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Chrisman Thesis Final.Pdf (600.71 Marsh’s Field: A Novella and Introduction A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English By James Chrisman This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of English _________________________ Patrick O’Keeffe Professor, English Thesis Adviser ___________________________ Carey Snyder Honors Tutorial College, DOS English ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College 2 Table of Contents Introduction: 4 Works Cited: 46 Marsh’s Field: 49 3 Introduction 4 1—Inspiration & Influence Roth. As a young writer, his record draws me to look up to him as Nathan Zuckerman and his peers looked up to The Suede: like I am a few classes after he has graduated, and his name is still here on the plaques in the halls, to be compared to, to define oneself against, to be discovered when one takes the time to wonder where the awards went. Twenty-nine novels. Two memoirs. Two works of literary criticism. Two National Book Awards (1960, 1995), two National Book Critics’ Circle Awards (1987, 1991), two Pen/Faulkner Awards, the National Medal of Arts, the Pulitzer Prize, the Frances Medici Foreign Book Prize. His works are collected by the Library of America—one of only three living writers with that particular honor. Timothy Parrish suggests, in the Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, that “Roth has been perhaps the most critically significant and consistently controversial American writer of the past 50 years” (Parrish 1). This essay will address both parts of this claim as it traces Roth’s usage of the Bildungsroman throughout this long career, but before doing that, it is worth acknowledging that the reason Roth’s career is so tempting to study and to emulate is that he wrote for all of those years; unlike, say, Thomas Pynchon or Marilyn Robinson, he took virtually no breaks until the retirement he opted for just a few years ago. Today Roth is heaped upon those awards, dormant, above America’s living writers, dead writers, and would-be writers like me. This work ethic, this commitment to one’s craft over half a century, through controversy, commercial success, and acclaim is—to me as a young writer—truly inspiring, something to aspire to. And so I admire him for this, and I wonder how he kept going, 5 and I consider in this introduction the controversial and acclaimed career of Philip Milton Roth. Faulkner—whom Roth called “the backbone of 20th century American literature” (Roth, “Acceptance Speech”)—is probably the primary influence on the novella you are about to read, more so than any other single writer. (This may be why his name is never mentioned.) With this influence in mind, along with the influence of other writers like Melville and Roth, I consider Marsh’s Field a work of American Literature. Roth considered Bellow the other vertebra in 20th century American literature’s backbone, but I think that Roth has taken his place. Roth and Bellow have many similarities, and they fill a similar role, with many of the same faults and omissions (depth of female psychology and exploration of other minorities’ experiences) and many of the same strengths and themes (depth of male psychology and exploration Jewish-American experience). With their weaknesses in mind, it seems that Roth and Bellow have fallen out of favor and out of syllabi, and this is probably for good reason. To study the development of 20th century American Literature without studying Roth, however, would be a mistake, an omission. One would miss experiencing his rhetorical power, his inventiveness—but, from a more scholarly perspective, one would also miss what America has considered its top caliber writing for half a century, and one would not consider the influence that Roth has as a writer both serious and successful, and one would miss “Roth’s multifacetedness, the 6 constant reinvention, that is at the heart of his extraordinary career” (Parrish 2). Further, I believe that Roth is one of the main links between Faulkner and I—a father, if Faulkner is by now a grandfather. And like any child to parent, figurative or otherwise, in equal proportion to the way Roth supports and nourishes me, I strain against him. Marsh’s Field is a part of this process. When I read Goodbye, Columbus over a summer early in my college career, I was struck by it, its craftsmanship, the perfection of its narrative arc; like many of the books I read at that time, it shaped me as a writer, a reader, a person; it may have even been the first novella that I ever read. That could be why the novella you are about to read, Marsh’s Field, resembles it so much (even if, unfortunately, I seem not to have absorbed its humor). The novellas resemble one another in that they are part of the same tradition: Marsh’s Field and Goodbye, Columbus are both Bildungsromane. Other than American Literature, this is the main tradition that my novella participates in and is in dialogue with. As I will argue, Roth has served as the torch bearer for this genre in the later half of the 20th century. He has worked within it, played with it, expanded it, mastered it; he has kept it alive. He has proved, as W. Clark Hendley asserts in his article on Roth’s The Ghost Writer,” that “the form is not moribund in the right hands” (Hendley 99). People often say things like this about the Bildungsroman: it is “moribund,” dry, lacking freshness and relevance. This, as I will show, is a misconception about an essentially dynamic and elastic genre. The Bildungsroman has been kept alive for hundreds of years by people who take it into their own hands, who 7 reshape and resuscitate it. Roth has actively (re)made the Bildungsroman, that seemingly antiquated genre, a living American tradition. Let us note, however, that for all of his impact and for all of his accomplishments, one does not celebrate Roth without reservations. Aggressive and apt criticisms have been leveled against him since the beginning of his half-century career (remember that he is both “critically significant and controversial”). One can counter some of these criticisms as surface readings: what may seem to be Roth’s misogyny could be, upon closer inspection, Roth’s investigation of misogyny and male psychology. As Debra Shostak aptly observes in “Roth and Gender,” “Where a female character in Roth’s early work appears flattest, she is presented almost exclusively through the male character’s point of view . Roth’s work can appear as much a prescient critique of misogynistic attitudes as a purveyor of them” (Shostak 112). This is true of virtually all of the texts we will look at, but it also true that the original criticism can be leveled against them to begin with. Shostak’s lens may correct many unfair criticisms of Roth, but it does not absolve him completely. Many of these criticisms are fair and deserve an honest assessment. As Julia Keller put it in her aptly titled article, “Philip Roth Hates Women* (*Is that true? And does it matter?),” Roth’s female characters function as “things against which men can sharpen themselves, or dull themselves. Women flirt, they flit, but they do not really live, if by living we mean making moral choices and owning up (or not) to responsibility” (qtd. in Gooblar 8). It is striking how similar this description is to how one might describe the way women have traditionally functioned in the 8 bildungsroman. Women are, as Castle puts it, “instrumental” (Castle 4)—before the rise of the female Bildungsroman—never subjects of Bildung themselves. The question for me as a young writer becomes, then, what do I take from this genre and this writer, and what do I leave behind? How do I keep my affection for Roth while distancing myself from what I find deplorable in him? This—the question of influence—is a major theme of Marsh’s Field. I hope, taken together, that this novella and this introduction will form in part a kind of mediation on that question— even, and especially, if neither lead to a clear answer. This introduction will survey Roth and the Bildungsroman and finally will discuss briefly my departure from both the genre and the writer that I admire and reject. 2—A Genre in Crisis I have neglected to define exactly—if one can claim to speak exactly about so nebulous a genre—what I mean when I use the word Bildungsroman (following Gregory Castle’s lead in Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, I will not italicize Bildungsroman nor Bildung throughout this introduction, unless the passage from which I am quoting does so). In this section, I will discuss the development of the genre and the problems with discussing the genre that came from those developments. Put simply, “there is no consensus on the meaning of the term Bildungsroman” (Hardin x). Scholars and critics struggle to settle on a definition that is both specific enough to avoid over application and broad enough to encompass a German genre that has radically evolved over its 220 years and its life on multiple continents. 9 James N. Hardin, in his introduction to Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, bemoans our country’s misunderstanding of the genre in asserting, “in spite of the efforts of a few scholars of German literature, American literary criticism in general failed to inform itself about the nature of a type of novel more talked about than understood .
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