Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity

Philip Roth’s Rude Truth

This page intentionally left blank

Philip Roth’s Rude Truth The Art of Immaturity Ross Posnock P R I N C E T O N

U N I V E R S I T Y

P R E S S

P R I N C E T O N

A N D

O X F O R D

Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2008 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-13843-5 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth’s rude truth : the art of immaturity / Ross Posnock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11604-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-11604-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Roth, Philip—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3568.O855Z845 2006 813’.54—dc22 2005055240 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion with ITC Garamond Book Condensed Display Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 3

5

7

9

10

8

6

4

2

For Sophia Rose Posnock and her bravery

This page intentionally left blank

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. —Emerson

If you are repelled by immaturity, it is because you are immature. —Witold Gombrowicz

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

1 2 3 4 5

xix xxi

Introduction: Roth Antagonistes 1 Immaturity: A Genealogy 39 Ancestors and Relatives: The Game of Appropriation and the Sacrifice of Assimilation 88 “A very slippery subject”: The Counterlife as Pivot 125 Letting Go, or How to Lead a Stupid Life: Sabbath’s Nakedness 155

6 Being Game in The Human Stain 193 7 The Two Philips 236 Coda: “The stars are indispensable” 260 Notes 267 Works Cited 287 Index

295

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

W

hat wisteria and alcohol are to Faulkner, and fishing and bullfights to Hemingway, rudeness is to Roth. It seems to be everywhere in his books—a sport and a pastime, often delivered as a rant. Rudeness in Roth is a source of stylistic energy, but also a principled (even moral) position, the antidote to the condition of “anti-humanity that calls itself nice. Nice.” Nathan Zuckerman repeats the word, letting its horror emerge, then declares: “I don’t care” if “my kid grows up wearing pantyhose as long as he doesn’t turn out nice . . . another frightened soul, tamed by inhibition” (AL 600–601). Implied here is that the anti-nice, the rude, is synonymous with a vitality won from socializing forces bent on exacting obedience, restraint, repression—basic constituents of mature adulthood. For Roth, rudeness is precious lifeblood, not simply boys being boys, and an earlier exponent of rudeness, Emerson, would concur. But Emerson hedges slightly: “I . . . ought to speak the rude truth,” he vows, but finds that “every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right” (Essays 273, 262). Roth too is not as truculent as he advertises (the quote above from Zuckerman occurs as he is having fun masquerading as a pornographer). Always within is the devoted son and good boy, a figure who explicitly emerges, relatively irony free, in his two family memoirs. Of course, Emerson is no Whitman, Roth is no Céline or even Hubert Selby or Kathy Acker. But these limits are precisely what make immaturity possible: it is a mode of being that emerges not from the obliteration of bourgeois restraint, but from pushing or defying its limits,

xii

|

P R E FAC E

and by being judged against a presiding norm. Immaturity is diacritical, implicitly asking—immature compared to what? The “immaturity” I am concerned with is of literary rather than personal interest, and on the few occasions I touch directly on Roth’s biography it is to make a literary point. The “art of immaturity” names not only a subject but also a literary practice or strategy as old as the novel itself: recall the childish Don Quixote’s quarrel with reality. His wariness of its demands to adapt demonstrates for the first time, says one philosopher, the paradox that art’s contribution to society is in fact resistance to society (Adorno, Aesthetic 321). More recently, Milan Kundera has located Quixote’s resistance in the havoc Cervantes wreaks on certitude, replacing the “apodictic and dogmatic discourse” of his younger contemporary Descartes with “the wisdom of uncertainty” unique to the genre, and licensing a freedom for later novelists to play games with reality rather than to obey canons of realism, plausibility, and chronological order (Art 7, 15). Without using the word, Kundera adumbrates a number of the elements that “immaturity” will summon in this book.1 Without mentioning his friend Philip Roth, Kundera returns us to the origins of the modern novel in Europe as one useful, if unfamiliar, literary context to discuss a writer usually regarded as a wholly known quantity, confined to a particular region (New Jersey), particular aesthetic tradition (American literary realism and naturalism), and, above all, a particular ethnicity (third-generation American Jew). I hope readers expecting (yet one more) discussion about Roth and being Jewish in America will come to be persuaded that this topic has for too long been isolated from a more capacious inquiry into larger dimensions of his art and broader questions of what it means to be human. As W.E.B. DuBois noted long ago, “failure to recognize the Universal in the Particular breeds the menace of all group exclusiveness and segregation” (Writings 1194) In a writing career that has flourished for nearly half a century, Philip Roth long ago slipped the bonds of particularism not least by exemplifying that the local cannot be thought apart from the worldly, that the devoted chronicler of Chancellor Avenue in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood has fashioned his themes and innovative forms of representation in lifelong conversation with canonical predecessors

P R E FAC E

|

and contemporaries from Europe and the United States. Of course there have been other American regionalists, Faulkner preeminently, who have rendered the local within larger patterns furnished by venerable literary models, a modernist strategy pioneered by Joyce. But Roth makes his literary engagements and allusions the subject of his fiction, integrates them directly into his characterizations, a method made plausible by the fact that nearly all his protagonists and narrators are writers or figures of highly developed sensibility for whom literature is the stuff of life.2 In short, as if behind the backs of the pigeonholing critics who would anchor him to his historical coordinates, Roth resides in a “world literary space . . . an actual—albeit unseen—world” without frontiers, be they national, regional, or aesthetic (Casanova 3).3 Neither is it stratified by class entitlement. This republic of culture is found on no map save the one drawn by literature. How it shapes a number of Roth’s major novels is the main subject of this book. I attend especially to his practice of appropriation—by which he claims his literary forebears wherever he finds them—as one mode of transport to this kingdom of world culture. Like the rude play of immaturity, appropriation insists on democratic access and resists preordained authority (including the authority of historical context). This skepticism encourages the letting go of culturally enforced restraint and the experience of aesthetic bliss, the last phrase associated with that meticulous student of Cervantes, Nabokov. Roth and Nabokov share with Kundera a less than reverential attitude to the nineteenth-century elevation of realism into the prime responsibility of the serious novelist. Yet Nabokov and Roth also exhibit a genius for realist verisimilitude founded on a nearly tactile responsiveness to “the sensory fullness . . . the superabundant detail of life” that Roth calls “the rhapsody” (HS 52). Roth’s notion of rhapsody is entwined with the grossly corporeal and visceral, thus true to the root meaning of aesthetic. While Roth’s version may not be as elegant as Nabokov’s, both novelists immerse themselves in “the blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography” (HS 22). And what places a Humbert Humbert or a Mickey Sabbath in the midst of the blizzard is their seamless joining of desire, flesh, and art. When Roth writes of “the contaminant

xiii

xiv

|

P R E FAC E

of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are,” he is bringing together the crude force of desire and an aesthetic imperative to be “mindful”— to render in language our fleshly “matter” (HS 37). In sum, Roth—resistant realist, worldly regionalist—is different things at once. If one were forced to name the sharp point upon which those things converge, it would be “provocation”; Roth conceives it as inseparable from art but also makes provocation a subject in itself, a force that disrupts assurance and control. By midcareer he began calling this force “counterlife” or “counterliving,” as a way of understanding the capacity—indeed propensity—of individuals and history for defying the plausible and predictable. (As early as 1960, he famously commented that American reality was so outrageous it was “even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination”) (RMO 167). One literary manifestation of Roth’s acute feel for the unsettled has been what Saul Bellow once called the “sliding” focus of his irony: “You don’t know when he means you to take him seriously. When you think you’ve got him connected to a position, you find he’s gotten away from you” (qtd. Shostak, Philip Roth 269). Bellow was speaking (on a television documentary) of Roth’s most vertiginous novel—Operation Shylock—but his remark applies more broadly—to the provocations of “counterlife” that Roth imprints on his late work starting on the level of the sentence. Bellow’s remarks bring to mind his own very different understanding of art. As he stated in his Paris Review interview: “I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too” (“Art” 67). Stillness is neither the slippery Roth’s strong suit nor interest; and Bellow’s well-known statement about his art helps clarify a difference between two writers and friends who have so often been linked, usually for superficial reasons. Chapters 1 and 5 take up in passing some of their intersections, but I will spend some of the following pages elaborating the instructive differences in how their careers have played out in American culture since the early 1970s. This era was the pivotal moment when the youth or counterculture, having instigated political tumult, helped radicalize literary taste. It moved, broadly speaking, from realism to an antirealist experimentalism

P R E FAC E

|

that, unlike earlier high modernism, fed on the energy released by Beat writing of the late fifties and continued blurring boundaries between high and low, art and life, the psychotic and sane.4 By 1965 Leslie Fiedler was speaking of the youth culture as testament to the “obsolescence of everything our society understands by maturity,” including language itself: in their fondness for “porno-esthetics” and obscenity (in this era Ed Sanders launched Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts) “they seek an antilanguage of protest as inevitably as they seek antipoems and antinovels” (195, 197). The importing of French literary theory and practice, beginning with Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet in the midsixties, was an additional source of iconoclasm. This ventilation of high culture was felt far and wide and indirectly helped prepare the way for both postmodernism and multiculturalism in the eighties. The event that crystallizes this transitional moment, it now seems clear, was the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. Pynchon’s novel was the Moby-Dick for those of the hip “new sensibility” coming of age by the middle to late 1960s, and it crowned an already remarkable amount of advanced fiction—by John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Burroughs, William Gaddis, William Gass, John Hawkes, Ishmael Reed, Susan Sontag, among others—that was required reading for the intellectually and politically adventurous. (It is worth noting that by the eighties political correctness and its suspicion of difficult art as ideological heresy drove a wedge between avant-garde literature and the commitment to social justice.) In a recent essay on this period and the pivotal place of Gravity’s Rainbow, Gerald Howard, a self-described “connoisseur” of the era’s experimental fiction, makes vivid this realignment of the canon in the early 1970s: “We had, of course, little use for the standard issue Big Names. Bellow had put himself beyond the pale with his churlish Mr. Sammler’s Planet; Cheever and Updike were too suburban; Vidal wrote historical novels with plots, for God’s sake (great essays though). . . . Only two Big Names escaped our scorn—Philip Roth, as a result of all the excellent trouble he had caused with Portnoy, and Mailer, for his omni-directional rage against the machine” (30).5 Howard’s sketch sounds right to me and not simply because it tallies with my own period taste. With Mr. Sammler’s contempt for the sixties

xv

xvi

|

P R E FAC E

(“a sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world,” says the title character, an erudite, melancholy, Holocaust survivor in New York), Bellow did indeed lose credibility with the new sensibility, a rift he welcomed and sought to widen in coming years. With the Nobel Prize in 1976, Bellow’s attainment of high mandarin status was certified. And in the 90s, his biting irreverence about multiculturalism, reflected in his notorious jibe, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him” sealed his reputation for grouchy disengagement (qtd. Atlas 573). But what of the status of Bellow’s colleague Roth, eighteen years his junior? Portnoy had turned him into a culture hero to the young, but his novels of the seventies, The Breast, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire, made him increasingly unpopular with other branches of that audience—feminists and antirealists.6 They came to have as little use for him as the Jewish moralists he had offended as far back as 1959. Roth’s sense of his own status might be glimpsed in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), refracted through Nathan Zuckerman. In the midst of a nervous breakdown in Chicago, he receives a letter from the University of Chicago student paper: “The editors wanted to interview him about the future of his kind of fiction in the post-modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon” and attached ten questions. Among them: “why do you continue to write? . . . Do you consider yourself part of a rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition?” (686–87). One answer was The Counterlife, published three years later. It was hailed as a triumph by William H. Gass, a premier theorist and practitioner of experimental fiction. Although the novel upended realist conventions, Roth insisted that the antirealism of The Counterlife was not in the service of a contemporary theory—postmodernism—but of life’s inherent antirealism. In its crafty fabrications, his novel was miming the caprice of reality.7 And Roth’s gamesmanship was as old as the genre of the novel itself. Recall again Don Quixote: its second half includes characters who have read the first half and regard the Don as both real and fictive. Having once flaunted a raw immaturity (in Portnoy), now Roth became famous for depicting the interpenetration of the actual and artifice; with the help of his alter ego Zuckerman, he flaunted insouciance about the sanctity of the real. The book after The

P R E FAC E

|

Counterlife was his memoir The Facts. Starting with the pseudotransparent title, Roth mocks the genre’s special relation to truth by addressing the book to Zuckerman, who replies with an extended critique. So, to stay with the terms from The Anatomy Lesson, Roth was not engaged in a “rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition.” He was proving over and over how much power to unsettle, how much audacity, remained both in the genre dedicated to the new—the novel—and in the modernist (Poundian) dictum to “make it new.” In a display of stunning imaginative vitality he published five ambitious novels in seven years (1993–2000). The culmination, chronologically and artistically, is The Human Stain; almost at once it was recognized as a major achievement, is widely taught and written about, and, arguably, is as close to a canonical work as Roth had written since Portnoy. Although The Human Stain risks potentially incendiary topics such as racial passing, academic feminism, and sexual relations between a man and woman far apart in age and class, the novel’s politics are in fact not simple or easy to discern: it attacks the “tyranny of propriety” and “virtue-mongering” on the right and left. This rampant moral didacticism incites resistance—the rudeness and rage that drive The Human Stain (and Sabbath’s Theater, 1995). But Roth’s characters, rather than being left at the mercy of these passions, work through them, turning them, implausibly but persuasively, into the very condition of intimacy and empathy. The stature of The Human Stain also makes clear that Roth’s career trajectory and his presence in the culture would not follow Bellow’s— the literary titan turned embattled curmudgeon.8 Rather than this familiar script, Roth’s would be a career busy inventing new ones. For here is a certified Big Name (to recall Gerald Howard’s term), deep in his fourth decade of work, still capturing and challenging the imagination of the educated reading public—even outraging it. On the way to the National Book Award, Sabbath’s Theater repulsed, among many others, the New York Times daily reviewer. And in 2004 The Plot Against America was a national best-seller. Many read its fantasy of demagoguery triumphant in the land of democracy as an ominous reflection of post-9/11 political malfeasance Another of his late nineties novels—American Pastoral—explicitly

xvii

xviii

|

P R E FAC E

took up the sixties, and some regarded its portrayal of antiwar violence tearing up a family as a turn to the cultural right (a turn that was greeted with dismay or delight according to one’s political beliefs). But, as Louis Menand wrote in a review: “if being on the cultural right means having an old-fashioned modernist commitment to high art, Roth has always been on the cultural right” (94). I concur, but with these caveats: from our present vantage, Roth’s lasting power tells us something new—that the postmodernist commitment, at least in its more programmatic versions, has proved “old-fashioned,” while the modernist continually renews itself, responding to the zeitgeist while also excavating the space of world literature.9 Roth’s career is sustained by its irreverent attitude toward realism and above all by its capacity to evoke and be carried away by the “rhapsody” of “sensory fullness”—art’s primal rhythm and matter.10 Attuned to the rude and elemental, Roth has kept faith with modernism for most of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond without becoming rearguard or embattled. In truth, such terms as cultural “right” or “left” are empty in regard to a writer whose aim—to “affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times”—is more inclusive than bound to particular contexts and local incitations (Emerson, Essays 267). The pledge to speak rude truth and to make an art of immaturity acquires cutting force from literary and philosophical practices that predate modernism and afford a perennially vital set of aesthetic motives and imperatives. “The times” are always ripe for tonic rudeness since smugness (often in the guise of religious or rationalist certitude) seems virtually a transhistorical given. Montaigne rose to the occasion, as did William James, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, and Roth’s friend the painter Philip Guston. They, along with a number of others, will appear in chapters 2 and 7. “To affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted”: Mickey Sabbath’s sublime ambition and impossible project may be as close to an artistic credo as his creator would care to disclose (ST 198).

Acknowledgments

R

oth provokes strong opinions and lively conversations, and I have enjoyed hearing and engaging in a number of both. It has been fun as well seeing him win over some previously suspicious readers. Nancy Ruttenburg, with the zeal of a new convert, was a great interlocutor. Joan Richardson too had a conversion experience and offered excellent suggestions. Rochelle Gurstein, a potential convert, was characteristically gracious, as was Jack Barth, in discussing Philip Guston. Sharon Cameron was in no way a convert but trained her exacting eye on sections of early drafts and much improved them. From longer distances, David Shields, Sara Blair, Susan Glenn, Mary Esteve, and Jessica Burstein all offered useful advice. Stephen Cox, Gregg Crane, George Kateb, Richard Poirier, and Eric Sundquist helped me rethink things with their incisive critiques of various chapters. Emily McKeage carefully read the whole manuscript and made a wealth of subtle comments that invariably improved matters large and small. Richard Isomaki has been a scrupulous copyeditor. Judd Tully introduced me to Philip Guston’s dealer David McKee. I am grateful to all of the above. Also due thanks are Lawrence Buell, Michael T. Gilmore, and Gregg Crane for inviting me to talk about Roth at Harvard, Brandeis, and Michigan respectively. On each occasion I profited from the range and richness of audience responses. Mary Murrell acquired this book for Princeton University Press, and her staunch interest and support made everything easier. Hanne Winarsky has been a worthy successor, and I have much appreciated her commitment and enthusiasm. Earlier versions of some

xx

|

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

material in chapters 2, 3, and 6 appeared, in different form, in Raritan. Its editor, Jackson Lears, is always a source of sage counsel. This book, as promised, is for my daughter. As a teenager, she has shared her expertise about a couple of the subjects mentioned in my title and subtitle. But she has also taught me something more. Those who know her will understand my dedication.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations appear parenthetically in the text to identify references to Roth’s books. al ap b c d da f gc gw hs imc

The Anatomy Lesson American Pastoral The Breast The Counterlife Deception The Dying Animal The Facts Goodbye, Columbus The Ghost Writer The Human Stain I Married a Communist

lg mlm os p pc pd rmo s st zu

Letting Go My Life as a Man Operation Shylock: A Confession Patrimony Portnoy’s Complaint The Professor of Desire Reading Myself and Others Shop Talk Sabbath’s Theater Zuckerman Unbound

This page intentionally left blank

Philip Roth’s Rude Truth

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction: Roth Antagonistes

D

ecrying the “sanitized” eulogy he has just heard delivered over the coffin of his friend the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who has suddenly died during heart surgery, an unidentified mourner, bearded and middle-aged, gives an impromptu countereulogy on the sidewalk: He made it easy for them. Just went in there and died. This is a death we can all feel good about. Not like cancer. . . . The cancer deaths are horrifying. That’s what I would have figured him for. Wouldn’t you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always. Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel’s unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death—and the feeling police, the grammar police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and the mythmaking! . . . I can’t get over it. He’s not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart people, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontaminated, deloused—suddenly he’s Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchlessness? I really had him down for cancer, the works. (C 217–19)

2

|

INTRODUCTION

Reading this, we know where we are: the outrage, wit, excess, cadence, and above all the voice—the careening, over-the-top verbal intoxication that takes on a lyric life of its own, one of near giddy pleasure in its enraged vulgar onslaught; we are in a Philip Roth novel, in this case The Counterlife. Verbal energy overturns boundaries as Neil Simon consorts with Hegel, Zuckerman invades the collective body—“an irritant in the Jewish bloodstream”—while turning his own inside out—“looking with a mirror up his own asshole”—and words are set in motion: the bland laugh machine Neil Simon morphs into a verb—“Simonize”— that has the impossible task to polish and domesticate “our filthy, selfafflicted Zuck,” Nathan’s last name now a pungent monosyllable. If the voice can be torrential and perfervid, it can also, even in its excess, be spare. Here is a vintage moment of the latter mode, a small aria to a man whom Roth calls “my kind of Jew”: “Worldly negativity. Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. The this-worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. The malice. The comedy. The endurance. The acting. The injury. The impairment” (OS 394). The voice is by now unmistakable, as indelible as Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s. I have quoted the countereulogy for the pleasure of hearing Roth, but also because it can serve as his miniature self-portrait—albeit an inflamed and burlesqued one—which makes immediately vivid his investment in provoking genteel sensibilities, in embodying the unpalatable. Roth’s infamous mocking of bourgeois pieties is crucial to our sense of his literary identity and presence in contemporary culture. In fact, this is to say hardly more than that he is a modern writer; épater le bourgeois is modernism’s reflex. Yet who has made it so fertile a subject, a source of literary history, of comedy and pathos, who has made it more his own than American literature’s bad boy? Portnoy’s Complaint was the first novel to show a Jew “going wild in public”—“the last thing in the world a Jew is supposed to do”—and the sheer gusto of Roth’s portrait of a “ ‘cunt crazy’ masturbator of the respectable classes” caused a publishing sensation in 1969, and helped define the era’s raucous impiety (RMO 258, 256). Thanks to its assault on adulthood and restraint, the novel made the words Roth and immaturity seem a natural pairing. But the immaturity of Portnoy’s Complaint—exorbitant,

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

raw, regressive—is only one mode of immaturity, whose subtler incarnations have engaged not only Philip Roth but any number of writers, thinkers, and painters as they all explore less defended ways of being in the world. As my preface suggests, Milan Kundera is one of Roth’s chief interlocutors in this book, one of the figures whom I set in conversation with a novelist whose cosmopolitanism has for too long been hidden under the familiar rubric of Jewish American. Early on, conventional wisdom cast Roth in “the role of the rebellious Jewish son” and junior partner, born in Newark in 1933, of the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud (Wisse 317). While this grouping is more than the “journalistic cliché almost wholly devoid of content” Roth dismissed in 1981 (RMO 104), it has by now outlived its initial usefulness. For one thing, Roth’s near halfcentury career of remarkable, indeed relentless, productivity—since 1959 twenty-two works of fiction and five of nonfiction—has left such early and parochial rubrics in the dustbin of literary history. And he has gone far from home (if only to return in The Plot Against America, which seven-year-old Philip Roth narrates). For thirteen years Roth lived in London half the year; for five years in the seventies he was a regular visitor to Prague, where he “took a little crash course in political repression,” became close with several writers, including Kundera, and was pivotal in publishing the English translations of some of the leading works of postwar Eastern European literature (RMO 140). Roth’s own books have a large international audience (they have been translated into over thirty languages, and in fall 2004 two were best sellers in France). All of these experiences, including his permanent return to the United States in 1989, which renewed his sense of the country and became a catalyst for his American trilogy (1997–2000), have significantly enlarged and deepened his art. Roth’s cosmopolitanism has created a body of work that is best understood in an international context—American, European, and Eastern European. The main effort of this book is to construct these overlapping frames of reference, using them as a resource for literary criticism of the fiction, and making vivid Roth’s creative engagement with a rich lineage of intellectual history. Threading together my multiple contexts

3

4

|

INTRODUCTION

is the subject of immaturity. As a fertile homegrown resistance to the renunciations required by adulthood, immaturity began to appear as such in the American renaissance of the mid–nineteenth century as part of romanticism’s celebration of the child and of spontaneity.1 This open, unguarded sensibility, earlier discounted by Enlightenment scientism and rationalism but in touch with Renaissance humanism, would come to inspire one current of international modernism, including the work of a number of European and Eastern European novelists and thinkers. While the separate branches of this romantic and modernist lineage are well known, their convergence upon the subject of immaturity and in the work of a single capacious novelist remains to be explored. By redescribing this distinct current in modern thought, I hope to enlarge and clarify our understanding of a writer confined for too long to rather befuddled received opinion that sees him (and his narrators) as “uneasily poised between the bourgeois Jewish family that hemmed him in and the Christian cold shoulder that nudged him out . . . it was never clear where he thought he belonged or to what he owed allegiance” (Wisse 318). This response, with its trace of exasperation at Roth’s elusiveness, is a perennial one to the cosmopolitan evasion of fixed identity.2 Roth is actively defying the trajectory of most major twentiethcentury American novelists, whether earlier figures such as Faulkner and Hemingway or his original cohort of Bellow, Mailer, Malamud. Critics generally agree that the later work of all these writers marks a falling off from their prime. But the preponderance of major novels in Roth’s career, by my estimate, leans toward the later decades: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), The Counterlife (1986), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and The Human Stain (2000) comprise the first rank, closely followed by The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Operation Shylock (1993), American Pastoral (1997), and The Dying Animal (2001). In Roth’s surge in the nineties and into the next century, with The Plot Against America (2004) and Everyman (2006), he has published eleven books, nine of which were novels, and five of which were distinguished works. This is unprecedented in American letters of the twentieth century. Late Roth is now beginning to deserve comparison with what is

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

usually regarded as the summit of late turns of novelistic genius— Henry James’s major phase at the start of the century. It is tempting to see the sketch above as charting a triumphal march from Jewish Newark to the WASP throne of literary greatness—a hymn to cultural assimilation by a gradual sacrifice or bleaching out of ethnicity. Indeed, Roth has said of his Jewish cohort, each of us “found his own means of transcending the immediate parochialism of his Jewish background” (RMO 108). In fact, Roth’s own means of transcendence was not the familiar route of assimilation hinted at above but rather something closer to its opposite—what I will be calling “appropriation,” a word borrowed from Emerson, who borrowed it from Goethe, and a word also crucial to Ralph Ellison, who understood all of culture as an “appropriation game” (Collected 511). A writer Roth much admires, Ellison, in using the term, builds upon the thinking of a mentor, the philosopher Alain Locke, and upon W.E.B. DuBois. Henry James, another Roth favorite, also figures here, for without using the word appropriation he makes vivid the spirit of its practice when he says “to be an American is a great preparation for culture . . . we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and . . . claim our property wherever we find it” (Letters 1:77). To rewrite assimilation as appropriation banishes the whole melodrama of assimilation whereby the outsider is required to cast off old (ethnic) ways for new and submit to a culture assumed to possess a stable, homogenous identity; this sacrificial process affirms a hierarchy of insider/outsider, native/alien grounded in blood and origin.3 By contrast, all that appropriation requires is a good library. It houses what DuBois famously called “the kingdom of culture” where the color line of Jim Crow America does not obtain. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” as DuBois memorably noted in 1903 (365). Aesthetic bliss escapes, however temporarily, the long arm of history. The formulation tentatively floated above—Roth’s career as “the triumphal march” to WASP literary greatness—is deflated when we recall the importance of the Newark Public Library for the young Philip Roth. Raised in a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood, in a house that contained few books, Roth treasured the library as the arena for claiming his public property. He begins his career in effect by honoring

5

6

|

INTRODUCTION

this kingdom and its importance as a haven for ethnic and racial outsiders. Goodbye, Columbus is partly about a lower-middle-class Jewish librarian in Newark’s grand public library and a poor black boy who haunts the place and is in love with Gauguin’s paintings. The librarian briefly befriends the boy, helps him gain access to the art books, and urges him to get a library card. The story ends with the librarian, after a bitter breakup with a girl from a wealthy Jewish family, staring into another library, observing a wall of books needing to be shelved. The “kingdom of culture,” free of racial and class barriers, beckons him back to a life among books. One of the objects in the public domain Roth appropriated was Henry James. Roth tell us in his memoir The Facts that The Portrait of a Lady “had been a virtual handbook during the early drafts of Letting Go,” his first novel (157). Far from concealing this inspiration, Roth builds it into the plot: his Jewish graduate student protagonist is writing a dissertation on James. So perhaps I was too hasty in having discarded my prior formulation; let me amend it: one of the reasons Philip Roth acquires James’s mantle is not because of an act of cultural passing in which Roth appears in WASP-face, but rather because Roth’s literary sensibility is distinctly cosmopolitan in James’s appropriative sense. Greek for “world citizen,” cosmopolitan is rarely a neutral term and often pejorative because it usually involves a refusal to revere local or national authority and a desire to uphold multiple affiliations. In an academic culture obsessed by identity, the cosmopolitan has the distinction of being grounded instead in the practice of appropriation: insouciance regarding claims of ownership and the drawing of boundaries becomes the basis of a cosmopolitan relation to culture. To achieve it liberates culture from the proprietary grip of a single group; possessiveness—of the dismal and familiar “jazz is a black thing, Shakespeare a white” sort—is set aside for sampling, fixity for mobility. Cosmopolites refuse to know their place. And cosmopolitanism, which challenges the sense of entitlement to cultural riches assumed to repose in privileged birth or inheritance, is, in theory at least, what democratic America embodies.4 Recall that James said “to be an American is a great

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

preparation for culture.” Here is Ellison’s version, from his famous evocation at the start of Shadow and Act of his freewheeling Oklahoma youth in the 1920s. The state’s blacks “were often charged by exasperated white Texans with ‘not knowing their place,’ ” and Ellison and his friends proved them right (Collected 50). As self-styled “renaissance” men, he and his friends sampled literature, art, and music high and low; “we were ‘boys,’ members of a wild, free, outlaw tribe which transcended the category of race. Rather we were Americans” (52). Here is Roth’s version: “I would think that much of the exuberance with which I and others of my generation of Jewish children seized our opportunities after the war—that wonderful feeling that one was entitled to no less than anyone else, that one could do anything and could be excluded from nothing—came from our belief in the boundlessness of the democracy in which we lived and to which we belonged” (F 123). Belonging, then, does not conflict with this sense of cosmopolitanism as appropriation; indeed Roth is a great regionalist, the laureate of New Jersey who has made his old Newark neighborhoods a living presence in many of his books. He has said that “the great American writers are regionalists. It’s in the American grain” (qtd. Alvarez 17). Since the motor of Roth’s sensibility is contradiction (Kierkegaard’s very Emersonian sentiment “the whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself ” is an epigraph to Operation Shylock), the regional and cosmopolitan interact—the one containing the other—in productive ferment. Ethnicity is also within the American grain. Jewishness for Roth was “wholly secularized” in his words, but remained the source of a distinct cultural style: of satiric wit, contentiousness, and irreverence, all useful attributes for playing the American game of appropriation. Roth speaks of his graduate school days at the University of Chicago in the midfifties as a time when he and his friends did not submit to a sacrificial ritual of assimilation but rather brought to their confrontation with high literary culture a “playful confidence” in their Jewishness as an “intellectual resource. It was also a defense against overrefinement, a counterweight to the intimidating power of Henry James and literary good taste generally, whose ‘civilizing’ function was variously tempting to

7

8

|

INTRODUCTION

clever ambitious city boys” at ease with their own casual coarseness. He and his friends would refer to Isabel Archer as a “shiksa,” and “much scrupulosity was expended determining if Osmond wasn’t really a Jew” (F 123, 115). In Letting Go and later in The Ghost Writer Roth, as we will see in chapter 3, reveals a subtler understanding of James as not simply the paragon of refinement but an interrogator of its limits, not only a target but an ally. The freedom of appropriation can produce some stunning, very American, anomalies: Roth, perennial “bad boy” and the preeminent Jewish novelist of his generation, enters American high culture by appropriating James as crucial inspiration in his career-long assault on all that James is conventionally said to embody—the cultural and moral prestige of refinement, good taste, seriousness, maturity. Although famous as the impeccable Master, James also deflated mastery, relishing bewilderment and vulnerability and abjectness. He flaunts these qualities in his autobiography A Small Boy and Others, in the New York chapters of The American Scene, his account of his return to his native land, and in some of his most important fictional characters (Lambert Strether, for example), as part of his strategic resistance to the rigidity of bourgeois character structure, its anal deformations, as Theodor Adorno called them.5 James shares this assault on propriety with a number of his canonical predecessors, among them Melville and Whitman. Above all, as we will shortly see, Emerson is the key figure in revising the dominant models of rationality and maturity bequeathed by the Enlightenment. And Roth, I will argue, discerns that his antinomian predecessors’ dismantling of rationalist, disciplinary models of knowledge, of success, and of selfhood is a countercultural endowment that he is free to use for his own purposes. Indeed, the title of his first novel, Letting Go, can be read as a neat summary of what the countermodel proposes as the goal of the dismantling—a relaxing of the constricted psyche. Now my prior formulation of Roth’s long march toward Jamesian preeminence can be more precisely revised: Like James before him, Roth seeks to fashion a creative immaturity. Henry James turns out to be a nexus where two of the major themes of this book—cosmopolitan appropriation and immaturity—intersect. Both James and Roth disrupt

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

modes of static, anchored isolation: the proprietary (culture as elitist, private preserve) and propriety (the self as defended and fortified). It is not accidental that the Czech and Polish authors who are among those Roth most admires—Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz—are powerful theorists of immaturity. They fashion it, each in their own way, as a stance against the coerced conformity of totalitarian oppression. Immaturity, then, is always political for the Eastern Europeans I will discuss in chapter 2. It is true as well of the predecessor I most consistently invoke—Emerson. Initially this may be puzzling, for Emerson is conventionally regarded as the faintly embarrassing guardian of our most cherished American isms: optimism, exceptionalism, individualism, ahistoricism. But reading Emerson through Roth brings “Experience” and “Circles” center stage, the speaker of inadmissible, uncensored truth whom Nietzsche revered and described as containing “so many ‘possibilities’ that even virtue achieves esprit in his writings” (qtd. Buell 239). While the Emerson to be found here is a prophet of possibility, this is admittedly not the whole of Emerson—missing, for instance, are the metaphysician and transcendentalist. But I conduct my appropriation in an Emersonian spirit: I treat him neither as a static touchstone for the ages nor as only embedded in his historical moment. Instead, he emerges as a fluid, metamorphic, living presence who thrives on the antagonistic energy released when one “abstain[s] from dogmatism and recognize[s] all the opposite negations, between which, as walls,” one’s “being is swung” (Essays 426). Two of the great enemies of ideology and of bourgeois pieties, Emerson and Nietzsche share with Roth a love of agonistic combat and rude truth. Given Emerson’s elusiveness it is not surprising that he has a complex relation to the Enlightenment’s twin pillars, maturity and reason. His renovation of both terms prompted a new way to think about immaturity. In 1784 Kant published his famous “motto” for the Enlightenment— “have the courage to use your own understanding!” Only by thinking for himself does man emerge from his “self-incurred immaturity” (58). (The gender exclusiveness of this will soon concern us.) “It is so easy to

9

10

|

INTRODUCTION

be immature,” remarks Kant; all one need do is rely on the panoply of authorities that surround one—starting with the books one reads. But maturity requires, says Kant, that one always “look within oneself . . . for the supreme touchstone of truth” (qtd. Schmidt 17). This reverence for the spiritual sanctity of the individual’s inwardness and his access to intuitive truth unattached to empirical evidence is one reason Kantian idealism was welcomed in 1830s New England intellectual culture, inspiring the transcendentalism of Emerson and his circle. Kantianism was also a philosophical ground of romanticism, that other liberating European current of thought then intoxicating American intellectuals. Both movements granted the mind’s shaping powers of perception an unprecedented dignity, a respect for inwardness that developed out of an earlier foundational tenet of Enlightenment, Descartes’s cogito—“I think therefore I am”—and its bracketing of custom and tradition. The self as the product of its own making has been called Descartes’s “truly novel emphasis” and explains what made his ideas so “naturally” adaptable to the United States, as Tocqueville famously noted (Smith 23).6 In the 1830s Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a key mediator of Romantic and Kantian thought to New England, and he borrowed his crucial distinction—between reason and understanding—from Kant. “I think it a philosophy itself,” an excited Emerson said of this distinction, for it furnished an alternative to what was stultifying in Descartes—his deadening reduction of reason to mathematical certainty and calculation, a reduction that entailed the stark divorce of reason from emotions. In light of Coleridge’s Kantian terms, this impoverishing dimension of the Enlightenment legacy could be averted. Now Cartesian reason was resituated as closer to understanding, which Emerson in an 1834 letter characterized as a “wrinkled calculator” who “toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues” and relies on the “expedient” and “customary.” In contrast, reason, according to an enthusiastic Emerson in the same letter, “is the highest faculty of the soul—what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision. . . . The thoughts of youth & ‘first thoughts’ are the revelations of Reason” (Letters 133). And poetry is one of the things that resides in the province of reason.7

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

Most striking is Emerson’s paradoxical formulation that reason “never reasons,” for it embodies the impatience of youth, what in “SelfReliance” he extols as the “nonchalance” of a boy—“independent, irresponsible”—who “cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests” (Essays 261). “Whim” is the brusque boy’s angle of vision, his zigzagging moodiness in tune with nature’s incessant, incorrigible movements. Emerson’s audacious reversal of Enlightenment reason and maturity also feeds on the anarchy and spontaneity latent and untapped in Kant’s demand to shed reliance on authority and to think for oneself.8 Emersonian anti-Enlightenment reason forms the basis of the exhilarating, defiant immaturity that Emerson calls self-reliance. His undoing and remaking of reason and maturity can be regarded as a model for what Emerson means by abstaining from dogmatism so as to recognize “all the opposite negations.” For the self, as if an extension of nature, is split by volatility and ambivalence; and Emerson invites us to stay attuned to this by inhabiting contradiction and perversity. Both will, in his word, give “edge” to one’s feelings: “your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines” (262). Reason “never reasons” and maturity is never mature: in this book, maturity suffers a reversal analogous to Cartesian rationalism when exposed to Emersonian reason. The premise of Kant’s notion of Enlightenment, maturity, is emptied of its project of mastery and remade in effect as immaturity, disrespectful of dogma, authority, bounded form—all that insulates one from a more open, less censored engagement with the moment. Rather than goal centered, immaturity is ludic, seeking not to dominate but to enter the turbulent flow of what Emerson calls “counteraction” and Roth will call “counterlife”: rhythms that prosper in the refractory domain of the aesthetic, if we allow that term to include visceral ways of being in the world. Immaturity, as it appears in canonical American fiction, to speak broadly and schematically, comes in two main varieties: one is the insouciant impurity and mobility—disguise, cross-dressing, interracial friendship—sponsored by Huck Finn, who, ultimately, “lights out for

11

12

|

INTRODUCTION

the territory” (thus inaugurating a legacy of misogynist escapism that is particularly visible in famous mid-1950s fiction, as we will note below). The other is the antiescapist imperative of immersion that Isabel Archer enacts. She is brought low from heights of self-idealization. Toward the end she descends, in effect, from vertical to horizontal—she imagines with pleasure relaxing into a “cool bath in a marble tank,” ready “to cease utterly, to give it all up,” and soon slips into Ralph’s deathbed to comfort him (Portrait 465).9 Isabel’s loosening of executive will plays havoc with the undertaking of projects—what preoccupied the younger and more rigid Isabel—and this relaxing captured Roth’s imagination from early on. But not until his late fiction does Isabel’s lowering most powerfully exert itself. Roth has described his most flagrant performance of (Huck Finnish) immaturity, Portnoy’s Complaint, as very much of its historical moment—the “demythologizing decade” of the sixties when presumably sacrosanct and permanent institutions and values toppled, rousing the “most propagandized generation of young people in American history”—his own “silent” generation—into a collective shattering of pieties (RMO 77). Having established in the early sixties his “maturity credentials” with two “indisputably earnest” novels, Roth felt that now the time was right to start burnishing his immaturity credentials (RMO 104). To continue his self-confessed “pursuit of the unserious” begun in Portnoy, Roth wrote a book about baseball, The Great American Novel (1973), whose hero calls Melville and Hawthorne “my precursors, my kinsmen,” saluting their earlier endeavors to take the measure of America. By then Roth was, in his words, feeling an “increased responsiveness to and respect for, what is unsocialized” in himself, as the “infectious volatility” of the era “was inspiring feats of self-transformation and selfexperimentation in virtually everyone” (RMO 76, 80, 66). This mix of elements—the iconoclasm and fluidity of the times, which invited reinvention and exploration of the unserious and unsocialized within, and the turn to canonical predecessors for inspiration—together would form the seedbed of a rich immaturity from which would emerge his finest works in the ensuing decades. Roth was hardly the only person in the late sixties who “worked long

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

and hard and diligently” to be “frivolous.” Immaturity was by then a pronounced cultural style. Recall Abbie Hoffman writing in Woodstock Nation prior to his conspiracy trial in 1968: When I appear in the Chicago courtroom, I want to be tried not because I support the National Liberation Front—which I do—but because I have long hair. Not because I support the black liberation movement, but because I smoke dope. Not because I am against a capitalist system, but because I think property eats shit. Not because I’m against corporate liberalism, but because I think people should do whatever the fuck they want. And not because I am trying to organize the working class, but because I think kids should kill their parents. Finally, I want to be tried for having a good time and not being serious. (Qtd. Mattessich 6–7)

This spirited enunciation of a flagrantly immature politics offers a series of truculent either-or assertions that seem to empty out the political of anything but defiance. Hoffman’s kind of immaturity, aggressively antidialectical, is amusing but more sterile than creative. So is the immaturity of the fictional Dean Moriarty of Kerouac’s On the Road. The ultimate hipster and “holy goofball,” virtually a Platonic model of midcentury American bad boy immaturity, Dean is oblivious to norms or routine, feasts insatiably on what comes his way, relies on his prodigious energy to get the maximum kicks. Driving back and forth the length of the United States whenever, Dean’s anarchic, improvised life of spontaneity mocks obligation and is at first exhilarating to his friend Sal. In his openness and immunity to inhibition, Dean’s consciousness is rapturous, pure, sensuous receptivity. But, finally, for all his energy, an air of futility surrounds him, exhausting Sal and everyone else. The painful ending, when a desperate Dean arrives impromptu in New York to see his old friend only to be turned away, expresses Kerouac’s own unease with Dean’s empty freedom. Immaturity as valiant protest against spiritual torpor is not confined to hipster hedonism. Bourgeois intellectuals are also drawn to it. Consider Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who late in Herzog (1964) recalls that a navy psychiatrist during the war diagnosed him as “unusually immature. I knew that, but professional confirmation caused me deep anguish. In anguish I was not immature” (323). A part-time professor and

13

14

|

INTRODUCTION

intellectual historian in a malaise over his second divorce, Herzog is a self-confessed failure. But his refusal of ambition and success has been in part an effort to be free to cultivate his own thoughts and feelings independent of the postwar Left’s romantic contempt for modernity. Their attitude is full of “the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness” (75). A playful, impulsive immaturity disavows such numbing grimness and becomes an alternative to the resentment and suffocating sense of “grievance” that for Herzog afflicts his generation, one that has made its motto not God is Dead but “Death is God”—the belief that “nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power” (290). Fragile, vulnerable, guileless, cuckolded, charming, and childish, Herzog is a specialist “in spiritual self-awareness” who tries “to keep alive primordial feelings of a certain sort.” If this sounds fuzzy, it is; vagueness is one of Herzog’s failings: he is a man “of strong impulses, even faith, but lacked clear ideas” (307, 93). With limited success, he seeks to make his life a sustained escape from the fashionable negativity that has conquered “the powers of soul” by “substituting hate for love”; “this hatred of the present has not been well understood,” he notes (163; Bellow, It All Adds Up 113) . Seized by the need to explain and clarify his and the century’s spiritual crisis, Herzog writes letters to the living and the dead; “to God,” for instance, “he jotted several lines”). He has tried, to quote a famous passage, “bucking such trends . . . obstinately, defiantly, blindly but without sufficient courage or intelligence, tried to be a marvelous Herzog, a Herzog who, perhaps clumsily, tried to live out marvelous qualities, vaguely comprehended” (325, 93). Whitman is one of his inspirations in becoming “marvelous”: just as he recalls the diagnosis of immaturity from 1942, he describes himself as having reached an “unusually free condition of mind. ‘In paths untrodden,’ as Walt Whitman marvelously put it, ‘Escaped from the life that exhibits itself . . .’ Oh, that’s a plague, the life that exhibits itself, a real plague! . . . an overflow of narcissism” (323–24). Herzog, a descendant of Isabel Archer’s immersive immaturity, is weary of the “bonebreaking burden of selfhood and self-development,” and has contempt for therapeutic upward mobility. He anticipates Roth’s Whitmanic

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

Mickey Sabbath, a more bodily rendering of Herzog’s erudite and fragile dissent from adulthood (93). What would a creative immaturity look like? Herzog believes “there are human qualities still to be discovered” once man can cease taking “revenge upon himself, a revenge of derision, contempt, denial of transcendence” (164). It has been said, reports Herzog, that “in man, selfawareness has been accompanied” by a loss of “natural powers, of a price paid by instinct, by sacrifices of freedom, impulse” (163). What Herzog seems to be summarizing without saying so is the Frankfurt school thesis of the dialectic of Enlightenment. It exposes Enlightenment’s self-defeating character: the self, to preserve itself, must curtail its range of affect and sacrifice its impulsive vitality (a logic that also fascinates Roth, as we will see). One of the authors of the thesis was Theodor Adorno. Although Adorno’s notorious negativity would make him a sworn enemy of Herzog’s, they actually share an interest in escaping the dialectic of Enlightenment by cultivating immaturity. Like Emerson’s rewriting of Enlightenment maturity as the insouciance of “self-reliance,” the dialectic of Adorno and his collaborator, Max Horkheimer, is an effort to elude the calculating and ascetic consciousness bequeathed by the Cartesian and (in their emphasis) Baconian reduction of reason to the instrument of abstraction.10 For Adorno, maturity is purchased at a grim cost to the self: to dominate external nature, which is the imperative of scientific progress as Bacon described it, demands that one subjugate one’s inner nature. Maturity denies inner nature for the sake of self-preservation. The impulse to be free from self-incurred maturity (to invert Kant) creates the temptation to relax vigilance by tapping the “uncurtailed primal element” in the self and releasing unharnessed affect—openness, vulnerability, the spontaneous impulses of curiosity and imitation (all part of what Adorno calls the “mimetic heritage” of childhood). To reconnect to mimetic impulse is to enliven thinking: “Audacious reflection,” remarks Adorno, “wants to give thought what cautious reflection drove out of it—naivete” (Notes 2:219). The ban on naïveté, like the taboo on the mimetic in general, fortifies “normality,” which, for Adorno, is part of the “sickness proper to the epoch.” Adorno’s project is to abolish neither the Enlightenment nor maturity but to “release

15

16

|

INTRODUCTION

[them] from entanglement in blind domination,” from a pinched psychic economy of survival and scarcity (Adorno and Horkheimer xvi). In this release “amazement is rediscovered . . . an astonishment at individual things . . . emphatically opposed to the power of convention, which is a dingy lens in front of the eye” (Notes 2:219).11 Particularity and detail blossom. According to Jürgen Habermas, who was Adorno’s student, his former professor “never accepted the alternatives of remaining childlike or growing up; he wanted neither to put up with infantilism nor to pay the cost of a rigid defense against regression, even were it to be ‘in the service of the I.’ In him there remained vivid a stratum of early experiences and attitudes . . . in free communication with his thought—opened, as it were, to his intellect. The vulnerability of the senses and the unshockability of a thought free from anxiety belonged together” (104). Refusing the bad options of the helpless infant or the insulated adult, Adorno elected a vulnerability that became a capacious receptivity to experience that quickened thought. In the next chapter, I will call this mode a “mature immaturity” (borrowing a phrase of Gombrowicz’s). The “uncurtailed primal element” in Adorno flourished, as Habermas observes, thanks to the protective devotions of his wife. This last point raises the question of immaturity’s relation to gender. Is it solely a male privilege? On the Road suggests it is. Recall the venting of rage against Dean by his circle of betrayed women; they have been footing the bill, long overdue, for his immaturity. And they will never be reimbursed; there is no reciprocity in this arrangement. The same could be said of Herzog’s numerous affairs with women who variously indulge him. The obligations imposed upon the maternal figure by children and husbands tacitly demand that she remain fixed and reliable and responsible in presiding over the household and marriage. This demand seems socially to stigmatize deviance from this role in ways not analogous to the male escape from responsible fatherhood and adulthood. There are of course a number of women writers who depict and make use of a “mature immaturity”—Sylvia Plath, Jane Bowles, and Carson McCullers come to mind as midcentury instances, and Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston are some earlier ones. But these earlier figures seem

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

exceptions that prove a rule: that the burden of maturity on women seems far heavier than on men, as if the punishments meted out to nineteenth-century characters who flee the maternal—Emma Bovary and her American counterpart Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening— remain cautionary. The fact that Plath, Bowles, and McCullers are at least as famous for their lavishly self-destructive lives as for their work suggests that immaturity may be a subject that brings life and art into dangerous proximity for women writers. Bluntly put, for most women writers, as for black authors, the pressure of exemplarity makes anarchic immaturity too costly.12 For instance, by the end of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) we witness a turn away from immaturity, after immersion in riot and chaos, in the protagonist’s (incipient) achievement of responsibility implied in the title’s second word. And Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) subtly avoids immaturity even as it abolishes maturity and embraces the Freak as normality’s secret sharer. Yet it does so not by warring against the family and the domestic but by reconfiguring them as part of a larger loosening of conventional gender roles. Ironically, if flagrant immaturity is an unaffordable luxury for American women writers of this era, historically women have been confined to the political and legal status of the immature.13 To open up the matter of gender and Roth is of course to enter a notorious minefield. Perhaps only Norman Mailer has so provoked readers. Many regard Roth’s work not as liberating but as testament to his numbingly repetitive, misogynistic, priapic obsessions, charges reprised upon the publication of The Dying Animal in 2001. If Roth will always remain beyond the pale for some, that may be the risk of creating indelible portraits of men embodying and suffering the deformities of American masculinity. The crux of the gender question for Roth concerns aesthetic distance: does Roth possess it, or do his characters’ obsessions override any aesthetic control he might exert? I believe Roth usually maintains aesthetic detachment; how else, for instance, could he compose the unsparing portrait of a compulsive misogynist in The Dying Animal or of the increasingly shrill and lost boy Alexander Portnoy? These pitch-perfect renderings of first-person narrative voice bespeak an artist whose detachment frees him to inhabit a fictive psyche

17

18

|

INTRODUCTION

while simultaneously exposing it, immersing the reader in disturbing human complexity. But when his hysterical, narcissistic males are not imprisoning women in fantasies that attenuate their humanity, Roth accords female figures a depth of characterization; those I have in mind include Lucy Nelson, the protagonist of his underrated second novel When She Was Good, Michelle Cowan in Sabbath’s Theater, and Faunia Farley and Delphine Roux, two risky figures from The Human Stain. Yet risk of offense attends Roth’s depictions of either gender because he abjures the very notion of “balance” as a threat to the freedom from “appropriateness” that literature perhaps uniquely offers (RMO 195). Aesthetic distance becomes the condition whereby literature can traffic in the unbalanced, that realm where the uncensored, the anxious and exaggerated come to imaginative life, typically under pressure of a character’s analytic scrutiny, sometimes self-generated (ignited often by rage, frustration, desperation), or supplied by the older Nathan Zuckerman’s interpretive, empathic narration, or elicited in the back-andforth in a therapist’s office. Male lust, in Roth’s work, is the most immediate vehicle for shattering the constraints of balance; but male sexuality operates, ultimately, as much metaphorically as literally, a metaphor for how any of us find ways to keep at bay, however temporarily, the obligations to be appropriate, moderate, agreeable, virtuous.14 But if the chaos of desire keeps these idealized expectations (precariously) at some remove, sexuality in Roth does not achieve the status, say, of a Lawrentian redemptive wholeness joining man and woman. Neither erotic nor lyrical, but raw and explicit, sexuality in Roth’s portrayal as easily enslaves and isolates as emancipates. Finally, Roth is most interested not in sexuality per se but the larger power of which it is part—the “unsocialized,” to use his word quoted earlier, that zone of the psyche where the capacity for resistance and renewal resides. And this release of the unsocialized—“the full play of all things”—is “why the novel matters,” to borrow Lawrence’s phrases (533, 538). The genre’s special preserve is its avid and intimate access to private life, the distinctive domain of Roth’s unbalanced fiction, which mimics the anarchy of the uncensored in artifacts of relentless verbal energy. The force of the unsocialized and the force of literature are symbiotic, and both release us from bondage to the correct and approved. The

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

ensuing liberation is always hedged; more than once it occurs at the eleventh hour as death looms (as the examples of Silk and Sabbath suggest). In suggesting the “absurdities” that would ensue if one confused a “balanced portrayal” with a novel, Roth imagines an irate reader’s letter: “ ‘Dear Fyodor Dostoevsky—All the students in our school . . . feel that you have been unfair to us. Do you call Raskolnikov a balanced portrayal of students as we know them? Of Russian students? Of poor students? What about those of us who have never murdered anyone, who do our homework every night?’ . . . Dear Vladimir Nabokov—‘The girls in our school . . . and so on.’ ” Most readers and writers are drawn to literature, Roth remarked in the early 1960s, to discover “all that is beyond simple moral categorizing” (RMO 199, 195).15 Roth accounts for at least part of the notoriety and derision that came his way after Portnoy as a failure of his readership to respect or understand aesthetic distance; Portnoy, a “novel in the guise of a confession,” was read as a “confession in the guise of a novel” (RMO 254).16 A famous quip of the era was the novelist Jacqueline Susann’s remark on the Tonight Show that she’d like to meet Roth but didn’t want to shake his hand. But this ignores what Roth considers the “fundamental novelistic gift”—the “art of impersonation” (123). The confusion of life and art is one of his consuming subjects, as all his readers know, one he renders with ever more audacity and inventiveness—witness The Facts, Operation Shylock, and The Plot Against America. The first is Roth’s memoir that he addresses to a fictional character who appends to it a long critique; the last two are novels with protagonists named “Philip Roth” (indeed Shylock has two such characters!). Because he deliberately blurs the line between art and life, Roth is often accused of encouraging readers to abolish aesthetic distance and confuse him with his characters.17 Actually, his aim is more complicated—he imperils the boundary to expose how permeable it is and always has been. Reality and artifice routinely interpenetrate in the presentation of self in everyday life, as Erasmus, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Erving Goffman, Henry James, and other keen social analysts have been telling us for centuries. To grasp our inherent theatricality is valuable to the extent that it sparks critical scrutiny of the inveterate American reflex to look through artifice to the (alleged) real, as if the two are neatly separable

19

20

|

INTRODUCTION

and antithetical. Roth, in short, seeks to challenge the cherished and abiding myth of the natural. This inquiry, which he extends to a number of our unexamined certitudes, is initiated in The Counterlife, culminates in The Human Stain, and defines one of the central concerns of his late fiction. If issues of gender lead to questions about Roth’s complex sense of the relation between art and life, the latter matter evolves into another distinctive dimension of Roth’s oeuvre—that his art creates a world unto itself, as if one vast twenty-volume novel. “It’s all one big book you write anyway,” he has remarked (RMO 138). After all, eight novels (including two trilogies) are presided over by Nathan Zuckerman, three by David Kepesh, and two are narrated by Philip Roth. This recursiveness creates a degree of hermeticism, a condition that has another source as well—in the running commentary his work provides on its own writing. Perhaps more than any writer, Roth supplies the terms of his own evaluation (Henry James did as well but confined the effort to his prefaces). The novels are stuffed with critical discourse that analyzes characters and texts within the book we are reading. A novelist who dies is eulogized with a review of his best-known novel; an autobiographer (Roth himself, in The Facts) is subjected to scathing dissection of his memoirs by one of his characters; writers receive detailed critiques of their lives and work from relatives and friends; Roth’s own ambitions for a Nobel Prize are mentioned and mocked; fans offer glowing, trite encomiums. Alvin Pepler, having tracked down Zuckerman in a deli, thanks him “For everything. The humor. The compassion. The understanding of our deepest drives. For all you have reminded us about the human comedy” (ZU 192); enemies supply nasty diatribes; even a character’s therapist writes him up in a case study. In “Creativity: The Narcissism of the Artist,” published in a psychoanalytic journal, Peter Tarnopol reads that he “acted out his anger in his relationships with women, reducing all women to masturbatory sexual objects” (MLM 242).18 In effect, Roth has been conducting a career long preemptive strike, telling his readers before they form their own opinions or hear it from the critics that he (or Zuckerman or Tarnopol or Kepesh) is, among other things, overly clever, self-absorbed, emotionally vacant, compulsively manipulative, and, of course, a disaster with women.

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

Because many of his characters are hyperself-conscious, hyperarticulate, and given to harangues and monologues, readers complain that Roth is too busy explaining himself, is more an expounding essayist than a self-effacing novelist. And there is a measure of justice in these charges. Faced with the avalanche of assessment and interpretation Roth creates, a critic is tempted to imagine that everything that might be said has already been said. One needs to step back and see that his very desire to control the terms of discussion is also what Roth is exposing as futile, a desperate bid for armored insulation. In Roth’s work control and mastery are simultaneously being enacted and unraveling; impulse and counterimpulse are at war, a crucial source of his work’s pathos and of thematic and formal tension. The considerable achievement of The Facts is to distill this tension into thirty pages of “merciless self-evisceration,” as we will see at the close of this chapter. In this study I take seriously Roth’s sense of his oeuvre as one vast text with each book to be read within and against the larger whole. My analyses focus on particular texts (I offer sustained readings of several) while being alert to the weave of internal connections generated by Roth’s interlocking novels. To appreciate this dimension of Roth—the collocation whose rich inwardness has deepened over time as the oeuvre grows—one needs to hear how works, early and late, sometimes seemingly disparate ones, comment on each other prospectively and retrospectively. By my ear, the late nineties novels don’t group together as the publisher (probably with Roth’s blessings) says they do. That is, I set Sabbath’s Theater into conversation with The Human Stain even though the latter text is the last volume of the so-called “American trilogy,” of which Sabbath is not part. And unlike many, I do not regard the first volume of that trilogy, American Pastoral, as the summit of his career. As chapter 3 argues, the novel’s rigorously immanent stance creates remarkable realist power but also militates against the imaginative audacity that marks Roth’s finest work. Instead of proceeding exhaustively, a task bound to be laborious given the size of the oeuvre, I will work in the free spirit of appropriation described above by Henry James. For this practice encourages what Adorno, in describing how best to read Hegel, calls “relaxation of consciousness.” Since “letting go” is a prime Rothian imperative, such relaxation seems

21

22

|

INTRODUCTION

apt. As an approach to a text, relaxation in effect makes a virtue of not knowing one’s place. It means not warding off associations but opening the understanding to them. Hegel can be read only associatively. At every point one must try to admit as many possibilities for what is meant, as many connections to something else, as may arise. A major part of the work of the productive imagination consists in this. At least a portion of the energy without which one can no more read than one can [read] without relaxation is used to shake off the automatic discipline that is required for pure concentration on the object and that thereby easily misses the object. (Adorno, Hegel 141–42)

Adorno describes a guiding ideal to be sought, if not achieved, in reading a novelist whose relentless world-making resounds with the play of echo and overlap. Making connections is always a finite and selective process. Although a number of linkages will be made, others will not; pertinent but familiar ones—Kafka, Céline, Lenny Bruce for example—will be passed over in the interest of making fresher ones. The second half of this chapter will offer a reading whose bookends are Roth’s two major forays into historical reinvention, The Plot Against America (2004) and the Anne Frank section of The Ghost Writer (1979), the astringent deidealizations of the earlier work challenging the idealizations of the latter. Other juxtapositions will generate additional tension, for the relatively affirmative and sunny quality of this recent novel attracts into its orbit a number of darker countertexts that collide with it in mutual illumination. The Plot Against America is a nightmarish historical fantasia of the United States veering into fascism in 1940. It acquires much of its power from being a thought experiment grounded in fact: what might have happened had the late thirties currents of nativist anti-Semitism embodied in Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and others surged into a tidal wave lifting Charles Lindbergh, American hero, isolationist, and Nazi-sympathizer, into the White House. The possibility was not entirely remote; at a 1942 America First Committee rally in Madison

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

Square Garden a crowd of twenty-five thousand erupted into cries of “Our next president!” when Lindbergh appeared to address them. The Plot Against America has Lindy running as a staunch isolationist on the Republican ticket, easily beating FDR in 1940 and ushering in an ominous eclipse of democracy in a United States now ruled by an antiSemitic white supremacist. He envisions America as a fortress of “national unity,” a stronghold—founded on what the actual Lindbergh called “our most priceless possession,” “our inheritance of European blood”—against “dilution by foreign races” (14). Although pogroms erupt throughout the nation, fascism does not take root here; the plot against America fails. The novel’s events are refracted through the bewildered, frightened eyes of none other than seven-year-old Philip Roth, who recounts as an adult those days of “perpetual fear” when he was a third grader in Newark and his family was turned upside down, caught in the very eye of the gathering fascist storm. His parents, Herman and Bessie, last seen lovingly memorialized by their son in two nonfiction volumes (though nonfiction is always a relative term with Roth), The Facts and Patrimony, are here reborn as the novel’s major protagonists, both near-heroic in their resistance to Lindbergh and in their frantic efforts to keep family and community intact. Even this summary will suggest to longtime readers of Roth’s fiction that The Plot Against America includes a dimension as startling as its historical fantasia—the tender evocation of the strength of parental love and family loyalty. Until now, these themes have been rare, perhaps unprecedented, in his fiction, as if in devising the plot against America, he was also plotting against—trying to resolve—a defining preoccupation of his oeuvre: “the eternal problem of attachment.” This is the mocking phrase of the aging rake David Kepesh in The Dying Animal (105). His acidic monologue would seem to be the polar opposite of The Plot Against America, as it depicts the Rothian isolato (to borrow Melville’s term) in extremis, a man who “took a hammer to domestic life and those who stand watch over it,” and who has dedicated his life to “imposing as few constraints on [his] independence as possible” (112). He is a man condemned by his own son as terminally immature—“you’ve never been serious for a day in your life” (89). A cultivated libertine, a PBS culture critic and occasional professor,

23

24

|

INTRODUCTION

Kepesh has found in the sexual act a “purity” of “revenge,” however fleeting, against life’s frustrations and defeats. But as he improbably finds himself obsessed in his sixties with one of his young ex-student lovers, this purity grows increasingly elusive and Kepesh begins to doubt that even his image of “pure fucking”—between dogs—is all that pure. Even among dogs there are “in canine form, these crazy distortions of longing, doting, possessiveness, even love,” all elements that Kepesh uneasily labels “the extraneous.” If sex is revenge against life and “also the revenge on death,” it is, as well, Kepesh implies, revenge against love, that maximally messy threat to self-sovereignty. With despair and awe at love’s persistence, Kepesh calls it “this need. This derangement. Will it never stop?” (105–6). Roth protagonists have been grappling with forms of that question since the spectatorial aesthete and bachelor graduate student Gabe Wallach ended Letting Go (1962) pondering the “larger hook” he was on. By the end of his complaint, Portnoy has thrown in the towel and gone to the dogs: “Maybe the wisest solution for me is to live on all fours! . . . and leave the rightings of wrongs and the fathering of families to the upright creatures!” (305). The monastic, aging Zuckerman of the second trilogy over which he presides—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain—has pretty well solved the “the eternal problem of attachment”—not least because he is a self-described “helpless eunuch” after prostate surgery. He is a far cry from the manic satyr of his first trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson), where women abounded. But Zuckerman tended to reduce them to pliable and temporary helpmates, as he was preoccupied by a physical and emotional ordeal triggered in part by his guilt and rage over his scandalous literary success. The aging Zuckerman grows attached to those who help him spin out narrative—Murray his old English teacher (I Married a Communist) and the memory of his friend Coleman Silk. Only Coleman’s doomed affair with Faunia and the long-running adulterous union of Sabbath and Drenka, replete with its own intricately arranged infidelities, could be said creatively to address, if not resolve, the problem of attachment. In sum, until The Plot Against America an essay titled “Attachment in the Novels of Philip Roth” would make for very quick reading indeed.

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

Yet his current breakthrough is hedged—it depends not on the realist rendering of adult relations but on the freedom of a fable involving a magical return to childhood. More specifically, it requires an ominous fantasy of isolationism to unfreeze the balked impulse to connect, just as it takes the shock of his lover’s perhaps imminent death to thaw Kepesh and lead him to the brink of repudiating his aversion to commitment. Though far from a major work, The Plot Against America is arguably Roth’s most emotionally reconciled novel and offers an opportunity to step back and survey the tumultuous Rothian world whence it comes. To assist us in learning the ground rules, I will enlist the help of the younger David Kepesh, as Roth portrayed him in The Professor of Desire (1977), when he was still questing after endless desire. The novel concludes at the summer cottage of Kepesh and his girlfriend Claire as they are hosting the visit of Kepesh’s widowed father. He has brought along a new friend, a fellow widower, Mr. Barbatnik, a Holocaust survivor. After he tells his harrowing tale of survival, Kepesh asks him what he wanted to be before the war started: Probably because of the strength of his arms and the size of his hands I expect to hear him say a carpenter or mason. In America he drove a taxi for over twenty years. “A human being,” Barbatnik answers, “someone that could see and understand how we lived, and what was real, and not to flatter myself with lies. This was always my ambition from when I was a small child. In the beginning I was like everybody, a good cheder boy. But I personally, with my own hands, liberated myself from all that at sixteen years. My father could have killed me, but I absolutely did not want to be a fanatic. To believe in what doesn’t exist, no, that wasn’t for me.” (257)

Instead, Mr. Barbatnik adamantly insists on thinking for himself. His “ambition” to be a “human being” is at once simple and momentous; it acquires resonance in Roth’s deft counterpoint: to Barbatnik’s calm detachment he juxtaposes Kepesh’s compulsive pursuit of the phantom of realized desire, a quest that greedily devours present contentment. Just as soon as he starts cherishing the haven he has created with his lover, Kepesh wonders “how much longer before I’ve had a bellyful

25

26

|

INTRODUCTION

of wholesome innocence.” “Only an interim. Never to know anything durable” are the phrases haunting him as the apt epitaph of his life (251). Refusing all fanaticism, Mr. Barbatnik’s lucidity coincides with Kant’s Enlightenment imperative—“have the courage to use your own understanding!” Such sober rationalism is of course hardly the keynote of Philip Roth’s fiction and makes Barbatnik a rare figure in a fictive world populated with compulsives and transgressors embracing excess of every stripe. Roth’s work draws energy, wit, and outrage from his assault upon maturity and self-control; we have noted his effort to be “frivolous” and to subvert his “considerable investment in seriousness.” But rather than repudiating maturity and seriousness, Roth redefines them, reflecting his stake in reinvention as the basis both of art and of selfhood. This is a commitment to unsettlement that includes keeping open the status of human being as an ambition to be achieved. “We are writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time” (RMO 161). Authors write novels in ways analogous to how we compose our selves, creating “counterlives” and “counterconfessionals” that, like a boxer’s counterpunching, are modes of survival in a world where we are never immune from being “blindsided by the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything.” This line from The Human Stain (336) sums up the raw force of risk and chance ceaselessly proliferating, the “real” about which Mr. Barbatnik is so lucid. In Roth’s universe the real is not an entity, but instead is what frustrates our control; and characters and readers, like the author, must be skeptical of all that purports to be solid and serene. They are asked to engage in supple negotiation of the hazardous, the unfinished and flowing, a letting go of mastery the better to honor history’s recalcitrance—the animating condition of Roth’s turbulent, plastic world. The imperative of flexibility responds to a demand not for conventional seriousness but for being “game,” a key word in The Human Stain. Amid life’s and art’s messy makings and unmakings, fanaticism purifies experience, arrests it in structures and identities of stubborn rigidity and inertia. The resulting purification (what Roth will come to call “pastoral”) deadens, as Zuckerman explains at the end of I Married A Communist, “because everything that lives is in movement. Because

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

purity is petrifaction. Because purity is a lie” (318). The ironic twist in Roth’s vision, the turn of the screw that increases tension and pathos, is that the very antidote to fanaticism—the supple self-reliance implicit in Mr. Barbatnik’s liberating insistence on thinking for oneself—easily freezes into another form of fanaticism, that of malignant autonomy (Kepesh of The Dying Animal, for instance). This is the pure product of a society whose root ideology renders the illusion of self-sovereignty as natural as the air we breathe. The Human Stain depicts a man trapped in the antinomy of radical individualism; he seizes it as his birthright, but his defiant willfulness blinds him to limits, to the simple fact that “history claims everybody, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not” (“The Story” 12). Roth made this remark in a recent essay about The Plot Against America, but it derives from a passage in The Human Stain that sums up the unraveling of Coleman Silk’s “life as a created self.” The history the novel describes is the 1990s era of political correctness, a national “purity binge” that culminates in the outbreak of sanctimony surrounding the Clinton/Lewinsky sex scandal; the censorious atmosphere indirectly triggers Silk’s downfall and eventual remaking. The Plot Against America stages the eruption of an earlier, more sinister “purity binge,” a national contagion of fanaticism. The novel makes the political doctrine of isolationism the corollary of human selfishness and indifference. The analogy between political and personal isolation is evident when Philip asks his father what Lindbergh’s campaign mantra, “an independent destiny for America,” means. “It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for” (84). What gives pathos to the last sentence of Mr. Roth’s answer and saves it from being merely a patriotic bromide is that the action of the novel explodes his poignant assumption that America possesses an immutable single unity of meaning and purpose. The iron loyalty Herman Roth expects and embodies within his family and the sense of decency and democratic fair play that he takes to define America will be violated not only by external political events but by violent conflict within his own family. His younger son, Philip, watches him “fall apart” and eventually recover, but with his optimism

27

28

|

INTRODUCTION

and energy now tempered. Yet in seeing his father “powerless to stop the unforeseen”—the advent of Lindbergh and the fear that swamps Newark—Philip comes to grasp that history is an ambush, and that this is an inadmissible truth in a country dedicated to mastery. “The unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as ‘History,’ harmless history. . . . The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic” (114). Tossed in the tidal wave of history, Philip eventually loses his “juvenile purity.” In Roth’s world the loss of purity is a fortunate fall from illusion; in Lindbergh’s America purity is foundational. Indeed, his policy of isolation, like his racism, depends on erecting inviolable borders to keep out the alien. But these fanaticisms are only the most obvious ones; less visible because naturalized as quintessentially American is the purism of rugged individualism. Lindbergh of course is one of the actual mythic icons of that creed—the “adored Lone Eagle, boyish and unspoiled . . . the legendary American man’s man who gets the impossible done by relying solely on himself ” (29–30). Here, it might be said, Coleman Silk meets his paragon, as did Ronald Reagan. The Reaganesque spell Lindbergh’s presence casts resides in his power to evacuate history and exist in a mythic yesteryear, creating a national fantasy that Roth, here as elsewhere, links to a pastoral purity. In a brilliant stroke, he makes the enforcement of pastoral a government project designed to secure Lindbergh’s vision of “an independent destiny for America.” Because this independence requires not only impermeable borders facing out but the pastoralizing of American Jews within, Roth brings into being a new federal agency, the “Office of American Absorption,” that inaugurates the “Just Folks” volunteer work program. Its announced purpose is to “implement programs ‘encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society’ ” (84–85). Sacrificial assimilation is the prime mechanism of control in this garrison state. The novel traces the destructive workings of isolationism on an individual level, a condition Roth conceives as one of stunted responsibility and which he will also link to the asocial ethos of what Lindbergh lauds

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

as “entrepreneurial individualism.” The image of this stunted absence of humanity is the stump, what cousin Alvin’s leg is reduced to by a war wound (determined to fight Hitler, Alvin has enlisted in the Canadian army). Having once been the “family’s conscience” in his refusal to abide Lindbergh’s abandonment of European Jews, Alvin returns home an embittered remnant, indifferent to the war on fascism: “Alvin didn’t care one bit. No longer was he burdened by concern for anyone’s suffering other than his own” (158). Careful to avoid turning his novel into a neatly dichotomized morality play, Roth makes his stunted specimens of humanity as various as America; they come in different ethnicities and modalities and include the metaphorical and the literal. Besides Alvin, there is “Little Robert, the living stump,” a legless man who begs outside Mr. Roth’s insurance office and chimes out ball scores in his “deep, declamatory voice” (128). He haunts young Philip, especially after he sees his father and Robert exchange greetings, saying each other’s name. Witnessing this brief moment of intersubjectivity enlarges Philip’s understanding of what counts as human. Mr. Roth’s easygoing greeting of the legless Robert epitomizes for Philip his father’s capacity for an openness and adhesiveness rare in a world populated by isolationists of all sorts, from the Lindberghs to the “exalted egoism of . . . conspicuously dynamic Jews” like Uncle Monty. This cutthroat fruit man—one of the “brutal entrepreneurial machers” strictly “in business for themselves”—feels no compunction about firing his brother Herman for taking off from work to help rescue a neighbor (123). Herman and Bess Roth are markedly different temperaments, indefatigable in their concern for others in the face of widening catastrophe. They form the novel’s moral center. Its ethical core is relayed to Philip in an epiphany as he watches his mother finally break down in tears: “there was nothing for me to do except watch until the weeping had drained her to the dregs, whereupon my whole idea of her underwent a startling change: my mother was a fellow creature. I was shocked by the revelation, and too young to comprehend that there was the strongest attachment of all” (340). Attachment simply by virtue of being a fellow creature—not an American, not a Jew, not a Gentile—is set forth as a

29

30

|

INTRODUCTION

universalism that acts as a moral counterweight to an aggressively nationalist American political culture deformed by isolationism both in foreign policy and in the greedy self-absorption of capitalist acquisitiveness. Not only is seven-year-old Philip “too young to comprehend” the claims of a “fellow creature” (as opposed to someone called mother or father or cousin), he attempts to rid himself of all obligations. His desired form of stump-hood is to become an orphan. Twice Philip resolves to leave home. Unlike his brother Sandy, who as a publicist for the Just Folks program is “riding the crest of history,” Philip seeks nearoblivion: “I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan” (233). Later he says he wants “to start out fresh as a boy nobody knew” (346). These Huck Finn impulses of a seven-year-old to vanish and reinvent himself outside history—to recover, somehow, “a child’s peacetime illusion of an eternal, unhounded now”—partake of the national fantasy of pastoral regression back into the “womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory” (C 323). But each time Philip is thwarted in his effort to exit history and attachment. Responsibility comes to him in the shape of hapless Seldon Wishnow, Philip’s nerdy, needy schoolmate and shadowy secret sharer who lives downstairs from him with his dying father and harried mother. After many plot twists, Seldon, now an orphan, winds up in the twin bed next to Philip, just where the one-legged Alvin had slept. Seldon is nursed back to strength with Philip’s devoted help. But now, as he says in the novel’s final words, “there was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.” Here yet another living stump, but one outside the family circle, bids for Philip’s human fellowship, and this time he accepts. The intimacy between human stump and human prosthesis becomes the redemptive image of attachment amid a world of loss, a world most of whose members seem to have signed the contract of mutual indifference. Philip is indeed his parents’ son. All this benign stagecraft is, to put it mildly, quite atypical of Roth. He is after all the writer about whom John Leonard said with only some

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

understatement that he finds it “preposterous and maybe even evil that anyone should try to be, pretend to be, remember having been, or believe in the marginal possibility of one day being happy” (9). Even while The Plot Against America is not a happy book, it does exude a certain mellowness of reconciliation. He has written a fable and hence is less obligated to the demands of realism and of his own propensity for outrage. And also typical of a fable, the book fails to build narrative momentum (in part because in its last quarter it resorts, newsreel fashion, to summaries of national events as the crisis plays itself out) and its characters tend to remain static, as if dwarfed by the imaginative daring of Roth’s rewriting of history. “Maybe now that I’m nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free,” remarks David Kepesh late in The Dying Animal (106). Perhaps this provides a clue as to what impelled his creator to surmount a nightmare of isolation by reasserting the claims of attachment. One rendering of this nightmare is The Plot Against America of course, but another is The Dying Animal. Near the novel’s end, Kepesh, having sculpted his life with the conviction that “he who forms a tie is lost,” faces the nagging persistence of what he would like to dismiss as “these crazy distortions of longing, doting, possessiveness, even of love” (106). Soon after, he is blindsided by the sudden reappearance in his life of his former lover, who is herself still reeling from a recent diagnosis that she may be mortally ill. When she eventually calls from the hospital asking to see him, Kepesh feels compelled to go. He breaks off a conversation with the unidentified person to whom he has delivered his monologue. But just as Kepesh is about to depart, his interlocutor at last speaks: “Don’t.” What? “Don’t go.” But I must. Someone has to be with her. “She’ll find someone.” She’s in terror. I’m going. “Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you’re finished.” (156)

“Finished” ends the novel; left open is whether Kepesh will heed these words and stay put. Or will Kepesh, who, like Coleman Silk in The

31

32

|

INTRODUCTION

Human Stain, years ago “took a hammer to domestic life,” at this late hour take a hammer to the life of Teflon bachelorhood he has so meticulously fashioned for himself? (112). The trap that ensnares Kepesh is the same one facing Coleman Silk, the trap of mastery: “there is the drive to master things, and the thing that is mastered is oneself ” (HS 273). This is Roth’s version of the “dialectic of Enlightenment.” Imprisonment in one’s means of survival lurks within “the drama that underlies America’s story”—the upping and leaving to “become a new being.” Roth’s alertness to the paradox that complicates this “story” forms the basis of what might be called the plot against radical American individualism in his late work, an ideology whose undoing he locates within its very constitution. One reason The Human Stain is one of Roth’s most venturesome books (along with Sabbath’s Theater) is that Coleman Silk manages, late in life, to smash his way at least partially out of the trap, to rewrite the plot; with the help of his “game” companion Faunia he takes a hammer to his masterful selfhood. We can only guess if Kepesh will perform a similar rewrite—that is, turn “you’re finished” from meaning “doomed” to meaning something like “completed” or fulfilled in solidarity with a fellow creature. Such a turn would fulfill Rilke’s famous imperative, “You must change your life,” which are the words Kepesh quotes to conclude his first incarnation, in The Breast (1972). That this possibility of change survives the bleakness of The Dying Animal testifies to Roth’s gift for eluding any refuge of purism, be it sentimentality or despair, the better to nurture his respect for what in The Plot Against America bruises and strengthens his seven-year-old imagined self—the force of the “unforeseen.”19 The Plot Against America is not Roth’s first rewriting of history. More audacious, and riskier to his audience’s sensitivities, is the section in The Ghost Writer where Nathan reinvents Anne Frank as a postwar Holocaust survivor in America. She shares with young Philip the orphan fantasy to “start out fresh” as someone “nobody knew.” Anne gives herself the “sweet name” of Amy Bellette and becomes a comely, “selfintoxicated” but gifted writer at little Athena College in the Berkshires, where she is the adoring student and would-be lover of a venerable Jewish American author E. I. Lonoff.

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

In this earlier work of 1979, the rewriting of history moves in a direction opposite The Plot Against America—not as homage to parents but as revenge against them. In The Ghost Writer the orphan fantasy is not simply of a new start but of violent severance from origin as the spur of creative liberation. This circulates in the imagination of two ambitious young writers—both Amy and another Lonoff adorer, the earnest twenty-three-year-old Nathan Zuckerman. On a visit to the fastidious master’s home, Nathan meets and becomes smitten with Amy, soon wrapping her in his impious reinvention. In conjuring up a new Amy, he expresses what his idealizations repress—his own need to be at odds with all authority figures, including the one he worships, Lonoff. For Nathan’s Anne, becoming Amy means that Anne must keep the secret of her survival from her beloved father, who is the family’s sole known survivor and who has arranged for her diary to be published. And becoming Amy allows Anne to become a spectator of her ascent to historical and literary immortality via the Diary’s international success: “It is too late to be alive now. I am a saint,” she tells Lonoff (150). Some readers of The Ghost Writer have been offended by Roth’s irreverent use of Anne Frank (A. Cooper 185). Offense of course is Roth’s aim, a way to push against the limits of “good taste” without apology and enact what his protagonist also insists upon—a “refusal to justify” himself to his elders (GW 110).20 The propulsive rage that feeds creativity is what Amy Bellette/Anne Frank and their creator Nathan come to discover. Reflecting on her “responsibility . . . to the dead,” Amy realizes that an ax was what she really wanted, not print. On the stairwell at the end of her corridor in the dormitory there was a large ax with an enormous red handle, to be used in case of fire. But what about in case of hatred— what about murderous rage? She . . . never found the nerve to take it down from the wall. Besides, once she had it in her hands, whose head would she split open? Whom could she kill in Stockbridge to avenge the ashes and the skulls? If she even could wield it. No, what she had been given to wield was Het Achterhuis, van Anne Frank [the original Dutch title—The House Behind—of her diary]. And to draw blood with it she would have to vanish again into another achterhuis, this time fatherless and all on her own. (147)

33

34

|

INTRODUCTION

This is the logic by which she justifies keeping her secret, and it affirms her “seething passion to ‘come back’ as the avenging ghost” honoring the dead (148). “ ‘For them,’ she cried, ‘for them,’ meaning all who had met the fate that she had been spared and was now pretending to” (147). But she soon realizes that her sense of the nobility of her obligation is only the idealized public face that hides what really thirsts for vengeance—this “half-flayed thing” that is herself: “I felt flayed. I felt as though the skin had been peeled away from half my body” (152). She continues: “it wasn’t corpses I was avenging—it was the motherless, fatherless, sisterless, venge-filled, hate-filled, shame-filled, half-flayed, seething thing. It was myself” (153). Here we glimpse the brutally stunted stump of self that is Anne Frank as survivor, a self too hideous to appear in public, a “my” that must become an Amy. So Anne becomes Amy Bellette, the “sweet name” that, she says, hides “from hatred”—of others and of herself. Amy is the “avenging ghost” not simply of those who perished but of her own dead Anne Frank self. Her quest for vengeance is also a quest for “Christian” tears, pity, and love (“to be loved mercilessly and endlessly, just the way I’d been debased”), but this need is as insatiable as the hunger for revenge: “I will always be this half-flayed thing. I will never be young. I will never be kind or at peace or in love, and I will hate them all my life” (153). Her effort to seduce Lonoff is rooted less in love than the desire to (at least as his wife sees it) “bewitch him, to break through the scrupulosity and the wisdom and the virtue into his imagination, and there, as Anne Frank, to become E.I. Lonoff ’s femme fatale” (155). But Amy’s effort is also more daring and critical—to stain the purity of Lonoff ’s small, perfected art, to become in effect his counterself— flayed and furious—embodying everything that is not “fussiness” and “fastidiousness,” everything that might escape his “relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self” (74, 56). Here are the lineaments of Nathan/Roth’s own artistic creed. The Ghost Writer’s excursion into historical fantasy, the reinvention of Anne Frank, is pointedly unsettling, for at its heart is a self reduced to a suffering “thing”—a stump of rage. But whereas the human stumps of The Plot Against America are usually images of sterile, selfish autonomy, this “half-flayed thing” that survives as Amy Bellette is a figure of creative

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

power, making her diary into an ax of vengeance. To borrow the words of Richard Wright’s exhilarated response to reading the satirical shafts of Mencken, Anne/Amy is “slashing with [her] pen, consumed with hate”; she uses “words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club” (237). “And to draw blood” with her ax of a book—to maximize the shock of its integrity and gravity—it must be a work of posthumous witness; so she will turn the ax against her past and disappear into Amy and America, remaining “fatherless and all on her own” (147). Shorn of even epidermal protection, a raw wound of anger, selforphaned Anne is a figure of artistic autonomy in extremis. Hers is an autonomy the opposite of sterile; stripped of defenses, she is responsive to everything around her. She is both an avenging ghost and a ghost writer—her diary a permeable medium or open channel for other voices to pass through and leave their imprints. And Anne/Amy is also a medium through which Zuckerman expresses his own rage, channeling it at least twice. The “cruelty” that the anguished Anne practices on Otto Frank, “her perfect father, now sixty,” echoes the seduction Amy practices on the staid Lonoff; he becomes her “Dad-da” and she his “little girl” urging him to abandon his wife. This echoes the cruelty that Nathan practices on his own perfect father (133, 118–19). The conjunction of rage and creativity reaffirms what Roth has always understood—art’s capacity for thriving on anger and wounds: “a writer needs his poisons” (RMO 139). The most powerful writing in The Facts (1988) dwells precisely on the anger that can propel art. Late in the book, Roth disturbs the carefully manicured pastoral rendering of his life story as an adored and adoring Jewish son. He brings on Nathan Zuckerman to launch a “countertext” to peel away the bland surface of this “nice-guy” memoir and to expose himself to a “really merciless self-evisceration” (F 172, 170, 185). As if still identifying with the Anne Frank he had returned to life nearly a decade earlier, Roth submits, in effect, to his own flaying. He has Nathan tear apart the self-exculpating representation Roth has styled of his relations with Josie, his first wife. As if still identifying with Lonoff, the immaculate purist, Roth stages his own encounter with an avenging ghost. For Josie was his femme fatale, a woman of “insanely destructive possessiveness” whom Roth met while he was in graduate

35

36

|

INTRODUCTION

school, married in 1959, and separated from in 1963 (171). Nathan homes in on Roth’s protective self-portrayal as Josie’s “victim,” a stance that allows him to see himself as innocent of anger until his fateful meeting with the femme fatale (and alcoholic) who embodies “everything the Jewish haven was not” (174). Only in 1968, with her death in a car accident, did years of strife and steep alimony end. “I felt absolutely nothing about her dying at thirty-nine other than immeasurable relief,” Roth states (153). “Where’s the anger?” Nathan asks his creator. “I doubt that Josie would have come into your life at all had the anger not been there already. I could be wrong, but you’ve got to prove it, to convince me that early on you didn’t find something insipid about the Jewish experience as you knew it, insipid about the middle class as you experienced it, insipid about marriage and domesticity, insipid even about love” (171). Opening up all that Roth has been carefully hiding—his “dark, or unruly, or untamed side” as he describes it here, and elsewhere as his “anarchic and unsocialized” impulses—Nathan strips Roth of the mask of innocence (F 169; RMO 66). Not only did you not turn away from Josie, Zuckerman tells him, but after an “initial flirtation” you pursued her, “needing that battle, that attack, that kick, needing that wound, your source of invigorating anger, the energizer for the defiance . . . Because the things that wear you down are the things that nurture you and your talent” (174). But Nathan is just warming up. “Everything you are today you owe to an alcoholic shiksa. Tell them that next time you’re at Yeshiva. You won’t get out alive” (178). Just kidding? Well yes . . . and no. Nathan’s zinger prefaces an earnest request: “I think you must give Josie her real name . . . because she comes so close, in an elemental way, to being a peer. . . . Josie is the real antagonist, the true counterself, and shouldn’t be relegated like the other women to a kind of allegorical role. She’s as real as you are . . . and nobody else in this book is” (179). Seeking justice, or at least subjectivity, for Josie, Nathan implores Roth: “honor with her name . . . the psychopath through whose agency you achieved the freedom from being a pleasing, analytic, lovingly manipulative good boy who would never have been much of a writer” (180). And Nathan specifies how she liberated Roth. All the other women in your

R O T H A N TA G O N I S T E S

|

life “call forth your maturity, challenge and coerce it, and you deliver, you meet that challenge easily. With Josie, however, you regress, shamelessly and dangerously. She undoes you where ordinarily you do up everyone else . . . and when you’ve done them up you leave them. But she undoes you and undoes you and undoes you. . . . Josie is the heroine you were looking for” (180). Freedom from being the good boy, freedom to discover and sublimate in art the anarchic and unsocialized parts of the self—all this requires an undoing of “maturity,” a wounding of the responsible adult self that risks leaving one a “half-flayed thing” (GW 153). This process of letting go or undoing defenses defines Roth’s creative economy, and Nathan demands respect for its prime catalyst. Josie the counterself and doomed fatal woman performs, like Amy Bellette, the inestimably valuable service of violating “the scrupulosity and the wisdom and the virtue.” Roth witnessed firsthand a compelling act of maturity undergoing a creative undoing in his friendship with the painter Philip Guston in the 1970s. As chapter 7 discusses, Guston was in the throes of a creative about-face, unwilling any longer to “mask the fear of revealing oneself ” and unflinching in exposing what he called “badness” and “rawness” (qtd. Mayer 170). The perversities of Roth’s creative economy are unique to the novelist but the desire to open up censored, renounced impulses sparks the antinomian energies of American literature beginning with the canonical nineteenth-century authors. In their extremity of imagination and radical skepticism they were the inaugural modernists, as D. H. Lawrence was perhaps the first to recognize. So the American grain in which I set Roth turns out already to be bursting its bonds, turning toward international modernism and vice versa, an expansiveness that the novelist’s own cosmopolitanism insists upon. If one had to articulate the broadly held aesthetic convictions among American and European and Eastern European modernists, one would do well to borrow the words of Roth from four decades ago. In one of the very few programmatic statements he has made about the power of literature, he wrote that it frees us “from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling,” allowing “both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not

37

38

|

INTRODUCTION

always available in day-to-day conduct; or, if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal, or advisable. . . . Ceasing for a while to be upright citizens, we drop into another layer of consciousness. And this expansion of moral consciousness, this exploration of moral fantasy, is of considerable value to a man and to society” (RMO 195). Immaturity, among other things, is a vehicle for the aesthetic exploration of moral fantasy. The next chapter’s cross-cultural genealogy will chart some of the ways in which authors, responding to different political and social pressures and to literary precedent, find in immaturity a way to outwit the stifling prohibitions of upright civic and ethical virtue.

2 Immaturity: A Genealogy

In the game as played by those literary aristocrats, the rules are somehow completely reversed. —Henry Zuckerman, in The Counterlife

W

e can start engaging the particular literary inheritances and affiliations involved in Roth’s investment in what he calls the “unserious” and “frivolous” and “irresponsible”—what I have been calling immaturity— by entering more fully the scene of Nathan’s funeral in The Counterlife. The funeral elicited, as we have seen, an improvised countereulogy on the sidewalk. The sidewalk countereulogist has an audience of one— Nathan’s brother Henry; he too is disgusted by the synagogue eulogy but for reasons quite different. Henry has just heard Nathan’s most notorious novel, Carnovsky, praised as a “ ‘classic of irresponsible exaggeration,’ as though irresponsibility, in the right literary form, were a virtuous achievement” (C 222). Henry regards as an outrage precisely what the eulogist, Nathan’s publisher, salutes—Zuckerman’s “plundering his own history like a thief,” bravely daring to “undress and vandalize a Jewish family in public.” The eulogist, remarks Henry to himself, hasn’t even paused to consider the pain Nathan had inflicted on his family. Full of “pieties about saying the unsayable!” and Nathan’s incomparable “daring,” the publisher never “had to pay a goddamn dime” for the consequences: Nathan’s “murdering [his] parents under the guise of art” (208). Henry, who hears the eulogy as a reproach to his own mature, responsible life as a prosperous suburban dentist with a wife and three

40

|

CHAPTER 2

children, wonders to himself: “What’s so wrong with a straightforward life? Is duty necessarily such a cheap idea, is the decent and dutiful really shit, while ‘irresponsible exaggeration’ produces ‘classics’?” (222). While satirizing both Henry’s bewildered, overwrought reaction and the smug glibness of the editor’s eulogy (which, as readers will recall, turns out to have been written in advance by Nathan!), Roth also wants us to take seriously what Henry in his anger has grasped acutely—that somewhere there exists a domain of so-called literary aristocrats who have completely reversed the rules of the game. This “society of intellectual elite” finds “being a good son and husband” a “big joke” and upholds the aesthetic and ethical values broadly understood as underwriting international literary modernism (222). In a nostalgic moment, Nathan had once summarized his intellectual inheritance by invoking a few authors and watchwords that comprised the template for how he (and his creator) would attempt to live the literary life in postwar America: “Stand alone. Like Swift and Dostoevsky and Joyce and Flaubert. Obstinate independence. Unshakable defiance. Perilous freedom. No, in thunder,” the last phrase Melville’s famous praise of Hawthorne (AL 488). To the uninitiated, the Henrys, the negativity of this rude cognoscenti would seem perverse in its exuberant mockery of bourgeois pieties. And simple facts: “two times two makes four is an insufferable thing,” says Portnoy’s predecessor in flamboyant first-person self-exposure, Dostoyevsky’s underground man. And he adds: “Two times two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing” (Notes 24). The rules are indeed somehow completely reversed. Engaging and elaborating this international genealogy will occupy the long midsection of this chapter, while the first part will look at Roth’s own stormy career, in particular his pugnacious engagement with immaturity as both modernist inheritance and native literary legacy. The third and concluding section will set Roth in the context of the cultural apotheosis of immaturity in the American 1960s. “Failed responsibility has been the leitmotif of my career with the Jews . . . [they] found me guilty of the crime of ‘informing,’ ” Roth remarks in Operation Shylock (377). He is referring to the first time he brought the wrath

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

of his Jewish elders down upon his head. Not long after his story “Defender of the Faith” appeared in the New Yorker in 1959, the AntiDefamation League publically chastised Roth for betraying “his” people, for being bad for the Jews, and by 1962 he found himself “excommunicated” (his word) from the Jewish establishment (F 127). And the worst— Portnoy’s Complaint—was yet to come. It ignited a conflagration in 1969. No less a luminary than the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism and pioneering Zionist Gershom Scholem called it “the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying” after the novel was quickly translated into German (qtd. A. Cooper 110). It takes the entire first Zuckerman trilogy and part of The Counterlife to work through hilariously the outrage Portnoy provoked among readers and the counterrage and penitence, mocking and sincere, this provoked in Roth. The last volume of the trilogy, The Anatomy Lesson, chronicles Zuckerman’s long-running grievance against Milton Appel, based on the critic Irving Howe, whose dislike of Portnoy’s “vulgarity” and negative reconsideration of the novelist in 1972 became influential (RMO 139). Zuckerman finds the critique particularly galling because Appel had been a “leading wunderkind of the Jewish generation” of New York intellectuals preceding his own (AL 476). Indeed, Zuckerman treasures an early essay of Appel’s on the battle (one generation before) between immigrant Jewish fathers and sons. Appel describes himself as feeling alienated and suffering, a response Zuckerman found overwrought. He compared it to his own great good fortune being raised as a “postimmigrant Jew”—a “ticket out of the ghetto into a wholly unconstrained world of thought” (480). Zuckerman was most impressed by Appel’s unpredictable turn to Yiddish literature. Rather than flee, in his brooding alienation, to the Anglophilic precincts of high culture and never look back, Appel translated Yiddish stories and published them in an anthology, a book, in Zuckerman’s admiring words, that took a “stand against the secret shame of the assimilationists . . . against the snobbish condescension of those famous departments of English literature from whose impeccable Christian ranks” Jews had been excluded (481). But over the years Appel became a mandarin moralist, now not only sternly scolding Zuckerman for books of insufficient virtue but in effect giving aid and

41

42

|

CHAPTER 2

comfort to the Henry Zuckermans—“vindicated in their judgment of Zuckerman by the cultivated verdict of the unassailable Appel” (483). Howe’s main complaint was that Roth was “an exceedingly joyless writer,” seething with “ressentiment,” debilities stemming above all from a “thin personal culture,” bereft of nourishing literary tradition (Howe, “Roth” 79–81). This judgment is strangely perverse given that from the start Roth has been a deeply literary, even bookish writer; his protagonists are often novelists or professors who wrestle with the question “what are bookish people to do with all the great prose they read,” as the professor of desire David Kepesh puts it (PD 173). Neil Klugman, the protagonist of Roth’s debut novella Goodbye, Columbus is a librarian, and the story he narrates resolves itself into a bildungsroman of discovering the literary vocation. And Gabe Wallach of Letting Go is writing a thesis on Henry James. The Human Stain is a novel so intricately allusive it recalls Ellison’s Invisible Man, a work that receives an homage in Roth’s book.1 Both novels are inventive riffings upon classic American authors, including Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson. And the act of creative affiliation itself reverberates as the very subject of The Human Stain, where a man decides to reconfigure his ancestry in ways analogous to how a writer chooses his literary allegiances. So when Howe says that a great writer (i.e., not Roth) absorbs a tradition into his work as a “way to both release and control his creative energies . . . more important, a vital culture talks back, so to say, within the writer’s work, holding in check his eccentricities,” he quite inadvertently describes Roth’s orchestration of voices, his ingenious acts of appropriation (Howe 79).2 But far from holding his eccentricities in check, Roth turned them into sources of experimental energy and renewal. In The Counterlife, for instance, he turns upside down and inside out the comfortable conventions governing the realist novel. Roth releases what those conventions suppress—the self ’s volatility and resistance to legibility—by immersing the reader in a narrative continually upended by abrupt reversals of “counterliving.” Operation Shylock (1993), where the two main characters are named Philip Roth (one the famous American novelist, the other an impersonator on the loose in Israel), presents an even more manic and vertiginous mix of real and unreal countermoves. The book

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

is subtitled a “confession”; the word suggests veracity, but the author continually shakes our confidence in extending assent to it. A prior release of anarchic energy occurs over the course of the first Zuckerman trilogy: Nathan tries to enact (with varying degrees of conviction) a panoply of atonements most of which only serve further to incriminate him, be it martyring himself to the (Henry) Jamesian “religion of art,” or marrying the still living Anne Frank (“Oh, marry me, Anne Frank, exonerate me before my outraged elders”), or becoming a gynecologist (not only would it “bestow a new perspective on an old obsession,” but also “he owed it to women after Carnovsky”), or enrolling in medical school (“he’d take a residency in leprosy and be forgiven by all. Like Nathan Leopold”) (GW 170; AL 577, 587). He describes his offense in writing Carnovsky as the “culture crime of desublimation.” His mistake was to make a “Jewish comedy out of genital life” instead of obeying those whom he mockingly imagines as urging him to “sublimate, my child, sublimate, like the physicists who gave us the atomic bomb” (AL 567). Roth’s sly irony here asks us implicitly to see him as a Dionysian liberator (or at least transgressive Jewish comedian) opposing a culture dedicated to death, a suggestion that reads as a parodic sketch of the two best-known 1950s arguments for desublimation, the “abolition of repression,” and the “resurrection of the body”—Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death. “The satirist of the clamoring body” is how the sidewalk eulogist had described Zuckerman. And twenty years later, in Everyman (2006), the suffering protagonist, sober and not at all satirical, is nevertheless a recognizable Rothian figure in his resistance to sublimations (at least for most of the novel). He muses that “should he ever write an autobiography, he’d call it The Life and Death of a Male Body” (52) and he locates his “philosophical niche” not in God or any other comforting abstraction but in the elemental facts that there are “only our bodies” and their decay. The ritual that attempts to efface this last fact has itself a materiality upon which the novel dilates. Acts of burial are central from the start of Everyman, and we read about not only the emotional but also the physical labor of getting the dead buried: watching “his father’s disappearance from the world inch by inch,” the protagonist finds that it takes six men nearly an hour to fill the grave with a four foot mound of

43

44

|

CHAPTER 2

dirt, some of which, thanks to a strong wind, he ends up tasting. Later we are treated to a tutorial on the back breaking art of grave digging; invited to expound, a cemetery worker meticulously instructs him on the intricacies of shovels and grids and edgers and the seven-foot spike called a probe. “ ‘With most folks, the less they know the better,’ ” the digger remarks, but the unnamed protagonist is ravenous for detail; Everyman is preoccupied with the consequences incurred from the rude betrayals by our own flesh (173). In the novelist’s most raucous rendering of the corporeal, Sabbath’s Theater (1995), the Whitmanic Mickey Sabbath—“hankering, gross, mystical, nude,” to borrow Whitman’s words—rages against, even as he craves, the dying of the light. The novel ends with his anguished and amazed realization that, despite his best efforts to do so, “he could not fucking die” (451). Described by Morris Dickstein as “the ugliest, most deliberately offensive book” of Roth’s career, Sabbath seemed in part motivated by a desire to escape the warm embrace of respectability (thanks to awards and his own loving family memoirs) that had threatened to turn the novelist into the “beloved elder statesman of Jewish and American letters” (Dickstein 225). A low-rent noble savage, Sabbath is an aging relic of the 1960s, when he won brief notoriety for his avant-garde puppetry. He is a “squat man . . . obviously very sexed-up and lawless, who didn’t give a damn what anybody thought” (ST 123). Slovenly and broke, he is not above begging in the subways while quoting from King Lear and mocking his own literary grandiosity. Sabbath takes pleasure in knowing “that he’d never had to please.” On one level Sabbath (dubbed “Sabbath Antagonistes”) embodies a fantasy of artistic freedom as defiance of the demand for “responsibility.” Roth has always associated this demand with the sententious “virtue” “racket” typically run by guilt-mongering authority figures, often literary critics or rabbis for whom “virtue is the goal . . . rightness is all” (PD 139; AL 567). “Unstained, undegenerate, unselfish, loyal, responsible, high-minded,” Milton Appel is “the Charles Atlas of Goodness!” a man who has never “taken a mental position that isn’t a moral judgment” (AL 573). Preoccupied with “Loftier Values,” Appel is “frozen stiff ” in his “militant grown-upism” (573), as if immune to change. To melt icy adulthood, relaxing its repressions and moralizing, has been

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

among Roth’s prime efforts, and it has produced twists and paradoxes that he has elaborated richly over the years. Late sixties and seventies Roth is full of young men whose frontal assaults on maturity freeze them in adolescence. By the end of his complaint, Alex Portnoy speaks of his “endless childhood! Which I won’t relinquish—or which won’t relinquish me!” (306). And the clueless author Peter Tarnopol is repeatedly told “be a man for a change” in My Life as a Man (1974), the novel that introduces Nathan Zuckerman. He begins life in the Roth universe as a character in some of Tarnopol’s short fiction; an exquisitely snobbish English major circa 1950, Nathan is a parody of an adult as captious aesthete.3 He filters experience through the vigilant analytical eye of “an elitist already reading Allen Tate on the sublime and Dr. Leavis on Matthew Arnold with his breakfast cereal.” As a budding New Critic, he submits his lover’s erotic epistolary fervor to unsparing close reading. “If Sharon had a fault as a student of carnality” it was that her prose was marred “by a too facile hyperbole” and betrayed “a rather primitive level of imagination. However, as for the passion itself, he had no criticism to make” (MLM 40, 24).4 As often occurs in Roth, aestheticism ignites its opposite—a violent craving for reality, “the lowest of genres—life itself.” This animates Zuckerman’s redemptive quest to become a doctor and incites Tarnopol to bloody his wife’s nose (AL 509). Tarnopol proceeds to pummel her after she presents him with her humiliating story of their marriage: “ ‘A real beating, Maureen! The real thing at last!’ . . . And the pages of the story were strewn around us, most of them bloodied too. The real thing—and it was marvelous. I was loving it” (MLM 280). Only with The Counterlife, which posits man’s “natural being” as the impersonating “skill itself,” does Roth resolve in his own work the apparently impervious American fixation on authenticity that is grounded in the dichotomy between the real (the virtuous) and the artful (the stained and corrupt). Not coincidentally, this resolution in The Counterlife is the one time when Zuckerman is happily married and is about to become a father. A measure of the precariousness of this lurch into “maturity” and domesticity is that we read of it only after learning Nathan has died since writing it. By the second Zuckerman trilogy (1997–2000) the problem of male American adulthood—in dread of attachment, oscillating between the

45

46

|

CHAPTER 2

polarities of frozen “grown-upism” or its parodic inversions—acquires larger resonance. Schtick recedes, history enters. Roth examines the midcentury soil in which white, middle-class, heterosexual masculinity grows to (culturally mandated) maturity, a soil cultivated by the still seductive ideologies of pastoral and of possessive individualism. They sponsor what Roth calls the “utopia of isolation,” both geographical and emotional, as if the stoic, bachelor killers that D. H. Lawrence regarded as native to classic American literature since Fenimore Cooper were still on the loose (IMC 315). The aging Nathan Zuckerman, living alone in the Berkshires, seems to have embraced this venerable solitude by the end of I Married a Communist (the trilogy’s second volume) despite the warning to “beware” that his old teacher Murray Ringold proffers near the end of the novel (“All that’s missing from your monkhood are the bells to call you to meditation”) (320). One of the book’s pointed ironies is that this “utopia of the shack in the woods . . . an impregnable solitude”—the emblem of Thoreauvian integrity and of the elusive “real thing” that lures the protagonists of the trilogy’s first two volumes—is not simply an American preoccupation but is shared by the alleged collectivist antidote to such bleak autonomy—Communism (315). I Married a Communist evokes the siren calls of masculine individualism, leftist politics, and high modernism, a nexus worth pausing to examine. The novel is a meticulous and (largely) sympathetic portrayal of the enthrallingly sentimental, noble, and tawdry populist political culture of the forties and early fifties American Left, a world where a treasured birthday present might be an album of Russian songs performed by the Soviet Army Chorus and Band, where Nathan gets gooseflesh when he attends a Henry Wallace rally, and rank and file are “three little words that thrilled” him (42). I Married a Communist depicts several sites of utopic isolation: one is the shack in Zinc Town in northwest Jersey where Nathan’s political idol, the devout Party member and radio personality Ira Ringold lives “close to the bone . . . life in the raw” (50). Another is the stark single room in a boarding house in East Chicago, Indiana, where Ira’s “army mentor” and Party instructor, the steelworker Johnny O’Day, resides (50). Nathan, who as a high school kid loved to visit the shack and worshipped Ira’s fervent commitment to helping the “little guy” against the pitiless traps of capitalism, has an

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

epiphany when later, as a college student, he visits O’Day to help hand out leaflets at a Gary steel mill: Now I understood what Ira was doing in the shack. Now I understood the seed of the shack and the stripping back of everything—the aesthetic of the ugly . . . that left a man lonely and monastic but also unencumbered, free to be bold and unflinching and purposeful. What O’Day’s room represented was discipline. . . . There was a firm impression to be taken from this room: the connection between freedom and discipline, the connection between freedom and loneliness, the connection between freedom and punishment. O’Day’s room, his cell, was the spiritual essence of Ira’s shack. And what was the spiritual essence of O’Day’s room? I’d find that out some years later when, on a visit to Zurich, I located the house with the commemorative tablet bearing Lenin’s name . . . [and] the anchorite room where the revolutionary founder of Bolshevism had lived in exile for a year and a half. (227–28)

Reflecting, as an aging man, on the above epiphany and its disclosure of an improbable lineage (Ringold, O’Day, and Lenin) that now includes him, Nathan understands both his own attraction to the freedom of ascetic discipline and the connection between loneliness and art making. For the novel’s third utopian space of isolation is Nathan’s austere bachelor’s quarters in the Berkshires, a house and writing cell that is an “upgraded replica,” he calls it, of Ira’s ramshackle “beloved retreat” (71). That house is the birthplace of each volume in the trilogy. Back in college, Johnny O’Day’s compelling Party discipline was eclipsed by a rival in rigor—literary modernism. Nathan soon found modernism’s demands more stimulating, for it asked more than virtue and obedience. Hence, as we shall see, he turns from Johnny O’Day to another partisan of uncompromising commitment who lodges in a single room—the aesthete Leo Glucksman. Looking back, Nathan ponders: “How did this idea of Ira’s shack maintain its hold so long”? And he answers that in the “palliative of the primitive hut”—which itself has a history that precedes America, for it was Rousseau’s before it was Thoreau’s—“are the earliest images” of “independence and freedom” that “do live obstinately on,” the province of no single ideology and in perennial rebuke of both Communism and

47

48

|

CHAPTER 2

capitalism for regulating the individual in the name of liberating him (72). Nathan also understands the lure of the “utopia of isolation” as an aspect of aging; the motif of the elderly man going into the woods, he notes, abounds in “Eastern philosophical thought” (72). The serenity this brings—a new note in Roth’s art—blossoms in the novel’s final and moving pages of farewell to Murray and transcendence of the earthly as Nathan gazes into the heavens at the stars. The coda of this study will discuss this turn to impersonal nature that avoids the mystifications of pastoral. That Nathan turns an isolated sanctuary into a fertile enclave of literary creation vindicates, if not entirely, his severe decision to be a “man by himself in the woods” (320). But “vindicates” implies too judgmental a stance, one that is slightly at odds with the spirit of Roth’s inquiry. He challenges rather than judges, carefully avoiding any dichotomizing that might simplify the deepest investments of his major characters, investments in which strength and its opposite are entwined. Thus he enacts the “critical thinking” extolled by Murray, Nathan’s model of intellectual clarity and former high school English teacher.5 For instance, in the trilogy, Roth will exert pressure on Nathan’s embrace of the isolato by means of ironic juxtaposition rather than explicit statement (his isolation brings him, for example, in The Human Stain, into uncomfortable proximity to another man of the woods, the homicidal Les Farley). But perhaps it is only fitting that a hermit is at the narrative helm of the trilogy. For its volumes anatomize the subjectivity of protagonists who are frozen in desolate autonomy, in asocial forms of American selfhood sponsored by the nation’s foundational rite of passage—“upping and leaving” (HS 334). Roth locates the impasse of self-sovereignty within its very constitution—“the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive [to up and leave] demands” ends up constricting when not devouring the self (HS 342). Much of his late work is engaged by the effort to devise alternatives to this dead-end quandary: counterliving, abandonment, letting go, being game. These are some of the terms I will invoke to describe modes of being that cultivate some degree of intimacy or intersubjectivity and thereby escape the repressions built into the frozen “grown-upism” of maturity and its adolescent opposites. An early bit of advice will echo for four decades: “Let it flow, let it

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

go,” counsels the wise old bohemian uncle in Roth’s first novel, Letting Go (1962), warning his writer nephew not to grow up to be a “canner of experience” (82). “To let the brute out” describes a comparable urge to forsake the lonely discipline of self-sufficiency for a receptivity and openness that is enacted late in life by Coleman Silk in The Human Stain and more extravagantly by Mickey Sabbath (HS 32). In these late novels Roth’s Nietzschean skepticism will extend to a pagan revaluation of Judeo-Christian values. Roth’s challenge to bedrock American assumptions turns what seems a merely adolescent commitment to badness (“to be bad—and to enjoy it!” Portnoy tells his mother, “is what makes men of us boys”) into his own version of a Melvillean “No, in thunder,” a moral vision and an epistemology that, in novel after novel, find their raison d’être in exposing the “fantasy of purity” as the appalling incitement for moral, aesthetic, and political violence (HS 242). Variously incarnated—as political correctness, as ethnic cleansing, as white supremacy, as the “virtuous” self-image required by the American Communist Party, as American exceptionalism—this pastoral fantasy of transparent identity posits a return to “imagined worlds, often green and breastlike, where we may finally be ‘ourselves.’ ” But this flattens human experience to an “idyllic scenario of redemption through the recovery of a sanitized, confusionless life” (C 322). So concludes Zuckerman in The Counterlife (1986), where he offers circumcision as the antithesis of pastoral, circumcision as the mark of history and of distinction, “quintessentially Jewish.” He surmounts this ethnic particularism fourteen years later in a novel that condemns the “tyranny of the we and its we-talk” propagated by political correctness. The antithesis to pastoral is universalized and ontologized as “the human stain” (in the novel of that title). It is in “everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark . . . The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark.” It “precedes disobedience . . . and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke” (HS 242). Roth’s epistemology reflects his mockery of purity and transparency. In a well-known passage early in American Pastoral that echoes others in his late work, he embraces misunderstanding as

49

50

|

CHAPTER 2

the condition of human understanding: “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living. . . . That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong” (35). This skepticism of pastoral, purity, and transparency assaults the foundations of the American myth of the natural. It is embodied most temptingly, for Roth, in the boyhood nostalgia of baseball; “Oh, to be a center fielder—and nothing more!” sighs Portnoy in his reverie of possessing perfect ease and self-assurance, “simple and essential affiliation with what is going on” (79). But such prelapsarian yearnings fail to honor or encompass the most basic fact about us—the human stain. A certain contradiction is evident: Roth’s own assault on purity can’t escape the inflated selfhood of the alienated intellectual, a posture that is symptomatic of the American reflex to heroicize, hence to simplify and purify. This contradiction has been lurking since the start of this chapter when we quoted Nathan’s vow of “unshakable defiance,” “Stand alone.” Another instance: reminded late in Operation Shylock of the demand as a young writer that he be “responsible,” Roth recalls his answer. “I hadn’t chosen to be a writer, I announced, only to be told by others what was permissible to write. The writer redefined the permissible. That was the responsibility” (377). In Roth’s depiction, literary history is the macho domain of fraught exchanges and tensions where genius feeds upon genius. Embracing “Stand Alone” as his brash credo, the young Roth actually stands within the most familiar American tradition, Emersonian individualism, one that he (as would Emerson) eventually turns against. One way to explain the contradiction would be to read “stand alone” less literally, as meaning to stand with his cohort of chosen outlaw luminaries. In any case, whether standing alone or together with towering predecessors, Roth embraces a modernism of Promethean heroism. Our intellectual moment has little patience with this romantic ethos. Oppositional high modernism has been out of favor for over a quarter century as materialist and historicist approaches have emerged to anchor (or, more radically, dissolve) the individual author in a web of contextual affiliations. This methodology, known as new historicism, emerged under the formative influence of Foucault’s antihumanism and his notion of the death of the author. Undeniably salutary as a

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

corrective, this redirection of scholarship from author to context is grounded in skepticism of aesthetic autonomy. However, this distrust has calcified into orthodoxy in some historicism, where suspicion of the literary has become a hobbling reflex, reducing writers to their historical circumstances.6 Not surprisingly, the prestige of historicism coincides with the much remarked decline in literature’s cultural authority and stature among the educated public.7 Among literary intellectuals in midcentury America, especially those dismayed by the coarsening of taste on the Stalinist Left, aesthetic idealism became a doctrine of nearly redemptive power, what Roth has called “a salvationist literary ethos” (RMO 67). Worshipping at the shrine, Roth in his twenties regarded literature as a “religious calling” (67). Despite being out of fashion in academia and the culture at large, and despite its occasional naïveté and complacency, the postwar romance and religion of high culture retains vitality. Roth’s historical reconstruction of that world makes this clear. Numerous times via Zuckerman and also in propria persona, Roth has dramatized his cultural initiation in the early 1950s at the University of Chicago. In I Married a Communist Nathan’s college mentor is Leo Glucksman, a young instructor who begins to transform him, in Nathan’s words, “into the descendant not just of my family but of the past, heir to a culture even grander than my neighborhood’s” (218). Initiation is itself a letting go; you “are let go” by your family “to choose new allegiances and affiliations, the parents of your adulthood” (217). Nathan’s new parent is the plump, foppish, boy genius Leo, who unabashedly invites Nathan to “join him in being ‘someone superior to the rest,’ in being, like the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard . . . ‘a great man’ ” (221). Leo offers a stern and needed corrective to Nathan’s tutelage under Ira Ringold. Ira’s Popular Front views make art a weapon of virtuous uplift in service of the people, all tenets that Leo zealously demolishes. Art is the domain of the particular, he tells Nathan, politics of the general, and they are forever in an “antagonistic relationship”: “As an artist nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. . . . To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda.” Leo’s commandments are shaped in response to the Communist contempt for disorder and love of the “carefully disciplined, organized,

51

52

|

CHAPTER 2

contained, predictable scientifically,” a simplifying spirit bent on extinguishing the individual, whose “intrinsic nature” is to refuse conformity (223). As usual in Roth, even what he esteems is not exempt from irony. In his effort to “deconventionalize” Nathan’s mind, Leo is “uncompromising,” full of “bile and manias,” qualities that Nathan associates with Ira and the dogmatic Johnny O’Day (221, 224). All are apostles of purity. Hence suspect. Leo’s basic positions are clearly of a piece with those of Lionel Trilling, the most influential postwar modernist critic; his The Liberal Imagination in 1950 urged a critique of a liberalism that had grown simplistic in its arid rationalism. Trilling famously concluded that in “carrying out the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty” (xiii). In the wake of Stalinism, Trilling successfully rehabilitated literature’s cultural authority. In a later influential essay, “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature” (1961), Trilling, reflecting his grounding in Freud and Nietzsche, equated modern literature with the antisocial and subversive, with ambivalence toward civilization, and emphasized its attraction to “primitive forbidden ways of conduct . . . as being the path to reality and truth, to an ultimate self-realization” (Beyond 21). Modern men, beginning with the Romantics, noted Trilling, seek, consciously or not, to validate “old modes of experiencing the world”—orgiastic excesses of paganism, for instance—“in order to escape from positivism and common sense” (17). On his final page, Trilling radicalized the familiar view of modern literature as an effort to free oneself from the middle class; its end, rather, is “freedom from society itself. I venture to say that the idea of losing oneself up to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping wholly from the societal bonds, is an ‘element’ somewhere in the mind of every modern person who dares to think of what Arnold in his unaffected Victorian way called the ‘fulness of spiritual perfection’ ” (30). It is only small exaggeration to say that Trilling’s extolling of risk and surrender (complicating his reputation as the soul of judicious good taste) adumbrates the horizon of Sabbath’s Theater and

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

The Human Stain where desperate efforts to enlarge the bounds of the human seem inextricable from courting disaster. Trilling’s bold public words, it turns out, hid a private pathos. In a 1933 entry in his journal brought to light by his wife Diana sixty years later, Trilling praises Hemingway for his “anarchic and ‘childish’ ” life, but a “better life than anyone I know could live.” Diana Trilling comments that her husband’s regard for Hemingway is a “shock” and observes that in the “dark recesses” of Lionel’s “heart where unhappiness was so often his companion, he was contemptuous of everything in his life which was dedicated to seriousness and responsibility” (369). Trilling’s avid and envious secret response to Hemingway’s freedom to cast aside dignity and responsibility offers a nearly irresistible comparison to Roth’s perverse embrace of irresponsibility three decades later. The “sheer pleasure of exploring the anarchic and unsocialized” that Roth celebrated in 1973 is what an earlier Jewish intellectual, son of immigrants, could only admire in the privacy of his diary, as he publically armored himself in high seriousness (RMO 66). He drew on the tragic stoicism of his hero Freud, who called renunciation the condition of being civilized. Trilling’s demeanor was shaped and pressured of course by the ordeal of working in an Ivy League milieu of smug, genteel anti-Semitism.8 When Roth began his career in the late 1950s he confronted a dilemma faced by more than a few ambitious postwar writers. It can be stated baldly: how does an ethnic outsider enter the predominantly Gentile and genteel American literary world without undergoing the penitent, deracinating ordeal of “assimilation by high culture” (in Jonathan Freedman’s phrase), without, in short, becoming a prisoner of WASP seriousness in the manner of Trilling. While granting that it was “possible for even a Newark Jew to become a kind of caricature of Noel Coward by virtue of ‘literary studies,’ ” Roth sought to avoid the solution of elegant Anglophilia (qtd. Searles 283). Instead, he fashioned a few counterstrategies. The best known of these was the calculated irreverence of raucous Jewish humor. But soon his sober Jewish elders protested and before long he was “excommunicated.” But in fact from the start of his career Roth had been engaged with and by other traditions. Refusing two sides of the same pompous

53

54

|

CHAPTER 2

coin—WASP seriousness and Jewish piety—he instead devised a more complicated strategy, one that preserved irreverence but connected it to his canonical American predecessors. By the end of the 1960s Roth would describe himself as deliberately, programmatically perverse—subversive not merely of the serious values of official literary culture (such subversion, after all, is the standard stuff of our era . . . ) but subversive of my own considerable investment . . . in seriousness. . . . I set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. . . . A quotation from Melville began to intrigue me, from a letter he had sent to Hawthorne upon completing Moby Dick. . . . “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” Now I knew that no matter how hard I tried I could never really hope to be wicked; but perhaps, if I worked long and hard and diligently, I could be frivolous. (RMO 75–76)

This is a crucial statement for understanding Roth, for here he links his “solution”—his embrace of immaturity, of the frivolous and unserious— neither to personal idiosyncrasy, nor to ethnic style, nor to the inspiration of some Dadaist or avant-garde project, but instead to America’s most illustrious literary tradition. Roth’s move may be startling but derives from shrewd insight—that Melville, Whitman, Henry James, and Emerson were attuned to the fun—the perils and pleasures—of letting go the constraints inscribed in such cultural ideals as seriousness, refinement, maturity. While these predecessors cannot be said to share his open, often obscene, embrace of rudeness and immaturity, Roth is inspired by their esteem for what Emerson praised as unsettlement—the saving dissonance that sparks “any hope” for rekindling the “energizing spirit” (Essays 413). Zuckerman resides in the Berkshires, which is Roth’s most obvious way to underline his sense of kinship with his great predecessors. Melville and Hawthorne enjoyed there an intense, if brief, friendship in the 1850s, and it is where, as Zuckerman notes at the start of The Human Stain, Hawthorne in the 1860s lived not many miles from where he lives now. The central topic of Roth’s conversation with his nineteenthcentury neighbors, and with Whitman and Emerson, is, inevitably,

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

American individualism. Like his predecessors, Roth does not limit the self to its familiar mode of flinty independence. Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance, for example, is only one dimension of his thought, one he himself turns against or undermines.9 “Contradiction, the countering of diction, is the genesis of his writing,” remarks Stanley Cavell (Unapproachable 81). The alleged prophet of romantic individualism is also its subtlest critic, a double move that sets Emerson in perpetual motion. This instability is apt, given that, as he says in his essay on Montaigne, “the philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility.” Emerson builds mobility into his thought by his propensity to interrogate abruptly his key terms. While celebrating the heroism of “self-reliance,” he is also turning against it—“why, then, do we prate of self-reliance . . . [it] is a poor external way of speaking”—or later ambushing it with a counteremphasis on “the laws of the world” that “often hurt and crush us” (Essays 272, 704). This last phrase is from “Montaigne,” which speaks of fate or destiny or misfortune against which “we have too little power of resistance.” “This ferocity,” as Emerson calls all the fated and contingent circumstances that envelop us, is immune to reason; in a startling image he names them collectively a “perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable” (704–5). As if inspired by Montaigne’s own willful crudities, Emerson is drawn to what refuses to be domesticated, to the insatiability of the “perpetual Belly”; his is a corporeal resistance to the respectable, a relish of the refractory. Late in the Montaigne essay insatiability reappears, gaudier than ever: dismissing the rationalist utopian Fourier’s claim that “every desire predicts its own satisfaction,” Emerson sets before us the child’s desire—“raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls” (708). This hunger makes a mockery of balance and harmony—the realm of “pastoral”— in human affairs. This counterpastoral Emerson, beloved by Nietzsche, prizes and enacts elusiveness and antagonism (“the mind goes antagonizing on and never prospers but by fits”) and has striking affinities, I will show, both with Roth’s own vexed relation to the respectable and with his notion of counterlife (483). While admiring obstinate autonomy, Roth, like Emerson, also shows how it is vitiated by its imperative of selfvigilance and control, sources at once of its strength and brittleness, of its

55

56

|

CHAPTER 2

susceptibility to unraveling or letting out counterimpulses in anarchic overthrow. “To be in any form, what is that?” Behind Whitman’s query in “Song of Myself ” is a conviction of the self ’s volatility, its propensity to waywardness. “Mine is no callous shell,” he declares. “I have instant conductors all over me” (215). Implicitly, the poet puts form itself under suspicion, as he rejects the notion of the possessive individual as a bounded entity. Writers of the American Renaissance dissent from the dominant Cartesian assumption that the thinking self is sovereign— that is, disembodied and abstract, defined prior to and fortified against experience. In the United States, Tocqueville cannily remarked, where the people are innocent of philosophy, “the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best applied.” The sovereign self ’s masterful maturity—the very notion a pristine abstraction—was a virtual given in an egalitarian, capitalist social order characterized by distrust, disconnection, and loneliness.10 No wonder that Thoreau, at the end of Walden remarks: “there is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life” (222). And Whitman asks: “What is a man anyhow? / What am I? What are you?” (206). Writing against socially imposed psychic impoverishment amid material prosperity, canonical figures experiment with alternatives to the presumption of self-ownership. This bias can result in the monumental self-absorption of an Ahab (with his self-described “queenly personality” and “royal rights”) or of many of the pariahs—the man of adamant, Goodman Brown, Reverend Hooper—who haunt Hawthorne’s stories. To puncture the inflated self, writers collaborate with and find power in more improvised and vulnerable modalities of being that are conventionally deemed abject or trivial—Bartleby’s elected passivity; Whitman’s negligent leaning and loafing; Emerson’s exhortations to “abandonment” and esteem of whim and the nonchalance of boys; Ishmael’s suicidal reveries and moments of self-dissolution; Melville’s naming of “irresponsibility” as the “profoundest sense of being”; and, a bit later, Henry James’s pleasure in bewilderment and in the “saving virtue of vagueness.” In sum: these are some of the experiments, inevitably perverse in the eyes of the status quo, in approaching a “whole human life” that Thoreau noted as so elusive.

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

Sabbath’s Theater and The Human Stain are Roth’s most powerful late novels, not least because they explore the temptation of irresponsibility and abjection that mocks the proprietary logic of American individualism. As if testing the limits of what Emerson calls “abandonment”—his belief that “the one thing we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety” (Essays 414)— both novels dwell with relentless avidity on the bodies and badness of their very different bad boys. Sabbath abandoned propriety and any shred of dignity a long time ago, while Coleman Silk’s late-emerging abandonment of control reverses the conviction that has hitherto ruled him—the self is a disciplinary project that maximizes freedom by tabooing impulse. Roth discerns a fatal purism in the very assumption, Cartesian inspired, that the self is a project; yet he also finds admirable Coleman’s commitment to the “raw I” and its “passionate struggle for singularity” (HS 108). At this point I will to step back from Roth to take a wider and longer view of the intellectual history that attaches to the theme of immaturity, specifically to pursue a genealogy inspired by the anti-Cartesianism of Roth’s key American predecessors. In the modernist branch of the genealogy of immaturity offered below, vital subjectivity is made synonymous with unceasing struggle to avoid or defer responsible adulthood, as if its achievement requires strategies of immunization and adaptation that reduce us to a state of anonymous conformity to larger social forces, be they instigated by democratic mass society or authoritarian regimes. This genealogy, associative and selective, will roam freely across time and space. But its organizing impulse follows the lead, if for different purposes, of Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, which offers a revised account of the origins of modernity. “The seduction of High Modernity” (1650–1950) as a period and intellectual construct, concludes Toulmin, “lay in its abstract neatness and theoretical simplicity,” features that fail to account for “the unavoidable complexities of concrete human experience” (200–201). Toulmin replaces seventeenth-century rationalism with Renaissance humanism, in particular Descartes with Montaigne, whom Emerson revered and to

57

58

|

CHAPTER 2

whom he devoted a famous chapter in Representative Men that I have quoted above. To “recover an idea of rationality that was current before Descartes,” Toulmin turns to Renaissance humanism’s modest demand that thought and conduct be reasonable. Roughly this entails accepting the vagaries of experience as more often the source of uncertainty and flux than anything else, as we grope among, negotiate, and tolerate life’s messy, stubborn particulars. Montaigne, a contemporary of Rabelais, describes his essays as “some excrements of an aged mind, now hard, now loose, and always undigested,” and doubts he will ever make an end of “describing the continual agitation and changes of my thoughts, whatever subject they light on” (876). Unconstrained by canons of respectability, Montaigne offers bodily processes as a model of the volatility of thinking that makes the prospect of definitive knowledge antithetical to human being. Montaigne calls “human ignorance” “the most certain fact” (1004). So fused are body and mind in Montaigne’s work that no book, Emerson says of The Essays, seems “less written”: “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive” (Essays 700). In Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” which clearly influenced Emerson’s own on that subject, the march of experience seldom takes its “course without tacking and changing direction amazingly; no quality unmixed”; this turbulence and “irresolution” condition the pursuit of knowledge (1005, 290). Montaigne regards himself as an astute and meticulous observer of others, but, unlike scholars, does not attempt to “arrange this infinite variety of actions, so diverse and so disconnected, into certain types and categories. . . . So two-sided and motley do they seem in different lights.” Because all he has learned he has “learned from experience, without any system,” Montaigne presents his “ideas in a general way, and tentatively. As in this: I speak my meaning in disjointed parts, as something that cannot be said all at once and in a lump” (1004). “What is remarked as rare,” says Montaigne of King Perseus of Macedonia— whose mind was of so “flighty and erratic character that neither he nor anyone else knew what kind of man he was”—actually describes “nearly everybody” (1005). The submission to the caprice of experience results in a certain opacity of the self to the self, and for Montaigne the most sensible response is the practical modesty of becoming “pliable and

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

supple” and nonjudgmental. This is achieved by cultivating habits that will “shape us for change and variation, which is the noblest and most useful of its teachings. The best of my bodily qualities is that I am flexible and not very stubborn. . . . There is no way of life so stupid and feeble as that which is conducted by rules and discipline.” And he remarks that the reader “will even plunge often into excess, if he will take my advice” (1011). Montaigne’s esteem of plunging, his open, relaxed, and bawdy essaying of things, “without a plan and without a promise” (266), gave way in the next century to the Cartesian “quest for certainty,” in John Dewey’s famous phrase. Severing man from nature, mind from body, Cartesianism wiped the slate clean, emphasizing decontextualized abstraction to establish permanent, timeless Truths of natural science and Philosophy. Thus the operations of reason were purified of the swarm of particulars that comprise our embeddeness in nature. One consequence was that “skeptical acceptance of ambiguity and a readiness to live with uncertainty” were no longer viable intellectual options (Toulmin 44). Human maturity in effect was redefined as the capacity for (abstract) rational thought and action. Left behind was Montaigne’s modest approach to philosophy: “Of the opinions of philosophy I most gladly embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, most human and most our own: my opinions, in conformity with my conduct, are low and humble. Philosophy is very childish, to my mind, when she gets up on her hind legs and preaches to us that it is a barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honorable with the dishonorable; that sensual pleasure is a brutish thing unworthy of being enjoyed by the wise man” (1042). Here Montaigne anticipates later thinking by implicitly disrupting conventional meanings of maturity and immaturity, refusing to simplify them as mere opposites. In Montaigne’s transvaluation, philosophy is “childish” precisely when it acts as the mature adult and rises on its hind legs to establish a presumptive superiority to what is below. The view from above, which imagines it perceives firm, discrete boundaries (earthly and divine, body and mind), turns out to be childish because it keeps itself aloof from experience, busy preaching instead of plunging

59

60

|

CHAPTER 2

into excess and flux where purity dissolves and alleged opposites mix. Unchildish philosophy, actual maturity, from Montaigne’s perspective, embraces what seems childish—being on all fours. William James would have concurred. Called a philosophic descendant of the Frenchman, James in effect renews Montaigne’s project in the late nineteenth century. James upends conventional meanings of maturity, as he seeks to dethrone Philosophy with a capital P by rejecting Cartesian rationalism’s dichotomous logic. One of the axioms James finds pernicious—the “divine right of concepts to rule our mind absolutely”—he calls “vicious intellectualism” and finds an antidote in his friend Bergson’s advice to dive into the flux of experience. James grants that to “fall back on raw unverbalized life . . . comes very hard. It is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason” (Pluralistic 121). Anticipating further objections, James remarks: “Philosophy, you will say, doesn’t lie flat on its belly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand and gravel . . . never getting a peep at anything from above” (125). Like his hero Emerson, James was distinctly uncomfortable in the role of authority, in his case that of Harvard philosopher in an academic culture where rationalism defined the discipline. James resolves his dilemma by embracing a flat-bellied small p philosophy that had been launched in 1868 by C. S. Peirce in his critique of the a priori Cartesian self. Pragmatism’s immersion in the primacy of experience— “we are like fishes swimming in a sea of sense,” remarks James—is decidedly akin to Montaigne’s vantage on all fours (Pragmatism 61). James is committed to shedding his “proud maturity of mind” as defined by the canons of Western rationalism, for a Montaigne-like mature immaturity. Montaigne, Emerson, and William James reject the Western concept of maturity because it is defined and stunted by rationalism’s severance of mind from body. Instead, the mature immaturity they favor abandons “itself to a slovenly life of immediate feeling” (Pluralistic 125) “I cannot keep my subject still,” says Montaigne. “I do not portray being: I portray passing” (740). Because it is always contesting reigning authority, immaturity, in sum, is a concept whose meaning is not discrete and fixed but depends on its opposite, the notion of maturity or authority to which it is being

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

(tacitly or explicitly) compared or opposed. Something of this diacritical shiftiness is suggested by one of immaturity’s most exuberant twentieth-century theorists, Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969), the Polish novelist admired by Philip Roth. “I am simply more aware of my immaturity [than are my fellow Poles] and this allows me a little distance; but I also confess that this immaturity fascinates, beguiles, and fills me with delight. For I am at one and the same time a mature Immaturity and an immature Maturity” (2:54–55). Gombrowicz remarks that his two masters are Montaigne and Rabelais (1:28). For the purposes of this genealogy, and at risk of being overly schematic, Gombrowicz’s discriminations can help summarize the implied linkages. “Mature immaturity” groups with skepticism, relativism, and antifoundationalism, and “immature maturity” with abstraction, rationalism, monism, and absolutism. The former assumes, with Montaigne, Emerson, James, and Roth, that “the world is but a perennial movement,” whereas the latter seeks a point of central arrival, a safe harbor of certainty (Montaigne 740). For a vivid depiction of “immature maturity” consider Milan Kundera’s portrayal in his novel Life Is Elsewhere of “the basic situation of immaturity”: in the “immature man the longing persists for the safety and unity of the universe which he occupied alone inside his mother’s body. Anxiety or anger persists as well—toward the adult world of relativity in which he is lost like a drop in an alien sea. That’s why young people are such passionate monists, emissaries of the absolute; that’s why the poet weaves his private world of verse . . . that’s why such a person can’t bear compromise, either in love or politics” (220). Kundera is describing the novel’s hero Jaromil, a lyric poet who betrays his art for political expediency in Communist-occupied Czechoslovakia after 1948. Kundera’s contempt is for “lyrical blindness in a time of terror” (Testaments 157); Stalinists used lyric poets to help seduce the masses by weaving a spell of “innocence.” This pastoral element is required, notes Kundera, because totalitarianism is “not only hell but also a dream of paradise—the age-old dream of a world where everybody lives in harmony, united by a single common will and faith,” as he told his friend Philip Roth in 1980 (S 95). The cost to Jaromil of joining paradise, writes Kundera, was his subjectivity; he “cleared out

61

62

|

CHAPTER 2

his soul,” exchanging “the beauty of singularity which only he understood for the beauty of generality understood by everyone” (Life 194). “Lyricization of the Terror” was the result (157). From the point of view of the Communists, Jaromil is mature, a reliable loyalist whose verses obey the approved Soviet aesthetic (for instance, free verse is verboten, only rhymed is permitted). From Kundera’s dissident perspective, Jaromil possesses merely the appearance of maturity; his “immature maturity” hides his terror of self-knowledge and his emotional refuge in the oblivion offered by the monism of unity and harmony. But what makes this more than the typical absolutism of youth is that Jaromil’s particular historical fate is to have his fantasy of regression mirrored by the fantasy of innocence offered by Stalinist dogma. It made joy compulsory: “anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or (what was equally sinful) giving way individualistically to inner sorrows” (The Joke 31). Totalitarianism, Kundera remarked to Roth, “deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children” (S 98). The coerced evacuation of subjectivity creates Soviet style pseudomaturity that Kundera calls immature. Kundera’s own personal response to the political uses of lyric poetry, disclosed in his meditation on aesthetics, Testaments Betrayed, was one of trauma followed by immunity “against all lyrical temptations” (158). He built up this immunity by becoming a novelist. In writing novels Kundera found “a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group, a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion” (158). Here is an Eastern European version of the “mature immaturity” of the heroic modernist outlaw, a credo devised in the teeth of Soviet authoritarianism and contemporaneous with, and analogous to, the postwar American recoil from Stalinism that we have seen shape the thinking of Roth’s Leo Glucksman in I Married A Communist and of Lionel Trilling. A friend of Roth’s starting in the 1970s, Kundera has clearly influenced his work. Roth dedicated The Ghost Writer (1979) to the Czech writer. In a 1980 interview they conducted, Kundera outlined his ludic

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

sense of art, extolling Sterne’s and Diderot’s conception of the “novel as a great game” (S 93), an antirealist tradition he would elaborate in The Art of the Novel (1988) and Roth would exemplify in The Counterlife. Along with Václav Havel (to be discussed in chapter 5), Kundera and Roth share an abiding suspicion of lyricism and utopian thinking, of pastoral and idylls, all fantasies of regression cultivated by totalitarianism (and, for Roth, by American exceptionalism) to erase the past and sanitize the present. But Kundera in “Lost Letters,” the opening story of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Roth in The Human Stain also explore the individual’s complicity in the effort to “leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll” (Kundera, Book 33). Such purification rites are doomed. This realization and Kundera’s theory of the novel sketched below are both germane to Roth, who pays tribute by invoking him by name in The Human Stain. And Roth’s novel implicitly engages as well a question that Kundera asks in The Unbearable Lightness of Being—“is maturity within man’s power?” Entering into this question and the logic that impels Kundera to pose it helps Roth reach an understanding of “being game.” Kundera’s aesthetics of the novel embody a “mature immaturity,” and his literary ancestors are united in their refusal to reduce human behavior to a predictable and calculable causal chain of actions. Nihil est sine ratione: Leibniz’s declaration (“there is nothing without its reason”) sums up for Kundera the premise of eighteenth-century rationalism against which he fashions his intellectual genealogy. He sees it as emerging out of two sets of divergences—Rabelais’s from Descartes and Laurence Sterne’s from Leibniz (Art 160–61). Rabelais’s humor and Sterne’s digressions mock the rationalist project of subjecting human experience to the grid of totalizing explanation. Nietzsche as well is a tutelary spirit for Kundera, who notes that the philosopher’s first impulse “is to break up whatever is rigid, to undermine commonly accepted systems, to open rifts for venturing into the unknown” (Testaments 174). And “authentically novelistic thought (as the novel has known it since Rabelais) is always unsystematic, undisciplined,” seeking not conviction, which in its rigidity quickly congeals, but experiment whose aim is only to inspire more thought (175). Gombrowicz would concur with Kundera. In his novels and diaries

63

64

|

CHAPTER 2

he remarks that the “imperialism of reason” devours whatever eludes it despite (or because of ) the fact that “life ridicules reason.” “Reason is a machine that purifies itself dialectically, but this means that dirt is appropriate to it” (1:185).11 Dirt—“hidden, intimate immaturity”— conditions the genesis of reason, and the interpenetration of seeming opposites is a fascination Gombrowicz shares with his friend and fellow fantasist the great Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. Four years before his death, in a 1938 essay on Gombrowicz, Schulz calls the “sewer drain of immaturity” the “primeval womb” of culture (161). I should note here that Philip Roth’s admiration for Schulz as well as Gombrowicz is well known; indeed Roth published books by both authors (and by Kundera) when he edited the important Penguin Writers of Eastern Europe series (1974–83), which helped make possible the first American publication of Schulz in English.12 To the familiar categories of classical existentialism (Heidegger’s authenticity and Kierkegaard’s ethical life, for instance) Gombrowicz contributes what he playfully dubs “the sphere of immaturity”; he wants to be a child, “but one that has come to know and has exhausted all the possibilities of adult seriousness. . . . For childhood to be allowed, one must have driven maturity to bankruptcy.” And with characteristic relish for dialectical antinomies he declares: “I am he whose only desire is to be mature—in an unceasing and fierce collision with everything that interferes with my development” (1:181, 178, 218). He collides with existentialism, Marxism, and Catholicism, each, in its own way, a sanctified source of Truth and therefore a target of Gombrowicz’s fierce mockery of orthodoxies. “My freedom,” he writes, “is a matter of instinct rather than cerebral meditation, is a freedom that does not want to be anything absolute—a freedom that is devil-may-care and free even in relation to its own freedom” (89). In Warsaw the pressure of conformity (embodied in the Catholic Church) sparked the literary avant-garde to a rebellion that exposed the limits of one-dimensional society. The publication in 1938 of Gombrowicz’s surrealist novel Ferdydurke occasioned Bruno Schulz’s remarkable essay announcing the work as a turning point: “Until now a man looked at himself . . . exclusively from the official side of things,” perceived himself “through the prism of finished and completed form,” and acted out “an official plot, mature and acceptable. . . . What hap-

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

pened inside him that was not contained in official meanings he disallowed, refused entry to the forum of the intellect, simply did not recognize. Thus it led, so to speak, an orphaned life outside being, outside reality . . . in a region with no name and no location” (158). Gombrowicz’s achievement, according to Schulz, one that allegedly exceeds Freud’s discovery of the subconscious, is his understanding of this clandestine and unacknowledged realm of immaturity as “the actual and quintessentially human domain of the true man” (159). Schulz stresses that the individual’s “immaturity” possesses “a world of corresponding counterparts” in the culture in which it develops and functions. From the standpoint of culture, immaturity manifests itself as the “waste products of the cultural processes, a zone of subcultural contents, misshapen and crude, a gigantic scrapheap littering the periphery of culture. Yet this world of sewers and gutters, this monstrous drain . . . forms a basic substance, a compost, a lifegiving pap out of which every value and every culture grows. . . . In this scorned and inglorious region, exuberant and abundant life proliferates.” Gombrowicz’s attention to this subcultural realm of the immature is, says Schulz, a “profound diagnosis of the very essence of culture” (159–61). The dirt and filth that Schulz and Gombrowicz both wish to make conspicuous—the “lower forms” that mock our pious “homage to more elevated and refined values”—is a project that strikingly complements one that Georges Bataille had been adumbrating just a few years before in Paris (Schulz 159, 162). In 1929 and 1930 Bataille began discussing “base materialism” and its most important manifestation, the informe— the formless. The formless, writes Bataille, “serves to bring things down in the world. . . . Whatever it designates has no rights in any sense, and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.”13 Of the imperative derived from base materialism, Bataille says, it is a “question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one’s reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority.” This submission to the lower entails immersion in “matter,” for “base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations” and enables one to recognize “the helplessness of superior principles” (163). And to recognize the limits of

65

66

|

CHAPTER 2

conceptualization. For the informe, writes Yves-Alain Bois, dismisses “everything that resembles something, everything that is gathered into the unity of a concept” (Bois and Krauss 79). Yet the informe avoids congealing into a concept because it names not an identity or state of being but an operation—one that crushes defined meaning and turns it to rubbish. Given this heartless subversion, is it any wonder, as Roth says in The Human Stain, apropos of Delphine Roux, that “every ultra-cool Yale graduate student” works on Bataille (188). Whereas art and cultural production in general do not tolerate sheer matter except as in-formed, that is, made over into form, Bataille seeks to dwell, like Gombrowicz, in unassimilable dirt. In this lowering from the vertical to the horizontal, the axis that governs the life of the animal, they are joined by William James, “flat on his belly,” as we saw earlier, and by Portnoy, who, as noted in chapter 1, is seeking to leave the world of “upright creatures.” Mickey Sabbath, that unregenerate man of filth, will be Roth’s apotheosis of lowness, of the release of animality. For all his base materialism, Sabbath is also a figure of Rabelaisian inclusiveness, enlarging the bounds of the human. In an insight congenial to Roth’s own dialectics, Gombrowicz will speak of an inner tension in human beings between the desire for form and definition and the desire for the formless, a tension that Sabbath seeks to resolve by fashioning a life from the “lack of form” that Gombrowicz links to immaturity. Kundera puts Gombrowicz in his modernist pantheon along with Musil, Kafka, and Broch; they incorporated “essayistic reflection into the art of the novel; made composition freer; reclaimed the right to digression; breathed the spirit of the nonserious and of play into the novel; repudiated the dogmas of psychological realism” that had become enthroned in the nineteenth century (Testaments 75). This twentieth-century cluster reclaims the spirit of play from Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, and Diderot, predecessors unconstrained by the realist obligation of verisimilitude that demands that behavior be explainable and plausible. For Kundera’s favored lineage, “suspending moral judgment” is the novel’s morality because in the absence of a “fervid readiness to judge” novelistic characters are spared being reduced to exemplars of preexistent ideals. Instead they develop as “autonomous beings grounded in their own reality” (7–8). In this way the European novel

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

nurtured Western society’s devotion to the rights of man, for the novel “teaches the reader to be curious about others and try to comprehend truths that differ from his own” (8). Nabokov’s Lolita comes to mind as a great affirmation of Kundera’s aesthetic—of both the suspension of moral judgment and the immorality of incuriosity. The genre of the novel, in sum, is for Kundera that realm of tolerance where “no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood” (Art 164). And it is also the realm of the “nonserious,” where humor resides, that “divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity” and “the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that comes of certainty that there is no certainty” (32). The Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880–1942) is an especially important figure for Kundera; he describes the author of The Man Without Qualities as creating the “thinking novel” where “nothing that can be thought about can be henceforward excluded” (Testaments 176). Nietzschean in his assault on closed systems, Musil was also inspired by the effort at the start of Beyond Good and Evil to find a new way of thinking, one that would reject laws of contradiction (identity is either A or not A) and reject as well the existence of opposites, belief in which had long been an article of faith for metaphysicians. Nietzsche taunts us to entertain some “dangerous maybe[s],” including maybe opposites are merely “provisional perspectives,” and maybe “good and revered things” do not derive from transcendental Being but are “insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things” (10; see also Harrison 162). Musil begins his mammoth novel set in Vienna 1913 by describing his hero Ulrich as a “possibilist”—one who possesses an acute “sense of possibility” the way others are said to have a firm “sense of reality.” Those who exhibit this possibilist disposition are ridiculed as living in fantasy and daydream, as “cranks, dreamers, weaklings” (11). Possibilists are, in short, immature in the eyes of what is deemed rational, healthy adult norms. Ulrich learns this firsthand when in a class essay on patriotism he writes that “anyone who loved his country must never regard it as the best country in the world” and then, “in a flash of inspiration,” adds: “for God creates the world and thinks while He is at it that it could just as well be done differently” (14). This ignites a great uproar and Ulrich nearly gets expelled. His possibilism is the seed of a central idea of the

67

68

|

CHAPTER 2

novel—the notion of “essayism,” of experimental living. If this sounds as Emersonian as Nietzschean, it is no accident. Musil deeply esteemed both men and invokes Emerson by name early on in the novel: “aphorisms like the one by Emerson that ought to hang over every workbench: ‘Mankind walks the earth as a prophecy of the future, and all its deeds are tests and experiments, for every deed can be surpassed by the next.’ Actually Ulrich had written this himself, putting together several of Emerson’s pronouncements” (34). Uniquely, The Man Without Qualities brings Nietzsche and Emerson together, and what issues from their engagement is “essayism.” Here it is explained: the drive of Ulrich’s own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything behaves as if it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. . . . What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist’s guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end. He seeks to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally and intellectually taboo. . . . Later this became an idea he no longer connected with the vague word “hypothesis” [“living hypothetically” had been the name of his ideal] but with a concept he oddly termed for certain reasons, “essay.” It was more or less in the way an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it—for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept—that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life. . . . A conscious human essayism [became his paradigm]. There was something in Ulrich’s nature that in a

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

haphazard, paralyzing and disarming way resisted all logical systematizing, the single-minded will, the specifically directed drives of ambition; it was also connected to his chosen term “essayism.” (269–73)

This remarkable summary passage, which merits canonical status but has been largely ignored, presents nothing less than an extended matrix of the intellectual background of international modernism. It reaches backward and forward, echoing Emerson, Nietzsche, William James, pragmatism, Bergson, lebensphilosophie (life philosophy), anticipating Adorno’s theory of “the essay as form,” and existentialism; all circulate here (with a nod back to Montaigne’s own essayism), together forming what amounts to a modernist paradigm for new ways to be human.14 Yet the model of ceaseless becoming, of the defeat of frozen adulthood, is at once exhilarating and dispiriting, an uneasy mix glimpsed in the following tautology: “the goal of any transvaluation of values is the activity of transvaluation itself . . . unfinishable process,” as Thomas Harrison has noted about Musil (165). A similar infinitude shadows Emerson’s famous declaration: “this one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes” (Essays 271). Leaving out the goal or object of becoming, Emerson propels us to ceaseless essaying. A good Emersonian, Ulrich dwells in possibility, but is also described as “waiting” in “quiet desperation” for “something unforeseen” to happen to him (276). He hesitates to “make something of himself ” (Emerson also had a famous problem of vocation) because what is made inevitably is reified. But of course without made things, including works of literature, culture would not exist. To liquefy all reifications, as Adorno long ago said about Lukács’s Marxism, is a compulsion that exposes the idealist limits of romantic anticapitalism. Musil, however, speaks of essayism as a “utopia.” Possibilism or essayism are unrealizable in actuality and by definition; that is, to actualize them is to betray them. This abstention from making becomes a kind of purism that Roth, for one, would reject. The strength of “conscious human essayism” is as an ideal, one that functions as a source of skepticism of any current reality principle and to encourage “dynamic preparedness, creative ability, ingenuity, resourcefulness” (Harrison 166). In The Human Stain these elements

69

70

|

CHAPTER 2

converge in what Roth calls “being game.” As chapter 6 will discuss, gameness is a mode of being that brings to resolution, however precarious, the thematic of immaturity in Roth’s oeuvre. To be game requires a relaxing of defenses, a letting go and letting “flow.” Yet in dissolving adulthood’s fortifications, “being game” avoids embarking on the lonely sea of endless becoming. Instead it pauses, risking vulnerability to form attachments: “because that is when you love somebody—when you see them being game in the face of the worst” (340). In The Human Stain Roth’s portrayal of “being game” is richly reverberant, engaging Kundera’s inquiry into maturity and drawing on canonical American predecessors—by inference, the Emerson of “Experience” and by allusion, the Melville of Moby-Dick who praises “godly gamesomeness.” Suspicious of the solid, of all that seems “final and complete,” essayism puts in question all forms of autonomy, preferring to comprehend events, values, meanings as elements of “an open-ended system of relationships” in which “independent meanings . . . no longer exist at all” (Musil 270). Concepts are a drag on this system, melting down possibilities into static entities. As William James says: “a concept means a that-and-no-other” (Writings 746). Meaning is contextual in the open system, dependent on the “function of other events” in “the field of energy”: “what is seemingly solid in this system becomes a porous pretext for many possible meanings.” Apodictic certainty, the objective truths of science and mathematics, would seem to have little place here. Two plus two equals four might fare as poorly in Ulrich’s system as it does in the mind of Dostoyevsky’s underground narrator. “Two times two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death” (24). A world submissive to mathematical determinism, says the underground man, arrests human desire, killing imagination and possibility. Because reason “satisfies only man’s rational faculty” and ignores “one’s very own free, unfettered desire, one’s own whim,” the narrator will stand up for “all human life, which includes both reason, as well as all of life’s itches and scratches . . . I’m standing up for . . . my own whim and for its being guaranteed to me whenever necessary” (25). Underground man is a former petty government bureaucrat who has dreamed his life away, a petulant, brilliant child and embittered or-

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

phan with grandiose ambitions. In a typical self-lacerating either-or he insists he must be a hero or be abject because he refuses to be second best. So he lives content to wallow in the mud, alert to every slight, real and imagined, taking pleasure in his degradation. Yet his ranting has a liberating clarity. He insists on the right to desire what is stupid and whimsical and injurious because “it preserves for us what’s most important and precious, that is, our personality and our individuality” (21). Perversity becomes the measure of subjectivity.15 Delmore Schwartz once implied an alignment between Dostoyevsky’s character and Rimbaud’s scrawling impious graffiti upon a park bench—Merde à Dieu (Schwartz 53). Notes from Underground (1864) has “entered into the very warp and woof of modern culture” (Frank 310). That obsessive, belligerent, selfloathing, ironic voice sounds perennially fresh because we hear versions of it incarnated in all sorts of garrulous monologists; television’s Larry David, quarrelsome and self-incriminating, comes to mind, as does Woody Allen, who has impersonated that ranting voice in a short story, “Notes from the Overfed,” but also Ralph Ellison’s invisible underground man, the suave outlaw Humbert Humbert, and the manically shameless Alexander Portnoy. When Roth says the modern writer “redefines the permissible”—“That was the responsibility”; and when Zuckerman recalls his credo: “Stand alone. . . . Obstinate independence. Unshakable defiance”; and when Trilling writes of the effort since the Romantics “to escape from positivism and common sense,” Dostoyevsky’s “antihero” (the word first appears in the novel) looms in the background as the archetype of negativity assailing established canons of reason and responsibility.16 In Operation Shylock, Roth’s former graduate school comrade, the Palestinian George Ziad, launches one of his “interminable monologues” about Israelis, then pauses to remark: “my talent was to teach Dostoevsky, not to live drowning in spite and resentment like the underground man!” (136). Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004), the Polish poet and essayist, was haunted by underground man’s defiance, hearing in it a clue to understanding the poetic impulse. As Milosz explained: in school we are indoctrinated to science’s worldview; the result is “the total defeat of images of the world which might be able to compete with those imposed by science, and

71

72

|

CHAPTER 2

hence the defeat of all non-Western ways of thinking. . . . It is possible that poets are particularly recalcitrant to that training, and that is why they become the voice of the universal human longing for liberation from what is cold as two times two is four, harsh and pitiless” (Witness 42, 51). Like Musil’s Ulrich, Milosz is a “possibilist”; he locates the poetic impulse “for the majority of poets” in the “continuation of their school notebooks,” when, in “those hours stolen from mathematics and physics” and “oblivious to the teacher’s words,” they made “fantastic sketches of ideal countries . . . surmounting the present tense because these were countries as they ought to have been” (42; Ulro 273). Milosz endorses the familiar Romantic image of the poet as a person “who differs from others in that his childhood does not end and who preserves in himself something of the child throughout his life” (Witness 41). But what is preserved is not subjectivism but the opposite— cognitive engagement, the “passionate pursuit of the real”: “no science or philosophy can change the fact that a poet stands before reality that is every day new, miraculously complex, inexhaustible, and tries to enclose as much as possible in words. That elementary contact, verifiable by the five senses, is more important than any mental construction” (Witness 56). Milosz’s “mature immaturity” (to recall the phrase of Gombrowicz, Milosz’s friend and fellow Pole) includes critical scrutiny of his own “strenuous self-discipline”: those, such as he, “who have it to spare know how much is lost through it and long to be released from it, to proceed by impulse and the hand’s own free momentum” (Ulro 4). Underground man inspires this release, this letting go. Milosz flouts science’s “grandiose certitude” because “a reality borne in upon man as inviolable necessity is, by human standards, unacceptable” (Ulro 59). As Milosz implies, underground man ended up providing terms for framing modernist aesthetic autonomy. One of the twentieth century’s greatest proponents of “aesthetic bliss,” Vladimir Nabokov, was also influenced by underground man’s refusal of the common sense of rationalist equanimity. They share a common enemy. Both Dostoyevsky’s narrator and Nabokov loathe Nikolay Chernyshevsky, one of the most influential midcentury proponents of utilitarian aesthetics and socialist realism, a wooden writer and muddled thinker whose novel What Is to be Done was later beloved by Lenin. In his 1938 Russian novel The Gift,

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

Nabokov calls him a “myopic materialist,” whose fuzzy eyesight and abstraction made him, ironically, indifferent to the material world. Chernyshevsky’s shrill didacticism reduced art to the instrumental— the humble servant of social justice and of life; art was at best “subsidiary and applied” (222). Nabokov portrays Chernyshevsky at length in The Gift, where the novel’s poet-hero writes a biography of him that comprises a chapter in the book. A direct line could be traced from Chernyshevsky to the uplift aesthetic of Zuckerman’s Stalinist idol Ira Ringold. What Is to Be Done roused Dostoyevsky to respond with Notes from Underground. The underground man stands up for whim against Chernyshevsky’s vision of scientific rationalism (or rational egoism, as the movement was known in mid-nineteenth-century Russia), which depicts human beings as machines of perfect calculation making choices always governed by what they perceive as their own interests. Always one to cover his tracks of indebtedness, Nabokov is well known for his condescension to Dostoyevsky. But Nabokov’s contempt for common sense surely echoes, albeit suavely modulated, the diatribes of the man from underground. Common sense, says Nabokov, is “fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are . . . irrational”; and he links the aesthetic with the “capacity to wonder at trifles” and to grasp the “supremacy of the detail over the general.” These abilities, bespeaking a “childishly speculative mind,” comprise the “highest forms of consciousness” (Lectures 372, 374). The creative mind, says Nabokov, seizes upon “things that commonsense would dismiss as pointless trifles or grotesque exaggerations in an irrelevant direction” (376). Not surprisingly, Nabokov was friendly with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, who as architects of Nathan Zuckerman’s beloved New Criticism, kept up a running battle in the 1930s and 1940s defending art’s devotion to particularity (“the world’s body”) against all manner of authoritarianism, including the abstract universalism of positivist science. When Nabokov says “there is nothing dictators hate so much” as a twinkle in the eye—“that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam,” and when Ransom writes that “mimesis,” as it renders particularity and the individual, “aim[s] at a kind of cognition which is unknown to pure science” but also wants “to recover its individuals, abandoned in science, in business and in affairs,” the commitment

73

74

|

CHAPTER 2

to honoring the recalcitrant self reaches back to Dostoyevsky’s narrator (Lectures 376; Ransom 206). The attention to detail in Milosz, Nabokov, and Ransom honors the precarious status of the individual: “the never-fulfilled desire to achieve a mimesis, to be faithful to a detail, makes for the health of poetry” in the face of political and social enforcement of the anonymity of pseudo-subjectivity (Milosz, Witness 56). Personality, Adorno noted in the 1940s, “scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions” (Adorno and Horkheimer 167). The hero of Nabokov’s great novel about totalitarianism, Invitation to a Beheading (1959), is arrested for the crime of inwardness; all his attempts “to feign translucence” fail to hide the fact that he is “opaque” in a world where everyone else “understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that ended in an unexpected way” (25–26). This world is an extreme version of the censorious realm of The Human Stain, where the persecuting spirit of political correctness (a stand-in for how any ideology operates) works by labels: “only a label is required. The label is the motive . . . the label is the logic” (22). Roth pushes back against this shorthand with a “blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography” (290). For Roth, as for Nabokov, transparency is the enemy. Rational egoists like Chernyshevsky hollowed out subjectivity. “A society of perfect egoists, all seeking their own best interests” would not produce anarchy, rational egoists glibly assumed, because “the genuine interests of all people are harmonious and hence jointly satisfiable” (Scanlan 558). Such a social vision of pastoral transparency, according to the underground man, reduces individuals to “piano keys” played upon by “the laws of nature” (Dostoevsky, Notes 22). But rational egoists, the narrator says in effect, have failed to reckon with man’s “sheer perversity.” “Merely to have his own way,” a man will “intentionally desire the most wicked rubbish . . . simply in order to inject his own pernicious, fantastic element into all this positive rationality” (22). If this hymn to the “imp of the perverse” sounds familiar to readers of Edgar Allan Poe, it is not an accident. Dostoyevsky admired Poe’s fiction, which he read in Baudelaire’s translations, and in 1860 wrote a preface to a group of translated Poe stories that appeared in a literary journal

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

he edited (Frank 74–75). One of those stories, “The Black Cat,” speaks of the “spirit of perverseness,” of which philosophy “takes no account,” and poses the rhetorical question, “have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?” Poe’s supremely rational disquisitions on man’s irreducible perversity project an uncanny irony designed to call into question the unruffled serenity of his narrative voice. This tension is uniquely Poe’s, and makes his tone so different from the decidedly unserene underground man. And it is equally distinct from the American contemporary who shares Poe’s and Dostoyevsky’s esteem for whim—Emerson. Though “mummified as a late-Victorian gray eminence” (Buell 241), Emerson in fact has a belligerence that emerges in his praise of whim and rudeness—“let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times,” he avers. “This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of those deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse” (Essays 267, 273). Dostoyevsky’s narrator would have vigorously agreed. In “Experience” Emerson presents one of his rudest truths as he lifts the curtain of genteel propriety to expose the unsocialized, uncensored self, all appetite and entitlement, immune to restraint, empathy, and the anchorage of “character.” “We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others.” The engorged private self, having dropped the public mask of maturity, surrenders to the “rapaciousness” of the “creative power” of its own subjectivity, a power that “threatens to absorb all things.” The “great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love” (487). In Buddha-like repose, fascinated by our own spreading dominion, we “permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us” (488). The self-license Emerson unflinchingly reveals is echoed in underground man’s peevish demand: “should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea? I say, let the world go to hell as long as I can always have my tea” (86). When Emerson writes, “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot

75

76

|

CHAPTER 2

spend the day in explanation,” his bluntness enacts what he praises— the impatient, fierce, unrepentant judgments of nonchalant boys (262). They possess what he calls the “healthy attitude of human nature” (261). Emerson’s contempt for bourgeois politeness—“I will not hide my tastes or aversions”—is part of what the young Nietzsche found exhilarating: “Emerson—never have I felt so at home in a book, and in my home, as—I may not praise it, it is too close to me. . . . The author who has been richest in ideas in this century so far has been an American” (Gay Science 12). Another of Nietzsche’s kindred spirits was, understandably, Dostoyevsky: after reading Notes from Underground he remarked: “he is the only psychologist from whom I was able to learn anything. I rank my acquaintance with him among the most splendid achievements of my life” (Kaufmann 60; qtd. Shestov 143). Emerson and Nietzsche would concur with Milosz’s remark apropos of underground man: “a reality borne in upon man as inviolable necessity is, by human standards, unacceptable.” Rewriting reason as intuition and as the province of youth, Emerson rejects Cartesian abstraction and certainty as part of his larger project to speak of inadmissible appetites and to invigorate the shrunken American psyche: “man is timid and apologetic,” mired in cautious rationalism, cowed by the pressure of imposed social ideals of moderation, common sense, discipline, and tradition (Essays 270). But rather than simply extol the individual as the source of power, Emerson praises capacities—such as “surprise,” “spontaneity,” and “abandonment”—that he values precisely to the extent that they are outside the control or provenance of the individual’s executive will: “power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will, namely the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life” (482). Rather than modes of domination, self-trust and self-reliance turn out to mean something closer to a suppleness able to tap these hidden channels, willing to “thrive by casualties” and “fits” (483). The more “impressionable” one is, the more powerful (965). We seek with “insatiable desire” to “do something without knowing how or why,” he says in “Circles” of the letting go of control he craves (414). But the majority of his fellows, Emerson implies, live oblivious of the need for psychic renovation or of our precarious ability to shape events. “The results of life are

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

uncalculated and uncalculable,” but we smoothly sail on as if in serene control, wearing our masks of maturity, playing our social roles with (hollow) aplomb: “it is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people: there are no dupes like these” (483). “Experience” is Emerson’s greatest essay at least partly because it is his rudest, speaking unflattering truths as ruthlessly as “the oblique and casual” ruthlessness of experience. The exhilarations of infinite becoming, prominent in earlier essays, are here set aside. Instead, woozy disorientation presides. “We cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday”; “all things swim and glitter” (471). An unbearable lightness prevails. “Experience” disposes of any number of complacencies, including, most notoriously, those that surround the social practice of grieving (“people grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say”), and also the complacencies embodied in smugly self-assured masculine adulthood. Emerson summarizes much of what he wishes to unsettle: How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once and for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a business, that manly resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through all weathers will insure success. . . . Tomorrow again, everything looks real and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius,—is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise;—and yet, he who should do his business on this understanding would quickly be bankrupt. (482)

Here Emerson abruptly pulls the rug out from under the sunny, cando positivism of Yankee know-how. Henry James had to contend with a familial version of this brisk Americanism when his elder brother William in 1905 voiced his impatience with Henry’s famously demanding late style. William implored him to try for “absolute straightness in style” and “great vigor and decisiveness in action,” and Henry mockingly agreed to do so, however distasteful the task: “I will write you your book, on that two-and-two-make-four system on which all the awful truck that surrounds us is produced, and then

77

78

|

CHAPTER 2

descend to my dishonoured grave” (Letters 4:384, 382). As if echoing the underground man, Henry James uses the same shorthand arithmetic as a metaphor for soul-killing literalism. Clearly, by the time he humored William, Henry James’s notion of adventurous aesthetic experience was everything the rationally calculable and indubitably certain were not. Such stolid fixity was antithetical to the expansive energy of literary power. Implicitly concurring with Emerson’s notion that genius is not an “essence” but an “exhibition of new possibilities,” James described the audacity of novelistic genius as greatest “when [the writer] commits himself in both directions . . . by the law of some rich passion in him for extremes” (Essays 630; James, European 1062).17 Not content to remain solely the meticulous realist he began as, Roth has at times flagrantly dismissed two and two makes four. As readily as he has violated “good taste,” he has violated the canons of verisimilitude; in The Breast David Kepesh is a talking 150-pound mammary gland; and Kafka teaches Hebrew in 1940s Newark in a fantasy homage to one of Roth’s heroes. The audacious Operation Shylock, his most Nabokovian book, contrives and plays game upon game, doubling doubles, bending the sacrosanct boundary between fact and fiction as a way to reach a reality beyond the everyday: “let go of your Freudian belief in the sovereign power of causality. Causeless events don’t exist in your universe,” the other “Philip Roth” tells Philip Roth; “Well, read Jung on ‘synchronicity.’ There are meaningful arrangements that defy causal explanation . . . ‘the uncontrollability of real things’—Carl Jung knows all about it” (79). Given the precariousness of the real, it should not be surprising that Roth’s memoir would occasion one of his most perverse performances. Slipperiness starts with the very title: The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography draws attention to the built-in tension between “the facts” and what novelists do to them. The book plunges us immediately deep into Roth’s fictive world: what we first encounter is his letter to Zuckerman asking if what he, Roth, has written is any good and whether it is worth publishing. Roth is concerned that in “stripping the writing down to unvarnished specificity” he has written a desiccated book (F 7, 3). Then comes the memoir, followed by Zuckerman’s thirty-five-page reply, which strips away the mask of protective niceness, “the self-censorship

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

that is sticking out everywhere” (191). He urges his creator not to publish it. What we hold in our hands, then, is a book that wasn’t quite intended to become a book. The ambiguous status of The Facts underlines how Roth flagrantly “commits himself in both directions,” or, as he, I mean Zuckerman, puts it, constructs “a self-defensive trick to have it both ways” (192). Incorrigibility is Roth’s signature of aesthetic freedom, and the genealogy of immaturity assembled above is the deep background, the fertile matrix, from which he emerged into American literary culture of the fifties and sixties. To this context we now turn. What Marianne Moore said of poetry, “I too dislike it,” is probably what more than a few of us have been tempted to say of maturity. We noted in chapter 1 that even that impeccable paragon of high seriousness Lionel Trilling had his doubts; recall his private praise of Hemingway for his “anarchic and ‘childish’ life.” John Cheever, in his own journal entry (of 1960) speaks of the “dangerous, fascinating” temptation offered by the men’s room in Grand Central: “One could, with a touch, break the laws of the city and the natural world, expose the useless burdens of guilt and remorse, and make some claim for man’s wayward and cataclysmic nature.” But he draws back: “I seem threatened by an erotic abyss. The sensible thing is to stay out of such places” (139–40). On a less fraught note, Salinger’s Franny Glass laments: “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. . . . I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody” (29–30). Though more modulated than Trilling or Cheever, Franny’s comment catches something of the self-abandonment they flirted with and glimpses its terminal logic of abyssal self-extinction. The contempt for the “sensible” and “serious” bourgeois ego articulated by the fictive Franny Glass and by Trilling and Cheever is easy to understand: after all, maturity is a structure of sacrifice and discipline in the service of self-preservation; adulthood requires a sober taboo of impulse, an embrace of renunciation, the very things that make civilization synonymous with discontents. Yet after the Second World War, in the afterglow of Enlightenment’s successful defense against totalitarianism, maturity came to the fore with renewed prestige. In fifties America’s popFreudian lexicon, maturity was an ennobling ideal, or obligation, trumpeted in a variety of buzzwords—conformism, adjustment, adaptation

79

80

|

CHAPTER 2

to reality—that all seemed guideposts to maturity’s geographical sanctuary—namely suburbia.18 For intellectual historians the primal scene of postwar maturity is the Partisan Review symposium “Our Country and Our Culture” from 1952. Its premise, uncontested save by a very few participants, was that “writers have ceased to think of themselves as rebels and exiles” and have outgrown the “immaturity” that suffused “the alienation of the 20s and 30s.” But, the editors asked, perhaps wistfully, whether in the midst of this “reaffirmation,” the “tradition of critical-non-conformism (going back to Thoreau and Melville and embracing some of the major expressions of American intellectual history) can be maintained” (qtd. Bloom 199). The question is wistful because the “No, in Thunder” boldness of a Melville, say, seemed an echo from another world when compared to postwar America, that allegedly “one-dimensional” “society without opposition,” as Herbert Marcuse called it. Another of Melville’s phrases, “the vital center,” was more pertinent; Arthur Schlesinger Jr. used it to urge a tough-minded liberalism, one inoculated against the seductions of left-wing utopianism. In the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima there was much to be sober about, and Leslie Fiedler spoke for a number of thinkers when he called for a “liberalism of responsibility” that would no longer substitute “sentimentality for intelligence,” as he put it in An End to Innocence (24), whose title nicely encapsulated the liberal anticommunist zeitgeist. Positions to the right of Fiedler’s also made maturity the watchword. Recall the “literary dictatorship” of T. S. Eliot (to borrow Delmore Schwartz’s phrase of 1949), who ruled with the iron hand of “maturity” as one of his highest terms of critical praise.19 I want briefly to sketch some of the postwar American cultural context and show that its clashing imperatives of maturity and immaturity turn out to resemble the collision with sublimation’s “official plot” of maturity that preoccupied Gombrowicz and Schulz during the latethirties Warsaw avant-garde. Indeed the American 1950s will vividly affirm Bruno Schulz’s diagnosis, quoted earlier, that immaturity, imaged as “this world of sewers and gutters, this monstrous drain,” “forms a basic substance, a compost, a life giving pap out of which every value and every culture grows.” Until recently the “tranquillized fifties,” in Robert

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

Lowell’s celebrated phrase, was a decade best known for the somnolent maturity of the Eisenhower presidency. But this thin stratum of official culture hid the actuality that this sedated age was anything but mature. By 1960, Paul Goodman, always a fearless exponent of immaturity, concluded Growing Up Absurd by finding hope in the fact that the “existential reality of Beat, Angry, and Delinquent behavior” is “achieving a simpler fraternity, animality, and sexuality than we have had, at least in America, in a long, long time” (240). To borrow the terms of Schulz’s analysis of the rich compost of the subcultural, 1950s cultural forms erupted from the crude scrapheap of repressed, preterite forces of vulgarity, of vernacular, promiscuous mixing and reassembling “from the scrambled refuse of the old order.” What emerged was discordant and off-center: consider, as instances, the raw, quotidian yet intricately composed photographs of Robert Frank in The Americans, which incorporate “what earlier photographers rejected or scrubbed”; the vacated subjectivity of the characters in V by Thomas Pynchon, an author who “derived his jump cut structures from Porky Pig cartoons”; the “jumbled extant styles” of Richard Penniman (“Little Richard”), who fashioned a seamless mixing of multiple worlds—gay and straight, white and black, gospel and blues and pop. I have been summarizing the thesis and a few of the judgments of W. T. Lhamon’s Deliberate Speed (1990), perhaps the most original account of 1950s culture. Though Lhamon leaves Bruno Schulz unmentioned, the proximity between Lhamon’s approach to the 1950s and Schulz’s 1938 theorizing of culture and immaturity is striking. Lhamon argues that elite culture legitimates its prestige and dominance partly by “efficient gatekeeping, or sorting out of the unacceptable—defining it as insignificant. Over time, however, the rejectamenta inevitably looms larger than the acceptably explained heap. The insignificant or taboo trash becomes a compost heap for the future” (105). The compost (Schulz’s term as well) is the vernacular, and its DNA is lore—the customs, behaviors, gestures, stories, patterns of belief that fall outside cultural canonization and are always “infra-dig.” In the fifties, says Lhamon, this compost became the source of new paradigms, new “lore cycles” seeking to harness the energy of the overlooked and the rejected,

81

82

|

CHAPTER 2

and vernacular culture became more compelling to people than polite culture. For Lhamon, structures of repression in the 1950s breed immanent rebellion; hence, he finds that the totalizing quality of Marcuse’s diagnosis is precisely what renders it insufficient: “a truly one-dimensional society is impossible,” Lhamon remarks; “the very moment Marcuse claimed it [1964], the most popular and multifaceted oppositional spirit in the hundred years since the Civil War erupted all across America . . . [he is referring to the freedom marches in the South]. The ‘Society Without Opposition’ [Marcuse] . . . spun out subcultures which resisted it and contradicted its putative name” (140). In speaking of that time, Roth has described “the emergence of a counterhistory or countermythology” that challenged the country’s postwar triumphal sense of itself (RMO 78). Late-night radio patter, method acting, rock ’n’ roll, action painting, Beat poetry, spontaneous prose, photography, jazz, freedom riders, civil rights workers, all these various “pest groups,” in Lhamon’s phrase, are “resistant subcultures” specializing in “finding images and melodies and concepts within the mainstream to redefine, recharge, and refetishize” (Lhamon 140). Lhamon’s use of the word “pest” might suggest an impish child’s knack for irritating or provoking the adult “host culture.” But Lhamon, surprisingly, does not develop his diction’s suggestion into a positive revaluation of immaturity. Indeed, for Lhamon, “pest consciousness” embodies a particular kind of maturity that he salutes and specifies as Ralph Ellison’s special achievement in Invisible Man—a maturity of “full manhood” and “responsible action” grounded in a “blues ethic” that prizes “coping with, rather than evading or overcoming, the world” (49–50). In re-engaging with and refiguring pop and folk vernacular, Ellison shows his generation a way out of modernist despair and aestheticist withdrawal. Predictably (and somewhat simplistically) Lhamon arraigns T. S. Eliot and Clement Greenberg as purists whose aesthetics insist on escape from vernacular, from the stained, coarsened, messiness of daily life. Lhamon finds in Huck Finn the quintessential American purist, both Huck the character who lights out for the territory at the end of Twain’s novel, and Huck the literary critical fetish revered by several generations of Americanists as the icon of “the uncoerced self ”

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

(Henry Nash Smith’s phrase) of transcendent freedom from circumstance and the quotidian. More recent critics find yet other iconic uses for Huck, making him the fertile boy-father of a famous school of 1950s fiction. In his deft survey Leopards in the Temple Morris Dickstein says “ ‘Maturity’ was the albatross of the postwar generation,” and he cites the “picaresque novels of flight and adventure” that derive from Twain—Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Augie March, On the Road, and, a bit later, Rabbit Run—as all seeking liberation from the “maturity trap” (103–4). Celebrating perpetual adolescence, these novels rage against domestic responsibility and maternal nurture, and turn manhood, ironically, into all that resists growing up, a solitary bulwark against the demands of relation, especially becoming a husband and father. While the escape from entanglement in these works is rendered as a basically benign pastoral retreat, latent, less attractive dimensions emerge when escapism is aggressively urbanized and racialized, as in Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1959). There adolescent maleness acquires a nasty primitivism and verges on self-parody. Mailer’s anthem to the hipster—he who dares encourage the “psychopath” in himself—traffics in racial slumming grounded in white male privilege (“the hipster has absorbed the existential synapses of the Negro,” for the latter is enviably expert in “the art of the primitive”), a sense of entitlement present, if less noxiously, in Kerouac, say, and other fifties fiction that flails against the “maturity trap” (Mailer Advertisements 339, 341). Dickstein’s sketch of Huck Finn’s postwar literary progeny builds on perhaps the best-known and certainly (for its time) the most scandalous thesis about American literature—Leslie Fiedler’s use of Huck as the emblematic figure for the “immaturity” of American literature (“the notorious fact that our classic books are boys’ books”), first in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!” of 1948 and reprised in 1957 when Fiedler says that Bellow’s Augie March’s “rejection of power and commitment and success” makes him a Jewish Huck Finn (Reader 113). Less well known is that Fiedler in 1965 implicitly makes Huck the godfather of the sixties generation—the new mutants, as he calls them in an essay of that name. This remarkable essay is one of the very first to offer a synthetic portrait of the “new sensibility”

83

84

|

CHAPTER 2

perched in utopian flight from mainstream culture and the nagging demands of maturity.20 The “new sensibility” of the new mutants, in Fiedler’s view, is born of the convergence of various factors: antiwar student demonstrations against U.S. imperialism; civil rights protest; the free speech movement; the rise of the drug culture; the “drop-out” and homosexuality as part of the flourishing fifties legacy of beatnik and hipster, including Mailer’s “white Negro”; the “technological obsolescence of masculinity” by the transformation of work through automation; the assimilation by the late fifties into literature of prophetic and futurist strains of science fiction (reflected in Burroughs, Vonnegut, Anthony Burgess et al.) that evacuated the present and the past. These and other antipuritanical elements cohere, says Fiedler, as an effort to surmount “that bourgeoisProtestant version of Humanism, with its view of man as justified by rationality, work, duty, vocation, maturity, success”; in sum, the “new sensibility” takes as its animating premise “the obsolescence of everything our society understands by maturity” (195). Here a dialectical entwinement between maturity and immaturity (evident in Adorno and Gombrowicz) is replaced by simple opposition, an erasure of tension and continuity evident in the array of “post” prefixes Fiedler produces: “post-sexual” (by which he means “postheterosexual,” that is, the reign of the “polymorphous perverse” that Norman O. Brown applauded as an alternative to “full genitality”), “post-humanist, post-male, postwhite, post-heroic” and “post-modernist,” this last “post” earning Fiedler mention in the OED for being the first to use the word (202–3). In depicting the varieties of homegrown American romantic or pastoral protest against Western Enlightenment modernity, Fiedler’s “The New Mutants” reveals a collective, programmatic immaturity (bespeaking cool disconnection rather than anguished alienation) as the very heart of postmodernist sensibility circa 1965. Or to put it another, pugnaciously succinct, way: “The Age of the Jewish Moralist is over. It’s the age of the Jew freak.” This is how Philip Roth registered American postmodern immaturity (Fiedler, Reader 286).21 He made the remark in 1969 upon the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, that epochal and reviled eruption of the “sewer drain of immaturity, a region of disgrace and shame” (Schulz) that would leave an indelible human stain upon

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

the official plot of sublimation that organizes bourgeois American family life, especially its Jewish version. The received wisdom is that with Portnoy Roth broke the shackles of high modernist high seriousness, in particular his early apprenticeship to Henry James so evident in the sobriety and renunciatory angst suffusing the texture of his first two novels, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967). But this stock account leaves out the subtler, less frontal assault on maturity that Letting Go enacts in its creative, indeed audacious relation to Henry James. Chapter 3 discusses this and shows how Roth shrewdly discerns James’s antigenteel side—his understanding that good taste and refinement can deaden as much as enhance. Both James and Roth equate art with passion, agonism, contradiction, and mobility. This dynamism mocks static identity and could be said to inhabit what Gombrowicz calls “the sphere of immaturity,” that realm, we will recall, of “unceasing and fierce collision.” Roth is drawn to this realm as an alternative to the comfortable pieties of American pastoral founded on belief in transparency and redemption. Pastoral will always fail (at least in Roth’s novels) because it pursues purity, and purity is a doomed project, for it is blind to our fallen epistemological condition: that “error” is “the heart of the world,” since “everything that lives is in movement” (IMC 318). And purity is a lie because it freezes. John Calvin’s American Puritan heirs could not have said it better. The aesthetic correlative of the recognition of impurity is art’s obligation “to allow for the chaos, to let it in,” recalling Leo’s words. Letting in, letting go: these are, for Roth, the salutary acts of accepting the uncalculable in an unclenching that releases one from the vigilance of self-control and its defensive effort “to deodorize life and make it palatable” (IMC 179). In Letting Go, Uncle Asher, a self-described “sloppy-ass bohemian” artist, uncle of the novel’s other protagonist, Paul Herz, articulates a perspective rare in Roth’s fiction—one of pleasure in all that defies harmonious formal arrangement: “Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle, let them pass right through. . . . 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!” (82). Or, as Ralph Touchett put it to Isabel—“take things more easily . . . don’t question your conscience so

85

86

|

CHAPTER 2

much . . . don’t try so much to form your character” (192). Or as Emerson says in “Experience”: “Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy” (Essays 478). To relax the controlling and clutching hand is a directive the manic, aesthete Nathan Zuckerman usually finds nearly impossible to obey, and the struggle between the aesthetic impulse to arrange experience and the impulse to let go is a source of energy; as Roth has said—“the tension that leads to revelation” occurs when the imagination is “in transit” (he was speaking of another crucial agon in his art—the “transit between the good boy and the bad boy”) (F 167). To relax the clutching hand encourages, among other things, skepticism of all that contains or “cans” experience, including language itself. This skepticism informs the glimmer of insight gained by Peter Tarnopol, the protagonist of My Life as a Man, in his tormented efforts to attain manhood, to figure out how to become a man. He comes to recognize that his operative assumption—that manhood is a discretely demarcated realm, a point of arrival—is itself problematic: “How do I ever get to be what is described in the literature as a man? I had so wanted to be one, too— why is it then always beyond me? Or—could it be?—is this boy’s life a man’s life after all? Is this it? Oh, could be I thought, could very well be that I have been expecting much too much from ‘maturity.’ This quicksand is it—adult life!” (299). “Gladly would we anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand” says Emerson in “Experience” (476). Gladly would Tarnopol anchor at manhood but he discovers the anchorage is quicksand. Manhood is not some thing attained, the end point on the road map of the long journey from childhood to maturity. The psyche knows no such linear itinerary because the unconscious is without time, abolishes nothing, puts everything to use, exists in a perpetual present, mingles contraries. To act like a man, for instance, can be the act of a defiant child insistent on having its own way by miming adults, as Tarnopol learns on the final page of the novel when his father recalls him as a stubborn four-and-a-half-year-old refusing to let his mother take him home from school in a thunderstorm. “You gave her a look that could have killed . . . ‘Go home!’, you told her. . . . Everything you had to do by

I M M AT U R I T Y

|

yourself, to show what a big shot you were” (330). The boy imitating a radically self-reliant man reveals more about the tangled, precarious mimesis that is manhood (after all, act like a man is the imperative) than does any model of normality that we rely on as a guide to mark stages on our march to “maturity.” Roth puts this last word in scare quotes, the way Henry James, we will see, sets off “ ‘American’ character,” to emphasize its provisional and constructed status. “Maturity” is also artifice—to be a man is to imitate being a man—a coerced condition produced by the social imperative of adaptation. “Letting go” the urge to clutch, to be a canner of experience, is to resist the mania for formal closure that erects maturity and “transparent” representation into cultural fetishes. “Letting go” leaves one steeped in a fertile quicksand of immaturity that Uncle Asher urges, that Roth honors, and that Gombrowicz theorizes. In an important passage in his diary Gombrowicz writes: The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition, and the other, which protests against shape and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definitions. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form. . . . Making oneself conscious of that “lack of”—lack of form, underdevelopment, immaturity— not only does not weaken but strengthens . . . [and] could even become the embryo of vitality and development. (1:93)

Immaturity, a supple, self-interrogating, off-center stance, a deficit that functions as a node of skeptical energy at once affective, aesthetic, cultural, and political, has indeed been for Roth an embryo of vitality both within his fiction and without. In keeping with immaturity’s anarchic spirit, which defines and then contests what it has defined, we can conclude that Roth’s long commitment to a mature immaturity has helped sustain him in perpetual transition and multiple affiliations as he pursues the impossible project first enunciated forty years ago: “I don’t bottle experience. I’m interested in the flow.”

87

3 Ancestors and Relatives: The Game of Appropriation and the Sacrifice of Assimilation

Goethe frankly said, “what would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius[?] . . . My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of Nature; it bears the name of Goethe.” —Emerson, “Quotation and Originality” It is here, if we would but recognize it, that elements of the many available tastes, traditions, ways of life, and values that make up the total culture have been ceaselessly appropriated and made their own—consciously, unselfconsciously, or imperialistically—by groups and individuals to whose own backgrounds and traditions they are historically alien. Indeed, it was through this process of cultural appropriation (and misappropriation) that Englishmen, Europeans, Africans, and Asians became Americans. —Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station”

“

W

hat is it, this genealogy that isn’t genetic?” the young Nathan Zuckerman asks himself in I Married a Communist. He is thinking of the “allegiances and affiliations” that he has made, turning them into the “chosen parents” of his “adulthood,” mentors and guides, living and dead, whom he has acquired “through a series of accidents and through lots of will” (217). Nathan will come to realize the advantages for young, ambitious, literary intellectuals who grow up in a home without books to help constitute a repository of cultural riches (people such as

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

himself and his creator). What seems a deprivation can sometimes be fortunate because it makes one skeptical about a rampant mythology that says culture is an entitlement rooted in one’s individual and national origin, a matter of blood and soil. Dispossessed of this logic of purism and possessiveness, one is in a position to rethink genealogy apart from biology, to rethink culture apart from color. One is in a position, in other words, to develop a capacity for “critical thinking.” And this ability is itself the “ultimate subversion,” says Roth more than once in I Married a Communist, for it places a premium on will and reasoned choice rather than the passive assumption of entitlement by nature (2). Born about a decade earlier than Roth and growing up in Harlem in the early 1940s, James Baldwin also had to rely on critical thinking to make his way through the mystifications of identity and culture. Baldwin fashioned a distinction between the competing claims of “inheritance” and “birthright,” the former limited and limiting, the latter vast and boundless. “To claim the birthright from which that inheritance had so brutally and specifically excluded me” became, he wrote, the way to unlock the “conundrum of color” (xii). Or, in Ralph Ellison’s pithy summary, James Baldwin “is not the product of a Negro-store-front church but of the library, and the same is true of me.” And the same is true as well of Richard Wright, who “was as much a product of his reading as of his painful experiences” (Collected 163). In Black Boy Wright made indelible the importance of the library as the catalyst of his intellectual growth: so adamant is he about entering it, he forges a note from a white man to obtain a card to borrow books. For Americans outside the class entitlement to high culture, privileges synonymous (even now to some degree) with birth into the dominant WASP world, the public library has been a crucial material site of “the kingdom of culture,” the democratic space where one might simply “sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” to recall DuBois’s phrases from The Souls of Black Folk. Because one of the library’s liberating effects is to loosen the claims of race upon culture, Ellison was to find Hemingway a greater influence than Richard Wright because “Hemingway was a greater artist” (186). Or, to use Ellison’s terms, analogous to Baldwin’s, Hemingway proved an “ancestor” and Wright a “relative.” We

89

90

|

CHAPTER 3

cannot choose the latter but “one can, as artist, choose one’s ancestors.” Malraux, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot were among Ellison’s chosen ancestors, Wright and Langston Hughes among his “relatives” (185). These distinctions remain controversial—the overturning of “blood magic and blood thinking” is rare even to this day—and inevitably have a measure of defensiveness, hardly uncommon when an author renders an account of influences (505). But what remains unassailable and poignant in its simplicity is that electing one’s “chosen parents,” one’s “ancestors,” and one’s “birthright” meant heading to the public library for Roth, Ellison, and Baldwin. This chapter reads Roth texts, early and late, through a lens provided by the ungenetic genealogy fashioned by the “art of appropriation,” to borrow Goethe’s phrase. This art is a cultural and literary practice that, as we have already begun to see, is entangled in, while at the same time seeking to surmount, the confinements of ethnicity, race, and class. And this art is the means by which Roth negotiates his identity as American citizen and writer. He makes that entanglement vivid in retrospect in The Facts, but it is the pressing matter in his debut, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), where he works through his entwined ethnic and literary affiliations. Then in his first two novels Roth sets aside the ethnic dimension to enact his creative literary appropriation of canonical American predecessors. Letting Go (1962) engages with Henry James and When She Was Good (1967) with Hawthorne, the latter book his first and only novel devoted entirely to Gentiles. Three decades later, in American Pastoral, Roth revisits the historical moment of Goodbye, Columbus but not to celebrate, as he did in 1959, the “kingdom of culture.” Rather, he explores the road not taken, the path of assimilation as sacrifice that entails identifying America as a WASP nation founded on a myth of pastoral innocence. To join requires outsiders to purify themselves; not for nothing did the melting pot in the hands of nativists like Henry Ford become a cleansing ritual he staged at his factory, where workers in tattered garments of the Old World would end up with fresh American outfits.1 In contrast, those who “play the appropriation game” find that “in this country things are always shook up, so that people are moving around and rubbing off on one another culturally,” a promiscuous mingling that would alarm as-

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

similationists (Ellison, Collected 514). Phobic anxiety about dirt and cleanliness is the animating, if unconscious infrastructure of assimilation, which, in turn, produces in outsiders a susceptibility to idealization (of self and envied others) as a means of entry into the “uncontaminated life,” in the phrase of the protagonist of American Pastoral (385). The novel is imbued with the desolation that resides as the anxious underside of idealizing purist fantasy. Of the Newark Public Library, Roth has said: “since my family did not own many books, or have the money for a child to buy them, it was good to know that solely by virtue of municipal citizenship I had access to any book I wanted.” The ideal enshrined in the Newark Public Library—“the idea of communal ownership, property held in common for the common good”—“had as much to do with civilizing me as any I was ever to come upon in the books themselves” (RMO 217). These remarks are from 1969; a decade before in Goodbye, Columbus he had paid homage to the library. It nurtures the two outsiders, figures whom Roth carefully links throughout—the black boy (a nod to Wright perhaps) enraptured for hours in the stacks over Gauguin’s paintings of languorous maidens in their Tahiti paradise, and the sympathetic librarian, the protagonist and first-person narrator Neil Klugman, also infatuated with a beauty (Brenda) from paradise— the suburban paradise of Short Hills (a place he envisions, after telling the boy about Tahiti, as “rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream”) (GC 27). The matters limned above of writers seeking a space of communal public cultural property unbeholden to racial and ethnic tribalism is not a project usually associated with Roth. Equally improbable, at least at first glance, is his confessed sense of kinship with Ralph Ellison. This fact deserves to be better known than it is, for Roth’s admiration and the cosmopolitan love of appropriation that he and Ellison both enact are useful contexts not only for discerning the full drama of vocation that is Goodbye, Columbus but also for grasping that Roth is an American writer precisely in the sense that Ralph Ellison insisted upon. What makes an artist American for Ellison is less an a priori identity than a freewheeling approach to culture that rewrites heritage not as

91

92

|

CHAPTER 3

passive inheritance but as an assemblage produced by the act of seizing or appropriating from the past and present. Ellison calls this dynamic, antiproprietary practice “the appropriation game,” one “everyone played” (511). In the course of describing a panel discussion on which he served with Ellison in 1962, Roth stated that Ellison’s “intellectual position” was “virtually identical” to his own (F 128). While Roth did not elaborate, the grounds of their convergence include a shared emphasis on appropriation rather than assimilation and a refusal to be entrapped as a “representative” of their particular ethnic group. As well, Ellison and Roth would eventually be targets, for different reasons, of Irving Howe’s critical wrath, which, in turn, sparked a creative response—Ellison’s classic statement of artistic autonomy “The World and the Jug” and Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson, his enraged comic jag that mocks the demand to be “virtuous” and instead goes in quest of life “with real teeth in it” (AL 697). Although separated by a generation, both men made their lives proof that “choice and will” (Ellison’s phrase summing up what Howe “underplays”) are crucial attributes, outweighing “class, religion, region and race” in fashioning a cultural legacy, a usable past, in a society where “refinement of sensibility” floats free, “not the exclusive property of a highly visible elite” (Collected 181, 495). As if to prove his contention that by the 1940s “assimilation wasn’t a potent issue any longer” for his family, Roth in 1951 ventured out of Newark for the first time, to go to Bucknell in rural Pennsylvania, where Jewish students comprised 5 percent of the undergraduate population (F 49). After considering joining a Gentile fraternity, he decided for the single Jewish one: “I wasn’t afraid of the temptation to become an honorary WASP but was leery of a communal spirit that might lead me to self-censorship, since the last thing I’d left home for was to be encased in somebody else’s idea of what I should be” (51). Roth’s fraternity and later the school magazine gave him a forum for his budding satiric gifts (including a singing debut in Guys and Dolls) (54). Academically, he blossomed in a senior honors seminar in English literature—from Cynewulf to Virginia Woolf—that also required weekly doses of Baugh’s Literary History of England. He began to write short stories that ignored both his Jewish

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

background and English literary models but instead were solemn exercises in compassion, advertisements that Philip Roth was a “nice boy,” an ambition, he remarks in retrospect, even worse than wanting to be a “nice Jewish boy” (60). Nearly half a century, Roth noted in The Facts, spanned the distance from his Yiddish-speaking grandparents’ life in Newark’s poorest ghetto to his arrival at Bucknell’s “harmonious nativeness” (46). At college it was precisely not “going along like sensible assimilationists” that was part of the pleasure (54). Sacrificing nothing, Roth was initiated into a great literary tradition while giving Bucknell, via a frat house rendition of a Broadway musical and by injecting a New Yorkerish wit into the college magazine, a taste of a countertradition of Jewish and urban Americana. Roth, in sum, shaped his experience at Bucknell as if guided implicitly by a logic of cultural appropriation that reflected “the momentum of [his] family’s Americanization” (46). By neither denying ethnic difference nor “combatively insisting upon it,” Roth prepared himself well for graduate school at Chicago. The university seemed to him full of “unmistakably Jewish Jews far less self-conscious and uncertain about themselves than the Irish Catholics from Minnesota and the Baptists from Kansas—Jews wholly secularized but hardly chagrined by a pedigree from which they seemed to derive their undisguised contentiousness, their excitability, and a gift for satiric irony” (114). When Roth and his cohort encountered Henry James, the terms on which they met him blended their own and his. They took pleasure, Roth recalls, in bringing to The Portrait of a Lady “what we’d imbibed eavesdropping on our father’s pinochle games,” a pleasure that mocked “literary good taste” and refused to treat its own “strain of vulgarity . . . as an impurity to be purged from our speech.” Rather, they confessed to it “matter-of-factly, ironically, unashamedly” (115). With its willingness to smudge the aura of sanctity that sometimes surrounds high culture, appropriation is a practice well suited to Roth’s contempt for the genteel. This contempt extends to impatience when great writers try to clean up the outrageousness of their art with inspirational bromides promising redemption. When Peter Tarnopol reads Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech—“I believe that man will not merely

93

94

|

CHAPTER 3

endure: he will prevail . . . he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance”—he thinks: “And what the hell are you talking about? How could you write The Sound and the Fury, how could you write The Hamlet, how could you write about Temple Drake and Popeye, and write that?” (MLM 322). My Life as a Man resolves to avoid all redemptive rhetoric and seeks to adopt from Flaubert a “masterly pitilessness” that is indifferent to moving the reader (F 107). Roth’s heterogeneous appropriations in college and graduate school can be understood as a Jewish variant of Ellison’s exhilarating cultural adventures in the “chaos of Oklahoma” of his boyhood. Ellison and his friends respected neither the authority of the past nor the confines mandated by Jim Crow but instead immersed themselves in the “surreal incongruity” of the chaotic present. There a democratic “dispersion of ideas” circulated, which offered up patterns that violated “all ideas of social hierarchy and order” (Collected 53). This intimate involvement in a community where precedent and tradition counted for little and where he and friends improvised cultural ideals “catch-as-catch-can” with “an almost reckless verve” nurtured Ellison’s skepticism of the presumption that American identity and culture are stable a priori entities (54). Instead, he famously remarks, “when American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical” and full of “motley mixture”; Ellison shares his sense of the primacy of the ludic—“America is a land of masking jokers”—with James and with Roth (108–9, 500).2 In The Facts Roth states that he was “in awe” of Ellison (125). Roth declares their intellectual camaraderie in the course of recounting a harrowing evening at Yeshiva University in 1962, where they appeared together on a panel about minority writers. In the “most bruising public exchange” of his life, Roth is lambasted by audience members for allegedly disgracing the Jews in “Defender of the Faith,” a short story about a manipulative, wheedling Jewish army trainee who exploits his Jewish sergeant; the latter, at last infuriated, takes revenge. Roth’s response to the grilling is to grow overwhelmed by fatigue: “Ralph Ellison must have noticed my tenacity fading because all at once I heard him defending me with an eloquent authority that I could never have hoped to muster from halfway out to oblivion. His intellectual position was virtually identical to mine, but he was presenting it as a black American,

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

instructing through examples drawn from Invisible Man and the ambiguous relationship that novel had established with some vocal members of his own race” (128). Although Roth does not explain in The Facts, we need not look far to explain why Ellison came to his defense. They are ensnared in a similar cultural dilemma, familiar to us from our age of identity politics—the demand (tacit or explicit) to play the role of group exemplar, to be the right kind of Jew, the right kind of African American. Both refuse the demand (or, in Ellison’s case, refuse to make it primary) and are accused of betraying “their” people. The melodramatic charge of “betrayal” is worth pausing over: it is the rhetoric of proprietary, essentialist notions of culture (“our” people versus “their” people) that Ellison and Roth reject because such notions depend on the primacy of identity rather than action, on origin rather than appropriation. Roth’s “Writing About Jews,” published a year after the Yeshiva debacle is, like Ellison’s “The World and the Jug” of 1964, an effort to educate an audience in the freedom of modern art, even when practiced by minorities. Roth rejects the notion that he is a spokesman for the Jews. He neither sought nor intended nor would be able “to speak for American Jews.” Rather, he clarifies, “I spoke to them, and I hope to others as well” (RMO 211). The essay also explicitly invokes Ellison as an ally. In response to cries that a responsible Jewish writer must offer, in the words of an offended rabbi, “a balanced portrayal of Jews as we know them,” Roth seeks to expose the rabbi’s naive “assumptions about the art of fiction” (199). Literature, Roth explains, concerns “all that is beyond simple moral categorizing. . . . Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee the appropriateness of our feelings” (195). The rabbi’s demand for balance is, ultimately, a demand for positive imagery, a propagandistic obligation that, in restricting consciousness and candor, breeds stereotypes. Roth refuses this demand, of course, on the obvious aesthetic grounds but also for historical reasons. The rabbi’s fear in 1962 that imbalanced representations foment anti-Semitism is expressed as though “it already is 1933—or as though it always is.” Evidently, the Jew must remain a “victim in a country where he does not have to live like one if he chooses. How pathetic. And what an insult to

95

96

|

CHAPTER 3

the dead . . . piously summoning up the ‘six million’ to justify one’s own timidity” (208). In his “timidity—and paranoia,” Roth continues, the rabbi fails to see that “deliberately keeping Jews out of the imagination of Gentiles, for fear of the bigots and their stereotyping minds, is really to invite the invention of stereotypical ideas. A book like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for instance, seems to me to have helped many whites who are not antiNegro, but who do hold Negro stereotypes, to surrender their simpleminded notions about Negro life” (209). Roth then goes on to link his and Ellison’s shared cultural status as allegedly irresponsible authors: “Just as there are Jews who feel that my books do nothing for the Jewish cause, so there are Negroes, I am told, who feel that Mr. Ellison’s work has done little for the Negro cause and probably has harmed it” (209). For Roth, such a judgment is based on too narrow and literal criteria of political commitment. Mentioning Baldwin as well, Roth says, “as novelists, neither Baldwin nor Ellison are (to quote Mr. Ellison on himself ) ‘cogs in the machinery of civil rights legislation’ ” and are not going to convert “one Alabama redneck or one United States senator over to the cause of desegregation” (209). But this does not mean they have no political efficacy. “Certainly those of us willing to be taught, and who need to be, have been made less stupid than we were about Negro lives” (209). Refusing to fulfill the conventional expectations that constitute the “responsible” “black” or “Jewish” writer, Ellison and Roth unsettle each of these labels by insisting on the priority of their Americanness. The declaration of Americanness is at once a simple and slippery statement for both men because its referent is not an easily graspable, fixed and stable entity but connotes a “complex and pluralistic wholeness” that is always in “cacophonic motion” (Ellison, Collected 500, 504). America is a pluralistic society comprised of jostling, discordant, overlapping parts, a dynamism that Ellison images as a “vortex” or “whirlpool” (504). Therefore, to speak of the “Americanness of American culture” is to speak at best provisionally, to essay an attempt to “impose unity upon an experience that changes too rapidly for linguistic or political exactitude” (511–12). Roth also equates Americanness with energy, impurity, and anomaly; he speaks of the “boundlessness of the democracy” and notes that “city Jews” of his generation were “unembarrassed by

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

unrefined Jewish origins, matter-of-factly confident of equal American status,” and “felt American through their families’ immigrant experiences rather than in spite of them” (F 136). Describing the “weakening of social and class constraints accelerated by World War II” as setting the stage by the sixties for the entry of large numbers of Jews into Gentile academia, Roth sounds positively Ellisonian in his description of the American tumult that ensued—it involved “all manner of cultural defection, conversion, confusion, enlightenment, miscegenation, parasitism, transformation, and combat” (RMO 72). In rendering Americanness as an elastic, porous term for a turbulent social order, Ellison and Roth are descendants of Henry James. Not only, as we have seen, does James equate the activity of choosing and claiming our property with Americanness, but in The American Scene (1907) he puts scare quotes around “ ‘American’ character” to indicate typographically its status as “perpetually provisional.” Only an oxymoron can suffice to capture the country’s permanent unsettledness and openness, a messy condition which blurs the boundary line between immigrant and native: “who and what is an alien . . . in a country . . . peopled by migrations at once extremely recent, perfectly traceable, and urgently required[?] . . . Which is the American, by these scant measures?—which is not the alien?” (85). James’s momentous question (at a time of record levels of European immigration) imperils the sacred assumption of a fixed, core identity—White Anglo Saxon Protestantism—that functions as a baseline to measure authentic Americanness. These last two words form an oxymoron for all three authors, one that imparts something of the elusive meaning of America. Since disparate peoples “became Americans” by acts of cultural appropriation and misappropriation, stresses Ellison, being American is less a given than an effect of action—the “precious” capacity for “improvising upon the given” (510, 507). Given the centrality of acts of self-fashioning in the making of Americans, the category of natural or “authentic” Americans becomes problematic, if not null and void. And Ellison draws the same conclusion Henry James did—to say American is to say immigrant: “In relationship to the cultural whole,” notes Ellison, “we are, all of us, white or black, native-born or immigrant—members of minority groups” (500).

97

98

|

CHAPTER 3

“While I am without a doubt a Negro and a writer, I am also an American writer,” declared Ellison in “The World and the Jug” (Collected 172). This is precisely Roth’s perspective in regard to Jewishness and Americanness in Goodbye, Columbus. And Ellison’s claim in his essay that “it is not skin color which makes a Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American experience” tallies with Roth’s remark in The Facts that “being a Jew had to do with a real historical predicament into which you were born” (126). Historical predicament and historical opportunity outweigh the determinism of biology (“blood thinking”) in conditioning but not controlling the individual’s creative participation in the “appropriation game,” “one of the most precious” of American freedoms (in Ellison’s phrase). The above contexts suggest ample reason for enlarging the usual categories that confine Roth (especially his early work) to ethnic regionalism, to comedies of manners about a particular group—second-generation East Coast Jews—joining the postwar middle-class American mainstream. This sketches the terms in which Goodbye, Columbus (1959) was received. The conventional wisdom here is not wrong so much as incomplete; it ignores that the novella also dramatizes allegiance to the virtual opposite of ethnic regionalism, a commitment to the unraced realm that DuBois called the “kingdom of culture” and the goal of black striving. Of blacks and Jews the narrator of The Human Stain says: they are the “most unalike of America’s historic undesirables” (132). But Goodbye, Columbus implies a different story, one suggesting that blacks and Jews shared the quandary of how to negotiate their passage into American life and culture and that both found part of a solution in aesthetic idealism. In the story Neil will dream that he and the black boy visit an island in the Pacific (Neil captaining a ship, the boy his mate) but being forced to leave because the boy does not have a library card. In Newark Neil facilitates and protects the boy’s access to the art books and urges him to get a card. But he has no interest in obtaining one because the idea of taking a book home is appalling (“At home somebody dee-stroy it”): “I likes to come here. I likes them stairs.” “I like them too,” Neil says (43). So does Roth, who once remarked on their nearly overwhelming grandeur. “I’m . . . dark,” Neil tells Brenda Patimkin when he first phones for a date and she asks about his looks. “Are you a Negro?” she replies (5). To

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

her arch question Neil of course answers no, but his class position, not only his complexion, marks him as figuratively black; a graduate of the Newark campus of Rutgers, he is living with his aunt and uncle in a Newark tenement whose backyard is the “cindery darkness” of an “alley.” The exchange also has a distant echo of the fact that until the postwar era Jews had a precarious social and racial status; theirs was a “probationary whiteness”—they could become naturalized citizens but were not entitled to the full privileges of the WASP establishment (Jacobson 176). “White Jews” is a phrase Roth uses to describe the postwar triumph over probation that Brenda’s family embodies. As if to preserve the moment before full acceptance, Ellison in 1963 hopes to preserve a positive distinction between Jews and whiteness and to make tacit links between blacks and Jews. His eloquent defense of Roth at Yeshiva clearly enacts this sense of kinship. For Jews to identify with the American power elite, for Jews to write as though they were “responsible for the system of segregation,” is what “Negroes call . . . passing for white,” remarks Ellison, who adds: speaking personally, both as writer and as Negro American, I would like to see the more positive distinctions between whites and Jewish Americans maintained. Not only does it make for a necessary bit of historical and social clarity . . . but I consider the United States freer politically and richer culturally because there are Jewish Americans to bring it the benefit of their special forms of dissent, their humor and their gift for ideas which are based on the uniqueness of their experience. The diversity of American life is often painful, frequently burdensome and always a source of conflict, but in it lies our fate and our hope. (Collected 173)

Ellison, in turn, has been described as a “black Jew” by Leslie Fiedler, an ascription to which he playfully assents, adding “but someone should have said that all of us old-fashioned Negroes are Jews” (363). One wonders what Coleman Silk would have said. Was he born of this remark? Ellison’s pluralism, it is important to note, is not static, is not positing an array of discrete, immutable ethnicities, each a note in the harmonious symphony of America. Such separatist pluralism would, ultimately, be as purist as the nativist demand of coercive assimilation. Rather, Ellison’s version of diversity is, he says, “painful” and full of

99

100

|

CHAPTER 3

“conflict” because it is reciprocal and risks change; to use, for instance, Jewish “gifts” in one’s cultural makings is inevitably to mix them with others’ gifts, thereby altering both in unforeseen ways. The turbulent arena of appropriation makes interaction—the mutually transformative act of seizing and remaking—the premise, one inimical to notions of purity or sovereign origination.3 The democratic access embodied in the public library reflects an iconoclastic model of assimilation as free appropriation of cultural goods rather than the more familiar sociological notion of a casting off or sacrifice (or even betrayal) of the old for the new. Both models of assimilation circulate in Goodbye, Columbus. But the story’s most ingenious move is to critique the familiar model—assimilation as sacrifice—as inimical to the practice of creative improvisation. Roth depicts the “kingdom of culture” and Jewish migration to the suburbs as enacting two instances of the American freedom to make use of cultural and social opportunities rather than as a loss or betrayal of “genuine” identity. In other words, the freedom of access that the little black boy exercises in going to the library and gorging himself on Gauguin—“that’s the fuckin life,” he exclaims to Neil as they gaze at pictures—is analogous to the Patimkins’ seizing of opportunity to achieve their own version of the good life. In this light Neil’s remark that “now, in fact, the Negroes were making the same migration [out of Newark], following the steps of the Jews,” though myopically optimistic as sociology (it was 1959), serves to link these groups together as on the move, roused by a vision of a better life. And both the black boy and Mr. Patimkin retain in their new experiences their comfortable, pungent vernacular speech and habits; they do not cast them off in an effort to put on airs. The Patimkins still store their old Newark furniture in the attic. This is not to deny that the novella portrays the postwar era of mobility spurring Jewish migration into the upper-middle-class suburbs, where the Patimkin children are free to become “goyim” (Gentiles), as their father cheerfully complains. Brenda has a nose job (“I was pretty. Now I’m prettier”) and her brother is having his fixed in the fall (9). But this freedom to remake oneself expresses not simply the desire to fit in (to assimilate)

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

but also and equally the freedom to improvise upon the given (to appropriate). “Green lawns, white Jews . . . The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Patimkin dethrones Anne Frank,” says a character to Philip Roth in Operation Shylock, a mocking summary of the “pastoralization of the ghetto” that is the cultural moment crystallized in Goodbye, Columbus (OS 132). Neil’s Aunt Gladys also understands this “pastoralization” as a bleaching out of ethnicity (“white Jews”), a judgment and logic to which Neil does not assent. When she asks: “since when do Jewish people live in Short Hills? They couldn’t be real Jews believe me,” Neil replies: “They’re real Jews” (41). Aunt Gladys’s suspicions about the genuineness of the Patimkins’ ethnic identity testify to the anxiety that assimilation always raises, anxiety expressed in the invidious rhetoric of authenticity. In Roth’s novella this anxiety is not dwelled upon, although surely the question of what is a “real Jew” hovers in the background of the entire story.4 This essentialist question is always conformist and intolerant (Aunt Gladys being a benign exception proving the rule) not least because it posits an inherently exclusionary insider/outsider split. This model encourages familiar images—the insider’s sense of entitlement that he or she possesses a birthright to culture, the outsider’s craving for social advancement that requires one betray or forget where one comes from. Significantly, Goodbye, Columbus has little use for this standard script of the pathos of assimilation. Which is to say that Neil Klugman is portrayed neither as a parvenu with frustrated social ambitions (he has frustrated romantic ambitions) nor as a resentful moralist who laments (with Aunt Gladys) the Patimkins’ suburban life as a betrayal of ethnic roots. “They’re real Jews” is his unruffled reply when invited to indict them. A detached intellectual and unambitious former philosophy major with a sardonic wit and athletic build, Neil has an affair with Brenda that is “just personal” (to borrow a phrase from The Great Gatsby) rather than a means of social advancement. Neil is neither Stendhal’s Julien Sorel nor Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths. The absence of pathos cannot simply be explained away as consonant with the tale’s comedic mode. Rather, the irrelevance to Roth of this essentialist melodrama of assimilation is his way of suggesting the priority of the messy Americanness of appropriation and self-(re)invention.

101

102

|

CHAPTER 3

Goodbye, Columbus ends with a dejected Neil, having said his final goodbye to Brenda, walking through Harvard Yard and coming upon Lamont Library: “Suddenly, I wanted to set down my suitcase and pick up a rock and heave it right through the glass, but of course I didn’t.” His rage is displaced into a subdued epiphany of vocation as his gaze penetrates the reflections of his image in the glass and he sees a “broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved. I did not look very much longer” (97). He hurries to a train that gets him back to Newark “on the first day of the Jewish New Year. I was back in plenty of time for work.” Work is the story’s last word; combined with the sense of renewal in the time of the year, Neil’s work, it seems warrantable to suspect, will eventually move beyond service at the information desk to include writing the novella we have just concluded. As if in answer to the question he asks God in St. Patrick’s (as he waits for Brenda to obtain her diaphragm from the doctor)—“where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness . . . which prize is You?”—he observes the “broken wall of books” needing to be shelved. This is the beckoning image of his salvation inside the “kingdom of culture,” the third paradise the novella offers (along with Tahiti and Short Hills) and the only one where Neil is at home. American Pastoral (1997) marks Roth’s return to the postwar era of Jewish “pastoralization” and is his most sustained portrayal of the “culminating moment of Jewish assimilation in America” when paradise seemed a palpable American reality and the “triumph of the untragic” appeared to be at hand (Rubin-Dorsky 97). The novel devastates the assimilative ideal but not on behalf of a countermodel of appropriation. Indeed, the book offers no alternative. Analogously, the novel devastates American masculine maturity (the hero has “not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility”) but not on behalf of a less constricted mode of being (AP 5). Rather, as the controlled anger of the main character seems to implode by the end of the endless suburban dinner party that lasts nearly 150 pages and comprises the final section of the book, as he steadily sinks “under the weight” of futility, so too the novel sinks into a torpor of repressed rage (384). This mimetic bond between character and form, and a barely stifled anguish, are powerfully rendered.

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

But the cost is high: the imaginative energy that might, in the novel’s words, permit “letting the beast out of the bag,” a letting go that describes the audacious risk taken by Sabbath’s Theater and The Human Stain, is absent from American Pastoral (274), as is any intimacy between Zuckerman and his protagonist, “Swede” Levov. The novel, in sum, stakes all on its commitment to immanence, to being so inside the world it creates that it abolishes any transformative possibility. This may be the loneliest novel that Roth has written.5 The novel’s inwardness with its sentimental, pastoral hero (who likens himself to Johnny Appleseed) has, we shall see, the consequence of vitiating Roth’s portrayal of the sixties, that decade when the “indigenous American berserk”—the New Left’s “counterpastoral”—blows American pastoral to “smithereens” (86). Roth’s political imagination, in I Married a Communist so richly evocative of the political and literary mentalité of those caught up in the romance of “democratic” Communism in the forties and fifties, here is left as stymied as the Swede is by “counterpastoral.” Like most of Roth’s novels after The Counterlife, American Pastoral examines the seduction, delusion, and power of antitragic “utopian thinking”—in this case, its function as the motor of American faith in Enlightenment progressivism as the United States entered the era of postwar triumphalism. This faith projects the golden American future as perfected equality, a steady march out of the past, out of “each generation’s getting smarter—smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations before—out of each new generation’s breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-American insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals” (AP 85). This enunciates a sleek, seemingly painless assimilative ideal that an American Jew of utopian bent—the novel’s hero—will shoot directly into his bloodstream, “forming” himself into “an ideal person” sailing above the messiness of history. And that hero seems destined from birth to embrace and embody this ideal: Seymour “Swede” Levov, Jewish Newark’s high school idol in the 1940s, is a “blue-eyed blond” Jew with the looks of an “insentient Viking,” a “staid and stone-faced boy”

103

104

|

CHAPTER 3

of “mature seeming sobriety” (3–4). In idolizing the Swede’s “unconscious oneness with America,” Nathan remarks the “tinge of shame and self-rejection” in his own and others’ adoration: “I don’t imagine I’m the only grown man who was a Jewish kid aspiring to be an allAmerican kid during the patriotic war years” (19–20). So the Swede, who “so lightly” wore his Jewishness, gives hope to that aspiration for Americanness. The Swede’s vision of equality and of Americanness is less transcendence of ethnic identity than obedience to an a priori WASP model. This is soon made clear in Nathan’s rhapsody for “the boy we were all going to follow into America . . . at home here the way the Wasps were at home here, an American not by sheer striving . . . not by being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best. Instead—by virtue of his isomorphism to the Wasp world—he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the regular American-guy way” (89). As we are already beginning to see, American Pastoral opens a gap between Jewishness and Americanness that doesn’t exist in Roth’s autobiographical writings. As he reiterated in 1997: “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing. . . . I was historicized as an American. I never felt anything like alienation because I’m a Jew” (qtd. Shostak, Philip Roth 236). In the novel, to close the gap requires assimilation to the WASP world; in other words, the sacrificial model that Roth portrays as irrelevant in his own boyhood is central to American Pastoral. Not surprisingly, in Roth’s fictional world this natural all-American guy doesn’t stand a chance; he will have to be inducted into history, savaged by all manner of boomeranging forces of the unforeseen. Like the other novels in the American trilogy, American Pastoral proceeds on two entwined narrative levels—it is a “realistic chronicle” packed with voluminous detail that also exposes its own artifice as Nathan Zuckerman’s meditative reconstruction of an American life. In the first ninety pages Nathan appears as a first-person narrator and character who then, unique in the trilogy, effaces himself for the rest of the novel to become the third-person narrator of the Swede’s story; his speculative task is “the revelation of the interior life that was unknown and unknowable” (80). So, to be precise, most of what we learn about the Swede is Nathan’s evocative guesswork.

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

The circumstances that prompt Nathan’s evocation are meticulously described, especially since they will condition his act of mimesis. Zuckerman shows up at his forty-fifth high school reunion only to learn the Swede is dead. Almost at once Nathan is seized with the idea of writing about him, embracing the “hero in his destruction” and feeling the “bewilderment of his tragic fall” (88). His salute to the Swede’s natural American guyness occurs as Nathan is engulfed in nostalgia (“a load of unruly emotion began sliding around in me”) heightened by hearing the “honeysweet strains” of Johnny Mercer’s “Dream.” He dances with an old high school sweetheart: “in earnest, right then and there, while swaying with Joy to that out-of-date music, I began to try and work out for myself what exactly had shaped a destiny unlike any imagined for the famous Weequahic three-letterman back when this music and its sentimental exhortation was right to the point” (87). Soon, lost in thought about his book, Nathan says: “I pulled away from myself, pulled away from the reunion, and I dreamed . . . I dreamed a realistic chronicle” (89). This anomalous formulation welds together “Dream,” dream, and realistic chronicle, and their dissonant inextricability forms the novel’s stunted horizon of meaning: a realistic portrayal will expose the Swede’s American dream as faintly kitschy sentimentality, as “Dream,” as, in other words, pastoral, which for Roth is a prime mode of regressive nostalgia (as he concluded at the end of The Counterlife). Roth underlines these associations by taking a verse from the song as one of the novel’s epigraphs: “Dream when the day is thru / Dream and they might come true.” “Dream,” in other words, is the American Dream, and sponsors both American pastoral as the assimilative ideal—“forming yourself as an ideal person”—and American Pastoral, the novel that examines the disastrous consequences of this idealization. And as the beseeching background music at the reunion, “Dream” facilitates and entwines Nathan’s simultaneous surrender to nostalgic Americana and imaginative allegiance to representing the Swede’s story. “Dream” is part of what constitutes the Swede’s own “quaintness,” which includes Dawn, the pastoral name of his Irish Catholic wife, a former Miss New Jersey, who raises prize beef cattle on their colonial cow farm. And, problematically for the novel’s historical insight, the “quaintness” of “Dream” will also serve

105

106

|

CHAPTER 3

as one of the scrims through which the Swede’s baffled rage will evoke the sixties. “Seymour was into quaint Americana,” as his brilliant, nasty brother Jerry the Miami heart surgeon (“a guy who wields a knife for a living”) says at the reunion. The Swede, who took over from his father the three-generation-old family glove company, bought a colonial house built in 1786 in western New Jersey near where General Washington and his troops camped: out in Old Rimrock “all of America lay at their door. That was an idea he loved” (275, 310). Living in the house embodies Swede’s idea that in postwar America the moment of perfected assimilation has arrived: “this is a new generation and there is no need for that resentment stuff from anybody, them or us.” “Jewish resentment, Irish resentment—the hell with it” (311). Catholics, Protestants, and Jews are at last ready, he says, to stop asserting their separate superiority and “live in harmony . . . no matter what their origins.” And he dismisses his father’s warnings that the “rock ribbed Republican” enclave he has moved into with his Catholic wife is full of “haters” and in the 1920s was Klan territory (309). “We own a piece of America,” he tells his wife. “I couldn’t be happier if I tried” (315). Swede’s America is a mythic pastoral awash in naive optimism. Feeling “he was settling Revolutionary New Jersey as if for the first time,” he likes to imagine he is Johnny Appleseed—“just a happy American. Big. Ruddy. Happy. No brains probably, but didn’t need ’em” (316). Given the ugly ironies that come to intrude on this harmony, more than one critic has read American Pastoral as an act of self-revision, as Roth’s cautionary tale about the calamities that befall Jews (including himself ) eager to join the Gentiles. Neoconservatives put a different spin on the notion of Roth’s self-revision. They delightedly devoured the novel as a portrait of a heroic father and son, the noble Swede, brought low by vicious student leftists, a family saga that was proof that its author, for decades the corrosively cynical mocker of American Jews, had at last seen the error of his ways and was now coming home.6 But Roth is not calling for a return to roots; nor does Levov’s failure involve a betrayal of his “authentic” Jewishness. Rather, in his attenuated understanding of America and his fixation on assimilation, the Swede

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

seals off both in his anachronistic, platitudinous fantasy of America as a Revolutionary New Jersey colony of landed gentry. His error is not “playing at being Wasp[s]” (in Jerry’s scathing words) but in equating such play with the attainment of genuine Americanness (“Let’s face it, they are America,” says Levov of Protestants) (280, 311). The Swede’s rhetoric of America overcoming “origins” in blissful harmony is belied by his fetishizing them. When his wife eventually takes as a lover an oldline Rimrock WASP with a “proprietary manner,” their neighbor Bill Orcutt, Swede refers to him as “Mr. America” and says he seduces by “genealogical aggression—the overpowering by origins” (301, 383). No wonder that Levov, who liked to joke to his mother, “I want to own the things that money can’t buy,” seems not terribly outraged by his wife’s affair (“the cuckolded husband understands”). Long ago he himself was seduced by the romance of origin (307, 384). With his “fatal attraction” (as Jerry sees it) to duty, responsibility, and self-control, Swede Levov is a paragon of stalwart masculine maturity: “No guile. No artifice. No mischief.” But, wonders Nathan, “what did he do for subjectivity,” what had “turned him into a human platitude”? (20, 72, 23). The Swede is overdue for disaster, and most of the novel presents a procession of reality instructors who will offer their services in bringing him down to earth. Above all, there is “Little Merry” and her “darling bomb”; this is how Jerry refers to the Swede’s sixteen-yearold, stuttering, enraged daughter Meredith, whose protest bombing of Old Rimrock’s post office during the Vietnam War accidentally kills a local doctor and blows up her own family’s perfect life (68)—blows it up, but also gives her father subjectivity for the first time: a “tormented inner Swede” emerges now that the “undivided oneness of existence” he believed in is fractured (206). Merry spends years on the run, and Swede finally discovers her living as a Jain in a filthy Newark hovel. Her father may have been “into quaint Americana,” “but the kid wasn’t,” as Jerry notes. “He took the kid out of real time and she put him right back in. My brother thought he could take his family out of human confusion and into Old Rimrock, and she put them right back in. . . . Goodbye Americana; hello real time” (69). The Swede understands Dawn’s attraction to WASP aristocracy as a way

107

108

|

CHAPTER 3

to avoid the messiness of real time: teamed up with Mr. America, he reasons, she’ll “be rid of the stain of our child, the stain on her credentials” and she can “begin to resume the uncontaminated life” (385). Jerry loathes Merry, but in his own hateful way identifies with her rage, the furious backlash of “counterpastoral” (86). At one point, caustically riffing on the Swede’s pastoral life in Rimrock, Jerry says: “The cows. Cow society. Colonial old America. And you thought all that facade was going to come without cost. Genteel and innocent. But that costs, too, Seymour. I would have thrown a bomb. I would become a Jain and live in Newark. That Wasp bullshit!” (280). Jerry the surgeon operates as history’s scalpel inflicting its wounds, tripping up the best intentions, staining the Swede’s obdurate niceness, and scorning his refusal to “let the beast out” (274). Another reality instructor is Rita Cohen, Merry’s political mentor and perhaps lover, who seeks sexually to humiliate the Swede by trading information about Merry for sex. Meeting him at a hotel, Rita says: “you came here to fuck me. Ask anybody. Why does a middle-aged capitalist dog come to a hotel room to meet a young piece of ass?” When the Swede asks, “what is the aim of all this talk? Will you tell me?” Rita responds: “The aim? Sure. To introduce you into reality. That’s the aim” (143). The disgusted Swede rejects her efforts at seduction; all Rita does is stoke his frustration. Loathsome and intellectually clichéd (she calls the Swede “Mr. Legree” and his factory a “plantation”) and a thoroughly implausible character, Rita is aligned nevertheless with Jerry, Zuckerman, and Roth in the collective effort of humiliation and truth telling. A certain stacked-deck note of contrivance is evident in the entwinement of political and sexual allegory that Roth has Rita insist on, as if she is devoted to the coarsest rendering of the decade’s motto, “The personal is the political.” With Rita’s baiting of the Swede, the New Left becomes the sadistic temptress of liberal suburbia, as raw young female sexuality displays itself to mature male restraint, unleashing the latter’s latent misogyny.7 The meaning of this allegory—that is, the historical or psychological insight it yields about the sixties revolt of the young against the America of their parents—remains murky. No less obscure is the question of just what Levov has done to become a New Jersey Job. “You basking unpunished in the crime of your

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

wealth” is Rita’s ready answer (370). Is it simply being a capitalist who has made a fortune running his family’s glove factory in Newark? Or is it having once kissed the eleven-year-old Merry on the mouth? Or is his crime having been bland and happy and without irony? What is the connection, Swede asks himself, between “how we lived and what she [Merry] did?” (281). “What is the poison that caused it?” (74). The novel ruminates obsessively over such questions; appropriately, its final sentences are two more questions that receive no answers. For Jerry, however, the answer is simple. “You made the angriest kid in America,” Jerry tells him, because “you are unrevealed.” “To this day, nobody knows who you are. . . . That is why your own daughter decided to blow you away. You are never straight about anything and she hated you for it. You keep yourself a secret,” never taking off the mask of the good, obedient son, the well-meaning, liberal father (279, 276). But Jerry’s explanation, at least at first, makes no sense save as rivalrous sibling rage. Indeed, Jerry, who, like his father Lou Levov, is “rashness personified, Little Sir Hothead,” seems more Merry’s father than does the Swede (62). As Zuckerman’s speculative fiction shows, Seymour harbors no secret but is a loving husband and father, a transparent man (at least until the bombing) with nothing inside to reveal, a man whose limitation is that he imagines everyone else is also transparent: “everybody who flashed the sign of goodness he took to be good” and thus “had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife” (409). So transparency and guilelessness are evidently the Swede’s undoing. Lacking the capacity to fashion a counterlife, he is doomed. The Swede’s rage at Rita’s taunting is the main lens through which sixties radicalism enters the novel. “He heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of the violent Uncorrupted who called him a criminal” (256). At other times he imagines Merry on the run, eking out a living washing dishes, finding time “to study the revolutionary thinkers, to master Marx, Marcuse, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, a French theorist whose sentences . . . had sustained her in much the same way as the ritual sacrament of the vanilla milk shake and the BLT” (261). The schematic quality of this passage instances the price Roth pays for having Swede’s kitschy Americana perspective be the controlling sensibility, a decision dictated by the immanent method that

109

110

|

CHAPTER 3

requires Nathan’s effacement. The Swede’s political ruminations seem at once too pat and too thin as well as improbable—either as observations the Swede would make or experiences that Merry would have. In confronting the political dimensions of his daughter’s violence, the Swede seems over his head, lost in sentimentality, at one point so desperate to contact Merry that he even imagines chatting with Angela Davis, who appears to him late nights at the kitchen table. At such contrived moments of bringing history home, Zuckerman and his creator are as if trapped by the Swede’s limits. And here Roth seems to yield to the kitsch temptation to attempt a “great American novel” (an object of satirical fascination in his 1973 novel of that title), the kind of panoramic survey of the state of the union and the American soul that committees award Pulitzers to (which in fact American Pastoral won). The chronicle novel diagnoses a family as a microcosm of the nation and the era, a genre that the country doctor of Europe famously mined, to borrow Nabokov’s teasing remark about Thomas Mann. In explaining why Merry bombed the paradise she was born into, the Swede, not Jerry, reaches the most sensible conclusion: “there is no connection . . . it’s as disconnected as everything else . . . there are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books . . . It is not rational. It is chaos” (281). Earlier, Nathan had made a similar remark: the Swede “had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense. . . . The nice gentle man with his mild way of dealing with conflict comes up against the adversary who is not fair—the evil ineradicable from human dealings” (81). However sensible these banishments of allegory, such explanations offer the Swede little solace; and they also erase history in their appeal to a generalized human nature and metaphysical darkness. Yet apart from these abstractions that seek to fathom Merry’s act, particularity is honored with a vengeance in American Pastoral. This is the rich bounty of Roth’s immanent method. Allowing Nathan to disappear into the genial Swede, to “inhabit this person least like” himself sometimes for “ten hours at a stretch” (74), Roth practices a strategy of “unflinching immersion in the object,” as Adorno describes immanent critique (Prisms 33). The means of that immersion is detail—what Nathan in a draft of his undelivered reunion speech calls “the immensity

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead” (43). The conjoining of death and details is resonant given that the latter are primarily commemorative, in the service of evoking a lost world, especially the Levov’s Newark Maid glove factory, every facet of whose operation and production, the history and the lore, the “trade talk,” Roth dwells upon with loving, elaborately imagined precision. Roth’s commitment to bringing Newark Maid to life, the fidelity to detail upon interlocking detail that makes the rendering a triumph of realist representation, is itself an act of labor, craft, and devotion not unrelated to the very values that the novel associates with the factory—its multiethnic, interracial teamwork, pride, loyalty, and benign paternalism all forming together a kind of pastoral capitalism. And its glory days are over—long ago Newark Maid fled burned-out Newark for Puerto Rico. Gloves are from a vanished artisanal America, an “outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs” (277). If American pastoral is more nostalgia than reality, be it in Newark Maid or Old Rimrock, its opposite—“counterpastoral,” “another America entirely”—is very much alive in its appalling degeneration (86). In the novel’s emotional climax, Swede Levov leaves briefly his sterile pastoral world to enter Merry’s “counterpastoral”—her filthy Newark hovel where she lives in rancid serenity as a Jain, the fundamentalist Indian religious sect whose project is the “perfected soul” of absolute passivity. It teaches a simple truth: “you must be done with craving and selfhood” (264). Unwashed, in rags, emanating a stench, veiled with the “ragged foot off an old nylon stocking,” Merry lives “for purity, in the name of purity,” reverent of all life, including water, vermin, and microorganisms, in a suicidal parody of pastoral harmony whose end is “self-starvation . . . the price paid for perfection by the perfect Jain” (231, 240, 244). She has been raped twice in Newark. Horrified by what she has become, overpowered by her smell—“the lowest human smell there is”—Levov vomits on her as he cries out “Who are you!” (265–66). The Swede here protests his daughter’s inhuman purity by staining it, a defilement that desperately tries to bring doomed Merry back into the fallen human world.

111

112

|

CHAPTER 3

Merry, “the daughter who is chaos itself,” is at once her rational, orderly father’s nightmare opposite but also a grotesque version of his own project of purity (231). Merry’s “perfected soul” echoes and savagely mocks the Swede’s “utopian thinking” that has purged itself of old habits and attitudes to create “an ideal person” leading an “uncontaminated life” (85, 385). The romanticism of elected poverty—Tom Hayden, as if anticipating Merry’s logic and circumstances, boasted in 1962, “I live in Newark among the rats”—suggests the quest for innocence or transcendence animating the New Left (qtd. Howe, Margin 292). No wonder that Irving Howe, a man of the (old) Left and politically sympathetic, would later remark after meeting Hayden and other SDS leaders, “we could not go along with their pastoral simplicities” (qtd. Alexander 44). Merry Levov’s horrifying pastoralism, her zombie-like “asceticism and self-denial,” returns us to the novel’s start—the “staid and stonefaced boy” whose “insentient Viking mask” makes him look “as though he didn’t feel a thing” (3–5). The stone is sinking by the novel’s last pages. The noose of Levov’s life is tightening around his neck. At a late afternoon barbecue he is defending himself, as usual, against “the onslaught” of his “unrelenting father,” observing Dawn and her lover Orcutt’s flirtation, enduring another vicious phone call from Rita Cohen, anguishing about Merry’s wretched life in her tiny cell of a room that earlier that day he had visited, recalling Jerry’s taunt, “you’re afraid of letting the beast out of the bag” (384). The Swede “is cracking up in the only way he knew how, which is not really cracking up at all but sinking, all evening long being unmade by steadily sinking under the weight. A man who never goes full out and explodes, who only sinks” (384). For all his mythic heroic aura, the Swede exits with a whimper, surrenders to being “unmade,” whereas a Mickey Sabbath, a Coleman Silk remakes himself, paradoxically, by going full out and exploding, by letting the beast out, indifferent to consequences. “What are you talking about? What beast?” asks the baffled Swede upon first hearing Jerry’s taunt. His question is a good one, and neither Jerry, Nathan, nor Roth answers directly. Jerry utters it on the phone when his brother, shaken, calls to say he has just come from Merry’s room. Jerry fires back: “What are you going to do, Seymour. . . . Go

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

back to her room and get her. . . . or she’s going to be raped a third time. Do you love her or don’t you love her?” (273–74). Swede’s response—that he can’t go and get her, that Merry has “gone crazy”— precipitates Jerry’s lacerating critique (he is one of Roth’s great rude rhapsodists): “You loved her [Merry] as a fucking thing. The way you love your wife.” What rules you, Jerry tells him, is fear of “creating a bad scene! You’re afraid of letting the beast out of the bag! . . . the boy who never breaks the code. Whatever society dictates, you do. Decorum. Decorum is what you spit in the face of. Well, your daughter spit in it for you, didn’t she!” (274). For the Swede to take Merry home, Jerry implies, would be too messy and shameful an ordeal for tidy pastoral fiction to abide. Ironically, Jerry the surgeon, up to his elbows in the bloody mess of human flesh, acerbic, cynical Jerry, urges nothing less than the enactment of unconditional love. Let go the fiction of purity, he tells his brother, and embrace the beast—the indecorous “bad scene” that would scandalize the neighbors and his family—and bring the ruined child home. “Do you love her or don’t you love her?”; Jerry’s challenge haunts the frozen Swede as the barbecue drags on (384). Things get worse by the afternoon’s end as Bill Orcutt’s drunken wife stabs the senior Levov in the face with a fork. The bewildered man’s “face was vacant of everything except the struggle not to weep” (421). A guest, a literature professor full of contempt, begins to “laugh at them all,” relishing “how far the rampant disorder had spread.” The closing two paragraphs comment: Yes, the breach had been pounded in their fortification, even out here in secure Old Rimrock. . . . They’ll never recover. Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life! And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs? (423)

These beseeching final questions sound as if they are the hapless, suffering Swede’s last futile plea to learn why his decent life has aroused such wrath and inflicted such pain upon him. But they can also be read as emblematic of Zuckerman’s and Roth’s inner quandary about the Swede that has been evident from the beginning—starting with “what

113

114

|

CHAPTER 3

did he do for subjectivity?” As well, they echo the doubts Zuckerman voiced early on about his speculative fiction born of a rush of high school reunion nostalgia. Has Nathan “imagined an outright fantastical creature . . . well, who knows? Who can know? When it comes to illuminating someone with the Swede’s opacity . . . it’s up for grabs” (77). But apart from his fondness for gazing into the epistemological abyss, Roth poses these final unanswerable rhetorical questions for another reason, as if to let us know that his strategy of immanence has left him stranded deep inside the Levovs’ world, just as the Swede is left stranded, desolate, sinking down to what is “always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper” (225). There is some knot of irreducible ambivalence, of revulsion and sympathy, that remains for the novelist and his narrator. The anticathartic ending does nothing to untie the knot, a forbearance that accounts for the ending’s power. Both “realistic chronicle” and “Dream”-induced “dream,” American Pastoral moves us by the rigor of its immanence, by the unresolved, anguished perplexity shared by Roth, by Nathan, and by the Swede. “Paradise Lost,” the novel’s long final chapter, is framed by the present-tense barbecue that slowly unravels into violence and cruelty, and within this frame the Swede’s mind wanders over his past, over Merry, over his defiance of his father in marrying Gentile Dawn, over his own brief infidelity after his daughter’s bombing, over Dawn’s facelift at a Swiss clinic. In between these wanderings, his mind returns to the suffocating present. Watching the “predators” Dawn and Orcutt, he berates them in his mind: “I want an answer! I want it tonight!” he inwardly screams to his wife, demanding to know what she sees in her lover (359). Swede must keep his thoughts to himself and not overstep “a boundary fundamental to civilized life,” which describes the one Jessie Orcutt crosses when she stabs Mr. Levov (423). Roth renders the Swede’s interior drama in free indirect style, which uses a third-person narrator to mime from within the consciousness of a character, as if with first-person intimacy. James’s The Golden Bowl is one of the great achievements of this technique, and it seems more than accidental that American Pastoral’s final chapter recalls James’s novel in both formal and thematic ways. In the second half of The Golden Bowl, the register of consciousness shifts

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

to Maggie Verver, who has begun to awaken from innocence to knowledge, specifically of her husband Amerigo’s adultery with her best friend Charlotte, who is married to Maggie’s father. But Maggie must not veer by a hairsbreadth into articulated truth, must keep up the civilized surface of appearances at all costs. And while her father and husband and Charlotte play cards, Maggie circles them, playing out in her mind an intense drama of confrontation and punishment. At times she feels so exultant with rage and triumph she comes within an ace of speaking. Earlier, in the novel’s most famous scene, Maggie had signaled to her confidante Fanny her new knowledge when, after her friend drops the golden bowl to the marble floor (the bowl that Charlotte had bought Amerigo for a wedding present and is proof of their liaison), Maggie bends down and picks up the pieces. She will have the bowl repaired; she will weld back together the pieces of her broken marriage. Roth appropriates and revises this famous moment. The Swede and Sheila, his former lover and Merry’s former therapist, who hid her for three days without telling him, have a closed-door confrontation in Dawn’s office. He rebukes her for the secret and tells one of his own— that Merry in fact killed three other people in later bombings. “You could have prevented that,” Levov charges, “you had no right to let her go!” By now he has “pulled Count’s [Dawn’s prize cow] picture off the wall and hurled it at her feet,” and then is “down on his knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments and dumping them into Dawn’s wastebasket.” He steadies himself and “returned from the savagery of where he’d been to the solid and orderly ludicrousness of a dinner party. That’s what was left to hold him together—a dinner party. All there was for him to cling to as the entire enterprise of his life continued careering toward destruction—a dinner party.” He returns to the “candlelit terrace . . . while bearing within him everything that he could not understand” (379). Both Maggie and the Swede must bear everything within so as not to shatter the “boundary fundamental to civilized life.” Maggie’s patient inwardness gathers strength and outlasts everyone; soon she locks her straying husband in an embrace that concludes the novel. Whether their marriage is remade into passionate union or whether Maggie is now jailer and Amerigo her prisoner remains equivocal.

115

116

|

CHAPTER 3

Embracing no one, the Swede is adrift in his inwardness, slowly being “unmade”; the sterile, mocking pastoral that is his external life of rural splendor will soon become his burial ground. The Jamesian resonance Roth imparts to his novel’s last chapter is a late instance of his career-long appropriation of his predecessor. The Swede, like the young Coleman Silk, is an descendant of Isabel Archer, the character whom Roth in graduate school had affectionately called a “shiksa.” All three are absorbed in perfectionism—“forming yourself as an ideal person,” to recall how Nathan summarizes the Swede’s assimilative quest. It is a phrase that neatly enfolds Isabel’s aspirations of transparency. She lives to banish contradiction: “her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was” (54). And like the Swede’s similar trust in harmony, Isabel’s blinds her to the deceptions of those around her. James and Roth are both skeptical of turning the self into an object of self-culture because it assumes the self is a project and implies that experience can be comfortably tailored to dimensions of one’s liking. Isabel is said to be “always planning out her development, desiring her perfection, observing her progress” (56). Hubris inheres in this effort and breeds ironies and havoc. The Swede is already an object, “the desired object” formed by the neighborhood adoration accorded the local sports hero. But “the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feeling,” making him even more godlike in his seeming aloofness and passivity, even “mummified” as a “boy forever” (5, 36). The Swede, alas, sinks under the weight of all this; Isabel, heroically, by the end, dissolves her own objecthood and loses her purity. The sinking, “stone-faced” Swede echoes an earlier sinking stone— Lucy Nelson of When She Was Good (1967). Before discussing Roth’s appropriation in his first novel of James, I will sketch briefly the use he makes of Hawthorne in depicting another character entrapped in selfobjectification. When She Was Good grimly charts the consequences of intolerant moral perfectionism as it congeals into monadic isolation. “I don’t have emotions like other people. I’m a piece of pure stone,” Lucy tells her husband (158). She echoes her father’s judgment that she is “pure stone,” a remark made after Lucy, at fifteen, called the police to

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

have him arrested when he came home drunk and belligerent (21). In her short, enraged life, Lucy finds herself surrounded by “philanderers and frauds, cowards and weaklings, cheaters and liars,” and decides to bid “fathers and husbands farewell!” (305). Driven to madness by those around her, she takes off on an aborted quest to rescue her young son from her husband and find a safe place to give birth to the child with whom she believes she is pregnant (305). Called “Saint Lucy” by a mocking enemy (a phrase Roth used as an early title of the novel, and a not inappropriate one given that the actual saint is famous for her obdurate defiance—she was said to be as unmovable as a mountain when Roman soldiers tried to haul her off to jail), Lucy becomes a kind of midwestern Goodman Brown circa 1949. She is convinced of her absolute certitude in a town where, by her pitiless standards, strength of character is virtually nonexistent (278). Like Brown, her obsession with our fallen estate deprives her of human sympathy for the flawed earthly realm where most of us dwell, including her parents, hapless but vital in their mutual loyalty. With Manichaean severity, Lucy justifies her actions: “Yes, because she knew right from wrong, because she saw her duty and did it, because she knew the truth and spoke it, because she would not sit by and endure treachery and betrayal, because she would not let them steal her little boy. . . . they would make it seem that she was the guilty party, that she was the criminal” (303). Unlike the Swede, Lucy Nelson explodes and sinks, ending her wanderings sunk in a snowdrift, found after three days, frozen to death. Her icy stoniness, ultimately, is the emblem of her solitude and self-reliance turned pathological by desperate circumstances and by an unresolved, uncontrollable rage against her father that she turns outward and also inward upon herself: “there was only one person she would rely upon; it was now as it had always been—the one to save her was herself. She must hide” (304). But the problem is that Lucy, as she realizes, would flee to a “better world” armed only with “the power of her hatred, her loathing” (306). Roth accords Lucy’s derangement dignity throughout, including her final moments: “To where? [will she take her son] Oh, to some place where they would never be found! Some place where she would have her second child, and where the three of them could begin a new life. . . . She would be mother and father to them both, and so the

117

118

|

CHAPTER 3

three of them—herself, her little boy, and soon her little girl too—would live without cruelty, without treachery, without betrayal; yes, without men” (305). The pathos here is earned, as is the echo of Hester Prynne’s balked utopia of women in The Scarlet Letter and the echo of a Salingeresque pastoral vision of redemptive innocence that gives The Catcher in the Rye its title. In When She Was Good, the absolutism and idealism of American selfhood is an impasse of freezing desolation; impervious to relationality, to the possibility of intersubjectivity or even trust, Lucy’s world steadily shrinks—mother, husband, friends drop out—dooming her effort at transformation.8 Her imperviousness makes her a “native of these bleak rocks” (Emerson 490). For the impervious self—“constructed to shut things out”—is “a human possibility that first took root in America. It has not flourished anywhere else,” remarks David Bromwich of what he calls the “American psychosis” (35).9 Five years earlier, in Letting Go, Roth imagined a far less stark and severe protagonist as a vehicle for examining the idealized American self. This time Roth enlisted James as an ally in his effort. Letting Go counts as his most sustained creative response to an American predecessor. And Roth’s response to James is richer perhaps because, unlike Hawthorne’s men of adamant self-enclosure (whose descendants are Lucy Nelson and Swede Levov), Roth’s Gabe Wallach and James’s Isabel Archer finally let go the relentless drive to fortify the self and subdue experience, a relaxing of defenses that unfreezes adulthood and risks immaturity. From early on Roth seems to have been drawn to this risk and its latent power, and early on too he subtly discerned a similar preoccupation in James. I say subtly because Henry James in the 1950s was above all the forbidding master, the icon of impeccable high seriousness. Yet, rather than simply and predictably regarding James as either a monument to worship or a target to shoot at, Roth looks past the canonical image of Henry James the quintessential “Paleface,” as Philip Rahv influentially dubbed him. Roth discerns a less frozen and forbidding James who values the unserious and immature. This James wrote in his final preface that “it all comes back to that, to my and your ‘fun’—if we but allow the term its full extension” (European 1338). Roth has

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

fun with Henry James in Letting Go; after all, how often do we read a novel in which one character remarks to another: “Your conscience and James’s conscience both give me a pain in the ass” (576). As if to memorialize his kinship with the antigenteel side of James, Roth in 1979 would have Nathan Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer use a volume of James’s stories to help raise himself to the ceiling in the study of his eminent host Lonoff so as to eavesdrop on an intimate conversation occurring on the floor above: “Ah, the unreckoned consequences, the unaccountable uses of art!” Nathan rhapsodizes, adding that “James would understand” (117). James would understand the dismantling of refinement as not an expunging but an exposure of its limits. Those ideals and instruments of civilized behavior are all fighting a losing battle to insulate one from the stark vulgar fact not to be dodged: the casual, dumb brutality of experience, what Roth and Emerson both call “quicksand” and the Swede “chaos.” Against it there is no protection, as Mickey Sabbath instructs. “What we are in the hands of is not protection” (ST 344). He adds: “We are destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind” (204). Letting Go commences the representation of stupid life. In that novel a Jewish James scholar, a Noel Coward–ish narrator, Gabe Wallach, dandified, spectatorial, “unscathed,” who prides himself on his “innocence,” comes crashing down to earth, much as the proudly aloof Isabel Archer does by the end of The Portrait of a Lady. The novel is a conspicuous and tutelary presence in Roth’s pages as the primal American parable of stupidity, of prissiness colliding with that unconquerable instigator of messiness—what Henry James liked to call “clumsy Life at her stupid work” (European 1140). James’s novel preoccupies Roth from the second page onward of Letting Go; as he would later acknowledge, The Portrait “had been a virtual handbook during the early drafts” of the novel (F 157). Roth submits his plot and characters to an extended engagement both with The Portrait of a Lady and Henry James as a cultural icon. Characters discuss the novel several times, and James is the subject of a climactic conversation late in Roth’s novel. Here I will pause to sketch what in The Portrait of a Lady Roth finds particularly compelling. In a late moment of humiliating self-recognition, Isabel Archer realizes

119

120

|

CHAPTER 3

that “she has been a woman made use of . . . an applied, handled tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped iron and wood” (459). James wants us to understand Isabel’s reduction to a stupid, inert object not simply as a shocking reversal from the loftiness of her characteristic self-image but also as its mirror image. That is, Isabel’s recognition that she has been a woman who has been “made use of ” replicates her own earlier self-objectification as a woman of immaculate autonomy above all free to choose. Her most perceptive and loving observer, Ralph Touchett, is early on alarmed at her moral perfectionism (“you’ve too much power of thought—above all too much conscience”) and urges her to “take things more easily.” Isabel had already acknowledged the truth of Ralph’s assessment—“I’m absorbed in myself. I look at life too much as a doctor’s prescription”—but at this point she is too intoxicated by her sudden wealth to act upon Ralph’s warning to relax (192). Only years later, at the crisis in her marriage occasioned by Ralph’s dying and her rushing to his bedside against Osmond’s expressed wishes, does she begin to shatter her own objecthood and to “take things more easily.” In ways both painful and enthralling, she dissolves her narcissism by discovering that the fact of relation involves a “certain grossness” (466). The process of letting go commences on the train from Rome to England to see Ralph: “Nothing seemed of use to her today. All purpose, all intention was suspended. . . . She had moments indeed in her journey from Rome which were almost as good as being dead. She sat in her corner, so motionless, so passive, simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and regret” (464). With this relaxation comes not renunciation of life but Isabel’s sense of a deeper engagement— “life would be her business for a long time to come”—and this recognition is “an admission that one had a certain grossness.” The seed of this realization had been planted a bit earlier by the Countess Gemini, who, after informing her of Madame Merle’s secret plot, urges Isabel not to be too gracious any longer: “Be a little easy and natural and nasty; feel a little wicked, for the comfort of it, once in your life!” (455). Whether Isabel ever gets “nasty” is debatable, but she emphatically experiences “a certain grossness”; she climbs into Ralph’s bed and embraces his dying body; and soon she will feel on her own body the

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

visceral pressure of male desire. In Casper Goodwood’s passionate embrace in the climactic scene in the garden, Isabel feels “each thing in his hard manhood that least pleased her” (489). Readers always argue about the meanings of what comes next—she slips from Casper’s embrace, runs through the dark to the garden door, and then is reported to have returned to Rome. This is about all James provides; he withholds any reconciliation. A shaken Caspar is left, along with the reader, to puzzle things out, as if the novel has shrugged off all responsibility for explanation. One reader, Gabe Wallach, the narrator of Letting Go, says of Isabel, “she shows herself to have a lot of guts in the end” (12). Not by accident does Roth have Gabe, a graduate student at the University of Chicago writing a dissertation on the novelist, direct our attention to the ending of James’s novel. Letting Go, we will see, enacts an analogous trajectory. As I have sketched above, the final movement of The Portrait of a Lady hinges on Isabel’s letting go, which is at once a relaxing of defenses, a surrender of control, an immersion in intense experience (dying, sexual desire), in sum, an exposure to the unsettling ambushes once again of “clumsy Life at her stupid work” (James). The result is that stupidity topples refinement in the novel’s final movement but also mocks as futile the author’s (and his characters’) pretensions definitively to shape and arrange, harmonize and perfect life into the exquisitely burnished surfaces of art. By the novel’s end we have witnessed James’s audacious turning against his own sanctification of Art, a turning that reveals the limits of formal shapeliness, of “linguistic tact and moral scrupulosity.” These are qualities Roth had himself extolled in James (RMO 71). And this turning against displays a flexibility of mind, a capacity for self-critique and self-mockery, that may be the deepest lesson James imparts to Roth. James summarizes that lesson when he says (in his preface to The American) that the power of novelistic genius is greatest “when [the writer] commits himself in both directions; not quite at the same time or to the same effect . . . but by the need of performing his whole possible revolution, by the law of some rich passion in him for extremes” (European 1062). This rich passion for extremes and for the risk of moving in “both directions” speaks, I think, most intimately to Roth’s own combative sensibility (whose motor is “counterliving,” as we

121

122

|

CHAPTER 3

will see in chapter 4) and is a source of the suppleness that ultimately makes James and Roth “redfaces,” to use the latter’s term. This is the neologism Roth fashioned in a 1973 essay to evade Philip Rahv’s paleface/redskin (James/Whitman) dichotomy and instead to fashion a figure who would embody and narrate the conflict between these rivals (RMO 73). When we note that Roth means “red” in German, redface is “Rothface,” the point of maximum dissonance, “fundamentally ill at ease . . . and at odds with” palefaces and redskins (72). Though Roth does not explicitly call James a “redface,” this judgment subtly informs the final movement of Letting Go, where Gabe (and his creator) prove astute readers of James by resisting the party line laid down by Rahv. Gabe’s former lover Martha has been taking a course in James; was it taught by Philip Rahv, one wonders? For Martha proffers a paleface reading of James—“he writes a little bit like a virgin, don’t you think? I mean he has a very virginal mind, to put it mildly. . . . [he] doesn’t really know what goes on when the bedroom door snaps shut. It seems to me that people live more openly with their passions.” Gabe dismisses this as “an extraordinarily virginal remark” (570, 574). Roth’s complex orchestration of this scene includes the acute irony that Martha, not without justification, accuses Gabe, the astute detector of virginal remarks, of being in effect a virginal Jamesian observer figure. “You’re a perfectly prudent man” she tells him and envies (and loathes) his ability consistently to “get away unscathed” (575–76). Earlier Gabe had mused, “I am alone in the world and self-sufficient,” and more recently “had finally come to recognize in himself a certain dread of the savageness of life” (529). For her part, Martha is tired of being bloodied by experience: “I’ve let go and let go and let go—I’ve let go plenty. I’ve had a wilder history than you, by a long shot. I’ve got a right to hang on now. . . . I’m going to bring some order into my life” (576). But moments before this remark Martha injects disorder into Gabe’s— she slaps and bloodies him, as if staining his immaculate maturity, his spectatorial posture, and initiating him into savage life. Martha’s smack violates Gabe’s self-proclaimed “innocence” and launches him on a trajectory the very opposite of Martha’s—toward chaos, far “beyond what he had taken for the normal round of life.” Soon his “puny” life will become a site of violence and risk. In other words, Gabe’s letting go enacts

A N C E S T O R S A N D R E L AT I V E S

|

his own version of Isabel’s letting go, as he too takes upon himself a certain grossness. How puzzled Martha would be that her allegedly “virginal” Henry James is, like her creator, intent on savaging innocence. By splicing a conversation about James as cultural icon onto a climactic moment in his own novel and then correlating the movement of this climax with Isabel Archer’s exposure to multiple shocks late in The Portrait of a Lady, Roth makes remarkably creative use of James. And his overlay of James is particularly intricate thanks to Roth’s nuanced grasp of him as a “redface,” as possessed of a “rich passion for extremes” that sets grossness into reciprocal interplay with refinement. This last formulation can stand as a working definition of creative immaturity. Sharing James’s interest in less defended modes of being and in seizing one’s cultural property where one finds it, Roth shares as well his irreverence toward propriety and the proprietary. And like his predecessor, Roth is committed to reckoning the consequences of defying the static and self-contained. James indirectly gauged those consequences when, in his final preface, he distinguished between “non-revisionists” and revisionists; the lot of the former is “serene and their peace, above all, equally protected and undisturbed,” while the revisionists have never “seen or said all or . . . ceased to press forward” (European 1336). This dynamism keeps faith with what James calls “the religion of doing.” Its chief tenet is that “the whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in their turn, just so our behavior and its fruits are essentially one and continuous and persistent and unquenchable” (1340). James’s appropriation of Emerson’s phrase “the conduct of life” here reminds us, in turn, that Emerson makes a distinction that is analogous to James’s regarding revisionst and nonrevisionist. To every mind God offers a choice between “truth and repose,” says Emerson, and “take which you please,—you can never have both.” He in whom “the love of repose dominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—most likely his father’s. . . . He gets rest, commodity and reputation. . . . He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat” (Essays 425–26).

123

124

|

CHAPTER 3

Believers in the “religion of doing,” the unmoored revisionists unceasingly pressing forward refuse the consolations of repose found in pastoral harmony. Nor are they tempted by pastoral’s political equivalent—the “blood magic and blood thinking” of ethnic and racial tribalism whose proponents seek “insularity” and “psychic security” by huddling “within our inherited divisions of the corporate American culture.” These are the words of Ralph Ellison, describing one way we flee the messy turbulence of Americanness and democracy (Collected 503, 505). Ellison’s vision of dynamism—psychic, cultural, and political—seems to have internalized Emerson and James.10 Roth encountered another aesthetic of “doing” in the work of his friend the painter Philip Guston. “Abandon yourself to the unknown of the doing,” Guston once wrote in an evocatively Emersonian/Jamesian phrase; “there is only the next doing, which leads only to the next doing” (qtd. Feld 51). Guston enacted this abandonment to the unsheltered and unknown in a radical change of style and subject in the last decade of his life—a move to figurative painting from what he called the confining “purity” of abstract art and its pursuit of spiritual essences. “A lifetime of doing?” Guston’s question was rhetorical, posed to himself. But it can be heard as Roth’s as well. Nourished by the matrix of James’s “religion of doing” as variously inflected by Emerson and Ellison, and Guston, Roth in midcareer devises the counterpastoral principle of creative force that he calls counterlife. It declares as “the law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counterthought, for every urge a counterurge” (ST 158). Emerson suggests the same rhythm in his kinetic image of swinging between the “opposite negations” of one’s being, activity that demands a suppleness in negotiating the antagonistic impulses and desires that propel, in Roth’s phrase, life’s “powerful transforming urge” (RMO 162). The pivotal Counterlife emerges from and embodies this ferment—“the enlivening anarchy that overtakes anyone who even sparingly abandons” themselves “to uncensored desire”— renewing Roth’s career for another two decades (C 132).

4 “A very slippery subject”: The Counterlife as Pivot

In what I have to say you will find some things too simple and others too fantastic. But men are ruled by the simple and the fantastic. —Theodor Herzl to Baron de Hirsch The Jewish Question naturally lurked for me around every turn and corner. I sighed over it and made fun of it; I felt unhappy, but still it never really took hold of me, although even before I came here I wanted to write a Jewish novel. —Herzl, Diary

P

ublished 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, a playfulness usually associated with postmodern self-consciousness (a connection, we will see, that Roth refuses). Rather, Roth is continuing an earlier American tradition, one whose watchword is Emerson’s “Nothing is secure, but life, transition, the energizing spirit”; life “is a series of surprises” (Essays 413). This unsettling statement could stand as the novel’s epigraph. The Counterlife is Roth’s jokingly serious dismantling of what by the novel’s end he calls “the whole Western idea

126

|

CHAPTER 4

of mental health”—maturity, in short—and of the aesthetic correlative of maturity, namely the realist conventions that guarantee the novel’s illusion of life. He makes this double assault in the name of the self ’s volatility, its propensity “to define itself and then escape its own definitions,” to borrow Gombrowicz’s remarks on our recalcitrance to being completely contained in form (1:93). Roth calls this volatility “counterlife” or “counterliving,” a practice that takes as its model “what people envy in the novelist” in general—“the performing selves that the author indulges, the slipping irresponsibly in and out of his skin” (C 210). The “irresponsible” ingenuity of The Counterlife proved to be a prelude to the even more frenetic fabulations of Roth’s second Israeli novel— Operation Shylock. And we will see that the figure who links these books is, quite appropriately, the self-inventing, inauthentic, radically improbable founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, a man who seems to have come from the pages of a Philip Roth novel. Roth insists on making “irresponsibility” not simply a term of moral condemnation, one always on the lips of Zuckerman’s enraged brother Henry. Since Zuckerman Unbound, he has condemned Nathan for plundering the family for material—“everything is grist for your funmachine” (ZU 397). Irresponsibility is also in The Counterlife an aesthetic term of praise. As we know, Henry is infuriated when he hears Zuckerman’s notorious novel Carnovsky hailed as a “classic of irresponsible exaggeration,” but realizes that in aesthetic matters the “the rules are somehow completely reversed” (C 206, 222). Or, more precisely, reversal is the only rule. Henry would be equally appalled by the antithetical values of the intellectual and literary tradition discussed in chapter 2, where two plus two does not equal four. Roth’s reversal of the conventional status of the “irresponsible” reflects that tradition in general and in particular the logic of counterlife, which is propelled by the impulse to escape one’s own definitions. But, ironically, Henry shares this impulse of escape. It will soon emerge in the novel that Henry is “decent and dutiful” and also an adulterer; years earlier he was even on the brink of running off to Europe with a lover. So the upholder of solid bourgeois living is himself hardly immune to the self-subversion of counterlife, is hardly a man lacking

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

the “gift for theatrical self-transformation” (210). Henry clings to the realist fiction of leading a “straightforward life” that stands firmly opposed to Nathan’s shamelessly reckless one. But in a single moment of tormented self-awareness, Henry will come to see that, in The Counterlife as in life, nothing is secure but transition. At the outset I remarked that The Counterlife represents a transition in Roth’s art. Baldly stated, it is a move from a guilty relation to art and impersonation to an exuberantly ludic stance. The first imagines art and impersonation as diversion from pursuit of the real, which Zuckerman believes he has found in the hospital ward at the end of The Anatomy Lesson: “This is life. With real teeth in it,” he exults, for a moment free of his self-preoccupation that has been heightened by a condition of chronic pain in the upper body (AL 696). In craving the real, Zuckerman stands in a long line of American authors who find in the single-minded pursuit of art an estrangement from life—“starving myself of experience and eating only words.” The act of writing— moving sentences around all day—demands monastic concentration and sparks the counter-impulse to escape and reach “the real thing,” “the bilge, the ooze . . . the stuff. No words, just stuff. Everything the word’s in place of. The lowest of genres—life itself. . . . No more words!” (509).1 Zuckerman’s frenzied pursuit of life with real teeth expresses one of those “moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth,” as Emerson writes in “Experience” (Essays 472). The quest is futile, as Emerson says in the same essay, since we see only through the “colored and distorting lenses” of our own temperament and moods. In Emerson’s words, “it is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. The discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately” (487). In vain as well is William James’s plea in A Pluralistic Universe (1908) that we stop what he calls the “conceptual decomposition of life” (substituting concepts for life) by abandoning language (“I must deafen you to talk”) and letting “life teach the lesson.” James remarks: “I say no more,” yet announces this in the middle of his lecture,

127

128

|

CHAPTER 4

thereby consigning his hope of surmounting language to the merely figurative. He recommends that we “fall back on raw unverbalized life” as a legitimate revealer of “truth,” but warns that in so doing we risk becoming again “as foolish little children in the eyes of reason” (131–32, 121). At the end of Portnoy’s Complaint the protagonist has no words left and like an angry child concludes his monologue to his psychiatrist with a “pure howl,” a sputtering ‘aaaaahhhhh!!!!!” that requires four lines of “a” to join it with “h.” But Portnoy hasn’t come to the end of anything, as the novel’s famous “Punch Line” discloses. To his primal scream, his psychiatrist responds that now at last they can begin. But how does a writer escape “drowning in the tiny tub of yourself,” to borrow a phrase from Operation Shylock; how does one escape being chained, as Nathan laments, “to self-consciousness. Chained to retrospection. Chained to my dwarf drama till I die” (OS 55; AL 551). Nathan believes that one way out of the writing life’s devouring selfabsorption and instrumentality—“all I can do, when confronted with anyone’s story, is to turn it into material”—is to represent “suffering that isn’t semi-comical, the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck. War, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges” (AL 539, 550–51). But the ending of The Anatomy Lesson is moving precisely because the narrator abjures such immense subjects and soberly trains his eye on the immediate horror that is nothing but itself. In the hospital Zuckerman meets a Mrs. Brentford with 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. The rest, up to the eye socket, was a chunk of raw flesh” (694–95). And at times the horror, as if leaping up and seizing him, knocks him off his spectatorial perch: “tempted by the strangest yearning,” to investigate the canvas bins where the “night’s soiled linen is thrown,” Zuckerman “plunged his arms down through the tangle of sheets and bed wear and towels. He never expected so much to be so damp. The strength rushed from his groin, his mouth filled with bile—it was as though he were up to his elbows in blood. It was as though the reeking

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

flesh of Mrs. Brentford’s face was there between his two hands” (695). The repeated “as though” in this quotation marks the persistence of the figurative, a reminder that Zuckerman will struggle to learn the futility of grasping the “real thing” in language. By the end he surrenders his pursuit, realizing that he must remain “a man apart,” that is, a writer. His vocation of representation attains dignity as if in spite of his histrionics because of the narrator’s unflinching fidelity to finding the precise words. Hence it is useful to observe a distinction, in the novel’s final pages, between the narrator’s sobriety and Zuckerman’s self-mocking histrionics; the former acts as a counterweight to the latter. What is palpable in the wards—a liberating feeling of unconditional exposure where “nobody’s secret a scandal or a disgrace—everything revealed and everything at stake”—is akin to what the narrator of The Anatomy Lesson achieves by patient, articulate depiction of stolid suffering and attempted remedy: “the intern gently turned her head [of another patient]. ‘Was it very deep, Doctor?’ ‘We got it all,’ the intern told her, showing Zuckerman the long stitched-up wound under the oily dressing just behind her ear. ‘Nothing there to worry you anymore.’ ‘Yes? Well, that’s good then . . .’ ‘And—am I going to see you again?’ ‘You sure are,’ he said, squeezing her hand, and then he left her at peace on her pillow, with Zuckerman, the intern’s intern, in tow” (696–97). As if to release himself and Zuckerman from the metaphysical conundrum that is the endless chase after the real, Roth in The Counterlife posits man’s “natural being” as the impersonating “skill itself ” (C 320). Zuckerman argues this in the book’s closing pages, where he scorns the naïveté of the pastoral—“the appealing idyll of living ‘naturally’ ”— which is the basis of the dominant Western conception of psychic health. While admitting its attractions, Nathan declares that “the pastoral is not my genre . . . it isn’t complicated enough,” a prescient statement, for it predicts the shape of his creator’s subsequent career. Late Roth stages, with ingenious variation, pastoral igniting antipastoral, as life excites counterlife into being. In challenging the natural as a category or realm of value standing apart as the domain of the “real,” Zuckerman takes an antimetaphysical stance that becomes, in turn, a bridge into the next Zuckerman trilogy (the American trilogy of 1997–2000)

129

130

|

CHAPTER 4

and beyond, where the ludic—the construction of a counterlife—is aligned with the historical. But this is to leap ahead. Flagrant impersonation is hardly absent of course from Zuckerman Bound (1979–83; this is the collective title of the first trilogy, which also includes an epilogue, “The Prague Orgy”). We have only to think of Amy Bellette in The Ghost Writer and Nathan’s masquerade in The Anatomy Lesson as Milton Appel, editor of the pornographic magazine Lickety Split, the name borrowed from the critic who has savaged him in the quarterlies. The difference hinges not on impersonation versus its absence but the status of impersonation. The Counterlife makes it an ontological fact that defines human being in general, while the first trilogy construes it as psychological, inseparable from its birth in the overheated ingenuity of the young Nathan and then in his enraged imagination some years later. Part of the comedy of The Anatomy Lesson is Zuckerman’s self-lacerating relation to the real, what above I described as histrionic. By the end of the trilogy, tagging along with interns on their hospital rounds, Zuckerman relishes “the urgent, immediate human exchange!” between doctor and patient, the “indispensable work to be done, all this digging away at disease,” whereas “he’d given his fanatical devotion to sitting with a typewriter alone in a room!” (AL 697). However creative and comic the artifice, whether practiced on the page or lavished on an act of self-fashioning, it is understood as mired in the secondhand, a betrayal of or a fraud upon the real, at best a weapon to avenge life’s unfairness. For instance, Nathan’s fantasy of marrying the postwar Anne Frank will serve him as a definitive rebuke to the Jewish moralists angry at him for being a naughty Jewish boy spilling family secrets. We will see another version of this logic when Henry in The Counterlife turns Israel into the sanctuary of the “real,” of history and responsibility, using it as a club with which to beat his brother and the United States, twin embodiments for Henry of the mockery and evasion of all that Israel means. But The Counterlife scrambles the hierarchy that honors the real and devalues the invented, and also rewrites the mimetic contract between author and reader that functions as the enabling condition of realist fiction. Under the contract’s usual terms, the former is obliged to create

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

the illusion of life that allows the latter to surrender and assent to narrative. Roth amends matters: he is still committed to mimesis, but reimagines it as rendering life in its recalcitrance to formal shapeliness, its “intractability,” to borrow Peter Tarnopol’s word (MLM 194).2 The aim is to immerse the reader in a fictive world whose wobbly first principle is transition or shiftiness (as movement and deception) and where masking and unmasking—“counterlife”—seeks no end in anything more solid or “real” than the realization that “it’s all impersonation” (C 320). So in each chapter illusion is spun then unraveled; Henry the dentist, for example, who dies of heart disease in chapter 1, where Nathan attends his funeral, is leading a new life as a recent émigré to Israel in chapter 2. There he is visited by Nathan, who in a later chapter we learn has already died of a heart attack. After Nathan’s funeral, Henry discovers that the novelist has left behind among his papers a manuscript whose first two chapters we have just read and whose final chapter— Nathan’s first-person account of his move to England with his pregnant English bride—we are about to read. Infuriated after reading the opening chapters that have exposed a past extramarital affair, Henry throws away the pages. He is not the only exasperated reader of the novel, which somehow survives intact Henry’s rage. We have been tricked, seduced by the spell of narrative, which in each chapter first solicits the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, then abruptly upends it. “Why do you bother me like this?” Roth in an interview has imagined his impatient reader asking him. He answers: “Because life doesn’t necessarily have a course, a simple sequence, a predictable pattern” (RMO 162). Here, significantly, Roth reasserts the mimetic illusion—“there is nothing ‘modernist,’‘postmodernist,’ or the least bit avant-garde about that approach,” he says.3 In other words, all the narrative convolutions turn out to be in the service not of banishing the real, but of heightening verisimilitude. The flagrant implausibility of the actual is a lesson Nathan learned long ago in his midnight eavesdropping on the great writer Lonoff. Overhearing the old man’s intimate conversation with the adoring young Amy Bellette, Nathan says to himself: “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!” (GW 121). If transition and unpredictability characterize life, The Counterlife’s startling turns—and the book’s proposed coda is “a

131

132

|

CHAPTER 4

rather rapid transition”—become the apt vehicle to represent this turbulence. The novel schools the reader in becoming flexible or game in negotiating the entrapments of the actual. Nathan too has to improvise amid exigencies. After meeting Maria, he finds himself for the first time yearning for family life and fatherhood. But the drug he is taking for his heart condition has made him impotent, and they must conduct their affair more by talking than by anything else: “My carnality is now really a fiction and, revenge of revenge, language and only language must provide the means for the release of everything” (C 184). Even the declaration of the constitutive matter of any novel—that it is all and only words—is turned into a mimetic device of the plot. A reader’s capacity to suspend disbelief in narrative while simultaneously knowing that deflation looms has the curious effect not of instilling distrust in the fictive but rather the opposite: it encourages pleasure in the story while knowing it is hedged by the precarious and temporary. We become, for instance, emotionally engaged in the affair and marriage and move of Nathan and Maria to England only to discover near the end that Maria is tired and is “leaving the book” even though she has found it “kind of thrilling to live totally as somebody else’s invention.” As if by exposing the backstage machinery of fiction making—a practice ubiquitous in daily life—our confidence in its power is reaffirmed. If “it’s all impersonation,” if “the natural being may be the skill itself,” then the opposing and normative ideal of transparency to ourselves and others—the confidence in “being oneself ”—is illusory, or else is another mask. Nathan calls himself a “theater . . . and nothing more than a theater,” and this plastic realm of play replaces those domains— nature, the real—traditionally imagined as immune to change, stable in meaning (321). Nathan’s “chosen fate,” as Maria describes it, is “to be innocent of innocence at all costs.” But the cost of his choice comes too high for her. Nathan’s allergy to innocence means a chronic inability to enjoy peaceful, quotidian, connubial life and instead to be preoccupied with “irresolvable conflict” (313). In his defense, Zuckerman notes the boldness of his claims: “I realize that what I am describing, people divided in themselves, is said to characterize mental illness, and is the absolute opposite of our idea of emotional integration. The whole

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

Western idea of mental health runs in precisely the opposite direction: what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being” (320). In realigning the “Western idea of mental health” grounded on the idea of “a natural being, an irreducible self,” Zuckerman flouts “our idea of emotional integration.” Evidently the whole Western idea of maturity is a species of innocence, and he offers to replace it with “the joke of a self ”—the “ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that form” his “repertoire.” He admits he is probably exaggerating and grants the circularity of his argument, “since there is no way of proving whether I’m right or not,” but finds it “fun”“trying to get a handle on one’s own subjectivity” (320). But is Zuckerman’s skepticism of the genuine and authentic, a view that he ascribes to “certain self-aware people,” finally only, or merely, a fiction writer’s professional deformation? The novel’s first chapter, “Basel,” suggests otherwise, that the deformation, while particularly acute and isolating for writers, conditions social behavior in general. At his brother’s funeral, Nathan once again feels “the family outsider.”“Entering the synagogue . . . he thought, ‘This profession even fucks up grief ’ ” (14). Nathan never reconciled with Henry, who never forgave the satire and ridicule of their parents in Nathan’s best-selling novel Carnovsky. (Zuckerman Unbound is largely taken up with this bitter falling-out.) In The Counterlife’s opening chapter, Henry’s widow Carol has asked Nathan to compose a eulogy of three thousand words, and he writes them, but they don’t fit the occasion: “the trouble was that words that were morally inappropriate for a funeral were just the sort of words that engaged him. . . . He was now going to have a very hard time getting through the day without seeing everything that happened as more, a continuation not of life but of his work or work-to-be” (13). What sets him apart (and it was his “future as a man apart” that he had sought so desperately to “unchain himself from” in The Anatomy Lesson) is the narrative burning a hole in his pocket. His three thousand words—the opening twelve pages of the chapter—concern Henry’s doomed hope to change his life by leaving his stale suburban marriage to run off with a Swiss patient to Basel and live there as an “expatriate dentist.” Nathan bases his imagination of Henry’s fantasy of a

133

134

|

CHAPTER 4

counterlife—fueled by “what’s survived of brutish passion”—on his brother’s confession ten years before of that affair. This admission becomes the seed from which Nathan cultivates into full flower a fiction of Henry’s staying put and satisfying himself with local infidelity and, in the next chapter, being spiritually reborn as an “anti-Henry”—now called Hanoch—in the Judean hills. Inspired by Henry’s sudden death and the request for a three-thousand-word eulogy, Nathan has reread his voluminous journals, which contain the notes of his brother’s confession. In “Basel” Nathan juxtaposes lascivious excerpts from notebook entries with the official eulogy delivered by Carol and with scenes from the family gathering the day of the funeral. Although “the story Carol had chosen to tell wasn’t the one that he had pieced together,” her eulogy proves she is a “persuasive writer of domestic fiction.” Carol describes with perfectly managed sincerity a husband who chose death rather than impose on both of them a life of sexual frustration brought on by impotence, a side effect of the heart drug his bypass required. Carol, says Zuckerman admiringly, “had cunningly reimagined a decent, ordinary, adulterous humanist as a heroic martyr to the connubial bed” (48). Carol’s deathbed conversion of unkempt life into inspiring bourgeois art clearly parallels her brother-in-law’s remakings. And so do other details in “Basel.” Nathan imagines Henry and his dental assistant Wendy starting their affair with two words, “let’s pretend”—that they are dentist and assistant having sex. Wendy keeps saying, “Why is it so exciting when all we’re pretending to be is what we are?” (35). Even Barry Shuskin, a mourner at the funeral and a colleague of Henry’s who tries to persuade Nathan to invest in a cryonics facility, is busy remaking life: in his facility, body and head will be separated for freezing but eventually they are to be rejoined: they “reconnect the arteries, the brain stem, and everything else all to a new body . . . or they may be able to clone new bodies. