Descartes, as Susan Bordo notes, “The spiritual and the corporeal are now two distinct substances which share no qualities (other than being created), permit of interaction but no merging, and are each defined precisely in opposition to the other.” The body becomes res extensa, and the mind res cogitans; thus Descartes is able to formulate “complete intellectual independence from the body, res extensa of the human being and chief impediment to human objectivity” (355). And at the same time, he separates the intellectual world from the natural world, privileging the former over the latter. Bordo argues that Descartes implicitly and explicitly codes the marginal terms in his dichotomy—body, nature, subjectivity— as feminine, and thus his metaphysical project “appears, not merely as the articulation of a positive new epistemological ideal, but as a reactionformation to the loss of ‘being-one-with-the-world’ brought about by the disintegration of the organic, centered, female cosmos of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Cartesian reconstruction of the world is a ‘fort-da’ game—a defiant gesture of independence from the female cosmos, a gesture which is at the same time compensation for a profound loss” (359). Updike, it must be said, does not go as far as Descartes on this front; his existentialist orientation prevents him from praising Cartesian objectivity as an ideal, let alone as an attainable position—and, after all, in his introduction to Schulz he associates masculinity not with the intellect but with the world. And yet he still continues Descartes's project, both in this essay and in much of his fiction, in which male lust is presented as a powerful imaginative force, l’être-pour-soi that performs its operations upon the inert l’être-en-soi of the female body.