PHILIP ROTH AND THE STRUGGLE OF MODERN FICTION
by
JACK FRANCIS KNOWLES
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES
(English)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver)
July 2020
© Jack Francis Knowles, 2020
The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled:
Philip Roth and The Struggle of Modern Fiction
in partial fulfillment of the requirements submitted by Jack Francis Knowles for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English
Examining Committee:
Ira Nadel, Professor, English, UBC Supervisor
Jeffrey Severs, Associate Professor, English, UBC Supervisory Committee Member
Michael Zeitlin, Associate Professor, English, UBC Supervisory Committee Member
Lisa Coulthard, Associate Professor, Film Studies, UBC University Examiner
Adam Frank, Professor, English, UBC University Examiner
ii
ABSTRACT
“Philip Roth and The Struggle of Modern Fiction” examines the work of Philip Roth in the context of postwar modernism, tracing evolutions in Roth’s shifting approach to literary form across the broad arc of his career. Scholarship on Roth has expanded in both range and complexity over recent years, propelled in large part by the critical esteem surrounding his major fiction of the 1990s. But comprehensive studies of Roth’s development rarely stray beyond certain prominent subjects, homing in on the author’s complicated meditations on Jewish identity, a perceived predilection for postmodern experimentation, and, more recently, his meditations on the powerful claims of the American nation. This study argues that a preoccupation with the efficacies of fiction—probing its epistemological purchase, questioning its autonomy, and examining the shaping force of its contexts of production and circulation— roots each of Roth’s major phases and drives various innovations in his approach. This imaginative scrutiny is continually registered in the restless intertextual antagonisms that suspend Roth’s work—engagements and conversations that stretch beyond the injunctions of identity and the tugging inner gravity of the national culture. Tracing Roth’s sustained dialogue with the labile legacies of literary modernism, the following readings explore the range of ways in which the novels actively contest other literary texts, historicizing these encounters in the process. This dissertation complicates the established picture of Roth’s early work and emergence, recovering a writer heavily invested in weighing prominent interpretive claims circulating in the intellectual culture—debates powerfully incubated by the institutional history of the postwar university. It also explores Roth’s continual imbrication in the shifting cultural dynamics of the Cold War, focusing on the crucial importance of the novelist’s work surrounding the Penguin series “Writers from the Other Europe” to the evolving historical and
iii
political complexity of his own writing. The following analysis shows how Roth’s major novels of the 1990s not only emerge out of these formative contexts and transnational tensions but also reflect the renewed significance of the author’s negotiations with various modernist textual precedents to his ongoing struggle with fictional form.
iv
LAY SUMMARY
This dissertation explores the work of the novelist Philip Roth, analysing a literary career of both considerable controversy and high esteem. Roth has received a significant amount of critical attention. However, efforts to interpret Roth’s fiction have rarely strayed beyond certain key contexts, unpicking the author’s complicated meditations on Jewish identity, a perceived predilection for postmodern experimentation, and, more recently, his imaginative inquiries into the American national claim. Focusing on the inventive ways in which the texts interact with the works of a wide range of authors, “Philip Roth and The Struggle of Modern Fiction” situates
Roth more completely in the context of postwar modernism. This study focuses on Roth’s intellectual engagement with other modern writers. But it also places these encounters more fully in their historical contexts, from the institutional history of the postwar university to the shifting cultural tensions of the late Cold War.
v
PREFACE
This dissertation is the original, independent work of the author, Jack Francis Knowles.
Material included in the section “Man Can Embody Truth but He Cannot Know It” was first published as “Yeatsian Agony in Late Roth”, Philip Roth Studies, Vol.13, No.2. Fall 2017: 87- 94. Included with permission.
Material included in Chapter 3. “Holes in the Fabric” was first published as “‘How the Other Half Lives’: American Pastoral and Roth’s Other Europe”, Philip Roth Studies, Vol. 16, No.1. Spring 2020: 14-32. Included with permission.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ...... iii Lay Summary ...... v Preface...... vi Table of Contents ...... vii Acknowledgements ...... ix Dedication ...... x Introduction: Reconsidering Philip Roth ...... 1 Chapter 1. The Ruthless Art of Fiction ...... 28 I. “Arid Terrain” ...... 28 II. Truth, Boundaries, and Boxes ...... 40 III. Taking Hold ...... 48 IV. “A Weird Textual Consciousness”: The Uneasy Feel of Literary Experience ...... 57 V. The Burdens of Autonomy...... 70 VI. An Indecisive Man ...... 85 VII. “At Each Other’s Expense” ...... 92 Chapter 2. The Examined Life ...... 109 I. Jocoserious Meditations ...... 109 II. As Will: Reading the Body ...... 116 III. Where Representation Fails ...... 127 IV. “Nothing More or Less than the Lived Reality That It Was” ...... 137 V. “Søren Kierkegaard, of All People”: An Unlikely Mentor in Contradiction ...... 147 VI. “The Burden Isn’t Either/Or”: Arguing with Kierkegaard in The Counterlife ..... 162 Chapter 3. Holes in the Fabric ...... 190 I. Finding the “Other Europe” ...... 190 II. “It Was My Own Little Hogarth Press” ...... 201 III. “How the Other Half Lives” ...... 216 IV. “There Are No Uncontaminated Angels” ...... 227 V. “A Book of Voices” ...... 239 VI. “A Writer Always Envies a Boxer” ...... 257 Chapter 4. Contaminating Modernism ...... 279 I. “Life Is Unspeakable and to Be Exposed” ...... 279 II. “But Life Is the Great Teacher” ...... 288 III. The Muse in Dirty Tatters ...... 300 IV. “Love’s Bitter Mystery” ...... 314 vii
V. “Man Can Embody Truth but He Cannot Know It” ...... 321 VI. “What Can We Know Even of the People One Lives with Every Day?” ...... 345 Coda: Out of Time ...... 358 Bibliography ...... 382
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation is the result of many acts of kindness and generosity, the full scope of which I can’t hope to list. All errors and misjudgements are my own, but much of what is strongest and most perceptive in the following readings was conceived with the help and assistance of my supervisor, Ira Nadel, whose expertise, mentorship, and good humour were instrumental to its completion. My committee members, Jeffrey Severs and Michael Zeitlin, provided much guidance and commentary on often overlarge and unwieldy drafts. Thanks to all for their encouragement and their hard work.
I’d like to thank the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC for providing me with a home—and, when the time came, a home from home—to write a study of
Philip Roth, an ambition long conceived but an opportunity afforded with my admittance to the doctoral program.
To friends and family in whose examples I’ve learnt the inestimable value of an education many times over, I owe a wider and more affectionate debt. Friends who stretch across the globe have helped in ways they may not even have recognised. My parents have encouraged my studies with open hearts and open minds at every stage. And my kæreste, Cecilie, has been essential to the research, composition, and completion of this study, and the sanity and good cheer of its author, in all ways imaginable. For the support and the care, thank you.
To all the disappointed Platonists out there who may at some point stumble upon the following pages—who knows, perhaps Roth is your man.
ix
DEDICATION For C, with love and gratitude.
x
Introduction. Reconsidering Philip Roth
Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.
Nathan Zuckerman, Exit Ghost (2007)
On the computer in Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment these days is a Post-it note that reads, “The struggle with writing is over.”
Charles McGrath, “Goodbye, Frustration: Pen Put Aside, Roth Talks.” The New York Times, November 17, 2012.
Philip Roth—postwar modernist. Such is the central claim underlying this dissertation about
Roth’s body of work, a career of considerable controversy and high esteem spanning six decades and thirty-one published books. Or, not quite. The proposition that stands behind the following study is not that the critic discovers in Roth’s writing all the salient features of the overdetermined category of literary modernism. But it is the argument of this dissertation that it is impossible adequately to examine the concerns and innovations which shape Roth’s fiction without exploring the range of ways in which his novels engage and negotiate his modernist precursors. To trace Roth’s development, an evolution that, as Martin Amis has memorably
1
observed, takes a peculiarly uneven and disjointed trajectory, is inevitably to take the measure of various changes.1 Roth’s expansive oeuvre encompasses numerous striking shifts in approach, each distinct phase the consequence of a multitude of intersecting contexts and causes— biographical, historical, political, geographical, and aesthetic. Each of these developments in different ways, however, displays Roth in conversation with the labile legacies of literary modernism. It is these conversations, staged and sustained throughout the fiction, which occupy this account.
Why make the declarative claim only to offer the immediate qualification? In part, of course, I propose re-evaluating Roth in the context of postwar modernism at the outset to introduce the direction of the study, outlining a critical trajectory that the subsequent analysis complicates, stretching and nuancing the description in the process. But the proposition is also deliberately assertive, offered as an alternative to the kinds of reconsiderations of Roth currently in the ascendancy—reappraisals that have come to dominate the conversation about the author’s work after his death in May 2018. Adam Gopnik’s thoughtful reassessment of the oeuvre in the influential pages of The New Yorker is perhaps the most prominent example of the tendency the following chapters seek simultaneously to adjust and to augment. Written to mark the publication of Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013 (2017), the final volume of Roth’s work produced by the prestigious Library of America—a text completed after the author’s public retirement and, therefore, the de facto bookend of the writing life—Gopnik’s account embeds
Roth neatly in the tumults of the national story. “Philip Roth, Patriot” is the title of his
1 See Martin Amis, “Philip Roth Finds Himself”, The Rub of Time (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 281-285. David Gooblar also emphasises the many shifts and reversals of Roth’s career in The Major Phases of Philip Roth (London: Continuum, 2011). 2
valedictory assessment, and the interaction between the citizen and the American polis forms the guiding theme: “how the writer came to embrace the contradictions of a national identity.”2
One senses running throughout Gopnik’s reading, and others like it, an understandable urge to make Roth speak reassuringly to the present moment. At one point, the compulsion becomes explicit: “The desire to find a liberal way of imagining the particulars of American patriotism has become ever more urgent, especially in the light of Donald Trump’s Presidency.”3
Roth’s career offers no panacea for the predicament; but, according to Gopnik, in contrast to the redemptive arc of Barack Obama’s rhetorical embrace of the “contradictions of a national identity,” Roth’s patriotism of particulars—places and people, as opposed to ideologies and categories—works to combat the anxieties of the contemporary scene by scrutinising one’s torn and inescapable sense of belonging. The lesson Roth’s fictions end up revealing is not one of justice or progress but of community and attachment: I am, inescapably, participating in a national story as well as an individual journey.4 In the tensions of this dynamic lie the ligaments of an American liberalism to be cherished and fortified, neither worshipped nor deserted.
Gopnik’s reappraisal might reasonably be considered something close to the authorised party line. Certainly, his account of Roth’s career follows the spirit of the author’s own late nonfiction. Essays such as “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names” (2002) advance a similar account, placing the exploration of a national identity, and the convulsions that come
2 Adam Gopnik, “Philip Roth, Patriot”, The New Yorker. November 6, 2017. .
with it, at the centre of the finished oeuvre: “The American adventure was one’s engulfing fate.”5
This blunt assessment of the future that history bequeathed Roth’s generation of Americans, united by postwar prosperity and confidence, can certainly serve as a useful introduction to each and every text. As a result, Gopnik ends up offering a critical endorsement of Roth’s own analysis, looking back on a vocation that carried him through the various transformations wrought by the steady accumulation of the succeeding decades:
As a novelist I think of myself, and have from the beginning, as a free American and—
though hardly unaware of the general prejudice that persisted here against my kind till not
that long ago—as irrefutably American, fastened throughout my life to the American
moment, under the spell of the country’s past, partaking of its drama and destiny…”6
Roth’s rigorous embrace of an American identity is even beginning to eclipse the perception of the novelist as an arbiter of sexual scandal as the dominant image of him in the popular culture.
The desire to make the grand sweep of his fiction relevant to contemporary political traumas, recent developments which have once again defamiliarized the meanings implicit in the idea of the American nation, has begun to lend the perceived insights of the eminent literary grandee a hint of prophetic forecast. However dubious the case and the causes, there is little doubt that
Roth is drifting closer in his posthumous status towards some kind of secular oracle.7 “All the assurances are provisional”—indeed.
Though retroactive, there is, however, much to be said for granting the examination of the American prerogative prominence as Roth Studies moves into a reappraising phase, debating
5 “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013 (New York: Library of America, 2017), 333. 6 Ibid, 335. 7 Picking up the mood, the 92nd Street Y in New York City hosted a public reading of The Plot Against America on October 28th, 2018. 4
the oeuvre and its legacy. The interests and attitudes that would culminate in a text such as The
Plot Against America (2004), and the editorialist inclinations of pieces such as “My Uchronia”, are clearly latent in Roth’s very earliest publications. Consequently, much of the most recent scholarship has taken the national concerns that come to dominate the major works of the 1990s and beyond as providing the defining coordinates with which to chart the entire career.8 Though more circumspect and nuanced than Gopnik’s account, several recent readings begin from a critical starting point that could accurately be summarised as, “Philip Roth, American.” Whether following the prompts of Roth’s late nonfiction in asserting the essential value of such a perspective, or offering a more sceptical interpretation, chronicling and weighing the meanings of the relationship between the citizen and the nation now dominates the discourse.
The recent ascendency of such readings represents a significant shift in focus from prior interpretations. The earliest work on Roth established a number of incredibly influential contexts for much of the subsequent scholarship. Led by Hermione Lee’s perspicacious monograph, such studies place the author’s explorations of the middle-class, postwar Jewish family at the centre of the conversation, showing how this sociological material shapes the dilemmas and plots which encircle his male protagonists.9 Lee traces how Roth’s heroes struggle with the tension between home and escape; the in-here and the out-there; loyalty and rebellion. Setting a template for numerous subsequent readings, she deftly shows how this animating antagonism emerges from
8 See, for instance, Andy Connolly, Philip Roth and The American Liberal Tradition (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017) and Ira Nadel, “American Roth”, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 15 February 2019, 493-510. 9 Philip Roth (1982) is the first truly scholarly study of Roth as a significant twentieth-century writer, uninterested in defending a public figure’s critical reputation, focusing instead on detailed analyses of the texts themselves. Published with Roth at mid-career, before the major works of the late 1980s and 1990s, Lee’s readings of Roth’s early and middle novels set many of the terms for the numerous monographs and articles that followed. 5
the injunctions involved in grappling with a diasporic Jewish identity.10 Opportunities of further socioeconomic advancement and assimilation jostle recurrently in Roth’s work against fears of cultural abandonment and familial dissolution.
Many more expansive studies have read Roth along these general lines, granting the exploration of ethnicity and identity prominence.11 In his biographically inflected study, Philip
Roth and the Jews (1996), Alan Cooper offers a comprehensive analysis of Roth’s meditations on his own position as a Jewish writer.12 Cooper maps an overarching shift from the early, innocent treatment of his characters’ desires to achieve independence from their circumstances to
Roth’s fiercely complicated thinking about the experience of such massive historical contexts as the Shoah, Zionism, and the growing secularisation of contemporary culture. Cooper argues that the splintered formal structures of Roth’s most substantial mid-career novels, The Counterlife
(1986) and Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), emerge from the dilemmas inherent in navigating a hybrid identity in the modern world, where grounds of authenticity seem both ever more urgent and endlessly to slip away.13
10 Lee was one of the first to offer a sustained analysis of this aspect of Roth’s work, but many other readings of Roth have focused on precisely these tensions. See in particular Victoria Aarons, What Happened to Abraham?: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 11 This is not to claim such avenues are exhausted. Brett Ashley Kaplan, for instance, breaks new ground in Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 12 Cooper’s study moves through chronological developments in Roth’s thinking about Jewishness, at times suggesting his near-prophetic command of the intellectual, political, and spiritual demands which the second half of the twentieth century would make on Jews living in America. In truth, many of Cooper’s readings are shaped as a response to the charges of anti-Semitism which have beleaguered Roth’s reception since “Defender of the Faith” (1959), intensified by Irving Howe’s infamous and vituperative attack, ‘Philip Roth Reconsidered’ (1972). As such, there is an active sense of scholarly recuperation at play.
13 Cooper’s analysis ends with a few final thoughts about Sabbath’s Theater (1995), which was published just before the study saw print. As a consequence, Philip Roth and the Jews contains no meaningful analysis of many of the major texts of the 1990s. Nevertheless, its arguments influenced much scholarship on Roth. Timothy Parrish’s edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), for instance, includes sophisticated essays on “American-Jewish Identity in Roth’s Short Fiction”, “Roth and the Holocaust”, “Roth and Israel”, “Roth and Ethnic Identity”, all of which intersect with the arguments in Cooper’s study. 6
This first wave of scholarship situated Roth firmly amongst a group of second and third generation immigrant novelists; the triumvirate of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth quickly became academic shorthand for contemporary “Jewish American Fiction”. In studies sympathetic to the category, Bellow emerges as the central model for the demotic flare of Roth’s lively prose and
Malamud establishes a template for transposing meditations on Jewishness into the handling of narrative plot. Lee’s influential account reads Roth’s discovery of Kafka and his growing influence in these terms—Kafka compounds Roth’s reliance on fictional predicaments predicated on blockages and imposing boundaries, upping the voltage of his Malamudian intensities.14 Lee argues that Kafka’s narratological impact on Roth, rooted in a shared self-consciousness regarding their Jewish identities, is at play throughout all the subsequent fiction.15
So pervasive was the initial contextualisation of Roth as a “Jewish American Writer” that that novelist repeatedly expressed his discomfort with the constraints and limitations implied in the label. Roth’s immediate, instinctive dissatisfaction stemmed from a refusal to submit to a constrictive vision of ethnic allegiance, asserted by certain conservative sections of the Jewish
American community after the publication of “Defender of the Faith” (1959). Roth’s most elaborate and forcefully argued early nonfiction strenuously rejects the label “Jewish American
Writer”, advancing the freedom of the artist in its place. Essays such as “Writing about Jews”
(1963) and “Imagining Jews” (1974) recognise the charged nature of the cultural material Roth exploits on account of his own background at the same time that they reject any curtailments of the imaginative promiscuity of the writer in depicting the ironies, intensities, ambiguities, and
14 For an analysis of Roth and Kafka focused on meditations on Jewish experience, see Morton. P. Levitt, “Roth and Kafka: Two Jews’, Critical Essays on Philip Roth, Ed. Sanford Pinsker (Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall, 1982). For a further reading of Kafka’s impact on Roth’s handling of narrative structure, see Stephen Wade’s chapter “Enter Kafka” in The Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). 15 See Hermione Lee: “Roth’s novels describe different versions of “characterological enslavement” either accepted or resisted.” Philip Roth, 64. 7
hypocrisies of life as it is felt and lived. Representing the actual experiences of Jews, Roth concludes in these apprentice articles, must remain an act unfettered by the obligations that arrive with the imposition of labels.
But in an interview in 1981, Roth committed himself more specifically to displacing his classification as a Jewish American Writer with the description American Writer, a category he felt not only more accurate and sympathetic to the hard-earned social advancement of Jewish
Americans, but also more suitably capacious.16 Whilst his fiction at this time was burrowing inwards, moving through the novels that would eventually comprise the extended
Künstlerroman, Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985), Roth was actually beginning to reassess the formative significance of surrounding contexts of production. In fact, for all the alleged narcissism, the relentless self-scrutiny that marks each of the texts included in
Zuckerman Bound exposes the tensions that enable and ensnare the writing life. Ironically, as I later demonstrate, the emergence of the narrative persona Nathan Zuckerman in Roth’s middle- period, a character most frequently parsed as a ludic alter-ego and sly vehicle of self-analysis, registers a growing interest in exploring questions of time and place.17
In Roth’s own account of the environment that produced his sensibility and informs the bulk of his fiction, it was both the vivid reality of Newark, New Jersey in the 1930s and 1940s— in contrast to the stifling series of caricatures imported from a European history of persecution
16 Writing of his father’s generation upon receiving the New Jersey Historical Society Award in 1992, Roth replaced the casually cast hyphen with a description altogether more suitable: “Assimilation is too weak a word, conveying too many negative connotations of deference and submissiveness and muzzling and proposing a story insufficiently gritty to describe this process of negotiation as it was conducted by my father and his like. Their integration with the American actuality was more robust than that and more complicated; it was a two-way convergence, something like the extraction and exchange of energy that is metabolism…” “Patrimony”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960- 2013, 324. 17 Chapter 3, “Holes in the Fabric”, explores how the forms and concerns of the novels comprising Zuckerman Bound, in addition to the long evolution of American Pastoral, were shaped by Roth’s prolonged engagement with the literatures of Eastern Europe. 8
and ridicule, a place alive with the implacable force of details—and the powerful intoxicant of an imagined sense of American opportunity, figured in the unbound country that lay waiting beyond the nourishing confines of his Weequahic neighbourhood, which irreparably shaped him as a writer:
“I was eager to find out what the rest of “America” was like. […] I was still under the
influence of the populist rhetoric that had risen out of the Depression and had been
transformed by the patriotic fervor of World War II into the popular national myth about
the “vastness” of the land, the “rich diversity” of the “people.” […] Obviously, Bellow,
Malamud, and I do not constitute […] a school of anything.18
In later novels such as American Pastoral (1997), Roth explores the transformative effects of the
American involvement in World War II at great lengths, homing in on the enormous adjustments felt throughout the United States on account of the emotional exhilaration and economic development induced by the Allied victory. But the importance of the postwar milieu to the full span of Roth’s career now appears absolute. Roth’s earliest short stories, for instance, exhibit numerous features that could only accurately be described as “postwar.” These initial texts are shaped by precisely that crucible of cultural pressures and excitements that would later lead Roth to describe his sense of the American adventure as an “ineluctable” fate. “The Final Delivery of
Mr. Thorn” (1954), one of Roth’s first student publications, explores the stifled emotional baggage of World War II in a fashion clearly predicated on the example of Salinger’s early stories, exemplified in popular, influential, and widely read texts such as “A Perfect Day for a
18 “Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 129 & 131. 9
Bananafish” (1948).19 In more subtle ways, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959) and the uncollected fiction from this apprentice period display an acute observational sensitivity to the recalibration of the American national claim in the decades that followed the conclusion of the war. For all their investment in local specificities, Roth’s early domestic satires are rarely narrow in sensibility, his novelistic irony already attuned to all that was being eclipsed in the remarkable onward march of the confident and prosperous suburbs.
Describing Roth as a “postwar” novelist, then, does more than outline an overarching period; it gathers an abiding and consistent set of concerns. As a number of scholars have perceptively explored, the grave significance of the Holocaust is threaded throughout Roth’s ruminations on the responsibilities and conflicts inherent in negotiating a Jewish life in the modern world. To begin from the starting point “Philip Roth, American” is not to relegate such concerns as secondary to the national identity; but rather, it is to trace how the fiction refracts the powerful moral burden of the Holocaust through the prism of the postwar American moment to which Roth felt most tightly fastened. Key texts such as “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My
Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” (1973), The Ghost Writer (1979), and Operation Shylock: A
Confession, to take only the most obvious examples, each exhibit Roth filtering his existential uncertainty through the possibilities and the restrictions inherent to the American context in which he was formed. Indeed, for Roth, the exploration of the complexities of Jewish identity is always principally to be understood as an inquiry into a specific historical predicament, as opposed to any meditation on the transcendental, the theological, or the spiritual.
19 “The Final Delivery of Mr. Thorn” concerns a postman’s inability to deliver a letter bearing tragic news from the Western Front, a predicament that presents in the protagonist as a kind of submerged psychosomatic pain. Both aspects of The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and Sabbath’s Theater are anticipated in this curious little student sketch. 10
The volatile turbulence and ungovernable disorder dramatised in Sabbath’s Theater
(1995), perhaps the defining novel of Roth’s career and a text I analyse at length in Chapter 4,
“Contaminating Modernism”, is unimaginable separate from the novel’s interest in recovering the enduring historical trauma of World War II for the generation of Americans who absorbed both the casualties and the triumphs—figures left to sustain the damage and grapple with the numerous contradictions which the conflict bequeathed. Roth’s late work returns repeatedly to the same set of questions opened to the raw kind of scrutiny that cuts into Sabbath’s Theater.
Even the brisk and elegiac Nemesis (2010), Roth’s final piece of published fiction, re-examines the global conflict and its aftershocks. Set in a hypothetical version of 1944 that straddles the vivid past and the concocted “what if,” Nemesis offers its own melancholic meditation on the relationship between ethnic anxiety and the assaults of history by following the story of a specific individual battling a pernicious epidemic in poignant counterpoint to the steady trickle of news from events at the Western Front.
If, as this brief critical sketch demonstrates, the ascendant approach, “Philip Roth,
American”, represents a rich and productive cartography with which to map Roth’s career, it should also be apparent that this study does not aim to contradict and dislodge such readings; on the contrary, it seeks to complement and nuance the evolving debate by taking a different approach. What the Americanist lens leaves out, this dissertation seeks purposefully to recover; what the retrospective angle inevitably obscures, the following readings look actively to restore.
One can understand the temptations of critics such as Gopnik to streamline Roth’s evolutions to suit the summative conclusions of the later nonfiction. But a thorough analysis of the author’s development simply does not allow for the full-scale revisionism proffered:
11
As his work has evolved, and as he has a keener retrospective sense of his own
accomplishment, he has become aware, he says, that much of what he’s struggled for is
rooted not in the duly intoned roster of high modernism, Kafka and Beckett and Joyce,
but in a certain vein of American realism, even regionalism…20
Although Roth was remarkably quick to adjust the tone of voice in which the names were intoned, and though he would later discover his own blend of sceptical self-inquiry and representational regionalism, there is no doubt that he struggled consistently and profitably with the work of the roster, however sympathetically he reread the democratic propagandising of the
1940s later in life. Tellingly, Gopnik’s own observations about the material collected in Why
Write? betray some of his more dubious conclusions.21 “Philip Roth, Patriot” is simply not the whole story.
It is the same urge to historicise Roth, in fact, that insists on a more complex cartography, one responsive to other claims and contexts that interact with the engulfing American destiny of the precocious 1950 graduate of Weequahic High—naïve, confident, and almost preternaturally alert. Amongst these is the overarching conflict that the political realities of the Allied victory engendered and bestowed: The Cold War. That Roth lived through the early escalation of hostilities from containment to full-blown diplomatic crisis, that he worked through the era in which surreptitious proxy battles culminated in the eruption of horrifying and ecstatic violence in
Vietnam, and that he subsequently bore attentive witness to the grim stability of détente and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, ever sensitive to the excruciating ironies of life
20 Gopnik, “Philip Roth, Patriot”, The New Yorker. November 6, 2017. 21 Though Gopnik is at pains to replace Roth’s interactions with the “duly intoned roster of high modernism” with his engagement with a more modest, patriotic tradition of American realism, his own discussion of the material collected in Why Write? subtly undermines the claim: “Beckett’s name comes up more often in this book than one might expect.” “Philip Roth, Patriot”. 12
both under communist duress and encased by American cultural triumphalism, could lead one to conclude, from the outset, that the Cold War was the truly formative context in which Roth wrote. That he published his fiction and became a global literary figure during the period in which America successfully exported a vision of itself and its culture across the adjusting world would seem to confirm it.
Although the dynamics of the Cold War emerge infrequently and sparingly as a specific topic or isolated set of themes in the novels, and though they have received only a scant amount of critical attention, many crucial innovations in Roth’s fiction occur as a consequence of his continual imbrication in the development of the conflict. His career was routinely and persistently reshaped by its shifting tectonics. From the formal approach and intellectual allegiances of his early work in the 1950s, to his efforts supporting Eastern European dissidents through the 1970s and 1980s—evidenced most clearly in his work as General Editor of the
Penguin series “Writers from the Other Europe”—culminating in the mature historicism, political sophistication, and panoramic scrutiny that defines the major novels of the 1990s,
Roth’s disjointed evolution actually responds consistently to the changing tempo of the Cold
War. None of this is to claim that the fiction was an artistic response reducible to this cultural context and the key, transitional events that stud its progression. However, the major developments of Roth’s writing life are unimaginable divorced from his creative implication in the era in which America came culturally to define itself in relation to a global fight for freedom, and to envision and perpetually reencounter a wider world visible only through the terms of that same struggle. Roth would explore numerous specific historical concerns as the qualities of his fiction shifted and evolved. The looming context of the Cold War enveloped them all.
13
It is a claim elaborated throughout the intersecting arguments of this dissertation, explored most directly in the discussion of Roth’s prolonged and lasting engagement with the literatures of the “Other Europe” in Chapter 3, “Holes in the Fabric”—the suitable centre of this study—that purposefully complicates the ascendant Americanist approach. From the very beginning, Roth’s powerful embrace and rigorous scrutiny of a national identity were shaped by a series of transnational pressures, political contexts and circulations that extend beyond the tugging inner gravity of the national culture. This dissertation actively traces such movements in all their various manifestations, from the subtle irony with which Roth evokes and subverts
Jamesian patterns of transatlantic interaction in his first novel, destabilising the astonishingly influential set of accumulated meanings attached to such passages in the process, to the audacious decision to finance and assist the samizdat authors whom he met and befriended in
Prague. Even the overt American turn exemplified in Roth’s string of major novels in the 1990s, rediscovering the country and its postwar history as a distinct subject, is a development contoured by intellectual and literary engagements that extend through and beyond national borders. Whether probing Roth’s playful importation and teasing modification of a European lineage of philosophical scepticism or unpicking the aggressive intertextual patterns that enable the investigations into fictional consciousness in the major works—texts which summon the
“duly intoned” roster of canonical modernists to a particularly ruthless kind of appropriation, contaminating their hallowed forms in the process—the following readings all situate Roth in dialogue with material far beyond the linear, national tradition in which he is now most frequently placed.
The American Trilogy, often lauded as one of Roth’s grandest achievements, was, in fact, the product of an author consistently animated by pierced thresholds and the imaginative
14
possibilities occasioned by the ensuing interaction across boundaries. Even the Roth who emerges in the late nonfiction, the nostalgist of “I Have Fallen in Love With American Names”, arrived at his renewed infatuation with the propulsive force of the American adventure in the perpetual testing of the attachment, probing its potential, recurrently discovering and violating its limits. Philip Roth evolved into the figure of “Philip Roth, American”, the icon now weaved into the fabric of the national story, not fundamentally by submitting to his most powerful sense of belonging but by challenging the durability, the dangers, and the meanings of the claim again and again.
The object which bears the weight of Roth’s imaginative scrutiny, the vehicle which carries this conversation with the shaping force of history forward, is the textual form of the modern novel. To discover and contest the possibilities of fiction in the context of the postwar period is a compulsion that drives the various stages of Roth’s development, rooting each of his most significant phases, refracting the surrounding circumstances in the process. The following reconsideration of Roth therefore proceeds from a recognisable vision of the author as a figure defined by the torn dynamics of the struggle. But I recover a Roth driven less by indignation in response to censor, impatient with prohibitions and eager to antagonise, than a writer propelled by his continual negotiation of the form in which he worked. In I Married a Communist (1998)
Roth fictionalises the origins of this mindset in the suitably playful and demotic image of learning “how you box with a book.”22 The phrase aptly captures both the dynamism that characterises his fleetfooted intertextuality and the playful precocity that precedes it.
If the first wave of scholarship inaugurated the vision of an embattled writer, fiercely independent and unwilling to bend to propriety, it was Roth’s position as a Jewish author
22 I Married a Communist (New York: Vintage, 1999 [1998]),78. 15
fighting against the prohibitions and tender feelings of the community that held sway. While such readings continue to dominate the picture of Roth’s early work and emergence, an established critical pattern I analyse and seek to complicate in Chapter 1, “The Ruthless Art of
Fiction”, more recent studies have emphasised a different set of tensions. And yet Roth’s determination to transgress continues to orient a number of the most significant interventions.
Ross Posnock’s ruminative account of the novelist, a powerful meditation in its own right, which the following chapters recurrently find themselves in conversation with on account of several conspicuous overlaps and divergences in focus and approach, is organised around the principle of artistic “immaturity.”23 Embedding Roth in a rich and varied tradition of thinkers, each guided by the unruly spirit of an uncharacteristically radical Emerson, Posnock uncovers Roth’s powers as a novelist in “a vitality won from socializing forces bent on exacting obedience, restraint, repression.”24 Similarly, Patrick Hayes emphasises Roth’s preoccupation with transgression in his recent Nietzschean reading of the novelist’s career-long exploration into the kinds of power that literary fiction activates and mobilises—extra-moral capacities that call into question the ethical turn in postwar literary studies that Hayes finds his subject exposing as fragile, banal, and suspicious in equal measure.25
This dissertation is not conceived in opposition to but in dialogue with such approaches.
While I recover instances of renunciation, resignation, and bodily accommodation that play significant roles in Roth’s evolution as a writer, sites of weakness and vulnerability that have
23 Posnock was one of the first critics boldly to insist upon reading Roth in an international context, situating his work alongside Eastern European authors such as Milan Kundera and Witold Gombrowicz. These readings provide ample provocations and insights for the direction of this study; however, Posnock’s rather grand Americanist enthusiasms, and the model of intellectual cosmopolitanism he deploys throughout his analysis, see him sidestep a number of crucial analytic opportunities. 24 Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), xii. 25 See Patrick Hayes, Philip Roth: Fiction and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 16
been persistently ignored, I also reinvoke the image of the embattled novelist. But, in contrast to those accounts which emphasize Roth’s intellectual attachment to instances of moral transgression, I focus instead on the importance of Roth’s textual antagonisms—the various ways in which the fiction actively contests the modernist precursors that the author inherits.
Indeed, the following chapters read Roth alongside the forms he recurrently negotiates while also historicizing these encounters. It is this aspect of the approach which accounts for the loose sense of chronology guiding the progression of the readings. This dissertation neither encompasses the entire bibliography nor accounts for every curve in the journey; similarly, I do not discuss all of
Roth’s numerous interactions with the legacies of literary modernism.26 However, the following arguments and interpretations, unpicking specific dimensions of Roth’s fiction, intersect both thematically and diachronically. To explore the energy and the friction that Roth’s novels bring to bear on other writers is, unavoidably, to be interested in imaginative transformation. “Philip
Roth and the Struggle of Modern Fiction” tracks a number of the most significant ways in which
Roth transforms his materials and traces Roth transforming. As such, change propels this critical story.
But the exploration of creative change can be a vexed issue. To focus on the various ways in which Roth engages with textual precedents is inevitably to invoke questions of influence, opening a domain of inquiry vulnerable either to florid extemporizing or cool dismissal. From the outset, I resist the temptation to allow a nervous determination to avoid stumbling into the intentional fallacy to foreclose questions about the many formative ways in which Roth’s work
26 Roth’s negotiations with Faulkner, for instance, are a conspicuous blind spot in the following analysis. That Roth engaged intimately with novels such as Sanctuary (1931), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932) is not in doubt, and this dissertation would be enlarged by pursuing such questions at a precise textual level. I have elected not to write about this interaction on account of limited space, choosing to pursue other lines of inquiry. I have privileged Roth’s encounters with Joyce, Yeats, and Woolf in Chapter 4, “Contaminating Modernism”, with the deliberate intention of pushing against the Americanist approach to Roth identified in this introduction. 17
actively stages a series of conversations. From the very beginning, Roth’s fiction engages with other writing; from the allegorical inquiries of his first novel, Letting Go (1962), to the mercurial, allusive resonances of his late novellas, the texts themselves dramatise their own encounters with other literary objects. As a result, I use contestation and negotiation as the operative terms with which to dissect moments of intertextual tension, as these allow for a more precise analysis of the various ways in which the writing interacts with existing textual forms. Consequently, the following chapters also probe Roth’s archived papers, draft documents and collected notes currently stored in the Library of Congress. Attention to this material allows for a more detailed sense and more intimate tracing of the specific textual interactions and circulating cultural pressures that surround the fiction. Restlessly, ruthlessly, and ruminatively, Roth’s novels explore questions posed by their own rereading of existing works. The archive provides one set of materials with which to begin to answer them.
Roth’s playful literary self-consciousness, exhibited in different ways throughout the career, could be seen to highlight the limitations of such a critical approach. The text’s very awareness of itself as a constructed object, a feature of many of Roth’s novels, is a characteristic that emphasises the contingency and fluidity of meaning at the point of interpretation, as opposed to the moment of writing. The context of intellectual contestation, and the creative transformations that occur in the interaction between authors and their sources, is a model of analysis that Roth’s work seems subtly to undermine by way of its openly allusive approach.
When characters and narrators refer obsessively to their reading and flaunt their connections to books more transparently than the author, relations between texts remain resolutely dynamic and ever-changing. Consequently, in his reading of Roth’s interactions with other writers, Derek
Parker Royal leans on a Kristevan approach to intertextuality to argue that Roth’s fiction conveys
18
a postmodern understanding of both literary production and the shifting constellations through which we narrate our experience and invent ourselves: “constructing the self is an open-ended and always ongoing process.”27
But a limitation, carefully observed, need not necessarily coalesce into a proscription.
Accordingly, the intertextuality of Roth’s fiction, multiple and pervasive, need not dissolve entirely questions of influence.28 It is perfectly coherent to read key instances of intertextual engagement as sites of tension as well as points of shifting deferral. And, just as the countervailing pressures crucial to Roth’s meditations on the self are often elided in interpretations that take their cue solely from postmodern theoretical approaches, the formative significance of Roth’s creative negotiations with other authors are made too readily to disappear in the total acceptance of the poststructural prohibition. The liberation into fluidity of meaning carried in il n’y a pas de hors-texte can easily curdle into a restriction, immobile and unresponsive. The fact that Roth routinely ironized his own contexts—specifically, his literary contexts—does not mean that we cannot trace their outline and examine their effects, however contestable the conclusions drawn ultimately prove to be. Taken as a whole, Roth’s body of work insists upon an understanding of writing as an act in, as opposed to simply being about, the world. Our textual constructs are inherited and challenged as much as they are perpetually reinvented.
The following chapters therefore broach the subtle dynamics of influence. But my analysis of a novelist struggling fruitfully with his form, engaged with the work of those writers who published before and alongside him, purposefully avoids the Bloomian model of
27 Derek Parker Royal, “Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism”, The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Ed. Timothy Parrish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30. 28 This is a point Parker Royal partially concedes: “This is not to suggest that Roth’s fiction does not bear the imprint of authors”, “Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism”, 23. 19
unconscious anxieties and inventive annexations—an account of artistic activity which, for all its dated presumptions, lingers even in the places in which it seems most visibly to have been banished. Roth’s most conspicuous tussles with his influences, and certainly the interactions at the centre of this study, are not points of conflict between “strong” talents, wrestling in the procreative act of muscular misreading. Instead, I explore the numerous ways in which Roth openly scrutinizes the textual precedents he evokes. The Freudian presumptions of submerged
Oedipal conflict that structure Bloom’s grand theory fail to provide an accurate description of
Roth’s voracious appetite for lively, active negotiation.29 Indeed, the act of imaginative inquiry into the efficacies of fiction itself might stand as Roth’s most consistent and powerful engine of invention, working in different ways across the broad arc of the career.
Avoiding a Bloomian framework, whether overt or covert in its application, also reflects the decision to situate this study of Roth in contexts that stretch beyond the tradition of the
American novel, the lens so imploringly invited by the author’s late nonfiction and the kind of interpretation currently coalescing into the standard critical approach. Though Bloom famously anchors his thoughts about influence in insights taken from Freud, it is the retooled spirit of
Emerson that truly powers the vision. As Colin Burrow has recently argued, Bloom’s intellectual fixation on the predicament of asserting artistic autonomy, and the zero sum game of originality and erasure in which he recasts it—a competition in which the individual triumphs over the vanquished context—is a vision of literary activity not simply braided with the emotional rapture of Emersonian rhetoric; but rather, artistic creation, in Bloom’s vision, is reducible to the process by which rigorous self-reliance is forged, fostered in the mastery and casting off of prior
29 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 20
allegiances. Bloom tells, in other words, a powerfully American story about canon formation.30
Certainly, the creative dialogue with what has come before can take such a form, aggressive and expunging. But the “provocation, that I can receive from another soul” might as easily instigate communication—reciprocal and instructive—as opposed to some inescapable and terminal battle for the sufficiency of the isolated ego.31 The ongoing antagonism of influence, as opposed to some perishing anxiety, might ultimately be a more suitable description of Roth’s relationship with his inherited forms.
In the following chapters, I repeatedly discover a novelist drawn to the dynamic of sustained engagement, as opposed to erecting the autonomous terms of his own achievement.
Roth wrote at length and in many different forms about the struggle for personal autonomy, returning to the theme as he probed the dynamics of the domestic family, the questions of allegiance that encircle the uncertain adolescent, and the tension between the need for domestic security and the yearning for erotic renewal that afflicts even the most serene experiences of adulthood. Roth also understood the predicament to be deeply rooted in the contradictory
American story of cultural derivation and sublime singularity, ingrained in the nation and its mythologies. Perhaps no other author demonstrated more consistently, though, that such struggles for autonomy from one’s influences, ranging in scale from the personal to the political, were not contests one could ever hope to transcend, erase, escape, or master. In Patrimony
(1991), a somber study of the most tender of all inheritances, the injunction of the father is given
30 Looking back at Bloom’s prominent career, controversial and frequently ridiculed and yet somehow also seemingly inescapable, Burrow writes: “How is a new nation to take over (from) the Old World and lay claim to its muses? […] what The Anxiety of Influence did was to take a distinctively 19th-century American set of cultural problems about influence, psychologise them, and then reexport them to the Western canon from which American writing principally derived. It did so in florid Emersonian rhetoric which Bloom made all his own…” “The Magic Bloomschtick” London Review of Books, Vol.41, No.22, 21th November 2019, 22-23. 31 See Emerson’s Divinity School Address of 1838: “Truly speaking it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject.” 21
the resonant final words: “You must not forget anything.”32 In the evolution of Roth’s own fiction, the Emersonian spirit of literary self-reliance was a propulsive force pitiful in comparison to the various transnational interactions and sustained intellectual conversations which suspend and enable the work. It is these literary contestations, engagements that move through porous boundaries as opposed to the creative triumphs which erect them, which occupy the following readings.
To explore Roth in relation to literary form is to contribute to a wide and diverse range of existing criticism. As David Brauner points out, the conventional distinction between realist fiction and postmodern fiction, a dichotomy that has until recently underscored the study of postwar literature in general, is a division of approach readily apparent in much of the critical work on Roth. Early studies such as George J. Searles’ The Fiction of Philip Roth and John
Updike (1985) emphasize Roth’s wry social realism, focusing on his observational comedy and accurate depictions of regular life. Lee’s aforementioned work, while not explicitly concerned with categorization, is somewhat similar. A number of more recent readings, sympathetic to the pictorial regionalism of the American Trilogy, have returned to the formal characteristics of realism as the best way to appraise the nature of Roth’s achievement.33 In contrast, perceptive and compelling scholarship from figures such as Elaine B. Safer, Derek Parker Royal, and, pre- eminently, Debra Shostak, emphasizes the full panoply of Roth’s postmodern characteristics.34
Leaning on a version of Bakhtin filtered through poststructuralism, Shostak reads Roth as a fundamentally dialogic writer, one whose artful sensibility fractures the psyches of his
32 Patrimony (New York: Vintage, 1996 [1991]), 238. 33 See Charles McGrath’s recent piece “Roth/Updike” in The Hudson Review, Vol.LXXII, No.3, Autumn 2019.
protagonists, engenders his multiplying narrative frames, and propels a prose animated by desire and difference. Parsed with the assistance of much postmodern theory, Shostak unpicks the various ways in which Roth’s fiction grapples with the elusive textuality of the self.
Brauner responds to the rather rigid dichotomy that separates prior readings by emphasizing the duality of Roth’s own work, insisting upon the centrality of paradox and the persistent combination of characteristics conventionally associated with postmodernist fiction and more traditional realist modes. Roth’s stylistic fusions can profitably be understood not as sui generis zig-zags in an isolated career, meditating on the volatile status of the self, but as specific instantiations of wider literary trends. Such an approach leads Brauner to a range of successful comparisons, dexterously demonstrating the limitations of prior groupings. The old triumvirate of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, so essential to the first wave of scholarship, is exposed as particularly thin. Similarly, the neat contrast of Updike and Roth, a durable paradigm for many critics concerned with uncovering realist intensities, and the alignment of the novels alongside the major metafictional experiments of writers such as Barth, Pynchon, and Barthelme, seem equally insufficient in the light of Brauner’s more spacious treatment of contemporary comparative contexts.35
But both the compartmentalized approaches to Roth’s oeuvre, granting either the traditional realist or metafictional innovator prominence, and the account of a hybrid author whose novels oscillate between apparently irreconcilable modes, each fail to account for the powerful continuities that underwrite all Roth’s major evolutions and phases—continuities that orbit what Brian McHale has elsewhere isolated as the “modernist epistemological dominant.”36
35 Brauner reads Roth alongside a wide range of contemporaries, including figurers as varied as Howard Jacobsen and Bret Easton Ellis. See Philip Roth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 36 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 10. 23
And as postmodernism continues to be displaced as the leading explanatory category in the study of postwar literature by a series of distinct approaches, figuring the major developments of the decades after 1945 less as a time of formal breaks and new beginnings than as a period of adjustment and perpetuation, the dichotomy that undergirds much of the analysis of Roth’s fiction begins to seem unduly rigid.37
Novels that critics such as Shostak find exhibiting an uncritical attitude towards the postmodern condition begin to seem, in retrospect, more concerned with scrutinizing the limitations of ludic metafiction. In Chapter 2, “The Examined Life”, I offer an extended analysis of The Counterlife, a text often reduced to series of quotable aphorisms about the performative self, in the context of Roth’s engagement with a tradition of philosophical skepticism running through Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Similarly, works which have routinely been studied in relation to an unreconstructed account of the realist text, such as Roth’s debut novel, Letting Go, explored at length in Chapter 1, “The Ruthless Art of Fiction”, and the major works comprising the American Trilogy, discussed from different angles in both Chapters 3, “Holes in the Fabric” and 4, “Contaminating Modernism”, reveal a novelist at different points in an ongoing negotiation with the efficacies of fictional form. Across his career and in a variety of different guises, Roth found ways to incorporate the intensity and the uncertainty inherent to the compositional struggle inside his texts. How to dramatise the point of contact with the life beyond the page, to fill the boundary separating the written word and the unwritten world with magnetic sparks, rendering McHale’s epistemological dominant iridescent in the process, was an animating question that reigns over the full arc of the career.
37 Assessing this shift before cataloguing and advancing a series of new approaches, Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek and Daniel Worden write, “postmodernism has begun to drop out of academic discourse […] in terms of periodization, these new approaches to post-1945 literature often find continuity where advocates of postmodernism find rupture.” “Introduction”, Postmodern/Postwar—And After (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 1&7. 24
One of the most consequential developments in the wider study of postwar American literature has been the compelling way in which critics have traced the extension of modernist practices through the economic boom of the 1950s and beyond. Scholars have successfully shown how modernist textual forms and patterns of cultural reception were coopted by the state during the Cold War, reshaped and reproduced to suit an evolving set of geopolitical circumstances.38 As pointed out, the shifting tectonics of this overarching cultural context were not only formative for Roth, they are also neglected avenues of inquiry in the growing body of criticism surrounding his novels. Similarly, as figures such as Mark McGurl have demonstrated, the textual features of literary modernism were recalibrated as a direct consequence of the remarkable expansion of the university and its institutions, a development refracted through the explosion of the “creative writing program” as a ubiquitous presence in American culture and the most influential engine of literary production in the postwar years. Roth, frequently entwined in the structures of the university, stands as one of McGurl’s paradigmatic examples of the “High
Cultural Pluralist”, a category grouping numerous writers of the postwar decades, “called upon to speak from the point of view of one or another hyphenated population, synthesizing the particularity of the ethnic—or analogously marked—voice with the elevated idiom of literary modernism.”39
While the following chapters intersect with such panoramic arguments, particularly as they trace the permeation of modernist textual forms as they seep through the postwar decades, my study departs from a different starting point, one focused on analyzing more specific points
38 Greg Barnhisel’s Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) has led the way in this regard. I bring a number of his most salient insights to bear on Roth in Chapter 3, “Holes in the Fabric”. But this avenue of analysis is actually relevant to the broad arc of Roth’s entire career. 39 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 57. 25
of literary contact within the oeuvre of a single author. The following readings are unashamed to uncover the agency of that author at work. As I explore in Chapter 1, “The Ruthless Art of
Fiction”, Roth’s early novels reflect the importance of the institution of the university and the intellectual ideas that circulated through its classrooms and corridors; however, the notion that these texts can be reduced to this context, the passive embodiment of the proliferating system, does not hold up in the light of an attentive reading. Letting Go and When She Was Good (1967) each in their own ways display a novelist actively scrutinizing his own contexts. And the same is true of Roth’s wider engagement with various textual forms and the intellectual and political pressures which suspend them. From his playful appropriation of a lineage of philosophical skepticism to his return to the venerated texts of canonical modernists such as Joyce, Yeats, and
Woolf in his major novels of the 1990s, the epistemological intensity of Roth’s writing was the consequence of his own vigorous engagement with the work of other authors. This dissertation examines several significant phases in the evolution of the conversation, historicizing the encounters in the process.
***
Why the struggle? Or, as Roth phrases it with his final collection of nonfiction, Why Write?
“Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen?” This question is posed in Exit
Ghost (2007) as a last rise to eloquent introspection. It arrives shortly before Nathan
Zuckerman’s concluding sentences collapse into incoherence and his authority, long vested in his role as Roth’s most complex narrative voice, dissolves. “Not for some. For some […] that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter
26
most.”40 This reflection on the powerful claim that fiction makes upon its readers is no serene elegy for the departing artist; but rather, it offers a valedictory glimpse of what I take to be the central concern underpinning Roth’s entire oeuvre. What do we risk in acts of literary amplification and how should we understand the rewards and meanings we acquire?
When he came to write a new introduction for Richard Stern’s touching, scarcely read book Other Men’s Daughters (1973) in 2013, three years after publishing his final novel, Roth reflected on the death of a valued friend and the end of a once ebullient literary imagination and creative intelligence. In his tribute, Roth settled on a wonderful image with which to capture what had been lost: “What did I prize in him? What do I most miss about him? His scrutinizing engrossment with every last vicissitude of existence, his raptness and his rapture, his lucidity, his being perpetually wide awake as if he were being stung by life ….”41
There it is—the sharp piercing of seemingly inviolable boundaries, the power and the potency of an experience distilled, the open vulnerability and the tremendous force, the sense of beauty and danger intertwined in one great puncture, as if caught perpetually off guard by the thing itself. “Stung by life.” One wonders if Roth wasn’t truly describing himself.
40 Exit Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 147. 41 Philip Roth, “Introduction: In Memory of Richard Stern”, Other Men’s Daughters (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), viii. 27
Chapter 1. The Ruthless Art of Fiction
I. “Arid Terrain”
In April 1974 Cynthia Ozick wrote to Philip Roth to offer her thoughts on the manuscript of his latest novel. In the course of presenting a sharp, intelligent commentary, seemingly exasperated by the fixations of the popular press, she offered a typically perceptive lament. Typed in brackets in the middle of a paragraph addressing the intimidating question of the “Jewish Writer’s Social
Responsibility”, Ozick writes, “I wish sometimes people would talk more about Letting Go, and let Portnoy go a bit. Oh, how I envied you Letting Go!”1
The substance of Ozick’s complaint is, for the most part, still accurate. Oddly, Roth’s first full-length novel is scarcely read. Even after a late surge of energy saw Roth gravitate right to the centre of the canon of modern American literature, confirmed by the prestigious Library of
America edition of his complete work and certified by his run of prominent prizes, Letting Go
(1962) is rarely mentioned, let alone seriously discussed. When She Was Good (1967), his subsequent novel, is all but forgotten.2 It has become something of a commonplace feature of academic criticism of Roth to move straight from the precocious observational satire of his debut book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959), to the scandalous verbal explosion of
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which emerged ten years later. Goodbye, Columbus hints at the early promise; Portnoy represents the thunderous breakthrough.
1 Philip Roth Papers, Box 26, Folder 12. In her letter Ozick offers a perceptive commentary on Roth’s novel My Life as a Man (1974). This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. In the removed quotation, Ozick conveys her admiration for Letting Go. 2 Incredibly, in Patrick Hayes’s recent book, Philp Roth: Fiction and Power (2014), a thoroughly researched and compelling single-author study of Roth’s entire career, When She Was Good isn’t even included in the bibliography. 28
In his intimate profile of Roth published in The Atlantic to coincide with the release of
Portnoy, Ted Solotaroff established many of the key moves that would go on to shape this general critical pattern. Referring to Roth’s first two novels as “arid terrain”, Solotaroff praised
Portnoy as a momentous triumph. His enthusiasm matched the book’s immediate notoriety and its swift bestseller status.3 The clamour that still surrounds Portnoy, less as a text than as a cultural event, is such that any assessment or analysis of Roth, however brief, is likely to locate its key terms in the text’s wildness: its frenzied exploration of the torn psyche, its lurid fixations on guilt and transgression.4 The shockwaves were such that it is ultimately unsurprising that
Roth felt it necessary to exploit his newfound fame and its consequences as a subject in his
Zuckerman Bound series in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Everything, from the content of his subsequent fiction to his critics’ most consistent terms of reference, seems to pivot on the public scandal of Portnoy. Perhaps more clearly than any other novel beside The Catcher in the Rye
(1951), the book’s fixed place at the centre of Roth’s career, its referential power over the entire oeuvre, demonstrates just how welded the intersection between canonicity and celebrity became in the development of the postwar American novel.5
Anticipating many of Morris Dickstein’s claims about the inward, existential turn in
American fiction produced amid the social conformism of the postwar boom and the predominant focus of many writers of the 1950s and 1960s on the power of the voice—“volatile, immediate, and seductive”—Solotaroff’s early interpretation cast Portnoy as a playful liberation
3 Portnoy’s Complaint was the biggest seller in the history of Random House up to that point, outselling even The Godfather. 4 It is striking, for instance, that Louis Menand’s thoughtful review of American Pastoral (1997) found it necessary to return to Portnoy. Such an interpretive manoeuvre is not inappropriate; however, it is a telling example of the most consistent features of Roth’s critical reception. See Menand, “The Irony and the Ecstasy: Philip Roth and the Jewish Atlantis.” The New Yorker (May 19, 1997), 90-94. 5 Ironically and somewhat prophetically, Roth lamented the power of this very intersection in his remarks upon receiving the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus in 1960. For a thorough treatment of this topic, see Roth and Celebrity, Ed. Aimee Pozorski (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012). 29
from the austere sense of literary authority that characterised Roth’s experiences at graduate school in the University of Chicago.6 The era of high Jamesian restraint and sophistication, a widespread celebration of controlled literary intricacy that Jonathan Freedman has expertly shown to have been performing powerful and ambivalent cultural work in the advancement of
Jewish Americans in the academy, established the formal horizons of Roth’s first big books.7 For
Solotaroff, the Jamesian revival of which Roth was such an enthusiastic young advocate was to prove the decisive limitation of his first two novels; Letting Go and When She Was Good lack the compulsive energy that would go on to characterise his strongest writing. They are works weighed down, above all, by a dogged sense of seriousness.
Perhaps even more significant for the trajectory of much of the criticism that followed,
Solotaroff’s profile read the return to the subject of domestic Jewish family life in Portnoy as the key change of focus that enabled Roth to find his form: “This was new all right, at least in
American fiction—and, like the discovery of fresh material in Goodbye, Columbus, right in front of everyone’s eyes. Particularly, I suppose, the Jewish writers’ with all that heavily funded
Oedipal energy and curiosity to be worked off in adolescence and beyond.”8 Exploiting the sense of exposure implicit in the psychoanalytic situation was the apparent masterstroke that released the potential of the material. Under the influence of the explosive reception of Portnoy, Roth’s fiction quickly became synonymous with the idea of personal confession and the textual power of uninhibited speech.
6 Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1950 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002), 92. 7 Jonathan Freedman writes of the many Jewish academics who promulgated the James revival: “a double transformation occurred. They were remade into versions of Henry James, that ambivalent and conflicted embodiment of high-genteel culture; meanwhile, and, by the same logic, James was converted, in subtle but unmistakable ways, into a cosmopolitan Jew.” The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 158. 8 Ted Solotaroff, “The Journey of Philip Roth”, Atlantic (April 1969), 71. 30
This chapter seeks to analyse and to complicate the established picture of Roth’s early work, centred on the idea of the momentous breakthrough and preoccupied with the notion of aesthetic liberation that such a conception implies.9 Letting Go and When She Was Good have been persistently ignored or downplayed precisely because of their deviation from the standard account of Roth’s development, bursting onto the scene and breaking into a forceful, ethnically- marked voice. What happens if we reverse the assumptions, retracing his emergence through the prism of Letting Go and When She Was Good? Situating Roth’s first two novels more precisely in their literary historical contexts, the following readings grant prominence to their neglected features and concerns—the very characteristics that have seen them consistently overlooked.
In the course of its multiple narrative strands, where obligations continually wrestle against claims for freedom, Letting Go actually forms a thoughtful early meditation on the questions of literary autonomy and the peculiar epistemology of fiction that would go on to fuel
Roth’s thinking throughout his career. When She Was Good extends the interrogation to a point of crisis and despair, probing the limits of fictional representation. If we read Roth’s early work and map his initial development only under the retrospective light cast by Portnoy, we inevitably distort the picture. Far from comprising a sequence of aberrant artistic errors, failures subsequently eclipsed, Roth’s first two novels reveal an author intimately engaged in the intellectual scrutiny of his chosen form and its contemporary contexts of production and circulation.
9 Recent research by Scott Saul has emphasised just how protracted, contorted, and difficult the textual construction of Portnoy seems to have been, tempering claims of imaginative “free reign” and compositional fluidity often presumed on its behalf. See “Rough: A Journey into the Drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint,” “Roth’s Yarzeit” (4/12/2019), post45.org.
Such a critical move requires resisting the master’s precepts in addition to challenging the established interpretation. Roth would go on to lend credence to the general emphasis of
Solotaroff’s account of his breakthrough in his own slender memoir, The Facts: A Novelist’s
Autobiography (1988). Here he describes the writing of Portnoy as an act of emancipation from overbearing artistic influences:
[it was an experience] of liberating me from an apprentice’s literary models, particularly
from the awesome graduate-school authority of Henry James, whose Portrait of a Lady
had been a virtual handbook during the early drafts of Letting Go, and from the example
of Flaubert, whose detached irony in the face of a small-town woman’s disastrous
delusions had me obsessively thumbing through the pages of Madame Bovary during the
years I was searching for the perch from which to observe the people in When She Was
Good.10
Some dimension of Solotaroff’s “heavily funded Oedipal energy,” the friction between different generations of Jewish Americans in the story of postwar assimilation, is reimagined as the struggle for independence represented in the writer’s journey from hesitant apprentice to confident artist.
When Hermione Lee published her short but influential monograph, Philip Roth (1982), the first studious, scholarly reading of the existing body of work, which sensitively traced the author’s oscillations between decorous restraint and vaudeville abandon in the works published up to The Ghost Writer (1979), it was Roth’s treatment of the tensions of the Jewish assimilation story that took centre stage in her analysis. For Lee, Roth explores, “the liberated Jewish
10 Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (Penguin: London & New York, 1988), 157. 32
conscience, let loose into the disintegration of the American dream.”11 Though they are briefly discussed, the rather different emphases and demands of Letting Go and When She Was Good are sidelined in Lee’s interpretation and read as productive stepping stones: the necessary missteps of a talented writer finding his voice.
Roth’s remarkable second wind, an explosion of creative energy that saw him produce a sustained run of commanding fiction in the 1990s, resulted in a substantial increase in readings and interpretations of his entire body of work. The conversation surrounding Roth is now such that “Roth Studies” has emerged as a clearly defined area of activity and a minor academic industry; “Rothians” now work in ways previously reserved for “Faulknerians.” The range of critical approaches to the fiction has greatly expanded alongside the general increase in interest, placing Roth’s work in a range of incisive new contexts. But even much of the strongest, most persuasive recent material on Roth has exhibited an uncritical tendency to recapitulate the notion that his first two novels are undeserving of sustained scrutiny, preferring instead to track his progress across the more easily comparable and culturally resonant terrain of Goodbye,
Columbus and Portnoy.
Timothy Parrish attributes Letting Go and When She Was Good to the biographical sting of Roth’s famously hostile reception amongst conservative Jewish readers when he published some of his first short stories. Pointing to the outcry caused by Roth’s unsparing treatment of the predicament of torn loyalties in texts such as “Defender of the Faith”, Parrish writes that “Roth himself seemed uncomfortable that he could excite so much critical attention from this fact and his next two works […] veered considerably from the cultural milieu of Goodbye, Columbus and
11 Hermione Lee, Philip Roth (Methuen: London & New York, 1982), 45. 33
the early stories.”12 In fact, in his inventive reading of The Human Stain (2000) and its intertextual interactions with the life and work of Ralph Ellison, Parrish argues that Roth’s hostile reception at the Yeshiva University symposium “The Crisis of Conscience in Minority
Writers of Fiction” in 1962, where he was berated by the audience for his unflattering depictions of Jewish characters, holds the key to the development of his entire writing life.13
Similar examples of sidestepping the first novels are apparent across Roth’s interpreters.
David Brauner begins his study of the oeuvre with Zuckerman Bound, an excision of the early work common in more recent readings.14 For his part, David Gooblar notes the skillful assembly of Letting Go and When She Was Good, briefly outlining how their subject matter reflects the
Jamesian atmosphere of intellectual seriousness that characterised the work of the New York
Intellectuals; however, Gooblar affords the fiction Roth worked on from 1960 through 1967 no real space in his account of the author’s “major phases”, electing instead to ground his analysis in a reading of Roth’s debut novella.15 And Debra Shostak’s Philip Roth: Countertexts,
Counterlives (2004), one of the most thorough studies of Roth’s career published to date, comes closest to an exact restatement of Solotaroff’s judgement of “arid terrain”: “In writing Portnoy’s
Complaint, Roth freed himself of the voice that dominated Letting Go and When She Was Good, the measured voice of his ‘master’, Henry James, in order to give free rein to the vernacular
12 Timothy Parrish, “Roth and ethnic identity,” The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 129. 13 Parrish writes: “Roth’s version of the Yeshiva Battle crystallizes the positions Roth and Ellison inherited as “minority” American writers and predicts the course their careers would take.” “Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain,” Contemporary Literature, V.45, N.3, (Fall 2004), 429. Recent research from Steven J. Zipperstein would seem to contradict Roth’s near-mythic portrayal of the symposium in The Facts, recovering a far less abrasive exchange between the young novelist and the audience at Yeshiva University than he has led his readers to believe. See “Philip Roth’s Forgotten Tape: The Beginnings of the Great American Writer”, The Jewish Forward, May 28, 2018. 14 See David Brauner, Philip Roth. 15 Gooblar writes, as if by way of justification for this omission in his focus, “Both Letting Go and When She Was Good have moments of real power, but they are by no means easy books to like, with their unremitting tone of gloom.” The Major Phases of Philip Roth, 44. 34
voice of his childhood environment among New Jersey Jews.”16 Even more strenuously,
Shostak’s brief glance at When She Was Good, “Roth amid the Alien Corn”, makes the ingenious but rather forced claim that the displacement of Jewish concerns drives the text’s icy detachment and forms its true, elided subject: “the novel is a meaningful entry in Roth’s oeuvre in large part because of its very distance from things Jewish. In the end, that gap speaks volumes.”17 When
She Was Good, in this reading, is what happens when Roth evacuates the defining characteristics of his own material: at a latent level, it is a book about not writing about Jews.
This established critical narrative certainly provides a neat, linear account. It leads tidily into the self-reflexive preoccupations with Jewish identity that drive much of the writing Roth produced in his middle period. It also usefully obviates not only the complexities of Roth’s first two novels but also their perceived lack of quality. Neither Letting Go nor When She Was Good received particularly strong reviews upon publication and later readings have largely corroborated the perception of them as being grim, burdened, and dispiriting works.18 Some more recent scholarship has begun to challenge the consensus, though, pointing to a few of the engaging nuances buried in the supposedly forbidding text of Letting Go.
In his rich and sonorous description of Roth’s career as a sustained assault on the strictures of literary maturity, codes of refinement that came to prominence “after the second world war, in the afterglow of Enlightenment’s successful defense against totalitarianism”—a victory theorised by the New York Intellectuals and then extolled and circulated by influential literary magazines such as the Partisan Review—Ross Posnock argues that the mantra “Letting
16 Debra Shostak, Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 83. 17 Ibid, 114. 18 Alan Cooper provides a neat summary of these initial reviews. Many judgements of the books’ failures seem troubled by Roth’s refusal to break out of his own sense of despair. See Philip Roth and the Jews, 80-87. 35
Go” approximates the governing credo of rebellion reigning over Roth’s entire artistic venture.19
Leaning heavily on the character of Uncle Asher, the squalid, bohemian painter who competes in the novel’s development to advise the earnest Paul Herz, Posnock reads Letting Go as a book that not only shows Roth recuperating the more transgressive sides of James’s fiction, but also as a text that exemplifies the antinomian energy and embrace of flux animating “America’s most illustrious literary tradition.” It is a lineage that, in Posnock’s terms, encompasses Melville,
Whitman, Emerson, James, and that features other cosmopolitan cameos from a more richly international “republic of letters.”20
As spokesman for the attack on the circumscriptions of society, Uncle Asher provides his most complete account of the values undergirding his own vocation when he looks to dissuade
Paul from marrying Libby whilst he is still young:
Listen to Uncle Shmuck, will you? Things come and go, and you have got to be a
receptacle, let them pass right through. Otherwise death will be a misery for you, boy; I’d
hate to see it. What are you going to grow up to be, a canner of experience? You going to
stick plugs in at either end of your life? Let it flow, let it go. Wait and accept and learn to
pull the hand away. Don’t clutch!21
In drawing attention to the dimension of the novel exemplified in Asher’s anti-commandment,
Posnock certainly dismantles the persevering claim that Letting Go represents a simple, strained plea for moral seriousness on behalf of its young author. Indeed, the turbulence of ludus unleashed, the force central to so many of Roth’s major texts and a current which Posnock connects to an Emersonian spirit of ‘counteraction’ reverberant in all his major artistic
19 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, 79. 20 Ibid, 54. 21 Letting Go (New York: Touchstone 1991, [1962]), 82. 36
influences, is already present in Letting Go. Posnock thus successfully shows a side of Roth’s first novel that anticipates the direction of many later works; behind Mickey Sabbath and his gargantuan promiscuity stands something of “Uncle Shmuck.”
Asher’s principled rebellion against ethical ossification, advocating in its place an aesthetics of experience that understands transgression as an implicit condition of an embracing life, is also central to the other key revaluation of Letting Go in the recent scholarship. Patrick
Hayes has shown how thoroughly the text ruminates on the merits of Lionel Trilling’s valorisation of ‘moral realism’ and ‘the tragic sense of life,’ both of which were influential ideas at the time of the book’s composition. In the course of his analysis, Hayes uncovers aspects of the novel that show Roth breaking against the conservative celebration of restraint implicit in these widely adopted means of conceptualising literary value.22 Subsuming much of the material that Posnock explores under the guise of Roth’s artistic “immaturity” into a distinctively post-
Nietzschean account of the kinds of power mobilised by literature, Hayes’s reading of Letting Go shows just how subtly Roth’s early work contemplates some of the dominant intellectual codes of the postwar literary milieu; however, Hayes is at pains to emphasise that Letting Go remains ultimately unresolved about the veracity of its own critique. 23 “What is most important about
Letting Go as a first novel,” Hayes concludes, “is how it sets the agenda for Roth by opening up the core questions about the way in which the redemptive aesthetics of the New Liberalism
22 Thomas Hill Schaub emphasises the powerful political utility of these kinds of readings to the New York Intellectuals and their project of shoring up a revisionist American liberalism during the early phases of the Cold War: “Thus out of the complexities of recent history emerges a fairly simple narrative, almost mythic in its dimensions and in the elemental service it provides the intellectual culture.” American Fiction in the Cold War, (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 10. 23 Hayes writes, “Roth’s work is best thought of within a broadly Nietzschean line of response to the critique of subject-centered rationality.” Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 23. 37
framed the value of tragedy, the ramifications of which his fiction will take much further in the years to come.”24
In the course of their interpretations, both Posnock and Hayes explore crucial aspects of
Letting Go’s complex intertextual dialogue with the work of Henry James, a figure whose novels, prefaces, and essays were accruing an astonishing range of culturally overdetermined meanings in the exact milieu in which Roth was working on the text. Significantly, Posnock and
Hayes each trace intellectual reverberations that stretch far beyond earlier readings figuring
James as an overbearing, limiting influence on the novel; however, as the stark differences between their readings implicitly suggest, with each emphasising radically different dimensions of the master’s connotations, Roth’s thinking about James in Letting Go, confronting the multitude of his meanings and the arenas in which those meanings are contested, actually lies at
“the ambitious heart” of the text.25 As I subsequently argue, Roth makes much more inventive and widespread use of James than even Posnock or Hayes suspect.
As Roth was drafting Letting Go, conversations surrounding “The Art of Fiction” (1884) were at the epicentre of many of the most consequential debates about the kinds of roles that literature should play in the culture at large.26 Though often conflated, the distinct communities of the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics each drafted James to fight slightly different
24 Hayes, Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 71. 25 Posnock emphasises a vision of James in tune with much of the recent scholarship surrounding his work, arguing that his fiction mobilises ambiguous affects to question and destabilise social structures. For Posnock, Roth makes active use of these transgressive dimensions. By contrast, Hayes is at pains to show Roth interacting with earlier influential interpretations circulated by the New York Intellectuals, which emphasise the ethical valences of Jamesian complexity as providing an intellectual bulwark against hostile simplifications. Trilling’s discussion of “moral realism” in his essay on The Princess Casamassima in The Liberal Imagination is of paramount importance to Hayes’s reading. 26 The publication of Leon Edel’s multivolume biography through the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Jamesian tenor of Cleanth Brooks’s and Robert Penn Warren’s “Letter to the Teacher” in the second edition of Understanding Fiction (1959), and Trilling’s increasingly philosophical appropriations of Jamesian complexity comprise only the most conspicuous examples of the ways in which James seemed to refract this contest of ideas. 38
political battles through the modes of reading they advocated.27 And as Mark McGurl has argued, Jamesian tenets, often plucked from the criticism and prefaces as much as the novels, also played a decisive role in the proliferation of creative writing programs across the United
States—a literary historical development that ran alongside a much vaster expansion of universities and exponential increase in the reach of higher education which characterised the cultural arc of American life during the second half of the twentieth century.28 Far from blithely celebrating the subtlety of the consummate literary craftsman, even the most seemingly disinterested acts of formalist Jamesian appreciation in the initial postwar decades were implicated in these vast, underlying cultural currents. With a precocious sense of purpose,
Letting Go takes the measure of the situation, actively questioning the drift of literary texts along these powerful intellectual streams.
Far from passively reflecting the prevailing atmosphere of “moral seriousness” that characterised the seminar room at the University of Chicago, or submissively staging ideas gleaned from the New York Intellectuals, Roth’s first novel engages, actively scrutinises, and subverts many of its most significant contexts. While Posnock’s enthusiasm for Uncle Asher’s pithy maxims leads to a rather unbalanced account of the important role of artist figures in the novel, and Hayes’s explicit Nietzschean focus on the reappraisal of tragic experience narrows the parameters of his historicisation, both readings successfully restore something of the complexity of the exploration of literary authority in Letting Go to view. And here, in his first novel, Roth is
27 Thomas Hill Schaub provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of the Cold War politics at work in Trilling’s revisionist liberalism in American Fiction in the Cold War. And, while often thought of as apolitical on account of its hermeneutic operations, Mark Jancovich persuasively shows just how preoccupied with influencing the condition of American society the New Critics truly were in their attempts to challenge the limits of scientific discourse and the rhetoric of rational coherence. See “The Southern New Critics”, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume VII Modernism and the New Criticism, Ed. A Walton Litz, Louis Menand, Lawrence Rainey. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 200. 28 See Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009). 39
nothing if not intimately and intelligently engaged with the complicated issue of literary authority. Under its seemingly austere surface, Letting Go exhibits a curious determination to examine the possibilities of fiction and its cultural transmission in a range of startling ways. It is an emphasis continued and stretched even further in the chilly atmospherics of When She Was
Good. To undertake a more historicised reading of Letting Go and When She Was Good is to uncover Roth wrestling with ideas that recur with increasing intensity and ingenuity throughout his career. Far from abandoning the “arid terrain” of his first two novels, the author would return to the ideas first explored in these early texts again and again as his writing evolved. But many of these underlying preoccupations were, in fact, driving Roth’s writing from the very beginning.
II. Truth, Boundaries, and Boxes
To a certain extent, Roth was deliberately edited into the label he came to dislike more than any other, the identification which would both constrain and ignite his thinking throughout his writing life: “Jewish American Writer.”29 Recognising the market’s likely responsiveness to unified subject matter, George Starbuck, Roth’s first editor at Houghton Mifflin, selected the five additional short stories to be included in Goodbye, Columbus on the basis of their shared focus— the fresh, comic exploration of the socioeconomic tensions at play in the postwar experience of
Jewish Americans. As Victoria Aarons points out, “all the stories in Goodbye, Columbus pose these questions of Jewish identity. They collectively reveal a deeply felt ambivalence toward what it means to be Jewish in post-World War II America.”30 While absolutely crucial for Roth’s
29 In his late essay “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names” Roth writes, “I have never conceived of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or Jewish American writer.” Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013 (New York: Library of America 2017), 335. 30 Victoria Aarons, “American-Jewish identity in Roth’s short fiction,” The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 11. 40
development and the scope of his later work, this was not the only terrain explored in his earliest texts; several short stories published in literary magazines in and around the same period that were not selected to sit alongside “Goodbye, Columbus” exhibit a number of distinct preoccupations.
Critics such as Gooblar and Hayes have shown how some of the first short stories and movie reviews that Roth published in venues such as the New Republic, Esquire, and the New
Yorker in the late 1950s showcase a range of opinions prominent in the cultural community loosely defined as the New Liberalism; pieces such as “The Kind of Person I Am” (1958) where
Roth wryly celebrates his self-conscious implication in American intellectual life, display a willing appropriation of some of the values that bound writers and thinkers such as Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., Philip Rahv, and Lionel Trilling.31 Though the burgeoning flare for satire is unmistakable, the ideas and arguments of these influential figures, Hayes argues, were the making of Roth’s initial outlook and the major model for the tone and content of his early publications.
Certainly, Roth’s cultural commentary in this period reveals a conspicuous level of disdain for the engulfing trivialisations of the booming entertainment industries. The leap from the learned critique of a David Riesman to the precocious scorn of the young Philip Roth was not, in fact, much of a jump at all.32 Goodbye, Columbus itself generates its most biting ironies when lampooning the tastes and mores of the ascendant bourgeoisie. Much of the comedy in the
31 Hayes writes, “Instead of a focus on class struggle and political transformation informed by ‘Utopian illusions and heady expectations,’ the New Liberalism privileged the discourse of ethics over politics, and the achievement of a resistant sensibility over social upheaval: at the outset of his career Philip Roth was this kind of person, a liberal intellectual in an age of happy problems.” Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 31-32. 32 In a radio interview with Christopher Lydon in 2006 for Radio Open Source, Roth explained that as a young man he had audited David Riesman’s classes on the sociological study of mass culture at the University of Chicago, encountering an approach exemplified in his bestselling study The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950). 41
title story stems from the way Neil Klugman’s rather cold eye falls over the often dubious uses of the Patimkin family’s newfound affluence; access to money and the easy comforts of
American consumerism emerge in Roth’s debut novella as forces that seem to alienate characters, leaving them lonelier. The complexities of fiction, art’s capacity to disclose contradiction and heighten the awareness of social nuance, stands in remedy in a manner loyal to the editors of Partisan Review.
But Roth’s initial efforts at writing exhibit more than an intellectual attachment to the cultural politics of The Liberal Imagination (1950) married to the sharp, observational sting of the talented satirist. The capacity of fiction “to see behind things,” as he explained it to David
Remnick later in his career, evoking terms and examples redolent of the grandest achievements of modernist innovation, seems to have been one of Roth’s obsessions from the very start.33
What, precisely, does the textual form of literature apprehend of the world beyond the page? In what does its epistemological purchase on experience inhere?
Few critics have looked to Roth’s student publications for more than evidence of a budding artistic sensibility. Printed in the Bucknell University magazine Et Cetera, a journal that
Roth helped to found and edit during his time as an undergraduate, his earliest short stories are certainly derivative efforts; most are texts that labour over a misplaced sense of authenticity.
Composed in the middle of the 1950s before Roth moved to the Midwest and the intellectual ferment of Chicago, one senses in each of them a tentativeness of execution anathema to his later prose. And yet, in a way that prefigures not just many of the dynamics of Letting Go but also something of the acutely delineated dilemmas of Tarnopol, Kepesh, and Zuckerman, stories such as “The Box of Truths” (1952) exhibit an early investment in exploring the writer’s imaginative
33 David Remnick, “Into the Clear”, The New Yorker (May 8, 2000), 87. 42
situation as a narrative predicament, treating the acts of composing fiction and publishing stories as a distinct subject unto itself. And the handling of this subject in these early college sketches displays a surprising level of sensitivity to the epistemological tensions induced by the material.
On the surface, “The Box of Truths” elaborates little more than an author’s bristling anger after receiving a rejection from a literary magazine. A dismissive editor explains to an ambitious young man that he may possess a facility with sentences, but he lacks a subject: “you don’t have anything to write about. It’s as easy as that. You haven’t lived.”34 Later, sitting at a nondescript bar, the mawkish “box of truths”—the story’s central image—thus flies open to expose an empty vacuum at the heart of the author’s motivation. While “The Box of Truths” does little more than stage this insight in a scene of drunken self-pity, describing the sting of the editor’s criticism leads Roth towards a first, clear articulation of the problematic nature of literary knowledge:
“Why, with some friends he could talk into the lazy hours of the morning of Gatsby, and
Eugene Gant, and Carrie, and, sometimes, Lear … what motivated them to do this … and
… that…But. Had he ever considered so searchingly, so sympathetically, real people?
Had he?35
Any confidence that art can achieve a neat overlap with experience, or that “Understanding
Fiction” yields actual understanding, is left conspicuously fragile. The question of exactly where texts end and people begin is left enigmatically unresolved.
These kinds of concerns recur in the more sophisticated pieces Roth began submitting to more prestigious magazines a few years later. Getting some measure of truth into the box,
34 Philip Roth, “The Box of Truths” Et Cetera, Oct 1952, 11. 35 Ibid, 12. 43
however, seems to have proved both a persistent and compelling difficulty. The story “The Day it Snowed” was Roth’s first real publication. Appearing in the Chicago Review in 1954, this debut effort is a less than wholly successful experiment in exposing the unsparing pitilessness of life; however, it does show Roth circling around the epistemological tug of fiction—the strange, liminal boundary at which representation pierces into knowledge—in interesting ways. It is, in essence, another story of revelation: a little boy, lied to about the recent deaths of family members, learns of his blindness at the exact moment in which he is struck and killed by a funeral hearse. In a way “The Day it Snowed” represents Roth’s first, clumsy experiment with the cruel narrative ironies that would shape some of his most innovative later novels. Something of Zuckerman’s travails, Coleman Silk’s retribution, and Bucky Cantor’s foreshadowed fate are inelegantly anticipated in Sydney’s untimely ending.
Cooper, one of the few critics to examine the short stories that did not appear in Goodbye,
Columbus, writes dismissively of “The Day it Snowed,” stating that, “there are echoes of
Hemingway’s In Our Time, without any of its truth.”36 Certainly, the tone of the piece is forced.
While Roth’s prose may in part aspire to the clean cadences surrounding Nick Adams, though,
Cooper’s comparison with Hemingway misses the reverberations of the story’s most startling moment, which falls in the final sentence:
But then Sydney turned and saw the old man moving away under the oak trees, and he
broke for the sidewalk, crying, “Mister, Mister Man, please come back—" but before he
could reach the sidewalk, the big black hearse, like an angry whale, came charging down
36 Alan Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews, 28. 44
the left side of the road to be first in the funeral line, and it crushed the boy to the ground,
like feet crush acorns, and it shattered forever his thin glass voice.”37
As the break into lyric similes at the rapier-like point of emotional clarity suggests, the writer who is really being channelled here is not Hemingway but Joyce, a figure whose decisive and lasting impact on Roth has been somewhat overlooked as a result of the prominence of other contexts and frames of influence.38
“The Day it Snowed” is deliberately constructed to bring about its own kind of painful epiphany in a way pioneered in the technique of Dubliners (1914). Roth attempts to generate a textual disclosure of knowledge wherein words, however clumsily, take us into the enigmatic substrata of things. And the title makes the debt to Joyce explicit, purposively evoking the imagery of the famous final paragraph of “The Dead,” in which revelation falls “faintly through the universe” as delicate white snow flakes come to rest on the surrounding graves.39 The narrative treatment of Sydney’s ignorance in the story, the way in which an elegiac ending ruptures his understanding at poignant cost to himself, mirrors the underlying structure of
Joyce’s text. In “The Dead,” Gabriel’s sudden revelation of his wife’s inner life is ingeniously presented as a profound interpretive failure; we witness the misrecognition inherent in an artist’s vision of the object before him. Subtly, Joyce exposes the sleight-of-hand of authorial design at the very moment in which a powerful transformation of understanding occurs. As Roth would
37 Philip Roth, “The Day it Snowed”, Chicago Review, Vol.8, No.4 (Fall, 1954), 44. 38 Joyce’s influence on Roth takes a number of distinct forms as his career develops, culminating in the major fiction of the 1990s. I address this substantive textual contestation, and the limited critical work pairing Roth and Joyce together, in Chapter 4, “Contaminating Modernism”. 39 James Joyce, Dubliners (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1914]), 176. 45
later put it in one of his more expansive returns to Joycean textual epistemologies and the deception inherent in all acts of fictionalisation, he gets it wrong, but that’s what life is.40
The single most striking detail in “The Day it Snowed,” however, is the peculiar image
Roth uses to describe the car that hits Sydney, crushing his body and extinguishing his voice.
