Roth and War: Two Cases
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ROTH AND WAR: TWO CASES __________________________________________________________________ A thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri ___________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Degree Master of Arts _____________________________________________ by BRIAN VAN REET Dr. Speer Morgan, Thesis Advisor JULY 2009 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled ROTH AND WAR: TWO CASES presented by Brian Van Reet, a candidate for the degree of master of arts, and hereby certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. ___________________________________________________ Professor Speer Morgan ___________________________________________________ Professor Samuel Cohen ___________________________________________________ Professor Steve Weinberg ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Professor Speer Morgan, Professor Samuel Cohen, and Professor Steve Weinberg. All three men gave me generous and invaluable gifts of time, patience, and expertise. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………………..……ii INTRODUCTION: THE ARC OF A CAREER…………………………………………….…….…….1 CHAPTERS “DEFENDER OF THE FAITH”: WAR AS CONFLICTED IDENTIT…………...…12 INDIGNATION: SEX, WAR, AND THE CONSOLATION OF HISTORY………...33 CONCLUSION: WIELDING WAR……………………………………………………………………..46 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………………………50 iii INTRODUCTION The Arc of a Career “There’s a strong warlike component to your Fate line. Your Fate line sort of rises in the Mount of Mars. You actually have three Fate lines. Which is very unusual. Most people don’t have any.” ‐ Jinx reading Roth’s palm in Operation Shylock War is one of Philip Roth’s recurrent themes, its martial drumbeat marking time throughout a career that varies greatly in style and subject matter. At his best, Roth represents the most complex problems of the 20th century in terms that are smaller and more knowable than the global forces one reads about in history textbooks. Take for example his depiction of 1930’s Newark, where he spent his childhood, a place and time evoked again and again in his work. Writing about this familiar setting allows Roth to explore mass migration, World War Two, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Great Depression—some of the hardest to represent and most important events of the twentieth century. Roth has also had his flops writing about war. The Great American Novel (1973) is a savage farce set in a fantastic, World War II‐era America. Word. E. Smith, the appropriately named narrator, demonstrates his penchant for over‐ alliteration as he tells the mean‐spirited tale of a homeless baseball team that competes in the Patriot League during the war, when all the able‐bodied pros are serving overseas. Falling roughly at the chronological mid‐point of Roth’s career, 1 Great American Novel marks what is arguably the qualitative low. Thankfully, the highs are much higher. This sort of variability is what one might expect from such a prolific writer, producer on average of more than a book every two years per half‐century. Along the way he has managed to win most every literary prize short of the Nobel and has the distinction of being the only living writer whose collected work is bound in Library of America editions. Before narrowing the focus to two representative works, I will introduce Roth in general terms. Imagine the arc of his career plotted on two axes: the x, time; the y, literary distinction. Some writers might begin somewhere close to zero on the vertical scale, steadily building their reputation with a succession of improving works. Others might start high with a great first novel and then peter out to obscurity. And still others (Harper Lee, Salinger) can only be represented by one or a few points. In Roth’s case there are many more to plot, twenty‐nine books in print with two more in the presses. Roth has been a constant self‐reinventor (also a theme of his work), alternatively writing Jamesian realism, novels completely in dialog, the psychoanalytic rant as novel, the metafictional confession as novel, etc. He produced his most conceptually far‐out work in the late sixties and early seventies. Our Gang (1971) belongs in this category. The novel, a brutal play in six acts, satirizes the Nixon administration. Our Gang was followed by The Breast (1972), a spoof on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in which the protagonist transforms into a giant breast. And then there was the aforementioned Great American Novel, for me the most difficult to enjoy of Roth’s books. Gang, Breast, and Great 2 American stand as his most overtly and ambitiously comic works. In this series of novels, Roth returns to mine the radical brand of humor that made Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) such a comic tour de force, but none of the three books that followed it achieved anything like Portnoy’s influence on pop‐culture. Other than Alexander Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman may be Roth’s most well known protagonist. In 1974’s My Life as a Man, Roth introduced what would become his longest‐running alter ego, who makes his second appearance in The Ghost Writer (1979). Ghost Writer features a young Zuckerman, promising author of a few stories, who accepts an invitation to visit his literary idol, E.I. Lonoff. What ensues is part fantasy (Lonoff has a young female assistant whom Zuckerman imagines is Anne Frank), part dramatization of the relationship between fiction and reality, and part rumination on the discipline of writing and how it sometimes interferes with other kinds of living. All are recurring themes in Roth’s work. By Zuckerman’s third appearance in Zuckerman Unbound (1981), he is the rich, famous, and hounded author of Carnovsky, a novel corresponding to Portnoy’s Complaint in terms of blockbuster status and taboo subject matter. Next in the series is The Anatomy Lesson (1983), with Zuckerman laid low by back pain. The only place he finds any respite is on the floor where he is serviced by four women, all the while struggling to maintain his sanity amidst a combination of drugs and stress. The novel ends on a low note, with Zuckerman as a patient in the hospital, roaming the corridors “with the interns at night, as though he still believed that he could unchain himself from a future as a man 3 apart and escape the corpus that was his” (449). These closing lines liken Zuckerman’s tortured body to his body of work, and the novel stands as testimony to the isolating effects of fame, physical pain, and psychological torment. The hard times came to a head when Roth suffered his breakdown. Passages of Operation Shylock (1993) fictionalize this illness, attributed (in the novel) to sleeping pills. If one had been asked during this time to predict the future of the middle‐aged writer’s career, the prognosis would not have been good. His mind was gone, his body going. He had written some good books, some bad, but had not been able to top the sales figures of Portnoy, nor the National Book Award of his first effort, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). One of his many harsh critics might have written him off as a has‐been—albeit an important one. But in one of the great literary turnarounds of all time, Roth’s breakdown did not prefigure his end, only a second beginning. As Timothy Parrish notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, the subject of artistic second chances makes a prescient appearance in Ghost Writer when Zuckerman notices Lonoff is reading Henry James’s “The Middle Years,” a story about a writer who dies without completing his great work: “ ‘A second chance,’ James’s artist says, ‘that’s the delusion. There never was but one’” (7). Parrish goes on to point out that in Roth’s essay on Bernard Malamud, Roth “projects his own ‘Middle Years’ nightmare on to Malamud,” depicting “the abject helplessness Malamud must have felt while dying before he had the opportunity to rework his sentences into 4 something memorable” (7). But unlike James’s character or the dying Malamud, Roth did indeed receive—or more probably—willed himself a second chance. In a 2004 review of The Plot Against America, Erik Tarloff begins with the following exclamation about the novelist’s late renaissance: “It is not clear when precisely it happened, but at some point while our backs were turned Philip Roth seems to have metamorphosed from enfant terrible into old master” (“Unmistakably”). Even if we can’t locate the exact moment, we can pin down the period when the tide started to turn. In 1987, around the time of his breakdown, Roth ended a long dry spell of not winning major awards for his books by winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1987); Patrimony (1991), a memoir about the illness and death of his elderly father, was likewise recognized. In 1993 Operation Shylock won a PEN/Faulkner, Sabbath’s Theatre (1995) received a National Book Award, and in ‘97 American Pastoral won the Pulitzer. In ‘98 Roth was awarded a National Medal of Arts. It should be noted that awards are not the only (and certainly not the best) way of evaluating a writer’s career. They reveal little else than how one book fared among a small group of critics within the context of other notable books published in one particular year. Still, awards (along with sales figures) are one quantitative measure of success (i.e., cultural influence), and along with critical responses (and the writer’s own response to his work), they are one of the few measures available without the benefit of great hindsight. In a hundred years it may not matter much that Roth won the NBCCA in 1987, but it undoubtedly mattered to Roth in the moment, and it did signal a burst of creativity to come.