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A New Literary Realism: Artistic Renderings of Ethnicity, Identity, and Sexuality in the Narratives of Philip Roth

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A New Literary Realism: Artistic Renderings of Ethnicity, Identity, and Sexuality in the Narratives of Philip Roth A NEW LITERARY REALISM: ARTISTIC RENDERINGS OF ETHNICITY, IDENTITY, AND SEXUALITY IN THE NARRATIVES OF PHILIP ROTH Marta Krogh Harvell, B.A., B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2012 APPROVED: James Duban, Major Professor Robert Upchurch, Committee Member James Baird, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Harvell, Marta Krogh. A New Literary Realism: Artistic Renderings of Ethnicity, Identity, and Sexuality in the Narratives of Philip Roth. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2012, 154 pp., bibliography, 246 titles. This dissertation explores Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959), The Ghost Writer (1979), The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Operation Shylock (1993), Sabbath's Theater (1995),and The Human Stain (2000), arguing that Roth relishes the telling of the story and the search for self within that telling. With attention to narrative technique and its relation to issues surrounding reality and identity, Roth's narratives stress unreliability, causing Roth to create characters searching for a more complex interpretation of self. Chapter I examines Roth’s negotiation of dual identities as Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus feels alienated and displaced from Christianized America. The search for identity and the merging of American Christianity and Judaism remain a focus in Chapter II, which explores the implications of how, in The Ghost Writer, a young Nathan Zuckerman visits his mentor E.I. Lonoff to find him living in what he believes to be a non-Jewish environment—the American wilderness. Chapter II also examines the difficulties of cultural assimilation in "Eli, the Fanatic," in which Eli must shed outward appearances of Judaism to fit into the mostly Protestant community of Woodenton. Relative to the negotiation of multiple identities, Chapter III considers Sabbath’s attempt, in Sabbath’s Theater, to reconcile his spiritual and physical self when seeking to avoid his inevitable death. Exploring a further dimension of the search for self, Chapter IV traces the legacy of stereotyped notions of identity, considering ways in which Roth subverts stereotypes in The Human Stain. The search for identity and its particular truths remains a focus of Chapter V, which explores Roth's creation of an unstable reality through The Counterlife, The Facts, Operation Shylock, and The Human Stain, suggesting that the literary imagination matters more than truth in fiction. In its attention to Roth's focus on identity, race, and narrative technique, this dissertation contributes to the evolution of criticism addressing the social significance of the major works of Philip Roth. Copyright 2012 by Marta Krogh Harvell ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABBREVIATIONS FOR PRIMARY WORKS ...................................................................iv CHAPTER I A NEW LITERARY REALISM: ARTISTIC RENDERINGS OF ETHNICITY, IDENTITY, AND SEXUALITY IN THE NARRATIVES OF PHILIP ROTH ........................ 1 CHAPTER II "THEY'RE GOYIM, MY KIDS": THE PROBLEM WITH GOING NATIVE IN GOODBYE, COLUMBUS .............................................................................................. 11 CHAPTER III THE ART OF JEWISH IDENTITY: "ELI, THE FANATIC" AND THE GHOST WRITER .......................................................................................................... 29 CHAPTER IV AMERICAN MORAL CONFINES: MICKEY SABBATH'S FAILED ANTINOMIANISM ......................................................................................................... 49 CHAPTER V THE LEGACY BEHIND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE AND IDENTITY IN THE HUMAN STAIN ................................................................................................. 66 CHAPTER VI THE CHALLENGE OF THE VENTRILOQUIST: "PERVASIVE UNCERTAINTY" IN THE WORKS OF PHILIP ROTH .................................................. 88 CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 111 ENDNOTES ................................................................................................................ 120 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 133 iii ABBREVIATIONS FOR PRIMARY WORKS AP: Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. CL: - -. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. DA: - -. The Dying Animal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. "EF": - -. "Eli, the Fanatic." Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959. EG: - -. Exit Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. EM: - -. Everyman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. GAN: - -. The Great American Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973. GC: - -. "Goodbye Columbus." Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959. GW: - -. The Ghost Writer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. HS: - -. The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. LG: - -. Letting Go. New York: Random House, 1962. OS: - -. Operation Shylock. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. PC: - -. Portnoy's Complaint. New York : Random House, 1967. PD: - -. The Professor of Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. PT: - -. Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. RMO: - -. Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. ST: - -. Sabbath's Theater. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995. TF: - -. The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988. WSWG: - -. When She Was Good. New York: Random House, 1966. iv CHAPTER I A NEW LITERARY REALISM: ARTISTIC RENDERINGS OF ETHNICITY, IDENTITY, AND SEXUALITY IN THE NARRATIVES OF PHILIP ROTH The works of Philip Roth focus on the instability of both art and life, all the while contemplating the search for, and formation of, identity. With attention to narrative technique and its relation to issues surrounding reality and identity, this dissertation explores Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959), The Ghost Writer (1979), The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Operation Shylock (1993), Sabbath's Theater (1995), and The Human Stain (2000).1 Treating Roth's novels and short fiction, I demonstrate that Roth relishes the telling of the story and the search for self within that telling. In his essay "Writing American Fiction," Roth says that, by focusing on the self, the writer can create an extraordinary outcome (RMO 189). I argue that, because Roth seeks to focus on the remarkable, he centers his work on binary oppositions: author/narrator, father/son, past/present, physical/metaphysical, fiction/fact. For Roth's narrators these juxtapositions create a reality filled with uncertainty: just as readers cannot trust any aspect of his art, so Roth questions reality in general. Anticipating a vital dimension of Roth's outlook, William Dean Howells, in Criticism and Fiction (1892), declares that "a story of our own life, honestly studied and faithfully represented, troubles [readers] with varied misgivings. They are not sure that it is literature….Its characters, so like their own, strike them as commonplace [and] they say they do not wish to know such people" (41). Howells thereby foreshadows concerns that I 1 categorize as part of Roth's literary realism.2 Indeed, the works of Roth focus on the inability of readers to trust texts in which narrators juxtapose every idea with its antithesis; at the same time, Roth's creation of a questionable version of reality makes it impossible for readers to determine where art ends and reality begins: the two often become inseparable in Roth's narratives. Thus, by generating this distrust in fiction, Roth dramatizes the constructed nature of both art and life. My investigation of Roth's narrative technique emphasizes, as well, how Roth threatens our understanding of self. Whether his characters are negotiating what it means to be Jewish and American or struggling with concepts of physical or metaphysical, each of Roth's juxtapositions leads to the characters' search for identity. I argue that Roth's juxtapositions create unreliability and cause the characters/narrators to struggle with the idea of fiction and reality as a construction. In fact, Roth's characters are in constant search for balance, and that search translates into an attempt to define their own reality and their own version of self. Although critics note how a search for identity in Roth's works entails struggles with the establishment of self (Jones and Nance), they do not demonstrate the pressures against which the characters struggle. Departing, as well, from Jones, Nance, and Cooper—who emphasize autobiography and fail to explore fully Roth's focus on the artificiality of art and life—I suggest that, because Roth's narratives stress unreliability, Roth creates characters searching for a more complex interpretation of self. To that end, this dissertation examines the precarious version of reality evident in the binary oppositions of Roth's narratives, illustrating how the instability of existence causes characters to pursue, and attempt to establish, their own personal (more 2 reliable) reality and self. The first chapter explores Roth's difficult negotiation of American and Jewish identities, ultimately concluding that his characters struggle to manage dual selves because being Jewish means that they
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