While the “big, black hearse” brings with it a fairly evident set of ironies, the decision to liken it to “an angry whale” is perplexing with regard to its narrative context; there is no meaningful associative leap to the rampaging mammals of the open seas in this mournful graveyard scene.
Indeed, the invocation of the enraged whale points unmistakably to the bookshelf and not to the ocean. It is Melville’s classic text, standing in metonymic relation to literature itself, which on some level annihilates the blinkered little boy. The power of fiction, in this suggestive early short story, comes crudely crashing through. An understanding of the world is momentarily achieved and obliterated, destroyed via the immense symbolic force of books.
In his preface to Reading Myself and Others (1975) Roth addresses his persistent fascination with the electrifying boundary that separates art from life:
Together these pieces reveal to me a continuing preoccupation with the relationship
between the written and the unwritten world. The simple distinction is borrowed from
Paul Goodman. […] The worlds that I feel myself shuttling between every day couldn’t
be better described. Back and forth, back and forth, bearing fresh information, detailed
instructions, garbled messages, desperate inquiries, naïve expectations, baffling
challenges.41
40 “The Dead” has some important echoes in Roth’s major novels of the 1990s. One of the most salient lies in the framing structure of American Pastoral. 41 Philip Roth, “Author’s Note,” Reading Myself and Others, xiii. 46
This statement is usually taken as a prelude to the overtly metafictional structures that Roth would turn to in his novels The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993).
These major works take the exploration of the interplay between fiction and the world it tries to apprehend to extraordinarily complex heights, displaying something of what Posnock has called
Roth’s predilection to stare into “the epistemological abyss.”42 But to read this self-conscious admission at mid-career as a beam of light blazing out into the impenetrable waters of future novels is to miss the powerful sense in which the relationship between the written world and unwritten experience was occupying Roth’s attention from the very beginning.
Nowhere is this more apparent, or more delicately conveyed, than the ending of
“Goodbye, Columbus” itself. The final description of the novella, in which Neil Klugman stares, newly alone, through the Lamont Library window, only to push beyond the sight of his own reflection “to a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved,” is one of Roth’s most resonant images. The subtle ambiguities it arouses in the text’s laconic denouement have resulted in a plethora of readings notable principally for their sheer range. Certainly, these concluding lines leave the protagonist poised on an important threshold. For many critics, the object of Neil’s gaze suggests the new allegiance; beyond the tribulations of class that marked in his romance with Brenda Patimkin and his flirtation with her family’s wealth lies the more rewarding struggle with books. Literature, as it were, is the higher calling.43 For others, Neil’s position outside the library, his reflection returned by the cold glass, highlights his ethnic marginality standing alienated in the exalted environment of Harvard Yard. The textual treasures that lie on the other side of the window emphasise the WASP world of literary America that Roth will continually invoke, disrupt but pointedly refuse to assimilate. Neil learns what it means to be Jewish in the
42 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, 114. 43 See Lee, Philip Roth, 30. 47
United States and “Goodbye, Columbus” concludes with a marked and significant sense of distance.44
There is a certain measure of truth to both of these readings; however, in many ways the most significant detail lies in what they share. “Goodbye, Columbus” ends with the porous boundary itself—we encounter an image that seems briefly to apprehend the permeable margin between unwritten and written worlds. While Neil’s reflection remains irrevocably on the other side of all those books, casually shelved as if to emphasise their unostentatious glamour, the visual illusion of the glass is such that life and literature momentarily converge and overlap. Neil and the texts he stares at are at once distinct and comingled: separateness and absorption are fleetingly entwined. From the paradoxes of this suggestive collision Letting Go begins.
III. Taking Hold
In a book of early notes now housed in the archive in the Library of Congress, jottings that evidently helped him charter his way through his influences and intertexts as he persevered with his first, big book, Philip Roth scrawled a resonant sentence in the middle of a lined page otherwise teeming with half-legible thoughts: “maybe feeling is a deception.”45 Certainly, in the landscape of Letting Go it often is. Roth’s first novel works scrupulously hard to detail its characters’ various emotions, from enraged passion to numb detachment, and the precarious situations into which these emotions lead them. But, more than this, Roth also seems driven by a curious determination to explore how far fiction can take us through the apprehension of feelings. The question of what kind of meanings we actually attain in even the most finely drawn
44 See Aarons, “American-Jewish identity in Roth’s short fiction,” 13-14. 45 Philip Roth Papers, Box 141, Folder 3. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. In the removed quotation, Roth expresses his doubts about the instructional value of feelings. 48
map of inner thoughts and impressions pervades the text. The imagery of hearts—aflame, aquiver, in peril, and hardened to stone—is everywhere, and Roth’s early drafts confirm that the initial sketches of Letting Go were written under the provisional title, “The Ambitious Heart.”46
Roth’s first novel forms both a powerful example of mid-century American psychological realism and a sharp reflection on the limits of the form’s penetration. Fiction itself, Roth seems to be speculating, might be the grandest site of self-deception of them all.
At the level of its design, Letting Go is a text of oppositions. More precisely, it is a text that explores the punishing frictions that drive a series of oppositions; abrasive interactions are probed and followed to a point just shy of exhaustion. In the course of seven vast sections and over six hundred pages, the longest novel of his career by a considerable margin, Roth examines social freedom in the late 1950s and its attendant discontents; or, to put it another way, Letting
Go takes a cold look at the prices of obligation in the American Midwest. Wealth grinds against poverty; opportunity rubs against scarcity; family makes claims on independence; sentiment jostles with sentimentality. Typically for Roth, the powers of competing religious and ethnic allegiances work to constrain the choices of individuals. Even the transatlantic divide between
Europe and the United States features as an important dynamic on the edge of the novel’s action.
And these largescale tectonics are played out in the stories of a range of characters who mirror the most conspicuous aspects of each other’s circumstances. The two main heroines, Libby Herz and Martha Reganhart, perform different variations on one of the most significant themes of the book: the meaning of suffering. Even minor characters, such as the filthy, commercial painter
Uncle Asher and the capricious but surprisingly successful abstract expressionist Dick
46 Philip Roth Papers, Box 131, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. The removed quotation was the working title of Letting Go as Roth drafted the novel. 49
Reganhart, form a resonant and deliberate pair—a portrait of the artist refracted through the prism of different, competing situations.
But the central opposition of Letting Go is the one Roth establishes between Gabe
Wallach and Paul Herz. The intertwined story of these two figures, each young literature students in possession of intelligence and a set of burgeoning intellectual enthusiasms, drives the action.
As Gabe and Paul move from graduate school in Iowa City to the University of Chicago to teach as junior members of the English Department, their lives become inexorably intertwined. For all they share, however, their different backgrounds and circumstances could not be more pronounced. Gabe is conspicuously wealthy, handsome, unencumbered, bereaved of his mother early in the book but capable of keeping his father’s heated affections at a distance. Moreover, his Harvard education and secular inclinations leave him unrestrained by ethnic attachments and somewhat blind to the realities of discrimination; though Jewish, Gabe lives very much beyond the cold glass that returned Neil Klugman’s reflection. By contrast Paul is poor, struggling, studious, and, crucially, cast out by his lower middle-class family in Brooklyn on account of his defiant decision to marry a Catholic. Both characters, in fact, orbit the idea of independence, but their lives are shaped by gravitational tugs from opposite sides of the same instantiating force.
Gabe values and preserves his autonomy but becomes increasingly troubled by it; Paul earnestly seeks out responsibility and is made to endure its many consequences.
As if to accentuate the fundamental difference that separates their experience of the world, the first section of the novel, “Debts and Sorrows”, sees Gabe and Libby drive out to pick up a stranded Paul, his ‘junk’ car having broken down under the weight of its own obsolescence, to take him home. While both Gabe and Paul return that very evening to the uncompromising task of studying Anglo-Saxon as part of their pursuit of literary knowledge, an undertaking
50
whose bizarre necessity exudes an undiluted form of academic disinterest, Roth begins Letting
Go with a scene that highlights the actualities of social mobility in postwar America at a most banal, literal level. After enduring Paul’s silent misery and Libby’s unforgiving anger during the journey home, it is no wonder that Gabe mocks the supposed sanctity of the intellectual burden the two of them purportedly share: “his Anglo-Saxon verbs, like mine, had been waiting for centuries to be memorized, and waited still.”47 The alleged purity of the literary calling, divorced from the trivialities of social life, is called immediately into question.
Their shared implication in one another’s lives, a comparable complicity that involves
Gabe not only kissing and falling for Libby, recommending Paul for a teaching job in Chicago, and finally pursuing a private adoption on their behalf, but that also sees Paul engage in a brief affair with his colleague’s former lover, propels not only the narrative but also the pervasive self- consciousness that suspends the entire text. Indeed, thinking about each other, ruminating on the conditions of the other’s life, shapes Roth’s treatment of his characters’ motivations. Gabe’s remark after driving out to rescue his stranded colleague is indicative of this pattern: “I began to wonder, as I went to sleep that night, how I would perform if I were Paul Herz.”48 This early speculation ripples through much of the subsequent action; Gabe’s decision to get involved with
Martha Reganhart, the divorced single mother who struggles nobly to raise her two children, carries with it a certain determination to emulate the seriousness of his opposite. But in Paul,
Gabe encounters the limits that define what he himself is and what he is not. And Gabe’s life stands in problematic opposition, a continual irritant, to that which Paul believes himself to understand most deeply about the world.
47 Letting Go, 15. 48 Ibid, 23. 51
The opposition between these two characters comes to a climax in the dramatic finale of the book, in which Gabe, “The Mad Crusader”, abandons his sense of restraint in a frenzied, ill- advised attempt to force the Herz’s private adoption of a baby—panacea to a troubled marriage—to a harmonious completion. Heavily under the influence of the example of Paul’s noble suffering, Gabe’s unexpected leap into decisive action fails. Out of his depth, he merely berates an intransigent, impoverished father, and comes perilously close to destroying the delicate social arrangement that he and others worked hard to engineer. Collapsed on the floor with his “forehead touching the rug,” newly condemned to a prostrate position that evokes the submissive stance of prayer, Gabe’s confident handling of the world, managing it from a cool distance, disintegrates.49 His voice returns only in the book’s final pages in the form of a humbled and embarrassed letter, in which he pleads for isolation rather than forgiveness, opting for exile to Europe. His rather weak attempt to explain his behaviour draws together the sadness of his predicament and the ignorance that seems to have fueled it; and in a telling sentence that could just as easily describe Paul, Gabe writes, “I thought at the time that I was sacrificing myself.”50
Though Letting Go mainly moves between passages that situate Gabe in the position of narrator-hero and extended sequences that opt for the omniscience of the third-person, the novel homes in on Paul’s conflicted psychology with equal penetration.51 In fact, telling Paul’s story seems to demand more distance in the narration precisely because the timbre of his delusions is of a different quality to Gabe’s. When the epiphanic collapse in his understanding occurs during
49 Letting Go, 627. 50 Ibid, 630 51 Though Gabe’s narration is by far the most prominent use of the first-person, Letting Go includes a variety of rather striking dives into the texture of the mind. Roth includes a brief passage from Paul’s anguished notes, a kind of free indirect discourse that moves into Cynthia Reganhart’s childish sense of things, and even an ambitious attempt to narrate the final, climactic scene of Gabe’s breakdown from Theresa Haug’s impaired, ignorant perspective. 52
a journey to his estranged father’s funeral, a dissolution that moves in the opposite direction to
Gabe’s frenetic breakdown but that exposes something of the same order of self-deception,
Paul’s mental unburdening comes into focus from an angle far outside himself. In his moment of crisis he is not the lunatic cyclone, but the eye of a much greater tempest:
What he saw next was his life—he saw it for the sacrifice that it was. Isaac under the
knife, Abraham wielding it. Both! While his mother kissed his neck and moaned his
name, he saw his place in the world. Yes. And the world itself—without admiration,
without pity. Yes! Oh Yes! What he saw filled him for a moment with strength. Not that
in a sweep of forgiving he could kiss that face that now kissed him; it was not that which
he had seen. He kissed nothing—only held out his arms, open, and stood still at last,
momentarily at rest in the center of the storm through which he had been traveling all
these years. For his truth was revealed to him, his final premise melted away. What he
had taken for order was chaos. Justice was illusion. Abraham and Isaac were one.52
It is a remarkable passage. The combination of ecstatic language, biblical allusion, and the
Jamesian rush of impression coalescing into thought could easily deceive one into imagining that
Paul takes hold of a precious nugget of metaphysical knowledge—a transcendent insight, to savor and to live by. What he actually learns is nothing more than how little he can hope to understand. As the tenor of his subsequent behaviour demonstrates following his return to
Chicago in the novel’s final sections, all Paul comes to recognise is the disarray that marks life as being distinct from even his most cherished and lofty preconceptions. He is not separate; he is implicated in the confusion. When questioned by his perplexed and frustrated wife about his decision to return to the synagogue despite his lack of faith, he simply points to a newfound
52 Letting Go, 451. 53
acceptance of ignorance: “I don’t expect to know everything.”53 In this preoccupation with all we cannot hope to understand, the novel clearly anticipates many of Roth’s later works. The more historically inflected themes that emerge in the American Trilogy, for instance, return to tensions first explored in Letting Go.
In an early reading of the novel, Scott Donaldson argues that Letting Go attempts an unusual synthesis between scrutiny of self and scrutiny of society. Roth’s characters want to discover how “to live in the world—a task which cannot be accomplished until they learn how to live with themselves.”54 The intellectual provenance of this judicious attempt to weave together the exploration of self-realisation with the forces of social antagonism—Jamesian psychological realism and Dreiserian environmental forces—Donaldson perceptively notices, can be found in
Roth’s most famous and widely quoted essay, “Writing American Fiction.”
Originally delivered as a speech at a Stanford University symposium in 1960, and then published to much critical attention in Commentary in 1961, “Writing American Fiction” has been frequently cited but persistently misunderstood. Or, to put it more precisely, critics have tended simply to isolate Roth’s famous remarks about the extraordinarily bizarre quality of life at the dawn of the 1960s, capturing something of its heady dose of carnivalesque unreality, as presage to the experimental strategies that went on to energise the era of high postmodernist fiction that subsequently flourished.55 For those critics who look to the essay to help understand
Roth’s own work, the baffling quality of American culture that the author describes as “a kind of
53 Letting Go, 614. 54 Scott Donaldson, “Philip Roth: The Meanings of Letting Go”, Contemporary Literature, Vol.11, No.1 (Winter, 1970), 22. 55 Brian McHale, in a now foundational narratological argument, argues that the postmodernist novels that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to take the measure of the plural sense of reality characteristic of the period via the projection of multiple fictional ontologies: “postmodernist fiction turns out to be mimetic after all, but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un-or anti- realistic, as at the level of form.” Postmodernist Fiction, 38. 54
embarrassment to one’s one meager imagination,” alludes to that species of irrepressible wildness and antic absurdity bottled in the exasperated voice of Portnoy’s Complaint and glossed in the glib caricatures of Our Gang (1971).
But “Writing American Fiction” was written almost a decade earlier; Roth delivered the speech and published the essay whilst he was moving through the early drafts of Letting Go. He would work torturously on When She Was Good for another six years before turning to the material that would eventually feature in Portnoy’s Complaint. Unsurprisingly, the actual argument of the essay speaks much more intensely to the concerns of his first two novels than it does to the slighter texts with which it is more often associated. What the neglected second half of “Writing American Fiction” diagnoses, after surveying the recent work of the major novelists of the day, is a persistent retreat from representing social experience. Writers have ceased to attempt to achieve any kind of meaningful purchase on the world beyond the page; contemporary authors seem instead to be offering different variations on the projection of the ego. Mailer’s exhibitionist insistence on becoming an agent in the culture, Salinger’s world-weary retreat into a kind of mysticism, and Bellow’s optimistic affirmations of the capacious energy of the self each result in a kind of “literary onanism” that limits the writer’s capacity to grasp what is outside himself as a subject.56 While these strategies may afford “joy, solace and muscle,” or even a flourishing of prose technique, writing to rejoice in the inner life or to construct wholly imaginary worlds must give one pause: “when the self can only be celebrated as it is excluded from society, or as it is exercised and admired in a fantastic one, we then do not have much reason to be cheery.”57 Roth thus concludes with the ambivalent ending of Invisible Man (1952), reading the entry of Ellison’s protagonist into his isolated underground limbo not simply as being
56 “Writing American Fiction,” 178. 57 Ibid, 181. 55
representative of the absolute feeling of alienation at the hands of a hostile, racist society, but instead as offering a telling image of the condition of contemporary American writing.58
Donaldson shows how Roth looks to break out of this very predicament, producing and exploring characters who try hard to “make contact with the world as it is.”59 Both Gabe’s and
Paul’s intertwined journeys towards self-realisation can be read as struggles to achieve fragile pockets of affirmation within the deterministic forces of class, race, community, and culture. But, as their respective breakdowns reveal, what they are most forcefully deprived of by the conclusion of the narrative is any illusion of control. They attempt restlessly to fashion the meaning of their lives against a set of mid-century American realities that all too powerfully strips it from them. Their acts of ego projection, in other words, each fail. Donaldson describes this central tension of Letting Go attentively; however, his interpretation elects not to discuss the most suggestive ways in which Roth grafts together the book’s exploration of the psychologies of its individual actors with the wider forces that constrain and produce them. Curiously, it is in their own self-conscious scrutiny of literature that Roth’s characters actually discover the terms by which they try to live and the eventual limits of this undertaking.60 As such, it is no accident that so much of the action in Letting Go takes place in and around the literature departments of the postwar university.61 Far from forming a jovial campus comedy, though, Letting Go looks to
58 It is easy to challenge the veracity of Roth’s critique; however, the argument of the essay offers an invaluable insight into some of the intellectual issues that Roth was grappling with as he attempted to shape (and reshape) the material in Letting Go. 59 Donaldson, 21. 60 James Atlas, in his sensitive reappraisal of Roth’s first novel, comes closest to latching on to this dimension of the text. See “A Postwar Classic,” New Republic 2 June 1982. 28-32. 61 Mark McGurl, in his influential study The Program Era, is able to read Roth’s interactions with the university and the formal reflexivity exhibited in different ways across his entire career as a wholly benign set of reverberations. The various strategies of self-consciousness across Roth’s work display nothing more than an eclipsing “autopoetics” driven and determined by the system. For McGurl, “autopoetics” functions as the chief aesthetic tenet through which literary modernism was instrumentalised by the institution of the creative writing program. The complexities of Letting Go make no meaningful impression on this analysis. In fact, though Roth’s most consistent interactions with the very institutions whose impact McGurl is at pains to examine occurred when he was drafting 56
the intellectual ferment of this setting in order to examine its own contexts of production and reception.
In fact, Letting Go ruminates on the more suspect pressures at play in the academic and intellectual culture of the late 1950s with surprising confidence and satiric alacrity; the narrative, texture, and strategies of the book work together to situate the ‘literary text’ on that ambiguous threshold between self and society probed in “Writing American Fiction.” As I have argued, this was an epistemological boundary that had preoccupied Roth from the very beginning; however, in his first novel it takes on a much more expansive and exhaustive set of meanings, deployed anew to scrutinise a number of powerful forces flowing through the instrumentalisation of literary studies in the academy. Often missed on account of Roth’s seeming commitment to the meticulous pressures of psychological realism, Letting Go is actually subtly inventive in the methods employed to achieve this kind of reflexive scrutiny.
IV. “A Weird Textual Consciousness”: The Uneasy Feel of Literary Experience
One of the most piercing descriptions of self-deception in Letting Go appears at the beginning of the fifth section, “Children and Men.” Here, taking the measure of his own misery before setting off on an impulsive bus ride back to Brooklyn, Paul Herz comes to a certain kind of painful appreciation of the real meaning of his own suffering:
It occurred to him now—as an icicle occurs to a branch, after a cold hard night of endless
dripping—that, no, he was not a man of feeling; it occurred to him that if he was anything
at all it was a man of duty. And that when his two selves had become confused—one self, his first novel, such as his brief presence in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Program Era conforms to the general critical pattern I described earlier, in which Letting Go and When She Was Good vanish from the shelf. 57
one invention—when he had felt it his duty to be feeling, that then his heart had been
stone, and his will, instead of turning out toward action, had remained a presence in his
body, a concrete setting for the rock of his heart.62
As this recognition regarding the tortured overlap between “the pretentions and the fact, what’s invented and what’s given” breaks upon Paul, falling through his character in wave after wave of regret and recollection, the precise quality of the insight moves into a bizarre kind of liminal uncertainty: “It all led to a very heavy sense of self—an actual sensation of these last years—to a weird textual consciousness of what stood between him and others.”63 Letting Go consistently broaches and mines this paradoxical terrain, wherein lived experience comingles with a distinctly textual frame of knowledge, replete with the implication of endless, unresolved interpretation.
When he kisses Libby Herz earlier in the novel, Gabe experiences his own comparable slide into this ambiguous kind of consciousness: “Following our embrace I had been visited with a mess of emotions, no one of which I could clearly identify. It wasn’t so much emotion, in fact, as emotionality: much strong feeling, no particular object.”64 In even the most vital and dramatic moments in their lives, characters in Letting Go seem to slip into disorientating literary experiences whose very textuality undermines their understanding.
This innovative dimension is installed prominently at the beginning of the novel in the form of a pronounced intertextual architecture. From the very first pages, Roth has the work of
Henry James loom over the entire text. In the opening of the first section, “Debts and Sorrows,” we learn immediately about Gabe’s isolated study of James’s late works, his concentration
62 Letting Go, 408. 63 Ibid, 408. 64 Ibid, 56. 58
“exact enough” to attend to “the involutions of the old master.”65 As I will examine later, the interaction that is really being signalled here is the one that Roth establishes between his narrator hero and James’s most mercurial observational agent in The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert
Strether. Crucially, James’s presence in the diegesis of Letting Go also plays a decisive role in propelling the narrative. Functioning as a strange kind of anti-MacGuffin, Gabe’s copy of The
Portrait of a Lady (1881) circulates between characters and results in the exposure of his mother’s confessional final letter, slotted forgetfully between its pages. The disclosure implicit in the early exchange of The Portrait of a Lady, with the same private note which opens the copy of the text we are reading sitting snugly inside the book Gabe distributes, kicks off a kind of readerly double jeopardy, investing a measure of danger into both the Jamesian text and Roth’s own codex. Gabe’s compromised copy of The Portrait of a Lady, a work celebrated ceremoniously throughout English departments in American Universities throughout the 1950s, acts as a curious and telling agent of disruption. The peculiar, shifting presence of James’s novel in Letting Go thus signals an immediate suspicion about the efficacy of the kind of knowledge transmitted by fiction—even fiction of the highest status—and the understanding it proffers. The version of The Portrait of a Lady that moves through the plot sows danger and confusion, as it were, at the exact moments in which it also sews the intertextual seams of the book.
Roth makes this reflexive ambivalence reverberant in the text’s design explicit in much of the dialogue. Characters don’t just read James; they think, obsessively, about the meaning of his work. Throughout Letting Go, figures frequently invoke the example of Isabel Archer as they meditate on the wisdom of their own choices. James’s famously ambiguous ending, which holds the question of whether Isabel is courageous or cowardly in an unresolved flash of dramatic
65 Letting Go, 3. 59
tension, exerts a powerful hold on the thoughts of Roth’s characters. The interpretive predicament of how to make sense of Isabel’s determination to “affront her destiny” and remake the world, as in Libby’s early debate with Gabe about the “guts” of her actions, features prominently in the very passages in which individuals seem particularly tormented by the opacity of their own decisions. “Whenever we talked principle,” Gabe notices when chatting with Libby about James, “it always wound up seeming as though we were talking about her.”66 And similarly, he reflects on the stirring of his own emotions later in the supermarket in a manner that seems purposefully to evoke an uneasy overlap between the impenetrability of Isabel’s most strident choices and the inherent strangeness of his own: “It was beginning to seem that toward those for whom I felt no strong sentiment, I gravitated; where sentiment existed, I ran.”67 Mrs
Osmond, yielding to a comparable impulse that came under an extraordinary level of scrutiny in lecture halls across the country in the very period in which Roth was writing Letting Go, famously, “darted from the spot.”68
This intertextual tension is palpable throughout Letting Go, but it assumes increasing stakes towards the conclusion of the narrative. When Gabe and Martha finally discuss James themselves they are newly separated. And this time it is Martha who has been reading and mulling over the difficult meanings encoded in the late works of the master. Yet the concentration necessary for this study to happen was attained in a way wholly different to Gabe’s earlier isolation in the administrative offices of the U.S. Army, located deep in the emptiness of
Oklahoma. Martha’s connection to “the world of feeling” has not been earned through books but through the sharp edges of lived misfortune. In a poignant scene touched not only by her failed
66 Letting Go, 31. 67 Ibid, 30. 68 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 636. 60
romantic relationship but also haunted by the unexpected recent passing of Markie, her youngest child, she offers an observation rather more wise than she may in fact realise: “I was saying, when your eyes fogged over, that you do get the feeling that old James, for all he does know, doesn’t really know what goes on when the bedroom door snaps shut.”69 Cruel pastiche of a well-known biographical speculation though the comment may be, on the evidence of the lives examined in Letting Go, Martha seems to understand more in this moment about the dubious relationship between the written page and the unwritten world than anyone else in the book.
James can only take you so far into the inscrutability of life.70 The pathos of her eventual decision to marry the dependable Sid Jaffe and take hold of some pitiful measure of order shows how she too can no longer hope to impose a greater, elevated meaning on her own story.
The inner logic of Letting Go is such that the ethical refinement that Gabe believes to inhere in the complexity of a Jamesian outlook, the subtle intellectual machinery through which he parses his own social experience, is placed consistently in question. In his reading of the novel, Hayes shows how the arc of the text focused on Paul’s suffering is intended to put pressure on Lionel Trilling’s valorisation of “moral realism”; Letting Go seems to be asking whether tragic experience, defined in Trilling’s terms through an influential reading of James, is truly redemptive.71 But in his interpretation of Gabe, the figure much more fully rooted and aligned with James in the course of the novel,72 Hayes simply notes that his rather different quest
69 Letting Go, 574. 70 Roth illustrates this comically as well as poignantly in the very same scene. When Gabe first sees Martha again after their separation, she tells him that her car has recently been stolen when her attentions were elsewhere: “I saw them stealing it. I was working a little late one night—reading The Princess Casamassima in my office—and when I came out to the Midway, there was my car being pushed away, out toward Cottage Grove.” Letting Go, 567. 71 In his essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature”, Trilling would go further than in The Liberal Imagination, stating, “more than with anything else, our literature is concerned with salvation.” Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 8. 72 In the early drafts of Letting Go, in which the opposition established between the two central characters is even more apparent, Paul is not simply ignorant of James’s major works, as in the published novel, but rather, Roth describes how Paul actively dislikes James’s fiction. 61
to acquire the wisdom of moral realism, “ends by suggesting that suffering might not teach anything at all, other than the recognition of an irrational will to power.”73 Perhaps; when Gabe memorably passes an awful accident on a drive home early in the novel, his quickened heart is soon shocked by the root indifference of the world: “What I saw surprised me. The face sticking up above the blanket belonged to nobody I knew.”74 The terms that define his frenzied breakdown in the book’s final section also seem to expose a kind of emptiness sitting deep down in the heart of things.
But does the “will to power” hold quite as much explanatory force as Hayes claims?
Gabe’s sudden attempt to overcome the intransigence of the world via sheer force of will proves as naïve as his earlier attempts to excise himself; his wild determination to blaze through the annoying legal difficulties slowing the completion of the Herz family’s private adoption, looking to outmanoeuvre a stupid, pugnacious man, sees him ruthlessly humiliated. Forceful dynamism, in other words, sees the “The Mad Crusader” break through to no new plane of knowledge, nor does it allow him to exert the terms of his own truth. In addition, the novel’s one direct reference to the kind of Nietzschean thought central to Hayes’s reading, when Gabe’s fragile father invokes a philosophical precedent for his idiosyncratic position in a breakfast debate about the legal rights of the family over the wishes of the child, moves to undercut the grandiosity of the allusion rather than endorse its claims. Dr Wallach, apprentice Nietzschean in an effort to impress his educated son, ends up making a fool of himself.
Ultimately, though, there is more at stake in the way that Roth arranges the interaction between Gabe’s literary experience and his social reality than a pointed critique of Trilling and the more dubious assumptions that undergird his politics. In the course of Letting Go, the utility
73 Hayes, Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 70. 74 Letting Go, 58. 62
of fiction as a vehicle of understanding comes under a much more pressing, wider scrutiny. That
“huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness,” which
James famously celebrates as the constellation underpinning the “immense sensibility” of the novelist, is shown to serve some particularly pernicious delusions.75 In fact, Roth ambitiously moves to recover something of the suppressed violence implicit in James’s original metaphor.
The silvery web that sustains “The Art of Fiction” not only apprehends the subtlety of the world in Letting Go; but rather, as in its use by the spider who creates it and is always implied by its existence, it is also shown to arrest, threaten, and destroy its moving parts. When Gabe visits some of Paul’s old friends in Brooklyn, encountering a world far removed from his own, he momentarily dreams of “the very simplest of lives” and submits to his own innocent vision.
Returning to a pattern begun with his attraction to the pathos of Libby Herz, Gabe acts on his fantasy, kissing the married Doris Horvitz. In the moment that follows, Roth depicts the sudden imposition of Gabe’s worldly sophistication in unequivocal terms: “For a second she looked nothing more than irritated, as though out on a picnic the weather had taken an unexpected turn.
But then she bit her lip, and life became, even for Doris, a very threatening affair.”76
Such moments purposefully undermine the moral texture of “The Art of Fiction.” Later in the narrative, when Gabe and Martha have their poignant conversation following the recent failure of their relationship, the teasing exchange about James soon gives way to an attempted seduction motivated less by lust than by the interior ache of wounded pride.77 In experiencing such waves of hurt sensation, Gabe seems finally to graduate to the exalted world of feeling he has been studying and writing about throughout his adult life. But Martha’s refusal to sleep with
75 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism (Penguin: London and New York, 1987), 194. 76 Letting Go, 187. 77 “The stirring within him was not just lust; lust was subsumed within it. He had to undo all that had been done, do what had not been done.” Letting Go, 572. 63
him, explained either side of a sharp, deserved thump to the head that draws a little blood from the most aloof of men, brings with it a devastating critique of acting on the flickering suggestiveness of such seemingly subtle, finely-drawn emotions: “Are you going to tell me about your fine conscience? Those little pains don’t even begin to count. Don’t kid yourself—your conscience and James’s conscience both give me a pain in the ass, if you want the truth.”78 The spider’s web is nothing if not ultimately self-serving. On a critical level, of course, Gabe has been using Martha and the pathos of her life all along as part of his own search to live up to a nobler idea of himself.
The scene ends in such a way so as to push this quivering ambivalence in the Jamesian intertextuality of the novel towards a sharp, ambiguous splinter. As Gabe leaves Martha’s room,
Roth provides an unusually clear delineation of the epistemological uncertainty that runs through the entire novel:
He turned to leave, and then—because he was so unwilling, so incredulous—he turned
back for a final instant. And what his eyes saw in her eyes—could it be? Uncertainty?
She knows she is fooling herself. She is in pain! Now he must take her in his arms! But he
could no longer deceive himself with what he wanted to believe were her feelings.79
The capacity “to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things,” that James celebrates so vividly in “The Art of Fiction” is here rendered entirely, crushingly delusory.80 The very sensitivity of Gabe’s impressions, his well-trained ability “to judge the whole piece by the pattern,” has in fact only enabled his most resilient misconceptions.81
78 Letting Go, 576. 79 Ibid, 577. 80 James, “The Art of Fiction”, 194-195. 81 Ibid, 195. 64
This pervasive tension in the “weird textual consciousness” that suspends the action of
Letting Go is redolent in more than just Gabe’s predatory instincts, penchant for self- preservation, and the literary reflexivity that shapes them. In an important early scene in which the pious young Paul encounters Uncle Asher for the first time, a meeting arranged in order to chat about his impending marriage, the principled young student, desperate to assume the serious, self-abnegating vocation of the writer, comes into contact with a genuine artist whose actual life seems to make a mockery of his illusions about the transcendent nature of the literary calling:
What—what had Asher wanted him to see? Was he missing something? Was this
happiness, saintliness, the serenity of which men dream? Was he witnessing a rejection of
the baser things, the ambitions, the quests, the greeds? Look, was this or was this not
human waste?
It was. And, curiously, this sight of his uncle’s condition brought palpitations to
Paul’s heart. The messiness surrounding him, the indignity of it all, suddenly shook his
own faith in himself. He experienced dread at the thought of his own life going wrong.
He actually allowed himself to wonder if there might not be a less stern path he might
take … for just a little while longer. Could he not chase butterflies again in Prospect Park,
catch them fluttering in his cheesecloth and coat hanger?82
The wry parody of Nabokovian aestheticism implied in the reference to the blissful hunt of the lepidopterist seems deliberate; the flood of waste that Asher brings forth purposefully shatters the crystalline lattice of feeling down which the experiential tremors of ‘Art’ are supposed to
82 Letting Go, 87. 65
travel.83 Nabokov’s formalist equivalency between the shivers in the spine and the lived force of the elevated tradition is exposed to the visceral hit of a wholly different kind of shudder.84
Similarly, Asher’s flood of filthiness, expressed not only in his putrid apartment and grimy habits but also in his resonant injunction to “let it flow, let it go,” destroys the claim to delicate, arrested stasis implied in the image of James’s fine silken threads.85
“What feelings washed up from Asher’s chest into his throat and mouth?” Paul asks himself as he ponders the meaning of his encounter.86 Certainly not the silvery sensations that
Gabe writes about nor the alabaster emotions that he dutifully enacts. Asher’s freedom seems to be of an entirely other order than the rarified sense of independence that fuels Gabe’s Jamesian studies and drives Paul’s heroic suffering. Above all, Asher’s resolute inclusivity seems to undercut the assumption that autonomy is achieved via a logic of abnegation. In fact, in Paul’s exposure to Asher’s embrace of human waste the very idea of aesthetic autonomy as a meaningful concept is called quite fiercely into question. The relationship between art and life must, in fact, be fundamentally porous. Following the pattern of oppositions established throughout Letting Go, this critique moves more fully into focus when viewed in tandem with the novel’s other main artist figure, the painter Dick Reganhart.
83 In his introductory lecture on literature, “Good Readers and Good Writers”, Nabokov writes, “In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.” Lectures on Literature, Ed. Fredson Bowers (London & New York: Harcourt, 1980), 6. 84 For an eloquent exploration of some of Roth’s interactions with Nabokov as an intellectual and aesthetic antagonist, focused primarily on middle period novels such as The Counterlife, My Life as a Man, and The Professor of Desire, see Luke Maxted’s recent article: “‘This is life, bozo, not high art’: Life, Literature and the Academy in Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov,” Philip Roth Studies, Vol. 14, N.2, 2018, 33-50. 85 Though James speaks of the fact that “experience is never limited” as he introduces this famous metaphor in “The Art of Fiction,” itself a widely circulated image during the high point of the James revival, Roth seems to seize more on its effaced ironies and contradictions than its attractive delicacy. When he came to draft “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a summative speech delivered in Newark in 2013 in which he reflected on his own fictional achievement, celebrating the way in which the novel as a form draws expressive strength by reveling in particulars, one can observe him continuing to rework the assumptions latent in James’s influential precedent. There is nothing casual in Roth’s addition of the word “ruthless” to describe the compelling intimacy of fiction. 86 Letting Go, 86. 66
Martha’s tempestuous former husband, father of her two young children and author of much of her misery, represents a bruising marital past. Having struggled in poverty for years,
Dick Reganhart returns suddenly in the middle of the novel to visit Chicago and to assume custody of his children. Newly rich and successful and yet peripheral to Martha’s life, his oddly attenuated presence on the margins of the action seems to suggest a secondary narrative function—Dick embodies the harshest dimensions of Martha’s misfortune and the most capricious characteristics of her fate. But Roth is surprisingly particular in his descriptions of
Dick Reganhart as an Abstract Expressionist, newly acclaimed and celebrated in a fashionable and powerful contemporary New York scene, and this laces a number of significant associations into the novel’s treatment of its artist figures. Most important here is a distinct echo of Clement
Greenberg.
Of all the prominent formalisms circulating the American intellectual culture in the 1950s and 1960s, Greenberg’s celebration of painterly flatness was one of the most vocal and influential.87 Advocating an exhaustive kind of late modernist self-consciousness that evacuates even the slightest hint of lived content from the constitution of the art object, Greenberg’s neo-
Kantian essays were not only some of the most forceful exaltations of aesthetic autonomy in the period in which Roth was working on his first novel, they were also amongst the most significant and widely read interpretations of the very visual style that Dick Reganhart adopts. The vague, vatic language that attends his paintings is unmistakable: “…manages a rigidity of space, a kind of compulsion to order […] the dull gold rectangles are played off against a lust and violence of savage purples, blacks, and scarlets that continually break in through the rigid…”88 Tellingly, it
87 In one of his most famous essays, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, originally published in 1939 in Partisan Review, Greenberg writes, “Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 6. 88 Letting Go, 203. 67
is this very insistence on the autonomy of the aesthetic, bringing with it a certain obliteration of precisely the kind of epistemological intensity that preoccupied Roth, which comes under pressure in the very moment that Reganhart enters the frame of Letting Go. When Cynthia notices one of her father’s paintings in the newspaper, pointing it out excitedly to her mother, the text actually restores the vanquished content of this most sovereign of images:
Her heart slowly resumed its normal beat, though it was true, as Cynthia said, that a
painting of her father’s was actually printed in the Times. She recognised it immediately;
only the title had been changed. What had once been “Ripe Wife” was now labeled
“Mexico.” That bastard. She allowed herself the pleasure of a few spiteful moments.
Juvenilia. A steal from de Staël. Punk. Derivative. Corny. Literal. Indulgent. She repeated
to herself all the words she would like to repeat to him, but all the incantation served to
do was to bring back so vividly all that had been: all the awful quarrels, all the breakfasts
he had thrown against the kitchen wall, all the times he had walked out, all the times he
had wept, saying he was really a good and decent man … All of it lived at the
unanesthetized edge of her memory.89
Martha’s angry attack on the erasure of lived circumstance, the purging of art’s socially embedded nature in the experience of real persons, is, in some sense, symbolically fulfilled a few pages later. Though Cynthia wishes to cherish the newspaper copy of her father’s painting, her younger brother Markie restores the chaotic cultural energy from which it ultimately came, accidentally crumpling the page, ruining the image. The nature of the desecration is suggestive.
As Markie wrinkles the paper, the disinterested gaze is compromised by a particularly banal kind
89 Letting Go, 202. 68
of contingency; but “Mexico” itself, at least in the form of the reproduction that Roth brings into the action of the novel, is certainly no longer transcendentally ‘flat’.
The “weird textual consciousness” that suspends so much of Letting Go therefore finds a neat, compelling corollary in the liminal space opened by the blade-like, “unanesthetized edge” of Martha’s memory of “Ripe Wife.” But the animating interest in scrutinising the idea of aesthetic autonomy stretches much further than the text’s subtle exploration of painters and the art they produce. In fact, the more crucial context for Roth’s interest in exploring the idea of autonomy is not Abstract Expressionism but the specific ascendancy of the New Criticism—a powerful intellectual movement within the discipline of literary studies that is weaved into
Roth’s first novel in a range of suggestive ways.90 The academic domestication of modernist textual forms in the 1950s, achieved via the exaltation of the operations of form and structure at the expense of cultural and referential context, would remain an important touchstone and point of antagonism throughout his work. This particular, almost entirely ignored dimension of Letting
Go is most vividly exhibited in the initial sparks of its earliest drafts, flashes that illuminate many of the underlying tensions of the finished text in a range of startling ways.
90 Fredric Jameson draws the work of figures such as Clement Greenberg together with the operations of the New Criticism in his account of literary modernism at mid-century, concluding that, “the New Criticism prepared the space in which an ideology of Modernism could emerge.” A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present (London; New York: Verso, 2002), 169. 69
V. The Burdens of Autonomy
Letting Go undoubtedly emerges out of the cultural tensions contained in the New Liberalism.91
One can certainly trace early signs of the sense of dissent that would eventually culminate in
1967 in the calculated decision to sting the establishment by publishing “Whacking Off (a story)” in Partisan Review. Strains of thought within Roth’s first novel subtly anticipate this explosive and calibrated hit on the reigning intellectual authorities. In addition to paving the pathway to public scandal, though, Letting Go also performs an extensive examination of the relationship between fiction and the dubious contexts in which we look to use and to understand it. The key point of conflict driving this aspect of the novel derives not so much from Roth’s meditations on the New York Intellectuals but on his direct experiences of the New Criticism.92
McGurl touches on Roth’s exposure to this key contextual territory when he tracks some of the ways in which the major tenets of the New Criticism fed into the institutionalisation of the discipline of creative writing in the postwar period.93 When he offers his rather withering reading of Roth’s fiction, McGurl focuses on highlighting the operations of a governing principle that he labels “autopoetics.” This routine function of the system, a recalibration of modernist complexity
“geared for the production of self-expressive originality” driven by the inexorable rise of creative
91 Going further, Andy Connolly positions such tensions as an underlying fault line running throughout Roth’s career. See “Roth and the New York Intellectuals”, Philip Roth and World Literature, Ed. Velichka Ivanova (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014), 103-121. 92 Conflations of the distinct cultural communities of the New York Intellectuals with the New Critics abound in efforts to historicise the intellectual history of the postwar university. However entangled these different strands of thought eventually became in the period during and after Roth published Letting Go, converging in a set of shared discourses during the early phases of the Cold War, the perception of their distinctions in the material weaved into the novel is clear and sharp. 93 Mark McGurl, “The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction”, Critical Inquiry, Vol.32, No.1 (Autumn 2005), 112. 70
writing, can be shown to engender even the most arresting and innovative aspects of Roth’s work: “Roth is very much a man of the system.”94
The Program Era implies that Roth’s early fiction exhibits an uncritical, Jamesian pleasure in the rewards of intricate literary craftsmanship.95 Such a claim seems oddly innocent of the abrasive features of Roth’s debut novel. But, more importantly, an attentive analysis of the ways in which Letting Go turns to the university—as a setting, context, and a site of intellectual scrutiny—inevitably complicates the totalising picture that McGurl describes. Adequately unpicking this dimension of Roth’s first novel insists upon a more clearly demarcated series of distinctions between “the system” and other ideas ascendant and circulating in the contemporary culture, particularly in the institutional setting of the postwar English Department. Indeed, as even a cursory reading reveals, Letting Go is far more forcefully concerned with the New
Criticism as an interpretive methodology, a literary pedagogy and a set of ideas about reading, than it is with the programmatic principle of “autopoetics” that occupies McGurl. Moreover, the often dubious ways in which the New Criticism domesticated many of the most revolutionary texts of the early twentieth century would later become crucial to Roth’s thinking in ways that stretch far beyond the account of “high cultural pluralism” advanced in The Program Era.96
Joyce, the modernist author most conspicuously absent in the defining texts of the New Critics
94 McGurl, “The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction”, 112&116. 95 McGurl writes: “This conspicuously networked feature of his individualistic autopoetics is recorded in other, simpler ways as well, for instance, in the prideful Jamesian literary professionalism that Roth began to assume in college and graduate school.” “The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction”, 116. 96 I address this question more fully in Chapter. 4, which explores the ways Roth’s major novels of the 1990s reengage with the textuality of works such as Ulysses, moving to recuperate them from the enduring legacy of the New Criticism. 71
but most awkwardly appropriated in McGurl’s account, would prove absolutely central to this development.97
With surprising self-confidence, Letting Go takes the measure of literary studies in the
1950s. Roth’s descriptions of the English Department at the University of Chicago, where Gabe works and Paul later arrives to teach freshman composition, are exacting and detailed. Though the book keeps this context on the margins of the main narrative, the dynamics of the faculty in which Gabe and Paul operate often intrude on scenes that ostensibly take place in settings far removed from the seminar room or the department meeting. On a certain level, Roth’s characters are always talking and thinking about texts. Letting Go devotes three extended set-piece scenes to the inner operations of the English Department, each largely focused on ridiculing the absurdities of the campus life; however, struggles over the most appropriate ways to read and teach fiction permeate the entire novel. And Roth’s early drafts confirm that fierce arguments about what to do with books—how best to think about the relationship between the written page and the unwritten world—were amongst some of the earliest ideas committed to paper. In a discarded scene, Gabe reflects on the brutality of a lecture delivered to his own students in particularly resonant terms: “I was rather more harsh than I intended, and excused myself by telling them that writing was a harsh business, whatever that meant, and gave them their break.”98 What we do with literary texts, in the landscape of Letting Go, really counts.
97 Lawrence Rainey and Louis Menand note this important but often forgotten fact when they write, “One can read the entire corpus of major works by the principal New Critics and find not a single extended discussion of James Joyce. When Joyce became an object of interest for Anglo-American scholars, it was through the advocacy of critics firmly outside or opposed to the New Criticism—such as Harry Levin and Hugh Kenner, to cite only the most prominent examples.” “Introduction,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume VII Modernism and the New Criticism, 8. 98 Philip Roth Papers, Box 131, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. In the removed quotation, Gabe describes his teaching in terms that emphasise his exacting expectations. 72
Significantly, Roth builds the portraits of the characters working in the English
Department around the characteristics of their methodology, highlighting this interest in examining certain prominent interpretive claims. For instance, Letting Go includes its own caricature of the pedagogical “wild man”, jumping on desks in the instruction of Moby Dick, investing everything in theatrical explication.99 The contemporary institutional prestige of the
New Criticism is also immediately satirised via a particularly withering portrait of intellectual obsequiousness: “Our New Critic, Victor Honingfeld, forever off to Breadloaf or the Indiana
School of letters, forever flashing at me rejection slips signed in John Crowe Ransom’s own hand.”100 The overall impression of these initial character sketches of the professoriate, it has to be said, is rather damning. But lying beneath even the most vicious moments of satire sits an earnest interest in the intellectual forces circulating the department.
Roth reserves his most pronounced assault on the tenets of the New Criticism for the unsparing depiction of John Spigliano, Chairman of the Humanities II staff and the most vocal proponent of an ideology of aesthetic autonomy. Even the character’s name seems to undermine his position, playing on a fancy, portentous uttering of the word ‘spiel.’ Suggestively, Spigliano is placed in a position of power. In the course of the novel he uses this institutional authority dubiously, seeking to hire and promote his conceptual allies. Paul Herz’s position becomes precarious on account of an impassioned refusal to submit to the authority of the critical system.
Roth also has Spigliano make a foolish pass at Martha Reganhart, undercutting the supercilious tone of disinterest that characterises both his methodology and his dialogue. Indeed, on the
99 Letting Go, 232. 100 Ibid, 233. 73
evidence of Spigliano, autonomous literary analysis is shown to be anything but unconcerned with contextual background.101
When Gabe offers some initial character sketches of his colleagues in the first section of the book, “Debts and Sorrows,” the language surrounding Spigliano deliberately invokes the terminology characteristic of Cleanth Brooks’ and Robert Penn Warren’s widely disseminated textbook, Understanding Fiction. Designed to prime a generation of instructors in the techniques of mechanistic formal analysis and the contemplation of the “organic unity” of the text, Brooks’ and Warren’s primer confidently asserts an inductive method.102 The different sections of
Understanding Fiction move through groups of stories, famously shorn of their historical contexts, which best exemplify certain aspects of technique. These chapters range from “How
Plot Reveals,” to “What Character Reveals.” The animating question put to each example text is
“how does it work?”; the elided interpretative predicament is: what meaning can we attribute to the experience of reading it?
This archetypal example of the New Criticism, powerfully invoked in Roth’s treatment of
Spigliano, reserves its most forceful language in support of its methodology as a pedagogical
101 In a way that deviates somewhat from the actual intellectual history of the New Criticism, where the movement from colleges and universities in the Southern United States to the heart of the department at Yale, where Brooks arrived in 1947, might best describe the general institutional trajectory of their critical praxis, Roth has Spigliano flaunt his shared Harvard connection with Gabe in distinctly unedifying terms. 102 Though ultimately less influential than Understanding Poetry (1938) in codifying and disseminating the methodology of the New Criticism, Understanding Fiction was no less powerful in advancing the idea of the “organic unity of the text.” Stories, not only poems, were subject to this powerful manner of reading during the immense expansion of universities across the United States in the first two decades after the Second World War. Indeed, it is important to remember just how radical a social proposition teaching a disinterested mode of ‘close reading’ was in a period when greater numbers of students were passing through colleges and gaining humanities degrees than ever before. Though the New Criticism was always predicated on suppressing political contexts, and clearly naïve in the expectation that it could arrive at the essential properties of literary texts, if we characterise the ascendency of the methodology as conservative we are, in a sense, practising a faulty kind of intellectual history. From the beginning, there was something revolutionary and powerfully democratic in the opening proposition that anyone, regardless of possessing inherited spheres of prestigious knowledge, could be taught to access the inner workings of a given text. 74
tool. The opening “Letter to the Teacher” invests heavily in a vision of the New Criticism as being, principally, a mode of instruction:
This book is based on the belief that the student can best be brought to an appreciation of
the more broadly human values implicit in fiction by a course of study which aims at the
close analytical and interpretative reading of concrete examples. It seems to us that the
student may best come to understand a given piece of fiction by understanding the
functions of the various elements which go to make up fiction and by understanding their
relationships to each other in the whole construct.103
When introducing Spigliano, Roth seizes not only on this distinctive critical language but also moves immediately to undermine its conceptual reliance on objective distance and the underlying presumption of pedagogical progress: “At staff meetings John explicates texts with the craftiest of understanding.” One senses not only a mechanistic bent but also an ocean of obfuscation in these ‘crafty’ skills. Indeed, Spigliano is presented to us as a figure obsessed, above all else, with the “geography of the prose.”
This subtle jab implicit in the tone of the allusion to Brooks and Warren soon gives way to more merciless ridicule, savaging the disconnect between written and unwritten worlds implicit in the ascendant methodology:
Spigliano is a member of that great horde of young anagramists and manure-spreaders
who, finding a good deal more ambiguity in letters than in their own ambiguous lives,
each year walk through classroom doors and lay siege to the minds of the young […]
103 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, “Letter to the Teacher”, Understanding Fiction (New York: Appleton- Century Crofts, 1959 [1943]), xiii-xiv. 75
Structure and form are two words that pass from his lips as often as they do from any
corset manufacturer’s on New York’s West Side.104
Later in the novel, in a rather cruel moment of mocking dramatic irony, Spigliano even finds the occasion of a relaxed Christmas party apposite to invoke the immense, explanatory power of the word ‘structure,’ offering the wisdom of his critical system at the very moment in which he seems to understand least of all what is happening. The receding of any epistemological grip on the world, implicit in Spigliano’s teaching, engenders Roth’s fiercest moments of scorn.
Roth’s satire of the New Criticism in Letting Go, located primarily in the portrayal of
Spigliano, is glib and cutting; the conceptual dispute underlying the critique is significant.
Letting Go works subtly to undermine the presumption of progress and advancement implicit in the interpretive mechanics of the New Criticism.105 In particular, Roth applies consistent pressure to the vaunted idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic. To sever the text from its contexts, as practiced in the techniques of Understanding Fiction, is on some level to sacrifice the generative, foundational friction upon which Roth’s writing depends. When Gabe refers to “ambiguous lives” when he makes his first assault on Spigliano’s teaching, he is doing more than attacking the dreary inner worlds of the surrounding staff. The paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions that the New Criticism isolates on the page are, for Roth, conditions immanent in the complexities of lived experience. And interactions between life and art, on the evidence of the “weird textual consciousness” that defines Letting Go, only clarify the impenetrability. The notion that we can
104 Letting Go, 63. 105 J.M. Coetzee, a brilliant comparative touchstone for thinking through many of the implications of Roth’s work, crystallised the issue thus in a memorandum composed during his own experiences teaching at the University of Cape Town at a similar time: “[Practical Criticism] is a package designed to simplify and streamline the preparation of large numbers of culturally semi-literate students for careers in schoolteaching. As a teaching package, it is modelled on a drastically oversimplified version of human psychology. Designed with the limitations of the 45- minute tutorial in mind, it fosters a skill in doing rapid explications of half-page texts with a tight semantic structure.” As quoted by Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm in Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee, 4. 76
render fiction an instrumental component of a grander mode of instruction gradually disintegrates.
Though the New Criticism only hovers at the margins of the finished novel as an explicit object of attention, Roth’s early drafts for Letting Go show just how powerfully this antagonism seems to have shaped the genesis of the text and its subsequent development. In the published version of the book, Roth includes an explosive scene that epitomises much of the larger struggle against the ascendant hegemony of the New Critics. Towards the end of the third section of the text, “The Power of Thanksgiving,” Spigliano and Paul argue over the critical merits of a freshman essay during a tense department meeting, disputing the correct grade. Underlying their debate, though, is a more substantive disagreement:
“The presence of life, or liveliness,” John had replied, “by which I take it you mean a few
turned phrases, may be a winning quality in the daily newspaper, but I don’t know if it’s
what we’re trying to teach students in this course.” “What are we trying to teach them?
“We’re not educating their souls,” said John; to which Paul replied, loudly, “Why
Not?”106
Though the details in the drafts are slightly different,107 this specific argument about critical praxis ripples through many of the earliest versions of numerous passages for Letting Go; variations on Paul’s irritation at being asked to talk about “parallelograms” in Moby Dick and the
106 Letting Go, 235. 107 An early version of this moment reads slightly differently: “You can’t teach content. Well, said Paul, you can. Impressionistically? Asked Federonchik. And Paul had said, yes, damn it, impressionistically. […] He could only educate their critical faculties, not their souls. He had adjourned the meeting, and most of the staff had gone out grinning.” Philip Roth Papers, Box 131, Folder 5. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 77
confusion of literature as a sub-species of geometry pervade Roth’s initial sketches.108 The question of just what kind of knowledge fiction grasps, proposed against the imposing counter- claim of the New Criticism, recurs in many of Roth’s notes and the original versions of a number of key scenes.
The first drafts of Letting Go also construct the central opposition between Gabe and Paul much more explicitly around the idea of aesthetic autonomy. In the published version, largely in service of the novel’s intertextual density, we learn that Gabe Wallach receives his PhD after completing a dissertation on James. He then joins the University of Chicago and describes his writing life in flat, bathetic terms: “every six months or so I plunged into my grimy dissertation and mined from it another Jamesian nugget to be exhibited.”109 By contrast, Paul is presented to us as the earnest novelist, wedded to a heroic conception of the artist mining the depths of the soul. In the original version, however, both Gabe and Paul aspire to become serious novelists. In these initial sketches, Gabe has been recently successful in publishing a first book to considerable acclaim, whereas Paul is struggling financially and fighting for recognition.110 And in an abandoned scene, Roth isolates the friction between them in a particularly charged and suggestive exchange. Though eventually reworked into a subtler, more oblique series of clashes in the final text, this early version shows just how directly the issue of autonomy underlies the central opposition of Letting Go. After describing Paul raging about the “lack of feeling”
108 Roth’s drafts exhibit numerous examples of this impatience with the New Criticism spilling out beyond the scenes located at the university. Paul’s rant in an early sketch of a conversation with Gabe is a salient instance: “I’m the only one whoever casts a doubt on what old Zigrosser says. He could talk about the parallelograms in Moby Dick and everybody would just sit on their hands. And it’s all such an obvious goddam fear of emotion. Such an obvious evasion of talking about what matters in a book.” Philip Roth Papers, Box 141, Folder 4. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 109 Letting Go, 230. 110 In this way, the earliest drafts lean much more heavily on Roth’s biographical experience after publishing Goodbye, Columbus. 78
displayed by his colleagues—a vague dissatisfaction eventually furnished by the more complete portrayal of Spigliano—Roth’s early sketch crystallises the antagonism thus:
Suddenly, Gabe thought to say: I save all that feeling for my writing. In my book people
didn’t go around lighting cigarettes and getting in and out of cabs. They felt, they lived! I
didn’t shoot off my energy in staff meetings, I didn’t go around so angry all the time. But
he didn’t. Paul had once written him a letter from Reading, saying “The difference
between us, Gabe, is that for me literature is an extension of life, for you it’s a
substitute.” It had burned him up when he had read it, but he had ignored answering it in
his own letter, knowing how much trouble Paul was having with his book. He ignored it
once again, and for the same reason.”111
Paul’s stinging assertion cuts to the heart of Letting Go. It is even possible that Roth eventually sacrificed the scene because it seems to dramatise the tension between his two main protagonists too directly. Paul’s resounding claim that, for him, “literature is an extension of life,” but for
Gabe, “it’s a substitute,” suggests that the intertwined story of these two writers actually forms a double-edged allegory about the burdens of aesthetic autonomy. In a manner that anticipates the reflexive features of many of Roth’s later characters, Gabe and Paul are nothing short of walking texts; the ambiguous lives of these two central figures are not only suspended in a “weird textual consciousness,” they are actually constituted through their own textuality.112 Where Paul is forced to experience the pathos of collapsing the epistemological distance of fiction, foolishly
111 Philip Roth Papers, Box 141, Folder 4. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. The removed quotation from Roth’s drafts demonstrated how powerfully the question of aesthetic autonomy shaped the constructions of Paul’s and Gabe’s characters. 112 Though she does not bring the early modes of reflexivity exhibited in Letting Go into the scope of her analysis, Amy Hungerford offers an apt description of this tendency in Roth’s work in pursuit of a separate argument about the proliferation of ‘personified’ texts in the postwar period: “Instead of turning texts into persons, Roth does the reverse, turns persons into texts. […] In Roth’s work, the person is eclipsed by the text, even destroyed by it.” See The Holocaust of Texts, 139-140. 79
thinking that his experience is his art, Gabe is made to endure a comparably unbearable burden, living for a complete vision of aesthetic autonomy. But such absolute claims, Roth seems to be suggesting, are incoherent and cannot last.
If Paul’s miserable sacrifice, his daily ritual of heroic suffering, can be read as an attempt to “extend” literature too far into life, then the consequences of this obliteration of the boundary between the written page and the unwritten world, in the terms established in Letting Go, are severe. The grim features of the Herz’s daily struggle, of course, devolve principally from poverty; Paul’s noble will cannot, in the end, assuage the crushing social forces that flow through his life. Even in some of the most dispiriting moments in the text, though, passages that take a long, dispassionate look at the constraining realities of mid-century America, it is difficult to overlook the possibility that Paul and Libby may encounter retribution not only for their moral seriousness in the face of their parents’ atavistic doubts, but also on account of the attempt to experience their life as if it was a “great book.” Of all the feelings that deceive Paul, his intuition that literature provides him with a guide about how to act might be the most salient. One of the most harrowing parts of the novel, for example, follows Libby’s reluctant agreement to go ahead with a particularly wretched abortion, rewriting one of the most touching scenes and virtuoso passages of prose in The Adventures of Augie March (1953); but the atmosphere of Roth’s rewriting of this episode, draining any capacity to achieve affirmation in the pain, seems to condemn the wisdom of self-resilience on offer to the pleasures of reading Bellow’s book. In the end, it is telling that Paul, after suffering his own melodramatic unravelling at his father’s funeral, seeks to abandon the vocation that once signalled his commitment to living through fiction. Provocatively, Paul never finishes his novel, and in the final section of Letting Go we
80
learn from Libby that he thinks he would actually be happier teaching in a modest high school.
Talking about books, rather than becoming them, might prove a more peaceful affair.
By contrast, everything prominent in Roth’s construction of Gabe sees him embody the ideological ideal of aesthetic autonomy. Gabe’s Harvard education, wealth, and power fuse with his mother’s dying warning not to try to change other people to produce a resolute determination to remain separate from life’s vicissitudes.113 Gabe is, in many ways, a walking example of what
Andrew Goldstone has memorably termed a “fiction of autonomy.”114 Roth even has Gabe enjoy a frivolous shopping spree, where he obtains the full wardrobe of the dandy, adopting the iconography of the very literary genealogy Goldstone describes. Suggestively, Gabe’s new costume renders both his claim to absolute independence and the underlying reliance of this stance on political economy entirely transparent.115 When he looks back in the mirror and notices the affectations that mark his new clothes, he seems intuitively to grasp something that Pierre
Bourdieu would famously go on to diagnose as a blindness inherent in many of the most influential formalisms prominent in the humanities.
113 In the third section of “Three Women,” Gabe makes this explicit: “I suppose I have certain advantages over my colleagues (and 99 percent of the world’s population) in not needing my job. I am alone in the world, and self- sufficient—economically, that is—while they, on pay checks that are slipped bimonthly into their boxes at Faculty Exchange, must buy provisions for wives, children, and in a few instances, psychoanalysts.” Letting Go, 229. 114 In tracing a genealogy of claims to aesthetic autonomy, discussing a lineage that stretches from Wilde to de Man, Goldstone proposes using “fiction” as opposed to “ideology”, pushing for a more dextrous analytic term: “We should treat autonomy claims with skepticism, and we must reject hyperbolic assertions that all literature is intrinsically autonomous, but we must take the forms of relative autonomy seriously as a genuine and significant aspect of modernist literature’s engagement with its world. We must undertake the literary-historical study of autonomy seriously.” Though Roth stands outside the purview of Goldstone’s readings, his key terms provide some invaluable coordinates to help historicise Roth’s early novels. Set in the moment of the New Criticism, before the importation of post-structuralism at Johns Hopkins altered the shape of literary studies in the academy, Letting Go is both powerfully embedded in this genealogy and subtly discriminating in calling time on such “fictions” of autonomy. See Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. 115 As Bourdieu puts it, “it suffices to note that the formalist ambition’s objections to all types of historicisation rests on the unawareness of its own social conditions of possibility.” As quoted in Mark Jancovich, “The Southern New Critics”, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume VII Modernism and the New Criticism, 215. 81
Gabe’s attempts to reform fail precisely because of his unwillingness to risk his own autonomy. Though Gabe gets involved with Martha Reganhart and enjoys a passionate relationship as part of his quest for seriousness, in the end he cannot bring himself to marry her.
He cannot even bring himself to give up his own separate apartment. Throughout Gabe’s story in
Letting Go, the complex burdens of literature remain a powerful substitute for the responsibilities of life. And towards the end of the fifth section, “Children and Men,” Roth depicts this inability to sacrifice the fiction of autonomy in a scene of startling personal detachment. When Theresa
Haug, the struggling young waitress who has recently given birth to an unplanned baby, leaves hospital, it has been arranged that Gabe will accompany her home. But suddenly, as they are about to drive away, he changes his mind. Abandoning even this most liminal of attachments,
Gabe simply gets out of the car and walks away. “What else could I do about Theresa Haug’s suffering,” he coolly reflects, “except turn my back on it?”116
Though Gabe does make fun of the New Criticism, as it is epitomised in the figure of
Spigliano, Gabe’s life actually seems to allegorise a version of the “organic unity” upholding the isolated New Critical text. Gabe’s penchant for unscathed self-preservation, what Paul crushingly refers to as his substitution of experience for literature, crystallises the praxis of detaching words and techniques on the page. In fact, the Spigliano doctrine, the insidious rhetoric of “form” and “structure,” sometimes creeps into Gabe’s own language as he tries to keep the lived chaos at bay: “Though I tell myself I value passion, I must admit that I do not value scenes of it; though I try to live an honest life, I do not like to see honesty stripped of civility.”117 Similarly, his treatment of Margorie Howells, a casual girlfriend he becomes involved with early in the novel, is not only cold; but rather, Gabe actually adopts a manipulative
116 Letting Go, 481. 117 Ibid, 240. 82
interpretive strategy close to the “crafty understanding” that Spigliano brings to bear on the texts in his classroom. As he negotiates her discreet exit from his life, Gabe sighs, “Margie, you romanticized—”. There is no space for lived ambiguity in Gabe’s swift restructuring; and the romancer, of course, was he. As they conclude the strained phone call that ends their relationship, there is a powerful symbolic overtone to Margorie’s retaliatory threat, lashing out at the maddening, self-contained unity of his cherished texts: “I’ll tear up all your books! I’ll break all the rotten spines.”118
It is no coincidence that the most compelling character in the book is the figure most fully rooted in the damage sustained by others’ claims to autonomy. And, fascinatingly, her character seems to have emerged as a kind of solution to the problems encountered in the compositional struggle of the text. Martha Reganhart does not appear in any of Roth’s earliest drafts. Roth’s first ideas committed to paper locate Gabe’s romantic interests in his students; other initial sketches are more specific, showing Gabe getting involved with a “kittenish” young woman called “Helene.”119 Even the most important set-piece scenes that Martha would later dominate were initially written without her. The most conspicuous example of this absence lies in the first version of the dinner party Gabe hosts for Paul and Libby—a social evening that goes disastrously wrong, leaving the friction between the two figures at the centre of the novel raw and bare. An important pivot in the plot, this evening of pleasant conversation quickly erupts into a ferocious disagreement.
But in the published version, eventually placed in the book’s fourth section, “Three
Women,” Martha steals the scene. In the finished text, the dinner party takes place in Martha’s
118 Letting Go, 41. 119 See Philip Roth Papers, Box 131, Folder 4. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 83
home. As Gabe’s calculated attempt to display his own solemnity goes awry, seeing him flaunt his money and the ease of his life in the exact moments in which he is at pains to be taken seriously by his suffering guests, Martha’s presence during the absurd squabble reframes the exchange. Indeed, as the conversation quickly devolves into a dispute about literary texts, with
Gabe arguing with the Herzes about his critical and moral principles, continuing a reflexive pattern by now firmly established in Letting Go, Martha sits silently hoping her two young children might eventually get some sleep in the next room. For her, literature is neither a substitute nor an extension of life, it is merely a part of it. While her sexuality on this occasion actually seems to embarrass Gabe, set against the example of Libby’s “ethereal and martyred air,” Roth designs this crucial moment in the narrative so as to contrast vividly the lived feel of
Martha’s experience against the opposing burdens of autonomy that her male guests wield and endure. As a result, Gabe’s and Paul’s competing fictions emerge in this explosive scene as rather preposterous ways of apprehending the world. In fact, Martha never slips into the kind of
“weird textual consciousness” that consumes so many of the other figures in the novel. Though she is dealt a hand of misfortune, her sense of things remains stubbornly actual.
The way Roth introduces Martha to the narrative in the published text further highlights how her character seems to have emerged as a kind of solution, or counterweight, to the preoccupations with the use, abuse, and cultural transmission of fiction which so powerfully shape his first novel. As she attends one of the English Department’s drinks parties on a rare night off from the diner where she works, Roth hands one of the book’s most endearing comic lines, a withering put down of Pat Spigliano’s prejudiced outlook, to Martha herself: “Excuse me, really. That woman makes me want to talk bawdy just as a kind of declaration of
84
humanity.”120 It would be easy to dismiss this kind of moment as an empty joke; however,
Martha’s central role and the attitudes she embodies are later taken up by many of Roth’s major works and a number of his most significant characters. She anticipates, for instance, the complex role of Faunia Farley in The Human Stain (2000).121 And the “declaration of humanity” that defines Martha’s presence in Letting Go might, for all its simplicity, approximate Roth’s most powerful critique of the fiction of autonomy—a critique that would later culminate in the blistering text of Sabbath’s Theater (1995).
VI. An Indecisive Man
One of the first things we learn about Gabe Wallach is that his “connection to the world of feeling” comes not from life itself but from reading the complex masterpieces of the master,
Henry James.122 Among the final things we learn, when he writes in reply to Libby Herz from the distant shores of Western Europe, is that he now thinks of his life as the tragedy of “an indecisive man.”123 One of James’s most celebrated late novels, The Ambassadors, tells the story of just such a figure, embedded in some of his most extraordinary, lambent prose.124 Though his vitalising experience of fin-de-siècle Paris and the sensory possibilities rippling through its culture prompt Lambert Strether into a spontaneous plea to seize the day—“be glad of it and live.
Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to”—The Ambassadors actually lingers over the impossibility
120 Letting Go, 67. 121 Martha’s robust sexuality also anticipates many of Roth’s later, more self-conscious attempts to liberate the erotic from the psychobabble of the Lawrentian tradition and the political transcendentalism characteristic of the work of contemporaries such as Norman Mailer. 122 Letting Go, 3. 123 Ibid, 630. 124 As Michael Levenson aptly phrases it, James’s late fiction offers something like the “ordeal” of consciousness itself. Long sentences flow through clauses and grammatical modifications with a kind of heightened temporality designed to mirror the movements of thought. See “Criticism of Fiction,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume VII Modernism and the New Criticism, 470. 85
of achieving the carpe diem frame of mind. In the place of such exultation, James offers instead a delicate elegy for the passing of the possibility of living life to the full.125 Caught quite literally between two worlds, Europe and the United States, by the novel’s conclusion Strether is forced to confront the melancholy consequences of being a meditative man, poised forever on the threshold. In the dramatic final scene of Letting Go, Roth’s protagonist tries desperately to live up to Strether’s sonorous charge; but the attempt, however courageous, fails spectacularly. He too is condemned to his doubts and regrets. “The Mad Crusader,” finally taking the world into his own hands, finishes prostrate on the floor. Throughout Letting Go, Roth engages The
Ambassadors as an active intertext, evoking and subverting its precedent in equal measure. Late
James establishes crucial horizons for the text, from the structural, transatlantic architecture of the novel to the hero’s most cherished principles. But, just as Gabe is finally wrecked and defeated, Letting Go ends up smashing the exquisite lattice of The Ambassadors, leaving its accumulated cultural value shattered, like the shards of a broken bowl, on the floor.
Strether’s hesitation, poised novelist-like on the edge of the action, is an emotional mood reworked in Roth’s portrayal of Gabe. His literary aloofness, his unwillingness to implicate himself in the complexities of life, clearly evokes both Strether’s reticence and his subsequent remorse. Roth’s decision to make his main character an observer-hero who becomes increasingly compromised by his exposure to the activities he scrutinises leans heavily on James’s example.
The literary imagination and critical faculties seem to function in each text as both a profound vehicle of understanding and a dangerous trap; for all the pleasure Strether feels as he soaks up the aesthetic grandeur of the old world, embodied most vividly in Madame de Vionnet’s mystique, and for all he may learn obliquely about the stirring of his own suppressed desires, his
125 Henry James, The Ambassadors, 176. 86
lush impressions most definitely also lead him astray. Strether’s fate at the text’s conclusion is left poignantly unresolved, his overarching interpretation of the meaning of the things he witnessed having been devastated by his unexpected encounter in the French countryside.126
Echoing such pervasive uncertainty, Gabe too is left trapped in the doubt which issues from his own profound misconceptions. Not only does he misread Martha, the figure who brings him closest to seizing hold of lived experience and making himself vulnerable, Gabe’s story also concludes with him palpably unsure about his future, clearly shaken as to where he truly belongs.127
James creates a pervasive sense of liminality in The Ambassadors by focalising the action through Strether’s darting mind, lingering over his sensations, tracing his shifting impressions and conclusions. The endless accretions of the prose impose a continual feeling of ever-shifting interpretation on the text itself. The Ambassadors draws attention to this sensory overload on virtually every page:
Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognize the truth that wherever one paused in
Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price,
if one would, on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick
one’s steps among them.128
It is precisely this sense of multiplying textual possibilities, swaddling experience in circles of accumulating interpretation, where Roth situates the protagonist of Letting Go. Though Roth’s prose is more controlled, less concerned with the kind of sensory enactment that impels James’s
126 When Strether encounters Chad and Madame de Vionnet on their boat outside Paris in the eleventh section of the novel, “taking a day in the country,” his understanding of the nature of their relationship is transformed from a virtuous attachment to an implied illicit, sexual relationship. This revelation calls all of Strether’s preceding interpretations of the meaning of his impressions into question. 127 Letting Go, 630. 128 The Ambassadors, 88. 87
more inscrutable syntactic modulations, Gabe frequently puzzles over how to read his own impressions in a comparable way. Even when the rush of sensation is handled in a more direct manner, Gabe is routinely left poised on Strether’s reflective threshold. Caught in a state of dread about his own strange physical attraction to Theresa Haug on the occasion of their arranged meeting, for instance, Gabe filters his description of events through his own quivering uncertainty: “I looked for sense; I looked for cause.”129
Letting Go signals its subversion of the inherited model of The Ambassadors, however, via the very different way in which Roth arranges the transnational dynamic between Europe and the United States.130 Indeed, for all the ambiguities it arouses, the glamour that James projects into his representation of Parisian culture could hardly be more pronounced. Gabe, on the other hand, ponders his thoughts in a series of rather forbidding Chicago settings notable principally for their sheer monotony.131 Similarly, while Strether makes his melancholy decision to return to the United States at the novel’s conclusion, leaving his affairs unresolved, Gabe arrives at precisely the same state of pointed uncertainty by moving in the opposite direction. After enduring his own titanic collapse in understanding, to Europe his must flee, purportedly to try to make some sense of “the larger hook” he is on.132 Roth, as it were, reverses the direction of
James’s pattern. Knowledge—or, more precisely, the collapse of knowledge—is channelled in the opposite direction.
129 Letting Go, 382. 130 The Ambassadors has frequently been read by critics as a loose allegory about the burgeoning, global manoeuvres of the ascendant United States, making its way in an increasingly connected world. But the transnational frame of the book also invests in a structural architecture that foregrounds porous boundaries, mirroring Stretcher’s mental struggle with emotional thresholds at a wider textual level. 131 See Gabe’s despairing account at the beginning of the fourth section of the novel: “At daybreak it was always snowing, and very late in the night too. Inside, snow blows against her bedroom window; outside, snow falls on my bleary lids; as I make a stab at navigating my car through a black antarctica to Fifty-firth Street, snow nearly sends me up trees and down sewers. At home it pings off my own window – time ticking, here comes dawn again-” Letting Go, 250. 132 Ibid, 630. 88
This subtle inversion of cultivated Jamesian glamour is also apparent in Roth’s only explicit portrayal of European culture. Though brief, Letting Go includes its own, small instance of transatlantic exchange. And yet the visit to the artistic treasures of the old world in Roth’s account could scarcely be more bathetic, undercutting the route down which aestheticized meaning seems to flow in James’s original text. In the beginning of the novel’s third section,
“The Power of Thanksgiving,” Roth includes a comic scene in which Gabe is made to view the pictures from his father’s recent European journey, where he traveled in concert with his new friends:
A slide flashed; color, various and make-believe, came back into the living room.
“This is Venice,” Dr. Gruber announced.
“Florence!” cried a woman behind him.
“Listen, Fay, all you saw was the vino.”
“It’s Florence, lover-boy,” came Fay’s voice, “nevertheless.”133
Though his trip has a mighty impact on Dr. Wallach, resulting in both an engagement to a new fiancé and the seeming amelioration of his emotional anxieties, the mind’s exposure to a rush of fresh, aesthetic impressions inverts the example set by Strether’s profound, sensual awakening.
During his trip to Europe, Dr. Wallach actually learns to sacrifice his attachment to anxious complexity, reinvesting his happiness in the pleasure of simple things; it is neither the splendour of the Roman Forum nor the treasures of the Louvre but the possibility of cheerful, tender company that nourishes the troubled mind. Dr. Wallach achieves precisely the kind of freedom that seems to course through Strether’s palpating thoughts; however, his liberation moves in the
133 Letting Go, 162. 89
opposite direction. Simplicity soothes his sore nerves; the weight of worried interpretation drops away. “I’m not going to be a burden to you,” he tells his son after returning to the American continent, “any more.”134 Similarly, the characterisation of Fay, Dr. Wallach’s pragmatic new companion, almost entirely reverses the subtle intrigue James contains in the inscrutable mystery of Madame de Vionnet.
But to evoke and to undermine these transatlantic, Jamesian passages is not simply to scrutinise the dated snobbery surrounding travel between the old and the new worlds. Letting Go inverts the textual pattern as part of its vigorous contestation of the meanings contained and transmitted by James’s late fiction. Here it is necessary to note the powerful position of The
Ambassadors in the cultivation of claims to aesthetic autonomy that form part of the genealogical story of modernist fiction. Beginning perhaps with Leo Bersani’s now foundational essay, “The
Jamesian Lie,” critics have shown how James’s late work moved progressively closer to a paradoxical state of formal purity at the same time that it strained ever harder to approximate mental experience: “In James’s late fiction the narrative surface is never richly menaced by meanings it can’t wholly contain.”135 As the artistry of the prose increases, the world beyond the page recedes. The pursuit of a kind of aesthetic immediacy in these late novels, in other words, encodes the simultaneous ascendency of the literary text’s self-conscious awareness of itself as an art object. In a related reading, McGurl links the sophistication of James’s impressionism, ever increasing in its insistent formal complexity as his career evolved, to the imperative to distinguish the “art” of fiction from the modes of consumption and patterns of reception which characterised the newly ascendant mass readership.
134 Ibid, 164. 135 Leo Bersani, “The Jamesian Lie”, Partisan Review Vol.36, No.1 (1969), 15. 90
Anticipating the reading practices of the New Criticism, The Ambassadors represents an early instantiation of this increasing focus on valuing ‘thought’ over ‘thing’—a change characteristic of the modernist art novel’s determination to distinguish itself against the pressures of the mass market.136 But as Andrew Goldstone argues, The Ambassadors actually dramatises this wider cultural process, enacting the metamorphosis in the text itself with an unusual and sustained intensity. The transformation of Strether’s lush, Parisian sensations into the pronounced, aesthetic lattice of James’s prose positions the reader not only as recipient of an isolated art object but as coproducer of the unfolding “fiction of autonomy” enabling the alchemy on the page:
The aestheticism […] redirects the search for the privileged artistic realm from the
decadent lifestyle to the Jamesian late style itself, the wonderful impressions and the
pleasurable cognitive puzzles created by James’s intense pressure on the English-
language systems of pronominal reference, verbal mood, and syntactic subordination.137
The transmutation of the codex before us into a distinct art-object, Goldstone argues, converts
James’s readers into “so many Strethers sitting alone in the lamplight turning over our perceptions.”138 James’s novel takes the rush of impressions that marks the endless interpretability of the world, so to speak, and repackages this complexity for the reader as the unquenchable material of art. Gabe, flicking through the pages of The Ambassadors at the beginning of Letting Go, imagines himself in just such a privileged, rarified position. Attending
136 McGurl writes, “Invested more and more, over the course of his career, in formal structures of arrangement rather than in the particularity of the thing, this increasingly abstract mode of writing harmonized with, even as it produced obvious tensions within, James’s efforts to find a ‘perfect’ structure and ‘rounded’ shape for the novel as a whole.” The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 28. 137 Goldstone, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, 51. 138 Ibid, 51. 91
to the intricacies of late James will help him leave the world behind in the triumphant direction of art.
This is the crucial dimension of The Ambassadors that Roth subverts in the composition of Letting Go, an inversion that magnifies his debut novel’s wider determination to question and disable the claims to aesthetic autonomy so pervasive in the intellectual climate it scrutinises.
The logic of Letting Go operates in entirely the opposite way to James’s celebrated novel. Where
Strether’s ruminations take flight with the rush of perceptions that cluster around Paris, Gabe’s meditations and sensations start from the finely drawn ambiguities of sentences. Gabe Wallach’s subtle experiences do not transform the world into a self-sufficient text; but rather, he begins with The Ambassadors and endures its collapse and its metamorphosis back into the chaos of lived experience. With his first book, Roth dramatises the failure of a “fiction of autonomy” to sustain its claim. Suggestively, Letting Go starts with a man alone in the lamplight, turning over the plush perceptions of a Lambert Strether, and then moves from this artificial isolation back into the fraught gap between written and unwritten worlds. The extraordinary aestheticizing machine of James’s late style, in other words, is switched painfully into reverse. Roth flips the mechanism. In Letting Go, the autonomy of the art novel, like the sanity of its observer-hero, disintegrates before us.
VII. “At Each Other’s Expense”
After publishing Letting Go, Roth’s work took an unexpected turn. His next novel took five years to finish and its early drafts confirm numerous rewrites, some of them drastic. Roth’s movement between different versions, continually reworking the plot, suggests great difficulty in
92
bringing the project towards completion. Though a slighter and less accomplished work than
Letting Go, the finished text remains Roth's strangest, most unexpected piece of fiction. While it anticipates important later novels such as American Pastoral in curious ways, When She Was
Good is unlike anything else Roth ever published.
The real difficulty of When She Was Good, however, does not lie in its startling deviation from Roth’s previous writing, eschewing the most consistent characteristics of his style, even though this fact has done more to shape the book’s reception than anything else. Early reviewers were quick to call the novel a failure, judging the departure from the very material that afforded
Roth his early triumphs to have been a mistake.139 Much of the subsequent scholarship followed suit. Lee takes issue with the prose itself, expressing discomfort with the wooden language that
Roth employs, noting the frequent tendency of the text to slide into platitude and cliché. Shostak focuses more on the displacement of Jewish voices, reading the Midwestern setting of the book, an empty American no-man’s land, as an oddly evacuated kind of imaginative terrain.140 Neither the move away from the tribulations of Jewish life nor the disconcerting blandness of the writing, though, encompass the genuine difficulty of When She Was Good. The truly striking thing about
Roth’s second novel is its cruelty—a cruelty of neither thoughtless disregard nor sadistic pleasure but of isolated, sustained, and pressing scrutiny.
In an influential argument based on an ingenious reading of Nabokov, educing moral meaning from the arch-magician’s enchanting aesthetics, Richard Rorty claims that the value of
139 As Julie Husband points out, in one of the few essays to examine the text, “Robert Alter [in a 1967 article in Commentary] calls When She Was Good “a brave mistake.” “Female Hysteria and Sisterhood in Letting Go and When She Was Good”, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, Ed. Derek Parker Royal (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2005), 25. 140 Shostak writes, “So what does this novel have to do with the performance of Jewish identity? Exactly nothing, and that’s the point. For all its plotting of inevitability, for all its humor and tragedy, the novel cannot escape a central and paradoxically defining absence.” Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, 115. 93
a certain type of fiction lies in its capacity to draw attention to our relations with others, “helping us notice the effects of our actions on other people.”141 Preoccupied with the power of literary prose and its potential malevolence, as defined against works of avowed political commitment, such novels allow us to “get inside cruelty, and thereby help articulate the dimly felt connection between art and torture.”142 In the case of Nabokov, his fiction dramatises with unparalleled sophistication the pernicious disaster of human incuriosity, either intermittent or total. In such cases, the literature of cruelty, for Rorty, becomes a literature relevant to the possibilities of what he calls “liberal hope.” What finally feels most disturbing about When She Was Good is the sense in which the text seems to despair about something like this fragile possibility—that curiosity might mitigate acts of cruelty, that fiction could allay or transcend the implications of
Rorty’s “dimly felt” connection between acts of literary projection and induced, avoidable suffering. In his second novel, Roth exhibits something closer to liberal hopelessness.
It seems strange to acknowledge, but When She Was Good is a much harder book to reconcile than many of Roth’s more self-consciously outrageous texts. Frank Kermode has offered the most eloquent account of the compulsion to shock the reader consistent across Roth’s career.143 “Defender of the Faith”, Portnoy, The Professor of Desire (1977), Sabbath’s Theater, and even the rather painful experiment with humiliation in the late novella, The Humbling
(2009), are each primed to court controversy in a way that When She Was Good clearly is not.
But it is much more unsettling than these more obviously transgressive texts. On the surface,
When She Was Good comprises a meticulous, often plodding experiment in naturalistic form, evoking American precedents established by Dreiser and Lewis. As Roth notes in The Facts,
141 Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 141. 142 Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 146. 143 See Frank Kermode, “Howl”, The New York Review of Books (November 16, 1995). 94
though, the text principally hews to the grand, Flaubertian model of Madam Bovary (1856). And yet Roth exhibits none of Flaubert’s characteristic sensuousness; When She Was Good is unremittingly bleak and its language is consistently rigid. Exposing the gap between fantasy and actuality in his second novel sees Roth drain the compulsive energy of his prose and install in its place something unmistakably cold and brittle.
In his early sketches and initial drafts, Roth wrote a particularly severe note to himself in block capitals: “WE ALL LIVE AT EACH OTHER’S EXPENSE.”144 This despairing take on human activity shapes the narrative.145 And the published text lays out these stark stakes almost immediately. When She Was Good opens with the reminiscences of the dependable Willard
Carroll, who, having driven out to pick up his feckless son-in-law, thinks back over the tragedy which recently befell his modest, Midwestern family in the years following the Great
Depression. But before we learn anything about the characters at the centre of the story, Roth explains Willard’s memory of his sister Ginny’s childhood illness—an episode that remains one of his “strongest boyhood recollections.”146 The scarlet fever leaves Ginny disabled and her cognition permanently impaired. Though she was initially sent to an institution by her parents, we learn that Willard nobly brought his sister home, only for circumstances to become ultimately too challenging. Ginny could not stop imitating Willard’s young granddaughter, and she followed her repeatedly to the school gates. As a consequence, Ginny was institutionalised again.
Roth’s description of Willard’s memory of this unhappy moment, where limitations on human
144 Philip Roth Papers, Box 230, Folder 3. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 145 In an equally bleak early scribble in the same set of notes, Roth wrote, “Book about powerlessness and pain.” Philip Roth Papers, Box 230, Folder 3. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 146 When She Was Good, 3. 95
generosity powerfully and devastatingly reassert their prerogative, speaks to the uncompromising vision of the entire novel:
Willard tried over and over again to somehow make Ginny understand the situation, but
no matter how he explained, no matter how many examples he used—look, there’s a
cow, Ginny, and there’s another cow; and there’s a tree, and there’s another tree—he
could not get her to see that Ginny was one person and Lucy was someone else. Around
dinnertime they arrived. Taking her by the hand, he led her up the overgrown path to the
long one-story wooden building where she was to spend the rest of her days. And why?
Because she could not understand the most basic fact of human life, the fact that I am me
and you are you.147
All the text’s subsequent pitilessness is suggested in this brief vignette. It is not the pathos of
Ginny’s sequestered life alone, though, that transmits the heartlessness of Roth’s second novel; instead, it is the withering address to the reader, the “and why?” which closes scene and paragraph alike, which does the real damage. The communication of the “most basic fact of human life”—that we are all fundamentally alone, condemned to the imprisoning terms of our own enclosed consciousness—is established not through any grandiose vision of moral collapse, with people fraying at their fraught seams; but rather, it is delivered to the tune of the teacher’s knowing question and answer. The elusively redemptive music of imposing, magisterial literary language, in other words, is quite pointedly denied. So too is any hope of mitigating the suffering of others. When She Was Good is not that kind of book.
Though it is often read as an isolated work—a lone, idiosyncratic error in an otherwise deeply interconnected oeuvre—many of the main features of When She Was Good actually
147 When She Was Good, 11. 96
emerge directly out of the tensions Roth explores in Letting Go.148 Indeed, Roth’s strange second novel makes more sense when read in tandem with his first. Though the text focuses on a group of main characters far removed from the university settings that shaped the material in Letting
Go, and Roth abandons his interest in capturing a lively range of voices, sacrificing the dialogic hum of the heteroglossia, the preoccupation with the powers of self-deception endures. But, in a sense, the target is much larger. The American mythologisation of experience, acute and ascendant against the background of the Cold War, enters the frame. When She Was Good attacks the national illusions of the prosperous postwar moment.
All of the principal characters in When She Was Good are possessed and limited by their own delusions; they each exhibit comparably naïve visions of the world, all right in the
American grain. Unlike the characters in Letting Go, however, who are riven with self-scrutiny and a heightened level of literary self-consciousness, the figures in When She Was Good possess no real doubts. In fact, they lack a meaningful sense of interiority at all. Willard, a compassionate grandfather, has unremitting faith in forgiveness and believes in the inherent goodness of people—a trait seemingly inherited by his gentle daughter, Myra. Duane, his hapless son-in-law, who also goes by the suggestively blank name “Whitey”, is blind to his own weakness and fails to come to terms with the fragility underlying his numerous attempts to reform. Roy Bassart, an inexperienced young man returning from a stretch of military service conspicuous by way of a lack of combat action, is foolish, ignorant, and proud. Though occasionally vulnerable, Roy’s dreamy nature, frequently furnished with the feel-good iconography of Hydrox cookies and cool glasses of Coca Cola, also renders him consistently blind to the consequences of his own actions.
Mercilessly, When She Was Good works to expose and to puncture all these illusions. But in
148 There is also a biographical continuity. As Roth explains in The Facts, much of both Letting Go and When She Was Good took inspiration from the deterioration of his first marriage. 97
each case the character felled by circumstance seems oblivious to the existence of alternative possibilities. The potential to recognise their own impassive cruelty remains beyond their comprehension and the concern of the narrative. Above all else, Roth seems intent on demonstrating his characters’ shared susceptibility to certain dangerous forms of American sentimentality.
The Midwestern setting of the text in the aptly named “Liberty Center” signals an immediate interest in scrutinising some types distinct in the cultural imagination of the postwar
United States; Flaubert’s critique of the myopia of the ascendant French bourgeoisie is replaced by a scorching indictment of the peculiar, historically specific varieties of “innocence” characteristic of the rhetoric of the American lower middle-class. Though its naturalistic form has seen When She Was Good frequently dismissed as a nostalgic book, out of touch with the tumult of its times, Roth’s second novel is actually an unmistakable product of the 1960s. The gap opened out by the ironic detachment of the narrative voice exposes an immense scepticism of authority, both literary and cultural. The mythic images of America, its grounding clichés and its language of self-justification, are routinely struck in order to ring purposefully hollow. In a book of early notes, circling around possible titles, Roth actually considered calling the novel,
“How long can we go on like this?”149 Before he even began a single sentence of Portnoy, in other words, Roth’s fiction recognised that a certain order of things was coming to an end.
In a letter addressing the possibility of a Swedish edition in 1970, Roth suggests that the detached feel of When She Was Good is absolutely central to the design of the novel, doubting that a translation could carry the necessary effect. His comments offer a curious insight into the
149 Philip Roth Papers, Box 230, Folder 5. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. The removed quotation was a considered title for the novel during its drafting phase. 98
strange, disconnected quality of the book, an aspect of the text that has often seen it dismissed by critics uncomfortable with such vapid prose:
Lastly, this book poses certain translation problems that may not be immediately
apparent; that is, it carries a certain middle American tone throughout, and it deliberately
employs the clichéd and the banal, even in the narrative itself. I would hope that when a
translator is selected, he might write to me so that I explain certain of my intentions a
little further.150
What Roth indicates here is the fact that we are not meant to credit the hackneyed narrative voice of When She Was Good. Cliché is being used deliberately to expose the empty thinking that carries the very ideas being conveyed. The book, like the stories we tell about ourselves, is built out of lies.
In its style, When She Was Good therefore pushes the reflexive crises of interpretation that afflict the main characters of Letting Go towards the very texture of the novel itself. There is no authoritative narrative voice governing the meaning of When She Was Good, there is only the steady, reliable stream of hollow, American words. The very banality of the language thus becomes an instrument of instability—we enter into something of the “weird textual consciousness” that previously seized Paul Herz and Gabe Wallach. At certain moments Roth signals this redirection overtly, exposing some particularly dubious acts of literary representation. When the hapless Roy Bassart returns from the military early in the narrative to the forgiving embrace of the natural landscape, for instance, he can’t resist the urge to turn it into a culturally attuned cliché:
150 Letter to Mr. Bernheim, August 21, 1970, in Philip Roth Papers. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. In the removed quotation, Roth expresses his doubts that a translated edition of the text could carry the correct connotations. 99
he sat in the sun by the landing, separating Hydrox cookies, eating first the bare half, then
the half to which the filling had adhered, and thinking, “Twenty. Twenty years old.
Twenty-year-old Roy Bassart.” He watched the flow of the river and thought that the
water was like time itself. Somebody ought to write a poem about that, he thought, and
then he thought, “Why not me?”
The water is like time itself,
Running . . . running …
The water is like time itself,
Flowing . . . flowing . . .
Sometimes even before noon he was overtaken with hunger, and he would stop off
downtown at Dale’s Dairy Bar for a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato, and a glass of
milk.151
The scene is not simply an agonising demonstration of bad poetry; Roth’s portrayal of Roy’s moment of literary inspiration, sat on the bank of the river, evokes a grand tradition only to empty it of meaningful content. Emerson’s thoughtful meditations and Twain’s playful adventures are both summoned and flattened in Roy’s insipid imagery—a poetics that seems alert only to the blank passing of time itself. And the rumination on the river and the rich multitude of its meanings ends with a particularly callow kind of abruptness, “overtaken” by the bland, consumerist iconography of the downtown diner. The cookies are insufficient; Roy is still hungry. As if the innocent image of grilled cheese and a glass of milk were insufficient to communicate Roth’s withering irony in this moment, the unmistakable roll of Hemingway
151 When She Was Good, 52. 100
“ands” completes the act of vandalism against the history of American letters and the possibility of sustaining a plentiful vision of literary meaning. Tellingly, after composing his poem, Roy ambles towards his old high school, catching the band singing a song out on the baseball field that approximates a vision of life as thin as his own: “A vict-to-ry/ For Li-ber-ty/ We’re going to win,/ A Vic-to-ry.” This moment, a picturesque postcard of innocent Americana, could scarcely be less demonstratively superficial; the sentimental effect on Roy, however, is almost sublime:
“For the hour of the day, for the time of his life, for this America where it is all peacefully and naturally happening, he feels an emotion at once so piercing and so buoyant it can only be described as love.”152
In fact, the allusion to Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” braided into Roy’s moment by the water, a celebrated early short story that Roth has discussed with reverence elsewhere, is perhaps the most significant intertextual reference.153 In a number of ways, the construction of Roy’s character across the novel seems purposefully modeled on the precedent of
Hemingway’s Nick Adams: both are young men returning to mid-America after stints in the US army, burdened with the difficult, complex task of readjustment. Moreover, this particular moment in When She Was Good, with Roy sat in meditation by the water, evokes the recuperative trip down river undertaken by Hemingway’s broken veteran, producing some of his most mercurial prose. Roth, however, deliberately reverses the Hemingway model. Not only has his returning soldier seen no combat, spending much of his time in the army playing tedious games of ping pong, his entire experience of the world seems to invert the powerful veneration of authenticity axiomatic to Hemingway’s story. After returning home, Roy neither gets back in touch with his fractured self nor does he restore any meaningful communion with nature. In fact,
152 When She Was Good, 54. 153 See The Facts, 58. 101
he is all too comfortable inside the kind of vacuous thinking that drives Hemingway’s prose towards sardonic cynicism and the clean clarity of the declarative construction. The restorative power of the river, evoked in Roy’s “flowing …. Flowing”, has become its own kind of empty artifice. In the odd atmosphere of When She Was Good, the powerful American poetry induced in attention to simple things has seemingly run dry. The declarative sentence can no longer be trusted to break through cliché back to the world.
When She Was Good does not go so far as to indict the national imaginary as a false consciousness, duped by the pernicious powers of culture industry; but the novel’s interest in unstable and deceptive representation is partly explored through the pernicious effects of pictures. Indeed, Roy’s chosen career path is particularly telling. When he returns to Liberty
Center he quickly trains to become a professional photographer. His doomed relationship with
Lucy Nelson, the sharp collision of competing delusions which provides the central antagonism of the text, comes about as a result of Roy’s new visual skills—sculpting flattering images. In tandem with a distressing degree of persistent coercion, Roy uses his camera to court and to persuade the reluctant Lucy: “He took hundreds of pictures of her. Once they spent a whole afternoon driving around the countryside in search of the right barn for her to stand in front of.
[…] He began a whole series of black and white studies of Lucy’s head, which he called
‘Aspects of an Angel.’”154 Long before Don DeLillo placed the American barn at the apex of the unreality of the age, When She Was Good mined the deception and the quiet menace contained in the soothing sight of the innocent farmyard.155 In many ways, Roy’s photographs are emblematic
154 When She Was Good, 99. 155 DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) memorably satirises the enveloping unreality of the simulacra in the depiction of “the most photographed barn in America.” 102
of the novel’s many representational surfaces. Mythologies always deceive; and American sentimentality is no less powerful and dangerous for being so evidently childish.
If the pitilessness of When She Was Good was limited to this kind of total skepticism, the novel’s underlying claim that “we all live at each other’s expense” would culminate in a kind of exacting, Flaubertian irony. Moreover, Roth’s second novel might also extend something similar to Rorty’s “liberal hope” in its treatment of the suffering felt as a consequence of the uncomprehending actions of others. But in the portrayal of Lucy Nelson, the novel’s central protagonist and the figure who experiences the most ferocious kind of narrative retribution as a consequence of her delusions, the text breaks into its own kind of cruelty, persisting almost mendaciously at the expense of its own heroine. Unlike the other characters warped by self- deception, Lucy is not really sentimental at all; her puritanical sense of moral clarity emerges from a wholly separate strain of American innocence. Dogmatically, Lucy insists upon her own righteousness, attacking the wickedness of the social forces that constrain her choices and the impure actions of the people that surround her. She is, in other words, elect. Her belief in her own “goodness” is presented more as a kind of disturbed pathology than a site of redeemable ignorance. Even the deep precedent of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), evoked throughout, functions as an awkward kind of intertext, as Roth’s treatment of his heroine seems to eclipse the earlier novel’s critique of social sanctimony and moral hypocrisy. Lucy’s explosive unravelling in When She Was Good actually follows a similar structure to Gabe Wallach’s breakdown in the closing section of Letting Go; however, her vituperative collapse is presented in much more extreme terms. Lucy’s eruption at Roy in the final part of the novel, riven with anger at the weakness of her own father, sees her psychology flip from naïve self-deception to deranged, violent lunacy. And in the novel’s final pages, Lucy, still convinced of her personal
103
manifest destiny in the face of the intransigence of the world—“the good must triumph in the end!”—runs, falls, and freezes to death in the bleak Midwestern snow.156
It is simply insufficient to conclude that When She Was Good works to expose the absurdity of Lucy’s puritanical vision of life or that her incuriosity about others’ weaknesses limits her moral perspective, thereby helping to enlarge our own. Roth’s depiction of Lucy’s anger makes the novel much more unsettling. Lucy’s hagiographic identification with Saint
Teresa, appropriating the transcendent power of her pain, deviates markedly from Flaubert’s characterisation of Emma Bovary. Lucy’s attachment to The Story of a Soul early in the novel reveals the opposite inclination to a foolish fondness for wild romance. Her childhood attraction to the Catholic agonies of “submission, humility, silence and suffering” aligns her more clearly with the mistaken exaltation of sacrifice that famously grips George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke.157
It also sees her grapple with similar situations as Martha Reganhart and Libby Herz in Letting
Go. But Lucy Nelson is afforded no capacity to doubt, reflect, and learn; her delusion is total. As
I have argued, When She Was Good exhibits no confidence in the kind of voluminous realism that suspends Dorothea’s struggle and which stimulates and amplifies the predicaments of the characters in Letting Go. Instead, Lucy is condemned to the taught surface handed down by narrative platitude and made to bear an absolute burden of self-deception.
It is this dimension of the text, its uncomfortable ferocity and the extreme actions of its heroine, which has invited criticism of the novel. Though When She Was Good has often been ignored, readers who have turned to Roth’s work have frequently taken issue with the incredible
156 When She Was Good, 340. 157 Famously, Middlemarch begins with the sublime example of Saint Theresa, and the dangerous power of her example: “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long- recognizable deed.” Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1986), 4. 104
hostility that marks the depiction of Lucy Nelson. In a refreshingly inventive interpretation,
Nicole Peeler argues that the unsettling vehemence of When She Was Good is best understood as an exploration of Nietzschean ressentiment. Lucy’s understanding of her attempted rebellion against the existing order of things as the imposition of her own “goodness” parallels the struggle of the slaves in The Genealogy of Morals in a number of suggestive and powerful ways.158 In many ways, Roth makes clear that moral fervour is the only recourse available to Lucy to resist the claims that a powerful and violent patriarchy makes upon her.
In a more historically grounded reading of When She Was Good¸ Julie Husband argues that Roth’s early novels represent “a sustained, if ambivalent, engagement with the emerging women’s rights movement of the 1960s, the ‘second wave feminism’ that began with Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963).”159
Crucially, When She Was Good provides a particularly schizoid refraction of this period of cultural upheaval; in its treatment of Lucy, the novel develops both a “forceful critique” of patriarchy and exhibits an “inability to imagine a new community order” which makes her struggle seem “worse than futile.”160 Husband’s contextualisation of When She Was Good and her consequent critique of the book’s limitations are particularly persuasive on account of their sensitivity to the novel’s evident uncertainty and discomfort regarding its cultural moment—an ambivalence that I have traced more fully in relation to its representational features. But Roth’s treatment of Lucy’s anger, and the unremitting ire of the novel itself, I think, extends beyond these coordinates. The explosive cruelty of When She Was Good is simply not explained by the
158 See Nicole Peeler, ‘The Woman of Ressentiment in When She Was Good’, Philip Roth Studies, Vol.6, No.1, (Spring 2010), 31-45. 159 Julie Husband, “Female Hysteria and Sisterhood in Letting Go and When She Was Good”, 25. 160 Ibid, 26. 105
novel’s unresolved and ambivalent mediation of second wave feminism and the disruptive social antagonisms circulating in the culture.
Curiously, in his 1984 interview with Hermione Lee in The Paris Review, Roth gestures towards this dimension of the novel when answering a question implicitly grounded in something like Husband’s critique: “The force of the attack would be, in part,” Lee states, “that the female characters are unsympathetically treated, for instance that Lucy Nelson in When She
Was Good is hostilely presented.”161 Roth’s response deflects more than it clarifies, insisting, perhaps rather dubiously, on the primacy of the particular over the general. In the course of a defensive answer, however, he speaks frankly to his interest in examining “hostility” as a subject:
You know, the dirty little secret is no longer sex; the dirty little secret is hatred and rage.
It’s the tirade that’s taboo. Odd that this should be so a hundred years after Dostoyevsky
(and fifty after Freud), but nobody nice likes to be identified with the stuff. It’s the way
folks used to feel about fellatio in the good old days. “Me? Never heard of it.
Disgusting.” But is it ‘hostile,’ really, to take a look at the ferocity of the emotion they
call ‘hostility’?162
In its treatment of Lucy, When She Was Good clearly tries to isolate the deceptive force unleashed by this kind of consuming fury. But the early experiment with the taboo fails; the text is simply not equipped with a language or an angle adequate to the task. In later novels, Roth would return to the forbidden power of the tirade to tremendous effect, precisely because he learned to incriminate and compromise the power of the voice and expose its imperfect human
161 “Interview with The Paris Review”, Reading Myself and Others, 131. 162 Ibid, 131. 106
foundations. Whether that meant enacting the imposition of meaning in the forceful extension of personality, following the enchanting worlds weaved in the style of Rorty’s incurious and sensitive tyrants, or simply exhibiting self-pity with its painful combination of heightened self- awareness and blinding obliviousness, Roth’s major works expose the complex and mutually sustaining interplay of cruelty and suffering in vivid and inventive ways. The detached narration of When She Was Good, its lack of confidence in the very language it wields, limits the early experiment. In his second novel, instead of grappling with the suffering of rage, we see only the enraged hostility induced by the cruelty of the text. Lucy’s pain glows with an uncomfortable and iridescent intensity. But the pain of a saint is always something other than what it really is; hagiography inverted is but the same image in the negative. As a result, When She Was Good is ultimately unable to extend the possibility of mitigating or transcending the terms of its own preliminary fable: “the fact that I am me and you are you.”
***
In 1998, after the publication of I Married a Communist, some thirty years after he wrote When
She Was Good, Roth received a candid letter from Saul Bellow, as close to an undisputable authority on the postwar novel for Roth as one can possibly imagine. But something in Bellow’s comments seems to have particularly unnerved him. In his note, Bellow writes disdainfully,
“One of your persistent themes is the purgation one can obtain only through rage. The forces of aggression are liberating, etc.”163 In 2017, when Roth came to review the essays and interviews to be included in his final volume with the Library of America, Why Write? Collected Non-
163 Saul Bellow, “Letter to Philip Roth January 1st, 1998”, Saul Bellow: Letters, Ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2010), 541. 107
Fiction: 1960-2013, he made some revisions. His comments about the dirty little secret of
“hatred and rage” when discussing When She Was Good in his interview with The Paris Review were quietly removed.164
164 See “Interview with The Paris Review”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction: 1960-2013, 153. 108
Chapter 2. The Examined Life
I. Jocoserious Meditations
Philip Roth has rarely spoken of his debts to the ideas and writings of philosophers. His account of rebellious curiosity during his time as an undergraduate at Bucknell University, related during an interview with La Nouvel Observateur in 1981, is typical of the casual way in which he tends to refer to philosophical texts:
I chose an ordinary college in a pretty little town in a beautiful farming valley in central
Pennsylvania about which I knew practically nothing, where I went to chapel once a
week with the Christian boys and girls who were my classmates, youngsters from
conventional backgrounds with predominantly philistine interests. My attempt to throw
myself wholeheartedly into the traditional college life of that era lasted about six months,
though chapel I could never stomach and I made it a habit conspicuously to be reading
Schopenhauer in my pew during the sermon.1
The anecdotal mention of Schopenhauer, enlisted here as a kind of prop to signal intellectual independence and social defiance, is of a piece with many of Roth’s most prominent allusions to philosophical writings. The description of Mickey’s puppet performance of Nietzsche’s Beyond
Good and Evil in Sabbath’s Theater, to cite only a particularly mischievous example, exhibits a similarly impish attitude towards the great tomes of western philosophy. Throughout his fictional and nonfictional works, Roth has proved consistently unwilling to grant even the grandest, canonical meditations he refers to any lofty or elevated status.
1 “Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 129. 109
But the comic tone of Roth’s description of defiantly reading Schopenhauer as a precocious young man risks obscuring the actual importance of his reading of Schopenhauer to his own writing. More broadly, Roth’s playful handling of philosophical allusion has meant that, with a few notable and significant exceptions, critics have largely ignored this aspect of his work. While the intertextual fabric of Roth’s fiction acquires much of its density in relation to other novelists, his books also abound in philosophical reference, appropriation, and contestation.2 Moreover, Roth has often looked to particular works of philosophy for quite specific sources of literary inspiration; several of Roth’s most inventive novels ground their various formal innovations in relation to important philosophical intertexts.
What if we were not only to acknowledge and take the measure of some of Roth’s major philosophical influences but also to examine Roth’s playful handling of the material? Perhaps the real philosophical charge of his work lies in the resistance to circumscription that the playful comes to disclose. In a scarcely read essay on Erasmus, J.M. Coetzee reads The Praise of Folly as an exemplary model for the resistance of the literary text to being subsumed into another discourse: “we are dealing here with a text in confrontation with powers of interpretation that mean to bend it to their own meaning […] The power of the text lies in its weakness”.3 “Shape- changer,” Coetzee notes, is Stephen Dedalus’s phrase for this capacity, and he concludes in reference to another potent Joycean coinage, one whose authority lies in a kind of evasive resistance: “the power of the text lies in its weakness—its jocoserious abnegation”.4 Curiously,
2 I am aware that making essential distinctions between the discourse of philosophy and other forms of writing is a fool’s game, particularly as such demarcations are largely institutionally proscribed. Moreover, in the case of Kierkegaard, Roth often takes acute literary inspiration from his texts. Nevertheless, the scarcity of serious critical work on Roth’s philosophical reading and the uses of these intertexts in his fiction, I think, justifies paying specific attention to the this dimension of his work, however insecure the categorisation may ultimately be. 3 J.M. Coetzee, “Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry”, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103. 4 Ibid, 103. 110
one of Roth’s own late essays makes a similar move. “The Primacy of Ludus,” a short piece originally delivered as a speech in 2012, celebrates the insights that spiral from the irresponsible freedom of literary invention. Here Roth describes “mischievous provocation, satiric improvisation, spirited impersonation, farcical abandon, ironic irreverence…” not as mere clowning gestures, but instead as powerful agents of intellectual discovery.5 Ludus—“play unabashed”—emerges as a force that revels in the subversive “scrutinizing mistrust of values.”6
In an earlier, frequently cited interview, Roth famously claimed, “Sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness are my closest friends.”7 “The Primacy of Ludus” returns to this oscillating tension in his writing but places much greater emphasis on its anti-instrumentalising power. In a similar fashion as Coetzee, Roth invokes Joyce as a foundational example of the turbulent literary text, determined to avoid conscription. In a resonant move towards the “clamoring corporeality” of the body, locating the source of the ludic in precisely the same terrain that marks the most philosophically charged areas of his own writing, Roth concludes his summative late essay by celebrating the corpulent energy of fiction; the novel, attuned like Ulysses to the uncertain body, produces its own kinds of unstable knowledge. Looking back over the arc of his career, Roth urges us in his own distinctive way to get “jocoserious”.
This chapter traces Roth’s pervasive, ludic, and decidedly “jocoserious” use of the writings of two major nineteenth century philosophers: the Schopenhauer Roth alerts us to in his account of early disaffection in the all-American chapel, and the elusive, pseudonymous example of Søren Kierkegaard, whose work Roth has curiously tended to associate with his scholarly maturation at the University of Chicago. Both Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard recur as formative
5 Philip Roth, “The Primacy of Ludus,” Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 371. 6 Ibid, 371. 7 Philip Roth, Conversations With Philip Roth, Ed. George Searles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 98. 111
touchstones in a variety of Roth’s most inventive novels, providing much material and inspiration. Yet critics have largely neglected or downplayed these palpable influences. Perhaps at first glance the distance from industrial North Jersey to the sober vistas of nineteenth century
Christendom appears too great a leap. The ugly flashes of anti-Semitism that occasionally appear in both Kierkegaard’s and Schopenhauer’s texts, though typical of their milieu, may also have discouraged sustained attention to the impacts of these deep precedents.
Crucially, Roth’s literary interactions with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard are active and varied. The writings of these two philosophers, anchoring a number of Roth’s major preoccupations with the body, subjectivity, and questions of choice and desire, are never passively invoked as authorities on the metaphysical predicaments they describe when they are drawn into the orbit of the novels; but rather, Roth’s fiction tends mischievously to tussle with their precepts, claims, and conclusions, even as he draws closest to their insights. Similarly, though both Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard form consistent points of reference, their bodies of writing take on a shifting range of intertextual meanings as Roth’s career progresses.
Previous efforts to explore some of Roth’s philosophical dimensions have perhaps unsurprisingly focused on identifying sources for the transgressive energy of his major fiction.
Posnock’s rich account of many of Roth’s principal influences, tracing a genealogy of intellectual and expressive “immaturity”, remains the most compelling discussion of some of these formative connections. The decision to anchor his argument in a radical reading of
Emerson, twining New England’s most famous transcendentalist with Nietzsche as “two great enemies of ideology and of bourgeois pieties” ingeniously allows Posnock to situate Roth’s work
112
in a particularly illustrious tradition of American forebears.8 Placing Roth in a line of disruptive transgressors that runs through Melville, Whitman, and James, limned most consistently with insights from Emerson, however, requires no small amount of critical cunning.9 Roth’s own gentle mocking of Emersonian grandeur in “The Primacy of Ludus” suggests the limits of this approach and the kind of bold revisionism necessary for Posnock’s genealogy to cohere.10 And, more pertinently, Posnock’s rather grand Americanist enthusiasms sometimes result in strange deflections and missed critical opportunities, such as when he notes, “Kierkegaard’s very
Emersonian sentiment “the whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself” is an epigraph to Operation Shylock.”11 Why not investigate more than the faint echo of Emerson here, especially given the remarkable frequency of Roth’s direct allusions to the Danish philosopher, of which the resonant epigraph to Operation Shylock is only a single example?
Hayes builds on many of Posnock’s insights in his more systematic reading of Roth’s career, and his interpretation of the Nietzschean Roth—a novelist who produces and theorises a vision of literary art that “explores life in an extra-moral way through a fascinating delight in
‘power-seeking,’ which it incarnates in its own potent linguistic effects”—illuminates not only the depth and range of Roth’s Nietzschean enthusiasms, but also the compelling challenge of his work to the recent ethical turn in much academic literary study.12 Connecting Roth’s fiction to many of Nietzsche’s most influential and provocative texts, in addition to a range of twentieth
8 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 9. 9 Posnock is no stranger to his own revisionism, particularly with regard to his reading of Roth’s Emersonian reverberations. Speaking of the fantasy of determined individualism that remains immune to social claims, Posnock writes: “Its tutelary spirit is the canonical Emerson (rather than the “Nietzschean” Emerson I have been emphasizing) who states there is “no history, only biography” and who cherishes the “infinitude of the private man.” 139. 10 Responding to his receipt of the Emerson-Thoreau Medal, Roth writes, “I thank you and so too do the protagonists of the novels I mentioned at the outset, a decidedly untranscendental club utterly deficient in an exalted conception of being or an urgent concern with the education of humanity or the essence of religion.” “The Primacy of Ludus”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 371. 11 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 7. 12 Hayes, Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 3. 113
century theorists who build creatively on his work, including figures as various as Susan Sontag and Charles Altieri, Hayes undoubtedly provides the most sophisticated account of a philosophical Roth to date.
While I find little to dispute in Hayes’ overarching discussion, the programmatic account of a fundamentally Nietzschean Roth, read in such close, illustrative proximity to the core primary texts, inevitably precludes the possibility of tracing alternative philosophical interactions and contestations. It is no coincidence that the two nineteenth century thinkers whom this chapter brings to bear on Roth’s fiction, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, share many overlaps with
Nietzsche. Each, for instance, elaborates a profoundly anti-systematic philosophy. Nevertheless, exploring the ways in which Roth actively exploits Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, in addition to
Nietzsche, allows us to produce a more nuanced and varied picture of his philosophical dimensions. Moreover, it allows us to read Roth’s fiction more dynamically. To streamline Roth into a “distinctively post-Nietzschean way of valuing literature” not only precludes the significance of additional philosophical intertexts, it also risks viewing Roth’s novels as passive conduits.13 Treating the philosophical texture of Roth’s fiction “jocoseriously” insists upon a different approach. To put it another way, it matters that the version of Beyond Good and Evil included in Sabbath’s Theater is no Dionysian phantasmagoria but instead a failed adaptation—a
“hopelessly insane” five-minuet puppet show that never comes to pass.14
Perhaps most importantly, in looking to Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard in addition to
Nietzsche and his twentieth century epigones to explore a philosophically invested Roth, this chapter seeks to widen the critical frame from issues of transgression and literary value to include a broader range of contemplations, including but not limited to issues of subjectivity,
13 Hayes, Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 3. 14 Sabbath’s Theater, 194. 114
choice, and the body’s relation to our existential and metaphysical predicaments. Indeed, in only focusing on Roth’s extra-moral force as a novelist, we inevitably fail to do justice to various countervailing pressures in his writing; instances of renunciation and weakness that play significant roles in Roth’s evolution have been consistently ignored. The Roth who emerges in the following pages is less an artist of affirmation, empowered by the mantra Amor Fati, than a writer concerned with dramatising the stakes and the sensations of the unmasterable.
Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard seem to provoke Roth into exploring the many sides of defeat.
Broaching these questions and opening out our discussion of Roth’s philosophical influences to include Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard also helps to complicate the stakes of various established areas of Roth scholarship. As I subsequently show, Brauner’s compelling work on the centrality of paradox to Roth’s shifting fictional forms, and Shostak’s now foundational account of the textual constructions of subjectivity across the oeuvre, to cite only two prominent examples, are both nuanced and enriched when placed in conversation with this material.
Though many of Roth’s novels weave aspects of these intertextual conversations together, I have elected to explore them separately, as a compartmentalised approach allows for a more precise sense of how the negotiations with these two philosophers evolve. The subsequent three sections of this chapter uncover some of Roth’s most prominent Schopenhauerian inflections, focusing on The Professor of Desire, The Anatomy Lesson and Patrimony respectively. These books from different stages in Roth’s middle period all exhibit an intense attachment to aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, while also reflecting developments in the ways that Roth evokes and plays with the material. Roth explores the relationship between the world as will and the world as representation in each of these texts in different ways. The fifth section traces the
115
repeated allusions to Kierkegaard across the longer arc of Roth’s career, as they relate to his shifting approaches to textual form. The concluding section examines a particularly intense example of this negotiation, focusing on the complex ways in which The Counterlife (1986) reads and contests Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843) as an active intertext. An important midcareer pivot, The Counterlife represents Roth’s most consequential meditation on the
Kierkegaardian ideas surrounding choice, contradiction, and subjectivity that help to shape much of what is most distinctive about his fiction.
II. As Will: Reading the Body
As Letting Go progresses, the narrator Gabe Wallach slips deeper and deeper into a particularly self-conscious kind of melancholy. The causes appear to be manifold. In the terms reinforced throughout the novel, Gabe’s suffering devolves mainly from social circumstances and personal obligations. But in a crucial scene at the centre of the text, Roth links Gabe’s misery to a powerful sense of uncertainty that seems to originate in his own desire. Reflecting on the odd, uncomfortable way in which he was drawn to the moving and pitiable Theresa Haug the previous evening—“unable to believe in my body’s pulsing, unable to believe in my own temptation”—
Gabe is plunged into a pit of despair:
I was, I think, in a state of dread. At bottom I did not feel certain about what I would say
or do to the next human being I made contact with. I cannot say for sure whether, in the
bedroom of that unfortunate girl, something had been hooked up inside me or
disconnected, but what I knew, what I felt rather, was that within that maze of wiring that
unites a man’s mind, heart and genitals, some passage of energies, some movement, vital
116
to my being, had taken place. There are those synapses in us between sense and muscle,
between blood and feeling, and at times, without understanding why, one is aware that a
connection that has occurred in oneself—or that has failed to occur—has been a pure
expression of one’s character. And it is that which can bring on the dread.15
Gabe is far from seizing hold of a sharp Schopenhauerian insight into the noumenal nature of his pain, recognising that his inner desires express a blind and ceaseless striving—“the will is thing- in-itself”—reverberant in all things.16 The description of Gabe’s depression as a kind of “dread”, however, alerts us to a certain philosophical investment in this unusual scene. Roth subtly conveys some of the more ominous overtones of a Schopenhauerian basis for Gabe’s discomfort by framing his despair around some vague apprehension that he is just an ephemeral representation of deeper, darker drives. Crucially, Gabe locates the source of his distress in the
“maze of wiring” of his physical being—an image that emphasises a strange kind of corporeal opacity (“without understanding why”) and that aligns his despair with precisely the kind of meaninglessness that characterises Schopenhauer’s famous descriptions of our being, our wants, and our condition. Gabe seems particularly disturbed to discover that the confusing compulsions that shape his experience seem to confirm an empty kind of existence. As he reflects on his
“body’s pulsing”, his incomprehension regarding his own instincts seems to suggest the demoralising futility of insisting upon his good character as sufficient bulwark against this perversely animate void. Just as he commits himself to the difficult arrangement of a charitable gesture, acting as an altruistic agent in the Herzes’ private adoption, his bodily self appears to cut
15 Letting Go, 382-383. 16 Arthur Schopenhauer, “The World as Will,” The Essential Schopenhauer, Ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (London & New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 78. 117
the other way. The will is not his own. And as Schopenhauer vividly describes the condition in
On the Suffering of the World, “all striving of this will is essentially vain.”17
The fact that Roth encountered Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy early in his career is indicated not only in his account of essential reading material for weekly visits to the chapel but also in many moments similar to the description of Gabe’s “state of dread” scattered across his early fiction. His archived papers reveal a surprisingly assiduous knowledge of the atrophied landscapes of Samuel Beckett, texts which cleave closely to the Schopenhauerian vision.18 In
Letting Go, this material is only really permitted to hover in the background. Gabe’s bodily sense of despair works principally to undermine his lofty preconceptions and to expose his increasingly fragile posture of disinterest. The fact that Gabe’s rather rapid, melancholic swings between apathetic indifference and frustrated desire seem to conform to the cruel, empty metaphysics of
Schopenhauer’s great pendulum—“Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life”—never really intrudes as a distinct subject in Letting Go.19
By the time Roth was working on The Professor of Desire (1977), however, this interest in Schopenhauer’s explanation of our condition, insisting on the prominence of the body’s drives and the irreducible primacy of suffering – “the negativity of well-being and happiness, in antithesis to the positivity of pain”—emerges as a much clearer topic.20 The text returns to the character David Kepesh, introduced previously as the unwitting and undeveloped victim of the slapstick Kafkaesque fable The Breast (1972), but here Roth widens the lens of this slight novella, producing a vivid, realistic chronicle of his narrator’s entire sexual history.
17 Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, Trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2004), 20. 18 For a curious discussion of the relationship between Roth and Beckett, scarcely explored in the existing scholarship, see Joshua Powell, “The Aesthetics of Impersonation and Depersonalization: Samuel Beckett and Philip Roth”, Philip Roth Studies, Vol.14, N.2 (2018), 16-32. 19 On the Suffering of the World, 8. 20 Ibid, 4. 118
The Professor of Desire begins with the early Oedipal entanglements of childhood, moves through scenes of adolescent shock and discovery, and culminates in the more expansive adult terrain of marital struggle, emotional collapse, and domestic recovery. One of the most pronounced features of the novel, alongside its explicit content, is its propulsive momentum; the speed with which Kepesh’s first-person narration moves through time and place, flowing through emotional plateaus to new states of strife, is unremitting and exhausting. Roth’s decision to chronicle the story of one man’s desire seems to insist upon a brisk pace, keeping faith with the subject matter by refusing to allow the narrative to slow to moments of emotional or physical stasis. Only at the end of the text, in a passage explicitly concerned with the idea of renunciation, does the sweeping momentum of the prose relent and move towards calm. This is a novel in which the experience of life remains in agitated motion; only the will itself, Kepesh’s continual adversary, remains constant.
As a consequence of this narrative conceit, telling the story of the man through the history of his sexual activity, there is undoubtedly much about The Professor of Desire that feels dated and laborious; the sexual politics of the novel, with the representation of acts of coitus flickering between an erotics of liberation and an erotics of entrapment, owes as much to the culture of the 1950s as it does the liberalising decades that followed.21 And the way in which
Roth introduces a cast of fleeting female characters under the sole narrative condition that they function as objects of desire serves to flatten the text towards a particularly claustrophobic version of the patriarchal male gaze. The portrayal of Helen, Kepesh’s first wife, is an egregious example; seen only through the narrator’s eyes, Helen is perpetually trapped in contrasting
21 Louis Menand’s wry comment that, for all the transgressive content of his writing, Norman Mailer was “possibly the last man—of the 1950s” seems applicable to many of the attitudes on display in The Professor of Desire. See “Norman Mailer in His Time”, American Studies, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 150. 119
masculine fantasies of broken vulnerability and vindictive sexual authority. In many ways, The
Professor of Desire reflects some of Roth’s most striking limitations as a novelist in his middle period.22
But the decision to explore this terrain in the object case, so to speak, is no mere blind spot; subordinating the portrayal of character to the force of desire is crucial to the way The
Professor of Desire functions. Roth borrows from Schopenhauer an unsettling determination to view human life as a transient representation. Kepesh’s story is but the phenomenal apparition of the more elemental force of the will. In the Schopenhauerian universe, we are subject to the continual pendulum swing between desire and boredom; our activity lies not in our acceptance or rejection of this fact, but in the various ways in which we look to negotiate its brute persistence and its shifting effects. Similarly, telling the story of the man through the narrative of his sexual activity posits a kind of flipping of fictional value that brings the ceaseless, meaningless striving of the will into view as a distinct problem. Coming to terms with his desire is presented as
Kepesh’s essential, irreducible dilemma; his character is not only preoccupied with, but constituted through, his protracted struggle with his own longing. And Roth’s treatment of this erotic turbulence, bringing with it states of loneliness, guilt, and no small measure of libidinous jouissance, echoes Schopenhauer’s claim that the compulsions of sexuality and not the movements of the mind define the foundational rhythm of life: “sexual gratification is tied to a very obstinate selectivity which is sometimes intensified into a more or less passionate love.
22 Whether one regards The Professor of Desire as a book that displays Roth working with some of his worst instincts or as a text that highlights many of the constraints of his talents depends less on this particular novel, I suspect, than it does on one’s attitude towards Roth’s work in general. 120
Thus sexuality becomes for man a source of brief pleasure and protracted suffering.”23 Sex, and sex alone, sets the unenviable tempo of Kepesh’s story.
Though Roth leans heavily on Schopenhauer in the construction of the text, the novel also subjects his pessimistic philosophy to a certain amount of playful scrutiny. More precisely,
Roth situates Kepesh’s story alongside the stern and imposing example of Schopenhauer’s universal account of human suffering, and the deviations, the inability of Kepesh’s chronicle to live up to the awesome example of the philosopher’s thought, strays from the template to comic effect. In the novel’s denouement, the neurotic middle-aged Kepesh finds a new partner whose sense of compassion introduces a different kind of domestic harmony to his life, tempering the erotic strife that has previously characterised his experience. Kepesh describes his soothing relationship with Claire Ovington in terms that evoke Schopenhauer’s resounding claim that it is only through our coming to terms with the will, renouncing its hold over our thoughts and actions, that we can hope to mitigate the suffering it causes. Only through refusing to yield to desire, through practising self-renunciation and not satiation, can we hope to move towards happiness.24 Initially, Kepesh heeds the advice:
I tell you, I am a new man—that is, I am a new new man no longer—and I know when
my number is up: now just stroking the soft, long hair will do, just resting side by side in
our bed each morning will do awakening folded together, mated, in love. Yes, I am
willing to settle on these terms. This will suffice. No more more.25
23 On the Suffering of the World, 8. 24 Famously, Nietzsche would come to reject this strain of Schopenhauer’s thinking in particularly vivid terms: “Schopenhauer has done only what philosophers in general are given to doing […] he has taken up a popular prejudice and exaggerated it.” From Beyond Good and Evil, in A Nietzsche Reader, selected and trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1977), 226. 25 The Professor of Desire, 200. 121
“No more more” signals the new determination to abandon obedience to desire. For a while, the strategy works, and the novel appears to culminate in a blissful scene of tranquility in the New
England countryside, where Kepesh and Claire enjoy a prolonged cottage vacation. Et in Arcadia ego. Anticipating some of Roth’s later, grander fictional tableaux vivants, in a tragicomic twist of the knife the text concludes with Kepesh mourning the loss of his desire, the very source of his torment and the engine of his suffering. “Oh, innocent beloved,” he pines, “you fail to understand and I can’t tell you. I can’t say it, not tonight, but within a year my passion will be dead. Already it is dying and I am afraid that there is nothing I can do to save it.”26 Even here the will persists. Ironically, as the novel finishes with a scene of heightened domestic harmony, we know that Kepesh will fall short of the sublime example Schopenhauer makes of ascetic resignation.
Roth’s mischievous toying with Schopenhauer in The Professor of Desire takes on a more substantial complexion in his depiction of Kepesh’s academic study and contemplation of literature. Though most of the book focuses on the protagonist’s own torturous sex life, Kepesh’s dilemmas are routinely placed in focus through the lens of his own reading. Frequently, Roth deploys literary coordinates to frame his character’s difficulties. Though he bases his consolatory vision of aesthetics principally around music, Schopenhauer argues that the appreciation of art affords the fleeting possibility of alleviating our suffering, temporarily liberating us from our want and boredom via the act of contemplation:
The individual is transformed from a willing subject into a purely knowing subject, yet
continues to be conscious of himself and of his actions as a knowing subject. As we
know, the world as will is the primary and the world as idea the secondary world. The
26 The Professor of Desire, 261. 122
former is the world of desire and consequently that of pain and thousandfold misery. The
latter, however, is in itself intrinsically painless: in addition it contains a remarkable
spectacle, altogether significant or at the very least entertaining. Enjoyment of this
spectacle constitutes aesthetic pleasure.27
In The Professor of Desire, Roth deliberately scrambles this categorical distinction between the world as will and the world as idea; ironically, Kepesh is most often entrapped by his acts of aesthetic contemplation. The more rarified and sophisticated his reading becomes, the more painful the experience seems to be. The contemplation of art consistently fails to alleviate his erotic suffering or emancipate him temporarily from the will in the way that Schopenhauer describes.
This sense of entrapment, ensnared in the endless interplay between the world as will and the world as idea, shapes the intertextuality of the entire novel, but it is most vividly conveyed in
Kepesh’s extraordinarily somatic experience of reading Kafka.28 Midway through the text, the inscrutable sense of existential imprisonment central to Kafka’s fiction begins to shape Kepesh’s growing articulacy about his erotic struggle. But this heightened literary eloquence only serves further to enclose him. Echoing his previous incarnation as a version of Gregor Samsa keyed to the theme of sex in The Breast, Kepesh’s academic study of Kafka in The Professor of Desire culminates in another revolting bad dream. Just as he seems to be nurturing a healthy relationship with Claire, a corporeal rereading of Kafkaesque anxiety obtrudes in the form of a devastating and torturous nightmare. In a feverish scene of hallucinatory power similar in mood to a number
27 On the Suffering of the World, 101. 28 Roth’s discovery and near-obsession with Kafka in his middle period has been written about eloquently and extensively elsewhere. Morton P. Levitt’s essay, “Roth and Kafka: Two Jews” in Critical Essays on Philip Roth outlines many of the ideas that subsequent critics have elaborated and complicated. I return to Roth’s interactions with Kafka in Chapter 3, “Holes in the Fabric”, which historicises Roth’s interactions with the literatures of the Other Europe. 123
of Kafka’s own stories (“A Country Doctor” being the most evident example), Kepesh is taken to meet a favoured prostitute of Prague’s most famous son, only to be goaded and tormented about the ascetic author’s most intimate, secret mores: ““I demand to know!” “Something indecent,” he says, chuckling, “about what Kafka liked the most. His big thrill.” “What Was it?””29 In this disturbing passage, the idea of aesthetic contemplation as disinterested liberation dissolves into a kind of harried, visceral panic. Kafka re-imprisons Kepesh in the uncertain vicissitudes of his own body. Like Gabe Wallach, he is unable to believe in the meanings of this pulsing sensation, but this time the atmosphere is more fraught. In his agitated dream, Kepesh is brought to the maddening precipice of a knowledge he is then pointedly denied. Though he wakes, the residual uncertainty of the experience persists. “It was no dream.”30
Roth disrupts Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in this way throughout the novel, though often without recourse to the intense stakes of the traumatic nightmare. Indeed, The Professor of
Desire also exhibits a jocoserious investment in the more exquisite reaches of Kafkaesque irony, as it grapples with the brute persistence of the will. The most significant example is situated midway through the book, when Kepesh produces a parody of Kafka’s “A Report to an
Academy” whilst trying out ideas for his university teaching. The text he produces purposefully plays on the original story’s radical destabilisation of knowledge; the question of the veracity of
Kafka’s speaking ‘ape’ necessarily upsets all our certainties about speaker, listener, and the contexts of reception that usually concretise the meanings of texts and utterances.31 Kafka turns the uncertain authority of the literary voice into a self-sabotaging kind of joke. Kepesh attempts something similar in the form of an introductory lecture composed for an incoming class of
29 The Professor of Desire, 193. 30 Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, Collected Stories, Ed. Gabriel Josipovici (London: Everyman, 1993), 75. 31 Long before Stanley Fish assigned the governance of meaning to the “interpretive communities”, Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” had already demonstrated that texts bereft of context can never confirm anything, however entertaining the stories they tell may be. 124
undergraduates. “Honoured members of literature 341,” he begins, signalling in his allusive mode of address the playful appropriation of Kafka’s polite, groundless narrative voice.
Recalling his earlier assault on the autonomy of the aesthetic and the attendant analytics of the
New Criticism in Letting Go, Roth exploits the terms of Kepesh’s parody to heighten the friction between the written text and the unwritten world:
You will discover (and not all will approve) that I do not hold with certain of my
colleagues who tell us that literature, in its most valuable and intriguing moments, is
“fundamentally non-referential.” I may come before you in my jacket and tie, I may
address you as madam and sir, but I am going to request nonetheless that you restrain
yourselves from talking about “structure,” “form,” and “symbols” in my presence. It
seems to me that many of you have been intimidated sufficiently by your junior year of
college and should be allowed to recover and restore to respectability those interests and
enthusiasms that more than likely drew you to reading fiction to begin with and which
you oughtn’t to be ashamed of now.32
As window into Roth’s thinking about fiction, Kepesh’s introductory speech functions as a curious manifesto composed in a comic key. Kepesh swiftly disposes with the instrumental modes of instruction that previously earned Roth’s satiric scorn and helped to shape his first novel. The vision of literary study that emerges from Kepesh’s ironic disrobing, adopting the suit and tie of the professoriate at the very moment that he strips himself of the institutional protections they seem to preserve, seems to draw on the irreducible agonies of living in a desiring body as the master trope for fiction’s animating tensions. “Nor is it likely,” Kepesh points out to his students, “that you will easily find opportunities elsewhere to speak without
32 The Professor of Desire, 183. 125
embarrassment about what has mattered most to men as attuned to life’s struggles as were
Tolstoy, Mann, and Flaubert.”33 In contrast to an aesthetics of disinterested escape, Kepesh seems to be advocating something like its opposite—an aesthetics of implication.
But Kepesh does not play on “A Report to an Academy” merely to defend his own idiosyncratic approach to teaching; in fact, he prepares the speech to justify his own paradoxical act of exposure: “to disclose the undisclosable—the story of the professor’s desire.”34
Ultimately, Kepesh prepares his lecture as a foil, for he intends to detail all the features of his own erotic life to his students in his first seminar as material to assist in their learning. His major difficulties with desire, and not the formalist language of “structure,” “form,” and “symbols,” will provide the analytic tools necessary to grapple with the upcoming syllabus. As a result,
Kepesh’s “report” assumes a strange kind of descriptive relationship to the entire novel. The parody of Kafka’s shape-changing ape slyly suggests that the attempt to grapple with literature’s elemental force drives the entire, agonised chronicle of Kepesh’s intimate sexual struggles.
Consequently, The Professor of Desire sanctions a peculiarly dynamic understanding of the
“referential” properties of the literary object, wherein Schopenhauer’s description of the ruminative ascent inherent to the act of aesthetic contemplation is duly upturned. Roth dramatises the act of reading, contact with the enigmatic text, as an experience that involves the world as idea forever yielding towards the world as will.
The Professor of Desire probes these issues from Kepesh’s position as an avid academic. For all its explicit content, the book rarely strays from a fairly gentle comic mode. In subsequent novels, works even more invested in mining and contesting the Schopenhauerian take on human affairs, Roth explores much of the same material through the predicament of the writerly
33 The Professor of Desire, 184. 34 Ibid, 184. 126
situation. In texts such as The Anatomy Lesson, and later Patrimony, the “false antithesis between soul and body” that Schopenhauer attacked as one of the most suspect delusions of western philosophy assumes much greater importance to the combative shape of Roth’s writing.35
III. Where Representation Fails
The third installment of what eventually became Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue
(1985), The Anatomy Lesson continues where The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound left off in exploring the tribulations of Nathan Zuckerman as he grapples with the pressures of fiction, family, and the contested claims of identity. Closely paralleling aspects of Roth’s experiences of public scandal after publishing “Defender of the Faith” and later Portnoy’s Complaint, this sequence of novels explores the many cultural constraints imposed upon the Jewish writer in the postwar period. As critics such as Gooblar, Shostak, and numerous others have shown, Roth depicts the inevitable conflicts involved in negotiating a hybrid American identity. Throughout
Zuckerman Bound, the emergence of a sociological burden is almost invariably converted into a comic predicament and a fictional opportunity.
The previous two books in the series explore phases of audacious apprenticeship and the antic neuroses of celebrity exposure. The Anatomy Lesson, however, deals with a despondent, middle-aged Zuckerman, a man tired and weary of the struggle of writing. Moreover, in this later incarnation, Zuckerman is in chronic pain. As his state of anguish intensifies, Zuckerman fantasises about abandoning his artistic vocation and beginning again. But his circumstances fail
35 On the Suffering of the World, 37. 127
to yield to his plan, and the story concludes with a rebarbative novelist, stung and sore on all sides, stuck in hospital with his painfully broken jaw suggestively wired shut. In essence, The
Anatomy Lesson transforms a pun on the idea of the writer’s “corpus” into a sustained joke at the expense of its protagonist—a double meaning that Roth exploits most fully in the text’s summative final lines: “For nearly as long as he remained a patient, Zuckerman roamed the busy corridors of the university hospital, patrolling and planning on his own by day, then out on the quiet floor with the interns at night, as though he still believed that he could unchain himself from a future as a man apart and escape the corpus that was his.”36 As The Anatomy Lesson demonstrates, the struggle is in vain. Zuckerman can escape neither his body nor his work.
For all the claustrophobic focus of the novel on the suffering of its protagonist, The
Anatomy Lesson invokes and plays with a rich literary tradition, straying from the typical structure of the Künstlerroman by performing its own riff on the grand American topos of self- reinvention. Much of the text follows Zuckerman as he journey’s back to Chicago on an ill- advised quest to start a new life as a Medical Doctor and rewrite his origins. The ostracised artist imagines becoming instead a respectable professional success, newly enfolded into the clan. To put it bluntly, Zuckerman dreams of turning back into a good Jewish boy. Continuing the strain of psychological torment and the questions of conflicted allegiance which shape previous novels in the series, the repressed desire to atone for prior transgressions seems to haunt the middle- aged Zuckerman, motivating his reckless decision to attempt to rewrite his past. Indeed, the quest for an Oedipal form of absolution from the tribe, particularly with regard to his confrontations with his father, is a major theme running throughout Zuckerman Bound.
36 The Anatomy Lesson, 291. 128
In his discussion of Roth’s imaginative use of the template of the trial and the thematic significance of the use of legal language throughout each of the novels in the series, demonstrating the continuing influence of Kafka on Roth’s middle work, Brauner emphasises the importance of guilt to the structure of the series: “Far from liberating him from the bonds of
Jewish responsibilities, the death of his father binds Zuckerman ever more closely to them; instead of diminishing, the trial tropes intensify and proliferate.”37 Following this observation,
Brauner argues that Zuckerman’s chronic pain forms a psychosomatic reflection of these underlying psychological tensions.38
It does, and it doesn’t. While the novel does much to invite this interpretation of
Zuckerman’s chronic suffering, the text also refuses to allow it to cohere. In fact, Roth consistently deploys Schopenhauerian inflections in order to emphasise the strictly meaningless nature of Zuckerman’s debilitating bodily pain. Much of what drives Zuckerman crazy is not, in fact, the repressed conflicts that have shaped his experience of the writing life; but rather, it is the very insufficiency of these psychological explanations to account for his suffering that intensifies his predicament. Different iterations of pain as “poena, the Latin word for punishment,” swirl through Zuckerman’s increasingly agitated mind, amplifying his growing recklessness; none, however, succeeds in locating the source and diffusing the problem.39 As the subtle and ironic allusion to Rembrandt’s famous depiction of an “Anatomy Lesson” suggests, the question of what we can learn from the body is being deliberately held up to scrutiny in the depiction of
Zuckerman’s case.40 The stubborn possibility that we acquire no knowledge beyond the brute
37 David Brauner, Philip Roth, 34. 38 Ibid, 34-35. 39 The Anatomy Lesson, 34. 40 As Simon Schama’s gloss on The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632) implies, Roth’s novel teases out some ironies already present in this iconic painting: “this work of Rembrandt’s is, in the literal sense, from the Greek, an autopsia, an act of direct witness or seeing for oneself. But what they see, what we see, is that the same body which 129
insistence of physical suffering is continually invited, echoing Schopenhauer’s imposing pessimism. And in the impossible task of representing pain itself, Roth arrives at material that brings the fraught interplay between unwritten experience and fictional meaning into a new kind of charged focus. As a result, the epistemological seam of fiction becomes ever more troublesome in The Anatomy Lesson, occupying a much more visible position than in previous works.
Other critics have emphasised the importance of pain in The Anatomy Lesson, taking seriously Roth’s interest in medical illness, as opposed to interpreting the text symbolically.
Laura Muresan, for instance, provides an eloquent reading of the novel in the context of the literature of sickness more generally.41 Muresan effectively draws attention to the ways in which
Roth plays with the inherent resistance of pain to the signifying mechanisms of language, concluding that Zuckerman’s chronic suffering in The Anatomy Lesson ends up driving new, more expansive forms of inquiry: “Pain is then a corporeal impulse that triggers an endless search for a redefinition of one’s identity […] total blockage suddenly turns into a sort of motor that widens and propels the corpus to so far unimaginable horizons.”42 Certainly, The Anatomy
Lesson forms a pivot towards a new kind of expansiveness in Roth’s novels. Subsequent texts turn outward from the cloying “selfness” of Zuckerman’s debilitation towards wider social topics, taking stock of Prague, London, and Israel.
is stamped with the genius of godly engineering is also chasteningly limited by its fleshly housing.” Rembrandt’s Eyes (London & New York: Penguin, 2014), 353. 41 Muresan draws some resonant connections to Dickinson, Woolf, Proust, Dostoyevsky and others in the course of her analysis. Conspicuous by way of its absence, however, is Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, which The Anatomy Lesson seems particularly keen to subvert in its resistance to instrumentalising pain in the production of narrative meaning. 42 Laura Muresan, “Writ(h)ing Bodies: Literature and Illness in Philip Roth’s Anatomy Lesson(s),’ Philip Roth Studies, Vol.11, No.1 ‘Philip Roth Across Cultures, Across Disciplines” (Spring 2015), 88. 130
But even this careful contextual reading risks obscuring Roth’s determination to write vividly about the intractable reality of pain itself. In The Anatomy Lesson, physical suffering assumes a status that approximates the experience of absolute singularity. Roth’s notes and drafts of the text suggest that this most enigmatic quality of pain was at the forefront of his mind as the novel began to take shape. In a copy of The Pennsylvania Gazette (June, 1977), Roth underlined a significant passage from Mary Ann Meyer’s scientific discussion of the phenomenon of pain, notoriously difficult to examine: “The difficulty of relieving pain is tied to continuing human ignorance of the exact physiological functions of mechanisms known as pain receptors and the precise pathways over which pain is transmitted.”43 Suggestively, Meyer’s article begins with the unrepresentable qualities of the topic: “Words fail. Pain simply defies description.”44 In Roth’s own early notes, this material takes on a philosophical, rather than a strictly analytical, inflection.
Outlining ideas, Roth’s early sketches circle around the opacity of physical “suffering”. On one page he describes the torment of pain in terms lifted straight from Schopenhauer: “something unused in him that ate away in the form of deep boredom and dread. Purposelessness. Only time passing to no point.”45
Curiously, Roth’s notes connect these reflections to the compositional struggle experienced by the writer, confronted with the meaninglessness of experience and tasked with imbuing it with narrative significance and literary structure: “Needs some interpretation of life, if
43 Philip Roth Papers, Box 62, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 44 Ibid. 45 Philip Roth Papers, Box 61, Folder 3. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. The removed quotation grants the topic a Schopenhauerian inflection. 131
there wasn’t going to be a way out.”46 Throughout The Anatomy Lesson, this need frequently arises, but it is continually figured as an exasperating and intractable necessity:
Everybody wants to make pain interesting […] They want to give it significance. What
does it mean? What are you showing? What are you betraying? It’s impossible just to
suffer the pain, you have to suffer its meaning. But it’s not interesting and it has no
meaning—it’s just plain stupid pain, it’s the opposite of interesting, and nothing, nothing
made it worth it unless you were mad to begin with.47
Throughout The Anatomy Lesson, the exploration of the relationship between pain and its problematic representation becomes intimately intertwined with Roth’s interest in dramatising the epistemic stakes of fiction itself.
As Zuckerman labours with his craft and his predicament, the emancipatory possibility of aesthetic contemplation—Schopenhauer’s invitation to free oneself temporarily from suffering— serves only to torment him. This is exemplified in the novel’s opening intertextual joke, which sees Zuckerman reach for George Herbert to help him adjust to a cumbersome orthopedic collar.
The naïve expectation of receiving help from the literary object, unsurprisingly, does not go well:
“As best he could with his arching arm, he threw the volume across the room. Absolutely not!
He refused to make of his collar, or of the affliction it was designed to assuage, a metaphor for anything grandiose.”48 The Anatomy Lesson continually evokes the metaphysical movement from “the trivial to the sublime”, to use the phrase scribbled in the margins of Zuckerman’s
Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, but Roth routinely frustrates the process. “To
46 Philip Roth Papers, Box 61, Folder 3. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 47 The Anatomy Lesson, 200. 48 Ibid, 6. 132
become a pure subject of knowing means to be quit of oneself,” Schopenhauer claims in his imposing treatise on aesthetics.49 Roth’s representation of chronic pain seems to render such a process, even for the anointed artist, inherently impossible. Another of the novel’s key intertextual references makes this jocoserious disturbance explicit. Keenly aware of Beckett’s philosophical overtones, Roth has Zuckerman see only a reflection of himself in the emaciated strivings of the theatre of the absurd: “When, some years later, he went to see a production of
Waiting for Godot, he said afterwards to the woman who was then his lonely wife, “What’s so harrowing? It’s any writer’s ordinary day. Except you don’t get Pozzo and Lucky.”50
But Schopenhauer’s pessimism maintains its hold. Zuckerman’s only form of temporary relief from the insistence of his bodily suffering comes from sex. However, The Anatomy Lesson exhibits one of Roth’s most bizarre depictions of erotic activity. Zuckerman, we learn early in the book, is entangled with a “harem” of sexual visitors; frequently, women arrive at
Zuckerman’s apartment to sleep with the injured man, who can only enjoy these liaisons from the humiliating position of his playmat, condemned to his booze, prescription drugs, and the motherly preparation of rice pudding to help keep his pain to manageable levels. The representation of the sex that takes place in these scenes is notable mainly by way of its unrelenting banality. The thrill of the licentious is almost wholly absent from Roth’s language. If anything, the sex depicted is imbued with pathos. And almost all of the portrayals of intercourse in The Anatomy Lesson conclude with a trivialising reminder that the corporeal substratum of the will is master—“his body, playing yet another trick, erupted without so much as a warning.”51
49 Schopenhauer, “Metaphysics of the Beautiful and Aesthetics”, The Essential Schopenhauer, 104. 50 The Anatomy Lesson, 180. 51 Ibid, 137. 133
In complete contrast to the astonishing flight of fancy that takes possession of
Zuckerman’s young mind in the third section of The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson exhibits a continual unwillingness to allow Zuckerman to experience the rush of creativity as a narrative idea takes hold. Pain finds an existential correlative in the form of severe writer’s block. Quite brutally, in fact, Zuckerman tries repeatedly to bludgeon his writing down to a distinctly
Schopenhauerian sense of the meaningless striving of the noumenal world. Zuckerman attempts,
“To leave what is given untransformed. To capitulate to qwertyuiop, asdfghjkl, and zxcvbnm, to let those three words say it all.”52 In its own humorous way, The Anatomy Lesson even parodies
Zuckerman’s previous, audacious act of apprentice fiction-weaving; the one imaginative leap of a sensory fullness comparable to the Anne Frank counternarrative of The Ghost Writer arrives in the form of a bitter rant at the expense of Milton Appel, recasting the censorious critic of
Zuckerman’s previous novels as a vituperative pornographer.53 But, in direct contrast to his earlier, magisterial sweep of imaginative recreation, this crazed fictive explosion, performed to a driver who is barely listening, is presented as a futile act of slander by a frustrated man. As such,
Roth depicts the one moment of powerful narrative production in The Anatomy Lesson as the very inversion of the idea of aesthetic liberation from the squalor of life. Every word of
Zuckerman’s filthy diatribe is born of the world as it is.54 Narrative, in this instance, is only a kind of deception motivated by the basest of instincts.
The Anatomy Lesson ends with a reaffirmation of the connection between prose and pain implied in the pun on the writer’s corpus. After going berserk in a Jewish cemetery in Chicago,
52 The Anatomy Lesson, 37. 53 As numerous critics have explored, this aspect of The Anatomy Lesson plays on some defining moments in Roth’s biography, reworking his infamous dispute with Irving Howe following the publication of “Philip Roth Reconsidered” in 1972 in Commentary. 54 Echoing Roth’s approach in My Life as a Man (1974), producing fiction is presented as an act poised between self-revelation and self-deception. 134
threatening to strangle Mr. Freytag, emblem of the older generation, their injunctions and prohibitions all, Zuckerman slips and falls in the swirling snow: “You keeled over. Face forward, straight out […] it sounded like a rock hitting the pavement.”55 This fresh injury brings with it a new iteration of the threat of silence; the novelist’s mouth takes the hit and breaks his fall.
Suggestively, the scene places Zuckerman in a curious reworking of one of Roth’s first stories,
“The Day it Snowed”. Echoing the car accident that splices the epiphanic turn of the text with an act of meaningless, contingent destruction, The Anatomy Lesson reworks this earlier climax in the form of the enraged novelist’s clumsy fall in the snow-washed graveyard. A broken mouth, subsequently described in penetrating detail and with lurid accuracy, is Zuckerman’s revelatory reward. Pain, in all its irreducible primacy, is returned to the protagonist anew.
In the novel’s final pages, with Zuckerman amid the unwell bodies of the hospital ward,
Roth invests heavily in the language of physical wounds. Cheerfully mocking the “resident humanist,” Zuckerman’s doctor takes the wearied writer, exhausted by the sheer “selfness” of his situation, on a tour of suffering at its most elemental. The encounter with the vivid flesh takes place at the expense of the protagonist’s dignity, making fun of his earlier delusions. He is, and will become, no doctor. Tellingly, Zuckerman’s broken mouth is wired shut through the ordeal, keeping him quiet and humbly attentive. Zuckerman’s humiliation, though, is Roth’s gain:
He led the resident humanist to the far side of the bed and shined a pocket light on the
wound.
55 The Anatomy Lesson, 264. 135
There was a hole in her cheek the size of a quarter. Through it Zuckerman could
see her tongue as it nervously skittered about inside her mouth. The jawbone itself was
partially exposed, an inch of it as white and clean as enamel tile.56
The Anatomy Lesson finishes by pocketing the coin and capitalising on the clean slate suggested in that gleaming “enamel tile”. The image of the wound as a “quarter” imbues the representation of the suffering body, for the first time in the novel, with its own kind of perverse value.
Previously so intractable in its resistance to being conscripted for the production of meaning, pain now takes on a kind of revelatory force as unbridled access to the actual. But it’s a vision that purposefully subverts an aesthetics of ruminative ascent, the liberation of the contemplative mind. Instead, Roth’s coin-like hole assumes its visionary power and its worth as window into the recesses of the body. “This is Life.” The text concludes. “With real teeth in it.”57 The image of exposed teeth reaffirms the connection between the corporeal stuff of the will and the sharp edges of literary language. And, in addition, the implied bite that completes The Anatomy Lesson rearms the novelist with a particularly strong grip on the vicissitudes of life, even if the clamp of fiction necessitates leaving a disfiguring mark on the surrounding contingency.
In his account of Kafka’s achievement, Gabriel Josipovici emphasises Kafka’s uncanny appreciation of the crisis of authority that reshaped the predicament of writing in the disenchanted world of the modern age. As Josipovici envisions it, with admirable aplomb, to write against the void is, on some level, always to deface. Kafka’s adumbrations of the contradictions of this dilemma are often figured in his own work via the inherent uncertainties of
56 The Anatomy Lesson, 288-289. 57 Ibid, 290. 136
the somatic.58 One encounters everywhere in Kafka the hesitation or the intrusion of the body as a site of prohibition; across his writing, one feels the unwillingness of the corpus to obey. “For
Kafka,” Josipovici argues, “the act of writing was itself seen as a kind of violation of the world, and had to be recognised as such.”59 Many scholars have produced thoughtful and eloquent readings of Roth’s appropriation of Kafkaesque tropes and literary structures in the Zuckerman
Bound series, focusing on topics such as the dynamics of father and son, the template of the trial, and the exploration of a diasporic Jewish identity. But, at a crucial level, The Anatomy Lesson also mines and draws strength from a vision of the literary text as a violation of the world it apprehends. Kafka as artist of the body unwilling to bend towards meaning furnishes Roth with the fictional tools to stay true to Schopenhauer’s radical ideas about suffering precisely by contesting the philosophy he builds around them. The pain will not yield. The body of the text awkwardly remains.
IV. “Nothing Less or More than the Lived Reality That It Was”
Patrimony, in many ways the culmination of these preoccupations in Roth’s writing, includes its own curious discussion of teeth. As in The Anatomy Lesson, the imagery of teeth signals both the primacy of the actual—“This is life”—and the violations of the epistemic bite of literary representation. In this instance, though, the destruction of the artist is defined against the imposing example of the concrete violence of the primal horde. Same tools, different use:
58 Kafka’s letter to Max Brod, which Josipovici quotes at length, is illustrative of this tension palpable throughout his writing: “My whole body puts me on my guard against each word; each word, even before letting itself be put down, has to look round on every side; the phrases positively fall apart in my hands, I see what they are like inside and then I have to stop quickly.” What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 4. 59 Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, 54. 137
We aren’t like that and we can’t do it, to our fathers or to anyone else. We’re the sons
appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, useless at beating and
clubbing, unfit to pulverise even the most deserving enemy, though not necessarily
without the turbulence, temper, even ferocity. We have teeth as the cannibals do, but they
are there, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. When we lay waste, when
we efface, it isn’t with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawling violence but
with our words, our brains, with mentality, with all the stuff that produced the poignant
abyss between our fathers and us and that they themselves broke their backs to give us.
Encouraging us to be so smart and such yeshiva buchers, they little knew how they were
equipping us to leave them isolated and uncomprehending in the face of all our forceful
babble.60
The imagery of the novelist as cannibal, not merely disfiguring the world through misrepresentation but violating the primal contracts and natural bonds of the family, features heavily in the self-fashioning transformations of The Counterlife, a novel which ambitiously interweaves the language of writing, the thrill of theatrical performance, and the exhilarations of violence together.61 In Patrimony, though, this imaginative conflation assumes a different kind of solemnity. Subtitled “A True Story”, the text hews superficially to the genre of “life writing”, chronicling the terminal illness of Herman Roth as he suffers from a debilitating brain tumor in the final years of his life. The story that Patrimony sinks its teeth into, however tender its
60 Philip Roth, Patrimony (New York: Vintage, 1996 [1991]), 159. 61 This dimension of the novel evokes aspects of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), filtered through the popular and widely disseminated anthropological studies influential during Roth’s time as a graduate student in Chicago. For all its enduring imaginative power, this aspect of The Counterlife, relying on the transgressive currency of the image of the cannibal, is arguably its most dated feature. But the figuration of the underlying violence of literary representation remained crucial to Roth’s fiction, even as his imagery and his thinking evolved. 138
intentions, is none other than that of Roth’s own stubborn, decent dad—a man whom the text diligently ennobles, and, in the unsparing account of his decline, ruthlessly exposes.
On account of its moving treatment of a number of recurrent themes in Roth’s fiction, including but not limited to the relationship between fathers and sons, the material decay of the masculine body, and the elegiac power of memory, Patrimony has already received a striking amount of critical attention.62 Moreover, the detailed descriptions of Herman’s early life and his struggle to support a young family, passages that depict the father’s heroic emergence from humble origins in a narrative style that is perhaps most accurately described as a kind of lyric patience, prefigure Roth’s more expansive turn towards twentieth century history in subsequent fictional works. In writing of Herman’s battle as the son of Jewish immigrants, a man poorly equipped to navigate the struggle to American prosperity but who succeeds, modestly, through dedication and determination, Roth keys his prose for the first time to a number of themes that recur in the string of major novels he would go on to publish in the following years, including the expansive social vistas of the American Trilogy. Stylistically, the book also offers some of the first glimpses of the elegiac sparseness that Roth would return to in the Nemeses Tetralogy, his final works of published fiction.
Roth also returns in Patrimony to his Schopenhauerian preoccupations, particularly as they relate to the materiality of the body and the writerly predicament of producing narrative meaning. Roth’s jocoserious treatment of Schopenhauerian pessimism, for instance, takes a particularly touching, deft form in one of the text’s few comic scenes. Early in the memoir, Roth
62 Benjamin Hedin’s reading is typical in this respect: “The novels of Philip Roth—together with the stories of Franz Kafka—could be said to form the definitive twentieth-century fiction on the condition of being a son. […] In Patrimony: A True Story, a nonfiction chronicle about his own father’s death, Roth explores the bond between father and son more poignantly than in any other work.” “The Measure of All Things: Patrimony”, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, 143. 139
describes attending a musical concert organised by the Matzoh Fund for the Jewish poor in South
Miami Beach whilst visiting Herman in his retirement community. Music, bypassing the mediations of language, Schopenhauer famously claims, is uniquely equipped to attune us to the authentic condition of life. Sitting in the audience for the performance of a Haydn string quartet,
Roth experiences something of this stunning clarity; however, the performance provides no vehicle of rarified transport nor bequeaths any sense aesthetic emancipation.63 Instead, the Haydn reaffirms the corporeal terms of the very struggle that Herman endures, and that we all await:
I came to understand—as I never had when the performer was Perlman or Yo-Yo Ma—
just how much muscular labor goes into playing a stringed instrument. In the middle of
only the first movement I wondered if it was really a good idea for the viola player to go
on. He was probably close to eighty, a large, heavyset man with a stern, expressionless
face, and as the music heated up, that face grew paler and paler and I could see him
beginning to pant. The performance was as alarming as it was heroic, as though these
four aging people were trying to push free a car that was mired in the mud…64
Roth completes this disarming vision of the power of music recast as lived theatre of the absurd with the repeated Sisyphus-like lurch of the audience towards the refreshments with each pause in the rendition of the quartet: “twice more, at the end of a movement, many in the audience thought that it was over, and twice more, those who were headed for the coffee and cake had to be reprimanded and made to return to their seats...”65 Enduring the Matzoh Fund performance
63 Roth provides a similar description of the experience of classical music in a key scene in the The Human Stain, when Zuckerman encounters Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley at a Bronfman concert. See The Human Stain, 209- 210. 64 Patrimony, 57. 65 Ibid, 58-59. 140
comes to resemble a final dance with Schopenhauer’s great metaphysical pendulum: “want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.”66
And yet the light, comic touch with which Roth draws Schopenhauer’s pessimism into the texture of Patrimony does nothing to diminish the pathos of the narrative. Indeed, Herman’s indefatigable sense of resistance to futility stands in marked contrast to earlier texts that explore a similar interest in the inescapable facts of the body’s failings; Herman will not allow despair to overpower the brute dignity that defines his physical presence in the world. The crucial metaphor that Roth arrives at to describe this lesson of dogged persistence, grafting his relationship with his father to the creative dilemmas of writing, is the plain strength of the demotic: “he taught me the vernacular. He was the vernacular, unpoetic and expressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular’s glaring limitations and all its durable force.”67 In a curious way, the gift of demotic expression exposes one of the defining tensions of the entire text, wherein limitation and durability routinely collide. Paralleling the problematic choices involved in his duty of care for his father, the difficulty of shaping the blank suffering of Herman’s illness into a story presents
Roth with a distinct narratological predicament suspended between purpose and futility. One valence of the son’s patrimony, though, is the inheritance from the father of the only language adequate to accomplish the task.
Critics have frequently constructed their analyses of the text around the question of how to understand the formal self-consciousness of Patrimony, in the light of its daunting claim to tell
“A True Story”. Is this moving memoir not part of Roth’s enduring metafictional game? The unusual structure of his previous venture towards life writing in The Facts, bracketing the autobiographical sketch with Zuckerman’s cutting critique of the limitations of the genre,
66 On the Suffering of the World, 8. 67 Patrimony, 181. 141
deconstructs the idea that the form has any privileged access to the truth. Following Roth’s prompts, Brauner argues that Roth’s ostensibly “autobiographical” works participate in a larger, sustained interrogation of the categories of “fiction” and “non-fiction” across his oeuvre, problematizing the distinctions between these labels.
Taking a different approach, Gooblar writes about the complicated ways in which the cluster of novels that Roth published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Operation
Shylock: A Confession and Deception, alongside The Facts and Patrimony, each explore the ethical ramifications inherent in all acts of nonfictional representation. Downplaying readings of
Patrimony that emphasise its insistent textuality, interpretations that, if not wholly post-structural in approach, are certainly preoccupied with the generic expectations that Roth simultaneously seems to arouse and disable, Gooblar encourages us to take the book straight-up:
Patrimony stands apart from the other “autobiographical” books in its seemingly
unquestioned belief in the transparency of non-fiction writing; nowhere does Roth raise
doubts as to whether his version of the events narrated here are trustworthy. Clearly, the
shock and significance of a father’s death trumps all such writerly games.68
Gooblar argues that the ethical constraints of fidelity and consent inherent to the enterprise of nonfiction emerge as the crucial concerns of Patrimony. The dream that concludes the text, in which Herman returns to admonish his son for dressing his corpse in the wrong clothes, serves to remind us that Roth alone is culpable for the portrait of the father. The book finishes with a resonant warning that Herman has exercised no control over the pictures of vulnerability and heroic persistence that the writer wraps around him. Though tender and loving, the act of literary
68 David Gooblar, “The Truth Hurts: The Ethics of Philip Roth’s “Autobiographical” Books,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.32, No.1 (Fall 2008), 36. 142
representation undertaken in Patrimony entails its own act of violation. In the form of biography, in other words, Roth maintains his epistemic bite; after all, even though the text reaffirms a strong sense of solidarity with his father, Roth remains a violent son, attacking the
“uncomprehending” figure at the centre of the text with his own “forceful babble.” In a key moment in the narrative, Herman urges Roth not to tell his wife about his unfortunate humiliation at the hands of his failing body. The uncomfortable irony of the reply—"nobody”— exposes the moral quandary that defines the uncertain form of the book.
But the notion that, “nowhere does Roth raise doubts as to whether his version of the events narrated are trustworthy” warrants further scrutiny. While Patrimony achieves its melancholic grandeur on account of its faithful depiction of events, in short, as a result of its honesty, Roth frequently questions the trustworthy transmission of Herman’s story. Though the book operates on a certain assumption of fidelity to life, Roth seems continually sceptical about whether acts of narration are adequate to the actual situations that his text openly confronts.
Early on in Patrimony, for instance, Roth makes a wrong turn whilst driving and ends up in the
Jersey cemetery housing his mother’s grave. A later passage speculates on the significance of this error in a moment of epistemological hesitation characteristic of the entire text:
I was still glad that I had wound up there. I wondered if my satisfaction didn’t come
down to the fact that the cemetery visit was narratively right: paradoxically, it had the
feel of an event not entirely random and unpredictable and, in that way at least, offered a
sort of strange relief from the impact of all that was frighteningly unforeseen.69
This tension permeates Patrimony, suspending the self-conscious narration of Herman’s final years. Narrative emerges as both a necessary tool to help deal with Herman’s illness and a
69 Patrimony, 74. 143
dangerous deception. Imbuing the father’s suffering with the meanings conferred by the novelist risks misrepresenting the fundamental reality of his situation. As a result, Roth continually draws attention to his own lack of authorial comprehension of the moments and incidents he describes; when he finds metaphoric power latent in events, he quickly dismantles their claim. Later in
Patrimony, after discussing his father’s suffering on a phone call to a cherished friend, the phrase
“I don’t understand anything” becomes a kind of maxim. Its a refrain that, paradoxically, seems to signify wisdom rather than ignorance.
This abnegating self-consciousness—the determination to get at the “lived reality that it was” not via unquestioned transparency but through questioned transparency—is most vivid in the text’s undoubted central scene, when Herman spectacularly voids his bowels. In keeping with the Schopenhauerian insistence on the meaningless nature of our suffering, the power of the passage stems from its resolute refusal to transform the incident into a metaphoric event.70 In the course of describing Herman’s final years, Patrimony circles around various inheritances from the father, each with a legitimate claim to the defining legacy; hard-earned wealth, religion, and family tradition each find their emblematic manifestations. The vernacular is not the sole poignant bequest—an old shaving-mug that belonged to Roth’s grandfather, for example, acquires much in the way of genuine sentiment. But, in the astonishing passage in which Herman loses control of his bowels after being discharged from hospital, Roth makes it clear that the father’s shit, a mess left for the son to encounter, to clean, and ultimately to fail to overcome, emerges as the defining gift.
Curiously, the earliest draft of the text housed in Roth’s archive was initially composed under the title “The Unmastered Past”, emphasising the sense of uncertain understanding that
70 I am sufficiently Aristotelian to find the conflation of “metaphor” and “representation” in the way that Shostak reads this scene slightly odd. See Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, 47. 144
reverberates throughout the book.71 And it is the absence of mastery that defines this central scene. The true patrimony is the felt confusion itself:
I carried the stinking pillowcase downstairs and put it into a black garbage bag which I
tied shut, and I carried the bag out to the car and dumped it in the trunk to take to the
laundry. And why this was right and as it should be couldn’t have been plainer to me,
now that the job was done. So that was the patrimony. And not because cleaning it up
was symbolic of something else but because it wasn’t, because it was nothing less or
more than the lived reality that it was.72
Roth’s discovery of his father’s humiliation after he voids his bowels—“I beshat myself” are
Herman’s own words, finding the improbable combination of lexical grandeur and humbled sadness—is probably the most moving passage in the memoir, precisely because it sees the noble figure at the centre of the text so completely and abjectly assailed. Consequently, the subsequent clean-up is freighted with intimations of both the father’s miserable doom and the son’s impending loss. And yet even here Roth refuses to imbue his unenviable act of cleaning, described in a meticulous, almost loving fashion, with metaphoric meaning; though dealing with his father’s shit assumes the status of Roth’s defining inheritance, the patrimony that emerges takes the form of a simple injunction to confront the mess of the embodied world.73 The predicament of dealing with the stinking shit smeared all across the bathroom, contaminating all
71 Philip Roth Papers, Box 173, Folder 6. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. The removed quotation was a working title for Patrimony whilst Roth drafted the book. 72 Patrimony, 176-177. 73 In his reading of Patrimony, Brauner emphasises many of the same literary features of this remarkable scene. I am unconvinced, however, of the symbolic reading of Herman’s incontinence that Brauner provides, which seems to cut against the wider refusal of the text to yield to metaphoric meaning. We are wiser, I think, to read the voiding of Herman’s bowels not as “an uninhibited expression of vitality,” contrasting Alexander Portnoy’s perpetually constipated dad, but as “nothing less or more than the lived reality that it was.” See Philip Roth, 163-164. 145
the cleaning tools that it contains, down to the individual bristles of the author’s own toothbrush, fuses with Roth’s vision of the writer’s elemental task:
As my father was tended to and he was what counted, I would just as soon have nailed
the door shut and forgotten that bathroom forever. “It’s like writing a book,” I thought –
“I have no idea where to begin.” […] I had my work cut out for me. […] You clean up
your father’s shit because it has to be cleaned up, but in the aftermath of cleaning it up,
everything that’s there to feel is felt as it never was before. It wasn’t the first time that I’d
understood this either: once you sidestep disgust and ignore nausea and plunge past those
phobias that are fortified like taboos, there’s an awful lot of life to cherish.74
To represent faithfully, in the logic that Patrimony arrives at in this extraordinary moment, is to implicate the literary text in the shit. Embracing the encounter with the mess left in the bathroom grants Roth’s narration a paradoxical kind of power; accepting the irreducible, unmasterable defeat of life finally bequeaths Patrimony its authority as a text. Such acts may not liberate us from the root suffering of the world—the vain striving of the will persists even as fleeting representations arrive and perish. But in the vivid apprehension of all that is and all that cannot be mastered, Roth suggests there is real and lasting value.
In scenes such as these, Roth stays true to Schopenhauer’s imposing pessimism about the underlying nature of what it means to exist. It is an attitude towards embodiment that would continue to shape his subsequent fiction, even as the scope of his ambitions as a writer widened.
Patrimony, like The Professor of Desire and The Anatomy Lesson before it, permits no escape from our elemental predicament, born into certain suffering. And yet, if you’re willing to take it as it comes, to confront the thing as best you can, “there’s an awful lot of life to cherish.”
74 Patrimony, 173-175. 146
V. “Søren Kierkegaard, of all people”: An Unlikely Mentor in Contradiction
In its exploration of the torment of fame, Zuckerman Unbound draws on a variety of sources.
The murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King loom over the depiction of a nervous protagonist newly exposed to restless crowds. The novel also looks to the infamous quiz show scandals of the 1950s, exploiting this paradigmatic context of shattered American surfaces for background echoes of the sharper features of Zuckerman’s plight. The dark bargain between fame and innocence in the postwar decades characterises both the prevailing cultural atmosphere of Zuckerman Unbound and the immediate circumstances of its hero. Ultimately, the text turns on the consequences of Nathan’s newfound celebrity and his haunting sense of guilt; the enigmatic death of Zuckerman’s father, with his final word—“bastard”—inflaming his son’s uneasy conscience, pushes the novel’s exploration of fame to a particularly sharp climax.
And yet Roth turns to “Søren Kierkegaard, of all people” for one of the novel’s most significant intertexts on the costs of public exposure.75 Midway through the book, during his brief relationship with the Hollywood actress Caesara O’Shea, another figure trapped inside the paradoxes of American celebrity, Zuckerman accompanies her back to her hotel room at the
Pierre. Conspicuously placed on the table sits an open copy of The Crisis in the Life of an
Actress, Kierkegaard’s strange rumination on the predicament of the older actress tasked with performing the role of feminine youth. Though age presents a painful problem, the essay makes the claim that the distance of the accumulated years allows for the greater achievement of what
Kierkegaard calls “ideality”. As a result of all that extra experience, the older actress can achieve a more essential aesthetic relation to the part she performs—in the expression of the idea of
75 Zuckerman Unbound, (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1981]), 91. 147
youthful, feminine vitality, and not its passive embodiment, the artist finds their true power.76
But the gap temporarily eclipsed in the later performance has its own melancholic undertone.
Youthfulness regained in the idea is also youthfulness lost to time. In more ways than one,
Kierkegaard’s essay speaks to the circumstances of Caesara O’Shea, suspended somewhere between her inner experiences and the clamouring expectations of the audience, tasked with recapturing an image of the Hollywood starlet that moves further and further out of reach. More diffusely, Kierkegaard’s essay echoes Zuckerman’s own uneasy exposure to American celebrity and the weird sense of obligatory expectation that such notoriety engenders.77 “Aristotle let me down,” Zuckerman glibly claims, “He didn’t mention anything about the theater of the ridiculous in which I am now a leading character—because of literature.”78
Roth’s intertextual use of The Crisis, exhibited prominently inside the diegesis of the novel, is typically playful. Kierkegaard’s book projects its wisdom; Zuckerman picks up the text and reads aloud, recognising the curious overlap with Caesara’s situation. But the intellectual heft signalled by such a learned intertext is soon undercut; we learn quickly that Caesara has left the book out on the table on purpose to influence her guest: “I thought I would impress you with my brains and instead it’s Kierkegaard’s brain you’re impressed with.”79 And Roth closes the scene with the subtle subordination of Kierkegaard’s restless mind, and matters of the jousting
76 Kierkegaard writes, “in this actress there has been an essential genius which corresponds to the very idea: feminine youthfulness. This is an idea, and an idea is something quite different from the phenomenon of being seventeen years old.” The Crisis in the Life of an Actress. Trans. Stephen Crites (London: Collins, 1967), 85. 77 Valérie Roberge, one of the few critics to write about Roth’s intertextual dialogue with Kierkegaard, offers a more systematic reading of the ways in which Zuckerman Unbound engages with the philosopher’s ascending spheres of activity (‘aesthetic’, ‘ethical’ and ‘religious’.) Though there is much to commend in the level of detail that Roberge brings to bear on the interactions between these two texts, the analysis misses Roth’s playful handling of the material. Kierkegaard is less of a stable authority in Zuckerman Unbound, and in Roth’s wider work in general, than Roberge contends. See “The Place of the ‘Aesthetic’ in Zuckerman Unbound: Roth’s Conversation with Kierkegaard”, Philip Roth Studies, Vol.13, No.1. “Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation” (Spring 2017), 75- 91. 78 Zuckerman Unbound, 95. 79 Ibid, 94. 148
intellect more generally, to events that occur, as Martha Reganhart puts it in Letting Go, “when the bedroom door snaps shut.”80 “Is the point you’re making, reading in my little book, that you are nothing like the notorious character in your own?” Ceasara coyly asks. After Zuckerman pleads innocent to the charge—“you can’t imagine how depraved I am.”—Kierkegaard’s command over the scene is duly concluded: “Then borrow the book and read it at home.”81
This scene in Zuckerman Unbound encapsulates much about Roth’s repeated turns to
Kierkegaard as both a literary and a philosophical touchstone. The encounter with The Crisis allows Roth to evoke many Kierkegaardian themes that cut right to the heart of the text. In this particular example, the fraught relationship between the demands of authentic individuality and the distorting expectations of society, magnified in the portrayal of Zuckerman’s exposure to the antic vigour of American celebrity, is the most salient. But the way in which Roth allows lines from The Crisis to percolate through Zuckerman’s mind long after he leaves Ceasara’s hotel room also suggests something about the greater reach of Kierkegaard’s work and its curious grip on Roth’s thinking. The subversive irony, the attachment to paradox, and the obsession with the depths of inwardness which are all so significant to Roth’s fiction have important precedents in
Kierkegaard’s major texts. And, as in Zuckerman Unbound, Roth’s novels are often explicit in drawing the connections.
The juxtaposition of Kierkegaard against the causal comedy of lived experience in this unassuming scene is also broadly characteristic of the way in which Roth tends to arrange the intertextual engagement. Kierkegaard frequently functions as a powerful example of sustained introspection, invoked in contrast to the less rarified features of everyday life. Where Zuckerman
Unbound dramatises this mischievous invocation of Kierkegaard with comic subtlety,
80 Letting Go, 574. 81 Zuckerman Unbound, 96. 149
highlighting the power of his ideas at the same time as hinting at their limitations, other novels follow the same template with a coarser emphasis on the intrusion of sexual turbulence. The
Professor of Desire, for instance, offers its own caricature of the withdrawn Kierkegaardian in its brief depiction of Kepesh’s acquaintance, Louis Jelinek. Kepesh’s awestruck account of his friend’s seeming singularity, a separateness that seems to combine intellectual self-possession with an acutely adolescent sense of sexual isolation, with sodden Kleenex strewn with seeming abandon across Jelinek’s bedroom, hovers somewhere between mentor of the mind and farcical buffoon82: “I have only one male friend I see regularly, a nervous, and homely philosophy major named Louis Jelinek, who in fact is my Kierkegaard mentor […] When I happen to touch him, either accidentally or simply out of high spirits or fellow feeling, he leaps away as though in fear of having his stinking rags contaminated.”83 In The Professor of Desire, this crude parody culminates in a joke on the idea of total separation from the crowd—Jelinek abruptly disappears.
But the “Kierkegaard mentor” exerts his influence. Kepesh reads and “agonises” over Either/Or.
In many ways the most significant precedent for Kepesh’s reflexive erotic behaviour is the aestheticist doctrine espoused by the purported author of the first half of Kierkegaard’s dialectic study, the mysterious ‘A’.84
One could make a similar claim about the larger influence of Kierkegaard on Roth; for all the satiric undercutting, the philosopher leaves his mark. One can observe Roth drawing on
82 In keeping with the determination to expose all of Kepesh’s sexual anxieties without censor, the representation of Jelinek, focalised through the protagonist, contains many of the visceral characteristics of a teenage phobia of homosexual desire. 83 The Professor of Desire, 17-18. 84 Either/Or erects an extraordinarily elaborate textual structure, combining many voices, thereby staging its own kind of writerly Socratic dialogue. At the beginning of the text, we are invited to believe that the first half of the book contains the papers of a certain ‘A’, culminating in “The Seducer’s Diary”. Kierkegaard’s ‘Editor,’ a persona who only appears in the preface, even tells us that in the papers he finds ‘A’ only claims editorship of the Diary itself, raising the possibility of its fictional, aesthetic relation to the experiences it relates. Roth reserves his most profound meditation on Either/Or for his pivotal masterpiece, The Counterlife. See Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (London: Penguin 2004), 32. 150
Kierkegaard’s major texts throughout his career. Elaine M. Kauver provides a perceptive reading of the ways in which Roth’s “autobiographical” works engage Kierkegaard as a particularly charged precedent for the determination to splinter the writing self.85 But Roth’s negotiations actually stretch much further than the self-conscious interrogations of “autobiography” that preoccupy her analysis. Direct references to Kierkegaard abound throughout the fiction. The
Professor of Desire, Zuckerman Unbound, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock and I Married a
Communist each refer repeatedly to specific texts; many other novels exhibit numerous more subtle allusions to his ideas and writings.
In part, of course, this interplay reflects the broader influence of European existentialism on the development of the postwar American novel. Filtered through the fiction of major figures such as Sartre and Camus, exemplified in the circulation of widely read texts such as Nausea
(1938) and The Outsider (1942), traces of Kierkegaardian philosophy, with its radical emphasis on subjective experience, pervade many evolutions in the novel across the Atlantic. As Morris
Dickstein persuasively argues, the postwar boom and the prevailing atmosphere of social conformism in the United States that characterised much of the 1950s produced, “a deep sense of malaise that contrasted with the surface buoyancy and optimism.”86 Kierkegaardian existentialism, sieved through prominent French thinkers, provided useful ways of shifting the emphasis from the economic concerns that preoccupied an earlier generation of novelists towards the spiritual and personal issues that engaged a new crop of authors. The Kierkegaard of the journals— “The crucial thing is to find a truth that is a truth for me”—and of the readily relatable
85 Kauver writes of The Facts: “The competing voices of Roth and Zuckerman find their complement in Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. And the multiplicity of voices signals the characteristic fundamental to Kierkegaard’s and Roth’s texts—the contradictory, dialectical twofoldedness informing a discourse that never resolves its ambiguity and that dictates each new text be written against the previous one.” “The Doubly Reflected Communication: Philip Roth’s ‘Autobiographies’”, Contemporary Literature, Vol.36, No.3 (Autumn, 1995), 420. 86 Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple, 85. 151
notion of the “anxiety of freedom”, simplified and popularised in the wave of primers published and read on the fashionable institutional prestige of French existentialism, permeates the early work of many postwar American writers, such as the pre-Augie March Bellow. 87 And the impact of texts such as Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), combined with the popular influence of Salinger’s extraordinarily successful experiments in stifled angst, is clearly registered in Roth’s early comedies of neurotic hesitation. Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh and
Nathan Zuckerman each experience their own vaudeville struggles with the dizzying, entangled rush of ‘anxiety’ and ‘freedom’ characteristic of the prosperous postwar moment.88 The typical hero of Roth’s early and middle novels, bookish and male, agonises in their own unique ways over “the anxious possibility of being able.”89
But it would be a mistake to examine Roth’s textual conversation with Kierkegaard under the sweeping rubric of the broader influence of European existentialism on the shape of postwar
American literature. The range of direct intellectual tussles with the primary philosophical works, and the seeming depth of the engagement, demands a more careful approach. Many of the most significant of these interactions are actually operative at the level of fictional form; the most substantial ways in which Roth’s novels tend to draw from Kierkegaard take place at the level of their own pronounced, self-reflexive features. Kierkegaard’s use of a range of literary pseudonyms, rarely publishing under his own name and routinely exploiting a plethora of fictional narrators, for instance, prefigures Roth’s own shape-shifting reliance on a group of alternate voices.
87 Kierkegaard, “Early Journal Entries”, The Essential Kierkegaard, Ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 88 In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes that “whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude. Therefore possibility is the weightiest of all categories.” It is hard to surmise a better gloss on Alexander Portnoy’s comic predicament. The Essential Kierkegaard, 154. 89 Ibid, 141. 152
In The Counterlife, a text that I subsequently analyse at length, Zuckerman defines his novelist art via the paradox of impersonation: “I can only exhibit myself in disguise. All my audacity derives from masks.”90 Much of this daring ventriloquism is predicated on the examples of Johannes de Silencio, Victor Eremita, ‘A’, and Judge Vilhelm, and the assault Kierkegaard’s multiplying personae wage on claims to objective understanding. In “The Primacy of Ludus”
Roth refers to his own ‘antic troupe’ of questioning, clashing voices, championing the turbulence evinced in the presentation of competing, particular experiences. Throughout his career, Roth leverages the scrutinising power of Kierkegaard’s many-voiced texts.
The explicit attack on systematic philosophy that undergirds Kierkegaard’s writing, epitomised in the vicious critique of Hegel, finds no exact equivalent in Roth’s fiction. But the injunction to embrace the power of contradiction, central not only to Kierkegaard’s pattern of thought but also crucial to his restlessly innovative approaches to literary form, filters through.
Roth negotiates the imposing metatextual design of Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s major exploration of the predicament of choice, directly in The Counterlife; but Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic approach to philosophical argument, embedding his ideas in the inherent instability of fictional situations and routinely disrupting unexamined certitudes, leaves a much wider imprint.
Johannes de Silencio’s paradoxical description of his meditation on the story of Abraham and
Isaac in Fear and Trembling (1843) as a “dialectical lyric”, for instance, could serve as a perceptive description of the formal properties of much of Roth’s middle fiction. The urgent rush of voice, lyric in the raw narrative form, embracing all the unsettling and compromised powers of rage and rant, self-pity and self-assurance, is surely Roth’s most consistent engine of dialectic conflict.
90 The Counterlife, 275. 153
A number of critics have written eloquently about the significance of contradiction to
Roth’s work. Brauner deploys the concept of the paradox to anchor his entire approach: “At once sincere and disingenuous, introspective and imaginative, serious and hilarious, his work is, at the stylistic level, full of oxymorons, incongruities and reversals that reflect and enact an intellectual and ideological restlessness.”91 Gooblar goes further, claiming paradox for his own interpretive methodology—it is only in reading Roth “incongruously”, taking the measure of his dramatic shifts, than one can map the evolutions of his “major phases”. By contrast, Shostak explores this aspect of Roth’s fiction in relation to the preoccupation with subjectivity. For Shostak, the convulsions of the novels, indexing sliding ideologies and identities, reflect an abiding interest in interrogating the enigma of the self. And this inquiry animates the formal restlessness of the novels: “[the] compulsion to contradict and counter-imagine drives the logic within each narrative.”92
The methodology for Shostak’s reading of the dialogic Roth is constructed around a version of Bakhtin filtered through poststructuralism; however, the key intellectual interlocutor for Roth’s own embrace of textual contradiction is Kierkegaard. The epigraph to Operation
Shylock: A Confession, lifted straight from Repetition, points to this debt: “the whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself. […] Existence in surely a debate…”93 This vision of the inward self as a space of endless argument, a fractured subjectivity estimable only in the appreciation of volatile change, evidently speaks to the exhaustive narrative contortions of
Operation Shylock itself, where two Philip Roths compete over their impersonations of the novelist’s identity. While the subject of Israel, and more particularly the extraordinary spectacle
91 Brauner, Philip Roth, 19. 92 Shostak, Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, 4. 93 Operation Shylock: A Confession, 9. 154
of the Demjanjuk trial, spark this logic, it is Kierkegaard’s lesson on the truth of contradiction that actually helps to fuel the representational strategy. Roth’s faux “confession”, the metatextual claims of the preface to have reconstructed the story from actual notebook journals, and the case of the missing final chapter, apparently excised at the bequest of the Mossad, each take inspiration from the philosopher’s sly metafictional tricks. Formally, Operation Shylock looks to enact a distinctly Kierkegaardian logic of perpetually multiplying paradoxes and riddles.
The notion that “Existence is surely a debate..”, though, extends far beyond the elaborate structural pyrotechnics of Operation Shylock; few sentences offer such a compelling summary of the incongruities and reversals of the oeuvre. But Roth also absorbs and explores deeper strains of Kierkegaardian irony than those which are exhibited in his more extreme metafictional modes.
Kierkegaard’s own journey along the power of the Socratic dialogue lead not only to the critique of Hegel’s systematic approach to philosophy but also to an enduring fascination with the inherent limitations imposed by one’s subjectivity. In his early journal entries, Kierkegaard circles continually around the primacy of human ignorance and the necessity of grounding one’s thinking in the idea of limitation: “one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable.”94
This strain of thought is enacted most vividly in Fear and Trembling, a text which performs a virtuosic riff on incomprehensibility in the enigmatic rereading of Abraham’s fateful choice and the depiction of the unknowable secret of faith.95 In The Concept of Irony, the
Socratic acceptance of the unmasterable vistas of knowledge, embracing an epistemology of
94 “Early Journal Entries”, The Essential Kierkegaard, 12. 95 In a curious late essay on Kierkegaard, preoccupied with relations between paradox and secrecy, Jacques Derrida sees much of his own philosophy reflected in the irreducible textual enigma of Abraham in Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard’s Abraham comes as close as anything I am aware of to the apprehension of singularity—“The revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit”—in Derrida’s writings. See “Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)”, Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, Ed. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 162. 155
doubt, emerges as a more fully elaborated description of irony’s conceptual power: “to know that one is ignorant is the beginning of coming to know.”96 Roth not only seems to draw on this understanding of irony; but rather, many of his novels also play with patterns of understanding that mimic the same movement from error, embrace of misperception, and, finally, tentative steps towards clarity. In The Human Stain (2000), Zuckerman ends up arriving at a judgement extraordinarily close to Kierkegaard’s position, on account of his multiplying misjudgements:
“What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything.
The things you know you don’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”97 Pointedly,
Zuckerman directs his lacerating critique towards his own craft. The invocation of ‘Intention’,
‘Motive’ and ‘Meaning’ seems deliberately intended to point towards the novelist’s own means of generating understanding. The truth of life in all its particularity eludes the designs of fiction; only by renouncing his claim to knowledge, Roth suggests, can Zuckerman begin to grasp his material.
In turning to the literary education of the young Nathan Zuckerman, I Married a
Communist actually offers a kind of packaged, narrative account of Kierkegaard’s instructive influence on the postwar American novelist. Enfolded into a wider exploration of artistic patronage, set in part amid the fraught politics and strained loyalties of the McCarthy era, the closing movements of the novel isolate both the profound impact of the philosopher and the ultimate limitations of his example. Roth’s unlikely mentor in contradiction is appraised with a new kind of contextual clarity. The playful appropriations of Kierkegaard give way in I Married a Communist to a more conclusive kind of assessment. The novel returns to the association
96 “The Concept of Irony”, The Essential Kierkegaard, 34. 97 The Human Stain, 209. 156
between Kierkegaard and intellectual maturation introduced in previous texts; late in the book, with Zuckerman remembering his experiences of the University of Chicago, Roth introduces the figure of Leo Glucksman as a counterweight to the powerful example of Johnny O’Day and the uncompromising militancy he represents. “Untypically tolerant of idiosyncrasy and eccentricity,” enigmatically clad in a costume designed to signal strident originality, Glucksman schools
Nathan in the irreducible primacy of the particular: “As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify.”98 The lesson arrives as a powerful corrective to Zuckerman’s earlier affiliations and allegiances—the greater part of I Married a Communist explores the story of the young man’s adolescent attachment to Ira Ringold, the intellectual force of his general claim, and the communist politics he vigorously propounds.
As Zuckerman recalls the encounter with his new mentor at the University of Chicago,
Kierkegaard’s philosophy propels the greater part of Glucksman’s biting homily on the subject of the oppositional intellectual:
Then and there he proceeded to initiate an introduction to Søren Kierkegaard. He wanted
me to listen to him read what Kierkegaard, whose name meant no more to me than
Raphael Kubelik’s, had already surmised in backwater Copenhagen a hundred years ago
about “the people”—whom Kierkegaard called “the public,” the correct name, Leo
informed me, for that abstraction, that “monstrous abstraction,” that “all-embracing
something which is nothing,” that “monstrous nothing,” as Kierkegaard wrote, that
“abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing” and which I mawkishly
sentimentalized in my script.99
98 I Married a Communist, 223. 99 Ibid, 220-221. 157
It’s a powerful critique; and, as Nathan explains, under Glucksman’s tutelage, he quickly submitted himself to the cause of Literature: “I became Leo’s willing student and, through his intercession, Aristotle’s willing student, Kierkegaard’s willing student, Benedetto Croce’s willing student, Thomas Mann’s willing student…”100
Here, right in the middle of Zuckerman’s lesson regarding the separateness of the artist,
Roth carefully reveals the limitations of the Kierkegaardian influence. The repetitious lexical features of Glucksman’s tirade seem to expose the foundations of his posture and his stance. In the end, Glucksman offers only an alternative rhetoric. Withdrawal into the self may produce the
Great Man and his Great Books, given the right level of fanatical dedication. But complete singularity is revealed to be its own delusion—Glucksman represents the extreme opposite of
O’Day’s trivialising generalities. The two cleave to different sides of the transcendent claims of the sublime. The notion of the mind-apart, Roth seems to be suggesting, is its own delusion.
In its portrayal of the older Zuckerman’s isolation, now living in a kind of fantasy of the
American idyll and reminiscing on many of the most potent assumptions of the postwar decades, the closing movements of I Married a Communist end up casting a cold eye over the consequences of withdrawal into the writing self.101 Murray Ringold, Zuckerman’s former high school teacher and the sympathetic narrator of much of I Married a Communist, is particularly wary of the sacrifice: “Your aloneness,” he said. “I remember the beginning, this very intense boy so much looking forward to participating in life. Now he’s in his middle sixties, a man by himself in the woods. I’m surprised to see you out of the world like this.”102 More movingly,
Murray’s own recounted story—a sorrowful tale that includes his persecution at the height of the
100 I Married a Communist, 221. 101 Thoureu hovers ambiguously behind Roth’s depiction of Zuckerman’s rural abstention from life. 102 I Married a Communist, 320. 158
McCarthy mania, the destruction of his role as an educator, and the wasteful nature of the death of his wife—seems to dismantle the presumptive faiths of the intoxicating form of liberal humanism that he spent the better part of his life espousing. Study of the Great Books, even in
Murray’s capable hands, offers no remedy for the capricious forces of history, powered by the full force of the unforeseen; the idea of living separate from the crowds, even in backwater
Copenhagen, is but a fantasy. You are always subject to the world, monstrous abstraction though that may often seem.
Roth is too canny in I Married a Communist to offer an alternative account of the value of the literary to compete with the rarified example advanced by Glucksman, whose vision seems purposefully compromised by the concluding turns of the narrative. But a subtle compromise, in lieu of the imposing example of Kierkegaardian singularity, emerges in the novel’s final sections. Prompted by his reflections on his own early allegiances, thinking through his susceptibility to the compelling influence of a number of powerful figures, a trait depicted most fully in the story of his attachment to Ira Ringold, the older Zuckerman converts this vulnerability to strident rhetoric into a description of his underlying strength as a novelist:
I think of my life as one long speech that I’ve been listening to. The rhetoric is sometimes
original, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes pasteboard crap (the speech of the incognito),
sometimes maniacal, sometimes matter-of-fact, and sometimes like the sharp prick of a
needle, and I have been hearing it for as long as I can remember […] Talking to me
doesn’t seem to present an obstacle to anyone. This is perhaps a consequence of my
having gone around for years looking as if I needed talking to. But whatever the reason,
159
the book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am,
the answer surprises me: “Listening.”103
Suggestively, Roth inserts this observation between two memories of Glucksman’s manic speech, flush with impervious self-confidence. Zuckerman’s reflection on the power of listening is lodged between two merciless examples of lunatic lecturing. For all the instructive lessons in paradox, nuance, and inward introspection that Kierkegaard undoubtedly offers, condensed in
Glucksman’s compelling injunction not to simplify, the novelist must also look out to the many voices beyond the self. To listen is to engage a temporary transgression of the boundaries of one’s bottomless subjectivity. I Married a Communist dramatises this imperative structurally; the novel’s reconstruction of the recent past takes place as a many-sided dialogue, a strategy which purposefully moves beyond the splintered self towards the different voices competing over the social scene. Murray, Ira, Zuckerman, O’Day, and Glucksman each weigh in on the meanings of the postwar decades. In a curious way, the book offers a vision of fiction that converts the weakness for powerful rhetoric critiqued in the development of the narrative into an approximation of its underlying power—to continue to listen attentively is precisely not to submit. Indeed, as Nathan listens to Murray’s compelling story, his sense of all he thought he understood about his own past radically alters. It is when you stop listening to others that the contradictory conversation stops.
The final scene of I Married a Communist details a nostalgic memory that stands as a kind of symbolic primal scene, the inauguration of this wonderful capacity for listening. Sat newly alone on his garden deck, Zuckerman remembers his early enrapt experiences of the radio:
103 I Married a Communist, 222. 160
As I left the car and started toward the house, the elongated wavering of the flame
reminded me of the radio dial—no bigger than a watch face and, beneath the tiny black
numerals, the colour of a ripening banana skin—that was all that could be seen in our
dark bedroom when my kid brother and I, contrary to parental directive, stayed up past
ten to listen to a favorite program. The two of us in our twin beds and, magisterial on the
night table between us, the Philco Jr., the cathedral-shaped table radio we’d inherited
when my father bought the Emerson console for the living room. The radio turned as low
as it could go, though still with volume enough to act on our ears as the most powerful
magnet.104
This wistful moment betrays both the deceptive force of voices and the instructive capacity of listening that Zuckerman ascribes in powerful combination to the unsettling experience of fiction itself. The language Roth uses to describe the radio, sat like a cathedral near the young boys, evokes both notions of prestige and the dubious grounds of cultural authority. Impassioned rhetoric, language tamed to thought and shaped to expression, is dangerous and effective stuff.
As the memory of enrapture with the radio continues, the terms of the recollection appear deliberately to widen. Zuckerman could almost be talking about that other kind of contact with strong voices—reading—when he blows out the candles, preparing to retire for the night: “Is it not at least a semidivine phenomenon to be hurled into the innermost wrongness of a human existence by virtue of nothing more than sitting in the dark, listening to what is said?”105 Your influences, literary or otherwise, may lead you astray, deeper into this inscrutable darkness; but the capacity to go on hearing them provides the terms of its own escape.
104 I Married a Communist, 320. 105 Ibid, 321. 161
Roth’s thinking about Kierkegaard, I think, is contained within these closing claims. I
Married a Communist offers something like the final word on this important intellectual conversation. Throughout the novel, Roth appears determined to exhibit both the powerful influence of Kierkegaard’s writing on his own fiction and the limitations of his example in unusually stark terms. But the clarity arrives with I Married a Communist; earlier texts engage in a much more protracted negotiation with the mentor in contradiction. By far the most pronounced of Roth’s struggles with Kierkegaard takes place in a novel published ten years earlier—The Counterlife.
VI. “The Burden Isn’t Either/Or”: Arguing with Kierkegaard in The Counterlife
Kierkegaard’s name is mentioned once in The Counterlife, immediately before an explosive argument. It is almost as if Roth’s concluding nod to the philosopher of contradiction invites the novel’s final confrontation. “Kierkegaard” primes the closing quarrel in a book built explicitly around the idea of antagonism. In The Counterlife, disagreement is not only explored as an inevitable feature of one’s daily experience, jostling against other selves; but rather, argument drives both the creative power of art and the endless artistry of life. In the novel’s final section, pointedly titled “Christendom”, Zuckerman and his new wife Maria head to a swanky London restaurant to celebrate her birthday and to toast the beginning of their life together, nestled in a cosy home close to the Thames.106 But the scene quickly develops into a crisis that seems to contain all the ironies and the clashes, the surprises and the contradictions, which the novel explores at length. The sense of rapid transformation that shapes Roth’s depiction of lives
106 “Christendom” is Kierkegaard’s favoured term for skewering the intellectual and religious complacencies of his European milieu. 162
upturned by the impulsive will to take on a new role, enacted in the innovative convolutions of the narrative structure, is condensed in the crazed disturbance caused by the couple’s fierce argument.107 As Roth’s early notes suggest, the idea of transformative upheaval animates The
Counterlife: “A book of 180 degree turns. One version refutes another, or is opposed by another.”108
The combination of the discovery of Maria’s family’s anti-Semitism, the haughty mark of an aristocratic English background that is revealed during a heated exchange with her sister the previous evening, together with the experience of noticing a seemingly prejudiced comment from another diner in the restaurant, sees a blissful scene of connubial tranquility erupt into a ferocious disagreement. Enraged by Zuckerman’s decision to confront the slur in the restaurant and all that lies behind it, Maria refuses to accept the idea of living in combat: “if we are going to go on misunderstanding each other about this, quarreling all the time and putting this subject at the center of our lives, then I don’t want to live with you.”109 It is an argument that seems suddenly to threaten the breakup of the marriage.110 In the novel’s closing pages, Maria decides
107 The Counterlife is particularly difficult to summarise on account of its unusual structure. The novel consists of five distinct chapters that perform radically different variations on the same characters’ stories. “Basel” focuses on the death of Henry Zuckerman after unsuccessful heart surgery. “Judea” rewrites the same scenario, seeing Henry survive his operation but move unexpectedly to an Israeli settlement where his brother Nathan comes to visit him. “Aloft” implicates Nathan in a dramatic failed terrorist plot on board a flight back to London. “Gloucestershire” describes Zuckerman’s affair with an English woman named Maria, reusing the name of Henry’s mistress from an earlier chapter. In this chapter, Zuckerman dies after having heart surgery and Henry attends the funeral. In the novel’s final section, “Christendom”, The Counterlife explores a version of Zuckerman’s and Maria’s life together in London. Multiplying realities, therefore, collide and contradict one another as the text develops. 108 Philip Roth Papers, Box 79, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 109 The Counterlife, 306. 110 Roth’s notes for The Counterlife continue to score points against the New Critics in ways comparable to the satire in Letting Go. As he sketched out ideas for this scene, Roth wrote: “Remember Empson’s books, ‘Some Versions of the Pastoral’ (Writes to Maria),” later adding, “Our fate is to live without innocence, no matter how hard we try.” Philip Roth Papers, Box, 79, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 163
to write herself out of Zuckerman’s life and out of his novel: “I will not be locked into your head in this way.”111
Accordingly, The Counterlife concludes with a sharp sense of difference—a notion that spills over into Zuckerman’s speculative comments on the meaning of circumcision to a secular
Jew, such as himself. “Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strifeless unity.”112 Immediately before the fight erupts, Zuckerman half-anticipates that his newfound sense of harmony, living an idyllic existence with a bride bearing the virginial name of the foundational Christian myth, will not last.113 As Maria enjoys her birthday gift, an expensive bracelet styled in the suggestively conservative design of the Victorian jewelers she admires, Zuckerman takes a moment to question the veracity of all this newfound calm: “It was a great moment, for both of us. Whether it qualified as “real life” remained to be seen.”114 Indeed, in the logic of the novel, “real life” is found only in conflict itself.
Immediately before their conversation takes its ferocious turn, Maria teases Zuckerman about her passive disposition. It is an aspect of her personality that the final two sections of The
Counterlife, “Gloucestershire” and “Christendom”, seem willing to push towards caricature, highlighting the powerful sense in which Zuckerman appears to be in the grip of his own fantasy of escape and reinvention. In the restaurant, Maria gently mocks her own timidity in peculiar terms:
111 The Counterlife, 315. 112 Ibid, 323. 113 Roth’s notes convey these connotations more directly: “The myth cannot admit contradiction […] The worm in the pastoral is the past! Nothing is virginal, not even virginity.” Philip Roth Papers, Box 79, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 114 The Counterlife, 285. 164
“But why? That’s what nobody can figure out. Girls raised like us don’t ordinarily marry
men interested in books. They say to me, ‘But you don’t have intellectual conversations,
do you?’”
“Intellectual enough for me.”
“Yes, I talk intellectual? Do I really? Like Kierkegaard?”
“Better.”115
The way in which The Counterlife invokes the philosopher at this crucial moment in the narrative is broadly typical of Roth’s wider references to his work. Kierkegaard’s name appears emblematic of uncompromising intellectual contemplation. But, as in other novels that allude to
Kierkegaard as an authority on the complexities of experience, his grasp on the everyday rhythms of life is subtly undercut; time spent talking with Maria, rather than reading the convoluted meditations of the solitary thinker, invites Zuckerman into different, equally valuable realms of understanding. “Better” ones, in fact.
This subtle ambivalence is carefully arranged in relation to the novel’s wider intertextual engagement with Kierkegaard. A novel of arguments, Roth designs The Counterlife in a combative relationship with one of Kierkegaard’s most elaborate studies of choice—Either/Or:
A Fragment of Life. The interactions and echoes are numerous and formative. Both texts are deeply interested in the tensions of marriage, and they use the inquiry into this enduring social institution to reflect on the various complexities involved in reaching a decision and, more broadly, how to live. In his arrangement of The Counterlife, Roth also plunders the innovative metatextual structure of Either/Or, and the investigation into relations between the ethical and
115 The Counterlife, 289. 165
the aesthetic realms of experience, central to Kierkegaard’s mercurial exploration of the choices we make, shapes the novel in a range of ways. However, The Counterlife consistently applies pressure to the implied conclusions of Either/Or, upsetting and inverting its grip on things. The implied primacy of the ethical carried by the dialectic form of Kierkegaard’s text gives way in
Roth’s renegotiation towards something far less stable. The Counterlife thus represents a pivotal transition in Roth’s career-long meditation on the philosopher’s compelling thought.
To position The Counterlife as an important turning point in Roth’s evolution, of course, is nothing new. Many of the recent monographs and studies of the oeuvre figure the novel as both a distinct achievement and an expansive shift in focus. Posnock’s observation stands in descriptive relation to the various approaches of Roth’s major interpreters: “Published between the two Zuckerman trilogies, The Counterlife (1986) is not only pivotal chronologically but is a crucial transition in Roth’s art. That the novel is also about the fact of transition and pivots—in particular abrupt, baffling turnings placing us in New York, Tel Aviv, London, among other locales—at once suggests something of the book’s self-reflexive intricacy, its disruption of formal expectations.”116 But each critic makes different claims about the principal stakes of this novel of transition when dissecting Roth’s development.117 Inserting the evolving conversation with Kierkegaard into this discussion is not to downplay the importance of these other readings;
The Counterlife clearly contains multitudes. Moreover, the novel is also crucial to the expanding picture of Roth’s considerable transnational dimensions, contexts that are likely to assume
116 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 125. 117 To cite only some of the major claims: Emily Miller Budick positions the novel as a crucial development in Roth’s writing about Israel. See “Roth and Israel”, The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 68-81. Posnock argues that The Counterlife releases both Roth and Zuckerman from the endless chase after the real, positing “man’s ‘natural being’ as the impersonating ‘skill itself.’” See Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 129. Gooblar reads the novel as pivotal by virtue of the way in which it breaks the Freudian lock on Roth’s portrayal of the self. See The Major Phases of Philip Roth, 100. Brauner sees The Counterlife priming the counter-pastoral themes of Roth’s subsequent historical novels. See Philip Roth. And Hayes positions The Counterlife as central to the author’s evolving emphasis on a Nietzschean understanding of the “aesthetics of identity.” See Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 131. 166
greater importance to both our continued understanding of his work and our wider reconstruction and historicisation of the postwar period. 118
Exploring the ways in which The Counterlife reads Either/Or as an active intertext does, however, help to clarify more than the terms of Roth’s dialogue with Kierkegaard alone. Since its publication, The Counterlife has been associated, rather uncritically, with the decisive appropriation of postmodern narratological techniques. By way of its restless metatextual structure, the novel seems to disclose much about the inherent fictionality of experience and the endless indecipherability of subjectivity—a postmodern logic that finds its most concrete expression in Zuckerman’s concluding letter to his own character, Maria, flaunting the möbius strip of the text at the same time as announcing “impersonation” as the elliptic foundation of the self. And the law of endless interpretation concludes the book: “you could correctly reply that since there is no way of proving whether I’m right or not, this is a circular argument from which there is no escape.”119 Pointedly, Roth provides no stable centre with which to fix a particular reading of the novel down.
But The Counterlife is no passive exhortation of the free play of the sign. In fact, the novel continually places the postmodern logic of refashionable identities in combative tension with other animating ideas. The inescapable forces of history, the representational charge of realist narrative, and the intractable materiality of the body all emerge and surface, in different ways, with competing and compelling claims on the constitution of the self.120 The characters of
118 See Amy Hungerford’s prescient essay for a wide-angle discussion of these critical developments. “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary”, American Literary History, Vol. 20, No.1/2, “Twenty Years of American Literary History: The Anniversary Volume” (Spring-Summer, 2008), 410-419. 119 The Counterlife, 320. 120 The first section of the novel, “Basel”, outlines the emergence of these struggles as Zuckerman speculates on the meanings of his brother’s failed relationship with ‘Maria’, an earlier mistress: “How absurd, how awful, if the woman who’d awakened in him the desire to live differently, who meant to him a break with the past, a revolution against an old way of life that had reached an emotional standstill—against the belief that life is a series of duties to 167
The Counterlife, in other words, are all “ridiculously entangled”; acts of artistic reinvention seize and imprison, fail and stumble, as much as they free.121 When Henry raids Zuckerman’s notes and manuscripts in the novel’s fourth section, “Gloucestershire”, Roth gives convincing voice to alternative modes of understanding to those advanced in the text’s frequently cited final pages.
Henry not only asserts the imposing counterclaim of obligation, but also wisely recognises the importance in life of acquiescence to the actual. Reading a draft of the text’s final section,
“Christendom”—the very pages which combine Zuckerman’s fantasy of fatherhood with Maria with some of his most daring postmodern statements—Henry scoffs at all that is missed in his brother’s ludic, fictional dream of unconstrained self-fashioning:
But, no, Nathan was utterly unable to involve himself in anything not entirely of his own
making. The closest Nathan could ever come to life’s real confusion was in these fictions
he created about it. […] continuously seeking through solitary literary contrivance to
dominate what, in real life, he was to fearful to confront. Namely, the past, the present,
and the future.122
Similarly, the more explicit moments of postmodernist projection in The Counterlife are arranged in an antagonistic relationship to a range of alternative epistemological logics. It is during moments of heated friction with other people, such as Henry’s visceral disgust at his brother’s illusory distortions, tracked and contained in his surviving notebooks, and Zuckerman’s own incredulity in reaction to Sarah Freshfield’s atavistic anti-Semitism, that these tensions
be perfectly performed—if that woman was to be nothing more or less than the humiliating memory of his first (and last) great fling because she observed Christmas and we do not.” The subtle lexical echo of the central scene of unmasterable bodily confusion in Patrimony—“nothing more or less than”—is particularly suggestive. The Counterlife, 41. 121 The Counterlife, 41. 122 Ibid, 229. 168
become most visible: “I don’t have to act like a Jew—I am one.”123 There are limits to the all- conquering powers of impersonation, but the boundaries that emerge in The Counterlife are unfixed and labile. Kierkegaardian argument, as opposed to open consensus, drives the contestable discovery of these contexts. Ontological instability is contained and propelled by an engulfing sense of epistemological friction.124
The novel’s third section, “Aloft”, the most humorous of the text’s five chapters, depicts this process in particularly dramatic terms. Here a beaten Zuckerman, brutalised at the hands of
Israeli security agents, becomes part of an outlandish scene of failed terrorism. The secret service officers suddenly descend on the uncomprehending novelist during an otherwise uneventful flight from Tel Aviv to London to prevent Jimmy, a disturbed young man sitting next to
Zuckerman on the plane whom he first encountered at the Wailing Wall, from going through with his insane plan to liberate world Jewry from the burden of remembrance.125 Tellingly,
Zuckerman is swept up in the violence and the subsequent interrogation both seemingly at random and wholly against his will. The way in which Roth portrays this crazy sequence of events makes it seem as if “Aloft” is drawn less from experience than it is from the visual excesses of cinematic spectacle, unreal enough that Zuckerman even doubts the reliability of what is happening as he is ‘gagged’ and ‘slammed’: “I half sensed something illusionary.”126 But
“Aloft” takes comic advantage of this atmosphere of semi-revelry, staged suggestively far from the irreducible reality of terra firma, to introduce the sudden imposition of limits on the creative
123 The Counterlife, 279. 124 At the level of its narratology, The Counterlife consistently animates the conceded caveat in Brian McHale’s now foundational study of the ontological dominant of postmodernist fiction: “push ontological questions far enough and they tip over into epistemological questions.” Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 11. 125 Jimmy hands Nathan a crumbled paper that outlines his plan: “FORGET REMEMBERING! I demand of the Israeli government the immediate closing and dismantling of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Museum and Remembrance Hall of the Holocaust. I demand this in the name of the Jewish future. THE JEWISH FUTURE IS NOW. We must put persecution behind us forever…” The Counterlife, 165. 126 Ibid, 173. 169
powers of imaginative fiction. The authoritative transformations of the audacious American novelist, free in his pursuit of the perfect page, meet their match in the threat of hard force represented in the security agents:
“My name is Nathan Zuckerman,” I said when the gag had been removed, but he gave no
sign of absolution. If anything, I’d inspired still more contempt. “I’m an American writer.
It’s all in my passport.”
“Lie to me and I slit you open.”
“I understand that,” I replied.127
Just as Henry and Zuckerman both confront the meanings of the “concrete violence of surgery” at different points in the novel, the comic scene in “Aloft” dramatises the discovery of limits on invention. As with Zuckerman’s concluding comments on circumcision, knife and flesh herald the boundaries of ‘what if?’128
The Counterlife is often reduced to its postmodern dimensions in critical readings of the text.129 It is an interpretation that Zuckerman partially encourages. But many of the novelist’s comments in his final reply to Maria supply aphoristic statements—“I am a theater”—whose very quotability seem wryly suspect. And, more often than not, such statements are cited shorn of the narrative contexts that shape their expression when they are taken to stand as propositions
127 The Counterlife, 172. 128 In a set of notes for the novel, Roth describes the issue with disarming frankness: “We are circumcised, Maria, whether we like it or not. A wound is inflicted that’s not wholly symbolic. It also hurts.” Philip Roth Papers, Box 79, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 129 Derek Parker Royal, for instance, writes of the novel’s postmodernism in such a way so as to give the impression that this aspect of the text approximates its overarching meaning: “Such an awareness [regarding impersonation] is unquestionably postmodern, and it stands in direct opposition—or as a countertext—to an understanding of identity, individual as well as textual, as a unified agent of influence.” “Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism”, The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 28. 170
for the novel as a whole.130 Indeed, for all its metafictional innovations, the epistemic stakes of this text of antagonistic rewrites are established at the level of people—their conflicts, their exhilarations, and their inexhaustible misunderstandings. The final sentence of The Counterlife not only confirms the containment of the characters to the inescapable text; Roth also condemns
Zuckerman and Maria to the endless contradictions and rapid transformations inherent in the felt confusion of being alive. “To escape into what, Marietta? It may be as you say that this is no life, but use your enchanting, enrapturing brains: this life is as close to life as you, and I, and our child can ever hope to come.”131
It is in moments such as these, in the representational tensions induced in its metafictional movements, that the novel’s negotiation of Either/Or is most visible and most significant. In fact, many of the most pronounced self-reflexive features of The Counterlife play with precedents and formal tricks employed in Kierkegaard’s text, originally published under pseudonym. On a superficial level, Roth elects to channel ironies surrounding choice, volition, and self-invention established long before Lyotard called halt to the metanarratives of modernity.
More importantly, though, the novel’s intimate interactions with Either/Or shape the ways in which Roth probes the enigma of human agency, refracted in the impulsive decisions that drive the behaviour of each of the novel’s principal characters. Kierkegaardian precedents of contradiction, paradox, and self-deception lie behind these explorations in a variety of important ways. But, true to its form, The Counterlife argues with them all.
130 The impending dissolution of Zuckerman’s marriage and his possible abandonment of the new home he has established and renovated in London, for instance, are often presumed not to intrude on his claims in the novel’s final pages. But “I am a theater” evidently contains intimations of anger and resentment as well as intellectual provocation. Roth’s comment on the importance of “Context, context, context” during an exchange with Mary McCarthy about The Counterlife, though referring to a different quote from the novel’s closing letter, seems to me equally apposite here. See “An Exchange with Mary McCarthy”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 277. 131 The Counterlife, 324. 171
The opening sentences of Either/Or outline Kierkegaard’s interest in the murky terrain of hidden motivation, obscure and yet compelling:
Perhaps it has sometimes occurred to you, dear reader, to doubt the correctness of the
familiar philosophical proposition that the outward is the inward, the inward the outward.
You yourself have perhaps nursed a secret which, in its joy or pain, you felt was too
precious for you to be able to initiate others into it. Your life has perhaps brought you
into touch with people of whom you suspected something of the kind, yet without being
able to wrest their secret from them by force or guile. Perhaps neither case applies to you
and your life, and yet you are not a stranger to that doubt; it has slipped before your mind
now and then like a fleeting shadow.132
A novel haunted by its own circle of fleeting shadows, The Counterlife invests heavily in the idea that such inward secrets hold surprisingly significant sway over the actions of individuals.133
The conception of subjectivity as a “riddle” to be solved drives Either/Or and The Counterlife in comparable ways: “Nothing, after all, is so pervaded by seduction and damnation as a secret.”134
The papers loosely grouped in the first half of Kierkegaard’s text culminate in “The
Seducer’s Diary”, a narrative of erotic conquest purportedly imagined by the author of the first section of Either/Or, whom the editor cryptically titles ‘A’. But the power struggle of “The
Seducer’s Diary” is waged principally at the level of reading—the seducer agonises over how to
132 Either/Or, 27. 133 The phrase “Nothing comes without its shadow” recurs in Roth’s initial sketches for The Counterlife. Hayes subsumes this sentence into his Nietzschean reading of the novel. See Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 139. There is much to invite this associative reading; however, Roth’s notes imply a different understanding of the image of the shadow. The inescapability of the past—history and the ways in which history haunts and constrains the freedom of an identity—seems actually to have animated the recurrence of this phrase. Elsewhere in the same set of notes, Roth elaborates the image: “can’t shed your Jewish shadow”; “to think you can exist without a shadow. Henry knows better now”; “Every Jewish shadow has a gigantic hooked nose. The Jew willwill always be his shadow.” Philip Roth Papers, Box 79, Folder 2. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 134 Either/Or, 254. 172
untangle the ‘riddle’ of Cordelia’s affections: “I still cannot decide how she is to be understood.”135 And when he makes his calculated manoeuvres, the unnamed seducer leverages the powers of textual ambiguity: “a book has the remarkable property that it can be interpreted any way you wish.”136 Throughout the first half of Either/Or, ‘A’ elaborates a doctrine of studied disinterest, enjoying the cold arrangement and appreciation of the world from a distance. The pleasure he takes in his courtship and eventual abandonment of Cordelia is predicated, above all, on his control and detachment; the self-conscious manipulation of the young girl’s affection takes an unmistakably aesthetic form.137 In “The Seducer’s Diary” the underlying truth is always inaccessible, open to contest, and perpetually in question. The malleability of the aesthetic affords ‘A’ the opportunity of mastery.
Kierkegaard structures the entire text as a compromised dialogue; Either/Or stages a contradictory set of interpretations over the same existential questions. The first half of
Either/Or, A’s collected manuscripts, explore and advocate an idiosyncratic aestheticism, celebrating disinterest and detached self-preservation as tools necessary to navigate life’s unavoidable quandaries. The second half of the book, however, concerns a set of letters and treatises written in reply to this doctrine, purportedly written by a figure called Judge Vilhelm, whom the text calls ‘B.’ We are led to believe by the supposed editor of Either/Or, the figure
Victor Eremita, that these letters were mailed to persuade ‘A’ to reject despair and disaffection in favour of ethical engagement. Taken as a whole, Either/Or stages a textual argument—the
135 Either/Or, 284. 136 Ibid, 312. 137 At one point, ‘A’ assesses the stakes of his seduction explicitly: “Now have I, in my relationship with Cordelia, been constantly faithful to my pact? That is to say, to my pact with the aesthetic. For that is what makes me strong, the fact that I always have the idea on my side. It is a secret, like Samson’s hair, which no Delilah shall wrest from me. Straightforwardly to betray a young girl, that is something I certainly couldn’t endure. But the fact that the idea, too, is there in motion, that it is in its service that I act and to its service that I dedicate myself, that makes me strict with myself, an abstainer from every forbidden enjoyment. Has the interesting always been preserved? Yes, in this secret conversation I dare say it freely and openly.” Either/Or, 369. 173
papers of ‘B’ actively reread and reinterpret the papers of ‘A’. This dialectic A/B structure, with two textual voices disagreeing over how to live and how to act, is left pointedly unresolved.
Kierkegaard’s discourse on the predicament of choice is staged as its own unsettled dispute.
Tellingly, though, in Either/Or the injunction to live by the ethical has the last word.138
The Counterlife seizes on the curious powers of secrecy and the friction between competing interpretations in a range of analogous ways. The insistence on dynamic tension between the outward and the inward, for instance, shapes the way in which Roth depicts
Zuckerman’s acts of characterisation throughout the novel, tasked with solving the enigmatic
“riddles” of those surrounding him. In a certain sense, the book is about a novelist’s various attempts to use the skills of his vocation to try and understand the more surprising changes that mark the course of life. Zuckerman, the writer figure at the centre of The Counterlife, wrestles with the unknowability of his various subjects’ inner worlds, endlessly interpretable but ultimately unmasterable. This is particularly true of the novel’s second section, “Judea”, which concerns his brother Henry’s sudden transformation into a fundamentalist Israeli settler, newly armed and dangerous in the foothills of the West Bank.
When he travels to Israel to visit Henry, the limitations of Zuckerman’s epistemological grip on things are soon confirmed. The writer offers his strongest reading of the situation, but his
Oedipal interpretation of his brother’s act of rebellion against his origins, for all its compelling claims to explain Henry’s new religious fervency, receives remarkably short shrift: “And out the door he went, furious, and before he could be talked into going home.”139 And Zuckerman is canny enough to recognise the dubious foundations of his own potential misreadings: “observed
138 Either/Or concludes with a sermon called “The Edifying in the Thought that Against God We are Always in the Wrong”, a theological text that ‘B’ sends to ‘A’, initially composed by “an older friend who is a priest in Jutland.” Either/Or, 593. 139 The Counterlife, 140. 174
from the novelist’s point of view, this was far and away Henry’s most provocative incarnation, if not exactly the most convincing—that is, it was the most eminently exploitable by me. My motives too must be taken into account. I wasn’t there just as his brother.”140 Subjective interpretation is always epistemologically compromised; our truths are always partial, our secrets halfway hidden.
Roth dramatises opposing interpretations of the meaning of a life most conspicuously in the contrasting depictions of the two Zuckerman brothers’ eulogies, delivered in different sections of the novel. In the first chapter of The Counterlife, Zuckerman listens to the speech that his brother’s wife delivers at the funeral service with a mixture of wonder and incredulity;
Carol’s account of Henry’s death on the operating table folds the impulsive decision to go ahead with unnecessary surgery into a description of his husbandly devotion. In direct contrast to
Zuckerman’s speculations about the meanings of his brother’s choice, a reading which connects the decision to the spontaneous renewal of an affair, Carol’s eulogy portrays Henry’s decision to try and regain his sexual potency as the willful attempt to restore his marriage.
More drastically, in the novel’s fourth section, Henry finds a draft of the reading given by his brother’s literary agent at the funeral, concluding that Zuckerman actually composed his own eulogy. Nathan provided the official interpretation, in other words, of his own life’s meaning, and it was an exculpatory reading venerating the value of his fiction over the harmful effects of his life. Henry, a figure who suffered at the hands of his brother’s claims to artistic autonomy, a victim of the ways the novelist plundered the details of the family as he reshaped his experience into literature, reads the material and fights back. And in the ensuing confrontation with the powerful interpretations of the novelist, a contestation that encompasses not only the eulogy but
140 The Counterlife, 133. 175
all Zuckerman’s surviving manuscripts and notebooks—including the drafts of each of the chapters of The Counterlife itself—Henry exposes the disfiguring violence inherent in
Zuckerman’s partial epistemological purchase on things:
Swarming all right—his version, his interpretation, his picture refuting and impugning
everyone else’s and swarming over everything! And where was his authority? Where?
[…] Everyone buried and mummified in that verbal lava, including finally himself—
nothing straightforward, unvarnished, directly alive, nothing faced up to as it actually
is.141
In his disgust, Henry decides to maintain his own secrets; all that is unpublished, unexposed, and unwarped—including Zuckerman’s notes about his brother’s erotic life—will remain so.
Ironically, this very act of censorship is not only futile but proves to be actively compromising.
Having broken into his brother’s apartment via his own act of sly deception, Henry steals and destroys the very papers we’re reading.
This investment in the driving force of secrets and the contradictions that arise from their interpretation is most elaborately explored in the complex structure of the opening section of The
Counterlife. Enigmatically called “Basel”, the first chapter establishes the governing power of a specific ‘nursed secret’ in the form of Henry’s heart disease, and the devastating impotence his medication causes.142 This hidden dimension of Henry’s inward life results in the reckless decision to undergo the surgical operation that kills him; and the first section of the novel explores the confusion of those closest to him when he dies suddenly and seemingly without
141 The Counterlife, 232. 142 Critics have offered a number of interesting comments on the significance of ‘Basel’ to the themes of The Counterlife. Ostensibly, Roth names the chapter after the city because Henry’s mistress, Maria, departs America for Switzerland. But, as Ira Nadel notes, “Labeling the opening section “Basel” ironically refers to Theodore Herzl’s organization of the first Zionist Congress, which took place in Basel in 1987.” Philip Roth: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2011), 51. 176
explanation. The Kierkegaardian schism of the self, characteristic of the way in which Either/Or insists upon a fractured understanding of the recesses of subjectivity, feeds into the curious ways in which Roth splinters the narration surrounding the discovery of this secret.143 Zuckerman’s account of his brother’s funeral is interlaced with passages from an old notebook, a text which contains a brief set of notes from a conversation with Henry years earlier about an extramarital affair. These sketches, interwoven with the depiction of the ceremony itself, contest and contradict the ‘official’ interpretation of his death presented by Henry’s family. Carol’s voiced explanation of her husband’s fateful decision, framed explicitly around the idea of marital duty, cuts against Zuckerman’s hidden counternarrative, which figures Henry’s determination to regain his sexual potency as a desperate attempt to restore the freedom of erotic play. And, out of the antagonism between these different readings, Roth even introduces a third narrative strand—
Zuckerman’s speculative projections into the invisible tensions of the unsaid. As Carol and
Zuckerman embrace to say goodbye, the paradoxes multiply and mount:
But in Zuckerman’s arms, pressing herself up against his chest, all she said, in a
breaking voice, was “It helped me enormously, your being here.”
Consequently he had no reason to reply, “So that’s why you made up that story,”
but said nothing more than what was called for. “It helped me, being with you all.”144
The extent to which Kierkegaard stands behind this determination to refract the interpretation of Henry’s secret through competing readings of the same act is subtly indicated in the way Roth depicts Zuckerman’s confusion as he returns home to ponder the meaning of the
143 In the ‘Preface’ to Either/Or, ‘Victor Eremita’ also outlines the centrality of contradiction to the shape of human affairs: “so the ear is the instrument whereby that inwardness is grasped, hearing the sense by which it is appropriated. Whenever I found a contradiction between what I saw and what I heard, I found my doubt corroborated, and my passion for observation increased.” Either/Or, 27. 144 The Counterlife, 47. 177
events he witnessed at the funeral. The dialectic structure of Kierkegaard’s meditation on choice, either/or, is pointedly evoked in the way Roth arranges Zuckerman’s interpretive dilemma as the chapter ends:
Either what she’d told everyone from the altar was what she truly believed, either she was
a good-hearted, courageous, blind, loyal mate whom Henry had fiendishly deceived to
the last, or she was a more interesting woman than he’d ever thought, a subtle and
persuasive writer of domestic fiction, who had cunningly reimagined a decent, ordinary,
adulterous humanist as a heroic martyr to the connubial bed.145
Earlier in the first chapter, Roth evokes the Kierkegaardian structure of choice with a pointed
“If/then” as he describes the difficulty of arresting Henry’s pattern of mind. As the first section of the novel closes, priming the subsequent movement towards a range of antagonistic rewritings, Roth lays down his own reimagining of Kierkegaard in The Counterlife in the intractable form of Zuckerman’s stimulating choice. “Basel” fractures into its own sharp variation on an obstinate ‘either/or’ as it kickstarts the interpretive engine that propels the rest of the novel.146
The concealed fact of Henry’s heart disease, an example of the extraordinary tension between inward and outward in the constitution of a life, is not limited to the narrative splinters of the opening section of the novel. In The Counterlife, Zuckerman does not simply offer a range of different speculations on the circumstances of his brother’s death; but rather, the deep secret of heart disease is refigured as a foundational dilemma that many of the subsequent sections of
145 The Counterlife, 48. 146 Roth’s drafts of the novel show him playing with the phrase ‘either/or’ as he rewrote a number of key paragraphs. Either/or replaces “if I don’t”, for example, in an enigmatic abandoned exchange between Zuckerman and Maria: “Either I shut up, or you can be even more vindictive toward your brother than this.” See Philip Roth Papers, Box 79, Folder 1. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 178
the book orbit and reinterpret without resolving. “Basel” explores the discovery of the condition, its psychological effects on Henry and the consequences of the failed surgery; “Judea” sees
Henry survive the operation and then bolt from the smallness of his preceding depression over his lost potency, starting a new life amid the grander moral stakes of an Israeli settlement;
“Gloucestershire”, the fourth section, refigures the heart disease as Zuckerman’s own bodily affliction, an illness and predicament projected into his brother’s domestic situation in the manuscripts that Henry discovers, rejects, and ultimately destroys. The faults of the heart, actual and symbolic at one and the same time, drive both the reckless decisions of Roth’s characters and the logic of misrepresentation inherent in the rewrites of each of the novel’s five chapters.
And matters of the heart understood less literally are central concerns of both The
Counterlife and Either/Or. The fundamental decision examined in Kierkegaard’s study, a predicament that comes to stand for the problem of choice more generally, is the question of whether or not to marry. In the course of his ruminations, ‘A’, dedicated to the task of living
“poetically”, comes to reject the idea of choice as a false one: “Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. […]
This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all wisdom.”147 Judge Vilhelm, however, argues that this stance towards life abrogates the dilemma of choice in favour of accepting despair; the very injunction to act, to make a choice and to live by it, is the true meaning of either/or: “What takes precedence in my Either/Or is, then, the ethical. Therefore, the point is still not that of choosing something; the point is not the reality of that which is chosen but the reality of choosing. This, however, is what is crucial, and it is to this that I shall strive to awaken you.”148 Marriage, bringing with it the continual condition of commitment, insisting upon a temporality that goes
147 The Essential Kierkegaard, 43-44. 148 Ibid, 75. 179
beyond the immediate satisfactions of sensation, comes to represent the crucial example of living ethically because it makes choice perpetually manifest.149 According to Judge Vilhelm, it is only in the ongoing duty of marriage, living implicated in time, that one can achieve a state of equilibrium between the aesthetic and the moral and obtain an edifying sense of purpose.
The Counterlife engages with the existential implications of marriage in a number of significant ways. In the novel’s final two sections, “Gloucestershire” and “Christendom”,
Zuckerman yearns for the devotion implicit in the idea of conventional family life. In a subtle way, The Counterlife actually echoes the duality of Kierkegaard’s text—the first half of Roth’s novel exposes the hidden excesses of marital infidelity, whereas the second half gravitates towards an appreciation of the compelling virtues of marital responsibility. But, even here,
Zuckerman seems conscious that his desire for the conventional commitment implied in marriage represents not submission to the obligations of the ethical, but an attraction to his own fantasy of transformation.
Impotent as a consequence of his own heart medication, Zuckerman decides to have surgery to try to reinvent himself as a happily married family man: “caught up entirely in what has come to feel like a purely mythic endeavor, a defiant, dreamlike quest for the self- emancipating act, possessed by an intractable idea of how my existence is to be fulfilled, I now must move beyond the words to the concrete violence of surgery.”150 Even as the second half of
The Counterlife approaches the lessons of Judge Vilhelm, celebrating marriage as the paradigmatic example of the active decision, Roth subtly subverts the philosophical strategy of
Either/Or. Here the real power of choice that the second half of Kierkegaard’s study locates in the ethical life seems to lie somehow within the idea of the aesthetic. “If you seriously want to
149 “Marital love, then, has its enemy in time, its victory in time, its eternity in time” The Essential Kierkegaard, 71. 150 The Counterlife, 205. 180
renew your life, there’s no way around taking a serious risk,” Zuckerman tells an apprehensive
Maria, as he contemplates his own dangerous heart surgery.151 And the risk and the daring are located in the notion of a creative metamorphosis. “All my audacity,” Zuckerman later declares,
“derives from masks.” In the end, Zuckerman’s conception of harmonious marriage represents a variation on the numerous ways in the novel imagines the shaping force of artistic self- fashioning. Inside the contradictions of The Counterlife, commitment, the implicatory power of making a choice, lies not in the ethical but in the vigorous execution of an idea.
The first two sections of The Counterlife, each focused on different versions of Henry’s story, reconfigure the debate over marriage implicit to the structure of Either/Or in a similar way. The dualistic logic of Kierkegaard’s text, in which the ethical arrives to temper and to transcend the logic of A’s ‘poetic’ approach to life, is reimagined in the ways that Roth depicts
Henry’s marital struggle. Even in Henry’s case, the aesthetic appears to take precedence over the ethical. The true horror of Henry’s impotence following the discovery of his heart problems, for instance, appears to result from the crushing elimination of his capacity to reimagine himself in the guise of the aesthetic: “Impotence, Zuckerman had been thinking, has cut him off from the simplest form of distance from his predictable life. As long as he was potent he could challenge and threaten, if only in sport, the solidity of the domestic relationship.”152 Following this logic, the most startling scene in “Basel” moves to disclose the erotic power of the ludic imagination;
Roth frames Henry’s affair with a dental assistant as a lived conceit of playful performance.
Roth’s language emphasises the sense of liberation implicit in the aesthetic approach to the self:
“Look,” he said, “let’s pretend. You’re the assistant and I’m the dentist.” “But I am the
assistant,” Wendy said. “I know,” he replied, “and I’m the dentist—but pretend anyway.”
151 The Counterlife, 204. 152 Ibid, 30. 181
“And so,” Henry told Nathan, “that’s what we did.” “You played Dentist”, Zuckerman
said. […] “It was, it was wild, it made us crazy—it was the strangest thing I’d ever done.
We did it for weeks, pretended like that, and she kept saying, ‘Why is it so exciting when
all we’re pretending to be is what we are?’ God, was it great!153
Adultery, it seems, is the one true setting of Henry’s artistry.
The Counterlife routinely scrambles the dialectic opposition between the aesthetic and the ethical established and contested in Either/Or; Kierkegaard’s dualism gives way to a less stable sense of the friction between duty and pleasure, choice and abstention. In the case of both
Zuckerman brothers, the aesthetic makes its own claims on casting meaning over life’s elemental struggles. Though Roth elaborates and reimagines ideas from both sides of Kierkegaard’s textual dialogue, the logic of perpetual antagonism that shapes The Counterlife continually disables the argumentative clarity of the either/or decision. One of the most significant ways in which Roth reworks the dialectic structure of Either/Or in this way lies in the decisive subversion of Judge
Vilhelm’s most compelling argument, lodged in opposition to the stance of aesthetic disinterest advocated with such lyric skill in the papers of ‘A’: “There are conditions of life in which it would be ludicrous or a kind of derangement to apply an Either/Or, but there are also people whose souls are too dissolute to comprehend the implications of such a dilemma, whose personalities lack the energy to be able to say with pathos: Either/Or.”154 The underlying power of the ethical, Judge Vilhelm seems to suggest here, lies in the force of the lived commitment in itself. Ingeniously, The Counterlife appropriates this claim for its descriptions of the unleashed force of the aesthetic; the ludic account of active self-fashioning that animates the propulsive logic of the novel, in which characters routinely attempt to inhabit their own anti-myths,
153 The Counterlife, 34-35. 154 The Essential Kierkegaard, 71. 182
positions commitment decisively on the side of the artistry of life. The ethical loses the advantage carried in the spirit of action. In The Counterlife, to choose is almost invariably aesthetically to reinvent.
This reworking of Kierkegaard’s existential stakes is most dramatically figured in the novel’s second section, “Judea”. Rewriting the events of the first chapter, “Judea” sees Henry reimagine his life on a wholly different order of magnitude. Fleeing the parochial dimensions of his previous experience as a successful dentist and a conventional family man in New Jersey, and the liberal, attenuated sense of Jewish identity that he comes to believe his old existence to represent, Henry transforms into Hanoch, spontaneously leaving everything behind to begin again as a fundamentalist Israeli settler in the disputed territory of the West Bank. Chatting with his friend Shuki after arriving to visit this new incarnation of his brother, Zuckerman can barely hide his surprise and his exasperation: “Henry’s made it up. Henry appears to have left his wife, his kids, and his mistress to come to Israel to become an authentic Jew.”155 The “made it up” here is instructive. As The Counterlife conceives it, Henry seems determined to claim both a greater sense of legitimacy about his identity and greater moral stakes in which to exercise it. But his transformation into a pistol-wielding militant is fundamentally conceived as an aesthetic achievement, not far distant from the seducer’s self-conscious pact with the aesthetic as he torments the innocent Cordelia: “in this unfinished, other-terrestrial landscape, attesting theatrically at sunset to Timeless Significance, one might well imagine self-renewal on the grandest scale of all, the legendary scale, the scale of mythic heroism.”156 Henry leverages all his artistic daring to achieve his new sense of absolute attachment, converting his life into a grand moral mission. By refashioning himself in such a way, he even comes to insist upon his own
155 The Counterlife, 74. 156 Ibid, 113. 183
totalising either/or: “what matters isn’t what made you do it but what it is you do.”157 And as he explains, finally, to his condescending brother, what you do here is fight over control of Judea.
In Either/Or, some of Judge Vilhelm’s most impassioned, commanding rhetoric is reserved for the simple injunction to live, and not to disengage. Life is a moral struggle that must be confronted:
Like a Cato, then, I shout my Either/Or to you, and yet not like a Cato, for my soul has
not yet attained the resigned coldness that he had. But I know that this adjuration alone, if
I have sufficient strength, will be able to arouse you, not to the activity of thinking, for in
that you are not deficient, but to earnestness of spirit […] What, then, is it that I separate
in my Either/Or? Is it good and evil? No, I only want to bring you to the point where this
choice truly has meaning for you. It is on this that everything turns.158
In “Judea”, Roth imagines his own ironic variation on Kierkegaard’s “earnestness of spirit” in the form of Henry’s spiritual tutor and mentor in ethnic antagonism, Mordecai Lippman. A militant settler, Lippman—his name a play on Lip-Man—is perhaps the most thunderous voice in a novel built around ferocious vocal argument. And his is a dangerous mantra clearly rejected by the other moderate Israeli positions reflected in The Counterlife. The militant attitude propounded by Henry’s guide to Middle Eastern conflict, in other words, is outwardly anything but ethical in bearing. But Lippman’s enraged speech, insisting upon the primacy of action, provides an unmistakable echo of Kierkegaard’s “earnestness of spirit”, and the injunction to make a definitive choice is reiterated in just about every one of his sentences: “He is also good at throwing stones,” Lippman says of his enemy, “-so long as nobody stops him. But I will tell you
157 The Counterlife, 140. 158 The Essential Kierkegaard, 74. 184
something, Mr. Nathan Zuckerman: if nobody else will stop him, I will.”159 Though his authority seems to rest more on sheer theatricality than on moral clarity, Zuckerman is forced to concede the compelling audacity carried by Lippman’s voice: “His English came haltingly, but with forceful fluency all the same, as though he had mastered the language in one large gulp just the day before.”160 In his essentialist account of ethnic identity, Lippman wields the power of Judge
Vilhelm’s most imposing argument in Either/Or, evident in the double movement of his thought as he lectures the nearly silent Zuckerman, a novelist almost serenely detached from the predicament of choice in its most uncompromising forms. Either/Or: either you’re a Jew, or you’re not. Either/Or: either you fight, or you don’t.
Lippman’s powerful appearance in “Judea” suggests much about Roth’s determination in
The Counterlife to complicate and to upset the kinds of categorical distinctions that define
Kierkegaard’s text. This intertextual renegotiation is also, however, operative at the level of narrative structure. Kierkegaard’s overarching metafictional conceit, characteristic of many his philosophical writings, takes the form of the surprising discovery of a set of pseudonymous writings. In Either/Or, this occurs at the very beginning of the text, acting as a framing mechanism for the subsequent dialectic structure. In the “Preface”, Victor Eremita, a masked persona already at one remove from the author, explains how the fragmented, disparate papers of the book we are about to read came into his possession. After much deliberation—hesitating, suggestively, on the precipice of a decision—Eremita explains that he purchased a beautiful old escritoire from an old furniture dealer, eventually discovering both sets of manuscripts locked inside a clandestine, concealed compartment:
159 The Counterlife, 121. 160 Ibid, 123. 185
I unlocked the escritoire to pull out my money drawer and take with me what the house
could afford. What do you think! The drawer wouldn’t budge. […] A hatchet was
fetched. With it I dealt the escritoire a tremendous blow […] Whether my blow fell just
on that point, or the overall shock to the whole framework of the escritoire was what did
it, I don’t know; but what I do know is that there sprang open a secret door which I had
never noticed before. This enclosed a recess which naturally I hadn’t discovered either.
Here to my great surprise I found a mass of papers, the papers that form the content of the
present work.161
After explaining this extraordinary discovery, Eremita describes his scrupulous editorial process, sifting the manuscripts via the distinctive markings of each figure’s handwriting and their consistent tones and arguments, arranging the text into the eventual argumentative structure of
Either/Or. From the slippery uncertainties of his metafictional conceit, Kierkegaard erects a linear, hierarchical structure for the dialogue that follows.
Roth reworks the crucial aspects of Kierkegaard’s playful self-reflexive frame. The
Counterlife is constructed around its own similar instance found papers; however, Roth embeds the discovery of the manuscripts that comprise each of the chapters of the novel inside the diegesis of the narrative itself. In the fourth section, “Gloucestershire”, Henry stumbles across the drafts of the very book we are reading. The way in which Roth depicts the discovery purposefully evokes Eremita’s own unearthing of the papers of Either/Or. As he ransacks his brother’s apartment, desperate to protect his own secrets, Henry encounters “Draft #2” of The
Counterlife standing rather enigmatically “at the center of Nathan’s desk.”162 Where Either/Or erects a framing structure with which to stage its existential argument, holding the philosophical
161 Either/Or, 30. 162 The Counterlife, 225. 186
dialogue between the two sets of papers at a distance, The Counterlife subsumes its metafictional dimensions inside the convolutions and contradictions of the story. At the level of its self- reflexive structure, the novel moves decidedly against the clarity of the debate implicitly advanced by the form of Kierkegaard’s text. In Roth’s reworking, “the reality of choosing,” as the A/B structure of Either/Or implies, offers no escape from misperception.163 To choose in The
Counterlife is only to enter further into the confusion. Where Kierkegaard’s dialectic text deploys the inbuilt structure of an argument as the light guiding us towards wisdom, the form of
The Counterlife suggests that quarrel and contradiction are just features of being alive. The fight, unending and unresolved, goes on.
And Zuckerman says as much, newly frustrated by his own inability to live beyond antagonism, as The Counterlife comes to a close. In a resonant move immediately following
Zuckerman’s ferocious argument with Maria at the end of the novel, the fight with the intellectual interlocuter purportedly “better” than Kierkegaard, at least when it comes to demonstrating the inescapable frame of human conflict, Roth engages the novel’s crucial intertext directly at the same time that he refers obliquely to the metafictional structure of the very book we are reading:
Imagine. Because of how I’d been provoked by Sarah in the church and then affronted in
the restaurant, it was conceivable that my marriage was about to break up. Maria had said
it was just too stupid, but stupidity happens unfortunately to be real, and no less capable
of governing the mind than fear, lust, or anything else. The burden isn’t either/or,
consciously choosing from possibilities equally difficult and regrettable—it’s
and/and/and/and/and as well. Life is and: the accidental and the immutable, the elusive
163 The Essential Kierkegaard, 75. 187
and the graspable, the bizarre and the predictable, the actual and the potential, all the
multiplying realities, entangled, overlapping, colliding, conjoined—plus the multiplying
illusions! This times this times this times this … Is an intelligent human being likely to be
much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? I didn’t think so when I
left the house.164
Most critics correctly recognise the five-chapter structure of The Counterlife reflected in the
“multiplying realities” of Zuckerman’s “and/and/and/and/and,” pointing to the way in which each section of the novel rewrites the crucial details of the preceding section.165 What many have missed, however, is the powerful sense in which the text engages, opposes, and renegotiates
Kierkegaard’s mercurial study of choice as it arrives at this concluding logic. Zuckerman’s memorable pronouncement at the end of The Counterlife—“the burden isn’t either/or”—stands in combative relation to the book’s central intertext; in this pivotal novel, Roth moves decisively beyond the Kierkegaardian example that seems to have preoccupied him for years, though he would continue to allude and to refer to the philosopher’s thought in subsequent works. As mentor in contradiction, arguing with Kierkegaard shapes much of what is most distinctive about
The Counterlife. But Roth concludes with a very different vision of the vicissitudes of experience.
Late in Either/Or, when Judge Vilhelm critiques the self-indulgence of ‘A’, he could almost be talking directly to Zuckerman: “A person who aesthetically considers a whole range of life-tasks, like you in the above, is more likely to arrive at a multiplicity than an either/or.”166 Sat in his newly renovated house, nestled cosily on the suburban banks of the Thames,
164 The Counterlife, 306. 165 See Derek Parker Royal, ‘Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism’, The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 29. 166 Either/Or, 485. 188
contemplating the possible dissolution of another marriage, collapsing in time, still suffering the jet lag from his flight back from Tel Aviv the previous day, Zuckerman’s reverberant coda on the meaning of The Counterlife—“Life is and”—seems as sensible and as accurate a reply as can be.
189
Chapter 3. Holes in the Fabric
I. Finding the “Other Europe”
In a letter dated December 1978, the novelist Ivan Klíma wrote to Philip Roth from
Czechoslovakia to catalogue only the most recent of the daily humiliations imposed by the
Soviet regime. The most alarming new development, Klíma explains, involved the persecution of the writer Jiří Grůša, detained and arrested by the Czechoslovak secret police, the notorious
Státní bezpečnost (StB). Roth himself had been harassed by the StB the previous spring. “It happened in June—shortly before tenth anniversary of the August 68,” Klíma writes, “and the situation at that time was really very depressive and difficult.”1
Such incidents were typical of the oppressive approach adopted during the period of
‘normalizace’ (normalization), the pervasive crackdown directed from Moscow and imposed by the Husák regime through the 1970s and 1980s as a consequence of events during the Prague
Spring.2 Normalization entailed the deployment of both hard and soft power from the newly solidified state; military force and strict cultural censorship combined to constrain channels of dissent in a country small and compact enough for everything to be monitored. Writers were deemed to represent a persistent and meaningful threat to this enforced atmosphere of social obedience—a fact ironically confirmed twelve years later by the remarkable ascendency of the self-consciously bookish Václav Havel, propelled to the presidency by the signatures behind
1 Letter to Roth, December 1978. Philip Roth Papers, Box 17, Folder 7. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. In the removed quotation, Klíma expresses his frustration at the dire situation for writers in Czechoslovakia. 2 For a concise discussion of the historical significance of the Prague Spring, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage, [2005] 2010), 436-447. Judt concludes his analysis thus: “The illusion that Communism was reformable, that Stalinism had been a wrong turning, a mistake that could still be corrected […] that illusion was crushed under the tanks on August 21st 1968 and it never recovered.” 190
Charter 77.3 In 1978, such an astonishing political development would have seemed more likely to occur in one of Havel’s absurdist plays than on the cold, damp stones of Wenceslas Square.
Roth’s engagement with Eastern Europe during the later phases of the Cold War was both intense and consequential, and his friendship with novelists such as Klíma would make his life during this period particularly interesting. More significantly, though, Roth’s sustained interactions with the literatures of the “Other Europe” would also decisively shape many subsequent developments in his writing. This chapter traces the most significant ways in which
Roth’s negotiations with the “Other Europe” propelled the growing historical emphasis and political complexity of his own fiction. Where previous critics have tended to limit their discussions of this dimension of Roth’s work to the few explicit appearances that his time traveling inside Czechoslovakia makes inside his texts—in short, taking stock of the international settings of The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Prague Orgy (1985)—I show instead how this formative transnational context contoured many of his most innovative and arresting novels. More particularly, I examine how Roth’s various interactions with the Eastern bloc drove the increasing sophistication with which he explored the collision between the fictional and the historical.
Speaking from within the critical consensus that has coalesced around the historical turn in Roth’s major novels of the 1990s as representing a pivot towards the United States, Shostak aptly notes that the questions “what is history? How can one know history? How can one write it?” intensify in Roth’s later books, as he confronts some of the defining moments of postwar
American life, wrestling with the relationship between agency and determinism against the
3 For an account of the Velvet Revolution sensitive to this aspect of Havel’s ascendency, see Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990), 78-130. 191
panoramic backgrounds of national crises such as the Vietnam War, the McCarthy hearings, and the Lewinsky scandal.4 But we need to understand this urge to scrutinise the connections between self and nationhood, and the formal techniques Roth uses to investigate them, in the context that did the most to shape his sense of relations between the literary and the historical.
Finding Eastern Europe, I argue, was the spark that lit the fire.
And the fire would continue to burn. This chapter explores Roth’s curious role as an agent of cultural transmission across the porous boundary of the Iron Curtain. It also examines
Roth’s work as General Editor of the Penguin series “Writers from the Other Europe” through the 1970s and 1980s—a project that exerted an enormous influence on his own fiction in a range of overt and discreet ways. Curiously, the long evolution of American Pastoral (1997), from
1972 to 1997, tells precisely this story. Early drafts of the novel were committed to paper immediately after Roth’s initial contact with Czechoslovakia under normalization, and the protracted development of American Pastoral highlights many of the most significant ways in which the “Other Europe” shaped Roth’s evolving historical sensibility. But the wider importance of Roth’s encounters with the Eastern bloc can be felt throughout all his subsequent work, from the exchange dynamics that structure important texts in his middle period to the subtle echoes which reverberate throughout his later novels. Far from forming an occupational hobby or enigmatic distraction, Roth’s engagement with Eastern Europe was absolutely crucial to the shifting formal complexity of his own fiction.
As Jiří Holý explains in his historical analysis of normalization, state censorship necessarily occurred on a dramatic scale inside Czechoslovak society, precisely because the world of letters remained culturally significant, capable of influencing both hearts and minds:
4 Debra Shostak, Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, 230. 192
Public resistance to normalization was crushed by force […] Up to half a million were
sacked from their jobs. About 120,000 Czech citizens remained abroad after 1968 […]
People were forced into humiliating self-criticism [...] Editors, critics and scientists
became stokers, night-watchmen and window cleaners […] Secret instructions about the
withdrawal of books from libraries affected hundreds of authors. In all about a million
volumes were withdrawn […] vigilant control was maintained both through the collusion
of responsible editors in newspapers, reviews and publishing houses and a form of self-
censorship which removed in advance any sensitive themes or undesirable expressions.5
With dark irony, the era of normalization was grimly referred to at the time as “Stalinism with a human face,” a punitive parody of previous social aspirations. “The accusation against [Grůša] was very simple,” Klíma explains to Roth in 1978: “he made nineteen typewritten copies of his novel. Nothing more.”6 But, in the same letter, Klíma rejects the possibility of emigrating to escape the demoralising situation, severing contact with his nation and his language.7 He then closes his note with the modest but firm assertion that a life of literary resistance is not lived in vain: “As long as I can write and publish /though only abroad/ I have a feeling all my
“sufferings” are not senseless.”8 The power that remains to the powerless is, above all, vested in the power of words.9
5 Jiří Holý, Writers Under Siege: Czech Literature Since 1945 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 131-133. 6 Letter to Roth, December 1978. Philip Roth Papers, Box 17, Folder 7. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions 7 At the opening of Klima’s novel Love and Garbage (1986), the narrator voices similar sentiments to those expressed in the earlier letter to Roth: “In reality I wanted to return home, to the place where there were people I was fond of, where I was able to speak fluently, to listen to my native language.” Love and Garbage (London: Vintage, [1986] 2002), 2. 8 Letter to Roth, December 1978. Philip Roth Papers, Box 17, Folder 7. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. In the removed quotation, Klíma expresses his determination to continue to write and to publish. 9 The letter subtly echoes Havel’s famous essay, The Power of the Powerless (1978), published in samizdat form in the same year that Klíma wrote to Roth from Prague. 193
In 1978, Klíma was updating Roth on a political situation with which he already had firsthand experience. As Roth later explained, “From 1972 through 1977, I traveled to Prague every spring for a week or ten days to see a group of writers, journalists, historians, and professors there who were being persecuted by the Soviet-backed totalitarian regime.”10 An initial visit to see Kafka’s city developed into a long, intensive engagement not only with the political situation in Czechoslovakia but a wider fascination with Eastern Europe—its particular traditions, its distinct artistic cultures, and its importance and systematic degradation during the wider geopolitical struggles of the Cold War. Caught between world powers and darkened by the harrowing shadow of the Holocaust, Eastern Europe was a place where the moral stakes of everything seemed almost unbearably intense.
After returning from his first visit to Prague, Roth made considerable efforts to befriend a number of Czech exiles in New York to learn more about the postwar situation in the country and the communities affected. In 1972, he met Antonin Liehm, and he subsequently began attending Liehm’s weekly classes in Czech history, literature and film at College of Staten
Island, City University of New York. Each spring, he returned to Prague to engage with the writers and intellectuals being oppressed and to learn more about their situation and their work.
Klíma and his wife Helena acted as Roth’s principal guides during these trips as, unusually, they were both competent English speakers. But Roth actually interacted with a startling range of
Czech and Eastern European dissidents, artists, and writers during this period.11
10 “A Czech Education”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 368. 11 Between 1972-1977 Roth met, amongst others, Klíma, Kundera, Liehm, Vaculík, Havel, Ivan Passer, Jiří Weiss, Miroslav Holub, Rita Klímová, Tadeusz Konwicki, and Kazimierz Brandys. Back in the United States, he also met and befriended Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Manea. 194
Roth’s experiences and perceptions of life in the Eastern bloc were evidently vivid.
Writing about Czechoslovakia under Husák at a PEN Literary Gala in 2013, Roth describes his memories of the period as an invaluable and lasting “education”:
This education included visits with Ivan to the places where his colleagues, like Ivan
stripped of their rights by the authorities, were working at the menial jobs to which the
omnipresent regime had maliciously assigned them. Once they had been thrown out of
the Writers’ Union, they were forbidden to publish or to teach or to travel or to drive a
car or to earn a proper livelihood each at his or her preferred calling. […] So it was, so it
is, in the clutches of totalitarianism. Every day brings a new heartache, a new tremor,
more helplessness, more hopelessness, and yet another unthinkable forfeiture of freedom
and free thought in a censored society already bound and gagged.12
Roth’s grasp of the sharper edges of the Soviet system in the 1970s, and evident attachment to the strident rhetoric that flourished at the time, were not limited to these kinds of stylistic flourishes, remembered and dispatched with gusto following a brief brush against another world; his own personal experience of the regime concluded with a palpable demonstration of the realities of state control. On his final trip to Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, Roth’s hotel room was bugged and his telephone monitored. More threateningly, a plainclothesman followed him through the city as he interacted with some of the writers he had befriended on previous visits. He was then detained and questioned by the StB, and, clearly shaken, left the country the following day. His entry visa was subsequently revoked. With grim predictability, Klíma was also picked up and interrogated about the nature of the famous American author’s interest
Czechoslovak affairs. Roth would not return to the country until after the Velvet Revolution.
12 Philip Roth, “A Czech Education”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 368-369. 195
But, in a crucial sense, he never really left. “As long as I can write and publish /though only abroad/ I have a feeling all my “sufferings” are not senseless.”13 Initially it was this predicament, working to ensure that the dissident literary figures inside Czechoslovakia could continue with their own writing as best as possible, that Roth applied himself to after receiving his unforgettable “Czech education”. When he returned to the United States, he devised an ingenious plan to help fund those who were worst afflicted by the regime’s strict ban on publishing their own material inside the country. As Roth later wrote in a letter mailed to a number of literary reviews and magazines across the United States, courting attention for Czech novelists in the international press in the hope of furnishing them with some small measure of protection, the financial situations of dissident writers in the bloc were often dire and debilitating: “All their foreign royalties are taxed at about 90%, a punitive measure by which the government has attempted to impoverish and demoralize about a dozen of the most gifted writers in Czechoslovakia.”14
Roth set up a bank account in New York, playfully called the Ad Hoc Czech fund, and he enlisted fifteen literary friends to contribute a hundred dollars each month, pairing them with a corresponding author in Prague. “It made it more personal if they had a name rather than a fund,”
Roth explained to Claudia Pierpont Roth, in her biographical study of his writing life:
On that principle, he set up Arthur Schlesinger with a historian and Arthur Miller with a
playwright; other writers he enlisted included John Updike, Alison Lurie, John Cheever,
William Styron, and John Hersey. On the Czech side, Roth notes, Klima was on the list
13 Letter to Roth, December 1978. Philip Roth Papers, Box 17, Folder 7. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 14 Letter dated September 10, 1975. Philip Roth Papers, Box 27, Folder 1. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. In the letter, Roth describes the debilitating financial conditions which afflicted Czechoslovakian authors. 196
the first year but took himself off the next, when his situation improved. […] Kundera,
always a “lone wolf,” in Roth’s description, was never part of the plan.15
Roth’s role as an active agent of subversion during the 1970s, siphoning money through the Iron
Curtain to assist Czech dissidents in their activities, was neither a benign hobby nor a flirtation with international hazards undertaken for aesthetic ends. His Ad Hoc fund shows just how implicated and politically active he became in a cultural conflict that helped to redefine the received terms of the Cold War. Roth’s persistent attachment to the explanatory power of the concept of “totalitarianism”, in both his critical nonfiction and his own novels, owes as much to his energetic response to his “Czech education” as it does his earlier exposure to the reformed liberalism of the New York Intellectuals, characterised by a heavy, world-weary retreat from faith in the reformist powers of the state.16 And his determination to assist someone like Ludvik
Vaculík, one of the more committed agitators against the Czechoslovak regime whom Roth got to know, with both money and opportunities to disseminate material, suggests a determination to influence the social situation in Eastern Europe, rather than simply to understand it.17
And yet Roth’s activities as financier of subversive activity can scarcely be said to amount to the kind of systematic and organised coordination between the power of the American state, artistic production, and aesthetic form that occupies Greg Barnhisel’s detailed and provocative account of the close collaboration between the purveyors of postwar modernism and
15 Claudia Pierpont Roth, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2013), 92. 16 In his study of postwar American fiction, Thomas Hill Schaub traces the ascendency of a liberal consensus, hostile to social reform, that actively moulded itself in opposition to the totalitarian mirror in the East: “Thus out of the complexities of recent history emerges a fairly simplistic narrative, almost mythic in its dimensions.” American Fiction in the Cold War (Wisconsin: University Press, 1991), 10. Though Roth’s initial contact with Czechoslovakia may have taken place somewhere within these broad cultural terms, as his engagement evolved, it was precisely this kind of thinking that he became determined to disrupt. 17 Not only was Vaculík instrumental to the activities of the Prague Spring, authoring the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto of June 1968, he was also one of the most active samizdat authors in the decades that followed, helping to found Pelice (Padlock), one of the most significant outlets for Czech dissident writing. 197
the numerous, interconnected arms of the federal government of the United States.18 Barnhisel’s assertion that the 1940s and 1950s witnessed a purposeful retooling and political redeployment of modernist artistic forms—“a rhetorical reframing that capitalized on the conjunctions of government, business, and elite cultural institutions (museums, foundations, and universities)”— has only limited explanatory purchase on the function of Roth’s Ad Hoc Czech fund and his interactions with writers in the Eastern bloc generally.19 Most significantly, the consequential part of Roth’s engagement with the cultural politics of the Cold War—1972 to 1989—falls in the later period of the conflict, beyond the purview of Barnhisel’s analysis and the structural tectonics he assiduously maps. Roth’s moment of transnational influence and heightened activity occurred after events in 1968 dramatically disrupted the global scene. Civil and urban unrest from Chicago to Washington D.C., Paris to Prague, and the tumultuous social convulsions that drove people to the streets and both capitalist and Communist governments scrambling to react, radically altered the relations between state, citizen, and ideology on both sides of the Iron
Curtain.
In his masterful analysis of the postwar period, historian Tony Judt summarises the transitional years of the early 1970s, after these momentous moments of great social agitation, in
18 In the course of his analysis, exploring such key case studies as the funding Encounter magazine received from the CIA, the numerous Book Programs directed by the State Department, which include the occasional hilarious cameo from an inebriated William Faulkner, and the more diffuse interconnections between New Critical interpretive practice, the carefully calibrated international reception of Abstract Expressionism, and other discursive aspects of postwar American modernist activity, Barnhisel persuasively demonstrates his overarching claim: “The success of Cold War modernism wasn’t just a matter of promoting an American variety of the movement as the pinnacle of modernism; Cold War modernism redefined modernism as an affirmation of Western bourgeois liberal values that were considered particularly integral in the American self-construction. […] It may have even helped win the cultural Cold War.” Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 10-11&24.
19 Unless Blake Bailey’s access to material beyond the papers housed in the Philip Roth Papers in the Library of Congress reveals otherwise, we will have to conclude that the Czech Ad Hoc Fund took place beyond the reach and direction of the federal government of the United States. 198
distinctly deflationary terms, emphasising the overarching sense of political disillusionment characterising the cultural atmospheres in both East and West:
The deflation of causes—and the demobilization of the coming decades—thus confers in
retrospect an air of failure upon the decade of frenetic political activity [the Sixties]. But
in certain important respects the Sixties were actually a vital decade for the opposite
reason: they were the moment when Europeans in both halves of the continent began
their definitive turn away from ideological politics.20
So too in America.21 Though a rather lazy but often reiterated reading of the conservative, or even neoconservative, sympathies of American Pastoral has done much to persuade many to the contrary, Roth’s own politics had certainly shifted by the time he reached Prague, reflecting something of this wider sense of disenchantment in the state, principally on account of his active and pronounced opposition to the Vietnam War. By 1972, as he arranged to send money into
Czechoslovakia, Roth’s suspicions about, and alienation from, an American government led by
Richard Nixon were arguably as formative as his sense of injustice at the persecution of his new
Eastern European friends. In an interview with Alan Lelchuk originally published in Atlantic
Monthly to coincide with the release of Our Gang (1971), Roth would even use the proverbial invocation of Orwellian “newspeak” when characterising the rhetorical character of the
20 Judt, Postwar, 448. 21 In her recent political history of the United States, Jill Lepore describes the transitional years of the early 1970s— a time of shattered illusions and encircling “stagflation”—as a similar period of disenchantment and diminishing ideological confidence: “In the 1970s, many Americans began to wonder whether their nation’s fall had begun. Were its best days in the past? Had its ideals failed?” These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: Norton, 2019), 656. 199
incumbent American administration to associate the nefarious activities of the White House with the totalitarian aspirations of the Third Reich and the USSR.22
For all the impressive names that Roth persuaded to contribute to the Ad Hoc Czech fund, its operations were also necessarily less than professional for the plan genuinely to succeed and the money to reach the intended writers in Prague:
Of course, the intended recipients’ mail was routinely opened, so the Ad Hoc funders
couldn’t just send them checks. “I took the money over to a downmarket travel agency in
Yorkville,” Roth explains today. “I was looking for one that was really grubby, less likely
to be infiltrated by the government, and I found one with papers piled up in the windows,
really slovenly, and this guy behind the counter who looked like the fat headwaiter in
Casablanca.” These places specialized in getting money to family members behind the
Iron Curtain. [...] Klima made sure that all the coupons had been received, and he would
write discreetly either to his sister in the United States or to Roth. “It was a hole in the
fabric,” Roth acknowledges, “and it worked.”23
In his determination to assist Czech dissidents financially, Roth undoubtedly entangled himself in the cultural conflict of the late Cold War, though his participatory role in stoking geopolitical tensions was far less substantial than an earlier generation of prominent American literary figures, whose work became fully enmeshed in the strategic manoeuvres of the government of the United States. His ability actually to get money across the semi-porous divide of the Iron
Curtain, though, was no small feat, however low-key the plan was. The Ad Hoc Czech Fund
22 “It took an Orwell,” Roth notes, “and a Second World War, and savage totalitarian dictatorships in Germany and Russia—to make us realize that this comical rhetoric could be turned into an instrument of political tyranny.” “On Satirizing Nixon”, Our Gang (New York: Random House, 1973 [1971]), 215. 23 Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 92. 200
was, in its own modest way, a very real success.24 But the truly consequential “hole in the fabric” that Roth exploited between 1974 and 1989 was much more explicitly textual in nature. “Writers from the Other Europe”, the landmark series that Roth proposed and edited for Penguin Books, certainly left its mark on the shifting discursive terms of the late Cold War. It also drove Roth’s continuing interactions with the literatures of Eastern Europe, and substantially influenced crucial developments in his own fiction.
II. “It Was My Own Little Hogarth Press”
“The accusation against him was very simple,” Klíma wrote to Roth in 1978, describing the representative plight of Jiří Grůša: “he made nineteen typewritten copies of his novel. Nothing more.”25 The charge levelled by the StB related to Grůša’s participation in the underground literary culture that sprang up in response to the bans and prohibitions on publishing enforced during the height of normalization. As Holý notes, Czechoslovak literature split into three distinct areas of activity during the early 1970s: domestic “approved” publications, brought out by the state-monitored presses; domestic unpublished material, colloquially known as “samizdat” literature, in which typewritten copies of novels and pamphlets circulated among social networks and dissident communities; and foreign publishers set up by Czechs and Slovaks living in exile, such as Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto, run by Zdena Salivarová-Škvorecká and Josef
24 A telling indication of the nature of its operations while active, Roth’s Ad Hoc Czech Fund fell apart after a few years when PEN took over in order to make the donations from the American side tax deductible. The PEN committee responsible was unwilling to restrict the procedure to Czechoslovakia, Roth explained to Pierpont, as such an arrangement played “into the State Department’s hands.” Consequently, the arrangement collapsed. See Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 98. 25 Philip Roth Papers, Box 17, Folder 7. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 201
Škvorecký, and Index in Cologne.26 Such publications gradually became known in common parlance as “tamizdat” literature—foreign venues for dissident writing, produced largely for growing international readerships. Grůša had produced a samizdat novel, and it had been discovered.
His crime was, in fact, a widespread and consequential part of Czechoslovak literary life during the era of normalization, when Roth made his annual visits. “Samizdat became the new phenomenon of the age,” Holý writes:
While attempts were made after 1948 [the advent of Czech postwar Stalinism] to
preserve unpublished texts and prove that it was not possible for creative work to be
completely wiped out, samizdat was striving for something more; it was to be circulated
among readers creating an alternative means of communication and it was to function as
part of independent culture and independent thought.27
It was this aspect of the dissident culture in Prague that most energised and engaged Roth. The samizdat moment he encountered during his trips to Eastern Europe in the early 1970s seemed to confer upon the tension between artistic autonomy and social implication—a tussle that preoccupied and shaped his early novels—a new kind of political intensity and a greater set of moral stakes. It was also truly dangerous. Unsurprisingly, the peculiar dynamics of samizdat literature, intense and arresting, would occupy Roth’s imagination and continue to affect his sense of the interactions between words and power for decades to come.
Part of the magnetic attraction, at least initially, devolved from the inevitable glamour surrounding the newly proliferating samizdat culture that Roth discovered; outlets such as
26 Holý, Writers Under Siege: Czech Literature Since 1945, 136. 27 Ibid, 148. 202
Vaculík’s Petlice (Padlock), one of the best known of several prominent samizdat publications, became famous spaces for promoting and circulating genuinely original material.28 Almost as soon as the clandestine model of distributing typed manuscripts began, samizdat writers became self-conscious about the romantic energy engendered by their illicit methods of distribution.
“Samizdat was unconquerable,” Klíma would later claim, reflecting on the unusually intense relationship that this underground literary culture nurtured between the author and his readership:
“Almost everyone “lucky” enough to own a samizdat was surrounded by a circle interested in borrowing it.”29 The imaginative solidarity fostered when a reader risks as much as the writer in taking time with the text was not just defiantly political; for those who found sustenance and inspiration in the proliferating samizdat writings circulating in Prague, the experience clearly bordered on the erotic.
Roth’s imagination was not simply captured, however, by a heroic vision of the writer defying the systems of state censorship in ways analogous to his own earlier experiences violating certain prominent taboos. The distribution of samizdat manuscripts offered a vision of artistic activity that was both genuinely subversive, and, at the same time, wholly unconstrained by the language and historical determinism of leftist praxis, or lingering notions of writing in
Sartrean “good faith,” which were losing their attraction to numerous writers, artists, and commentators during the later phases of the Cold War.30 With many newly suspicious of the moralizing binaries and teleological imperatives of earlier generations, fresh aesthetic models
28 See Holý’s discussion of the specific significance of Petlice in Writers Under Siege: Czech Literature Since 1945, 148-154. 29 “Conversation in Prague with Ivan Klíma”, Shop Talk: A Writer and his Colleagues and Their Work (New York: Vintage, 2002), 51. 30 In his memoir, Klíma writes about his own disappointment with Sartre after hearing his observations about socialism in Europe. Sartre’s attachment to the tragic grandeur of the project in the wake of historical revelations about Stalinist atrocities, articulated during a meeting between the world-famous Parisian intellectual and local dissidents in Prague, receives the short shrift it deserves: “Certainly, I didn’t say this aloud, but hell was indeed a wonderful theme, if you didn’t have to live in it.” My Crazy Century: A Memoir trans. Craig Cravens (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 176. 203
that disabled prior assumptions seemed especially desirable. Roth, recently disabused of many of his previous presumptions, was keen to move beyond the received doctrines that drove an earlier stage of the conflict. Always apprehensive about claims of moral and political utility made on behalf of fiction during the height of the Jamesian revival, by the early 1970s Roth was evidently searching for new formal modes with which further to establish his distance from the conservative ossifications of “moral realism”.
In their disillusionment with the Communist system, the samizdat writers whom Roth met and supported, figures such as Klíma, Vaculík, and Havel, moved to recover a playful, anti- instrumental aesthetics that was nevertheless deeply politically engaged. The world of underground Czechoslovak literature that Roth encountered appeared to be operating on the side of the oppressed without subordinating either literary form or patterns of reception to the imperatives of a great, transcendent cause. In their embrace of experimentation, the major samizdat writers specialised in contorting certainties and commitments. Just as a benevolent vision of American exceptionalism was collapsing under the weight of deception and the scale of the atrocities surrounding the conflict in Vietnam, samizdat literature seemed to liberate the concept of a politically subversive literary text from the overdetermined language of the kind of
Marxist-Leninism that, nostalgia often permits us to forget, seemed to expire with the near- simultaneous arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague and the euphoric display of placards of Stalin crowding-out the faces of Parisian students as they confidently assumed the mantel of the revolutionary class. In 1968, images of crowds wielding Soviet and Maoist iconography as they marched, vociferously, for the kinds of personal freedoms that would soon come to resemble the axioms of the burgeoning consumerism of the West, circulated at precisely the same time that
Moscow extinguished the movement towards a free press and a multi-party system in
204
Czechoslovakia with tanks, strict government directives, and five hundred thousand Warsaw
Pact troops heralding a dogmatic return to Stalinist orthodoxy.31 The contradictions of ‘political commitment’ at the beginning of the 1970s, in other words, were an optical absurdity through which numerous convictions were duly scrambled.32 Roth seems to have been unusually sensitive to the collapse.
For Roth, the exciting, oppositional phenomenon of samizdat literature seemed more presciently and aesthetically alert to the extraordinary political ironies of the moment than either the prophets of the counterculture or the growing chorus of social reactionaries battling over the future back in the United States. For the most part, the dissident authors in Czechoslovakia necessarily wrote in an ironic relation to history—a lesson that would later prove instructive for
Roth, as he moved to fictionalise the social turbulence of his own nation and his own era. In the short term, the models that Roth encountered in the samizdat writers he began to read seem to have helped his own fiction progress from the slapstick modes adopted in the texts he composed in the years immediately after Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), before the lessons of his “Czech education” truly left their mark. The wounded outrage and glib satire of Our Gang and the hallucinatory strain of The Breast (1972), for instance, were soon jettisoned in favour of the subtler ironies and more nuanced provocations of My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of
Desire—texts that draw both directly and discreetly on his experiences in Prague.
31 See Judt, Postwar, 444. 32 Looking back on events in Paris at the end of the 1960s, historian Eric Hobsbawm wryly writes, “The year 1968 may prove to be less of a turning-point in twentieth-century history than 1965, which has no political significance whatever, but was the first year in which the French clothing industry for the first time produced more women’s trousers than skirts […] it may be argued that the really significant index of the history of the second half of the twentieth century is not ideology or student occupations, but the forward march of blue jeans.” Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Abacus, 2003), 261. Curiously, Roth’s earliest drafts of American Pastoral make much of the historical symbolism of various characters’ desires to live in a world defined by the availability of different varieties of blue jeans. 205
It is possible that his new exposure to Czech absurdist forms, replete with their own ample, reworked gothic tendencies, actually helped Roth reshape the autobiographical material he had worked on for years into the final, “warped” narrative structure of My Life as a Man—a novel that dramatises the inability to capture an experience accurately or visualise it without violently distorting the picture. Certainly, the slanted literary optics of the text concludes with one of Roth’s more direct attacks on the highfalutin literary discourse that flourished during the height of the Cold War, and which earned such scorn among the samizdat community in Prague.
In bringing My Life as a Man to its close, Roth borrows something of the dissidents’ sceptical self-mockery when weighing the claims of American cultural triumphalism. This is most apparent in the intertextual episode at the end of the novel, in a scene whose comedy issues from an uncomfortable play on aestheticized misogyny.33 Converting the stylised sexual violence of
Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931) into a farcical incident with a can-opener—a curious, domestic emblem of Nixonian confidence in the American consumer machine—My Life as a Man finishes with a particularly cutting joke at the expense of the idea of everlasting artistic eminence fostered by the indelible virtues of mankind:
During the night I paused at times in reading Maureen to read Faulkner. “I believe that
man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of
compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” I read that Nobel Prize speech from beginning
to end, and I thought, “And what the hell are you talking about? How could you write The
33 That Peter Tarnopol—Roth’s enraged and endlessly self-pitying narrator—is the evident butt of the joke does not make the attitude towards his ex-wife’s body any less disturbing and problematic in this outwardly comic and bathetic scene. 206
Sound and the Fury, how could you write The Hamlet, how could you write about
Temple Drake and Popeye, and write that?34
“Compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” Where Faulkner’s famous bromides about the innate marriage between freedom and human dignity helped to feed (and were fed by) the cultural arm of the United States Cold War machine, Czech novelists such as Vaculík were deliberately pulling apart the extraordinary, accumulated power of the Party’s own ideological platitudes.35
The Axe (1966), Vaculík’s first novel, a text Roth is likely to have read during his early experiences travelling to Prague, narrates a young journalist’s increasing disenchantment with the official interpretation of life sustained by the all-encompassing language of the Communist authorities. As he reflects on the sad, stoic alienation of his father from his working life as a carpenter and woodsman, a man ruined by the policies of collectivisation which he once loyally supported, it is the distorting power of cliché that Vaculík’s narrator comes sceptically to reject with the greatest bitterness and the sharpest mistrust.
That Roth was actively involved in the transfer of samizdat material during these years is certainly probable; lacking a working knowledge of the Czech language, his most significant role is likely to have involved bringing manuscripts out of Czechoslovakia, assisting in the movement of material over the border to international tamizdat venues. But it is not possible to reconstruct an exact account of which manuscripts he was involved in transporting across the Iron Curtain from the papers currently available in the archive in the Library of Congress. Roth’s major contribution to the dissemination of texts written by dissident European writers, though, came in the form of his own editorial project—the “Writers from the Other Europe” series. As he explained to Pierpont, he quickly recognised that his own usefulness lay in the fact that he could
34 My Life as a Man (New York: Vintage, 1993), 326. 35 See Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, 126. 207
help generate a much wider international readership for the Eastern European writers whom he began seriously to read and to study.
In 1973, Roth met with Penguin books and pitched the idea of a paperback series of
English translations of enigmatic and largely unknown writers from across Eastern Europe, focusing in particular on material from territories currently in the bloc.36 Tellingly, the first texts to appear in 1975 were written by Czech friends whom Roth knew well. The inaugural editions published in the series were Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs and Kundera’s Laughable Loves. But, as
Brian K. Goodman writes, in the only sustained critical discussion of Roth’s landmark series, the project soon grew:
The Other Europe would eventually expand beyond Czechoslovakia to encompass
Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia and introduce literary intellectuals like György Konrád
and Danilo Kiš to Western readers […] By the time the series came to an end in 1989, it
had published 17 works by 11 different authors, most of whom Roth never met. Although
the series sprang from a very specific political context and a particular set of personal
relationships, the Other Europe would constitute an alternative literary space that pushed
the cultural logic of the Cold War in new directions.37
Roth’s involvement as “General Editor” of the series was far from ceremonial. Between 1974 and 1989, he was continually reading new candidates, choosing appropriate cover-art, and liaising with the various writers and/or their estates. The project specialised in taking unknown voices and amplifying them, often securing the license on a novel already translated into English
36 The geographical specificity, and the politics of occupation that this specificity implicitly raised, was always central to Roth’s “Other Europe” project. Bookmarks produced by Penguin to promote the series included a map outlining the territories of the bloc. See Philip Roth Papers, Box 255, Folder 16. 37 Brian K. Goodman, “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War,” American Literary History, vol.27, no.4 (2015), 725. 208
but which remained virtually unread. Perhaps most significantly, Roth commissioned an introduction by an esteemed, attention-getting writer for each new volume. With Roth’s considerable encouragement, well known literary figures such as John Updike, Carlos Fuentes, and Angela Carter lent their own reputations in the form of these introductions, helping to build and shape the reception of the Eastern European writers selected.38 Roth wrote the introduction to Laughable Loves himself, and his praise of Kundera’s erotic playfulness clearly sought to capitalise on his own reputation as a scandalizing provocateur on Kundera’s behalf. “I wanted to send them into the world with a flourish,” Roth told Pierpont, “it was my own little Hogarth
Press.”39
The cultural impact of the project was considerable. All of the authors included in
“Writers from the Other Europe” increased their readership significantly, and most of the texts went on to be reprinted many times in alternative forms once the series was disbanded. In the case of figures such as Kundera and Bruno Schulz, Roth helped to construct particularly prestigious and lasting reputations.40 Kundera’s meteoric rise and the esteem in which his fiction is held in the West are well documented; Schulz moved from near complete obscurity towards a compelling kind of niche, claiming the critical attention of such luminaries as Cynthia Ozick and
J.M. Coetzee, among many other famous international interpreters.41
38 Goodman, “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War”, 727. 39 Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 93. 40 Goodman makes a compelling case that Roth shaped the series around Kundera on account of the “counter- realist” tendencies of his fiction. It is equally plausible, however, that the concrete affirmation of early sales figures drove Roth to publish four of his books in the series. A memorandum from Penguin in 1989 confirms that Laughable Loves sold more than twenty times as many copies as The Guinea Pigs. See Philip Roth Papers, Box, 27, Folder 5. 41 Coetzee’s interest in Schulz marks yet another curious interaction between Roth and Coetzee, a much-neglected comparative context in Roth Studies. See “Bruno Schulz”, Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005 (London: Vintage, 2008), 65-78. 209
Significantly, many of the introductions included in “Writers from the Other Europe” looked to root the texts being published in fairly elastic, improvised artistic contexts, making transnational literary connections rather than offering politicized readings. Updike’s introduction to Schulz’s Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1979) is typical in this regard, expending considerable energy drawing parallels to Proust, Kafka, Borges, Kierkegaard, and
Conrad. His brief essay then culminates in a bouncy riff on the deep mysteries of the personal struggle, ingeniously transforming the mythopoeic Jewish fabulist, brutally murdered at the hands of the Nazis, into a slightly more eccentric practitioner of Updike’s own fictional mission of consecrating the mundane and the everyday.42 In Updike’s terms, Schulz could almost be understood to spring from the illustrious modern canon decking the shelves in his Massachusetts study, and not a Galician town violently occupied in the war.
Though the “Other Europe” series was evidently intended to help the dissidents Roth met in Prague with their very real struggles for freedom against the Soviet state, Roth made considerable efforts to shield the project from the rigid ideological oppositions that drove an earlier phase of the cultural conflict. “Writers from the Other Europe” purposefully elected to assume neither the posture of active resistance nor the discursive signatures of literary protest.
The note that Roth included on the inside page of each new publication, for instance, consciously emphasised literary merit over topical, political concerns; the texts published, the General Editor claimed, were being collected together on the basis of aesthetic value.43 And in his own introduction for Laughable Loves, after assembling the requisite textual collage—“something
42 Updike writes, “Personal experience taken cabalistically: This formula fits much modern fiction and, complain though we will, is hard to transcend. Being ourselves is the one religious experience we all have, an experience shareable only partially, through the exertions of talk and art.” “Introduction”, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass trans. Celina Wieniewska (London and New York: Penguin, 1979), xix. 43 Roth’s note reproduced in the front matter of each volume reads: “The purpose of this paperback series is to bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers. In many instances they will be writers who, though recognized as powerful forces in their own cultures, are virtually unknown in the West.” 210
like a cross between Dos Passos and Camus”—Roth makes his determination to free Kundera from a significance conferred solely from his political circumstances explicit: “I would think that like Holub and Vaculík, Milan Kundera too would prefer to find a readership in the West that was not drawn to his fiction because he is a writer who is oppressed by a Communist regime.”44
Indeed, the real pleasure of Kundera’s stories—and the commitment to a perverse kind of delight assumes the central pull of the writing, in Roth’s unconventional account—lies not in the acuity with which he probes the Eastern European predicament of a people occupied and demoralised; but rather, the significance of Laughable Loves emerges from Kundera’s capacity to transform such desolation into literary objects of enjoyment. Laughable Loves categorically does not derive from the political genres of protest or manifesto, Roth claims in the central argument of
“Introducing Milan Kundera”:
But connects in spirit as well as form to those humorous stories one hears by the
hundreds in Prague these days, stories such as a powerless or oppressed people are often
adept at telling themselves, and in which they seem to take an aesthetic pleasure—what
pleasure is there, otherwise?—from the very absurdities and paradoxes that characterize
their hardship and cause them pain.45
The unlikely perseverance of the playful imagination makes Kundera’s text worth celebrating.
But, oddly enough, it was through precisely these kinds of manoeuvres that Roth’s landmark series made one of its most significant political interventions. At the same time that it announced a specific intention to uncover material from the oppressed context of the Eastern bloc, “Writers from the Other Europe” also worked to undermine the strictly oppositional
44 Philip Roth, “Introducing Milan Kundera”, Laughable Loves (New York: Penguin, 1975), xii. 45 Roth, “Introducing Milan Kundera”, xviii. 211
structure of the divide. Roth edited his chosen Eastern European texts, in other words, into a series of porous literary communities that transgressed against the notion of a grand, overarching struggle between competing worlds and different ways of life. Consistently morally ambiguous, frequently antic and/or absurdist in inclination, and purposefully contextualised alongside modern fiction’s most esteemed and established innovators, the “Other Europe” project was conceptually distinct from the Western construction of previous formidable Cold War literary reputations, such as those of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.
Indeed, indomitable displays of ethical courage or prophetic wisdom were conspicuously absent in the texts chosen. From The Guinea Pigs to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in the pages of Roth’s own “little Hogarth Press”, the ideological logic of the conflict was being evoked only to be routinely ironized and subtly undermined.
The intensity of Roth’s commitment to “Writers from the Other Europe” during this period should not be underestimated. Goodman diligently shows just how engaged Roth was with establishing and developing the project. In the course of his narrative history of the series, he also makes a persuasive case for placing The Prague Orgy, Roth’s slight novella and slender epilogue to the Zuckerman Bound trilogy, at the centre of the author’s middle period, preferring the term “Prague Era” to the more common critical focus on the emergence of the narrative persona Nathan Zuckerman as the referential touchstone for this transitional phase.46 Goodman urges us to grant “Writers from the Other Europe” much more prominence in the growing conversation surrounding Roth’s fiction: “In promoting the Other Europe series, Roth was also proposing a new transnational context in which his evolving work might be read.”47 The
“counter-realist” tendencies of the material that Roth collated, edited, and distributed—these
46 Goodman, “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War”, 735. 47 Ibid, 735. 212
writers’ “angled and sometimes inverted vision,” as he explained it to Pierpont—provide a striking set of coordinates with which to dissect many of Roth’s subsequent texts.48 The histrionic form of Sabbath’s Theater (1995), the counter-factual imagination behind the The Plot
Against America (2004), and the more pervasive attachment to a “perverse attitude toward history” in the novels since The Counterlife (1986), reflect Roth’s continuing fascination with aesthetic models initially promoted in the Penguin project.49
Goodman gestures here towards a particularly pertinent line of inquiry. Roth’s involvement with “Writers from the Other Europe” remains massively neglected in the existing scholarship—it is this critical inattention that necessitates such an expansive outline of Roth’s encounter with the Eastern bloc at the beginning of this chapter.50 Admittedly, the critical picture of Roth’s transnational dimensions is widening, and one suspects that it is avenues of analysis invited with the opening of archives—personal, historical, and institutional—that will continue to drive our increasingly nuanced understanding of a truly global literary figure. Catherine
Morley has given us one vision of a richly transnational Roth, though her focus on the inherited genre of the epic conceals as many of the tensions that occur with transitions across continents and countries as it does reveal many suggestive textual vibrations.51 And the recent collection
Philip Roth and World Literature (2014), while staking everything on placing Roth in a
48 Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 93. 49 Goodman, “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War”, 735. 50 Goodman’s reliance on archive material that has only been available to scholars relatively recently is surely one reason why the significance of Roth’s enduring interest in Eastern Europe has been neglected. But the rigid perseverance of alternative interpretive frameworks has also contributed to the problem. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, for instance, provides its own transnational vision of Roth; however, Israel and ethnicity anchor the entire approach. The “Other Europe” series, Roth’s major editorial project of 15 years, isn’t even mentioned. Similarly, the bulk of the more recent monographs and books dissecting the developments of the oeuvre have been published on the strength and prestige of Roth’s late American turn, and the formative importance of his Eastern European interests, in major studies such as Brauner’s, Shostak’s, and Gooblar’s, has consequently been ignored or downplayed. The “American” concerns of Roth’s later novels, I contend, were in fact deeply indebted to his work on the series and his interactions with the Eastern bloc. 51 See Catherine Morley, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo (New York: Routledge, 2008). 213
provocative set of international contexts, in truth, makes remarkably little of the specific importance of “Writers from the Other Europe.”52
The material history of Roth’s editorial project, its conception and the social and political circumstances that contoured its production, are both particularly significant to Roth’s development and consistently ignored. When scholars have looked briefly to draw connections between Roth’s fiction and the Eastern European literature he edited and popularised, too often the approach has limited itself to the task of illuminating kindred spirits. Cooper, for instance, offers some quick comments on Roth’s “involvement with the aftereffects of the Holocaust and with the condition of the writer behind the iron curtain.”53 Similarly, Gooblar elects not to grant
“Writers from the Other Europe” the prominence of one of Roth’s “major phases”, folding a few comments about Roth’s engagement with the bloc into a wider discussion of the profoundly important Kafka connection that first brought Roth to Prague.54
More expansively, Posnock places Gombrowicz, Schulz, and Kundera, three writers published in the Other Europe series, alongside Melville, Whitman, James, and Emerson, as he maps the “genealogy of immaturity” that empowers Roth’s fiction. The intellectual connections drawn are often provocative and compelling; however, the approach suffers from the template of the shared “cosmopolitanism” through which Posnock sets these authors in conversation with one another. Roth’s work conceiving the idea, selecting the manuscripts, and shaping the reception of the novels included in “Writers from the Other Europe”, and the numerous pressures suspending the development of the series, provide more convincing material with which to
52 See Philip Roth and World Literature: Transatlantic Perspectives and Uneasy Passages, Ed. Velichka Ivanova (New York: Cambria Press, 2014). 53 See Alan Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 163. 54 See David Gooblar, The Major Phases of Philip Roth, 62. 214
historicise Roth’s engagement with Eastern Europe than the shared participation in the “Republic of Letters” that houses Posnock’s ruminations.
Roth’s “Czech education” was rooted in a very specific set of contexts. Foundationally global, disruptively transnational, and sharply attuned to the shifting, unstable terms of the late
Cold War, Roth’s editorial project of fifteen years was nevertheless a product of the particular period in history that it actively addressed. Consequently, the dynamics of “Writers from the
Other Europe”, in addition to the material circulated in its pages, left a decisive impression on
Roth’s evolving approaches to fictional form and the terms through which he came to define and to understand the compositional struggle of the novelist. Though his attachment to a figure such as Kundera was fundamentally literary, impelled by the sentence and forged on the page, Roth was keenly aware of the circumstances that shaped the encounter and deeply engaged with the political situation that produced it. Moreover, as I subsequently argue, particularly in the case of
Roth’s enduring fascination with Kundera—the single writer who came to dominate “Writers from the Other Europe”—the comparative template of kindred spirits is inadequate to unpicking the subtle ways in which Roth’s later fiction would not only continue to evoke but also come to contest the alluring spell of the Kunderian influence. Here the intractable predicament of history most definitely reasserts its claim.
What is needed, then, is a synthesis between Goodman’s narrative history of the “Other
Europe” series and Posnock’s dextrous close reading of Roth’s major fiction, armed with an expansive sense of his artistic sources. Such an approach is perhaps most necessary in complicating the critical picture surrounding the increasing historical emphasis of Roth’s writing.
On one level, the fiction Roth produced in the 1990s clearly exhibits a kind of rebound nationalism—an attitude propelled by the author’s return from years living abroad for part of the
215
calendar year to residing solely in the United States.55 In the subsequent novels, the nation becomes a main point of focus and a newly capacious subject. But, as the protracted development of American Pastoral clearly shows, the holes in the fabric of the text reveal the significance of Roth’s engagement with the “Other Europe” to the eventual shape of his
American turn.
III. “How the Other Half Lives”
The ninth chapter of American Pastoral, the concluding part of the novel’s third and final section, “Paradise Lost,” the frenzied denouement depicting the Levov family’s extraordinary dinner party, a gathering organized at the height of the demythologizing months of the Watergate hearings and arranged under the dizzying heat of the summer sun, begins with the momentary interruption of a phone call: “One of the girls came out of the kitchen to tell him. She whispered,
‘It’s from I think Czechoslovakia’”.56 Earlier in the novel, Nathan Zuckerman explains the surprising fact that Seymour “Swede” Levov had actually been exploring the possibility of moving Newark Maid over to Czechoslovakia for some time, in the pursuit of cheaper overheads and a better quality of production.57 The family glove business is shown to be under threat from international competition. It is also revealed to be entangled in the politics of the Cold War, the overarching political conflict driving patterns of production and consumption across the divided globe:
55 Between 1976 and 1993 Roth lived half of each year in London, traveling regularly around Europe and Israel. 56 American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1998), 367. 57 Roth subtly lays the seeds for this dimension of the novel when Zuckerman meets Levov at Vincent’s restaurant, where the Swede complains about the Czech bureaucracy when he initially relocated the glove factory overseas. American Pastoral, 26. 216
[The Swede] told his secretary that he was going over to New York, to the Czech
mission, where he’d already had preliminary discussions about a trip to Czechoslovakia
later in the fall. In New York he had examined specimen gloves as well as shoes, belts,
pocketbooks, and wallets manufactured in Czechoslovakia, and now the Czechs were
working up plans for him to visit factories in Brno and Bratislava so he could see the
glove setup firsthand and examine a more extensive sample of their work while it was in
production and when it came off the floor. There was no longer any question that in
Czechoslovakia leather apparel could be more cheaply made than in Newark or Puerto
Rico—and probably better made, too. [. . .] Even though the Swede had assured his father
he had no intention of signing over any aspect of their operation to a Communist
government until he’d returned with a thorough report, he was confident that pulling out
of Newark wasn’t far down the line.58
The growing momentum of globalization is at least one of the material forces threatening the
Swede’s Edenic dreamworld. Newark Maid is, in fact, implicated in a more complicated, less nationally-bound vision of the world than the pastoral fantasy that the Swede’s daughter Merry so pitilessly obliterates when she blows up the local post office in protest of the Kennedy-
Johnson war.59
But when the Swede informs his secretary that he is “going over to New York, to the
Czech mission” to arrange his business trip, he is lying; Levov actually goes to visit his estranged daughter, who has been living in squalid conditions across from the dog and cat hospital—"ten minutes away. And for years?”—just a short car ride from the glove factory itself.
Purportedly engaged in planning a long, transatlantic journey across the Iron Curtain, the Swede
58 American Pastoral, 217-218. 59 For a detailed discussion of the anti-pastoral dimension of the novel, see Brauner, Philip Roth, 157-72. 217
instead experiences a traumatic encounter with the unseen reality of things right in front of him.
The possibility of going to Czechoslovakia bequeaths Roth’s protagonist a harrowing vision of home.
It is a pattern of recognition and narrative sleight of hand that American Pastoral repeats as the text moves towards its devastating climax. When the Swede answers the phone in the downstairs study, priming the final waves of disintegration and disgust that drive the novel to its fraught conclusion, the call isn’t placed from Czechoslovakia at all. The voice the Swede hears is unmistakably American: “Rita Cohen was on the line”.60 Levov’s phantasmatic tormentor, a character composed out of the popular iconography of the 1960s, knows all about the supposed business trip to Czechoslovakia, and she renews the venomous attack on all that the Swede’s life seems to symbolize: “Are you really able to believe that you, with your conception of life, you basking unpunished in the crime of your wealth, have anything whatsoever to offer this woman?”61 A phone call supposedly placed from the distant context of Eastern Europe ends up driving the Swede to confront a more vexed understanding of the meanings of America than the buoyant optimism, material prosperity, and redemptive exceptionalism embodied in the early chapters of his own life story. The persistent play with glossy surfaces in the initial characterization of Levov returns in the concluding dinner party in the form of Roth’s meticulous attention to the splendor of the family feast; the reminder of a rather different situation over in
Eastern Europe, suggestively attenuated at the edge of the characters’ comprehension—“I think
Czechoslovakia”—assists in the exposure of the rotten core at the heart of those “big beefsteak tomatoes” sitting so conspicuously on the table.62
60 American Pastoral, 367. 61 Ibid, 370. 62 Ibid, 292. 218
These curious occurrences in American Pastoral, when the context of Eastern Europe is invoked at the margin of the action at the very moments in which Roth ups the psychological voltage of the novel’s searing scrutiny of the cultural mythologies of the postwar United States, suggest much about the profound importance of Roth’s work surrounding “Writers from the
Other Europe” to his expansive turn towards American history. Far from representing a narrowing of focus towards the isolated nation and its singular concerns, American Pastoral reveals the powerful influence of Roth’s engagement with the Eastern bloc on many of the most significant innovations in his own fiction. Both the finished text and the story of its long evolution demonstrate the crucial role Roth’s negotiations with the “Other Europe” played in shaping the historical complexity of his later work.
American Pastoral was published in 1997. As critics such as Samuel Cohen have pointed out, the novel participated in the historical turn evident across American culture in the 1990s, as reactions to the end of the Cold War coincided with the calendar conclusion of the twentieth century. A number of major fiction writers reacted to the triumphalist atmosphere of the decade by examining the powerful shadow of the national past, its occlusions as well as its indelible hold.63 American Pastoral, with its exploration of the social cataclysms of the 1960s, participated in this wider, reflective work in a particularly intense fashion.
Roth actually began to write the novel in 1972. These early drafts were composed much closer to the political ruptures of the 1960s at the heart of the text. Remarkably, almost all the central thread of the narrative is established in these initial sketches, from the tormenting kiss to the shattering bomb, written a quarter of a century before the finished novel was published. But
1972 was also the first year that Roth traveled to Prague, and the journey across the Iron Curtain
63 Samuel Cohen, After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 3. 219
seems to have done much to inspire the grounding premise of confronting the mythological, triumphalist texture of life in the postwar decades. The first sentence of one of the original sketches, composed soon after Roth’s return from Czechoslovakia, moves immediately to establish an atmosphere of tin-eared jingoism, tuned to the mellifluous music of the self- confident American state: “As a child I had my mother’s love, as an adult I have had a handsome income as the result largely of my father’s prodigious labors, and all my life long I have enjoyed the liberties and security of an American citizen.”64 As he began the novel, Roth seems deliberately to have been inventing his own inverted Willy Loman, reversing his fortunes, lining his pockets and inflating his spirits. In contrast to the final version, one of the initial 1972 drafts even embeds the story in an unbearably affable example of the first-person voice. Another sketch from the same period, converted to the third person, sees Merry erupt in explosive fury at her father’s platitudinizing, blissfully inoculated against unhappiness on account of his gentle locutions:
“Well—”
“Oh don’t start off with ‘well’ I can’t take that easy-going shit of yours anymore!”
“Well,” he went right on. . .
A positive attitude proves to be an inadequate defense against the full force of the unexpected.
Suggestively, the 1972 drafts of American Pastoral were composed under the imposing title “How the Other Half Lives,” highlighting the crucial importance of Roth’s recent experiences in Eastern Europe to the origins of the text. Levov’s inquiries into the modes of production in Czechoslovakia take on a much more substantial narrative form in Roth’s initial
64 All quotations from the 1972 drafts of “How the Other Half Lives” are from the Philip Roth Papers, Box 39, Folders 1, 2, & 3. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 220
design.65 A journey across the grand divide was originally to form a crucial component of the story and a comparative principle, through which to organize the text. In the 1972 sketches, following his daughter’s decision to blow up the Princeton University Faculty Club, later changed to the Rimrock post office, Levov goes through with his plan and arranges a business trip to Prague. Before he travels, he is contacted by a Czech exile named Blenka, who asks him to transport a package to his own estranged daughter, still trapped inside the bloc. Blenka’s strained relationship with his daughter, explained through a series of meetings with his counterpart in the US, works to throw Levov’s predicament with Merry and her alienation from
American life into relief. Indeed, Blenka’s daughter, persecuted by the Communist regime on account of her father’s activities as a dissident, craves and is denied the very life that Merry loathes: “a hundred different shades of blue jeans in a hundred different styles.” The angry girl in the East, in other words, desires all the glittering rubbish of the West, the placating consumerism that the adolescent Merry comes to reject in such violent terms.
Though these drafts are clearly unfinished, it is not difficult to see how the initial sketches of “How the Other Half Lives” originally aimed to generate an ironic mirror effect as the narrative line took shape. After describing the tremendous demoralization of the country under Husák, passages that give Roth ample space to exhibit his new knowledge of the plight of the nation during normalization, Blenka warns Levov that he likely will not find what he is looking for—cheaper costs and a higher quality of manufacturing—in Czechoslovakia. But the implication, rather clumsily transmitted in the early drafts of American Pastoral, is that he will learn something about himself as a result of his upcoming encounter with the “Other Europe”:
65 Both Debra Shostak and Patrick Hayes examine these drafts, but neither fully explore the significance of Levov’s meetings with Blenka and the context of the “Other Europe” to the ways in which Roth reworked the material into American Pastoral. 221
“From business point of view it may not work out, but then there is more to life
than making a profit.”
“Yes, there is taking a loss.”
“There is also seeing how the other half lives. Life is an adventure as well as an
investment, Mr Levov.”
In these early drafts, Roth invests heavily in the idea of circulating through the Iron Curtain as a movement that produces understanding; an encounter with “over there” transforms the meanings of “right here.” A small sketch in Roth’s notes even outlines an intended tripart structure of: “I.
Home, II. Abroad, III. Home.” However, the knowledge acquired in the idea of transferring in and out of Eastern Europe was to be neither affirmatory, confirmatory, nor triumphalist. Roth’s earliest experiments with converting his contact with the “Other Europe” into fiction were fundamentally about upturning assumptions. In the journey to Prague, Levov’s smooth relationship with history, ruthlessly punctured by his daughter, was to be further exposed and ironically disabused.
Roth’s thinking throughout this period, fired by his experiences with Czech dissidents and his serious study of Eastern European fiction, was evidently energized by the inbuilt dualistic logic of the Cold War. Even though he seems always to have been quick to undermine the moralizing binaries of the conflict, as with his editorial choices with “Writers from the Other
Europe,” the underlying idea of exchange, the proposition implicit in the abandoned title “How the Other Half Lives,” drives the increasing historical emphasis of his writing in the 1970s.
Around the same time that he began his first sketches of American Pastoral, Roth started experimenting with numerous patterns of transnational interaction. The Anne Frank counternarrative that features prominently in The Ghost Writer (1979) is perhaps the most daring
222
example of Roth imaginatively exploiting an exchange template; however, it was an idea that he seems to have played with throughout various drafts of the 1970s before it found its eventual home in the young Zuckerman’s audacious hands. “How the Other Half Lives,” for instance, includes an abandoned take on an alternative history for Anne Frank. At one stage, Roth considered including a meeting between Levov and an Anne Frank character who, having survived the movement from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, ends up inside occupied
Czechoslovakia.
“‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” was first published in 1973 in New American Review, a year after Roth’s first trip behind the Iron Curtain.
In this text, formal hybridity combines with an explicit exchange narrative. A deliberate dual structure brackets a whimsical tale of transnational interaction: half critical essay, half short story, “Looking at Kafka” moves from a biographical meditation on the life and work of
Prague’s most famous literary son to a fictional account of an aged Dr. Kafka’s emigration and inevitable emotional struggles in plentiful, postwar America. In “Looking at Kafka,” Roth dramatizes an inverted version of the abandoned pages detailing Levov’s Czechoslovakian adventure.
The ingenious maneuvers of the essay, not least its audacious admixture of the solemn and the humorous, speak to many of the most significant features of Roth’s middle period.
Reading “Looking at Kafka” in the context of Roth’s interactions with the Eastern bloc and his early sketches of American Pastoral draws attention to some neglected dimensions of the piece.
How does historical insight actually enter the text? Curiously, the exchange narrative, with a middle-aged Kafka taking up work as a Hebrew teacher, works to intensify both the vivid apprehension of the texture of American life—the baseball enthusiasms so lovingly described
223
and the wisecracking schoolboys so believable in their gentle mockery of the “finicky professional manner” of their new instructor—and the sense of the contingency of this world of experience.66 Confused and bewildered by the social comedy that later plays out between Dr.
Kafka and his aunt, a courtship not unlike the failed erotic attachments that suspend many of
Kafka’s own stories, though refurnished with the tragicomic trappings of the Newark dating scene, young Philip comes to find the collision between these two separate spheres apposite to reflect on the broader limits of his understanding: “I am astonished [. . .] it seems there is more desperation in life than I have come across yet in my fish tank.”67 History, so to speak, arrives with the termination of the fantasy of complete knowledge. “Looking at Kafka” depicts one of
Roth’s earliest intimations of the ineluctable force of the unforeseen.
The abandoned pages of “How the Other Half Lives” commit to a similar kind of characterization as the one undertaken in “Looking at Kafka.” In the early sketches, Levov sounds suspiciously like an adult version of young Philip, serenely mollified: “with such plenitude, what sensible man could quarrel with his life?” “A coddled child,” young Philip yearns only to run around screaming all afternoon on the baseball field.68 As American Pastoral evolved, the literary strategy based on the idea of transnational exchange that instantiated “How the Other Half Lives” faded to the outer margins of the text. In the drafts from the 1990s, during which Roth returned to the papers to rework the material, he staked everything on the immanent inhabitation of the Swede’s perspective and his pain. But a key model for the intensity of this suffocating technique lies in the image of the “fish tank” that the young Philip uncovers late in the pages of “Looking at Kafka.” Indeed, Philip’s existence before the imposition of Dr. Kafka’s
66 “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting; or, Looking at Kafka”, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage, 2001), 291. 67 “Looking at Kafka”, 297. 68 Ibid, 291. 224
world anticipates the burst bubble Roth would come to construct around Swede Levov as he reshaped the emphasis of the novel. As Philip comes to recognize the unblemished innocence of his early life, an education that takes a peculiarly inverted Kafkaesque trajectory—the inescapable judgment of the father flipped into cloying paternal love, a struggle redeployed in
American Pastoral—it is the image of the enclosed “fish tank” that most accurately exemplifies the cocoon of his prior perspective.
The counterpoint of Roth’s decision to excise the exchange narrative and push the pressure of the “Other Europe” to the edges of the final text was markedly to increase the inner claustrophobia afflicting the central protagonist. When Merry shatters the Swede’s prelapsarian illusions of masterly order, much of the tension devolves from the fact that there is no escape for the hero from his self-containment, no journey beyond the confines of the castle walls.
Moreover, in the harrowing destruction of his fantasy life, brought to a fever pitch in the near- hallucinatory episodes of the final dinner party, the “fish tank” of “Looking at Kafka” becomes a truly frightening mental trap, condemning Levov to the inside of the edifice’s painful collapse:
“Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyone.”69
The Cold War context central to the design of “How the Other Half Lives” also faded as
Roth reworked the material. But the residual pressure of the original exchange structure can be detected in more than just the Swede’s containment to his collapsing cocoon. The final two lines are, in many ways, the most daring sentences of American Pastoral. To conclude such a lengthy rhetorical tour de force and frenzied examination of the social schisms of the 1960s with a couple of questions, to amplify the confusion of the era and trace the legacy of the fractures, only further to emphasize the unhealed ruptures with the open angles of the interrogative, sees the novel end with the very sensation of incomprehension afflicting its emblematic protagonist. One
69 American Pastoral, 357. 225
of the main effects of Zuckerman’s sudden call to judgement is to finish the text with the same sense of confusion and shock that greets Lou Levov, benevolent American patriarch, when the unconsenting object of his instructions, Jessie Orcutt, turns around suddenly and stabs him with the fork that feeds. The final lines of the novel seem to come from within an emotional space of frightened mistrust.
Yet the jagged ambiguity of the concluding lines actually makes a fitting, if purposefully uncomfortable, complement to the novel’s determination to dramatize the social dissolutions of the 1960s rather than resolve them. The questions Zuckerman poses, in other words, are both actual and rhetorical at one and the same time. And the origin of the text in the sketches for
“How the Other Half Lives” reasserts itself in the form of this unexpectedly awkward ending.
American Pastoral finishes by compressing the tale of destruction detailed in the novel’s previous four hundred pages into the binary logic of a fraught demand for answers. There is a distinct feeling of atonal incongruence projected in this summative request for comparative judgement: something of the funhouse mirror of history embodied in Blenka’s story oddly perseveres. In place of the exchange narrative taking Levov across the Iron Curtain and back,
American Pastoral instead arcs toward a single sentence that seems both to contain all the pent- up friction of the logic of the late Cold War—palpably unstable, poised, and ready to implode— and ironically to undermine the vision produced via the naive dualistic picture: “What is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”70 Viewed from within the “fish tank,” the answer to such questions is perhaps very little; but then, certainly by the novel’s conclusion, we know that the simplistic structure that allows for such bifurcatory clarity can no longer hold.
70 American Pastoral, 423. 226
IV. “There Are No Uncontaminated Angels”
The Prague Orgy, Roth’s most direct fictional exploration of his experiences of the “Other
Europe”, was eventually published in 1985 as an epilogue to the Zuckerman Bound series.
Taking the form of extracts from Nathan Zuckerman’s notebooks as he travels behind the Iron
Curtain in an ill-fated attempt to retrieve the manuscripts of a lost Yiddish writer, the father of an exiled Czech dissident whom Zuckerman first meets in New York, The Prague Orgy provides a fitting coda to the sequence of novels Roth produced exploring “the unforeseen consequences of art.”71 But the encounter with Prague, and the interactions with the dissident writers Roth befriended there, were actually essential to the genesis, preoccupations, and finished form of the series as a whole. In a short piece in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux newsletter, published in 1983 to promote The Anatomy Lesson, Roth explains that his decision to explore the comic difficulties which encircle Nathan Zuckerman emerged out of the “Czech education” in adjusted perspective provided by his experiences inside the Eastern bloc:
When I try to recall how I came to write these three books, it seems that actually they
began six years earlier, while I was visiting Prague for the first time […] The notes I
made then and on trips I took to Prague in subsequent years are about the consequences
of writing fiction in Czechoslovakia. I met and talked to Czech writers suffering those
consequences. Some became close friends, and while I learned about the punishment
dished out to them by the repressive Husak regime, they in turn asked to hear about what
71 The Prague Orgy (New York: Vintage, 1996), 61. 227
got dished out to me: what were the American rewards, who were the American readers,
what did novels in America mean?72
In the same promotional piece Roth notes that his initial efforts to transform his experiences in
Prague into a novel failed. He could not find an adequate or engaging way, he claims, to arrange the interplay between the American experience and the Czech experience: “perhaps because the contrast was entirely too vivid—was only vivid—I never wrote any such book.”73 The eventual form of The Prague Orgy, ironic and unusual, casting a transformative backward light over the arc of the preceding trilogy, provided the solution.
Where the previous Zuckerman books explore a series of tragicomic tussles between the exalted claims of literature and the messy claims of life, the slender text of The Prague Orgy, a novella of only eighty pages, provides both a curious contraction and a political expansion of the treatment of these themes. Here Roth narrows the focus but widens the lens; in occupied
Czechoslovakia, where Zuckerman travels for the first time, the unintended consequences of art assume a different set of stakes. The compositional struggle of the novelist is imagined not as a conflict over competing interests—family, fame, and tribe—but a battle against being forced into an encircling silence.
Begun in the early 1970s, and originally composed under the title “The World Around
Us,” the earliest version of The Prague Orgy was initially grounded in a similar exchange structure to “How the Other Half Lives.” Roth’s first drafts play more conspicuously on the contrast between Zuckerman’s wealth, frivolity, and naivety (as the owner of “six suits at a time” and a “Chesterfield coat”) and the oppressive political situation of writers working in
72 “Philip Roth on his new novel The Anatomy Lesson", FSG newsletter, published November 28, 1983, Philip Roth Papers, Box 62, Folder 2. 73 Ibid. 228
Czechoslovakia.74 “The World Around Us” moves immediately to swaddle Zuckerman in the same shell of innocent prosperity that Roth would eventually weave around the heroic Swede; however, in this set of drafts the opulent tailors of London and the hotels surrounding Green Park provide a European counterpoint to the degradation of Czechoslovakia under Husák.
It is not difficult to ascertain Roth’s reasons for discarding the first sketches of “The
World Around Us.” The vivid contrast achieved in sending Zuckerman across the Iron Curtain certainly allows Roth to play the American experience against the Eastern European setting to comic effect. But the comparative logic is altogether too transparent to infuse the material with sufficient irony or tension. In contrast to the editorial choices that Roth was making with
“Writers from the Other Europe,” “The World Around Us” struggles to eclipse or to nuance the kind of binary thinking that defined an earlier phase of the cultural Cold War. The final version of The Prague Orgy, however, does precisely that.
As he reworked the text, Roth gravitated towards the idea of mediation as the key to unlocking the potential of the material. The finished form of The Prague Orgy sees Zuckerman’s role shift quite drastically from the active participant in the social comedy that defines his earlier presence in Zuckerman Bound. Though the traveling novelist is very much caught up in the drama, The Prague Orgy repositions Zuckerman to the role of an observing intelligence, the mind framing and reporting on the main action. It is the Czechs who speak with an insistent and urgent voice in this novella, a reversal enabled via Roth’s decision to construct the narrative as a set of slightly fragmented extracts from Zuckerman’s notebooks. As Joseph Benatov notes in his discussion of the text’s ambivalent representation of tamizdat discourse, this shift in the balance of agency is reflected in the ironic depiction of sex, the licentious content announced so
74 All quotations from the drafts of The Prague Orgy are from the Philip Roth Papers, Box 181, Folder 1. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. 229
prominently in the title.75 Indeed, for all the titillating promise of the invitation to attend the
“Prague Orgy,” a connotation made concrete in Sisovsky’s vulgar instruction to Zuckerman “not to lay her too soon,” as he invites the famous American to retrieve his father’s manuscripts from his estranged wife, there is conspicuously little in the way of erotic activity present in the book.76
The openness is all empty, and desolate, talk—the rhetoric and exhibitionism of a people already stripped and rendered perversely accessible all the time. Not only does the abandoned Olga flaunt a peculiarly desperate and despondent vision of sexual availability, but Roth also implies a certain kind of impotence, or tentative bewilderment, on behalf of his traveling novelist, heading behind the Iron Curtain with an unusually specific purpose. Failure and embarrassment, neither conquest nor success, end up defining Zuckerman’s Prague experience.
The narrative conceit that enables this repositioning of Zuckerman from lead actor to compromised, filtering intelligence was drawn straight out of Roth’s experiences editing
“Writers from the Other Europe.” The Prague Orgy fictionalizes precisely the kind of tamizdat mission that the series enacted on a grand, prestigious scale. The decision to try to recover
Sisovsky’s father’s manuscripts, a Jewish author unknown and unread in the West who was brutally murdered by the Nazis, forms the main motivation for Zuckerman’s journey. In the depiction of this task, Roth reimagines many of his own experiences encountering the enigmatic stories of Bruno Schulz, subsequently working with the latter’s estate to publish his stories as part of an expansion of the Penguin project. The echo of Schulz in Sisovsky’s description of the
75 Joseph Benatov, “Demystifying the Logic of Tamizdat: Philip Roth’s Anti-Spectacular Literary Politics”, Poetics Today, vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 114. Benatov is alert to the different levels of irony involved in Roth’s depiction of tamizdat discourse; however, as Brian K. Goodman suggests, he is too swift to see irony coalesce into critique. “Writers from the Other Europe” was its own kind of tamizdat project, a publishing effort that Roth clearly saw the value of. 76 The Prague Orgy, 24. 230
lost manuscripts is both suggestive and reverberant.77 Though Roth changes certain details, slyly implying a Chekovian tenderness in the place of Schulz’s mythopoeic excesses, the evocation of the idiosyncratic Polish writer’s eccentric achievement grants the The Prague Orgy its narrative momentum.
Crucially, fictionalizing the act of mediation at the heart of “Writers from the Other
Europe” allows Roth to begin to dramatize the epistemological tensions induced in the act of recovering historical experience. The Prague Orgy purposefully depicts a failed tamizdat mission, a journey through the porous divide that proves wholly unsuccessful. In the breakdown of Zuckerman’s attempt to retrieve the cherished manuscripts, Roth exhibits not the transparency of literary mediation but its ambiguous opacities. Just as his editorial project worked hard to complicate the received dualisms of the late Cold War, The Prague Orgy depicts mediation as an act of entanglement. Zuckerman’s transnational adventure sees the famous and successful
American novelist blunder and stumble. The Prague Orgy openly depicts the encounter with the
“Other Europe” as a revelation of murky motivations and ineradicable stains—an exhibition of cultural defamiliarization that is amplified by our reception of the story via notebook jottings, hurried and skittish, as opposed to polished narrative. Clarity, in short, collapses. Zuckerman’s authority in Prague, his grounds of action, and his ambivalent interactions with the dissident community are ruthlessly ironized throughout. Not only is Roth’s writer-surrogate made to feel uncomfortably out of his depth in his attempts to win the papers from the estranged and volatile
Olga, but rather, as soon as he actually gets his hands on the box of manuscripts, the secret police arrest him, confiscate the texts, and then swiftly bundle him out of the country.
77 After discovering the enigmatic work of Bruno Schulz, Roth quickly decided to include him in the “Writers from the Other Europe” series. As his subsequent interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer suggests, Roth was gripped by Schulz’s arresting idiosyncrasies, features of his writing granted added poignancy on account of the tragic and devastating end of his life. Schulz was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, shot in the street by a Gestapo officer settling a petty grudge. 231
By the novella’s brisk conclusion, with “Zuckerman the Zionist agent” placed against his will on a plane, the patronizing “little world around the corner” refers not to the freedom-starved city of Prague but to the once nourishing simplicity of life back in America.78 The figure who futilely shouts about his citizenship as he is shuttled out of Eastern Europe is made to feel unexpectedly and crushingly sentimental. As Goodman argues, “For Zuckerman, the ‘little world’ is no longer the small Czech nation, suffering through the latest series of great power occupations; the bounded, claustrophobic reality is the US.”79 Echoing the education in alternatives that was originally to disabuse Levov, the exemplary Western businessman, of his most cherished platitudes, and the narrative sleights of hand that force the Swede to confront the parochial dimensions of his own attachments in the disintegrating fury of the final section of
American Pastoral, exposure to Czechoslovakia works to obliterate the unexamined meanings of home. In The Prague Orgy, the binary logic of us and them is stretched and scrambled.
Zuckerman’s fantasies of order collapse; historical experience tears through the fabric.
When he is detained and sent back to the US at the conclusion of the narrative, stripped of the very real candy-box of manuscripts he endeavored to circulate, Zuckerman experiences the tidal tug of history in a whole new way. It is a feeling that would go on to shape Roth’s major historical novels of the 1990s. In a manner distinct from the previous texts in Roth’s extended
Künstlerroman, Zuckerman, after traveling in and out of Czechoslovakia, is newly swallowed in
“the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.”80 In this way,
The Prague Orgy represents an important precedent for the kind of framing structures that Roth would deploy in the American Trilogy. With each of these later novels, authorial complicity jostles against the claim to observational autonomy in a manner reminiscent of the struggle at the
78 The Prague Orgy, 86. 79 Goodman, “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War”, 735. 80 The Prague Orgy, 84. 232
centre of The Prague Orgy; the authority Zuckerman assumes in narrating the isolated story is never permitted to separate from the ambiguities surrounding the urge to get involved in retrieving the tale. Zuckerman’s imaginative purchase on the historical narrative of American
Pastoral, for instance, is presented as a literary project sustained via an act of implicated mediation. In the case of the Swede, Zuckerman writes to resuscitate the object of his childhood adoration, his high school hero. The idea of recovering the story, explicit to the mission of The
Prague Orgy, is reworked as a specific interpretive predicament and a particular challenge of transmission that promises some compromised perspective on the engulfing force of the historical.
But just as Zuckerman is unceremoniously shuttled out of Prague without Sisosvky’s manuscripts, American Pastoral dramatizes a mediatory failure as a site of epistemological uncertainty that opens up the fragile possibility of understanding; the exposure of the limits of
Zuckerman’s grip on the recovered story, the way in which it slips out of his control, allows him both to highlight and to work through the representational predicament. The phrase “I was wrong” recurs throughout American Pastoral as an insistent refrain, and it comes to signal the demythologization of national experience and the emergence of history.81 The search for the meaning of the Swede’s life, in the final text of American Pastoral, is an enigma that fundamentally and necessarily eludes Zuckerman. But it also propels the book. Tellingly, the narrator’s filtering presence is a mediatory frame added to the 1972 drafts of “How the Other
Half Lives,” a shaping layer that generates levels of irony and hermeneutic friction wholly absent in Roth’s initial sketches.
Zuckerman’s sensation of bewilderment, essential to the eventual shape of each of the books in the American trilogy, stands in symbolic relation to Roth’s defamiliarizing strategy for
81 American Pastoral, 39. 233
representing the engulfing currents of historical experience. Something of the Swede’s inability to understand his own destruction, the incongruity of events and the torment that issues from his increasingly desperate search for consequential causality, is mirrored in the inevitable failure of
Zuckerman’s mediation of the tale. Roth’s narrator only begins accurately to grasp and to chronicle the American century as he comes to terms with the scale of his ignorance and his powerlessness. It is an education in intellectual impotence begun in terms drawn from Roth’s encounter with the “Other Europe”.
The Prague Orgy therefore provides an important model for the ways in which Roth redeploys Zuckerman as the mediating intelligence for his major novels about the recent
American past, assisting with his evolving strategies for representing historical experience. But much of the material Roth was editing in “Writers from the Other Europe” also influenced and shaped developments in his approach. Perhaps the single most important thing that Roth took from the Eastern European writers he selected and published in the “Other Europe” series involved the audacious positions these authors frequently adopted when fictionalizing their relationship with their own history. In his revealing conversation with Klíma, initially published in the New York Review of Books after the conclusion of the Velvet Revolution, and later reproduced in Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001)—a collection of interviews and essays that, interestingly, Roth proposed to his publisher, indicating some of the literary contexts in which he evidently felt his recent fiction ought to be understood—he broached the complicated question of complicity directly:
The Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski said that the only way to write about the Holocaust
was as the guilty, as the complicit and implicated; that is what he did in his first-person
fictional memoir, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. There Borowski may
234
even have pretended to a dramatically more chilling degree of moral numbness than he
felt as an Auschwitz prisoner, precisely to reveal the Auschwitz horror as the wholly
innocent victims could not. Under the domination of Soviet Communism, some of the
most original Eastern European writers I have read in English have positioned themselves
similarly—Tadeusz Konwicki, Danilo Kiš, and Kundera, say, to name only three K’s,
who have crawled out from under Kafka’s cockroach to tell us that there are no
uncontaminated angels.82
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the most startling books that Roth published in his fifteen years working on the project with Penguin. The original Polish collection came out in Wybor Opowiadan in 1959 and was immediately controversial; the first publication of Borowski’s Auschwitz fiction in English, however, seems barely to have registered a reaction.
This Way for the Gas was reprinted in “Writers from the Other Europe” in 1976. Jan Kott’s introduction to this later edition explores Borowski’s extraordinary determination to incriminate his writing in the horrors of life inside the concentration camp.
Borowski, Kott writes, obtained an unusually full “European education.”83 When he was a child, his father was placed in a Soviet labor camp, marking an early acquaintance with the inescapable force of an engulfing fate. During the war, after being imprisoned by the Nazis, he was jailed in Warsaw. From his cell window he could see the German soldiers throwing their grenades into the Jewish ghetto. By the end of April, he was in Auschwitz. This “European education” extended beyond the arrival of the Red Army and the end of the war, for Borowski’s subsequent story was part of the partitioned Polish future confirmed at Yalta—a legacy of the
Allied victory that reveals a more complicated story of guilt and responsibility than is often
82 Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (New York: Vintage, 2002), 62. 83 Jann Kott, “Introduction”, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski (New York: Penguin, 1976), 12. 235
communicated in accounts of liberation at the conclusion of the fighting. After returning to
Warsaw, trapped in the convulsions of modern history, he committed himself to the cause of building socialism and furthering the revolution. On July 1, 1951, not yet thirty, Borowski killed himself.
The sardonic tone that Borowski adopts in the title of his collection establishes a chilling, almost psychotic, dissociation from the content of his tales. This sense of detachment is perhaps ultimately less telling and congruent to the stories themselves, though, than the unexpected positioning that the title also adopts. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen assumes the voice of the appalling instruction as opposed to the ear of the innocent victim. Each of the stories included is written in the first person, and the narrator of three of these tales is Vorarbeiter
Tadeusz, a deputy Kapo in the camp, a figure entwined in its most insidious structures of power.
Each of these unnerving fictional choices is deliberate. “It is impossible to write about
Auschwitz impersonally,” Kott quotes Borowski as arguing:
The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is . . . But let them not
forget that the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that you survived? . . .
Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved “Moslems”
[. . .] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks,
unloading the transports, at the gypsy camp; tell about the daily life of the camp, about
the hierarchy of fear, about the loneliness of every man. But write that you, you were the
ones who did this.84
To fictionalize his Auschwitz experiences, for Borowski, meant revealing his own complicity in the history that unfolded there. To historicize in this way was neither to seek the objective
84 Kott, “Introduction”, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 22. 236
assessment nor to undertake the explanatory exercise; to write historically meant exposing one’s own inescapable entanglement.
This unsettling determination touches all of the stories in the collection in different ways, ranging from the blank account of absent sympathy in “The People Who Walked On” to the tale of violent retribution perpetrated in “Silence.”85 But Borowski’s drama of self-incrimination is most vivid in the title story itself, which details the appalling forced unloading of a new transport train at the edges of the camp. With equal attention to the mounting terror of the protagonist, exposing his horror and disgust, and his uneasy but active participation in the task, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” narrates the agonies of complicity in the things that took place at Auschwitz with a pitilessness that remains difficult to read, let alone understand.
Roth writes without such awesome and destructive moral burdens. His historical fiction addresses a fundamentally different subject. But the evolution of “How the Other Half Lives” into the finished form of American Pastoral reflects Roth’s sensitivity to this lesson in historical writing, provided in the pages of “Writers from the Other Europe.” Texts such as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen confirmed that to write historically is to implicate; to achieve the requisite charge involves a certain incrimination of the narrative voice in the history it observes.
In the 1972 drafts of “How the Other Half Lives,” the ironic perch from which we observe Levov is so detached from the idyllic fantasy life it depicts that the text drifts continually towards mocking parody. In Roth’s early attempts, Levov is little more than a wooden figure placed at the centre of a kind of knowing satire.
85 “Silence” sees a group of inmates seemingly accept an American soldier’s appeals to justice after the liberation of the camps. But after outwardly ceding to his appeal not to seek revenge on the captured S.S. criminals, the survivors pull a restrained trooper from the bunk, covered with blankets, half-smothered and hidden from view, to enact a bloody revenge: “the entire block, grunting and growling with hatred, trampled him to death”. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 163. 237
In contrast, American Pastoral moves decisively to implicate the narration: Zuckerman, the shaping mind of the text, is a man compromised by the Swede’s dream world, entangled in the mythologies of the period. In the first section of the novel, we learn not only of the young
Zuckerman’s enchantment as childhood witness to the Swede’s heroic activities on the sports field, but also, in the account of his high school reunion, of the powerful feeling—“astonishing” is his word—that sweeps through him as he remembers the community of his youth, united by postwar prosperity, confidence, and a renewed cloud of innocence.86 Events work with devastating energy to depict the forces of history exposing the delusions that structure this vision. But Zuckerman, the mediating intelligence that Roth introduced to the published text, the crucial change in design that released the potential of the material, is purposefully presented as being complicit in the fantasies that disintegrate. Wholly unlike “How the Other Half Lives,”
American Pastoral pushes for an extraordinarily claustrophobic inhabitation of the Swede’s historically circumscribed perspective. Even the literary strategy Zuckerman adopts as he attempts to tell the story, disappearing into the Swede’s mind in a daring act of literary ventriloquism, is designed to dramatize the production of the book before us not as an act of analysis but as an act of contamination. The verbs Zuckerman relies on when he explains his audacious method are instructive:
To embrace your hero in his destruction—to let your hero’s life occur within you
when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself into his bad luck,
to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy, when he is the fixed point of
your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic fall—well, that’s worth
thinking about.87
86 American Pastoral, 44. 87 Ibid, 88. 238
Zuckerman’s sensory rush of overwhelming feeling, a conceit Roth builds around the high school reunion and then extends into his narrator’s oddly intense identification with Levov’s naivety, staining the mediatory mind at precisely the point at which it purports to disappear, grants American Pastoral its own contamination in the history it apprehends. Roth’s engagement with the literature of the “Other Europe” was essential to the evolution of this narrative strategy.
When fictionalizing the cataclysms of the 1960s, the dramatic decade that did the most to shape his own implication in the postwar world, Roth may even have pretended to a dramatically more sentimental and nostalgic attachment to the swollen optimism of the period preceding Swede
Levov’s tragic fall, precisely to reveal the felt experience of that peculiar moment in the
American story as the analysts and chroniclers of the era, examining the data and patiently explaining the causation of events, simply could not.
V. “A Book of Voices”
Roth’s major fiction—in particular, the expansive panorama of the American Trilogy—meditates on the multitudinous meanings of the nation’s history. This ruminative reverberance, allowing the particular tales of its individual characters to echo with such clarity against the epic story of the American century, is achieved as a result of the intertextual density of the writing. Roth summons the spirits of the canonical dead to grant historical amplitude to the tragic stories of self-reinvention, haunted pasts, and unexpected fates which sit at the centre of these texts about the felt drama of the recent past. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, James—
239
these are the writers routinely evoked in the series of novels Roth produced in the 1990s.
Towards the end of I Married a Communist, Zuckerman says “the book of my life is a book of voices.” 88 He could just as easily be describing the literary strategy of Roth’s historical fiction as his own particular Newark story.
Many critics have explored the productive tensions engendered by this richly allusive prose. Posnock, for instance, unravels a tradition of immaturity that Roth relies upon to dramatize the struggle between flux and stasis in each of the novels in the Trilogy. For Posnock, this illustrious intellectual lineage reaches something like its apotheosis in the representation of
“being game”—an open emotional state central to the dynamics of The Human Stain. It is a vision of human improvisation in the face of circumstance that Posnock interprets in relation to the echoes of Emerson, Melville, and Hawthorne that swirl around the tale of Coleman’s dramatic downfall.
Timothy Parrish anchors his reading of Roth’s historical fiction in its intertextual density in a similar fashion. Placing The Human Stain in conversation with Invisible Man (1952) and
Ralph Ellison’s significance as a public intellectual in the postwar years, Parrish shows how
Roth’s treatment of race, autonomy, and appropriation draw on contradictions central to Ellison’s story.89 In narrating the tale of Coleman’s disgrace through Zuckerman, Roth rewrites something of his own formative interactions, as a fellow writer of “minority fiction” and sometime confidant, with the author of “The World and the Jug” and the most eloquent advocate of the freewheeling American adventure.
88 I Married a Communist, (New York: Vintage, 1999), 222. 89 See Timothy Parrish, “Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain”, Contemporary Literature, vol.45, no.3 (2004), 421-459. 240
Critical attention to these voices, though, has rarely strayed beyond the canonical figures whose words resonate so sonorously. But Roth also uses the idea of the echo as a way to bring the literatures of the “Other Europe” to bear on his historical fiction, replacing the more direct forms of transnational interaction that characterise earlier texts with a subtler form of scrutiny. In
Roth’s mature historical mode, the idea of transferring through the disabusing boundary is not entirely abandoned. The expansive fiction of the 1990s substitutes the stark narrative mechanism of exchange with the subtler vibrations of the echo. The true complexities of home, with all its innumerable entanglements, are exposed with the ironic assistance of the voices of the “Other
Europe”.
The exchange structures that Roth employed in various texts throughout the 1970s and
1980s took direct inspiration from the author’s vivid encounter and sustained engagement with the Eastern bloc. The eventual text of American Pastoral moved away from the Cold War template central to its origins; where “How the Other Half Lives” was initially arranged around an exchange structure, the published novel eliminated the idea of Levov circulating through the
Iron Curtain as a narrative devise and a comparative premise. Roth’s subsequent historical novels followed suit, situating the stories almost exclusively within the American continent. Though
The Plot Against America (2004) takes imaginative liberties and contorts the factual record, for instance, the specific setting of the United States remains palpably and concretely in focus—it emerges, in fact, with a new kind of topographical specificity.90 Even given its counterfactual conceit, The Plot is arguably Roth’s most distinctively “national” book. Tellingly, this exemplary fiction about America is conceived in relation to a European history that threatens to engulf it.
Something of “Looking at Kafka” endures.
90 See Jeffrey Severs, “‘Get Your Map of America’: Tempering Dystopia and Learning Topography in The Plot Against America”, Studies in American Fiction, vol.35, no.2 (2007), 221-239. 241
These echoes are too numerous, ranging all the way from the faint to the formative, to catalogue exhaustively here. However, certain key examples serve to demonstrate the extent to which Roth’s engagement with the “Other Europe” continued to shape the formal sophistication of his historical fiction. I Married a Communist, for instance, has obvious thematic and political affinities to the work of Czeslaw Milosz. The depth of Roth’s intellectual attachment to Milosz is indicated by the fact that he would often quote the Polish poet when tasked with conceptualising the role and responsibility of the writer, raising the spectre of the Iron Curtain as he sought to define the fundamental terms of the compositional struggle.91 Dramatising Nathan Zuckerman’s own journey through an American equivalent of the ecstatic dedication of The Captive Mind
(1953), I Married a Communist narrates the political disenchantment of an earnest and engaged young man in terms that implicitly evoke Milosz’s melancholy aesthetics of disillusionment.
What is less immediately obvious, however, is the way in which Roth echoes one of
Milosz’s most prototypical poems in the careful organisation of the text. I Married a Communist commits to a curious structure; a series of evening conversations with Murray Ringold, the novelist’s former high school teacher, sees the older Zuckerman reimagine the allegiances and betrayals that shaped his place in the recent past. It is an exchange of perspectives marked by both warm twinges of nostalgia and the cooler sensations of regret. This narrative arrangement draws inspiration from Milosz’s own poem about a conflicted personal history, remembered from the vantage of disappointment recollected in tranquility. In a number of significant ways,
“What does it mean” provides the essential shape and guides the tone of I Married a Communist:
It does not know it glitters
91 In the inaugural “Philip Roth Lecture” at the Newark Public Library on 27th October 2016, Zadie Smith actually explored many of the most significant features of Roth’s work in the context of Milosz’s famous statement—"when a writer is born into a family that family is finished.” “The I Who Is Not Me”, Feel Free: Essays (London & New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 346. 242
It does not know it flies It does not know it is this not that.
And, more and more often, agape, With my Gauloise dying out, Over a glass of red wine, I muse on the meaning of being this not that.
Just as long ago, when I was twenty, But then there was a hope I would be everything, Perhaps even a butterfly or a thrush, by magic. Now I see dusty district roads And a town where the postmaster gets drunk every day Melancholy with remaining identical to himself.
If only the stars contained me. If only everything kept happening in such a way That the so-called world opposed the so-called flesh. Were I at least not contradictory. Alas.92
Roth follows the fall of Milosz’s sad and tender eye over the unfulfilled promise of the previous decades, unable to transform in the willed and idealised way, as Zuckerman recalls his own history of powerful dedications and blinding commitments. The obstacles that he and Murray remember, unearthing the lost tensions of the years after the war, alive with both political agitation and McCarthyite paranoia, share unmistakable features with those enumerated in the poem: contradiction, opposition of ideal thought and inhabited flesh, and the unarrived magic— an absence which, in the end, amounts only to a belief unsubstantiated by the indifferent world. I
92 Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems (New York: The Ecco Press, 1980), 23. 243
Married a Communist explores all three, each embodied and dramatised in the combustible personality of the conflicted Ira Ringold.
Tellingly, Roth amplifies the echoes of Milosz in the novel’s final pages. There is a certain Dantean grandeur in the sudden swing to the planets; when Murray departs and
Zuckerman is left to contemplate the story they just shared out on the decking, lost in a candle- gloom comparable to the half-light of the poet’s dying cigarette, his decision to gaze up at the great stars and their epic configurations has the inevitable effect of enlarging the meaning of
Ira’s fall from grace and young Nathan’s subsequent disillusionment. But Roth’s decision to describe the stunning sight of the constellations as a brief reprieve from our inexhaustible tragicomedy—"you see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism”—draws on the weary wisdom of the concluding lines of “What does it Mean”.93 As Zuckerman looks at the burning planets, “wide awake from the stimulus of all that narrative engorgement,” something of the Polish experience seeps into the writer’s recollections of life in Industrial North Jersey.94
Several shadows loom over the counterfactual design of The Plot Against America in a similar fashion to Milosz’s haunting presence in I Married a Communist. As J.M. Coetzee points out, “the spirit that reigns rather distantly over the last, hurried-sounding pages of The Plot
Against America is that of Jorge Luis Borges.”95 This is certainly true of the overarching formal conceit, powering the slow-burn terror of the young Philip Roth during Lindbergh’s eerily realistic American administration. And Roth’s reliance on Borgesian fabulation is most liberally exhibited in the warped account of the end of World War II, related in the concluding pages of
The Plot. But the voices of the “Other Europe” mark the actual texture of the book far more
93 I Married a Communist, 323. 94 Ibid, 322. 95 J.M. Coetzee, Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005 (London: Vintage, 2008), 248. 244
conspicuously than the famous architect of textual labyrinths. Parrish hints at one of the most salient in his reading, reflecting on Roth’s decision to place a Fascist sympathiser in the White
House: “No Declaration of Independence protected […] Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew, from being killed by Hitler.”96
But Schulz’s textual presence in Roth’s novel is far more substantial than the ghostly indication of a history averted. The Plot, focalised retrospectively through a child’s perceptions of the mounting terror of the Lindbergh administration, purposefully recalls the timorous perspective of Schulz’s stories in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass—an extraordinary collection published in “Writers from the Other Europe” in 1979. Enamoured of his stamp collection and consumed by his father’s anxieties, the character of Philip Roth, caught in the full bloom of his innocent boyhood, mirrors the youthful viewpoint that guides and shapes Schulz’s distinctive fiction. Resurrecting the limitations and intensities of a childhood grasp of adult circumstances, a move characterised by the ecstasies of familial simplicity and the paralysing power of localised fear, is a strategy The Plot lifts from Sanatorium. Indeed, the extraordinary question that rings out early in Schulz’s story “Spring”—the longest piece in the collection and arguably its paradigmatic text—could be said to provoke many of the chilling ironies of The
Plot: “what attraction, dear reader, has a postage stamp for you? […] Is it a symbol of ordinariness, or is it the ultimate within the bounds of possibility, the guarantee of unpassable frontiers within which the world is enclosed once and for all?”97 Roth converts Schulz’s mythopoeic rhapsodies to the unraveling of realistic chronical, radically reworking the shape of
96 Timothy Parrish, “Autobiography and History in Roth’s The Plot Against America, or What Happened When Hitler Came to New Jersey”, Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, Ed. Debra Shostak (London & New York: Continuum, 2011), 149. 97 Bruno Schulz, “Spring”, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Penguin, 1979), 33. 245
the material; but The Plot finds a number of its most resonant images and haunting features in poignant references to the work of the murdered Pole.
Such echoes of the “Other Europe” complicate the meanings that accrue to the representation of the United States. The writer who seems to have done most to influence evolutions in Roth’s fiction, however, was not from Eastern Europe at all, though he would become celebrated as one of the most thoughtful witnesses of what took place on its soil. Primo
Levi received his own “European education” in ineluctable fates in a way similar to many of the authors whom Roth published during his editorship of “Writer from the Other Europe”. Born into a Jewish family in Piedmont, ostensibly unpolitical until the collapse of Mussolini’s regime brought the Nazis to Italy, if always repelled by the Fascists and their racial policies, Levi writes with grace and tremendous equanimity about his capture, imprisonment, and the unexpected luck that saw him escape and eventually travel home. His texts are amongst the most extraordinary records of life inside the concentration camps.
Levi’s moral poise and clear prose, a sharpness of mind that carries across from the
Italian into English translations of If This is a Man (1958) and The Truce (1963), shape his recollections of being sent to Auschwitz and his torturous route back to Italy. Initially transported deep into the USSR with the arrival of the Red Army at the end of the war, circling just south of Minsk and then making his way through occupied Romania, Levi’s detailed accounts of his terrifying time in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe provide a lucid chronicle of one man’s devastating encounter with precisely those engulfing historical circumstances dramatised throughout the pages of Roth’s Penguin project. Levi shared with many of the
Eastern European writers published in the series a determination to face up to Auschwitz and the realities of occupation, disabusing the understandable, if ethically egregious, attempts to offer a
246
redemptive account of the meaning of Europe’s cataclysmic conflict. The telling of history, Levi understood only too well, was not there to rescue us from ourselves.
In certain ways, Levi’s books stand apart from the “Other Europe” series. Conceptually and aesthetically distinct from writers such as Borowski, Kiš, Schulz, and Kundera, Levi was nevertheless absolutely crucial to Roth’s engagement with the literature of Eastern Europe. As for Klíma, a Czech Jew who miraculously survived his incarceration in Theresienstadt, for Levi the concentration camps and the killing fields established both the irreducible questions of the postwar world and the impossibility of answering them.98 The hope for such answers, in fact, was silenced by the successful extermination of the true witnesses—the drowned.99 Unlike the principal authors selected for the Penguin series, Levi’s texts were being read and acknowledged in English translations as Roth worked to expand the reach and scope of the series. Although, as
Judt points out, Levi’s initial reception reveals more about the moral urgency of his writing than it does any sense of representative cultural significance: “When he took Se questo è un uomo, the story of his incarceration in Auschwitz, to the leading left-wing Italian publisher Einaudi in
1946, it was rejected out of hand.”100 As Neal Ascherson points out, Roth was actually indirectly instrumental in bringing his work to a wider readership, popularising the texts and shaping crucial aspect of their reception. Though Levi remained beyond the direct purview of “Writers
98 In his memoir, a text which details his early experiences of Theresienstadt (Terezín) as a child, Klíma wrestles with very similar predicaments to Levi’s more famous meditations: “It’s a strange world when you are called upon to explain why you weren’t murdered as a child […] In this abominable lottery, I had drawn one of the few lucky numbers, and perhaps it had been slipped to me by Father or one of his comrades, or, paradoxically, by the very people whose primary aim was to eliminate me.” My Crazy Century, 22&27. 99 Primo Levi, The Drowned and The Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 2013), 89. 100 The subsequent history of Levi’s reception further highlights the astonishing lack of interest in the particulars of his extraordinary story—and the painful questions it raised—in both Europe and the United States: “Se questo è un uomo was published instead by a small press in just 2,500 copies—most of which were remaindered in a warehouse in Florence and destroyed in the great flood there twenty years later. Levi’s memoir was not published in Britain until 1959, when If This Is a Man sold only a few hundred copies (nor did the US edition, under the title Survival in Auschwitz, begin to sell well until twenty years later). Gallimard, the most prestigious of the French publishing houses, for a long time resisted buying anything by Levi; only after his death in 1987 did his work, and his significance, begin to gain recognition in France.” Judt, Postwar, 807. 247
from the Other Europe”, Roth endeavored to assist his circulation and aid his critical reputation in comparable ways: “for the English-speaking world [Levi] came more sharply into focus as a personality after Philip Roth’s long interview with him in 1986, less than a year before his death, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the London Review of Books.”101
Roth elected to republish this particular piece as the first section of Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, and the prominence in the collection indicates more than respect and admiration. In fact, the literary interview with Levi, conducted in Turin after a polite and courteous correspondence, suggests a number of crucial ways in which Roth was actively mining the material. If Shop Talk as a whole outlines some of the significant transnational contexts in which Roth evidently felt his recent fiction ought to be understood, the published conversation with Levi points to several specific threads in the tapestry. Where one might expect to find the interview focusing on the complexities of Jewish solidarity in a global world, Roth instead turns to the textual features of Levi’s writing, scrutinising the most significant details in his works and the most intriguing dimensions of his craft. Curiously, Roth establishes an immediate interest in exploring Levi’s recurring preoccupation with the various meanings of work.
It is a critical emphasis that Roth establishes in the text of the interview with the same kind of expositional attention to detail that he would later bring to bear on Newark Maid and all that it comes to represent in the expansive pages of American Pastoral. Before conducting the conversation with Levi, he requests a visit to the paint factory that employed the trained chemist throughout much of his adult life. Roth’s description of this space, clearly more than a mere setting—approximating instead something more like the bare stage of Levi’s imagination, from
101 Neal Ascherson, “Introduction”, The Periodic Table (Everyman’s Library: New York & London, 1995), vii. 248
which the subsequent performance is projected—provides an early template for many of the painstakingly accurate glove making passages of American Pastoral. Richly evocative and yet precise and detailed, evidently emblematic but curiously unembellished, Roth’s textual reconstruction of Levi’s factory establishes the crucial features of their subsequent conversation and points towards several subsequent developments in his own fiction:
Altogether the company employs fifty people, mainly chemists who work in the
laboratories and skilled laborers on the floor of the plant. The production machinery, the
row of storage tanks, the laboratory building, the finished product in man-sized
containers ready to be shipped, the reprocessing facility that purifies the wastes—all of it
is encompassed in four or five acres seven miles from Turin. The machines that are
drying resin and blending varnish and pumping off pollutants are never distressingly
loud, the yard’s acrid odor—the smell, Levi told me, that clung to his clothing for two
years after his retirement—is by no means disgusting, and the thirty-yard Dumpster
loaded to the brim with the black sludgy residue of the antipolluting process isn’t
particularly unsightly.102
Turning to Levi’s memories of the concentration camps, Roth grants Levi’s comfortable inhabitation of the paint factory and the joy taken in the material processes that happen there the keys to his personal metaphysics. In Roth’s reading, If This is a Man exposes the vicious parody inscribed over the Auschwitz gate; Arbeit Macht Frei looms over a place defined not simply by cruelty and suffering but revealed by Levi to be useless, wasteful, and ultimately senseless in its attempts to extract effort from unwilling bodies: “It’s possible to view your entire literary labor as dedicated to restoring to work its humane meaning, reclaiming the word Arbeit from the
102 “Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi”, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 1. 249
derisive cynicism with which your Auschwitz employers had disfigured it.”103 This sensibility is most powerfully registered in Levi’s reconstruction of the relentless demoralisation endemic to life in the camps. But it is also revealed in the alert assessments and curious asides that ground the voice of his memoirs in an unwavering kind of rationality: “the Buna factory, on which the
Germans were busy for four years and for which countless of us suffered and died, never produced a pound of synthetic rubber.”104
Levi’s whimsical novel The Monkey’s Wrench was published in the original Italian in
1978. It was only translated into English, however, in the same year as his interview with Roth.
Curious, Roth asked to read it. With humour and worldly wisdom, the text attempts to rehabilitate the representation of work from the monstrous parody that engulfed Levi’s early life.
A playful structure involving a series of conversations with the mercurial and mischievous
Faussone, a convivial construction rigger with much to say about the way the world works, sees
Levi divide each chapter into separate chats about the various jobs he has held. The Monkey’s
Wrench employs a light tone and brisk pace to revel in the joys, frustrations, and engaging stories that reveal work to be an essential part of an embracing existence. Late in the text, after considerable time swept up in conversation with Faussone, Levi offers something like a summative statement on this central theme, in the metaphoric language of physical transformation so characteristic of the precision of his prose:
As I was listening to Faussone, inside me a hypothesis was slowly coagulating,
something I didn’t then develop further, but I’ll submit it to the reader now: the noun
“freedom” notoriously has many meanings, but perhaps the most accessible form of
103 Ibid, 6. 104 Primo Levi, If This is a Man & The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 2000), 79. 250
freedom, the most subjectively enjoyed, and the most useful to human society consists of
being good at your job and therefore taking pleasure in doing it.105
Work is portrayed throughout the novel as the opposite of a source of alienation; practised properly, work in The Monkey’s Wrench provides humour, wisdom, and purpose.
Roth took much from The Monkey’s Wrench and the attitudes it voices as he reworked the skeletal material in “How the Other Half Lives” into the dense and ambiguous pages of
American Pastoral. The relationship between Levov and his work in Roth’s initial 1972 sketches grants the protagonist little more than a self-satisfied and thinly drawn adherence to the profit motive—an engine of prosperity, no doubt, but a dubious and shallow way of relating to the world which the text duly exposes. But the finished text of American Pastoral arranges a series of echoes of Levi to enrich and complicate this dimension of the Swede’s world, previously reserved for simple, and simplistic, mockery. Levi provides Roth with the necessary templates to grant the reconstruction of Newark’s industrial middle-class a complex mixture of nostalgic sentiment, romantic blindness, melancholy grandeur, and gentle dignity. Above all else, when he
“disappears” into Levov’s story, Zuckerman comes to emphasise the “humane meaning” of what goes on at Newark Maid. Levi provided a method, in other words, to uncover the rhetorical power and moral heft of the factory processes to which the Swede dedicates his working life, revealing a way to set them alongside everything that was being occluded and oppressed in the emotional attachment. This is not to say that Roth didn’t undertake extensive research on the history of glove making in America; the archived papers in the Library of Congress demonstrate conclusively that he did. But it was texts such as The Monkey’s Wrench which showed him how
105 Primo Levi, The Monkey’s Wrench, trans. William Weaver (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 155. 251
to unlock the necessary language to transform this raw material into descriptive passages of narrative import.
Faussone, mischievously meticulous, could easily be glossing the Swede’s loving account of the manufacturing process at Newark Maid as he guides Rita Cohen through the production of a glove when, between his own description of a complex technical procedure, he notes, “you surely don’t know how they’re rigged; or maybe you do have an idea, but you can’t know what it’s like to rig them. […] That’s why I enjoy telling about my jobs: it’s because so many people have no idea.”106 In one of its more solemn moments, The Monkey’s Wrench also provides testament to the determined personality that finds its full expression only in effort and application—a paean to dedication in a shifting world that Roth siphons into the portrait of Lou
Levov, the indomitable founder of the family business.107 Lou’s ferocious combination of blindness and insight reaches its climax with the rest of the novel in the feverish final scene of the summer dinner party. The returned fork, implement of yet another adopted job, assumed for duty’s sake, almost takes out his eye.
These echoes of Levi and the grave historical circumstances they allow to hover at the outer margins of the finished text, carefully embedded in Zuckerman’s mediation of the story, mean that the Swede’s aggressive response to his tormentor’s most malicious goads, for all his innocence and naiveté, carries real moral weight as well as frustration and anger:
106 Levi, The Monkey’s Wrench, 23. 107 “My mother was a good woman, a churchgoer, but she didn’t treat my father well. She never said anything to him, but she was tough, and you could see she didn’t have great respect. She didn’t realize that for this man, when his work ended, everything ended. He didn’t want the world to change, and since the world does change, and nowadays changes fast, he didn’t have the heart to keep up with it, and so he turned melancholy and listless. One day he didn’t come home to lunch, and my mother found him dead in the shop, with his hammer in his hand, like he had always said.” The Monkey’s Wrench, 93. 252
Please, I haven’t two minutes’ interest in childish clichés. You don’t know what a factory
is, you don’t know what manufacturing is, you don’t know what capital is, you don’t
know what labor is, you haven’t the faintest idea what it is to be employed or what it is to
be unemployed. You have no idea what work is.108
It is the dualistic account of life as a struggle between good and evil, the reductive binary of the angels and the demons—a pattern of thought that was originally to be upended via the crude narrative mechanisms of “How the Other Half Lives”—which comes to seem most ridiculous on account of the Swede’s vicious clash with a critique of capitalism launched from the abstract. In place of the rather strained passages explaining the parody of work in Czechoslovakian factories under Husák, the workers demoralised and drunk by late morning, American Pastoral invests instead in the stink of the tanneries, the sweat of the labourers, and the skillful craftsmanship of the cutters. As with Roth’s detailed, framing description of the chemical plant in his conversation with Levi, the world we inhabit is a contaminated place, its processes grounded in the unavoidable mess of material things. “The acrid odor,” Levi astutely cautions his American guest, the twinkle of the eye inviting the metaphoric leap, “is by no means disgusting.” The functioning factory is fundamentally anathema to the imposing innocence and clarifying violence of the abstract vision, from whichever side of the ideological divide it falls.
Levi’s understanding of the value of labour, a consistent preoccupation in his writings that clearly captivated Roth, was, at root, resolute in its rejection of idealism or cheap spiritualism. Work is neither redemption, alienation, nor salvation, but activity. In echoing Levi’s writings, informed by the cataclysms of European history and the gravest demythologizations of the postwar world, American Pastoral consequently muddles the Calvinist doctrines laced into
108 American Pastoral, 135. 253
many of the nation’s imagined fantasies about its self-constitution. Just as subtle allusions to
Levi trouble the more fascicle aspects of Rita Cohen’s leftist critique, the same resonances expose and undermine the dangerous fantasy of the Protestant valorisation of the work ethic, intimately entwined in the idea of America and ambivalently resurrected in Zuckerman’s nostalgic remembrance of the “paradise” that once was. In particular, echoes of Levi collide and oppose the Puritan genealogy Roth most memorably satirises in the cutting representation of Bill
Orcutt, walking exemplum of a cleansed and abstracted national history. The distinctive attitude and language that Roth took from Levi and braided into the final novel consequently work to undercut the sacrificial claim standing behind the myth of the benevolent nation. As Levi states in the final sentence of their shared conversation, after Roth’s memorable visit to the factory, “I don’t believe I have wasted my time in managing a factory. My factory militanza—my compulsory and honorable service there—kept me in touch with the world of real things.”109
With his vivid testaments to the processes by which matter morphs and moves, Levi opened out an attentive, capacious materialism shorn of manifest destinies and teleological ends.
Though echoes of Levi are most sonorous in the passages of American Pastoral focused on the meanings of work, crucial additions to the early drafts, one can detect his pervasive influence throughout Roth’s historical fiction. In The Periodic Table (1975), an ingenious memoir that pairs chemical anecdotes with a number of formative moments in his life as a technician, Levi elaborates his sense of the elemental philosophical lesson of material processes for the attentive human student. Given its powerful importance for Roth’s major novels, it is worth quoting at some length:
109 “Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi”, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 17. 254
Zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a
very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One
could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity,
which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to
changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I
lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to
turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil,
too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard
are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a
Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does
not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.110
The strategies in exchange, mediation, implication, and literary echo that Roth developed as he mined his engagement with the Other Europe all share a certain commitment to the value of impurities, interminable and irradicable, that Levi crystallises here. For in his later fiction Roth not only dramatises difference and contradiction in ways explored at length in The Counterlife; in his mature historical mode, he grants a certain kind of agency to human impurities in a way analogous to Levi’s chemical processes. It is the errors and the ignorance, attention to the irreducible confusion that pollutes proceedings, which provides the driving tensions that propel
Roth’s narrative method. History happens, in novels such as American Pastoral, I Married a
Communist, and The Plot Against America, in the ineluctable fates wrought by the stubborn grains of salt contaminating the solution. The people at the centre of each narrative may be
110 Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Everyman, 1995), 37. 255
swallowed by the colossal sweep of unforeseen social forces; but it is the impurities which turn the wheel.
Roth channels Levi directly in his own rhetorical paean to the ceaseless persistence of these impurities and their necessary function in the final part of his American Trilogy. In The
Human Stain, a novel that capitalises on the deeper meanings of unintended spills and stubborn residues in a number of significant ways, the echo of Levi’s rumination in The Periodic Table is unmistakable. Zuckerman, contaminant voice, meditates on the unlikely wisdom of Faunia
Farley’s throwaway phrase, as she plays with some captive birds in a crucial scene midway through the novel:
“The human stain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not
even with sadness. That’s how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the
girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity,
cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do
with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone.
Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.111
Reversing the biblical dynamic of the fall, here Roth offers his own secular retelling of man’s entry into history, subtly reworking the instantiating scene that propels the journey forward. The serpent’s temptation, capitalising on female vulnerability to set the story running with a foundational act of disobedience, is evoked in the combination of snake and woman drawn from the Genesis narrative. But here the girl, an innocuous staff member in a nature reserve, feeds the
‘serpent’ in simple adherence to the animal’s bodily routine; the transfer of knowledge and power moves in the opposite direction to the entrance into sin that governs the biblical pattern. It
111 The Human Stain (New York: Vintage, 2001), 242. 256
also eliminates the misogyny. And the lesson Zuckerman extracts from this seemingly harmless reversal, thinking through the philosophical implications of Faunia’s words as the snake willfully consumes another creature, an act undertaken without reflection or remorse, offers nothing less than an alternative account of the instantiating engine of history itself. “The stain that is there before its mark” not only describes the indelible imperfections from which none of us escape, it also hands the transformative power, the dissension that drives the process forward, to the physical presence of our material selves. Original sin is replaced with causation incarnate.
Contamination, as Levi claims, is the very stuff of life.
Beyond everything else that Roth took from his intense engagement with the Other Europe, this idea, underlying all of his later work in different ways, elevated to a principle in The Human
Stain, animated the increasingly sophisticated ways in which he negotiated the collision between the fictional and the historical in his major novels. The unyielding necessity of impurity in each of these texts is defining.
VI. “A Writer Always Envies a Boxer”
When Posnock moved against the durable consensus that Roth should principally be contextualised amongst a group of prominent Jewish American novelists, anchoring his fiction to the playful exploration of the meanings of an ethnic identity, one of the most exciting connections he elaborated to complicate this tendency centred on Roth’s intellectual attachment to Milan Kundera. Though his reading is limited by the critical frame he employs, Posnock’s decision to grant Kundera prominence yields its greatest critical rewards with his reading of The
257
Human Stain, a text intimately engaged with Kundera’s project: “to pursue Kundera’s playful, not frivolous presence in The Human Stain discloses that Roth shares his commitment to staining idylls, but also to volatility, to double moves that keep readers off balance.”112 Indeed, Kundera’s cameo in the story of Delphine Roux is anything but an unthinking literary salute aimed at a colleague and friend. Though ostensibly far removed from the main material of the narrative— the story of an African American who “passes” for years as a Jewish professor of classics— echoes of Kundera are crucial to the heady turbulence of The Human Stain.
Other critics have explored connections between Kundera and Roth. David James, for instance, discusses the dynamic between tradition and innovation that shapes Roth’s and
Kundera’s comparable experiments with fictional form. As James argues, it is the interplay between conformity and invention, central to the legacy of modernist textual forebears, which occupies these two contemporaries in a series of similar ways.113 For the most part, discussions of Roth’s engagement with Kundera focus on identifying intellectual continuities in this way.
But The Human Stain actually reveals a more complicated kind of dialogue, demonstrating the limitations of approaches guided solely by the intense sense of artistic kinship that Roth and Kundera undoubtedly shared. In the story of Coleman Silk, Roth embeds a more complicated meditation on Kundera, contesting aspects of his thinking at precisely the same time that he displays an open gratitude for the debt. The Kunderian spell, what Delphine Roux calls the “Kundera disease” in the account of her own initial infatuation with his work, percolates throughout the text in a range of ambiguous ways.114 Both its authority and its possible
112 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, 199. 113 See David James, “‘Advancing along the inherited path’: Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and the idea of being traditionally new”, The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, Ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 134. 114 The Human Stain, 261. 258
deceptions are powerfully registered in the course of the book. In The Human Stain, Roth’s inheritance from Kundera is depicted, like many of the more concrete cultural legacies explored in the course of the narrative, with an uneasy and conflicted kind of ambivalence.
To unpick this dimension of the novel is, in many ways, to restore the formative context of “Writers from the Other Europe” to the dynamics of the interaction. During the course of its fifteen-year history, Kundera’s fiction came to dominate Roth’s editorial project. Laughable
Loves was one of the inaugural texts in the series, and “Writers from the Other Europe” subsequently published translations of The Joke, The Farewell Party, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—a huge commercial success. In addition to these titles, twice as many as any other author included in the collection, Roth also wanted to publish Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere.
But, as Goodman points out, Kundera resisted the move. In his correspondence with Roth in the mid 1980s, Kundera complains that the category of the “Other Europe” risks imposing upon his work not only a limiting cultural specificity, bringing with it the danger of reductive political readings, but a perpetuation of the Stalinist “fiction” that the territories bound by Soviet occupation constituted any kind of coherent whole:
Kundera reiterated his concern that the Other Europe would be understood as a
euphemism for Eastern Europe. Kundera emphasized that, for better or worse, language
had an immense power to frame the political imagination. In a rush of broken English,
Kundera again argued that the entire notion of Eastern Europe was a monstrous
mystification, even if it had already become so common as to appear banal.115
By this stage in his own writing, Kundera was preoccupied with rehabilitating the idea of
“Central Europe”—his notion of a distinct culture broken and distorted with the imposition of
115 Goodman, “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War”, 731. 259
various political frames. From the destruction of the Hapsburg Empire to the Allies’ betrayal at
Munich and the annexation of the Sudetenland, artificial geographical boundaries had repeatedly severed his native Bohemia, Kundera now claimed, from its true heritage, alienating it from itself. Roth’s conceptual reliance on the grouping of the “Other Europe” privileged the territorial category of the Eastern bloc over this violated tradition: “I love you,” he protested, “I don’t love your colection.”
In Goodman’s account, Kundera’s growing discomfort with the Penguin series, an outlet that had done so much to further his reputation in the West, reflected the eventual limitations of the project as a whole. During its time, “Writers from the Other Europe” had not only drawn attention to the neglected literature of Eastern Europe; but rather, it had also complicated and nuanced the received discursive terms of the late Cold War, opening out a range of new directions. However, as the 1980s wore on, and the possibility of European unifications coalesced into concrete political objectives, the idea of the “Other Europe” proved increasingly insignificant. By 1989, it was largely obsolete.
But Roth’s dispute with Kundera over the utility of the “Other Europe” reflects more than wider developments in the discursive skirmishes driving the closing chapters of the Cold War. In fact, the disagreement points to a number of ways in which Roth’s engagement with Kundera evolved to include a spectrum of suspicions, thoughts that move beyond the evident admiration.
Most conspicuous amongst these centred on Kundera’s increasingly dogmatic disavowal of sociopolitical specificity. In a riff on “Central Europe” in the final section of The Art of the Novel
(1986), collected under the playful elaboration of a selection of “Key Words,” Kundera rejects the idea of geographical frames with a flippancy that borders on the insouciant: “national,
260
regional contexts are useless for apprehending the meaning and the value of a work.”116 Not only the “Other Europe” but all ideas of the nation are conceived as parochial constraints, inimical to the absolute freedom of the artist.
However necessary this uncompromising sense of independence may have been— resisting interpretative frames in order to challenge a communist politics enabled by the conceptual mechanics of allegory—Kundera’s claimed separation from place diverged from
Roth’s increasingly intense attachment to his own regional context. In his correspondence with
Kundera, Roth points to Joyce as an example of a writer who holds national concerns and wider themes in productive tension; the local and the existential converge without cancelling one another out. The sociopolitical setting, though always replete with obstacles, can enable as well as restrain. Even in the most charitable interpretation, Kundera’s cunning resuscitation of a
“Central European” artistic sensibility lost to various political encroachments seems almost prelapsarian in the faith it places in the restorative power of cultural conservatism. Occupations and invasions, after all, are historical realities, not merely incorrect interpretations of unblemished places. But for Kundera, History wielded to human designs was precisely the problem.117
To trace the evolution of this tension in the work each subsequently produced is to watch
Kundera gravitate increasingly towards magic realism and track Roth developing his own form of historical fiction, reinvesting heavily in his own national context. In his nonfiction study
Testaments Betrayed (1995), Kundera modifies his somewhat nebulous account of the art of the modern novel, identifying and celebrating a specific tradition that runs from Rabelais through to
116 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1995 [1986]), 125. 117 Across his writing, Kundera associates History with the Marxist and Hegelian eschatologies of modernity. The playful independence of the novel is conceived in opposition to these teleological systems. 261
Garcia-Marquez, grounded more explicitly in a spirit of mimetic rejection: “From the very first lines, Rabelais’s book shows its hand: the story being told here is not serious: that is, there are no statements of truths here (scientific or mythic); no promise to describe things as they are in reality.”118
In his conversation with Kundera in 1980, originally published as an afterward to The
Book of Laugher and Forgetting, a text later reproduced in Shop Talk, Roth hints at his scepticism regarding Kundera’s intoxicating sense of boundless freedom: “Yet surely there is something that makes a novel a novel and that limits this freedom.”119 In his conversation with
Klíma ten years later, Roth takes a more barbed swipe at the vogue for novelistic modes unfettered by any representational compact. Slyly aligning Klíma’s recent work with Chekhov in a move that suggestively parallels his previous praise of Kundera’s more restrained early short stories, Roth actively establishes his distance from the sweeping claims in The Art of the Novel, later distilled in Testaments Betrayed: “Klíma juggles a dozen motifs and undertakes the boldest of transitions without hocus-pocus, as unshowily as Chekhov telling the story “Gooseberries”; he provides a nice antidote to all that magic in magic realism.”120
Roth’s major novels of the 1990s work to repudiate Kundera’s mimetic disavowals by way of their compositional technique. The American Trilogy not only explores the various ways in which the political tides of the nation engulf the individual; Roth’s prose also becomes a newly capacious kind of recording instrument. The vividness of Roth’s historical fiction is, in essence, the effect of a deliberate observational intensity. Above all else, the American Trilogy is alive with the materiality of things—factories, bodies, and boxing gloves. Codifying this
118 Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 3. 119 Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 94. 120 Ibid, 43. 262
commitment in his own account of “the art of the novel” in his final essay, “The Ruthless
Intimacy of Fiction,” Roth systematically inverts Kundera’s claim:
This passion for specificity, for the hypnotic materiality of the world one is in, is all but
at the heart of the task to which every American novelist has been enjoined since Herman
Melville and his whale and Mark Twain and his river: to discover the most arresting,
evocative verbal description for every last American thing. Without strong representation
of the thing—animate or inanimate—without the crucial representation of what is real,
there is nothing. Its concreteness, its unabashed focus on all the mundanities, a fervor for
the singular and a profound aversion to generalities is fiction’s lifeblood.121
An emphasis on descriptive intensity is married here to exactly the kind of national context that
Kundera came so firmly to discard. In so far as both region and particularity impose boundaries on the novelist, in “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction” such limitations provide scope, focus, and above all expressive energy.
The divergence in Roth’s and Kundera’s respective approaches is reflected in the different ways in which each novelist came to write and to think about Kafka. Indeed, Kafka was at the foundations of their interaction from the very beginning; it was Kafka who virtually captured Roth’s imagination, bringing him to Prague in 1972. And it was the resurrected spirit of a Kafka retooled that loomed large over the antic samizdat culture that Roth found so arresting and which fundamentally shaped his engagement with the “Other Europe”.122 Both Roth and
Kundera produced breakthrough material, indexing aspects of their own development, in their ongoing intertextual dialogues with his work. Just as “Looking at Kafka” represents Roth’s most
121 “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 393. 122 For a discussion of the historical importance of the Czechoslovakian conference on Franz Kafka in Liblice in 1963, see Judt, Postwar, 437-438. 263
successful early experiment with an exchange narrative, Kundera adjusted his own approach in conversation with the other indomitable Czech K.
In The Art of the Novel, Kundera associates Kafka with a certain kind of indecipherability elemental to the innate autonomy of fiction. Setting the texts themselves against the allegorical solutions proposed by the “Kafkologists”, the significance of Kafka’s fiction lies in the distance he exposes between art and the world. “The novel form,” Kundera boldly declares, “is almost boundless freedom.”123 In his own texts, Kundera transforms this insight into an existential imperative. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kafka’s uncanny adumbrations of the entrapment of modern life helps to shape Kundera’s grand set of metaphysical scales, measuring the weight of tragedy against the cruel lightness of comedy—the elemental tension in which the characters in the novel fight continually for affirmation. The only thing that can tentatively liberate us from this struggle is the exquisite irony possible in our aesthetic experience.
In Testaments Betrayed, Kafka is subsumed into Kundera’s more concrete description of the lineage of the modern novel; Kafka marks a radical assertion of autonomy separating contemporary literature from the world it beholds.124 In Amerika, Kundera argues, Kafka established a new and particularly intense experience of a “literature about literature.”125 And from this foundational assault on credibility, modern fiction asserts itself in the place of a reality anathema to choice and possibility. Kafka exists in the strictly limitless domain of aesthetics— the only experience of limitlessness we still possess.
123 Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 83. 124 In a section about Kafka called “The Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta”, Kundera writes, “I stress this in order to make clear the full radical nature of Kafka’s aesthetic revolution. […] He cut a breach in the wall of plausibility; the breach through which many others followed him, each in his own way: Fellini, Marquez, Fuentes, Rushdie.” Testaments Betrayed, 52-53. 125 Ibid, 81. 264
But for Roth, Kafka came to mean something very different. His own negotiations associate Kafka’s work less with the demarcation of boundaries than with their disintegration.
With increasing intensity and formal sophistication, Roth’s allusions to Kafka come to trigger inversions and transformations that draw into question the very boundary guaranteeing the autonomy of art so central to Kundera’s artistic system. In works such as The Breast and The
Professor of Desire, such moments of dissolution are fairly frivolous; however, from “Looking at Kafka” and beyond, Roth’s emphasis on the impenetrable entanglement of fiction in the world it apprehends assumes a different set of stakes. What Kafka comes to signal in Roth’s mature fiction is the ineluctable confusion of history itself—the history that both produces and assaults us is, in fact, coterminous with the indecipherable meanings that suspend Kafka’s haunting world.
Roth’s most developed critical evaluation of Kafka falls in his conversation with Klima, included in Shop Talk:
He is anything but a fantasist creating a dream or a nightmare world as opposed to a
realistic one. His fiction keeps insisting that what seems to be unimaginable hallucination
and hopeless paradox is precisely what constitutes one’s reality […] he chronicles the
education of someone who comes to accept—rather too late, in the case of the accused
Joseph K.—that what looks to be outlandish and ludicrous and unbelievable, beneath
your dignity and concern, is nothing less than what is happening to you: that thing
beneath your dignity turns out to be your destiny.126
Kundera’s “literature about literature” Roth rereads as the fiction of defamiliarizing realism.
126 Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 64. 265
In The Human Stain, Roth channels these animating tensions with Kundera into a powerful combination of colliding echoes. Posnock points out that Roth seizes on the double- moves of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Delphine’s favourite novel, as part of his distinctive narrative strategy. Kundera’s jump-cut counterpointing of political vignettes against the personal hypocrisies of his characters feeds into Roth’s turbulent depiction of lives only halfway known. The Human Stain constructs its portraits of individual characters around outward traits presented to the world, only to reveal the duplicity sustaining such powerful postures in a manner predicated on Kundera’s example.
But the text that Roth echoes most clearly is The Joke, originally published in 1967, later reprinted in “Writers from the Other Europe” in 1983. In many ways, The Human Stain actively rewrites Kundera’s first novel—the uncannily prophetic book that was censored and banned, torn ceremoniously from Czechoslovakian libraries following the Prague Spring. In The Human
Stain, Roth mines both the narrative strategy of The Joke, with its conceptual reliance on a single combustible incident, and its open reflections on the surrounding cultural atmosphere. Kundera’s vicious satire of the kind of intellectual abrogation endemic in the puppet regimes of the Eastern bloc is retuned to the music of the “enormous piety binge” characterising the heady moralizing of the nation’s commentariat at the height of the Lewinsky scandal.127 The story of a man crushed and enraged by a censorious and intolerant atmosphere, pitted against a power structure conscientiously committed to maintaining platitudes, sits at the centre of The Joke and The
Human Stain in a range of richly comparable ways.
Each novel pivots on precisely the same kind of politically charged incident of misreading; the vibrations of language, volatile and unpredictable, propel both texts. The dispute
127 The Human Stain, 2. 266
surrounding Coleman’s use of the word “spooks” when taking attendance at the beginning of one of his lectures, what Zuckerman describes as “the self-incriminating word” leading to his persecution and his eventual alienation from the institution that previously defined him, exactly parallels the incident that drives The Joke. Ludvik’s casual note penned in haste to his girlfriend, making fun of the enforced optimism of the cultural moment in Stalinist Czechoslovakia—“A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”—sees him expelled from the Party and subsequently imprisoned. Misinterpreted as being sincere when he was only kidding around,
Ludvik becomes trapped in a devastating kind of joke predicated on the enforcement of a kind of univocal mode of signification. His very playfulness with words, an interest in implication and suggestion that moves beyond the tyranny of generalisation, sees him ruthlessly assailed.
The ferocious irony of Kundera’s first novel, the narrative cruelty that bares down on
Ludvik as a consequence of being so outrageously misunderstood, finds no release of pressure beyond the character’s own impotent anger: “I felt a wave of fury rush through me, a wave of unforeseen and unprecedented fury.”128 It is precisely this feeling of unbearable, senseless mockery afflicting the unfortunate Ludvik that Roth circles around the indignant Coleman.
Initially enraged by a galling accusation but later exposed to a professional disgrace that he blames for the untimely death of his wife, Coleman’s maniacal energy draws liberally on
Kundera’s example: “There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. […] Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.”129
Tellingly, both The Joke and The Human Stain use the same language to describe the imposed humiliation; the depiction of the “mysterious rite of purification” in Kundera’s first novel—its
128 Milan Kundera, The Joke, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), 168. 129 The Human Stain, 12. 267
violence, stupidity, but seeming necessity—anticipates Roth’s construction of the assault on the accumulated power of the pieties of his own period.130 The ceremonial repetition of the need to unpollute the civic arena through purgation resonates throughout The Human Stain. Athena is no different to Athens or communist Prague in the reliance on violent cleansing as the means by which the veneer of civilisation is maintained.131
Other features of The Human Stain echo The Joke in more complicated and nuanced ways. Coleman’s intense and invigorating relationship with Faunia Farley, for instance, an attachment that develops after his alienation from the academic community, contains shades of
Ludvik’s courtship of the estranged and enigmatic Lucie after his banishment from the Party.
Though Roth reworks the dynamic quite radically, both The Joke and The Human Stain position sexual experience, with equal attention to the irreducible vulnerability occasioned by erotic interactions as the empowering sense of vital pleasure, in combative friction with the accumulated power of the clichés and social platitudes that work to ensnare the protagonists.
Indeed, Roth’s celebration of Kundera’s attention to the inescapable paradoxes of sexual experience in the pages of “Writers from the Other Europe” finds its way into the presentation of
Zuckerman’s curiosity about Coleman’s emotional investment in his belated virility:
Kundera […] seems even in a book as bleak and cheerless as The Joke, to be
fundamentally amused by the uses to which a man will think to put his sexual member, or
the uses to which his member will put him; this amusement, mixed though it is with
130 The Joke, 197. 131 The epigraph to The Human Stain is taken from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King: “Oedipus: “What is the rite of purification? How shall it be done?” Creon: “By banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood …” 268
sympathy and sorrow, leads Kundera away from anything even faintly resembling a
mystical belief or ideological investment in the power of potency or orgasm.132
Coleman’s restored energy in The Human Stain, a kind of qualified recuperation that occurs chronologically after the high drama of his fall from grace and social esteem, issues from precisely this acquiescence to ridiculousness. And it is in the acceptance of a certain comic energy that he is able to confide and rejoice about his affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaner, almost three decades his junior, to the novelist living nearby. Beckoned to dance with his newly and disarmingly mischievous neighbour on a hot summer evening, an act of reckless abandon that envelopes all that passes between them in the rest of the text with the feeling of an improvised exchange, Zuckerman reasons that the affair with Faunia has restored “a taste for the foolishness of life” to the previously beleaguered classics professor.133 A powerful new erotic attachment has not liberated Coleman’s authentic, primal desires, previously suppressed by the weight of social convention; but rather, it has restored his enjoyment of being daring, audacious, and, above all, playful. Neither D.H. Lawrence nor Norman Mailer, in other words, stand behind the Viagra-tinged threads of The Human Stain. Coleman’s unlikely rejuvenation and the spirit that defines it is both conceived and thwarted under the Kunderian spell of human lightness.
Roth combines the text’s interest in a vision of literacy defined against static meaning and the reductive generalizations characteristic of the cultural climate with the destabilising power of erotic turbulence at the very moment in which Kundera’s name enters the novel directly. In the intertextual negotiation of Kundera, in other words, crucial aspects of The Human Stain collide.
In a portrayal that risks sliding into caricature, Delphine Roux exemplifies not only the sanctimony satirised more generally in the depiction of academic activity, bringing the spurious
132 Philip Roth “Introducing Milan Kundera,” Laughable Loves, xv. 133 The Human Stain, 26. 269
charge of racism against Coleman Silk in an attack not only on his person but on his pedagogy; but rather, she also comes to represent an instrumental vision of literary meaning anathema to
Roth’s wider vision of dynamic epistemological uncertainty. In the threatening note she mails to
Coleman, a text that begins with the banal platitude “Everyone knows”—a phrase that hangs, ominously, over the first section of The Human Stain—Delphine embodies a mode of reading insensitive to the particular, determined to impose contextual meaning via preconceived allegiance as opposed to inducing it with attention to the details that endlessly accrete and move.
But the riddle of Delphine’s own contradictions, indicated in the oracular valence of her cryptic name, is a hidden dimension of her story that Roth defines in direct relation to the work of the enigmatic Czech novelist pervading the ironies of the entire text. When Zuckerman describes Delphine Roux’s early infatuation with literature as a young woman in Paris, years before she arrives at the Athena campus, elaborating a preceding attachment to art more alert and vital than the theories she comes to rely upon to protect her from exposing her own vulnerabilities, Kundera is invoked as the paradigmatic example of a writer shorn of such shields and pretense: “Kundera’s intention in his lectures was to free the intelligence from the French sophistication, to talk about the novel as having to do with human beings and the comédie humaine.”134 As she gravitates towards a critical system that increasingly distances her from the texts she loves, adopting the prohibitions of the social structures as her own, Delphine comes to conceive of her abandonment of this intense early attachment as a betrayal not of herself but of
Kundera—a “Faustian bargain” necessary, she reasons, to succeed in academic America.135
The Human Stain decisively eroticises this early connection, aligning a vision of literary meaning sensitive to complexity and resistant to stasis with the both the thrilling force and the
134 The Human Stain, 267. 135 Ibid, 266. 270
uncomfortable turbulence of sexual activity. The young Delphine is purposefully described as being particularly attracted to Kundera’s “prizefighter looks”, investing in his “shabby” appearance a powerful aura of authenticity—a legitimacy also conferred by way of his struggle as an Eastern European author, seemingly speaking from outside the usual contexts and arguing against the received doctrines. When she comes to characterise the American men whom she frequently and unkindly mocks in letters sent home to France as a lonely expatriate, it is in the implicit comparison to the meanings that have accumulated around Kundera that these figures fall short of her estimation. “The Diapers” and “The Hats”, as she generalizes the character types available at the Athena campus, cannot live up to the standards established in an earlier infatuation with the mercurial author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
But the shaping attachment has its costs; it does not simply represent a loyalty sacrificed to expedient and convenient subsequent aims. The erotic nature of Delphine’s reading of
Kundera, in a display of contradiction typical of the manoeuvres of The Human Stain, wounds her deeply. Zuckerman actually aligns Delphine’s youthful intoxication with Kundera’s writing and the powerful feelings that coalesce around the interaction with a harmful and detrimental entry into the domain of desire. Enchanted with his thoughts on Madame Bouvary after attending one of his lauded lectures in Paris as an audacious seventeen year old, Delphine misconstrues her own attraction to Kundera as a shared compact between herself and Dominique, an exchange student who picks her up in the heat of the infection with “the Kundera disease.”136 Crushed by the dislocation of intentions made explicit one “terrible night” sometime later when she shows up and he is there waiting for her with his friend, “only interested in her body,” Delphine’s sudden exposure to her own devastating misconception leaves her disappointed and hurt. And this
136 The Human Stain, 261. 271
damaging early erotic experience, enveloped under the emotional volatility occasioned by
Kundera’s magnetic pull, leaves an even more insidious mark; as Zuckerman conceives it,
Delphine’s early misjudgement of another’s desire becomes lodged in her future readings of race—an invidious association that recurs later in life when she desperately struggles to find the language to imply that she is only interested in dating white men as she obsessively reworks her personal ad.
It is one of the most extraordinary ironies in a novel replete with sudden and dramatic reversals that the abstract figure whom Delphine ends up describing as she dreams up her ideal suitor ends up as a facsimile of Coleman Silk, the disgraced college Dean. Not only does her effort to free up her imagination disclose the surprising fact the she desires her former adversary in the struggle over academic pedagogy in Athena; but rather, Delphine ends up inadvertently fantasising about a date with an African American man, the very category she had previously endeavoured to exclude from consideration as a consequence of an unexamined, static prejudice.
This crucial moment in The Human Stain assists in the novel’s wider determination not only to obliterate the fantasies of complete self-knowledge that often empower our attachments to the identities we assert but also to demonstrate again that “our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”137 Epistemologies of certitude, in the logic of The Human Stain, can only deceive. To live is to be perpetually knocked off guard.
But when she describes the desired respondent to her personal ad, it is not only Coleman whom Delphine inadvertently conjures in the freeing description of what she truly “seeks.” Her fantasy also harks back to the writer with the “poetically prizefighterish looks” who once meant so much to her. And it is in the consequences of this collision that the novel also knocks its own
137 The Human Stain, 22. 272
salute to the jousting mind of the Eastern European novelist who echoes with such seeming authority through its pages decisively off guard. In the portrayal of the ruthlessly independent
Coleman, trimly built, playfully satirical and confidently defiant—intoxicated, above all, with his own singularity—Roth embeds all the energy and the dynamism that the wider novel connects to the power of Kundera’s writing. This association is established most vividly in the potent personality that Zuckerman infers from his increasingly intimate experience of Coleman’s physicality. Zuckerman’s readings of the man are subtly laced with Roth’s own indelible impression of Kundera’s imposing presence: “a combination of a prizefighter and a panther,” whose bodily solidity and piercing eyes betrayed his nature as a “lone wolf”.138 Coleman’s unmistakably Kunderian looks and attitude are far from incidental.
In the second section of the novel, “Slipping the Punch,” Zuckerman uncovers the disgraced professor’s extraordinary history, growing up as an African American in East Orange.
As Zuckerman reconstructs it, the earliest intimations of Coleman’s extraordinary decision to conceal his origins, to live in the unbound possibility of the first-person pronoun at the expense of the bound third-person, are contained in the talent Coleman exhibits as a promising young prizefighter. As an apprentice boxer, the young man ends up adopting a distinct counterattacking style, and through this activity he discovers both the intoxicating excitement of a double-life and the more unsettling urge to cause the singular harm that he alone is in a position to produce. In the perpetual motion of the contest in the ring, his meanings are his own to shape and deliver. In
Zuckerman’s description, these two new thrills inextricably fuse:
It was that something he could not even name made him want to be more damaging than
he’d ever dared before, to do something more that day than merely win. Was it because
138 Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 91-92. 273
the Pitt coach didn’t know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was
entirely his secret? He did love secrets. The secret of nobody’s knowing what was going
on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to think with no way of anybody’s
knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn’t
where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and the pleasure were to be found
in the opposite, in being counterconfessional in the same way you were a counterpuncher,
and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having to think about it.
That’s why he liked shadowboxing and hitting the heavy bag: for the secrecy in it.139
Coleman’s love of the clandestine, his excitement about the contained solidity of his own inner consciousness, an empowering attachment that Roth elaborates here in relation to the character’s sly counterpunching technique, sees him cultivate the self-confidence to escape from the historical predicament of his race. His skin light enough to “pass”, Coleman only needs to convert his identity into a self-contained secret, concealed like his thoughts out there in the ring, to sever himself completely from his origins.
The process that actually produces personal autonomy, then, in the perpetually off- balanced dynamics of The Human Stain, is reliant on the instantiating fact that remains hidden; the concealed secret enables the boundless freedom of the limitless lie.140 And this radical autonomy, aligned in the representation of the shadow-boxing to an unnameable instinct to assert one’s subjectivity in the excitement of violence, propels Coleman’s most devastating act of personal separation. When he takes the final step of his entry into whiteness by abandoning his mother, Zuckerman carefully describes the act as a kind of murder, emphasising the connotations
139 The Human Stain, 100. 140 Roth mirrors this aspect of Coleman’s story in the depiction of Faunia Farley’s own enabling secret—her feigned illiteracy. 274
of physical damage that have already accumulated around Coleman’s counterconfessional capacity. “Let her talk,” he prepares himself to remember, on the day in which he permanently leaves. Curiously, when she takes in the full weight of the betrayal, Mrs Silk does not cry over her son’s astonishing cruelty; she actually lectures her unusually audacious boy about the ominous threat that always seemed to loom somewhere, inaccessibly, inside his independence:
“She went on for nearly two hours, a long speech about his autonomy dating back to infancy, expertly taking in the pain by delineating all she was up against and couldn’t hope to oppose.”141
Above all else, Coleman always wanted to author himself.
As he became increasingly forthright about the claim to absolute autonomy shaping his own aesthetics, positioning the novel in an antithetical relationship to the history that surrounds and subsumes it, Kundera gravitated towards the metaphor of the game as a way to describe the oppositional nature of the artist, perpetually playing moves that upset the progress of the received script. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera even grants the writer licence to play fast and loose with the inherited instructions: “as opposed to the chess player, the artist invents his own rules for himself.”142 But in an earlier piece on the future of the novel published in the New York
Times Book Review in 1978, an essay that anticipated the astonishing success of The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting and later The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) in its celebration of the artist’s freedom to upturn even the most fundamental conventions of the novel form,
Kundera’s account of aesthetic autonomy is granted a more specific comparison: “A writer always envies a boxer.”143
141 The Human Stain, 140. 142 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, 20. 143 Milan Kundera, “Kundera on the Novel”, The New York Times Book Review, January 8, 1978, 1. 275
In the depiction of Coleman Silk, the counterconfessional figure at the centre of the novel, The Human Stain actually exhibits a more complex meditation on the daring and the skill and the sweeping momentum of Kundera’s art than the admiring picture inserted into the backstory of Delphine Roux. Indeed, in the sympathetic portrayal of Coleman’s stupendous singularity, a capacity that moves all the way from slipping the punch as a teenage athlete to the mischievous improvisation of another’s life as an officer in the U.S. Navy, culminating in an act of self-reinvention performed on a grand American scale, Zuckerman can’t help but reveal his admiration for the courage and the self-possession. Above all, as Roth suggests in the depiction of Zuckerman’s near flirtatious friendship with the octogenarian who asks him to dance on a hot summer evening, it is Coleman’s playful precocity which the entranced writer comes to find most disarming.
But Roth’s novel also decisively reveals the limitations of assuming the inviolability of such a vision. Coleman’s sublime independence is achieved at a human cost that the text gradually recovers. Moreover, history itself—the prescient realism of Kafka’s hopeless paradoxes—reasserts its grip on the protagonist’s bold and bracing freedom. In the end, the autonomy separating the dazzling prizefighter from the world he reworks is only an illusion— ultimately, in fact, it is an autonomy sustained by deception. When Clarence Silk, learned
Shakespearean in full possession of the amplitude of his words, admonishes his son when he finds out about the boxing that subsequently does so much to lure Coleman into the pleasures of a concealed life, he is speaking about more than the dangers of the sport: “With that remark, his father had heard enough. “I’ve seen men get hit with a punch that they never saw coming. And
276
when that happens,” Mr. Silk said, “their eyes don’t get watery—when that happens, it knocks them cold.”144 Try completely to escape the historical fabric, and the fabric tears you.
***
In 2008 the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes came across a document written by an officer in the Czech Communist police identifying an informant. In 1950 a man called Miroslav
Dvořáček visited a young woman at a dormitory in Prague and accidentally left his suitcase behind. He had recently become a spy for the West. A young cadet who wanted most of all to fly planes, Dvořáček had previously been expelled from the Airborne Military Academy for
“lacking a positive attitude” towards the people’s democracy.145 The general who recruited him promised that soon he would arrange for Dvořáček to become a military pilot. After he left the dormitory in Prague, the young woman told her boyfriend about the visit, who passed on the information to another figure living in the building. When Dvořáček returned to retrieve his suitcase, he was arrested. He served 14 years in prison, working for many of them in uranium mines. The piece of paper recovered by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes named
Milan Kundera as the informant.
Such documents are notoriously difficult to interpret. The veracity of the name provided to the police, in addition to the motivations of the policemen involved, ought to be treated with some scepticism. It is also possible, if not likely, that the StB forged the file to discredit one of its most visible critics. But such doubts certainly do not disqualify the possibility that as a young student Kundera had been responsible for the arrest. Collaboration with the communist police in
Prague was widespread, and at the time Dvořáček was arrested Kundera was an enthusiastic
144 The Human Stain, 96. 145 See Marci Shore, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013), 344. 277
Communist—a devoted member of the Party whose early verse sang the praises of Comrade
Stalin and the new world he would soon usher in. Whatever else the discovered document shows, the inescapable force of an unwelcome history most definitely reasserts its claim.
278
Chapter 4. Contaminating Modernism
I. “Life Is Unspeakable and to Be Exposed”
So J. Joyce continued with the seemingly endless revisions of his epic novel, pushing the patience of the printers in a way fitting for a literary work of such restless innovation, idiosyncrasy, and obscenity. As Richard Ellmann describes the weeks before Ulysses was finally published, Joyce was deep in the depths of the frenzy. Nora Barnacle was concerned about the possible damage to his fragile health: “It’s the great fanaticism is on him, and it is coming to no end.” In the grip of his mania Joyce placed increasingly ridiculous demands. Most famously, he requested a solid blue cover with exquisite white lettering, matching precisely the hues and contrasts of the Greek flag. The exasperated Monsieur Darantière had to travel to Germany to locate the exact shade of cyan. And still Joyce continued, at great expense to the already overburdened printers, to make alterations to the most subtle details of the text:
With Joyce the reading of proof was a creative act; he insisted on five sets, and from
notes he had made innumerable changes, almost always additions, in the text,
complicating the interior monologue with more and more interconnecting details. The
book grew by one third in proof. Darantière’s characteristic gesture, throwing up his
hands in despair, became almost constant when the type had to be recast time after time,
and Sylvia Beach was much tried; but Joyce won his point.1
As he poured over the proofs and galleys of Sabbath’s Theater (1995), his self-consciously outrageous and inventive novel about a disgraced former puppeteer, a peripatetic wanderer and repellent pocket-fondler cast in the Joycean mould, there is little doubt that Roth was seized by a
1 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 513. 279
similar sense of uncompromising fidelity to the multiplying minutia of the compositional struggle. Right up to the moment the text was published, Roth was actively reworking the material, labouring over the most subtle adjustments to lexis and syntax. “Any chance of correcting this before the die is cast?” he faxed his beleaguered manuscript editor, only to renege moments later on the requested alteration: “I screwed up. Now I’ve got myself in a pickle with the word “over.” Please re-correct according to the insert labeled 4/29. I should be straightjacketed and put away until the book comes out—and maybe I will be.”2
It was not the proofs and galleys alone, though, which buckled under Roth’s gargantuan expectations. The attention to detail that marks the various revisions of the innocuous “inside front flap copy,” the photoshoot that captured the writer in self-confident recline, and the astonishing fastidiousness with which Roth seems to have collated and examined the novel’s early reviews, deigning to tick his points of agreement with his expecting critics, all reflect the sense in which Sabbath’s Theater was always conceived by its author as a major artistic event.
This grandness of conception and anticipated reception animates much of what is most distinctive about the text itself.
Sabbath’s Theater revels in the powers of provocation, exhibiting an unrelenting determination to affront and to offend. In reading the book we keep consistent company with the detestable. But the energy of the text does not derive entirely from this continual willingness to shock. The novel also grounds its thematic attack and its formal design in relation to a kind of aesthetic monumentality—the sublime consummation of the artistic struggle—that Roth came to locate in Joyce, the towering figure who had previously only hovered rather distantly over his
2 Fax to Larry Cooper 1995, Philip Roth Papers, Box 13, Folder 19. This material has been removed from this document because of copyright restrictions. The removed quotation demonstrates Roth’s fastidious attention to detail in the revision process. 280
writing. The imposing example of Ulysses stands behind Roth’s conception of Sabbath’s Theater in a number of crucial ways. Not only does the book openly display its debts by way of a rich and playful panoply of allusions; but rather, the particular fashion in which the novel comes actively to reread Ulysses ignites the engine of its extraordinary, rapacious energy. Negotiating
Joyce is absolutely essential to Roth’s approach in Sabbath’s Theater, the book that inaugurates the high style of his fiction of the 1990s.
In fact, a meditative return to a number of texts from the modernist canon drives much of the material Roth produced during this period, though such connections, fiercely fought, have largely been ignored. This chapter explores the various ways in which Roth’s string of major novels returns to the pantheon of literary modernism, not simply alluding to a series of canonical authors but instead subjecting them to a lacerating kind of appropriation. In Roth’s sweeping fiction of the 1990s, luminaries such as Joyce, Yeats, and Woolf are recurrently invoked and engulfed—intertextual inspiration flows from the supersession of their established formal solutions, accredited on the syllabus and preserved on the shelf. In his late novelistic mode, a voice distinct from both the lapidary polish and vocal immediacy of earlier periods and phases,
Roth ruthlessly remakes a number of his most eminent predecessors. The textual forms of literary modernism are not so much jettisoned in these novels as they are recontaminated, reintroducing the mess of experience and the implacable specificity of the historical moment to the revered page. If the institutionalisation of literary modernism in the postwar university represented a certain mode of abstraction, Roth’s novels of the 1990s work to wreck and reverse the process. These texts reassert the primacy of life over the isolated literary object.
Few critics fail to notice Roth’s habit of referring to Joyce throughout his fiction—and the dialogue with Joyce proves to be the most significant of Roth’s intertextual negotiations.
281
However, most studies attribute only a decorative or associative significance to these scattered allusions. In her reading of Sabbath’s Theater, Debra Shostak notes the Bloomian provenance of some of Mickey Sabbath’s dirty habits. Yet the deep and pressing interaction with Ulysses never really figures in her otherwise perceptive analysis of the representation of the desiring male body.3 Similarly, Ross Posnock is alert to some of the ways in which Roth evokes a Joycean precedent for the novel’s unrelenting transgressive energy. “As though Joyce hadn’t sniffed filthily at Nora’s underpants,” Posnock notes, is a line in Roth’s slender novella Deception
(1990), though it could just as easily stand as the instructional epigraph to his later book about the wandering puppeteer.4 In addition, Posnock mentions Roth’s salute to Joycean strategies for rendering subjectivity. And yet the complexities of the interaction, particularly along these charged epistemological lines, remain unexplored.
With a wider lens, Catherine Morley argues that Joyce provided a crucial template for the ways in which many postwar American novelists sought to channel their own aspirations in the genre of the modern epic, offering a plethora of strategies with which to play the private drama of the individual alongside the national story.5 But her analysis of Roth’s American Pastoral
(1997) focuses on the dialogue with Milton’s Paradise Lost, the more prominent epic intertext in the novel. This relative inattention perhaps in part explains Brett Ashley Kaplan’s more pronounced discussion of some of Roth’s interactions with Joyce across the longer arc of his career. Slotted inside a study focused on the intense dynamic between “perpetration and victimization” that Kaplan sees as central to all of Roth’s writing, the intertextual dialogue with
3 See Shostak, Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, 46-59. 4 See Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, 156. What Posnock does not note is that a quotation from Ulysses focused on the filthy substratum of life did originally stand as Roth’s choice of epigraph in the novel’s drafts. 5 See Catherine Morley, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo (London: Routledge, 2009). 282
Joyce comes to disclose tensions between guilt and innocence that linger within a fraught sense of identity. In moving our attention beyond the decorative, Kaplan’s intervention on Roth’s attachment to Joyce is both discerning and illuminating. The decision principally to ground her analysis in relation to Finnegans Wake, however, results in some rather striking missed opportunities. As I subsequently argue, Ulysses is undoubtedly the text that Roth contests in the composition of his major fiction of the 1990s. “That Roth’s writings are in the wake of the
Wake” is certainly true; but it is to the waking hours of Joyce’s fiction that Roth most consequentially returns.6
It is crucial at this point to retrace some of the intellectual history that actually shaped
Roth’s early encounters with Joyce, as Sabbath’s Theater reflects not only an intense return to the texts themselves, but also a rigorous reengagement with the interpretive tensions surrounding
Joyce’s reception. The canonicity and status of a novel such as Ulysses, and the terms of its institutional prestige, are now so commonplace and firmly established as to obscure crucial features of Roth’s initial contact with the writing. For half a century, Joyce more than anyone embodied the powerful, modern idea of the artist’s heroic independence.7 That Roth was particularly sympathetic to this vision of Joyce’s willingness to stand apart from tribe and state in pursuit of the perfect page owes much to his own early experiences with various cultural arbiters that sought to silence him. Tellingly, Nathan Zuckerman assumes the name Dedalus in the second section of The Ghost Writer (1979), the text in which Roth most vividly fictionalises this aspect of his writing life, pushing against social constraints and a constricting vision of ethnic
6 See Brett Ashley Kaplan, Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 49. 7 For all our contemporary critical impatience with past assertions of artistic independence, Andrew Goldstone has persuasively argued that it is incumbent upon scholars to examine such “fictions” attentively: “we must take the forms of relative autonomy seriously as a genuine and significant aspect of modernist literature’s engagement with its world. We must undertake the literary-historical study of autonomy itself.” Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (Oxford: University Press, 2013), 2. Such considerations apply to any rigorous effort to explore Roth’s attachment to Joyce. 283
allegiance.8 Joyce as example, in other words, was arguably more important to the young Roth than the tumbling puns and mental monologues of his revolutionary prose.
Roth’s connection to the making of Joyce’s literary legend, though, was actually more substantial than his earlier, somewhat distant allusions might initially suggest. When Goodbye,
Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959) won the precocious wunderkind a National Book
Award for Fiction in 1960, it was Ellmann who picked up the award for nonfiction for the first edition of his celebrated biography James Joyce (1959). Still perhaps the crowning achievement of the genre, if long since sidelined with the ascendancy of distinct critical approaches,
Ellmann’s capacious vision of Joyce was instrumental in forging the writer’s postwar reputation; it was critical studies such as Ellmann’s, working in tandem with scholarship from figures like
Hugh Kenner, influential but idiosyncratic, which shepherded Joyce’s entrance into the academy and shaped the dynamics of his reception. Always an oddly anomalous figure to the hegemony of the New Criticism, for all that his prose could be said to quiver with the ironies and ambiguities that the hermeneutic system prized and privileged, Joyce’s canonicity was instead achieved in the celebration of the kind of embracing liberal humanism that propelled Ellmann’s account of the combined story of the writing and the life. “All-encompassing”, “relentless”, “grand”, with a
“passion for truth, however unpalatable” are the key terms Ellmann deploys to introduce his epic of the writer as mock heroic redeemer of the detritus of the modern world: “Joyce’s discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary.”9 In crucial ways, Roth resurrects Ellmann’s construction of Joyce across the sprawling text of Sabbath’s Theater. In the figure of Mickey Sabbath, Roth both restores and radicalises Ellmann’s account of the vitality of the modern literary text.
8 The Ghost Writer, (New York: Vintage, 1995), 75. 9 Ellmann, James Joyce, 5. 284
Though this critical approach shared a dubious reliance on universalisms with the tradition of Eliotian impersonality that exerted such a strong influence on the emergence of the
New Criticism and the institutionalisation of modernist textual forms, Ellmann’s study nonetheless offered an entirely different vision of the value and force of the literary object by way of its voluminous account of its central protagonist, who, for all his extraordinary capacities with language and frightening artistic confidence, was forever fragile, fallible, and humane. Far from lamenting the barren landscape of contemporary culture and seeking to transcend it by way of a logic of exclusive transcendence— “what branches grow/ out of this stony rubbish?” —
James Joyce instead saw in the contradictions of modern life, the tensions between the elevated and the degraded, much to be cherished.10 Its protagonist’s recognition of this fact, according to
Ellmann’s comprehensive analysis, represented the real key to his significance. Where Eliot’s academic epigones streamlined the escape into artistic disinterest into an efficient and influential interpretive program, Ellmann argued that the transmogrifications of experience into aesthetic forms in Ulysses take us inexorably further and deeper into life. In the ongoing and open interplay with the full range of experience, fiction finds its vitality. Ellmann’s vision of Joyce, in other words, granted the inclusive properties of the literary text the defining role in constituting its transformative power:
To come to this conclusion Joyce had to see joined what others had held separate: the
point of view that life is unspeakable and to be exposed, and the point of view that it is
ineffable and to be distilled. Nature may be a horrible document, or a secret revelation;
all may be resolved into brute body, or into mind and mental components. Joyce lived
between the antipodes and above them: his brutes show a marvelous capacity for
10 T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land.” 285
brooding, his pure minds find bodies remorselessly stuck to them. To read Joyce is to see
reality rendered without the simplifications of conventional divisions.11
Compare this account to Eliot’s earlier appreciation of Joyce in his essay “Ulysses, Order and
Myth” and you could be forgiven for thinking that Ellmann was pulling Joyce’s novelistic art almost entirely inside out.12 Read it alongside the program advocated in Understanding Fiction, a direct object of satire in Roth’s debut novel, and you’ll struggle to keep the opposing ends of the magnet together.13
When Philip Roth met Richard Ellmann on March 23rd 1960 in the Grand Ballroom of the Astor Hotel in New York City, the biographer’s remarks upon receiving the National Book
Award for Nonfiction implicitly reiterated the underlying charge of his critical study: “if an individual life is described too leanly, too much in terms of bony essences without the covering of ‘casual flesh,’ we grow anxious, we suspect distortion, we wonder if the essences are really there…”14 Roth made his own statements on the dangers of literary celebrity that evening, seeking to leave a fledgling mark on an attentive and prestigious crowd. However, his chance meeting with Ellmann arguably made the more significant impression. From that point on, he maintained a courteous and engaging correspondence with the scholar most famous for his exhaustive accounts of a number of the central figures in the development of literary modernism.
During his years living half the time in London, Roth and Ellmann would also occasionally meet, bonding not only over their literary interests but also sharing an identification with the margins
11 Ellmann, James Joyce, 5. 12 See T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” Similarly, compare James Joyce to “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, a crucial foundation for the consolidation of the New Criticism, and the defining features of Ellmann’s critical approach seem all the more distinctive. 13 For a detailed discussion of Roth’s engagement with the methods of the New Criticism propagated in Brooks’ and Warren’s Understanding Fiction, see chapter 1, “The Ruthless Art of Fiction”. 14 Richard Ellmann, as quoted in a press clipping in Roth’s papers, April 4, 1960, Philip Roth Papers, Box 254, Folder 12. 286
of the intellectual culture of English society. From 1970-1984 Ellmann was under the employ of the University of Oxford as Goldsmiths’ Professor of English, neatly nestled in the heart of the establishment. In his friendship with the irrepressible author of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), he shared a certain ironic attitude towards sober highbrow authority that was, in its own wry way, positively Joycean.
The design and language of Sabbath’s Theater strongly suggest that Roth returned to the pages of Ellmann’s “great book” years later when he sought to produce his own. The novel not only riffs relentlessly on the deep and varied precedents of Ulysses itself, it also reimagines the
“all-encompassing” metaphysics of James Joyce. Those evasive essences that Ellmann patiently tracks in the ever-accumulating blizzard of details that accrue to an individual life, Roth casts liberally over the casual flesh and bodily ruin of his stumbling anti-hero. The novel’s exhausting commitment to cataloguing the sordid incidentals of Mickey Sabbath’s disintegrating world is predicated in large part on Ellmann’s capacious example. The motif that Roth lifts from James
Joyce to underscore his account of a life saturated in the paradoxes and contradictions of modernity is the tidal drift of waste, bobbing in the current and soaking up the scum. In a representative moment deep in the novel, Sabbath confidently proclaims, “I am flowing swiftly along the curbs of life, I am merely debris.”15 In another instance, he experiences an overwhelming and ecstatic appreciation for his own symbolic embodiment of the rubbish receptacle, a revelation that breaks upon him with all the capricious force of one of Joyce’s chance epiphanies: “Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life.
And a laughable hunger for more.”16 Whether Roth’s antihero redeems anything in the style of
Ellmann’s tolerant humanism by way of this cumulative immersion, however, remains sharply
15 Sabbath’s Theater, 347. 16 Ibid, 247. 287
open to question throughout the course of the text. James Joyce is as rigorously challenged as it is sympathetically evoked as Roth rewrites the cyclical journey of Ulysses.
II. “But Life Is the Great Teacher”
Roth aligns Sabbath, a man with deep pockets and a fondness for filling them, with the talismanic realism of Leopold Bloom in a variety of different ways. Each possesses a sceptical but significant relationship with their Jewish identity. Reflecting the Odyssean derivation, both characters are wily and cunning whilst also compromised and weak. And Roth arranges many of the defining moments of Sabbath’s meandering journey in a deliberate echo of the underlying structure of Ulysses. During his compressed voyage, Sabbath goes to the funeral of a former friend in a direct parallel of Bloom’s attendance at the service for Paddy Dignam. He tracks the time with a pocket watch that not only clocks the hours but registers the emotional import of events.17 On one occasion, we also witness Sabbath happily at stool, performing his own homage to Bloom’s cheerful disposition and Joyce’s resolute inclusivity. The Homeric template that stands behind Joyce’s modern retelling of the epic journey, poised between the affirmation of
European culture and the ironic crisis of its forms, is consequently doubly attenuated in Roth’s novel. However, the classical parallel does actually intrude into Sabbath’s Theater in some curious comic moments.18
17 Famously, Bloom’s pocket watch stops at the precise moment Blazes Boylan and Molly Bloom consummate their affair at 7 Eccles Street. Sabbath’s pocket watch, an inherited heirloom from Morty, registers the weight of his grief as he remembers his deceased brother: “My mother gave me his watch. It nearly killed me, but I wore it. I took it to sea. I took it to the Army. I took it to Rome. Here it is, his GI Benrus. Wind it daily. All that’s changed is the strap. Stop function on the second hand still working.” Sabbath’s Theater, 300. 18 When Sabbath returns home to find Roseanna in bed with another women, his jealous rage recalls the fury of Odysseus upon learning of Penelope’s suitors. Where The Odyssey channels the misogyny into a scene of spectacular and efficient violence, Roth depicts Sabbath’s impotent fury with bathetic deflation, beating his chest like a gorilla in response to the smell of garbage strewn by some impish raccoons. Sabbath’s Theater, 442. 288
What most intriguingly aligns Sabbath to Bloom is the similarity of their sensory palettes.
The rather eccentric appetites that Joyce uses to individuate his everyman are recalled in Roth’s distinctive characterisation of his own stumbling wanderer. Bloom’s taste for the “fine tang of faintly scented urine” in the mutton kidneys he consumes with relish the first time we meet him in the fourth episode of Ulysses is reworked in the more explicitly sexual dimensions of
Sabbath’s unusual habits.19 The flavour of ammonia that seems to mark Bloom’s tastes as odd is converted into the joy Sabbath feels when enrapt in the oniony stink of pubic body parts. Roth rewrites Joyce’s attention to specific visceral details, in other words, in the direction of Sabbath’s personal sexual mores, pushing the powers of the particular towards the inescapable domain of desire.
Unsurprisingly, Roth forges the most significant connections between Sabbath and his
Joycean counterpart under the shadow of “Nausicaa”, the notorious episode in Ulysses in which a distant Bloom takes voyeuristic pleasure in the sight of the young Gerty MacDowell’s legs as she responds to his sad and lonely gaze. As Shostak points out, it is from Bloom’s sexual thoughts in this infamous episode that an early choice of epigraph for the drafts of Sabbath’s
Theater was lifted: “I’m all clean come and dirty me.”20 This original epigraph comes from a specific passage in “Nausicaa” in which Bloom ponders his own attachment to the sight of women’s lingerie, a moment evoked in a particular episode in Sabbath’s Theater, when the nomadic puppeteer raids the underwear drawers of his hosts, musing about his discoveries in the gentle and mawkish rhythms of Bloomian sentimentality.21
19 James Joyce, Ulysses, Ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London & New York: Penguin, 1986), 4: 4-5. 20 Debra Shostak, Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, 48. 21 “Half-slips. Loved the outmoded half-slip. A Woman in a half-slip and a bra standing and ironing a shirt while seriously smoking a cigarette. Sentimental old Sabbath.” Sabbath’s Theater, 155. 289
Sabbath’s polymorphous perversity, exhibited throughout the novel in the depiction of a desire that is not just excessive and rapacious but genuinely embracing, takes flight from the masturbatory fantasy that Bloom weaves out on the beach. “At it again,” the phrase that Bloom mutters to himself after he climaxes squalidly into his own shirt, is apparently one of Roth’s favourite literary quotations.22 The combination of exposure, resignation, and acceptance conveyed in the line certainly serves to describe the tone that authorises the narrative in
Sabbath’s Theater. In episodes detailing Sabbath’s memories visiting various brothels during his time in the merchant navy, Roth trades on the deep intertextual precedent of a Bloomian voyeurism all too human in its revelation of a character caught in the perpetual acquiescence to instinct. A Joycean pathos in the mire, enacted rhythmically in the pacing of “Nausicaa” itself, suffuses the lonely search of Sabbath’s long life. When Sabbath cries out “I am Drenka! I am
Drenka!” in a more extreme moment of doubt and pain, he even pretends to undergo precisely the same masochistic alteration that humiliates and denigrates the hallucinating Bloom in the climactic “Circe” episode.23 The solidarity in transformation is almost as touching as the wounded and nostalgic longing for the attentions of the lost lover itself.
For all that Sabbath’s dirty habits estrange him from the world, it is his openness that represents the crucial dimension of his life, gesturing towards the underlying meaning of his story. Sabbath is both disgusting and inclusive. He alienates and he absorbs. Midway through the novel, after he arrives at the comfortable bourgeois house of his old college friend, fleeing a marriage long since desecrated and beginning a wandering journey into the expansive uncertainty of the death-haunted present—an earthy odyssey that ultimately sees him roam,
22 See Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 326. 23 Sabbath’s Theater, 78. 290
affront, and return home—Sabbath takes a bath and plays with the domestic objects populating the room. Even in the very act of cleaning his bedraggled body, he contaminates and subsumes his surroundings. When his host, Norman, knocks on the door and enters, he is shocked to discover a framed photograph of his teenage daughter in the hand of the naked bather, with a pilfered tube of vaginal cream, personal item par excellence, removed from a private drawer and placed out on the counter. In his exasperation, Norman questions his guest’s extraordinary behaviour. And in the tense, comic dialogue than ensues, he aligns Sabbath’s lack of decorum and respect for boundaries with an absence of humanity. To be so brazenly revolting is to sacrifice that which is most essential: “You always fought being a human being, right from the beginning.”24 But Sabbath’s response, animating Roth’s approach to the entire novel in a range of inventive ways, is to invert the claim: “To the contrary,” said Sabbath. “To being a human being I’ve always said, ‘Let it come.’”25
Such openness and acceptance of it all, catastrophe and ecstasy, solemnity and farce, is expressed most poignantly when Sabbath returns to the graveyard of his parents later in the novel.26 As he walks alongside the monuments to the dead, he reads the inscriptions etched on the stones, each engraving little more than a cliché, but a cliché that, preposterously, marks all the whirling particularities that constituted a life once lived. Overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what is no longer there and the inadequacy of the simple words that remain, Sabbath, shameless and ridiculous, his own immoderate self now explicitly aligned to the irreducible immensity of grief, remembers the most innocuous scenes from his childhood growing up on the Jersey coastline. In a manner consistent with Roth’s repeated narrative strategy to solicit sentiment in
24 Sabbath’s Theater, 152 25 Ibid. 26 Roth read this passage of the novel at his 80th birthday celebrations in Newark, N.J. in 2013. The reading was later included in the text for “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction”, his final work of nonfiction based on his remarks that evening, in Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013 (New York: Library of America, 2017). 291
the mire, bathos bequeaths the ultimate pathos. Walking through the overlarge and empty graveyard, Sabbath recalls the repulsive sight of his prim grandmother, herself now reduced to the customary “beloved”, eating her corn on the cob in a “devouring frenzy” that used to make others at the table wretch. The physical abandon of her slobbering teeth was always an unexpected and unseemly shock. For Sabbath the spectacle was not only delightful but instructive. It was the unlikely detail that betrayed—“It taught me everything.”27
The reminiscence allows Roth to rhapsodise on the appreciation of a “reality rendered without the simplifications of conventional divisions”, recalling and reviving the crucial terms of
Ellmann’s appreciation of Joyce. The touching truth of the moment, for the weep-weary Sabbath, lies in the dynamic clash of contradictions that Ellmann ascribes to Joyce’s art: “This model grandmother, and Mother had all she could do not to throw you out into the street. And my mother was not unkind—you know that. But what affords the one with happiness affords the other with disgust. The interplay, the ridiculous interplay…”28 At several points in Sabbath’s
Theater, the liberated narrative voice, at times possessed with an antic wildness comparable to
Sabbath’s provocative behaviour, pauses to offer these asides, announcing the collision of opposing extremes as the authorising principle of the novel’s claim to its own perverse knowledge: “the law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counterthought, for every urge a counterurge.”29 Floored by the stunning absence of this tumultuous oscillation as he strolls through the Jersey graveyard, Sabbath places pebbles on the graves of his lost family and summons his most sonorous reply to the terminal verge. The statement is declarative and bold,
27 Sabbath’s Theater, 370. 28 Ibid, 370. 29 Ibid, 158. 292
but the proposition is fundamentally an embracing one, addressed outward to the enveloping silence: “Here I am.”30
The announcement, of course, evokes the reply of Abraham to his commanding god, instructed to seal the covenant in the unimaginable sacrifice of the son—the very act that
Kierkegaard, Roth’s mentor in contradiction, placed at the centre of his unorthodox philosophy of singularity.31 In appropriating the phrase, Sabbath reclaims the majesty and solemnity of the religious register for his own secular purpose. The sole surviving son, last mourner of the clan, addresses the void with the unlikely spectacle of his own brute persistence. To the absolute he confidently replies; however, the absolute is stunningly empty.
But Sabbath’s moment staring down death also recalls Joyce’s own use of the scriptural reference. When Stephen Dedalus accompanies the fellow lodgers at Martello tower to the shoreline in the first episode of Ulysses, “Telemachus”, the sight of the surf brings a traumatic memory of an encounter with a drowned sailor rolling into Stephen’s grave and heavy thoughts:
“The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am.”32 Thinking through the immensity of the unthinkable as he ponders the overwhelming absence of the graveyard, Sabbath is stunned into the same confusion that haunts the grieving Stephen. It is tempting to overemphasise the boldness of Roth’s protagonist when he replies with rhetorical confidence to an absent god. The defiance in “Here I am” is genuine. Like Joyce’s use of the religious address,
30 Sabbath’s Theater, 370. 31 This resonant moment in Sabbath’s Theater recalls Paul Herz’s epiphanic realization in Letting Go, a passage that also invokes the dynamic between Abraham and his commanding god that Kierkegaard explodes with meaning in his most famous text, Fear and Trembling. For a discussion of this moment in Letting Go, see chapter 1. For an extended discussion of Roth and Kierkegaard, see chapter. 2. 32 Joyce, Ulysses, 1: 677. 293
however, there is a distinct sense that the evocative line is delivered by a rapidly perishing corpse.
In a later scene, Roth compounds the intertextual association between peripatetic, pondering mourners. Grieving not only the lost family members and his recently deceased mistress, Drenka Balich, whose untimely death sets in motion Sabbath’s wandering odyssey, but also the absent brother, Morty, slain as a young man in in the final year of the second world war flying planes over the South Pacific, Sabbath stomps the coastline trapped in the “hurricane” of his own thoughts and memories:
tramping the beach wrapped in that flag—up through the sand to the Shark River
drawbridge and back, crying all the way, rapidly talking, then wildly mute, then chanting
aloud words and sentences inexplicable even to himself—not until two solid hours of this
raving about Morty, about the brother, about the one loss he would never bull his way
through, did he return to find in the car, on the floor beside the brake pedal, the packet of
envelopes addressed in Morty’s easy-to-read hand.
And he’d come back because after two hours of staring into the sea and up at the
sky and seeing nothing and everything and nothing, he’d thought that the frenzy was over
and that he had regained possession of 1994.33
Roth’s choice of language, emphasising again Ellmann’s collision of opposites in the form of lexical contradictions such as “wildly mute”, evokes the inscrutable confusion of “Proteus”,
Stephen’s solo meditation on sea, sky, and sensory signatures as he strolls Sandymount strand.
And yet the passage purposefully aligns the complexity of Joycean inner monologue not with the
33 Sabbath’s Theater, 407. 294
aesthetic ascendancy of formal sophistication but with the incommensurate sensation of raw, unadulterated grief. Inexplicability recoups a lived burden. In Sabbath’s Theater, Ulysses leaves the classroom and heads back to the grand boundary of knowledge and understanding figured in the liminal wash of the ocean. We are out on the edge of it all.
And the buried edge of it all, in the psychological margins mined in both novels, is enigmatically seamed in the haunting presence of the figure of the mother. Stephen’s sulking alienation is a mood that Joyce freights with guilt over the recent passing of the family matriarch.
This dimension of the novel reaches a terrifying climax in the drunken, expressionist theatrics of
“Circe”, where the mother’s decaying body returns with all the force of its previous repression.
The hallucinatory vision of the mother, with her “bluecircled hollow eyesockets” fixed on the son, emerges as a blank and terrifying accusation, indicting the once timorous and dependant child.34 “Amor Matris” is Stephen’s famous Latinate parsing of the eclipsing nature of his mother’s devotion: “subjective and objective genitive.”35 Pouring through the grammatical distance separating ‘I’ and ‘she’, memories of a once unifying connection to the mother pervade
Stephen’s fragile thoughts. Joyce’s thoughtful and lonely thinker cannot ponder his way beyond the haunting persistence of what is lost—the previous connection that was once not only substantial, but also, in some profound and mysterious way, essential. Mother’s love proves to be the one riddle, fascinating and repulsive in equal measure, that Stephen simply cannot solve.
Sabbath too, Roth explains, tried futilely to transcend the underlying bond: “When […] Sabbath went to sea only weeks after graduating high school, he was motivated as much by his need to escape his mother’s tyrannical gloom...”36 In the present tense of the novel, though, this ultimate
34 Ulysses, 15: 4160. 35 Ibid, 2: 165. 36 Sabbath’s Theater, 81. 295
horizon of meaning returns with the same astonishing force that afflicts Joyce’s ruminative outsider. Unruly Sabbath, a character fantastically unencumbered by familial prohibitions, actually suffers from a particularly acute and bizarre case of mother-haunting.37
Roth plays with this aspect of Ulysses early in the initial exposition of Sabbath’s Theater, making clear that Amor Matris will percolate the novel with a kind of devious, perverse energy.
The descriptions of Sabbath’s and Drenka’s affair at the very beginning of the text, surprising in the exactness with which Roth outlines their activities and unexpected in the erotic excess that unifies them, deploy precisely the kind of fleshly language that comes to define Joyce’s treatment of maternal power. The representation of Drenka’s generous frame and correspondingly generous sexual force resonates with the pagan mythologies of motherhood that
Joyce subtly evokes across his modern epic, reaching a kind of climax in the representation of
Molly Bloom at the end of the novel.38 In the unlikely figure of a Croatian immigrant who speaks only broken English and labours all day at a roadside Inn, Roth casts many of the resonances that accrue to the representation of the maternal body across the episodic journey of Ulysses. And, in his communion with the meanings that surround Drenka’s powerful physical presence in the text,
Sabbath is quite literally and astonishingly returned to the lost connection with his own mother:
“Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts […] he was pierced by the sharpest
37 In The Human Stain (2000), Roth provides a memorable description of the Joycean force of Amor Matris, sacrificing Stephen’s pretentious Latin for Zuckerman’s demotic American cadences: “It was not a moment to allow himself to be subjugated by the all-but-pathological phenomenon of mother love”, 138. 38 “Drenka was a dark, Italian-looking Croat from the Dalmatian coast, on the short side like Sabbath, a full, firmly made woman at the provocative edge of being just overweight, her shape, at her heaviest, reminiscent of those clay figurines molded circa 2000 B.C., fat little dolls with big breasts and big thighs unearthed all the way from Europe down to Asia Minor and worshipped under a dozen different names as the great mother of the gods.” Sabbath’s Theater, 5. 296
longings for his late little mother. Her primacy was nearly as absolute as it had been in their first incomparable decade together.”39
Sabbath’s sole companion in his ruinous and aimless journey, flying through his memories as he destroys his life, is the resurrected ghost of his mother, palpably and awkwardly and persistently present: “Eerie, incomprehensible, ridiculous, the visitation was nonetheless real: no matter how he explained it to himself he could not make his mother go away.”40 Roth’s handling of this haunting is doubly bizarre. Eschewing the gothic atmospherics of uncanny liminality to dramatise Sabbath’s possession by his own perverse case of Amor Matris, Roth instead relies on a more startlingly absurd set of aesthetic tricks to emphasise the discomforting persistence of Sabbath’s mother. The return of the maternal body, often interrupting moments of embarrassing obscenity and sexual gratification, is perhaps the most consistently strange feature of the entire novel. In one particularly jarring instance, Roth describes Sabbath’s long-deceased little mum hovering above his anti-hero like a helicopter, poised conspicuously in the invasive observation of the sordid events below. In another moment, Sabbath’s mother intrudes “like the home plate umpire peering in from behind the catcher’s back.”41 As with Stephen’s terror in
Bella Cohen’s brothel, confronted with the blank accusation that manifests his guilt, these odd and invasive occurrences end up driving Sabbath to the very edge of his life’s meaning. As his journey moves towards its close, Sabbath concludes that the accusatory significance of his mother’s mysterious presence is somehow aligned with his own interminable pursuit of error and misjudgement: “But what I was thinking really was that it all began with my mother’s coming to
39 Sabbath’s Theater, 13. 40 Ibid, 16-17. 41 Ibid, 29. 297
watch over my shoulder […] The goofiness you must get yourself into to get where you have to go, the extent of the mistakes you are required to make!”42
The connection between heteronormative desire and a return to a lost union with the maternal body is territory alive with the psychic tensions of the Oedipal schema. Freud, of course, feeds into both Joyce’s treatment of such themes and Roth’s ferocious rewriting of the domestic drama. In the case of Sabbath’s Theater, though, the Freudian intertext is so openly in play that the temptation to psychoanalyse the disintegrating Sabbath is as playfully stymied as it is clearly and repeatedly invited. The novel includes its own disturbing satire on the Freudian methodology in the form of Roseanna’s attempt at self-analysis during her protracted stay in a mental facility, piecing together her personal history.43 In the end, Roth depicts a ruthlessly antitherapeutic vision, and this outlook disables all attempts to allegorise, via the psychoanalytic method or otherwise. In Sabbath’s Theater the past is only endured, never solved.
Curiously, Ellmann’s study of Joyce provides a further source for Roth’s handling of the material. James Joyce embeds central arguments about the relationship between sexual intimacy and the bond with the maternal body in the story of the intellectual development of its protagonist, claims that Ellmann uses to unify his interpretation of Ulysses itself. In “The Growth of the Imagination,” a pivotal chapter in his exhaustive study, he makes the point directly:
His attitude towards his mother is clarified by his attitude towards Nora Barnacle. In the
letters he sent to Nora in that discomposed summer of 1909, there are many testimonies
that Joyce longed to reconstitute, in his relation with her, the filial bond which his
42 Sabbath’s Theater, 395-396. 43 “He had imagined her journal as mostly a harangue about him. But there was nothing about him. […] What a bother we are to one another—while actually nonexistent to one another, unreal specters compared to whoever originally sabotaged the sacred trust.” Sabbath’s Theater, 262-263. 298
mother’s death had broken. Explicitly he longs to make their relationship that of child
and mother, as if the relationship of lovers was too remote. He covets an even more
intimate dependence.44
It is this sense of cyclical recovery buried in the union between man and woman, a vision central to the ways in which Ellmann goes on to celebrate the restorative power of Ulysses as a dynamic literary object, that Roth quite brutally lampoons as he draws Joyce into the unseemly sexual drama of Sabbath’s Theater. After Drenka, porous and libidinous Penelopean surrogate, suddenly dies, several of her adulterous lovers pay their respects to all those powers suggested in her sexual generosity. Like Sabbath, these men sneak out illicitly in the night to visit her grave and mourn what they have lost in the termination of a once exuberant erotic bond. Rather than crying for the dead Drenka, however, in a display of awesome abandon into perversity, Drenka’s lovers masturbate over the earth holding the decaying flesh, evoking the mythic resonances of fertility vested in the images that Joyce delicately braids into the background parallels of
Ulysses. Out in the Jersey graveyard, though, there is no subtlety or ambiguity about the implications of the mother’s body in these absurd and upsetting scenes. And yet these midnight offerings, fired by a spectacular and grotesque commitment to restoring the lost filial bond, are peculiarly inert and futile. Simply put, for all the powers of description and rhetorical energy
Roth deploys in the troubling moments out in the graveyard, in Sabbath’s Theater there is no redemptive reunion of spirits and bodies. There is the uncomfortably accurate description of ejaculate hitting the sodden earth, and there is silence.
Roth’s reworking of the haunting power of Amor Matris, poised between comic farce and high tragedy in histrionic scenes such as these, stands in symbolic relation to the disconcerting
44 Ellmann, James Joyce, 293. 299
extremities that stretch and warp the different registers of the entire book. Wild oscillations shape Roth’s formal approach throughout; Ellmann’s description of Joycean antipodes is pushed towards breaking point. Sabbath’s Theater veers continually between the sublime and the disgusting, taking us into the poignant and forcing us to confront the barely credible. Misogyny and rage abound; but so too do humour and care. While the Joycean intertext that lies behind its composition is exposed to no small measure of satiric disfigurement in the course of these disorienting lurches, it would be a mistake to see Roth’s negotiation in purely combative terms.
For all that it is furiously rewritten, Ulysses undoubtedly bestows much of the insight of the novel. In the end, the ridiculous ghost of Sabbath’s haunting mother is the only figure who really seems to understand what it all comes down to. Addressing her crying son, shaking with tears, it is the lost mother who at one point calmly explains: “This is human life. There is a great hurt that everyone has to endure.”45
III. The Muse in Dirty Tatters
But it is art that has to take the measure of such sufferings. It is no coincidence that Roth puts his own artist, a teasing kind of avatar for the figure of the audacious novelist, at the centre of his meandering epic. Joyce does the same. However, Stephen and Sabbath possess very different, almost antithetical temperaments. Precious and burdened, Stephen’s presence in Ulysses is marked above all by a sense of disappointment. The vocation of the artist weighs down on him as a heavy responsibility. Sabbath, on the other hand, revels gleefully in the illusory aesthetic freedom engendered by his puppetry. Roth’s antihero takes only pleasure in the expressive license that his playful art forges, a mastery afforded by the digital subtlety of his hands. When
45 Sabbath’s Theater, 143. 300
he first meets his wife Roseanna, she aligns the intoxicating thrill of his raucous puppetry with the extraordinary capacity to animate that which is coldly inert: “Sabbath’s hands, she said, gave her puppets life.”46 This bracing sense of power fundamentally shapes Sabbath’s unruly existence, consistently unwilling to bend to propriety, ever eager to entice and to sting.
By the time we meet the disgraced puppeteer, though, humbled by the college that fires him for sexually harassing a student and thwarted by the arthritis in the hands that prevents any further displays of dextrous liberty, Sabbath has assumed his own strain of Dedalian disenchantment. The once indomitable performer is now bitterly subject to the disobedience of the bodies that surround him. Aesthetic autonomy, once again in Roth, has turned out to be a fragile and deceptive fiction. Not only has time lacerated the source of Sabbath’s freedom with the crippling illness in his once skillful fingers, the person with whom Sabbath enjoyed the greatest pleasure, Drenka, has also recently passed away, killed by a swift and devastating bout of ovarian cancer. The title of the first section of the novel, “There’s nothing that keeps its promise”, refers directly to the pact in unbridled erotic excess that binds Sabbath and Drenka in an open and libidinous affair. Sabbath’s Theater begins with Drenka’s unlikely request, in the form of an ultimatum contrary to their existing attachment, that they become monogamous. But the unkept promise takes on a much vaster meaning as the text progresses—we are all of us going to die.
Before he is dismissed from his position at the college, a professional disgrace that Roth elaborates midway through the novel, Sabbath pours all his residual powers of imaginative daring into a collection of taped sexual conversations with the students he is able to seduce:
“Once he’d passed into his fifties, the art in these tapes—the insidious art of giving license to
46 Sabbath’s Theater, 97. 301
what was already there—was the only art he had left.”47 The remaining capacity for transformation that the broken puppeteer retains is purposefully framed in Joycean language. In his description of Sabbath’s sordid and exploitative habit, Roth slyly recalls the revelation of the extraordinary in the ordinary that Ellmann casts in a redemptive humanist light. However, in
Sabbath’s Theater the elucidation of the repellent details of the everyday regains the obscene charge lost in the domestication and institutionalisation of the modernist text. The fact that “the ordinary is the extraordinary”, Sabbath’s Theater comes to disclose, can be an unpleasant and violating discovery as well as a radiant transubstantiation.48
The revelation of one such tape, the recording of phone sex with Kathy Goolsbee whose exposure leads directly to the dismissal of Sabbath from the college, dramatises this aspect of the novel’s rereading of Ulysses, determined to return the filth to Joyce’s celebrated experimentation and high-minded stylistic virtuosity. After recounting the incident and its aftermath, the text of
Sabbath’s Theater actually provides “an uncensored transcription of the entire conversation” in the subscript of the novel—a description of mutual masturbation that continues for twenty pages, footnoted below the progression of the main narrative. The reading experience is deliberately and pointedly defamiliarized during this odd digression in a manner that recalls Joyce’s own determination to subvert standard modes of narration. How should we approach the supplied secret tape, the hidden substratum that the topographical form of the novel in this case actively recovers? Should one skip the transcription, confident already of its lurid contents? Should one read each page in linear progression, with the heavily stylised procession of the main narrative suspended in counterpoint with the explicit material lying beneath the principal paragraph? Or
47 Sabbath’s Theater, 214. 48 Ellmann, James Joyce, 5. 302
should one process either the continuing story or the exposed tape in their entirety before returning to the alternative, exempted choice?
What is ultimately more consequential than the splintering of the linear readerly experience at this moment of exposure, however, is the fact that Roth intertwines this prominent instance of formal self-consciousness with such a pathetic and commonplace scene of sexual gratification. The language of Sabbath’s exploitative indiscretion with Goolsbee could scarcely be less expressive. In contrast to the torrent of sublime sentences that propel much of the novel, the exposed transcript offers only the clichéd stock phrases and bland mechanics of pornography.49 All that this fragmentation in the form of the book comes to disclose at this moment in Sabbath’s Theater is a secret so banal in its exhibition of the ordinary that it is barely worth reading. Before Sabbath and his student masturbate together during the phone call that sits provocatively at the bottom of the page, Goolsbee makes a tentative admission: “…it’s like I think about sex all the time.”50 The wisdom of the sentence, at least in so far as it has any, lies in the openness of the simple acknowledgement. Tellingly, we become complicit in her confession in the act of reading it—at least, those of us who choose to make our way through the transcript, already well aware of its contents, both shocking and utterly not.
The Goolsbee episode detailed in the subscript of the text might be the most obvious example of the ways in which Sabbath’s Theater pushes the reader towards the charge of corrupting obscenity, at one time ferocious and firmly held, which has long since evaporated from the status of Ulysses as a literary object. Sabbath’s Theater actively recontaminates the supposedly autonomous form of the modernist novel; stripping Joyce of his institutional
49 David Brauner argues that the rhetorical overload of the main narrative at this point in the text, “offers both a striking counterpoint to the sexualised language of the conversation that appears beneath it and a justification of it.” Philip Roth, 127. 50 Sabbath’s Theater, 217. 303
protection, Roth allows the filth to flood back in. This intertextual process is most humorously depicted in the reimagining of the Ulysses obscenity trial itself. Midway through the text,
Sabbath tells the story of his own arrest as a budding young street performer, brought to the courts on his own charge of obscenity. During a performance in Manhattan years earlier, ‘one of his puppets’, playfully breaching the boundaries demarcating the audience from the art, exposed the breast of a young woman watching in the audience. Sabbath’s account of the subsequent court proceedings deliberately evokes the legal defence offered in the famous case against
Joyce’s epic novel, divorcing the art of a literary text from the human material represented and contained in its pages.51 As Sabbath remembers his own experiences in court, recalling his wry sympathy for the man tasked with listening to such disingenuous arguments, the judge was unwilling to be diverted by the eloquent case for aesthetic disinterest offered on Sabbath’s behalf:
The judge covers his face. It’s three-thirty in the afternoon and the man has heard a
hundred and twelve cases before me. He is seventy years old and he has been on a bench
all day. He says, ‘This is absolute nonsense. I’m not going to listen to a professor. He
touched a breast. What happened is he touched a breast. I don’t need any testimony from
a professor. The professor can go home.52
Years later, Sabbath still respects the honesty of the judgement, unwilling to deviate from the reality of the situation. And yet Roth’s decision to grant primacy to the dirty truths, restoring the charge of obscenity both literally and figuratively at one and the same time, has precisely the
51 Kevin Birmingham writes of the legal defence of the novel during its famous obscenity trial, “Ernst made his case to Judge Woolsey for nearly an hour, largely by extoling Joyce’s merits. James Joyce, he argued, ‘led a monastic existence’ away from fans and reporters like ‘an austere Olympian.’” The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Penguin, 2014), 323. 52 Sabbath’s Theater, 319. 304
opposite effect of curtailing the novel’s numerous stylistic pyrotechnics. The filthy substratum, exposed throughout Sabbath’s Theater, recurrently ends up inspiring the most dazzling rhetorical effects. Sending the professor home, so to speak, actually emboldens the book. It is precisely the moments in which Sabbath’s Theater grips the sordid incidentals of life, depicting a near-tactile epistemological purchase on the vivid, sensory experience of unclean bodies and dirty minds, that Roth’s prose becomes most baroque, experimental, or confidently satiric.
Celebrating the plenitude of Ulysses, Ellmann writes, “A whole galaxy of new devices and stances and verbal antics, extravagant, derisive, savage, rollicking, tender and lyrical, is held in Joyce’s ironic dominion.”53 It is to precisely this sense of stylistic virtuosity that Sabbath’s
Theater both spectacularly, and at times strenuously, aspires. In doing so, Roth looks to restore all the original force to the cliché that Ellmann wraps around Joyce’s project. At times aggressively, on other occasions ironically, Sabbath’s Theater attempts to be “all- encompassing.”54 When Sabbath harasses the maid who cleans Norman’s house, the dialogue between the lecherous puppeteer and the nervous Rosa takes an unmistakably Joycean parodic form, applying Milton’s grand style to a scene of embarrassing and uncomfortable illicit energy.
And the passage concludes with a moment of sensory reverie characteristic of the temporal trances and moments of repose which invite the exaltations of the commonplace across the sprawling text of Ulysses itself: “Under the spell of her fleshiness, pressing against her pungency, his nose sinking deeper and deeper into the deep, Sabbath felt as though he were
53 Ellmann, “Preface”, Ulysses, Ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Penguin, 1986), ix. 54 Ellmann writes, “To be narrow, peculiar, and irresponsible, and at the same time all-encompassing, relentless, and grand, is Joyce’s style of greatness.” James Joyce, 7. 305
porous”.55 Soaking up his surroundings, Sabbath is both the most magnificent and the most horrifying sponge.
Sabbath’s final blaze of artistic power stems from the same interaction between the repellent strands of life and the heroic possibilities of creative magnification firing the reckless prose and experimental form of the novel. After Drenka dies and Sabbath storms out on his wife, he propels his wild journey with the thought of killing himself, claiming the terminal act of suicide as a kind of instantiating engine and final excuse through which to desecrate what is left before the curtain closes. In seizing control of his own death, Sabbath attempts to wrestle back the aesthetic authority to determine the concluding terms of his own existence. Death alone, it seems, remains to be authored. In the twinkle of lived performance attuned to the climactic act of suicide, Sabbath starts to recover some measure of his once indomitable artistic energy: “He was fairly sure that he was half faking the whole collapse. Sabbath’s Indecent Theater.”56
From this liberating possibility, that all the world remains his stage, Sabbath proceeds with remarkable energy to destroy what little is left of his life. Roth studiously maintains the ambiguity in the presentation of Sabbath’s actions throughout the novel. The unreality of imaginative projection, the very same intoxicant that fuels Sabbath’s and Drenka’s astonishingly libidinous affair in the years that it is active, equals conjoined by a shared commitment not only to erotic excess but to imaginative amplification, shapes the terms of Sabbath’s mental breakdown and ambulatory journey. When he bursts violently into tears in the kitchen of his college friend, unsure of his next move and subsequent destination, suicidal Sabbath clings to the
55 Sabbath’s Theater, 184. 56 Ibid, 185. 306
possibility that all his audacity is still vested in the power of the act: “If he was not coming apart but only simulating, then this was the greatest performance of his life.”57
This tension is most vividly exhibited in the extraordinary scene on the New York
Subway, in which Sabbath summons the half-forgotten lines of Shakespeare’s King Lear in a spontaneous and devasting display, unnerving the fellow travelers with the intensity of his broken recitation. Roth explains that his protagonist once produced the play in New York years earlier as a confident and energetic young man. The tragedy of Lear, in fact, holds a special place in Sabbath’s personal history—a haunting intertextual presence not unlike the spectral hold of
Hamlet on the unfolding minds in Ulysses. Rehearsing his budget version of Lear amid the social turbulence of the 1960s, Sabbath is entranced by the ethereal performance of Nikki, the actress of uncanny transport into the experience of others whom he later marries. But Nikki disappears a few years later in a consummate act of serene self-annihilation that stands as bewitching testament to her talents and capacity to act. Inexplicable and without trace, Nikki, sensational
Cordelia, simply vanishes. And this most enigmatic of absences in a novel saturated with the sensation of bereavement repeatedly tears holes in the text, for the event continually tortures the uncomprehending Sabbath, motivating his exile and relative isolation in Madamaska Falls and fueling the fiercest moments of his alienating misanthropy.
Nikki’s disappearance, emptiness in all its terrifying inexplicability, comes to represent a kind of absolute experience of loss that magnifies Sabbath’s grieving when the other loved ones in his life later become ill and pass away. Curiously, the sharpness of the confusion that Nikki’s unresolved absence casts over Sabbath’s life is an impression that the novel attempts to imitate and project out to the reader. Once the roaming wanderer is deep in the disarray of his journey
57 Sabbath’s Theater, 149. 307
towards extinction, he repeats the claim to several characters that he killed his first wife and disposed of the body with his once skillful and dextrous hands, source of his own previous mastery. Likely announced to shock and offend with gratuitous glee, these faux confessions, false and perversely incriminating, are nevertheless purposefully unnerving. In the terms established in the text, the possibility that they touch on an unnarrated episode in the novel flickers in Sabbath’s devious assumption of responsibility.
When the awesome, evocative words of the thunderstruck Lear tumble out of the aged
Sabbath’s mouth, flecking the present-tense of the novel as he stumbles through the whirling subway, the gravity of the lines— “Pray, do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man” — emanates not from Shakespearean poetic grandeur alone. In the fluid interplay between the incanted play and his experience, simulation and inhabitation, Sabbath takes hold of his own collapse and enacts the collision of extremes as lived spectacle of a mind splitting and falling apart: “Thought went on independently of him, scenes summoning themselves up while he seemed to wobble perilously on a slight rise between where he was and where he wasn’t. He was trapped in a process of self-division that was not at all merciful.”58 It is from this tension that the spectacle derives its sublimity. Performing the play that seems to erupt from somewhere deep inside himself to the bewildered commuters both holds Sabbath’s disintegrating self together and viciously tears it apart. In the Shakespearean madness that trembles forth he is, remarkably and paradoxically, still whole.
Tellingly, it is inside this monumental and extended episode of self-division, half- performed and half-endured, that Roth inserts the novel’s most direct pastiche of Joycean prose.
Sabbath’s Theater actually includes many remarkable passages of free indirect discourse; in the
58 Sabbath’s Theater, 201. 308
first half of the novel, the narration seeps between a third-person perspective at various degrees of remove from Sabbath’s situation, fired in stylistic volatility by his own forbidding unpredictability, and extended sections of inner monologue in a fluid interaction that Posnock aptly describes as “collaborative.”59 The simplicity of conventional divisions, breached with gusto by Sabbath’s provocative behaviour, is continually ruptured by way of this flowing formal strategy. And, more often than not, these porous transitions are opened with the reverie of memory. Incidental recollections frequently burst through into the texture of the present tense, dragging the narration into the mental particularities that mark Sabbath’s mind like a set of fingerprints. The touching mundanity of many of these memories is clearly predicated on the examples in Ulysses. The Proustian rush of the singular scene from the past, clarifying and exact, is nowhere to be found in Sabbath’s Theater. Instead, memory tumbles indiscriminately, with freedom to recount the significant and the sordid, and the inalienable bond between the two, in equal measure.
After concocting a series of newspaper obituaries for himself during his ride along the subway, blocks of text laid out topographically in a style reminiscent of “Aeolus”, Sabbath enters into an inner monologue composed entirely without punctuation. The passage deliberately recalls the living stream of thought in the final episode of Ulysses, “Penelope”, the great blast of linguistic freedom that brings Joyce’s modern epic to a close. Between his bursts of broken
Shakespeare, Sabbath falls directly into his own version of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, where the unburdening of syntactic clauses enacts a kind of literary revelation via a logic of absolute exposure. Predicated precisely on Joyce’s example, the force of this mental disclosure is rooted in the sexual: “from when we left leather shops tie wrists ankles blindfold proceed want to know
59 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, 156. 309
a secret I want to know only secrets”.60 However, Roth complicates the depiction of the formal conceit, as Sabbath is only too aware of the interceding artifice that enables the presentation of his gushing mind: “a blur whizzing blur why now most unpleasant invention nobody think ticker tape like this I don’t.”61 Just as Sabbath’s wild chanting as he stomps the beach looks to bring
Ulysses out of the classroom, in this experimental passage of embodied intertextuality down in the New York subway, Roth highlights the near total reification of Joyce’s most famous formal strategy. The torrential glory of “Penelope” has perhaps ossified into a textual artifact.
Moments after Sabbath enacts and rejects the “ticker tape” of Molly Bloom, Roth’s antic narration intrudes to confirm that Sabbath’s moment of near complete Joycean dissolution into pure language is predicated on the same ambiguity that suspends the entire novel:
So Sabbath passeth the time, pretending to think without punctuation, the way J. Joyce
pretended people thought, pretending to be both more and less unfixed than he felt,
pretending that he did and did not expect to find Nikki down in a basement with a dot on
her head selling saris or in her gypsy clothes roaming these streets of theirs in search of
him. So passeth Sabbath, seeing all the antipathies in collision, the villainous and the
innocent, the genuine and the fraudulent, the loathsome and the laughable, a caricature of
himself and entirely himself, embracing the truth and blind to the truth, self-haunted
while barely what you would call a self62
Even in a moment of seemingly absolute exposure, unruly Sabbath ceaselessly pretends. The open window into his unfixed thoughts is merely another concealment. But in the course of
Sabbath’s epic act, spanning the duration of the entire novel, Roth does reveal the pressing force
60 Sabbath’s Theater, 195. 61 Ibid, 195. 62 Ibid, 198. 310
of a consciousness that eludes. In this extended passage contesting the novel’s central intertext,
Roth does not depict the mind’s relation to the world in the conceit of total exposure to the rush of thought that brings Ulysses to its ecstatic close; but rather, Roth relocates the enigma of consciousness in the contradictions induced in the collision between the invented and endured. In manoeuvres such as these, enlisting a direct parody of Ulysses as it attempts to dramatise the mind of its central character, Sabbath’s Theater openly acknowledges the Joycean precedent that stands behind its own purposes at the same time that it ruthlessly blazes beyond the existing solutions.
Indeed, in various comments about modern literature in his later years, Roth ends up circling back to this central question regarding the epistemological grip of fiction on the vicissitudes of mental experience: “‘the problem for most seriously ambitious writers,’ Roth believes, is, precisely, “how do you drive the wedge of consciousness into experience?’ […] ‘If you neglect consciousness, you write popular fiction’ […] ‘Fiction invents consciousness […] in books it exists in developed language.’ And ‘the Mt. Rushmore’ of this language, of course, is
Joyce’s Ulysses.”63 The mature novels of the 1990s are each, in their own ways, shaped by this compositional question. In his reappraisal of Saul Bellow, an essay first published in 2000 as the decade of his own major fiction came to a close, Roth somewhat surprisingly focuses on precisely this issue. “Rereading Saul Bellow” enumerates all the old themes regarding Bellow’s invigorating embrace of a freewheeling American identity and the creation of a buoyant and durable new prose. However, Roth places a more demanding and exacting critical focus on unpicking Bellow’s own contribution to the fictional invention of consciousness.64
63 See Pierpont, Philip Roth: A Writer and His Books, 211. 64 After describing Moses Herzog as “that labyrinth of contradiction and self-division” in a way that clearly recalls the narrative strategy of Sabbath’s Theater, Roth writes: “Herzog is Bellow’s grandest creation, American 311
Down in the chaos of the subway, Sabbath’s Theater renegotiates the imposing Joycean proposition, looming with all the authority of Mt. Rushmore, that the mind lies somewhere within the tumultuous stream of words. Actively rereading Ulysses, Roth repositions the enigma of agency beyond the grand flow of uninhibited sentences. Sabbath’s life may drift along like debris in the tide, but the mind itself, even in a novel as proximate to its protagonist as this one, is always illegible and just beyond reach, however claustrophobically its bears down on the texture of experience. Consciousness in Sabbath’s Theater is estimable only in the “antipathies in collision” that propel the narrative forward; its presence is, therefore, fundamentally a negative one.65 We move from obscurity to a contingent form of indecipherability.
Aspects of this formal strategy, of course, are anticipated in the contradictory structure of
The Counterlife. And the preoccupation with the vicissitudes of a “mind that is a mind” carries forward into the elaborate framing structures that suspend the action in each of the novels of the
American Trilogy. We get our interpretations of people wrong, Zuckerman repeats in different ways in each text, because people remain resolutely unknowable. In Sabbath’s Theater this distinctive aspect of Roth’s approach, dramatizing all that eludes, even in a text predicated on revealing the most revolting thoughts of its character, comes most fully into focus at the end of the novel. Although the idea of killing himself liberates the desolate Sabbath into the belief that he is free to author the terms of his own ending, releasing him into the terminal aesthetic independence of his final performance and thereby powering the text forward, the conclusion of
literature’s Leopold Bloom, except with a difference: in Ulysses, the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel, and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition, intellect, and breadth of rhetoric, whereas in Herzog Bellow endows his hero with all of that, not only with a state of mind and a cast of mind but with a mind that is a mind.” “Rereading Saul Bellow”, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 147. 65 Sabbath’s Theater, 198. 312
the novel turns on an unanticipated irony. He simply cannot do it. Death-desiring Sabbath, marching towards his own grave with manic energy, cannot kill himself.
But it is neither fear nor cowardice that ultimately prevent Sabbath from claiming his own life and bringing the curtain down on the act. The final twist in the fate of the disgraced puppeteer instead exposes the underlying truth of his radical individuation, revealing in the process the most daring feature of Roth’s approach to the distinct problem posed by the “wedge of consciousness.” The concluding sentences of the novel explain the reason for Sabbath’s unlikely persistence: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go?
Everything he hated was here.”66 Sabbath’s unyielding and defiant wielding of his own subjectivity is catalogued in the various ways in which he offends, desecrates, and disgusts those around him. His trail of destruction, like the innumerable memories and details that cluster and swirl around his filthy form, evidence a life lived in the gale force wind of howling particularities. In the end, however, this radical singularity turns out to be an identity mapped not in the logic of accumulation that defines his unkempt body but an irreducible sense of self achieved in negation. The mind at the centre of the text is a hole; Sabbath’s subjectivity is fundamentally empty. He is what he hates.
As the novel finishes, with Sabbath alone and shunned, “ankle-deep in the pudding of the springtime mud”, he confronts the terrifying fact that the seeming limitlessness of his own hatred substantiates his very being—this boundaryless nadir, in fact, forms the “self-haunted” absence from which Sabbath is continually able to refashion the act. The stunning emptiness that enables the devious ambiguity suspending Sabbath’s entire performance, in other words, is an inner and rapacious void just as cavernous as the awesome silence out in the Jersey graveyard. Late in the
66 Sabbath’s Theater, 451. 313
novel, perhaps haunted by creeping intimations of this fact, Sabbath reasons that he might stuff his consuming hollowness with a newly recovered set of artifacts, his brother’s letters and a surviving box of his personal belongings. Becoming custodian of Morty’s objects, things that have long since survived their owner, might keep the truth at bay a little longer. But it is no use.
As Roth makes clear in the novel’s desolate final sentences, Sabbath is only what he violently repudiates. “To be or not to be”, alluding to Hamlet’s witty revulsion in the face of life and death alike, is the playful title of the second section of the novel. Ironically, on the concluding page of
Sabbath’s Theater, “to be” turns out to include as fathomless depths as “not to be.”
IV. “Love’s Bitter Mystery”
Desire and death; eros and thanatos; chaos and oblivion. Such destructive poles have understandably dominated attempts to accommodate Roth’s most openly incendiary book. So abundant is the treatment of Sabbath’s ruinous energy that it can be difficult for critics adequately to grapple with the text. That it is a major novel, perhaps even the central novel, in
Roth’s oeuvre is not in doubt—David Gooblar admits as much in his own recent essay explaining his reluctance to deal with Sabbath’s Theater in his monograph about Roth’s “major phases.”67 The omission in a study concerned with mapping Roth’s most significant transitions is a particularly striking one. Gooblar’s unease is, however, an indicative discomfort. The fact that
Sabbath’s Theater is a work of extraordinary ambition has not lessened the difficulties involved in discussing a text that so freely inhabits and cooperates with a protagonist of such fierce misogyny and withering misanthropy. Sabbath’s Theater rages with great sound and fury, and
67 See David Gooblar, “’Invariably the prelude to missing the point’: Philip Roth, Mickey Sabbath, and Me”, Philip Roth Studies, Vol. 15, No.1, (Spring 2019), 53-58. 314
little comfort, about sex and death. As such, whether exculpatory or explanatory, transgression is the topic around which almost all discussions of the novel inexorably orbit. For Gooblar,
Sabbath’s Theater is, finally, inassimilable. My own analysis of the ways in which the text actively rereads Ulysses has in part returned to some of this terrain, whilst also pushing our attention in some neglected directions.
Given all this focus on the novel’s aggressive stance, it is easy to neglect the fact that
Sabbath’s Theater is really a book about love. Neither the thrill of disobedience nor the titillation of the off-limits ultimately define Roth’s restless approach. Indeed, the very features of the text that cause such discomfort, the obscene behaviour and acidic nihilism that drive the narrative, stain the prose, and inflame the broken protagonist, are not conceived in opposition to the novel’s preoccupation with soliciting sentiment in the filth of human behaviour. In fact, Roth maintains such a sustained commitment to Sabbath’s nastiness precisely in order to break a downpour of tenderness over the narrative like a dramatic caprice in the weather. The most consequential of the text’s numerous oscillations between competing poles of experience is the emotional volte-face from vicious destruction to remembered love that suddenly overawes the unruly antihero. And the rampaging energy of the rest of the novel is designed to leave us particularly unprepared and vulnerable to the ensuing flood.
Sabbath’s sentimentality is a feature of his personality that Roth hints at in a range of buried ways. It might seem strange to note that Roth’s most unpleasant character turns out also to be his softest and most defenceless. But the figure who at one moment relishes etching the word
“whoremonger” on his own gravestone is the same man who can still weep, locked in monstrous suffering, over the death of his kid brother half a century before. Even Sabbath’s polymorphous perversity is, oddly, rather conservative; what most excites the roaming wanderer as he debases
315
all that surrounds him are not so much new and surprising stimulations but memories of his own loss of sexual innocence. This is most evident in Roth’s elaborate evocation of Sabbath’s time at sea, frequenting various brothels in the perpetual search for the unknown act with the unencountered person. When he attempts to seduce Michelle Cowan later in the novel, clad in the ridiculous costume of a bathrobe several sizes too big, Sabbath also drifts unwittingly back towards the provocative dialogue he once shared with Drenka. Memory, above all else, proves to be Sabbath’s greatest thrill and his most raw burden. He is drenched, irretrievably, in the past. At the end of the novel, after he returns home from his wandering odyssey, memory opens up the prickly traveller like a wound. A mere box of Morty’s old things is enough to destroy him. And the very passage detailing Sabbath’s misery in being always and inexorably the grieving brother leads directly to the novel’s most surprising and overwhelmingly emotive scene. Immediately after he recalls the original trauma in his Gold Star family, Sabbath is swallowed in the devastating memory of the loss of his adulterous companion: “Drenka. Her death.”68
When Richard Ellmann wrote the preface to the corrected text of Ulysses, he pulled both his account of the significance of Hans Walter Gabler’s corrections to numerous corruptions in previous editions and his overarching interpretation of Joyce’s novel together around the theme of love. In James Joyce he had made the same case more diffusely, echoing the determination of his subject to approach the topic from a tentative and qualified distance. On several occasions in his biographical study, Ellmann notes Joyce’s habit of mocking the excess and the ridiculousness of the romantic cliché.69 But love—bodily, transitory, and fragile—is the covert force underlying
68 Sabbath’s Theater, 415. 69 A representative example: “Joyce took pleasure in undercutting romanticism, so when Budgen happened to speak of the ‘heart,’ Joyce commented, ‘The seat of the affections is lower down, I think.’” James Joyce, 432. 316
the human drama of Ulysses. Introducing the authoritative corrected text, Ellmann makes the case more plainly:
The most significant of the many small changes in Gabler’s text has to do with the
question that Stephen puts to his mother at the climax of the novel. Stephen is appalled
by his mother’s ghost, but like Ulysses he seeks information from her. His mother says,
‘you sang that song to me. Love’s bitter mystery.’ Stephen responds ‘eagerly,’ as the
stage direction says, ‘Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all
men.’ She fails to provide it.70
Gabler’s detailed reconstruction and assiduous analysis of Joyce’s papers confirms that the unannunciated word, the real enigma haunting the entire novel, is love.
As it is in the truly climactic moment in Roth’s most innovative and extraordinary book, when Sabbath recalls how Drenka, once so ebulliently alive, perished and passed away. Sabbath may not remember singing the lines from Yeats’s forlorn poem as his mistress lay on her deathbed, the woman in whom his deepest and most affectionate bond and the greatest excesses of his sexual desire are startingly bound together. And yet, as for Stephen, “love’s bitter mystery” defines this most haunting of memories. For it is here that Sabbath’s affection for the dying
Drenka, oozing away her own vital fluids on the damp hospital bed, is rendered most touchingly visible. Unarticulated but defining, echoing the deflected gravity of the Joycean precedent, love emerges as the underlying force of Sabbath’s Theater—the word known to all men but the experience most elusive and hardest to grasp. As such, the passage detailing Drenka’s death follows the pattern established throughout the text. Roth can only represent the overwhelming force of the emotion that grips the detestable Sabbath by way of the “ridiculous interplay” that
70 Ellmann, ‘Preface’, Ulysses, xii. 317
the novel as a whole explores at such antic lengths. Sabbath’s love for Drenka is so powerfully registered in this particular passage precisely because of the exhaustive and unhinged treatment of his unpleasant hatred of almost everything else.
In a similar fashion, replaying the misdirection on a more concentrated scale, the conversation that Sabbath and Drenka share in their final moments together evinces their devotion in the most unlikely of places. Caught in the semi-coherence of a morphine-induced reverie, Drenka reminds Sabbath of the time they pissed on each other, in a moment of wild abandon years earlier up at the Grotto. But the tenderness in the taboo, and not the transgression, defines the recitation of the memory. “It was a lustful feeling…” Drenka admits, pondering the sensation of the act. The deeper meaning, however, lay in what they alone were able to share: “a feeling of giving, also. In a way that I could not do to anyone else.”71 The novel’s climactic emotional scene relies on a startling transformation of the very notions of openness and entanglement that have subsequently led the reckless and invasive Sabbath into error and isolation. The passage detailing Drenka’s death decisively flips the depiction. Here Sabbath’s remarkable openness assumes an entirely different significance as measure of his capacity to love. “It takes two to tangle” is one of Drenka’s most endearing errors when speaking her heavily-inflected English. It is a mistake that Sabbath takes particular delight in on account of the
Joycean serendipity of the pun, becoming something akin to his ironic mantra.72 His final,
71 Sabbath’s Theater, 427. 72 “She was weakest at retaining idiomatic English but managed, right up to her death, to display a knack for turning the cliched phrase, proverb, or platitude into an objet trouvé so entirely her own that Sabbath wouldn’t have dreamed of intervening—indeed, some (such as “it takes two to tangle”) he wound up adopting.” Sabbath’s Theater, 71. 318
desolate thought after remembering Drenka’s last moments pushes the substance of the phrase in a more melancholy direction: “To commingle with you, Drenka, to commingle with you now.”73
Drenka’s and Sabbath’s touching reconstruction of the night they pissed upon each other, recalled in this most unusual of deathbed scenes, enacts an embodied vision of love in a peculiar and arresting way. Roth dramatises the powerful emotional attachment between his wicked and devious characters with the memory of a scene of porous bodies and flowing minds, an act of exchange that expresses an empathetic extension toward the “unspeakable” aspects of the human experience. However squalid the method, consensually bound under each other’s bodily streams,
Sabbath and Drenka are temporarily one. The image of a physical boundary yielding to an inclusive interaction, in this case the transaction of excreted liquids between exultant lovers, is envisaged as a kind of literary inclusivity that locates expressive power in the process of absorption. There is a Joycean precedent for the way in which Roth imbues these fleshly waters with such heavy symbolic significance. Famously, Molly Bloom’s menstrual blood, arriving in the final hour of Ulysses with both the sense of preordained inevitability that guides the epic structure and the disorderly unpredictability of pure chance that rules its content, contains echoes of the Eucharist in order to consecrate the significance of the body in all its private and hidden realities. Evidently, Roth elects not to channel Joyce’s transubstantiatory aesthetics, lodged against the Catholic Church; however, in this defining scene, Sabbath’s Theater clearly draws on the powerful Penelopean example. Straining to articulate her feelings about the fluid exchange with Sabbath years earlier, Drenka arrives at a telling description of that night up at the Grotto as a “rite of passage”.74 A dirty act between two old and unlikely lovers engaging in nothing more
73 Sabbath’s Theater, 429. 74 Ibid, 428. 319
than a moment of kinky arousal takes on an unexpected and radiant kind of significance.75 Loss of self, the shared yielding of boundaries, binds Sabbath and Drenka together in some dynamic holy compact.
When he recalls Drenka’s death at the end of the novel, Sabbath not only meditates on the loss of an unflinching and audacious companion in erotic excess—the most enticing co- conspirator of his life. Bitterly, he realises that he truly loved her. To embrace in such a way on the night they pissed on each other was almost to seep into one other. Roth’s sly handling of the dialogue implies that Sabbath and Drenka not only shared an extraordinary experience but were at that moment able most intimately and irretrievably to intertwine. As a result, Sabbath’s love of
Drenka represented the one true reprieve from the exhausting emptiness of his own subjectivity.
Comingling with Drenka, the bottomless nadir was temporarily breached and flooded.
Remembering her dying as he sits alone in the car on Ocean Avenue, leaking her last liquids onto the hospital bed in some wretched parody of the embodied connection they once enjoyed together, Sabbath confronts not only his overwhelming loneliness but the hollowing fact of himself alone.
Ulysses, Ellmann claims, ultimately offers a redemptive outlook by way of its covert celebration of love. Imperfect, bodily, spiritual, tormenting, and temporary—a perpetual frustration on account of its inconstancy—Joyce’s epic novel of modern life restores the faith by insisting on the reality:
75 Patrick Hayes writes, “Sabbath’s urine doesn’t just come down: instead, “it came upon me,” a phrase that in literary English carries the force of a religious revelation.” For Hayes’s, this epiphanic moment is linked to a Nietzchean intimation of “tragic joy.” I argue that the Joycean inflections of Roth’s treatment of the body, scattered across Sabbath’s Theater but particularly concentrated in this scene, suggest something a little less rarified if similarly significant. See Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 89. 320
Like other comedies, Ulysses ends in a vision of reconciliation rather than of sundering.
Affection between human beings, however transitory, however qualified, is the closest
we can come to paradise. That it loses its force does not invalidate it. Dante says that
Adam and Eve’s paradise lasted only six hours, and Proust reminds us that the only true
paradise is the one we have lost. But the word known to all men has been defined and
affirmed, regardless of whether or not it is subject to diminution.76
In its own unexpected and rebarbative way, Sabbath’s Theater seems to confirm this vision. But any consolation in “Love’s bitter mystery” in the pages of Roth’s own epic novel arrives with a brutal sting. The effect is confusing. In the end, wandering Sabbath is overawed with human tenderness in a manner clearly based on Bloom’s and Stephen’s examples; whether the emotion purges him of anything, in a fashion predicated on Ellmann’s trust in the restorative cycle of the grand scheme of Ulysses, remains deliberately open to question. Indeed, Roth’s return to Joyce seems to invert the optimism of Ellmann’s influential claim. Love, if anything, leaves Sabbath sundered once more. The broken puppeteer’s existence is ironically affirmed on the novel’s final page. However, Roth concludes without the assurance of a mighty “yes.” Lonely Sabbath, a man apart, is instead left to persevere with the consuming force of a bold and empty no.
V. “Man Can Embody Truth but He Cannot Know It”
When Norman Cowan takes Sabbath into his tidy New York home, clearly worried that he is on the precipice of a colossal mental breakdown, Norman lets him sleep in the bedroom of his teenage daughter, Deborah, currently away at college. Sabbath quickly sets himself loose on her
76 Ellmann, ‘Preface’, Ulysses, xiv. 321
possessions, emptying the cupboards in a shameless search for concealed photographs and intimate erotic confessions. “Scavenging with his nose,” he ransacks the room, raiding the underwear of the innocents in a comic parody of the sacking of civilisations. It is one of the text’s truly hilarious and debased scenes, a passage that includes one of the first examples of the irreverent way in which Roth goes on to slide the narration between the antic third person and
Sabbath’s own impudent voice. Pouring through Debbie’s stuff, Sabbath virtually personifies the invasive assault on privacy that defines the uncensored approach across Ulysses.77 During his shameless search, Sabbath gets his grubby hands on just about everything. The affirming thrill of fondling Debbie’s things, in fact, anticipates the stunning impact of Morty’s box of objects later in the narrative.
But Sabbath doesn’t get his arthritic fingers on an actual copy of Joyce’s writing. Instead,
Roth uses the scene to stage an intertextual encounter with W.B. Yeats, another figure from the canon of modern literature whose work resonates throughout the major novels of the 1990s.78 As
Posnock argues, Yeats represents an important antecedent for Sabbath’s Theater, an intellectual interlocutor who inspires crucial aspects of the text: “Roth drapes Sabbath in the iconography of various modes of heroically melancholy modernism (Yeats and Whitman are two exemplars) for his own revisionary purposes, as if clearing a space of his own in the canon.”79 However, Yeats’s powerful presence in Sabbath’s Theater stretches far beyond the status of a canonical predecessor, admired and subsequently discarded. Embedded in the diegesis of the novel on a
77 In his introduction to the corrected text of the novel, Ellmann memorably states, “In its subject-matter Joyce’s book invades our privacy.” “Preface,” Ulysses, ix. 78 Yeats was also, of course, another of Richard Ellmann’s favourite subjects. However, Hermione Lee has recently claimed credit for inspiring Roth’s reinvestment in the poet across his later fiction. In the new introduction for the latest edition of her monograph about Roth, Lee, one of Roth’s trusted circle of readers and dedicatee of Nemesis (2010), points out that she was integral in placing Yeats before the novelist as he was redrafting Sabbath’s Theater. See Philip Roth, iii. 79 Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 162. 322
number of significant occasions, Roth’s intertextual dialogue with the poet of steely resolve—
“cast a cold eye/ on life, on death”—assumes a more complicated role.80 In fact, many of the stakes of the novel are established in terms drawn from a Yeatsian poetics that attempts precariously to straddle the ridiculous and the sublime. And Roth’s negotiation with Yeats proves crucial to subsequent novels in a manner predicated on the example of Sabbath’s Theater.
When Sabbath finds one of Debbie’s college notebooks, a photocopy of Yeats’s poem
“Meru” serendipitously slips out. His fingers still sticky with sweet jam, Sabbath picks up the sheet of paper and reads the text. Stunned, he flatters himself by seeing his own wandering journey beyond the edge of bourgeois acceptability reflected in the imagery of grand collapse depicted in the poem:
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality81
80 When he won the Man Booker International Prize in 2011, Roth quoted this line famously etched on Yeats’s gravestone during an interview with the BBC, as he reflected on the nature of his own literary achievement. See “Philip Roth Interview (2011),” BBC. The Review Show, 11th July 2011. www.youtube.com.
Placing Yeats within the novel in this way affords Roth an easy satiric opportunity. After
Sabbath reads “Meru”, he flicks through his absent host’s classroom notes, jottings that display a shallow attempt to grapple with the themes of the text. Debbie’s seminar not only sidestepped the threatening substance of the poem but also sought to contain its meanings to the unconscious effects of language. As the morning class on Yeats concluded, civilisation remained very much hooped together, sustained not by the semblance of peace but by the pattern of pronounced pronominal bias detected in the text. The void failed to intrude into proceedings with Prof.
Kransdorf on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Disgusting Sabbath, ransacking the bedroom, reintroduces the averted chaos to proceedings.
Roth’s careful spatial arrangement of the scene does more than emphasise the incongruity of the comic clash. The decision to stage Sabbath’s encounter with Yeats in such a conspicuously domestic setting, a place characterised by the fastidious maintenance of categories, implicitly aligns the contextual containment of the poem in the university seminar with the commitment to boundaries suggested in the delicate order of Debbie’s bedroom. High domesticity, in other words, forms the symbolic analogue of the academic sequestration of Yeats’s uncompromising vision. Immediately before he reads the poem, Sabbath eyes a couple of columns casually sketched in Debbie’s notebook, isolating and demarcating her strengths and weaknesses as a personality. It is an example of language deployed in the comforting analysis of conventional divisions comparable to her reading of the poem—a banal act of interpretation that Sabbath, the human amalgam of colliding oppositions, quickly destroys. But in the wider dialogue with Yeats across Sabbath’s Theater, the instrumentalisation of textual practices inside the academy becomes more than just an object of satiric scorn. The novel also attempts to embed the grave thresholds of Yeatsian modernism back into the precarity of experience.
324
Tellingly, Sabbath’s moment “ravening, raging, and uprooting” the decorous civility of
Debbie’s bedroom does not represent his only contact with Yeats. Roth’s spatial configuration of the intertextual interaction actually stretches back to Sabbath’s time at sea. His earliest experiences of reading Yeats, we learn later in the narrative, were as a result of another enigmatic wanderer, a man placed in deliberate contrast to Professor Kransdorf and his introductory seminar on modern poetics:
he was remembering the guy who’d given him those books to read on the Standard Oil
tanker, remembering how they unloaded through that great piping system at Curaçao and
how that guy—one of those gentlemanly, quiet types who mysteriously spend their lives
at sea when you would expect them to wind up as teachers or even maybe ministers—had
given him a book of poems by William Butler Yeats. A loner. A self-educated loner. The
guy’s silences gave you the creeps.82
Sabbath’s literary education with Yeats was not only begun far from the institution of the postwar university but also instigated and encouraged by a figure whose most memorable characteristic was his unsettling appreciation of silence. Something of the void—the “desolation of reality”—was manifest in the lonely extremes of life as a mercenary sailor. Out in Curaçao,
Yeats was not studied but lived.
And yet Sabbath’s emotional identification with Yeats, aligned with the profound discovery of existential verges, is also an encounter compromised by circumstance. Sabbath falls someway short of the grandeur of the Yeatsian vision. In a later scene, horrified by his friend’s determination to bring his life and his marriage to ruin, Norman assigns to Sabbath something of the sublimity of “Meru”. But it is no compliment, and it comes in the form of an
82 Sabbath’s Theater, 245. 325
uncharacteristically vicious attack: “The inverted saint whose message is desecration. Isn’t it tiresome in 1994, this role of rebel-hero? […] The immensity of your isolation is horrifying.”83
Indeed, even as he reads the poem, Sabbath falls a long way short of the awesome Yeatsian example. Not only do his sticky-sweet fingers sully the purity of the destruction depicted, his hands staining the text with the ludicrously expensive jam provided by his patient hosts, Sabbath also projects himself into the imagery of the instability of civilisation at the very moment that he raids a defenceless young girl’s private drawers. Flicking through young Debbie’s notebook, we are a long way from the falls of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Roth shows Sabbath assuming the burden of Yeats’s poem of man, “Ravening, raging, and uprooting”; however, he does so on the condition that the vatic vision of human inconstancy takes on a comic proportion as well as a tragic one.
This sense of bathetic deflation is broadly characteristic of Roth’s pattern of allusions to
Yeats across the longer arc of his career. The poet is both consistently venerated and routinely undercut. The tension between the aspiration to escape into the disinterest of art and the disintegration of this attempted break out, an effort which suspends much of Yeats’s writing, serves as a continual point of reference for Roth’s own preoccupation with dramatising the friction between art and life. Indeed, Yeats provides Roth with much more than a symbolic exaltation of a life devoted to the “perfection of the work”; he also gives him a vocabulary and point of contact for dealing with the permeable limits of this vision. Yeats’s yearning to be transmuted into art—“gather me/ into the artifice of eternity”—is a sentiment that Roth is suspicious of even as he is recurrently drawn into its orbit.84 In Roth’s fiction, a certain dream of aesthetic autonomy is often invoked through Yeats, but it remains, stubbornly, a dream. This
83 Sabbath’s Theater, 347. 84 “Sailing to Byzantium”, W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 239. 326
tussle between art and life is most vividly embodied in the instability of a living mind and a feeling body. The most interesting and formative aspect of Yeatsian longing for Roth, therefore, lies in the anguish underlying the desire itself: the constitutive impossibility that nevertheless drives the urge.
The most intriguing early reference to Yeats in Roth’s fiction occurs towards the end of
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Basking in post-coital afterglow, Alex celebrates his sexual union with Mary Jane by reciting “Leda and the Swan,” attempting to elevate their intercourse to the highest register that his learning can summon. As Brauner notes, Alex immediately regrets it85:
“How can those terrified vague fingers push/ The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”
“Hey!” She cried. “Thighs!”86 The bathos finds its full force in the simultaneous disintegration of
Yeats’s fragile grandiloquence and the ridiculous lack of self-awareness that the protagonist exhibits (though by this stage in the book, we can hardly be surprised). Where Yeats moves to subsume the tremors of history into the rhythms of sexual violation, exploding the Ledaean body in a moment of cosmic radiation, Roth’s recitation generates comic energy by exposing the gulf between the idealized poetic vision and the reality on the ground. Alex’s somewhat tragic desire for his sexual appetite to translate seamlessly into transcendent art is thoroughly undercut, and the transformation actually enacted is the very opposite of his intentions. “Leda and the Swan” dissolves back into the pornographic content that the poem’s sonnet form works so hard to alchemize.
Roth expands on this tension in the final David Kepesh novella, The Dying Animal
(2001), a text completed soon after the American Trilogy and published under a conspicuous and
85 Brauner, David. “Masturbation and its Discontents; or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy’s Complaint”, Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer, Ed. Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio (University of Delaware Press, 2010), 58. 86 Portnoy’s Complaint, 192. 327
suggestive Yeatsian title.87 Though Kepesh wears his learning with much more confidence and sleight of hand than the young Alex, he is nevertheless the victim of a very similar problem, in that he desperately wants his life to assume the same gravitas as his reading. In fact, the aged
Kepesh proves to be one of Roth’s least sympathetic portraits of guarded personal autonomy.
The famous literary critic and part-time academic, resurrected from the comedic struggle of The
Professor of Desire, has petrified into a particularly brittle and self-deceiving relic. The kind of poetic disinterest that Kepesh confidently claims as his own inevitably collapses as soon as it is compromised by the contingent particularities of his own desire. As Judith Yaross Lee points out, the most intriguing instance in which this tension in Kepesh’s self-assurance is exposed occurs at the very point that Roth chooses to invoke “Sailing to Byzantium” directly:
A double joke in The Dying Animal comically inflates, then deflates, Kepesh’s post-
orgasmic satisfaction. He elevates the sexual climax by invoking high art […] Yet
Kepesh flaunts his facility with poetry at the (convenient) moment that he admits that his
ejaculation unexpectedly (that is, prematurely) ended his intercourse with Consuela.88
The precariousness of an embodied existence, represented here in Kepesh’s comic crisis, so to speak, collapses the bridge into the Byzantine city. The elevated invocation of art as a separate and crystalline sphere unto itself disintegrates under the pressure of inconstancy as soon as it is absorbed into the material world.
Roth’s engagement with Yeats centres on this continual interaction between the aspiration towards literary transcendence and the anchoring constraints of life. The battle is not
87 “Consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 240. 88 Judith Yaross Lee, “Affairs of the Breast: Philip Roth and David Kepesh”, Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer, 73. 328
presented as a singular collision but instead explored as a fluid space of confrontation and exchange, and the dynamic relationship between art and experience is always both a frustrating and fruitful tussle. Crucially, though, the Yeats invoked and mined to such effect in the later novels is not simply aligned with the escape into artifice. The poet’s truly decisive influence on
Roth lies in empowering an aesthetics of the body, in which these mental vacillations are ultimately subsumed. And what an art of the body affords is the perpetuation of the predicament as a continuing conflict, withholding the possibility of resolution. The unwritten world and the written word are balanced in a state of embodied agony.
As the careful reader of Yeats inevitably discovers, the later poems are marked above all by the irreducible insistence of the materiality of the human form, exposing the detached reverie of escape into aesthetic distance to the rush of interior drive and appetite. As Daniel Albright writes, in the final third of his writing Yeats “strives for the fullest possible representation of physical experience,” and this introduces a new command and greater reach to his poetic project.89 The limitations of the body anchor a new kind of sublimity; the wistful rhythms of old are discarded in favour of an enigmatic and forthright directness. “Man can embody truth,” Yeats famously claims in one of his final letters, “but he cannot know it.”90 It is this contradictory dimension of Yeats’s writing that most vividly animates Roth. As suspicious as his novels are of the grandiosity of the Yeatsian vision, he is almost irresistibly drawn towards the raw, corporeal force of its later incarnations.
The competing attitudes either side of Yeats’s pronouncement also give rise to the real complexity of The Dying Animal, for as much as the novella does deflate Kepesh’s often ludicrous pretensions, it is equally sensitive to the notion that art can ultimately escape neither
89 Daniel Albright, “Introduction,” W. B. Yeats: The Poems (London: Everyman, 1992), xxx. 90 Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, Ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 922. 329
the powers nor the impairments of the body, and it achieves its full freedom in the recognition of this fact. Aesthetics are a part of our sensory experience—a fact that Roth demonstrates in this text by unfolding the meaningless contingencies of the flesh. The shock of Consuela’s looming fate after her startling diagnosis, Kepesh’s incongruous perseverance, and the astonishing physical explosion that precedes his friend George’s death are all ignited by the imposing
Yeatsian language of the perishing skin. And in the case of George’s terminal moments, The
Dying Animal attempts something like a vernacular and secular translation of the divine contact
Yeats contains in the violent drama of the Ledaean rape. “The last amazing act of George’s life,” as Kepesh describes his friend’s powerful yielding to somatic drive, bolting upright from the hospital bed to struggle futilely against his wife’s clothes, forces Kepesh to consider the same elemental question that concludes Yeats’s greatest sonnet.91 Just what buried energy was George in contact with as he endured this final blaze of terminal experience? We can never know; the
Yeatsian body announces a kind of absolute epistemological limit. Accordingly, Roth pushes the fictional representation to a point of mimetic strain where the declarative gives way to the interrogative: “Yes, that was something, wasn’t it? Kate said. And then with her weary smile she added, “I wonder who it is he thought I was.”92
Certainly, the mischievous knowledge that accrues to Sabbath’s “stupid” life lies not in the wisdom that he wields but in the wisdomless truth he is able to embody. “Invariably the prelude to missing the point” accurately describes the perpetual sense of bemusement that defines the banished puppeteer—a confusion both painful and glorious at one and the same time.
But living amid the dissolution turns out to be precisely the point. And a key source for this destructive strategy lies in the absorption of the recklessness of Yeats’s late style, of which
91 The Dying Animal, (Vintage: New York, 2001), 123. 92 Ibid, 123. 330
“Meru” is merely one modulation. Sabbath is, in many ways, the translation into character of the poetics of freedom that Yeats negotiates through the meaningless anguish of the body. The sublimity of Roth’s prose across Sabbath’s Theater, a lacerating and stunning clarity that is achieved by embracing the force of the ridiculous, rather than containing or effacing it, draws on the example of Yeats’s ferocious and destructive rush of ladderless creativity.93 Above all, it is the sense of abandon of the later poems which emboldens the verbal energy and license of the novel. By way of illustration, the havoc Yeats wreaks on the Christian Incarnation in “A Stick of
Incense,” exposing its lurid ruins, could almost serve as Sabbath’s own individual heroic creed:
“Saint Joseph thought the world would melt / But liked the way his finger smelt.”94 It is a poem not often included on the syllabus.
The place of Yeats on the syllabus also occupies The Human Stain. Or, more precisely, the use of writers such as Yeats inside the academy forms one of the many struggles depicted in the novel. Yeats is not, in fact, an open intertextual presence; at no point in The Human Stain does Roth refer to his writing directly in the manner of Sabbath’s Theater or The Dying Animal.
Nevertheless, the poet of “Among School Children” provides many of the most charged images and motifs that Roth deploys in the course of the narrative. Broadly speaking, Yeats provides a key touchstone for Roth’s handling of the predicament of the once eminent College Dean.
Coleman Silk, an “old smiling public man”, is not simply assailed by historical circumstance; but rather, he becomes tightly ensnared in the embodied agony of Yeats’s late poetics.95 When an unexpected and controversial affair with Faunia Farley restores the turbulence of an intense
93 The predicament and approach of the “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” clearly informs the wretched and sublime story of the detestable Sabbath. Arthritic hands bereft of their once glorious puppets stands in symbolic relation to the collapsing imagery dramatised in Yeats’s poem: “Now that my ladder’s gone/ I must lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”, W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 395. 94 Yeats, “A Stick of Incense”, W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 388. 95 Yeats, “Among School Children,” W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 261. 331
erotic attachment, Coleman tests the limits and the durability of the humanist pedagogy that previously informed his teaching and insulated his life. In his newfound vulnerability, he cannot help referring to his unlikely paramour as Helen of Troy, evoking dubious Yeatsian parallels to lend a learned gravitas to his experiences.96 But in the unfolding of his story, “rage”, the motor- emotion of “Meru” and the first word of The Iliad, departs from the page and tears Coleman apart.
Yeatsian imagery also plays a more subtle role in the way The Human Stain ruminates on the study of literature, questioning the legacy of the domestication of modernist forms and the methods of reading dominant in the academy. As Hayes argues, the context of the culture wars surrounding approaches to the canon, alive and hotly contested throughout the 1990s, is crucial to understanding The Human Stain. The debates and thinking inflamed with the publication of
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) percolate the text. However, attempts to align Roth with either side of the argument, on evidence gleaned from the narrative, are stymied by the novel’s self-conscious resistance to instrumental interpretation.97 Though it includes a number of moments of merciless ridicule, The Human Stain seems more determined to make encounters with literary objects problematic rather than celebrating either their value or ongoing utility. Published in the same year as Ravelstein (2000), Roth’s return to a campus novel confidently exhibits more differences than similarities from the valedictory tone of late Bellow.
The Human Stain is no commentary on the edifying effects of the western canon.
Hayes draws attention to a number of allusions buried in the seemingly incidental details of academic life at Athena College. It is the habitual temptation of Roth Studies to see in the
96 The Human Stain, 232. 97 As Hayes points out, Kasia Boddy is able to read The Human Stain as a conservative defence of the traditional canon at the same time that Jonathan Freedman can convincingly align it with work on cultural hybridity as practiced by Homi Bhabha. See Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 216-217. 332
author’s barbed comments about critical theory in a range of interviews over the years license not to take his engagement with intellectual debates about the teaching of literature seriously.98
Hayes’s discussion of The Human Stain demonstrates the folly of such approaches. The book is vigorously alive to critical conversations—cultural, methodological, and political. The quick, casual reference to George Bataille, mentioned only once as the subject of Delphine Roux’s doctoral dissertation, for instance, slyly evokes a conception of literature defined against the heady moralizing that brings Coleman to ruin. The affective power of art, Bataille claims, is not only disruptive but, as a consequence of its unsettling ferocity, necessarily evil.99 In the university that moves swiftly to ostracize Coleman, this provocative and controversial conception of literature, a vision that once claimed the intellectual attention of the very figure who seems furthest from its insights, has been strategically forgotten.
Another interlocutor drawn subtly into the texture of The Human Stain whom Hayes does not discuss is Paul de Man. At its most basic level, Roth’s account of Delphine’s academic backstory not only deliberately evokes the powerful importation of French literary theory into the teaching of the humanities across American universities but also points to the prestigious sway of the English Department at Yale, the institution most heavily associated with the postwar advent and dissemination of Deconstruction. In Delphine’s somewhat obsequious attachment to the status of her Alma Mater, disappointed by the provincial realism of Athena in contrast to the dazzling sophistication of her training, Roth pokes a little fun at the textual practices advanced from Yale. A threat of sophistic emptiness looms in the exposure of what Delphine truly cares
98 In a 2014 interview with Svenska Dagbladet, for example, Roth notes, “I agree that it’s been a good time for the novel in America, but I can’t say why. Maybe it is the absence of certain things that somewhat accounts for it. The American novelist’s indifference to, if not contempt for, “critical” theory.” “Interview with Svenska Dagbladet”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 382 99 Hayes writes, “They bespeak a desire to make literature serve some kind of identifiable good, whether to the polity at large or to the individual in particular. But “literature is not innocent,” Bataille argued in Literature and Evil, “it is guilty and should admit itself so.” Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, 230. 333
about. There is as much blindness as insight in her inability to come to terms with life in a less rarified environment. Perhaps, Zuckerman’s reconstruction implies, she has been reading with a subtlety that is misplaced.
But de Man’s importance to the tensions of The Human Stain is not limited to Roth’s return to satirizing the professoriate, an aspect of the text that recalls the allegories of reading at the centre of Letting Go. In fact, de Man’s significance is to be found in the novel’s ambiguous handling of some of Yeats’s most famous images.100 In particular, The Human Stain returns, in a number of its most controversial scenes, to the contested meanings of the Yeatsian dance—the very poetic figure that virtually launched de Man’s criticism and the ascendency of his methods.
Famously, de Man channeled ideas lifted from Derridean poststructuralism into his own approach to unpicking literary form, seeing in metaphoric symbols the same constitutive contradictions that Of Grammatology exposed in the underlying structure of language itself.101 In
“Semiology and Rhetoric”, the article that established his reputation and anticipated the astonishing success and influence of studies such as The Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man grounded his method in an idiosyncratic interpretation of the final lines of Yeats’s “Among
School Children.” Tellingly, it is this very poem which casts such a substantial shadow over
Coleman’s bewilderment at the height of his old age.
100 The public scandal surrounding revelations about de Man’s past arguably has a faint echo in the way in which Roth reveals Coleman Silk’s concealed history. But such an associative connection is far removed from the real energy of the text. Debates about de Man’s critical work, however, cut to the heart of the tensions explored in The Human Stain. 101 It is tempting to chart the intellectual development of Deconstruction as a repudiation of the hegemony of the New Criticism, and the work of de Man can certainly be understood as a break from previous interpretive practices, as argued in studies such as Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism (1980). With added distance, however, the continuities between the two systems of reading, organised around a conception of textual autonomy and powerfully incubated and shaped by the institutional history of the postwar university, seem far more obvious and significant than the supposed rupture. 334
Yeats’s laconic text ends with a famous blast of beauty. A perfect couplet arrives as the consummation of the poem’s reflections on the consolatory possibilities of art. After lamenting the forces of division, demarcation, and separation, experiences manifest in the unenviable process of aging, Yeats offers aesthetic command as an affirming source of synthesis:
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?102
Often read as a rhetorical question to be greeted with a silence that confirms the indivisibility of dancer and dance, sign and referent locked in an elegant and dynamic harmony, “Among School
Children” is conventionally understood as a symbolist celebration. In art a nourishing balance is to be found. But, as de Man pointed out, such an interpretation conceals, and is structurally reliant upon the erasure of its opposite. It is entirely coherent to read “Among School Children” as asking how we might divide form and content. And this possibility discloses a rhetorical system radically discontinuous with itself: “the authority of the meaning engendered by the grammatical structure is fully obscured by the duplicity of a figure that cries out for the differentiation that it conceals.”103 Deconstructing Yeats’s most resonant symbol, de Man reintroduced all the occluded rhetorical frictions of relations between dancer and dance. In the very poem that most powerfully affirms their interconnection, form and content actually come undone.
There are three pivotal dancing scenes in The Human Stain, and each of these passages engages provocatively with the textual dynamic that de Man isolated and influentially questioned. In the course of the novel, “body swayed to music” comes to disclose both the full
102 W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children”, W.B. Yeats: The Poems, 263. 103 Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”, Diacritics, Vol.3. No.3 (Autumn, 1973), 30. 335
measure of life’s ineradicable uncertainties and the unavoidable compulsion to attempt to untangle them. In these scenes, arguments about literary form are weighed with the added scrutiny of lived experience. The first dance in the novel, for instance, virtually propels
Zuckerman’s quest into the unknown, igniting the premise of the very book we are reading.
Previously so hesitant to author Coleman’s furious rebuttal after being petitioned to settle his score against the institution that humiliates him, Zuckerman becomes enchanted to tell the story after he shares an unlikely foxtrot with his spontaneously bewitching neighbour. When a favourite song comes on the radio during a casual game of cards, Coleman asks Zuckerman to dance. All that he does not know about his counterpart coalesces in Zuckerman’s uncharacteristically Yeatsian and neo-Platonic intimation as he glides across the floor: “this was not even another man. This was another soul.”104 In the pleasurable confusion of the dance, a scene that Roth deliberately and surprisingly eroticises, Zuckerman learns both about what he failed to discern about his friend, and, as a consequence, most wants to know.105 The labile interaction between form and content dramatised in Coleman’s mischievous and rhythmic movements becomes not just an aesthetic spectacle but a powerful engine of curiosity.
The link between the propulsive turbulence of desire and compulsive narrative curiosity, subtly intertwined in this scene early in the exposition of the novel, places the playful foxtrot between elderly neighbours in conversation with another crucial scene—Steena Palsson’s erotic dance, performed decades before on an otherwise uneventful evening in an apartment in
Greenwich Village. In fact, it is the memory of his relationship with Steena, prompted by the discovery of an old letter, which seems to compel Coleman suddenly to dance with Zuckerman
104 The Human Stain, 25. 105 “There was nothing overtly carnal in it, but because Coleman was wearing only his denim shorts and my hand rested easily on his warm back as if it were the back of a dog or a horse, it wasn’t entirely a mocking act.” The Human Stain, 26. 336
and fling him around the room. Midway through the novel, in the section of the text detailing
Zuckerman’s reconstruction of Coleman’s past, the dynamic between sign and referent contained within the image of the dance also assumes the more complicated stakes of cultural racialization.
In “Slipping the Punch,” Roth elaborates Coleman’s extraordinary history growing up in an
African American family in East Orange, New Jersey, exploring how he learned to leverage the misconceptions of others to maximise his own freedom. Coleman’s capacity to evade categorisation, and the stigmatisations and prejudices that come with it, relied upon his capacity to slide between social significations. But, as the conflicts that emerge during his intense relationship with Steena demonstrate, such slippages were not without their dangers and their costs. When Coleman eventually invites Steena to meet his family, she learns about his past and a racial identity she had never previously thought to have existed. As a result, Steena breaks off contact. The painful and sudden end of their relationship subsequently does much to motivate
Coleman to commit to the deception he has grown used to practising and sever himself completely from his origins.
Roth actually makes the relationship between these torn anxieties surrounding social racialization and the issue of textual interpretability explicit. Coleman’s unease surfaces most visibly when he comes across a poem that Steena hurriedly scribbles down one day at the dizzying height of their relationship. Evidently, his panic stems principally from a simmering sense of guilt about his decision to conceal his past. In the dim light of the hall, he misreads the descriptive line “and the back of his neck” for “and the back of his negro” and frets about the implications of discovery.106 However, Zuckerman represents the mounting nervousness of
Coleman, locked in a struggle to decipher Steena’s words, not as the consequence of his position
106 The Human Stain, 112. 337
as the threatened subject of her description but as the confused and vulnerable reader of her text:
“What was so ambiguous about what she saw in him? […] The more he reread the simple stanza, the more opaque the meaning became—and the more opaque the meaning, the more certain he was that she distinctly sensed the problem that Coleman brought to her life.”107 Lost in the irresolvable problem of interpretation, as opposed to being stunned by the clarity of an unambiguous accusation, Coleman is “undone.”
The connection forged between desire and a determination to untangle relations between sign and referent that guides Zuckerman’s curiosity about Coleman returns here in an inverted form. The young Coleman, as Zuckerman comes to reconstruct him, is anxiously blindsided by the very same confusion that so unsuspectingly enchants the enveloping novelist. Roth’s sexualization of the language when he describes Coleman’s agitated discomfort pouring over
Steena’s poem—“Each time he tried to penetrate her meaning, it slipped away”—returns to the implications of the enigmatic hold of the image of the dance, the very figuration that previously bewitched Zuckerman. Here, however, something like de Man’s radical rereading of relations between dancer and dance, containing the Yeatsian symbol to its own autonomous logical implosion, seals the reader forever outside the self-contained contradictions of the text.108 Fearful and uncertain, Coleman is pointedly excluded from Steena’s fleeting little poem.
Crucially, however, the young Coleman also comes to experience the pleasure of the enigma of the Yeatsian symbol. The interaction between desire and unknowability, the very connection that subsequently destroys the relationship with Steena and looms gravely in the
107 The Human Stain, 113-114. 108 De Man concludes his revolutionary reading of Yeats thus: “We end up therefore, in the case of the rhetorical grammatization of semiology, just as in the grammatical rhetorization of illocutionary phrases, in the same state of suspended ignorance. Any question about the rhetorical mode of a literary text is always a rhetorical question which does not even know whether it is really questioning.” “Semiology and Rhetoric,” 33. 338
secrecy that comes to define his life, also has the power to leave him astonished. Immediately after describing the lonely anxiety of his inability to understand Steena’s poem, Roth moves swiftly to dramatize the rhapsody of readerly inclusion and implication. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” assumes something more akin to its traditional reading, sweeping and magisterial, in the scene in which an unexpectedly confident Steena performs a striptease at the foot of their bed. When Steena dances before him, Coleman is not denied meaning but awash with the fluidity of meaning. His inability to separate form from its content, astonished by
Steena’s movement away from all that he previously felt he understood about her, leaves him replenished. Indeed, the depiction of the event purposefully draws energy from the sliding apart of sign and referent; in the heat of his intoxication, Coleman suggestively describes the performance as “the single most slithery dance.”109 Here the exposure of form and content to labile change is no cause of panic and brings with it no threat of isolation. Instead, the slippage emerges as an inclusive invitation to improvise. Steena not only offers Coleman an erotic display of all the potential of her youthful body but gifts him the most blissful kind of rapt confusion.
As Jonathan Freedman points out, Roth carefully arranges the racial stereotypes and significations surrounding the libidinal spectacle of Steena’s dance.110 Expectations aroused by connotations in the language are made to glide and shift. The primitivist myth purposefully evoked in the description of Roy Elridge’s wild music, for instance, is undercut by the empowering force of Steena’s improvisation—a freedom to recreate that Roth ironically links to the fortune of her own social racialization, as opposed to the underlying fact of her race:
“Prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song, there to see, plain as
109 The Human Stain, 115 110 Freedman dexterously unpicks the interacting levels of improvisation in this highly charged scene: “Roth’s layering of impersonations raises this question: who is masquerading as whom, if the person one is masquerading as is himself masquerading as somebody else?” Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 192. 339
day, was all the power of her whiteness.”111 Roth also deliberately highlights the fact that
Elridge’s spirited playing on the recording represents an act of improvisation comparable to
Steena’s spontaneous dance, reinterpreting a Gershwin standard in an entirely new way.112
Coleman, caught up in the dangers and the exhilaration of his own audacious act of self- fashioning at this moment in the narrative, is above all astonished by the ease with which the inexperienced young Steena enacts all the possibilities of her own freedom, sliding the terms of her identity with an authority that supersedes the claim of origins. But above all it is the blank canvass of her whiteness—in essence, the privileged license of the unconstrained social significations surrounding her skin—which permits her the chance to shift and blur.
Unsurprisingly, when he fails to penetrate her meaning on this particular occasion, to arrest the connotations of Steena’s dance in the formation of some stable textual pattern, Coleman experiences the uncertainty as an affirming and desirous thrill: “How did I find you? Who are you?”113
Such passages establish a complicated series of expectations for the central dancing scene in The Human Stain. Later in the text, in a pivotal passage that not only echoes Steena’s erotic striptease decades before but also evokes Zuckerman’s own restless curiosity at the beginning of the novel, Faunia performs a dance for the elderly Coleman that eschews flirtation and mischievous play for a heavier, weightier sense of significance. Six months into an affair that has intensified Coleman’s ostracization and heightened the danger of attack for Faunia on account of her violent and disturbed ex-husband, she sways her body to the very same music that previously inspired Steena. The descriptive handling of the scene, however, radically rewrites the
111 The Human Stain, 115. 112 See Freedman, Klezmer America, 182. 113 The Human Stain, 116. 340
implications of the earlier performance. Zuckerman’s account of Faunia’s dance, erotic but not coquettish, compliant and invitational but also defiant and unapologetic, shifts the emphasis away from the dizzying effects of the aesthetic spectacle towards the felt experience of the dancer herself. Where the meanings and sensations of Steena’s “slithery” actions were registered almost entirely in the bliss of Coleman’s spectatorial confusion, the significance of Faunia’s movements lies in the relationship between her improvisation and her own subjectivity. This scene, much more elaborate and highly wrought than the other key dances in the text, explores the same questions from the opposite angle.
Indeed, the passage when Faunia dances provides the first moment in the entire novel in which Zuckerman’s narrative moves tentatively inside her own enigmatic thoughts: “He’s never seen me dance like this, he’s never heard me talk like this.”114 In the central dancing scene in The
Human Stain, Roth carefully reworks the spectacle of improvisation into a moment of personal exposure. In her choice to reveal all her vulnerability to Coleman, Faunia actually expresses her power. Here Roth provides his most cunning response to the overdetermined question “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—the intriguing conundrum that ripples through the text in various ambiguous ways. The renegotiation does not emerge in the form of an extricable answer; but rather, The Human Stain moves to embed all the rhetorical and grammatical contradictions contained in the Yeatsian poem back into the lived paradoxes of experience. It is only through the spontaneity and the embodied creativity expressed in her decision to dance that we begin truly to know Faunia. And this implicit claim comes to stand in symbolic relation to the novel itself, with regard to Zuckerman’s curiosity about Coleman and his eventual decision to write a novel about him. It is only through fiction, the projected lie and aesthetic spectacle that turns the
114 The Human Stain, 213. 341
otherwise impenetrable opacity of experience momentarily transparent, Roth suggests, that we can stake a claim on another’s subjectivity at all.
Reinvesting in the volatile epistemological purchase of the poetic figure of the dance—an image subject to a kind of petrification into a hermetically sealed symbol as a consequence of the institutionalisation of the New Criticism, later elevated to the very pinnacle of the self-contained autonomy of the text on account of the influential methodology of de Man—Roth draws Yeats ruthlessly back into the texture of lived experience. In the depiction of Faunia’s dance, Roth retains all the complexity and the slippages, the intimations of discontinuity and unstable signification that recall the various academic debates and contexts that have accrued to the ending of “Among School Children”. But he insists upon reintroducing dancer and dance alike to the material plenitude and rushing confusion of the lived world.
Significantly, this central scene begins with a long and patient representation of the setting, a passage in which Roth’s descriptive intensity, lingering over the feel of the bedsheets and the tactile realities of the limbs that deck them, seems to fuse with the emotional force and empathetic bond achieved in the exchange between characters. In the description of Faunia herself, a woman assaulted and assailed by misfortune throughout her life, Roth emphasises the brute physicality of the body that subsequently sways. Here graceful movements are pitched not in opposition to weathered forms but as something closer to their consummation. On this occasion, the freedom of Faunia’s whiteness, in marked contrast to Steena years before, is weighed down and filled in with specifics. And the enigmatic influence of the performance over
Coleman, in its own way transporting, emerges from this close, vivid attention to the embodied details that Faunia commands and moves. The dynamic particulars, neither the static significations nor the freeplay of the signs, attest to the true power and the reach of her
342
subjectivity in this moment. The mention of “a petal-shaped, rouge-colored bruise” at the joining of her throat and torso provides a faint echo of the Navy-tattoo that Zuckerman spies on Coleman at the beginning of the novel—an unlikely detail that goes on to suggest the avalanche of hidden specifics that constitute anyone’s biography: “A tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”115
But in the rhythmic unfolding of her own particulars in the dance that she performs for
Coleman, arguably the central and most controversial scene in the entire novel on account of the way in which Roth veers dangerously close to a retrograde priapic fantasy, Faunia ends up establishing not her separateness from Coleman but “that thing, that connection.”116 This, it seems, is as close as we can be to getting people right. Going with the fiction. Her spontaneous act makes their bond manifest at a level that seems to stretch beyond the sexual relationship they already share. In fact, the performance provides Faunia with her own improvised epistemological grip on all the chaotic contingency and inescapable misconceptions that whirl around and beyond them. For it is during the dance that she exposes both a daring intimation of her own hidden depths and names Coleman for what he is in her own eyes. “I see you, Coleman” is the resonant refrain in the dialogue they exchange as she moves before him; the curious, sympathetic, eroticised gaze is deliberately cast both ways.117 In fact, Faunia sees with a penetration that overawes the phallic energy of Coleman’s own enraptured stare. Not only does she describe
Coleman’s feelings of injustice and his broken emotions with a tenderness and an understanding that she struggles subsequently to live up to, she also commits to the compact between them in the offer to reshape herself in response to his desire: “I am whatever you want.” The dance
115 The Human Stain, 22. 116 Ibid, 226. 117 Ibid, 232. 343
comes to represent the power of her commitment, however temporal and transient, to the connection itself.
As it does too for Coleman. After Zuckerman reconstructs the scene when Faunia danced for the disgraced College Dean, a man abandoned by his colleagues and spurned by his judgemental children, the novelist comes to believe—in his own mental way, to improvise—that
Faunia was the only person Coleman ever shared his secret with. Who Coleman truly was he gave to Faunia alone to decide and determine. In the interplay between individuals dramatised in the figure of the dance, Faunia and Coleman were therefore able to achieve an intimacy that outplayed the inexhaustible complexities and endless suggestive details mapped in the personal histories that can never entirely interlace and cohere. Notions of possession and ownership yield to a vision of dynamic exchange. It is not for nothing that Roth describes the seemingly inconsequential hair of Coleman’s that remains stuck to Faunia’s cheek as she begins to sway to the music as “an ampersand.”118
Roth’s engagement with the Yeatsian poetic figure of the dance, a metaphor that has accrued such a volatile range of meanings inside the academy, reflects a similar sense of compromise as his wider negotiations with the poet across his major fiction. In many ways, The Human Stain follows the intertextual example established in Sabbath’s Theater and exhibits a similar attitude towards both the fragile grandiloquence and the imposing grandeur of the Yeatsian vision as the one reworked in The Dying Animal. In the meditation on the symbol of the dance, Roth filters his rumination more directly through the institution of the postwar university, involving de Man, his insights and his controversies, in the terms of the interaction. For all that Yeats is undercut, The
Human Stain confirms its own kind of commitment to the powers of synthesis affirmed in
118 The Human Stain, 227. 344
“Among School Children.” Improvised and qualified, touched by no small measure of despair and shaped by a tragic ending that colours the reconstruction of events, Roth’s reworking nevertheless represents a qualified return to the wisdomless truth involved simply in embodying the bond. “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” As the remarkable lives of Faunia and Coleman attest, simply not at all.
VI. “What Can One Know Even of the People One Lives with Every Day?”
When unruly Sabbath, Roth’s most aggressive polluter of the alabaster forms of literary modernism, raids Deborah’s bedroom, he pours scorn on her books. The most egregious example of the “laudable ideologies” represented on the shelf is Virginia Woolf: “Shallow, shallow, shallow! Enough reading and rereading of A Room of One’s Own… an overbred English parody of a borzoi, effortlessly superior, as only the English can be, to all her inferiors, who never took her clothes off in her life.”119 Beyond the cruel satire, Sabbath’s derogatory comments actually form an ironic kind of homage to the free indirect dives into the mind that define so many of the innovations of Woolf’s fiction. Roth exploits the little tirade as an unlikely opportunity to tip the narration into Sabbath’s meandering point of view. And the episode concludes with a meditation on “the law of living: fluctuation” in a manner reminiscent of Woolf’s own contemplations of life lived amid the “flicker” of experience. Ultimately, though, Sabbath’s insults serve to strengthen the text’s allegiance to Joyce. The accusation that Woolf is “overbred” trades on her
119 Sabbath’s Theater, 157. 345
own famous reactions to Ulysses, the novel that did so much to free her own writing, but from whose squalid excesses she could not help but recoil.120
Sabbath’s caricature of Woolf represents a slanted and potentially misleading introduction to the ways in which Roth wrestles with her work. The combative and demeaning nature of the intertextual interaction in this scene does, however, highlight the friction, in addition to the intensity, which seems to mark Roth’s thinking. His own comments about Woolf suggest both a rigorous response and a qualified estimation of her achievement. And the very fact that Woolf stands out as the only female modernist to occupy his attention during this major phase seems to illustrate the sense in which Roth’s conception of authorship remained resolutely tied to masculine experience, even as his fiction came forcefully to demonstrate the ironies, hypocrisies, and self-deceptions that all notions of manhood contain and transmit. One can’t help but think that the novels of the 1990s would be even richer in their search for epistemological solutions if the artists mined for inspiration stimulated more complex and diverse inquiries into the dynamics of representation. Even as Roth engaged intimately and thoroughly with Woolf’s writing, the invitation to reflect thoughtfully on relations between gender and authorship seems largely to have been ignored.
But the invitation to reconsider the question of our capacity to enter the inner worlds of other people, a tension palpable across Woolf’s work, was certainly something Roth seized, and we see it pushing evolutions in his compositional approach. In a conversation with David
Remnick produced with the BBC to mark the conclusion of the American Trilogy, circling again around the question of consciousness central to the structures of his major novels, Roth argues,
120 In her diaries, Woolf famously writes of Ulysses, “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are…” Sabbath, certainly a self-taught man, seems to take the slight personally. 346
“if you have only consciousness without the gravity of experience, you have the failed experiment of Virginia Woolf, where consciousness so dominates the novel that is ceases to move through time the way a novel needs to.”121 Similarly, Roth’s comments in his essay about
Bellow, published in the same year, deploy a comparison to Woolf to emphasise the merits of a balance between thought and action in contrast to a complete dissolution into mental fragments:
“It isn’t that, as a storyteller, Bellow apes […] Virginia Woolf in The Waves. […] disjointed perception is dictated by the mental state of the central character rather than by an author’s impatience with traditional means of narration.”122
In moments such as these, Roth displays his own discomfort with mannered textual techniques in terms that recall his earlier comments about his own relation to the generation of writers often grouped under the totalising rubric, “modernist.”123 Such formal tricks have petrified into language bereft of any epistemological purchase on life. But the discriminating attitude towards Woolf, an object of scrutiny palpable across his later work, also suggests a specific contestation. A key context for this renewed interest stems, at least in part, from Roth’s reading. Woolf returns to his attention during the period of his major fiction less as a consequence of the circulation of social energy than as a direct result of the circulation of texts.
For much of the mid-1990s, the literary critic Hermione Lee, one of Roth’s trusted circle of readers of new manuscripts and an important confidant and friend, was working on her
121 As quoted in Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 211. 122 “Rereading Saul Bellow”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 301. 123 “The lesson of modernism isn’t encapsulated in a technique that’s “Joycean” or a vision that’s “Kafkaesque”; it originates in the revolutionary sense of seriousness that’s exemplified in the fiction of Joyce, Kafka, Beckett […] By now the methods of these outlandish writers have themselves become the conventions of seriousness, but that in no way dilutes their message…” “Interview on Zuckerman”, Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, 176. 347
exhaustive biographical study of Woolf.124 The text was eventually published in 1996, just as
Roth was turning his attention toward the material that evolved into the American Trilogy. Their correspondence during these years confirms not only Roth’s interest in the subject but also his high esteem of the book itself.125 The immediate emphasis of Virginia Woolf, the way in which
Lee organises her approach to her intimidating heroine, placing Woolf at the apex of the predicament that befalls all acts of life-writing, gives a strong indication why:
In her diaries and memoirs and fiction, she is always insisting on the difficulty of
knowing people: “she would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or
were that.” […] For this legendary egotist is also an emphathiser of extraordinary powers.
[…] she is constantly trying, via her own ‘performances’, to get inside other people.126
If a return to Joyce helped to propel the virtuosity of Roth’s major fiction, igniting his prose and authorising a mischievous range of formal experiments, Woolf announced the limits of such dazzling acts of imaginative daring. To try to know people is, inevitably, to fail to understand.
In a frequently analysed passage early in the exposition of American Pastoral, the culmination of a series of mistakes in his own reading of Swede Levov, the former sports hero from Weequahic High School, Nathan Zuckerman channels his own strain of Woolfian doubt.
Reflecting on all that he failed to discern, he labels his account of the difficulty of knowing people, “an astonishing farce of misperception.”127 But this comedy of errors is no mere modesty topos and it invites no abstention from the task: “The fact remains that getting people right is not
124 Hermione Lee was the interviewer for Roth’s “The Art of Fiction” piece for The Paris Review in 1984. She is also the dedicatee for Nemesis, Roth’s final piece of published fiction. Lee’s monograph, Philip Roth, remains one of the strongest studies of the early work. 125 A fax from the mid-1990s confirms that Roth read Virginia Woolf. In it he expresses his compliments, noting how the material left him both impressed and deeply shaken. Philip Roth Papers, Box 19, Folder 7. 126 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), 6-7. 127 American Pastoral, 35. 348
what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”128Accordingly,
Zuckerman moves from his recognition of the difficulty of accurately imagining the inner life of the Swede to his own attempt to do just that. In writing American Pastoral, he projects himself into his protagonist; fictionalising Levov allows him to get behind the superficial surface of the figure before him. Many of the tools Zuckerman adopts for this literary “performance” he takes directly from Woolf.
In his discussion of American Pastoral, Lawrence Buell notes that Roth’s treatment of the recent past, poised between the seemingly exclusive poles of nostalgia, dismissal, and violent critique, evokes a “sense of confusion about national destiny.”129 This agitated uncertainty, Buell argues, actually recoups some of the anxieties central to the constitution of the “dream” of the
“Great American Novel” itself, originally a form of discursive succor for a fractured nation in the years following the Civil War. Describing the novel’s determination to offer such a splintered vision of the historical period it addresses, Buell casually notes, “It’s Roth’s version of Virginia
Woolf […] the world broke in two.”130 It is an apt description of the clean rupture between the
Swede’s self-confident American exceptionalism and the vituperative disenchantment of the nation after the atrocities in Vietnam, the sudden break between two incompatible viewpoints that Roth dramatizes in the emotional fallout after Merry’s act of domestic terrorism.
But the Woolfian dimensions of American Pastoral stretch much further than the famous snap in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, the moment when “human character changed” —a loaded quotation that seems to stand behind Roth’s own phrase late in American Pastoral, describing a
128 American Pastoral, 35. 129 Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 207. 130 Ibid, 205. 349
“life broken cleanly in two.”131 Woolf actually permeates the text in a range of suggestive ways.
In particular, Mrs Dalloway (1925), the work that Roth seems to have admired most and the very novel that moves decisively to imagine the rupture of worlds, both private and political, has a curious intertextual presence in American Pastoral.132 Roth draws on Woolf’s exploration of different attitudes and experiences either side of the First World War to depict the social schisms caused by the conflict in Vietnam, a sundering that Mrs Dalloway projects in the fleeting intersection of Clarissa Dalloway’s superficial attachment to beautiful surfaces and Septimus
Smith’s shattered sense that all that remains is but a sham.
The characterisation of the Swede, exuding benevolent prosperity and innocence, recalls something of Woolf’s treatment of Clarissa’s complacent privilege. And the decision to pose
Merry’s exposure to the sight of Tibetan self-immolation on the television as the damaging spectacle that possibly altered her personality bares comparison with the shell-shocked trauma of the rambling Septimus. More directly, Roth borrows the broken words of Woolf’s uncomprehending veteran, struggling to feel, to estimate the lived sensation of a world fracturing into incompatible fragments: “It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”133 No longer able to understand the meanings of an America that once seemed so nourishing and so certain, Levov shares in the education: “He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense.”134
Woolf’s preoccupation with the sensation of time in Mrs Dalloway, the full force of the longue durée and the startling violence of the sudden snap, also flows powerfully into the
131 American Pastoral, 328. 132 For evidence of Roth’s admiration of Mrs Dalloway, see Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 211. 133 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin, 2000), 96. 134 American Pastoral, 81. 350
concerns of American Pastoral. Roth does not redeploy the conceit of chronicling the fluctuations of a particular day as the novel’s overarching template; however, the third section of the text, “Paradise Lost”, invests in the sustained duration of single scene in order to educe the teeming psychological vibrations of its central protagonist in a manner clearly predicated on
Woolf’s example. Clarissa’s extravagant dinner party and the collision of attitudes it engenders is rewritten as the Levovs’ summer meal amongst family and friends—a gathering that includes the full range of representatives of the staid, the privileged, the deviant, and the helpless. Woolf’s discreet invocation of concrete political power in the form of the enigmatic presence of the Prime
Minister at the Dalloways’ home, looming at the edge of proceedings, is reworked in the form of
President Nixon’s pernicious presence on the television. With a near preternatural apprehension of the significance of the moment, the Levovs arrange their own dinner party during the height of the Watergate hearings, a topic that twins with Deep Throat as the principal subject for conversation. The spectre of an America splitting apart thus convenes around the genteel setting of their decadent old table.
The concluding feast, a scene that stretches on for the final hundred pages of the novel, dramatises both the fragile social forces holding the nation together and the countervailing pressures tearing it apart. Roth’s Woolfian concentration on the ticking over of the Levov’s summer dinner party deploys a specific moment in a particular setting as window into the overarching historical rupture. Time, in the searing ending of American Pastoral, comes to signify the engulfing power of change, an inescapable realisation that dawns as a direct consequence of the Swede’s unenviable containment to the temporal torture of a single scene:
“the solid and orderly ludicrousness of a dinner party. That’s what was left to hold him
351
together—a dinner party.”135 Indeed, throughout “Paradise Lost”, Roth scatters Woolfian metaphors of time itself congealing, accreting, and afflicting the Swede. The ferocity of his suffering as he sits through the meal, inflamed by his recent discovery of Merry living in wretched squalor as a practising Jain, is registered in the recurring motif of time as a physical thing from which he has no hope of escape: “the evening seemed to the Swede stalled, stopped, suspended, provoking in him a distressing sense of nothing more to follow, of nothing ever to happen again, of having entered a coffin carved out of time from which he would never be extricated.”136
In a certain sense, the Swede’s containment to his “coffin carved out of time” represents his uncomfortable imprisonment inside a Woolfian novel. And the true terror of experiencing his own inhabitation of Mrs Dalloway rewritten for the age of Vietnam devolves from the Swede’s unexpected acquisition of Woolfian powers of empathetic projection. In “Paradise Lost”, for the first time in American Pastoral, the Swede begins to see beyond the superficial surfaces of the people who surround him. The greatest source of his pain during the claustrophobic collapse of his world comes as a result of his glimmering apprehension of the inner lives of other people.
What Lee describes as Woolf’s extraordinarily sensitive grasp on the predicaments of life- writing, the Swede endures as a wrenching discovery of duplicity and deception.
Amid the disingenuous jousting of the conversation during the dinner party, Levov gleans the betrayal of his confidant Sheila Salzman, the therapist who did so much to help Merry as a child but who also sheltered her after the bombing. He also begins to uncover the ignorance of his parents, recognising their faith in decency, dedication, and the reassurance of the community for the fantasy that it is. Even more distressing, his capacity to trace the implications of
135 American Pastoral, 379. 136 Ibid, 337. 352
suggestive details, moving patiently from the subtle action to the mental motivations that it conceals, sees him uncover the affair between his wife, Dawn, and their supercilious neighbour
Bill Orcutt, an erotic attachment that he never previously could have suspected. His thoughts racing with an intensity that borders on the hallucinatory, Swede Levov—simple, affable, prosperous, and caring—is torn apart by a restless Woolfian curiosity about the hidden thoughts of the people surrounding him, other worlds of meaning ordinarily so difficult to access and so hard to understand: “Tonight the imagining would not let him be.”137
But “Paradise Lost” is not, finally, the Swede’s version of Mrs Dalloway. In fact, it is
Zuckerman who makes the decision to rewrite the novel, taking inspiration from Woolf in order to address the very same predicament that her writing so powerfully confronts. At the end of Mrs
Dalloway, Sally Sexton comes closest to distilling the underlying uncertainty that Roth powerfully evokes: “she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day? She asked. Are we not all prisoners?”138 Early in the novel, sliding between various misconceptions about the life of the Swede, Zuckerman is faced with precisely this problem: “Only…what did he do for subjectivity? What was the Swede’s subjectivity? There had to be a substratum, but its composition was unimaginable.”139 Writing his own version of the modernist novel, a text dominated by heaving tides of consciousness, provides the solution; placing the enigmatic and opaque Swede at the centre of Mrs Dalloway grants him sustained access to the disintegrating and darting mind of the man. But is Zuckerman not also jumping to conclusions? What do we really see by virtue of the ventriloquism? Aware of its own artifice, the final section of American
137 American Pastoral, 359. 138 Mrs Dalloway, 211. 139 American Pastoral, 20. 353
Pastoral actually retains the epistemological irony that Woolf’s fiction so expertly dissolves. The very act of turning mental experience transparent to view is clouded over with the pale cast of doubt.
Numerous critics emphasise the disappearance of Zuckerman in the development of the narrative. Roth deploys a framing structure to introduce the historical subject, but American
Pastoral evolves into a realist chronicle of the Swede’s tragic story.140 Even scholars who emphasise the importance of the mediation of the tale end up treating the final section of the novel as though Zuckerman only reappears as a character in the concluding sentences, the exasperated questions which suddenly complete the text.141 Such readings miss the subtle ways in which Roth deliberately highlights Zuckerman’s shaping thoughts in a number of crucial moments in “Paradise Lost.” The penetration into the Swede’s distressed consciousness in the text’s final section is a virtuoso performance. That it is a literary performance, however, is a fact that Roth does not entirely allow to evaporate. The description of Dawn’s interview with Lou
Levov before she and Seymour get married, a passage from the past that critics often emphasise in the exploration of the novel’s ambivalent treatment of ethnic difference and its erasure in the constitution of the postwar claim of the nation, is a scene that Zuckerman not only reconstructs but quite clearly authors. The language deployed draws attention to the active decision to insert the extract into the unfolding of the dinner party: “Here’s the opening of the inquisition that the
Swede never forgot…”142 This is not so much the present “shadowed and intercut with the past,” as Lee memorably describes the flickering feel of Mrs Dalloway, as it is a collage conscientiously assembled in pursuit of the same effect.
140 See Pierpont, Philip Roth: A Writer and His Books, 212-213. 141 See Samuel Cohen, After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, 73. 142 American Pastoral, 391. 354
Even more significant is the curious way in which Roth introduces one of the novel’s most famous and frequently discussed images. Levov’s identification with Johnny Appleseed, the childish enjoyment he feels when pretending to seed the new world in loving parody of his hero, represents both the dizzying heights of his naivety and the more pernicious features of his emotional investment in a mythic vision of America.143 But the extent to which this imagined episode gets to the truth about the figure it describes—the heroic high school athlete whose life was derailed by the shocking behaviour of his daughter—is a question that Roth purposefully allows to re-emerge. The description of Levov’s most ridiculous delusion arrives after
Zuckerman openly checks himself and conscientiously opts for the more startling fictional decision:
With Robinson he did not feel like his father—he felt like Orcutt….
No, no. You know whom he really felt like? Not during the hour or two a week he
happened to be on the receiving end of a Bucky Robinson pass, but whom he felt like all
the rest of the time? He couldn’t tell anybody, of course: He was twenty-six and a new
father and people would have laughed at the childishness of it.144
This odd moment in the narration emphasises the preposterousness of pretending to be Johnny
Appleseed, sharpening the bite of the satire during the very same section in the novel in which
Zuckerman also generates the most touching moments of sympathy for the Swede and all that he has had to endure. In addition to the moments of cutting caricature, portraits of a thin and flimsy past that “Paradise Lost” depicts flaking to ruin, the ending of American Pastoral also includes scenes of exquisite tenderness, such as the sensitive and surprising description of the Levovs’
143 Shostak’s reading of this association of Levov with Appleseed, one of many interpretations to grant it prominence, dexterously unpacks the implications. See Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, 102-103. 144 American Pastoral, 315. 355
martial sex life and the delicate moment during the dinner party in which the embattled Swede reaches out to clutch his wife’s hand. But the revelation of Zuckerman’s editorial decision- making immediately before he describes the fantastical notion that his protagonist often felt like
Johnny Appleseed, on one occasion even imagining himself sowing the earth in front of his house, seems designed to remind us that we are in the grips of invention. Zuckerman’s imagination is the real driving force of both the credible descriptions and the incredible speculations that ripple through the ending of American Pastoral. A Woolfian prohibition on understanding others perseveres at precisely the moment in which it purports to disappear.
The epistemological ambiguity is a fitting one. The search for meaning and its maddening absence is operative at all levels of the text. History, in American Pastoral, refers less to the coherent causation of events than the feeling of incoherence that arrives during social and cultural upheaval. Similarly, if “Paradise Lost” leaves us uncertain about what we can discern from the narrative we have just finished reading, the sensation places us in solidarity with the characters at the centre of the text. Roth’s careful design of the novel insists that the autonomy of others remains absolute. That which Zuckerman cannot quite grasp about the Swede, the Swede cannot grasp about Merry. Questions about the thoughts of others go resolutely unanswered; the pressing force of mental experience, the abiding concern of Roth’s major fiction of the 1990s, necessarily eludes.
What does it mean, finally, that Zuckerman resorts to rewriting Mrs Dalloway to stake his strongest claim on the inner life of the Swede? Certainly not that fiction fails as a report on experience or that his narrative represents a total fabrication. Roth’s real achievement in
American Pastoral is to make sure that our awareness of Zuckerman’s empathetic performance in life-writing in no way works to cancel the fictional claim or render it futile. Perhaps, Roth
356
appears to suggest, this is as close as we can hope to come. Leaning on Woolf to burrow again into the enigma of “a mind that is mind”, American Pastoral seems determined both to emphasise the illusory magic of the imaginative act and the deception upon which it rests.
Ultimately, there is great irresponsibility in narrating the lives of others. As Zuckerman’s fanciful description of the Swede pretending to be Johnny Appleseed subtly suggests, there can also be tremendous recklessness. The mistakes we make are not mitigated by the clarity we achieve, and the exercise is always compromised. But imagining the possibility, thinking your way into another, is no frivolous exercise in make-believe nor a coercive act of sabotage. A novel can take hold at the same time that it takes flight. Frustrated by the inaccessibility of Peter
Walsh’s thoughts, the mind in the room that she most desperately wants to understand and which presses upon her with all that is kept secret, Clarissa Dalloway perhaps puts it best: “Why not risk one’s one little point of view?”145
145 Mrs Dalloway, 184. 357
Coda Out of Time
In a 2011 interview with Mark Lawson on the BBC, arranged to discuss his receipt of the Man
Booker International Prize and to engage in a conversation about the full arc of his career, Philip
Roth dryly remarked that he preferred the phrase “recent work” to “late work” to describe his newest books.1 For obvious reasons, the former carries the more generous connotations. It also implies a more optimistic prognosis. Roth knew only too well, however, that his most recent writing had indeed entered a late phase. Not only had he adjusted the layout of the oeuvre on the inside page of each publication, rearranging the collected titles to introduce an entirely new cluster of concluding texts, “Nemeses: Short Novels,” but Roth had also published his final book. Only months later he announced that he had given up writing fiction with an inconspicuous comment in the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, conceding that over the previous three years he hadn’t produced a single page. After clarifying the situation with the
Anglophone press, the withdrawal was complete. The irrepressible author most famous for scandalising bourgeois America ended his career with the most decorous of exits, shocking the literary world once again with the odd decision to announce a dignified retirement. Orchestrated with incongruous serenity and a strangely formal sense of occasion, Roth was done. The struggle with modern fiction was officially over; the Nemeses Tetralogy represented the artistic end.
To speak of a late phase or the intimidating pyrotechnics of a late style is, perhaps inevitably, to invoke something of a critical cliché. Theodor Adorno’s famous meditation on the awkward audacity of Beethoven’s late string quartets remains the paradigmatic example,
1 “Front Row”, BBC Radio 4, Monday 27th June 2011. < https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0122v5g> 358
emphasising the unwillingness of the artist to yield to harmony and resolution in the completion of the terminal work. Lateness, for Adorno, represents a qualified assertion of subjective power, a vision of intransigent creativity registered in the refusal to abdicate aesthetic authority when confronted with one’s waning significance. Formal dissolution and commanding negativity leave the landscape of late style, addressed to this unconquerable predicament, cleft and cracked with difficulty.2
As Edward Said influentially claimed years later, priming an eager rush of articles and monographs ready to export the argument to the alienated moods of numerous aging artists,
Adorno’s commentary on lateness was both deeply inward and yet also outwardly encompassing.
The lonely embrace of one’s exile from the comfort of the known world was the signature of his understanding of late style, but it spoke to something wider, palpable across his life and work.
Indeed, it crystallised his very condition: the brilliant Weimar intellectual ruthlessly wrenched from a home he could neither return to nor ever hope to escape from. Everything that was contradictory, belated, penetrating, and jarring about Adorno’s thought—the abrasive understanding of relations between form and ideology; the embarrassing inability to contemplate jazz music and awaken to a new dawn of popular entertainment; the insistence on holding the redemptive possibilities of high cultural achievement in dialogue with the pernicious effects of a culture subordinated to commercial imperatives; and the knotted, unyielding effects of his own crabbed sentences—stemmed from the pain and possibility of a perpetual state of dislocation. In his discussion of late style, Adorno theorised the predicament as the terminal, temporal challenge, producing an abstract critical language that scholars such as Said could cast over the
2 Adorno writes, “the power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves, it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.” “Late Style in Beethoven”, Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 566. 359
irascible ruptures of an artist’s thorny final works, rereading the nature of the entire achievement as the inherent exile sustaining the imaginative mind. What are we when we are out of time?
Uniquely positioned to express just how thoroughly we have always been constitutively out of place. Late style is, in essence, the experience of modernity distilled.
Several critics have contextualised the fiction Roth produced after the plush amplitude of the American Trilogy in relation to the ruminations of Adorno and the reverberant reflections of
Said. In the first decade of the new century, writing with remarkable efficiency through his seventies, Roth completed a further seven texts; between 2006 and 2010 he published a new book every year, each a slender novel or lean novella characterised by spare prose and an elegiac tone. Ira Nadel connects the emergence of a discernable late style during this period with the perseverance of desire, tracing how Roth’s lifelong preoccupation with “The Chaos of Eros” enters a distinct and torturous phase of thwarted will, flooding the forms these final texts take with waves of unresolved libidinal tension.3 Placing Roth in the context of a group of older novelists formed by the presumptions of the postwar period, Peter Boxall reads these works as something more like the awkward persistence of modern lateness itself, the overhang of a cluster of aesthetic categories whose currency is no longer responsive to the condition of life in the rapidly transforming world. Late Roth, preoccupied with the experience of exhaustion and the dwindling failure of both body and mind, charts a “dawning recognition that [the artist] cannot extend his twentieth-century literary and political sensibility into the new millennium.”4 The novelist finds it impossible confidently to give voice to the moment in which he finds himself adrift.
3 See Ira Nadel, “The Fate of Sex: Late Style and “The Chaos of Eros””, Philip Roth Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 “Philip Roth between Past and Future” (Spring 2013), 75-88. 4 Peter Boxall, Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 32. 360
In an essay explicitly focused on viewing the end of Roth’s career through the lens provided by Said’s now canonical readings of untimeliness, Matthew Shipe identifies Exit Ghost
(2007) as the author’s self-conscious dalliance with the various dimensions of late style.5 The final Zuckerman novel, a text riven with contradiction and formal ruptures on account of the narrator’s ailing memory and dwindling powers of imaginative projection, documents the consequences of the aged artist’s impetuous decision to provoke a young rival as he returns to the antagonisms of the social scene. Intransigent in the face of inevitable failure, tortured by an erotic longing that now seems only to erase his aesthetic command, Zuckerman’s terminal performance sees him author his own entanglement in the very fissures that Said outlines: “I’d like to explore the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against. . . .”6
Late style not only usefully glosses the predicament that befalls Roth’s rapidly disintegrating narrator; the obdurate collision contained in the fitful paroxysm of “unproductive productiveness” identifies and describes his imaginative reaction to the problem with real precision. “He and She”, the playlet that Zuckerman composes out of the unresolved contradictions he rashly invites in his encounter with the alluring and unavailable Jamie Logan, locates his literary response to the enclosing world in the reaffirmation of unyielding aesthetic pressure. And Roth freights the defiant effort with unmistakable allusions to the examples of belated untimeliness which Said eloquently explores. Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, central to the elliptic and touchingly incomplete argument of On Late Style (2006), is the very music
Zuckerman imagines playing over the two voices, exposed and isolated, at the heart of his final
5 See Matthew Shipe, “Exit Ghost and the Politics of “Late Style””, Philip Roth Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 189-204. 6 Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 7. 361
literary work—the fragments of an imagined play, hurriedly sketched out on the ephemeral sheets of his hotel stationary, which mark the extinction of the artist but pointedly do not resolve the tensions he brings forth.
But Roth’s true late works—collected together in the suggestively neat and enclosed grouping, arranged ex post facto, of “Nemeses: Short Novels”—comprise a very different proposition and necessitate a distinct approach. Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The
Humbling (2009), and Nemesis (2010) share certain features with the self-conscious excursion of
Exit Ghost. The exhaustion, decay, and diminishing capacities of the desiring male body pervades them all. Here we are not so much death-haunted, as in the rampaging annals of corpse- licensed anarchy in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), as we are haunting death—returning again and again, with a persistence bereft of exasperation, to the impending grave. Prompted by this preoccupation with physical diminution and blank extinction, a comparably elegiac mood descends on each narrative. However, the four texts comprising the Nemeses Tetralogy channel their mournful energy—more precisely, their mournful extraction of energy—in a very different way to Exit Ghost. In his final works Roth seems deliberately engaged in a process of removal, emptying prose, form, and predicament of the propulsive drive that once animated his writing.
In a curious moment in Exit Ghost, the time-ravaged Amy Bellette, object of such imaginative daring in The Ghost Writer (1979) at the very outset of Zuckerman’s saga of a life caught in the liminal space between the unwritten world and the written word, describes her prior experiences with the deceased E.I Lonoff—mentor, muse, and antagonist. “In adversity it was strangely rapturous,” she reflects.7 The observation extends a deliberate awareness of Roth’s antagonistic art, providing a kind of reflexive kindling for the fragmenting prose of the novel,
7 Exit Ghost (New York: Vintage, 2008), 152. 362
determined once again to achieve a state of glowing agitation, unyielding in the apprehension of the coming collapse. Zuckerman’s attitude is mournful, to be sure; however, the burning rashness of his youth—what at one point he refers to as “the tyranny of my intensity”—returns to ignite both the narrator and his prose.8 Conrad’s The Shadow-Line (1917) provides an intertextual vehicle for the effort.9 For all his alienation, returning to the bewildering streets of New York
City for the first time in years, Roth’s novelist, powered again by literary friction, can still produce a fractured prose of rapturous force.
Stylistically, the Nemeses quartet attempts something very different. The sentences are significantly sparer here, the appearance of control more insistent, epitomised in the repeated use of stark noun phrases, such as the concluding beat of Everyman: “Cardiac arrest.”10 Fluid ambiguity is coldly curtailed as a matter of compositional routine. And when Roth’s language does begin to move to a more sweeping rhythm in these short, final novels, the pacing conveys a certain tranquility. The strange rapture and exultation occasioned by adversity is replaced by a kind of lyrical reverie, gracefully composed clauses unfolding in the remembrance of lost ecstasies or acting as artful witness to memorable displays. We never arrive at luminous points of conflict.11 The reminiscence of boyhood days spent swimming in the North Atlantic in
Everyman, the weirdly attenuated description of the riotous raid on the women’s dormitory in
Indignation, eerily distanced from the carnage by way of the smooth, painterly control of the language, and the poetic description of Bucky Cantor’s masterly throws of the javelin on the
8 Exit Ghost, 59. 9 “Rash moments”, a quotation lifted from Conrad’s exploration of impulsive volition in The Shadow-Line, haunts Zuckerman throughout the narrative. 10 Everyman (New York: Vintage, 2007), 182. 11 In a curious inversion of prior expectations, the closest we come to such glowing friction in Everyman arrives when the protagonist’s second wife discovers his infidelity. But her evisceration of the cheapness of his actions, pained and yet also painfully accurate, is never met with a robust, vocal response. Instead, the narration simply concedes: “these episodes are indeed well known and require no further elaboration.” Everyman, 123. 363
final page of Nemesis—these are examples of a subdued compositional control. Lyricism has almost entirely displaced the startling drive and lacerating sting of old.
The change is most obvious in the way the Nemeses Tetralogy works to extract the prose energy out of some of the most familiar Rothian templates. The pivotal scene of Indignation, for example, depicts an argument between the bristling college freshman, Marcus Messner, and the patrician Dean Caudwell, a disagreement that sets in motion the young man’s foreshadowed downfall. But, for all that Marcus finds the encroachment upon his independence intolerable, leading to an intemperate outburst and a sudden bout of vomiting, Roth seems purposefully to leaden the exchange. Where previous, comparable scenes revolving around the struggle for autonomy emphasised the ambivalences and hesitations of agency, Marcus’s conflict with the
Dean and the institutions he embodies is imbued with the sense of a future seemingly foreclosed.
The extraction of the possibilities of contingency is reflected in the management of the language.
Angry and enraged, Marcus’s resistance nevertheless takes a peculiar rhetorical form, deploying the stage-managed cadences of the high school debate champion as opposed to the vocal drive of the inassimilable rant. Indeed, his most strident rejections of the Dean’s calls to order, epitomised in their dispute about religion, consist of long quotations from Bertrand Russell, learned by rote and recited almost automatically in the metronomic advance of his argument. The fury of old is transformed into a peculiarly mobile kind of verbal artifact; the embodied language so characteristic of Roth’s previous work is no longer the true, fixed locus of the story. In the case of Indignation, this detached positioning takes the specific form of a state of morphine- induced reverie—Marcus’ delirious recollection, eerily on the brink of the posthumous as he is wounded and dying in the Korean trenches—from where the narrative is projected. But each of
364
the short Nemeses novels, echoing an ancient, classical sense of fated paths, diffuses the tension from the prose and installs in its place a choric feeling of spectatorial disenchantment.
Late Roth, then, exhibits a surprisingly acquiescent attitude to the arrival at expressive limits. Partly, this reflects the stark preoccupation with death and works to convey a sense of stoic acceptance about the inevitable ending. After all, finality is mortality distilled. However, the Nemeses Tetralogy also reflects a clear determination to emphasise narrative closure.
Structurally, each of the novels is a tale defined by completion. Everyman, the first text in the quartet and the most definitive example of the general approach, leaving the protagonist purposefully nameless and pacing his story to the steady, mounting rhythm of a medical history that will only terminate, establishes the format. The tale begins and ends with the unadorned certainty of the protagonist’s funeral.
Even Bucky Cantor, the hero of Nemesis and the figure most clearly afflicted by the capricious effects of chance in the form of his contraction of polio, the cunning twist upon which the plot turns, is a figure subsumed and defined by this curve towards formal closure. When we arrive late in the novel at the revelation that our reception of Bucky’s story is refracted through the sceptical and ironic perspective of the narrator Arnie Mesnikoff, a move that deliberately recalls the elaborate mediations of Nathan Zuckerman in the American Trilogy and his fractured efforts at literary amplification in Exit Ghost, the dilation into ambiguous hermeneutic tension is powerfully curtailed by Bucky’s dogged desire to play the doomed and reticent part. Curiously, the cold way in which the former playground supervisor casts off his romantic attachment to his fiancé after suffering his paralysis, justifying the severing of the relationship in the selfless preservation of her freedom—an independence that is saved and yet therefore also extraneous to the text we are reading—seems to encapsulate something crucial about the quartet of short
365
novels which draws Roth’s oeuvre to a close. The Nemeses Tetralogy actively abrogates the prior terms of the struggle. Submission to the terms of the allotted story, following dutiful
Bucky’s example, defines the approach throughout.
This impulse extends to the ways in which Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and
Nemesis reinterpret many of the intertextual tensions scattered throughout Roth’s earlier work. In
The Humbling, the Chekhov of irreducible social ambiguity is repackaged as an aesthetic formula for literary suicide. Everyman contains a number of references to Kafka; however, unlike in the texts of old, in which the Prague presence provokes the collapse of presumed truths and casual certainties, these allusions are rethreaded into the patterned texture of the inevitable.
Reworking Kafka’s famous description of literature as the axe to split the frozen seas within us,
Roth’s bland everyman endures the violent sting of aesthetic possibility as the revelatory intimation of his doomed fate: “The young man who started out hoping never to live two lives was about to cleave himself open with a hatchet.”12 The writer of exquisite uncertainty is here redeployed as an unlikely agent of formal closure.
Nemesis contains similar moments. It is notable, for instance, that Bucky’s time at the
Indian Hill summer camp, the place to which he suddenly retreats on the advice of his fiancé, seemingly escaping the polio outbreak menacing his Weequahic neighbourhood, includes an unusual and remarkable incident. “A huge swarm of butterflies,” arriving serenely and delighting the staff and the children alike, serves to suggest just how delicate and illusory his blissful escape from circumstance is. The Nabokovian imagery, seducing the campers and counselors with the
“weightless fragility of those innumerable, colorful fluttering wings”, implicitly aligns the
12 Everyman, 111. 366
illusions of pleasurable fiction against the intractability of experience.13 But, unlike in Letting Go
(1962), where the contestation and rejection of Nabokovian aestheticism works to ignite the text’s epistemological intensity, in Nemesis the opposition is stark and fixed, the evocation of the lepidopterist’s loving gaze simply a delusory distraction from the enclosing world. “Everybody was happy, because everybody knew that butterflies didn’t bite or spread disease but disseminated the pollen that made seed plants grow.”14 What fools.
The most significant, and unnerving, of the novel’s rearrangements, however, operates at a larger level. The central intertext of Nemesis, as numerous reviewers and critics have been quick to notice, is Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947).15 The connection is forged not only in the evident overlap of subject matter, with Roth’s treatment of an imagined polio epidemic standing in the place of Camus’s abstract and unnamed pestilence, but also in the historical context that stands squarely behind both imaginative explorations. Where The Plague establishes a loose and labile allegory of the Nazi occupation of Vichy France, Roth creates a poignant counterpoint between events in the afflicted American neighbourhood, eventually placed under quarantine, and the trickle of news from the distant shores of Europe. Bucky’s emotional investment in the conflict, nervous for the friends enlisted in the fighting and shamed by the fact that he was unable to join them, ensures steady updates from the Western front weave through the development of events—a strategy that invites questions about the wider meanings of the story unfolding at home. Nemesis may be located in America, but the text is implicitly concerned with the relationship between the behaviour of the local population and the horrifying experiences endured abroad. The obscure mediation of the tale, revealed later to be filtered through the
13 Nemesis (New York: Vintage, 2011), 181. 14 Ibid, 181. 15 In his review, Nicholas Lezard writes that the comparison with La Peste is no lazy association. See “Nemesis by Philip Roth – Review”, The Guardian, Tuesday 27th September 2011.
perspective of Arnie Mesnikoff, one of Bucky’s charges on the Weequahic playground during those fateful summer months, recalls Camus’s decision to withhold the identity of his own chronicler of the years Oran suffered under the plague, allowing judgement and complicity to shift and blur until the tale is fully told. It is only at the end, as it were, that we really understand where we have been located all along.
Bucky’s entanglement in the ethical quandaries advanced by the The Plague is also dramatised in a scene early in Nemesis, in a passage describing a traumatic memory from childhood. When he kills a rat as a young helper in his grandfather’s store, an obligation that he carries out with swift decisiveness in the face of the gruesome, gory consequences that ensue,
Bucky is symbolically implicated in the unforgettable situation that opens Camus’s existential narrative, where the odd spectacle of dying rodents, perishing throughout the city, comes to signal an impending moral malaise. The vivid spectacle of the killed rat, lodged early in the story, implicitly contaminates Roth’s text with the imagery of Camus’s novel. In Nemesis, obedient and honourable Bucky is not only facing up to the horror and hysteria induced by a terrifying epidemic, he is also being measured against the human instincts and archetypes sketched in The Plague.
Gradually, Bucky breaks into his own kind of semi-awareness of the stakes: “He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance.”16 But Camus’s insistence on illuminating pockets of choice in the otherwise dark and closed passage of sweeping conditions is pointedly rewritten. At the level of its overarching structure, Roth’s final text reaffirms a Kunderian suspicion of moral allegory. As a consequence,
Nemesis collapses the inbuilt freedom of the form, with the narrative suspended at a convenient
16 Nemesis, 154. 368
distance from its underlying content. Roth instead privileges the particularity of the events described, and as such the medical realism of the virus presses with more singular force on the figures effected. More specifically, though, Bucky’s adherence to a rigorous sense of duty, his feelings of obligation in the face of civic collapse, epitomised in his determination to shake the hand of Horace, a disabled and unclean wanderer in whose dishevelled person and fetid hygiene the fears of the local population become most potently invested, reverses the pattern established in The Plague. “Common decency,” Dr. Rieux’s modest defence of ethical choice when swallowed in a structure beyond one’s control, does not simply fail the dutiful playground supervisor in his noble struggle against the spreading virus.17 Far more unsettlingly, Roth actually ties Bucky’s profound sense of decency and his faith in fortitude to his impending doom via that statistically rarest of things, an asymptomatic carrier of the virus, from whom continued contact with others presents a very real and devastating danger. This connection, which brutally disables the way in which Camus’s allegory functions, is almost totally beyond Bucky’s limited comprehension: “For someone who had previously found in diligence and hard work the solution to all his problems, there was now much that was inexplicable to him about why what happens, happens as it does.”18 In late Roth, moral courage does nothing to combat the forces that subsume the powerless individual.
Most startling, the protagonist of Nemesis discovers that the paradoxical closure of absolute and inviolable caprice extends even to his own personality. Brave and generous Bucky, defiantly battling the spread of polio and the steady implosion of the community, inexplicably breaks and flees his Weequahic neighbourhood. In doing so, he leaves the children he was
17 Tempering the romantic inclinations of the sulky Rambert, Rieux phrases the problem thus: “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is—common decency.” The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1960), 136. 18 Nemesis, 154. 369
entrusted to protect, joining his fiancé in the supposed safety and seclusion of the countryside.
The decision is rendered opaque and automatic, fired neither by overwhelming fear for his own safety nor intemperate fury in the face of an unsurmountable obstacle. “How could he have done what he’d just done?”19 The contradiction that cleaves Bucky’s life apart comes seemingly from nowhere, the protagonist broken not from within but from without. Nemesis seems to suggest that the explanatory purchase of characterological motivation, the narrative currency that developed fiction deploys in the assessment and exploration of questions of personal responsibility, is simply inadequate to the outlined task. The power of external forces totally subsumes the seemingly honourable hero.
And it is on the question of ethical responsibility in the face of circumscribed options, a domain that readily intersects with the structural presentation of character, that Roth’s intertextual engagement with Camus’s allegorical imperative, and the wider extraction of energy characteristic of the Nemeses Tetralogy, appears most consequential. To put it another way, the patterned allusions of Roth’s last novel purposefully evoke the monumental question of individual accountability in the face of wicked and malevolent human possibility only to circumvent the issue. As Tony Judt writes of The Plague, echoing Hannah Arendt, in composing the story of a great pestilence and the actions of the individuals swept up and imprisoned by its terrifying advance, Camus uses the inbuilt contingencies of fiction to address the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life—“the problem of evil.”20 Nemesis, by contrast, arrogates the burden of responsibility to the random progress of the polio virus itself and the propulsive force of what worldly Arnie finally refers to as “a malicious absurdity of nature.”21 Evil, in effect,
19 Nemesis, 135. 20 Tony Judt, “On The Plague”, When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 (New York: Penguin 2015), 181. 21 Nemesis, 273. 370
disappears from the portrait. In fact, exasperated by the older Bucky’s crippling decision to blame himself for unwittingly assisting in the spread of the illness, Arnie comes quite cruelly to mock the sorrowful, humbled figure for his deluded and tenacious attachment to the significance of his own role in the unfolding of events. We are told that the disabled former playground supervisor was a humourless man, lacking the wit to tell a joke or the sense of satire necessary to achieve any distance from things as they are. Irony can liberate us, tenuously, from the problem of a condition beyond our control, as it does for the imagined chronicler of Roth’s imagined epidemic, himself a victim of the malicious disease but more readily disposed to leave its traumas behind and build a life at some remove from the allotted abyss. But can irony truly help us address the more pernicious problem of evil?
Roth’s final book can easily be read as an elegiac and elegantly plotted story, the scope of its ambition contained in the cunning, artful explication of a touching narrative. With Nemesis, the author delivers a convincing depiction of a community under siege and provides a moving portrait of a man assailed by the devastating period in history that he lived through. However, the details of the text, at times so defamiliarizing, invite us to speculate on precisely what is at stake in the acquiescence to closure advanced in the conclusion of the narrative; to inquire further, in other words, into the wider implications of Roth’s late fiction. How should we understand the decision to cap the completed oeuvre with these heavily disillusioned literary landscapes?
In Mark McGurl’s recent appraisal, these final works represent a distinct and discernable
“modest phase”, reacting against the burning ambition and strident individualisms not only characteristic of Roth’s earlier work but also constitutive of the shape of postwar American fiction. In this understanding, the Nemeses Quartet resembles something like the futile but 371
moving aesthetic therapy occasioned by the steady displacement of the story of the embattled individual and his frustrated desires.22 Such a recognition of the diminished significance of the powers of personalisation is clearly crucial to these final works. But one wonders if the stakes aren’t somewhat greater than McGurl’s caricature of earlier aspirations towards fictional amplitude and existential complexity tends to imply.23
J.M. Coetzee, in an especially thoughtful interpretation of Nemesis, evidently provoked by the challenging moral positioning which the text adopts, emphasises the significance of the collision between Arnie’s and Bucky’s perspectives, a thinly drawn but crucial aspect of the text.
Though this divergence in outlook only moves into focus once the tale of the polio outbreak is fully told, the point at which their attitudes separate is the key to making sense of the novel.
Taking his cue from an Aristotelian conception of tragedy and the Ancient, abandoned worldview inscribed in the title, “Nemesis”—the very word Roth selects to group his late works into a subdued, valedictory quartet—Coetzee recovers a reading of Bucky’s fate suppressed by, though not entirely ejected from, the narrative itself. If we take Bucky’s experience to be truly tragic, according to this elevated conception of human actions and their consequences, as they echo on the earth and in the heavens alike, and not to be merely contingent, it is possible to hold fast to the world of good and evil that the text otherwise seems purposefully to flatten:
22 McGurl writes, “Here, as distinct from the notionally open-ended ongoingness of the big novel, the genre above all others at war with the need to conclude, the shortness of the short novel enables the sensation of completed form; and enables, too, the therapeutic repetition of that form.” “Philip Roth’s Modest Phase,” in “Roth’s Yarzeit,” 04/12/2019 post45.org.
372
Back in the 1940s, Bucky looked at what polio was doing to Newark (and what war was
doing to the world), concluded that whatever force was running the show could only be
malign, and vowed to resist that force, if only by refusing to bend his knee to it. It is this
resistance on Bucky’s part that Arnie singles out as ‘stupid hubris’.24
What Arnie is unable or unwilling to recognise the importance of, and what the novel conscientiously dampens and mutes, without entirely silencing, is the power of Bucky’s anguished why?—the exasperated question in which the burden of our incomprehension and the pressing force of our mortal fate is inextricably fused. It is still possible to take the experience of this contradiction seriously, as Bucky willfully and vainly and crudely tries to do, as opposed to diffusing the tension and attributing it all to the chaotic determinism of inevitable bad luck.
Nemesis as a whole performs something like the latter, dismissing the hero’s inability to escape the imprisoning terms of his awesome and unanswered question; but the former understanding of
Roth’s novel, one man’s struggle against the sweeping devastation of a menacing predicament, nevertheless haunts the text like an unseen hologram.
Coetzee’s ingenious and sophisticated reading takes its liberties. How viable is it, ultimately, to insist upon the value of tragic experience in the face of the kind of atrocities that
Nemesis purposefully evokes at the margins of the action? Does the systematic degradation of the noble conception of humankind during the very period in which the story is so conspicuously set, the momentous summer of 1944, not leave the very notion of tragic catharsis smouldering in the horrors of the twentieth century? While one might hesitate before accepting such a reading of
Bucky’s story in its entirety, recuperating the meaning of his life from the meaningless devastation the text brings to bear on the protagonist, there is no doubt that Coetzee’s critique
24 J.M. Coetzee, “Philip Roth’s Tale of the Plague”, Late Essays 2006-2017 (London: Harvill Secker, 2017), 45. 373
clarifies the essential problem posed by the Nemeses Tetralogy to the seasoned reader of Roth’s wider work: why does the author extract the enigmatic friction of human agency in his late fiction, foreclosing the possibilities exhibited by these stories from the beginning? How should we understand these anti-parables, skeletal tales hollowed of the promise of instruction invited by their chosen forms and bereft of both the moral pressure and playful energy characteristic of their antecedents in the Roth canon? Waning powers of imagination, the author no longer fully stretched by his approach to the material, seems an unsatisfactory conclusion in the light of the structural coherence and self-conscious manoeuvres of the Tetralogy as a whole.
We might speculate about this question in a range of different ways (and speculation is no doubt the operative term). Roth’s response to his contemporary, discussing Coetzee’s invested interpretation of his final book with Claudia Roth Pierpont late in the pages of her biographical study, suggests at least one way of contextualising these final, slender works about four destroyed men—blandly representative types, who are each in turn swallowed by circumstances beyond their control, brought to a point of resounding silence as a result. Describing a conversation about Nemesis with the author, Pierpont quotes Roth claiming that, “Coetzee takes a “grander stand” than he himself is able to do,” adding the crucial qualification: “it’s a stand I would have taken as a younger man.”25 We can take this comment simply as further evidence of
Roth’s determination to reflect the despondency and the diminution of old age; world-weary and disillusioned, the novelist can no longer entertain heroic possibilities contained in one’s personal intensity. But perhaps the recognition reflects something else. As a younger man, it was the struggle with fiction itself, staged and sustained throughout the work in the numerous ways this dissertation has traced and explored, which animated previous incarnations of Bucky’s anguished
25 Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and Hist Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 318. 374
why? Whether antic and amusing, jocoserious and sceptical, historically situated and politically orientated, or grave, sublime, and ferocious, the experience of the contradiction between an enclosed fate and a meaningful sense of experience was registered above all in the contact and ongoing negotiation with books. “Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it,” claims Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man (1974). The sentiment reigns over the arc of Roth’s career. In the Nemesis Tetralogy, such vaunted stakes for the struggle with fiction largely drop away.
And we see them fade as a result of the ways in which Roth’s final novels openly reinterpret the earlier works themselves. Indignation essentially repackages a notable passage from Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), in which Alex aligns his continual sense of frustration with an old song he learned at school during the war, “The Chinese National Anthem”—the very same music that returns to haunt Marcus Messner as he feuds with the Dean and feels the institutions around him closing their grip.26 Where the psychoanalytic patient is rather pointedly left to persevere with his irresolvable predicaments, the narrative actively eschewing closure, the allusion to the earlier novel in Indignation cues the series of events that lead to Marcus leaving the college and being drafted into the conflict that kills him. That which suspends and sustains
Portnoy’s Complaint—the antagonism of agency—actually prompts the sweeping denouement of
Indignation to terminate the story.
Similarly, Nemesis rewrites the relationship between Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin at the centre of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), redeploying the earlier protagonist’s precocious,
26 “Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called “The Chinese National Anthem.” “Arise, ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!—“We will build a new great wall!” And then my favourite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-na-tion fills the hearts of all of our count-try- men!” Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Vintage, 1994), 169. 375
erotic entanglement in the prosperous world of the socially mobile suburbs in the form of
Bucky’s engagement to the rich and sheltered Marcia. Roth’s return to the imagery of luscious, ripe fruit in the depiction of his hero’s movement into this new world, with its suggestive hints of sexual satisfaction, compounds the intertextual connection. But Neil’s irony and his artistic intelligence, not to mention his air of smugness, are pointedly removed from the later portrait, replaced with something altogether more earnest. Most significant, the end of the affair in
Goodbye, Columbus prompts Neil to wander through Harvard Yard, projecting the terms of his ongoing struggle to understand his experience into the overlap between his reflection, returned by the glass of the Library, and the “broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved” which stretches out in front of him.27 By contrast, Nemesis folds the termination of the erotic relationship between its characters into the melancholic closure of the narrative, the break off of contact epitomising Bucky’s submission to the concrete terms of his own isolation.
The Humbling provides the most disturbing example of this tendency. Simon Axler, the most despairing of Roth’s portraits of the depleted artist, engages in an evening of sexual play with his partner and a young woman they entice to join them one night at a bar. This short scene late in the novella is characterised by the sense of theatrical amplification and the kind of demonic language which define the expansive recklessness of Sabbath’s Theater (1995). Unlike the former novel, however, where such unruly openness and fluid dissolution of personal limits enlarges the capacity to feel, to endure, and ultimately to love, the lascivious spectacle instead cues the final movement of Axler’s sharp, irredeemable humiliation. The limits suddenly reassert their devastating prerogative over the enlivening thrills of performative license, driving the
27 Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (New York: Vintage, 1993), 136. 376
failing artist to complete the one act which ungovernable Sabbath could not accomplish—to kill himself.
Arguably the most evocative example of the various ways in which the Nemesis
Tetralogy returns to earlier works in the oeuvre, actively repositioning established templates, falls at the end of Everyman. The passage in which the nameless protagonist meets a gravedigger after visiting the burial place of his long-deceased parents, drawing a beautiful and precise description of the way in which the earth is prepared for the awaiting coffin, is perhaps the definitive scene of Roth’s late fiction. The echo of the canonical, or possibly even supra- canonical, moment in Hamlet—a connection that earlier reviewers of the text were quick to notice—imbues the passage with a certain kind of solemnity and sense of high purpose. The more significant allusion, though, is actually much more modest, as this scene in Everyman also returns us to Roth’s first published short story, “The Day it Snowed” (1954). At the outset of his career, Roth sent a character to the cemetery to discover the truth about death, perplexed by the recent disappearance of his relatives and all that he was being shielded from. As he embarked on the Nemeses Tetralogy, his final works of fiction, he repeated the gesture. Fearful and uncertain, the old and retired advertising executive arrives at the same setting, propelled by the very same search: “I want to know” […] And he did. He did not want to go.”28
The cruel and ironic twist of “The Day it Snowed” falls at the end of the story. Just as
Sydney discerns the truth, he is felled by a hearse that swerves around the corner and crushes his fragile body. The destructive force and stinging clarity transferred in the brutal thump of the vehicle are pointedly aligned by way of Roth’s imagery with the contradictory, irreducible
28 Everyman, 173. 377
powers of literature—to enlighten, to extinguish, to synthesise, and to shock.29 But the literary education which the protagonist receives during his trip to the cemetery in Everyman reverses the pattern of associations. That the hero receives a literary education, and not simply an unsentimental and meticulous account of how a grave is prepared, is transmitted in the assured rhythm and declarative authority of the language. Though it lacks the glowing rapture of Roth’s earlier rhetorical set-pieces, the description the gravedigger provides is vivid and precise, the unfolding of the sentences an unravelling laced with meaning in and of itself. And it is the elimination of ambiguity enacted by this explanation, the simple way in which the gravedigger’s task is described and conveyed, which the protagonist most appreciates, and which seems also to assuage his agitation:
“Well, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for everything you’ve told me and for
how clear you’ve been. You couldn’t have made things more concrete. It’s a good
education for an older person. I thank you for the concreteness, and I thank you for being
so careful and considerate when you dug my parents’ graves.”30
The contradictions of the why are, rather astonishingly, diffused. Literary language as the productive source of lived tension has lost its function. In the Nemesis Tetralogy, something beyond one’s mortal place in the world is coming to an end.
One of the least flattering features of Roth’s interviews in this late phase of his career is the mordant despair about the state of reading, lamenting the slow demise of literary culture, an activity increasingly displaced by more infantilising modes of contemplation. The announcement of each new book was almost unfailingly accompanied by the sweeping comment about the
29 For a discussion of the significance of this story to the development of Roth’s early work, see Chapter 1. “The Ruthless Art of Fiction.” 30 Everyman, 180. 378
death of the novel. As he composed the Nemeses Tetralogy, Roth appears not only to have been extracting the energy from the intertextual contestations which drove the broad arc of his career; he also seems to have situated himself as a lonely witness to the dissolution of the wider struggle represented in the activity itself. In a conversation with David Remnick, published on the cusp of the twenty-first century, Roth provided an expansive account of his feelings about the fate of fiction, elaborating the reasons for his anxiety. The passage is worth quoting at length:
The evidence “is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end,” he said. “The
evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen, the
progression from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer. There’s only
so much time, so much room, and there are only so many habits of mind that can
determine how people use the free time they have. Literature takes a habit of mind that
has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration
in the presence of an enigmatic thing. It is difficult to come to grips with a mature,
intelligent, adult novel. It is difficult to know what to make of literature. […]
To explore consciousness was the great mission of the first half of the century […] The
whole effort was to expand our sense of what consciousness is and what lies behind it.
It’s no longer of interest. I think that what we’re seeing is the narrowing of
consciousness.31
There is much to quarrel with here. Do shifts in behaviour truly reflect such disenchantment with the demands of fiction, whether measured statistically or considered anecdotally? Is there not something sourly self-absorbed in containing the steady disintegration of the enterprise itself in
31 David Remnick, “Into the Clear”, The New Yorker, May 15, 2000.
the experience of one’s waning significance? Most perniciously, does Roth’s despair not merely index a declining monopoly of power over the purview of literature—the shift from one set of assumptions to a more plural constellation of intersecting claims? The culture is now, indisputably, many cultures.
But to understand the Nemeses Tetralogy properly, to take the measure of Roth’s final works of fiction, I think, is to take such fears seriously. These slender novels, stoic and plain in their treatment of death and extinction, also look to confront and to accept the diminishing power of the literary text. Coetzee is able to mount a defiant stance in the face of this engulfing circumstance in his interpretation of Nemesis only by resurrecting a tragic worldview and pattern of thought long since extinct. Roth’s late quartet leaves the unmistakable impression that soon enigmatic literary objects of modern fiction and the habits of mind that wrestled with them will become historical artifacts and an abandoned set of epistemes too. Mournful of the loss and yet acquiescent to the new conditions, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis chart the failure of the activity that once seemed essential and inescapable—"invincible,” even, to confer
Roth’s final word of published fiction on the animating struggle itself. What previously felt certain to endure is certain no more.
I take a fundamentally different view. There is an enormous number of reasons to feel optimistic about the ongoing vitality of literature, writing and reading alike. To list them here, however, would be to conclude this dissertation with a mortifying lapse into self-satisfied cliché.
If working on a study of Philip Roth offers anything in the way of assimilable instruction, it is the injunction to resist just such a temptation. And yet something pressing in the pessimism of
Roth’s final novels, and, specifically, the ways in which they address the contraction of our collective efforts “to expand our sense of what consciousness is”, gives me pause when I think
380
again about our contemporary moment. The fiction of irresponsibility, reaching across boundaries and violating limits, wrestling with the deception and the truth intertwined in all acts of representation, taking liberties with developed language—fiction, in short, that reaffirms something mysterious about the reach of consciousness, as opposed to trapping it in preestablished lanes or translating its reverberations into synaptic, computational sparks. Well, perhaps that is more fragile than it once seemed.
381
Bibliography
Aarons, Victoria. What Happened to Abraham?: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.
Adorno, Theodor. “Late Style in Beethoven”. Essays on Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Amis, Martin. The Rub of Time. London: Jonathan Cape, 2017.
Ash, Timothy Garton. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. New York: Random House, 1990.
Atlas, James. “A Postwar Classic.” New Republic. 2 June 1982. 28-32. Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University Press, 2004.
---. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004.
Barnhisel, Greg. Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Bellow, Saul. The Adventure of Augie March. London: Everyman, 1995.
---. Saul Bellow: Letters. Ed. Benjamin Taylor. New York: Viking, 2010.
---. Ravelstein. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Benatov, Joseph. “Demystifying the Logic of Tamizdat: Philip Roth’s Anti-Spectacular Literary Politics”. Poetics Today. Vol. 30, No. 1. Spring 2009.
Bersani, Leo. “The Jamesian Lie”. Partisan Review. Vol.36, No.1. 1969.
Birmingham, Kevin. The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
382
---. Ed. Philip Roth: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 2003.
Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Trans. Barbara Vedder. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Boxall, Peter. "Since Beckett." Textual Practice. 2006: 301-317.
---. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
---. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: University Press, 2015.
Brauner, David. “Masturbation and its Discontents; or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy’s Complaint”. Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer. Ed. Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio. University of Delaware Press, 2010.
---. Philip Roth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert Penn. Understanding Fiction. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1959.
Buell, Lawrence. The Dream of the Great American Novel. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2014.
Burrow, Colin. “The Magic Bloomschtick”. London Review of Books. Vol.41, No.22. 21th November 2019.
Camus, Albert. The Outsider. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Penguin Classics, 2012.
---. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. London: Penguin, 1960.
Chekhov, Anton. The Oxford Chekhov. Trans. and Ed. Ronald Hingley. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Coetzee, J.M. “Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry”. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
---. Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005. Ed. Derek Attridge. London. Vintage, 2008.
---. Late Essays 2006-2017. London: Harvill Secker, 2017.
383
Cohen, Samuel. After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009.
Connolly, Andy. Philip Roth and The American Liberal Tradition. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.
---. “Roth and the New York Intellectuals”. Philip Roth and World Literature. Ed. Velichka Ivanova. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Random House, 1993.
---. The Shadow Line: A Confession. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Picador, 1985. de Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric”. Diacritics. Vol.3. No.3. Autumn, 1973.
Derrida, Jacques. “Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)”. Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. Ed. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Dickstein, Morris. Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1970. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Donaldson, Scott. “Philip Roth: The Meanings of Letting Go”. Contemporary Literature. Vol.11, No.1. Winter, 1970.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1986.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
---. “Preface”. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London: Penguin, 1986.
Freedman, Jonathan. Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
---. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
384
Gladstone, Jason, Hoberek, Andrew, and Worden, Daniel, “Introduction”. Postmodern/Postwar—And After. Iowa: University Press, 2016.
Goldstone, Andrew. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Oxford: University Press, 2013.
Gooblar, David. “’Invariably the prelude to missing the point’: Philip Roth, Mickey Sabbath, and Me”. Philip Roth Studies. Vol. 15, No.1. Spring 2019: 53-58.
---. The Major Phases of Philip Roth. New York: Continuum, 2011.
---. “The Truth Hurts: The Ethics of Philip Roth’s “Autobiographical” Books”. Journal of Modern Literature. Vol.32, No.1. Fall 2008.
Goodman, Brian. “Philip Roth’s Other Europe: Counter-Realism and the Late Cold War”. American Literary History. V.27, N.4. 1 December 2015, 717-740.
Gopnik, Adam. “Philip Roth, Patriot”. The New Yorker. November 6, 2017.
Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.
Havel, Václav. “The Power of the Powerless”. Living in Truth. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.
Hayes, Patrick and Wilm, Jan. Eds. Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Hayes, Patrick. Philip Roth: Fiction and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Hedin, Benjamin. “The Measure of All Things: Patrimony”. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2005.
Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. London: Abacus, 2003.
Holý, Jiří. Writers Under Siege: Czech Literature Since 1945. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008.
Howe, Irving. “Philip Roth Reconsidered”. Commentary. December 14, 1972: 69-77.
385
Hungerford, Amy. “On the Period Formerly Known as the Contemporary”, American Literary History, Vol.20, No.1/2, Spring-Summer 2008. 410-419.
---. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature and Personification. London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
---. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Husband, Julie. “Female Hysteria and Sisterhood in Letting Go and When She Was Good”. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2005.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
Ivanova, Velichka. Ed. Philip Roth and World Literature: Transatlantic Perspectives and Uneasy Passages. New York: Cambria Press, 2014.
James, David. “‘Advancing along the inherited path’: Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and the idea of being traditionally new”. The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Ed. David James. Cambridge: University Press, 2012.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
---. “The Art of Fiction”, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. Penguin: London and New York, 1987.
---. The Golden Bowl. New York: Knopf, 1992.
---. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Roger Luckhurst. Oxford: University Press, 2009.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London and New York: Verso, 2002.
Josipovici, Gabriel. What Ever Happened to Modernism? New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2010.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Knopf, 1991.
386
---. Dubliners. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
---. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London & New York: Penguin, 1986.
Judt, Tony. “On The Plague”. When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010. New York: Penguin 2015.
---. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Vintage, 2010.
Kafka, Franz. Amerika. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: New Directions, 1962.
---. The Castle. Trans. Wille and Edwin Muir. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1957.
---. Collected Stories. Ed. Gabriel Josipovici. London: Everyman, 1993.
---. The Trial. Trans. Douglas Scott and Chris Waller. London: Pan Books, 1977.
Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Kauvar, Elaine M. “The Doubly Reflected Communication: Philip Roth’s ‘Autobiographies’”. Contemporary Literature. Vol.36, No.3. Autumn, 1995.
Kermode, Frank. “Howl”. The New York Review of Books. November 16, 1995. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Crisis in the Life of an Actress. Trans. Stephen Crites. London: Collins, 1967. ---. Either/or: A Fragment of Life. Ed. Victor Eremita. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin 2004. ---. The Essential Kierkegaard. Ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000. ---. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Sylvia Walsh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kimmage, Michael. In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012.
Klein, Scott W. “Nathan Zuckerman as Irish Jew: James Joyce, National Difference, and Roth's The Counterlife”. Philip Roth Studies, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2008, 153-169.
Klíma, Ivan. Love and Garbage. London: Vintage, 2002.
---. My Crazy Century: A Memoir. Trans. Craig Cravens. New York: Grove Press, 2010.
Kott, Jann. “Introduction”. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. By Tadeusz Borowski. Trans. Barbara Vedder. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, 1995.
387
---. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Penguin, 1981.
---. The Joke. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. Middlesex: Penguin, 1985.
---. “Kundera on the Novel”. The New York Times Book Review. January 8, 1978.
---. Laughable Loves. New York: Penguin, 1975.
---. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. Trans. Linda Asher. London: Faber & Faber, 1995.
---. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper, 2009.
Litz, A Walton; Menand, Louis; Rainey, Lawrence. Eds. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume VII Modernism and the New Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Lee, Hermione. Philip Roth. New York: Methuen, 1982.
---. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997.
Lee, Judith Yaross. “Affairs of the Breast: Philip Roth and David Kepesh”. Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer. Ed. Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio. University of Delaware Press, 2010.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: Norton, 2019.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and The Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus, 2013.
---. If This is a Man & The Truce. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus, 2000.
---. The Monkey’s Wrench. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
---. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Everyman’s Library: New York & London, 1995.
Levitt, Morton P. “Roth and Kafka: Two Jews”, Critical Essays on Philip Roth. Ed. Sanford Pinsker. Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall, 1982.
Lezard, Nicholas. “Nemesis by Philip Roth—Review”. The Guardian. Tuesday 27th September, 2011.
Maxted, Luke. “‘This is life, bozo, not high art’: Life, Literature and the Academy in Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov”. Philip Roth Studies. Vol. 14, N.2. 2018.
388
McGrath, Charles. “Goodbye, Frustration: Pen Put Aside, Roth Talks.” The New York Times, November 17, 2012.
---. “Roth/Updike”. The Hudson Review. Vol.LXXII, No.3. Autumn 2019.
McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
---. “Philip Roth’s Modest Phase”. “Roth’s Yarzeit”. 04/12/2019. post45.org.
---. “The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction”. Critical Inquiry. Vol.32, No.1. Autumn 2005.
---. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2009.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
McKinley, Maggie. Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction 1950-1975. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Milosz, Cseslaw. The Captive Mind. Trans. Jane Zielonko. London: Penguin, 2001.
---. Selected Poems. New York: The Ecco Press, 1980.
Medin, Daniel. L. Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth and W.G. Sebald. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010.
Menand, Louis. American Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
---. “The Irony and the Ecstasy: Philip Roth and the Jewish Atlantis.” The New Yorker. May 19, 1997.
Morley, Catherine. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Muresan, Laura. “Writ(h)ing Bodies: Literature and Illness in Philip Roth’s Anatomy Lesson(s)”. Philip Roth Studies. Vol.11, No.1. “Philip Roth Across Cultures, Across Disciplines”. Spring 2015.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. London & New York: Harcourt, 1980.
389
Nadel, Ira. “American Roth”. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. 15 February 2019.
---. Critical Companion to Philip Roth: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2011.
---. “The Fate of Sex: Late Style and “The Chaos of Eros””. Philip Roth Studies. Vol. 9, No. 1. “Philip Roth between Past and Future”. Spring 2013. 75-88.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. A Nietzsche Reader. Selected and trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1977.
Parrish, Timothy. “Autobiography and History in Roth’s The Plot Against America, or What Happened When Hitler Came to New Jersey”. Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America. Ed. Debra Shostak. London & New York: Continuum, 2011.
---. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
---. “Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain”. Contemporary Literature. V.45, N.3. Fall 2004.
Peeler, Nicole. “The Woman of Ressentiment in When She Was Good”. Philip Roth Studies. Vol.6, No.1. Spring 2010: 31-45.
Pells, Richard. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. New York: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.
Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Roth Unbound: A Writer and his Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Powell, Joshua. “The Aesthetics of Impersonation and Depersonalization: Samuel Beckett and Philip Roth”. Philip Roth Studies. Vol.14, N.2. 2018. 16-32.
Pozorski, Aimee. Ed. Roth and Celebrity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.
Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Remnick, David. “Into the Clear.” The New Yorker. May 8, 2000.
Roberge, Valerie. “The Place of the ‘Aesthetic’ in Zuckerman Unbound: Roth’s Conversation with Kierkegaard”, Philip Roth Studies. Vol.13, No.1. Spring 2017. 77-95. 390
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Roth, Philip. “The Box of Truths”. Et Cetera. Oct 1952.
---. “The Final Delivery of Mr. Thorn”. Et Cetera. May 1954.
---. “The Day it Snowed”. Chicago Review. Vol.8, No.4. Fall, 1954.
---. “The Kind of Person I Am”. New Yorker, November 29, 1958.
---. Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. [1959] New York: Vintage, 1993.
---. Letting Go. [1962] New York: Touchstone, 1962.
---. When She Was Good. [1967] New York: Vintage, 1995.
---. Portnoy’s Complaint. [1969] New York: Vintage, 1994.
---. The Breast. [1972] New York: Vintage, 1994.
---. My Life as a Man. [1974] New York: Vintage, 1993.
---. The Professor of Desire. [1977] New York: Vintage, 1994.
---. The Ghost Writer. [1979] New York: Vintage, 1995.
---. Zuckerman Unbound. [1981] New York: Vintage, 1995.
---. The Anatomy Lesson. [1983] London: Vintage, 2005.
---. The Counterlife. [1986] New York: Vintage, 1996.
---. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. [1988] New York: Penguin, 1988.
---. Deception: A Novel. [1990] New York: Vintage, 1997.
---. Patrimony: A True Story. [1991] New York: Vintage, 1996.
391
---. Operation Shylock: A Confession. [1993] New York: Vintage, 2000.
---. Sabbath’s Theater. [1995] New York: Vintage, 1996.
---. The Prague Orgy. [1985] New York: Vintage, 1996.
---. American Pastoral. [1997] New York: Vintage, 1997.
---. I Married a Communist. [1998] New York: Vintage, 1998.
---. The Human Stain. [2000] New York: Vintage, 2001.
---. The Dying Animal. [2001] New York: Vintage, 2002.
---. The Plot Against America. [2004] Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
---. Everyman. [2006] New York: Vintage, 2007.
---. Exit Ghost. [2007] New York: Vintage, 2008.
---. Indignation. [2008] New York: Vintage, 2009.
---. The Humbling. [2009] London: Jonathan Cape, 2009.
---. Nemesis. [2010] New York: Vintage, 2011.
---. Reading Myself and Others. [1975] New York: Vintage, 2001.
---. Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. [2001] New York: Vintage, 2002.
---. Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013. New York: Library of America, 2017.
---. “Introducing Milan Kundera”. Laughable Loves. By Milan Kundera. New York: Penguin, 1975.
---. “Introduction: In Memory of Richard Stern”. Other Men’s Daughters. By Richard Stern. New York: New York Review Books, 2017.
392
Royal, Derek Parker. “Roth, Literary Influence, and Postmodernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Ed. Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: University Press, 2007.
---. ‘Postmodern Jewish Identity in The Counterlife.” Modern Fiction Studies 48.2. 2002: 422-43.
Safer, Elaine B. Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth. Albany: State U of New York P, 2006.
Said, Edward. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
Salinger, J.D. Nine Stories. Boston: Little Brown, 1953.
Sandbank, Shimon. After Kafka: The Influence of Kafka’s Fiction. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964.
Saul, Scott. “Rough: A Journey into the Drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint”. “Roth’s Yarzeit”. 4/12/2019. post45.org.
Schama, Simon. Rembrandt’s Eyes. London & New York: Penguin, 2014.
Schaub, Thomas Hill. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Suffering of the World. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 2004.
---. “The World as Will.” The Essential Schopenhauer. Ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher. London & New York: Harper Perennial, 2010.
Schulz, Bruno. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. Trans. Celina Wieniewska. London and New York: Penguin, 1979.
Searles, George J. Conversations with Philip Roth. Jackson, London: University of Mississippi Press, 1992.
---. The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.
Severs, Jeffrey. “‘Get Your Map of America’: Tempering Dystopia and Learning Topography in The Plot Against America”. Studies in American Fiction. Vol.35, no.2. 2007: 221-239.
393
Shipe, Matthew. “Exit Ghost and the Politics of “Late Style””. Philip Roth Studies. Vol. 5, No. 2. Fall 2009: 189-204.
Shore, Marci. The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. New York: Crown Publishers, 2013.
Shostak, Debra. Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Smith, Zadie. “The I Who Is Not Me”. Feel Free: Essays. London & New York: Penguin Books, 2018.
Solotaroff, Ted. “The Journey of Philip Roth.” Atlantic. April 1969.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.
Stecopoulos, Harilaos. “Cold War Postmodernism”. Postmodern/Postwar—And After. Ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek and Daniel Worden. Iowa: University Press, 2016.
Stern, Richard. Other Men’s Daughters. New York: New York Review Books, 2017.
Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. New York: Viking Press, 1965.
---. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking Press, 1950.
Updike, John. “Introduction”. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. Trans. Celina Wieniewska. London and New York: Penguin, 1979.
Wade, Stephen. The Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin, 2000.
Yeats, W.B. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954.
---. W.B. Yeats: The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. London: Everyman, 1992.
Zipperstein, Steven J. “Philip Roth’s Forgotten Tape: The Beginnings of the Great American Writer.” The Jewish Forward. May 28, 2018.
394