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Years of the Plague. a Rereading of Philip Roth's

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Years of the Plague. a Rereading of Philip Roth's 191 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE YEARS OF THE PLAGUE. A REREADING OF PHILIP ROTH’S NEMESIS GABRIELA GLĂVAN West University in Timişoara Abstract: Philip Roth’s exit from the literary scene occurred in 2010, with the publication of Nemesis, a novel that stands apart in the writer’s oeuvre. This final book explores a dramatic moment in 20th century American history – the poliomyelitis epidemic that claimed the lives of thousands of children in two deadly waves, in 1916 and 1952. Roth recontextualizes this dramatic event by integrating it into the Second World War period, in 1944, and focuses on the tragic destiny of Bucky Cantor, a sports teacher doomed to play a significant role in this unusual context. I shall focus on the metamorphosis of Roth’s central death theme, interpret Cantor’s role as tragic hero and propose a rereading of the novel that integrates the current moment – the COVID19 epidemic. Keywords: collective death, ethnic conflict, illness, Jewishness, poliomyelitis, World War II 1. Introduction Although death has been a major trope in Philip Roth’s oeuvre since the beginning of his literary career, its meaning was confined in the realm of individual experience. His later novels mark an opening towards the demise of others as an allegory of one’s own mortality – Everyman, Dying Animal and Exit Ghost project a complex philosophy of death as a subjective experience the protagonist must face. Roth’s final novel, Nemesis, rearranges this theme in a new framework, that of collective tragedy, filtered by a single consciousness, that of Bucky Cantor, himself a modern version of Everyman, the protagonist of Roth’s homonymous novel. A collective process leaving indelible marks on society and public consciousness – the poliomyelitis epidemic of 1944 (that, in reality, happened in 1916 and 1952) is a rather unusual issue for an author whose predilect themes concern the inner life, sexuality and historical tragedies of his characters. However, an equally relevant interest that Roth frequently manifested is in the mythology of his childhood, his native Newark, and the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic, a minor universe reflecting ethnic and political aspects challenging minorities in post-war America. I shall explore the meaning of Cantor’s life-changing experience as a tragic hero of the polio epidemic, while at the same time proposing a rereading of a plague novel in a pandemic context, that of the present COVID19 global health crisis. The collective aspect of the novel, focusing on communities, relationships, family ties and ethnic adversities is a rather familiar trait of Roth’s fiction, present in novels such as American Pastoral (1997) and The Plot Against America (2004). Illness and physical suffering, on the other hand, reflect the author’s long-lasting preoccupation with the biological life, the body and its precariousness in the aging process. In Nemesis, illness is life-threatening, may induce permanent paralysis and B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 192 predominantly affects children and the young. In 2013, The Library of America published four novels written by Philip Roth under the title Nemeses: Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling and Nemesis. At the time, Roth was the only living American author who had his work published in a definitive edition by The Library of America. The volume reunites these works under the sign of fatal circumstances, historical and individual, shaping the fate of the protagonists. Nemesis, more than the others, gathers, in a dense narrative of pain, grief and disbelief, the multi- leveled effects of a disease that had made countless victims until 1953, when Jonas Salk developed the formalin inactivated polio vaccine. Later, other versions become available – in 1956 Albert Sabin developed a vaccine using a live-attenuated polio virus. 2. The allegories of a killer In an interview from 2010, published online, when he announced his retirement, Philip Roth commented on the creative process that led to his writing Nemesis: "I began [writing] as I sometimes do with a book [by jotting down] on a yellow legal pad all of the historical events that I've lived through that I've not dealt with in fiction," Roth explains. “When I came to polio, it was a great revelation to me. I never thought of it before as a subject. And then I remembered how frightening it was and how deadly it was and I thought, ‘OK, try to write a book about polio’” (Gross 2010). The writer’s primary intention was, therefore, to revive a historical event that he had witnessed and, as he had previously done in other novels, fictionalize and integrate it into his own mythology of 20th century America. His strategy of promoting a protagonist, structured as a tragic hero that takes upon himself the misfortunes of an entire community, results in an alert and dramatic unfolding of events, culminating, much like in classical tragedy, with the revelation of the hero’s truth, leading to disastrous consequences. In terms of tragedy, it is of paramount importance to identify the protagonist’s hubris, as the notion quantifies his relation to others and the world. Bucky Cantor, who is a physical education teacher, is a protective figure for the children attending the playground he supervises. His savior complex proves destructive, leading to uncontrollable consequences. An orphan whose mother died in childbirth, Cantor tries to control the collective destiny of the children under his care, questioning divine intervention and communal action. Roth shaped his protagonist with great tragic heroes in mind, whose moments of anagnorisis (understood as revelation and essential discovery) brought great suffering, mutilation and symbolic death. When he discovers that he has been the spreader of the polio virus, infecting and endangering the children he was supposed to protect, Bucky punishes himself, ending his engagement to Marcia and retreating from social life. The individual tragedy of Bucky Cantor is a condensed version of the collective trauma of the poliomyelitis epidemic, placed by Roth in 1944, one of the most dramatic years of World War II. This connection heightens the inner tension of the novel, as the epidemic that claimed the lives of thousands of children is allegorically reimagined as a process alluding to the Holocaust. In order to amplify its severity and impact upon humanity, “Roth fantasizes a polio epidemic to coincide with World War II” (Budick 2014: 2). Bucky’s poor eyesight, a clear allusion to Oedipus’ blindness to his own tragic fate was the reason he was rejected by the US Army when he wanted to enroll as a volunteer to fight against Nazi Germany. Except for one, Bucky’s friends, young men of the same age, have just 193 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE come through the landing in Normandy alive and unharmed. For Eugene Cantor, the Jewish young man unfit for draft (Jewishness itself being, traditionally, for centuries, in the past, a reason for exclusion), the war on the front becomes a domestic war targeting an invisible, ubiquitous enemy. In a comprehensive study on aspects of the self in Philip Roth’s Nemesis, Victoria Aarons (2013: 55) argued that the writer intended to give the story a universal meaning by relying on structures of “mythic time and place as well, out of real time” By superimposing historical facts on a fictional frame, Roth created “a hybrid of realism” (Kaminsky 2014: 113). Two articles published earlier in 2020 question the remarkable similarities between the imaginary plot in Nemesis and the health crisis caused by the SARS- COV2 virus – Richard Brody’s The Eerie Familiarities of ‘Nemesis’, Philip Roth’s Novel of a Polio Epidemic in The New Yorker and Samuel G. Freedman’s Philip Roth’s Epidemic and Ours in The Washington Post. Both were published in April 2020, during the first wave of the COVID 19 pandemic, when little was known about the disease, the mortality rate was soaring in Europe and the prospect of a vaccine was disarmingly distant in the future. Public life was brutally halted with worldwide lockdowns, masks covered faces to protect people against a virus that randomly attacked individuals of all ages, the daily news heightened collective anxiety to an unprecedented level. Human interaction changed under the pressure of social distancing, suspicions against otherness and difference reignited latent controversies. Public health policies and restrictions were often based on political calculation, with electoral campaigns using the pandemic in opportunistic ways. In the reality of 2020 and in Roth’s fictional narrative, human bonds weaken, since social distancing was firmly recommended as a means to control the spread of the virus. As any major crisis does, the polio epidemic put an enormous strain on societal dynamics, worsening ethnic asperities, paving the way to abuse and marginalization. Many passages in Roth’s novel strangely anticipate the gloom of the COVID 19 pandemic, describing the fear and helplessness of a fight with an unpredictable enemy: He could hear a siren in the distance. He heard sirens off and on, day and night now. They were not the air-raid sirens - those went off only once a week, at noon on Saturdays, and they did not induce fear so much as provide solace by proclaiming the city ready for anything. These were the sirens of ambulances going to get polio victims and transport them to the hospital, sirens stridently screaming, “Out of the way - a life is at stake!” Several city hospitals had recently run out of iron lungs, and patients in need of them were being taken to Belleville, Kearny, and Elizabeth until a new shipment of the respirator tanks reached Newark. (Roth 2010: 50) There were numerous poliomyelitis outbreaks in the United States, starting in 1894, when the state of Vermont was the scene of a dreadful epidemic.
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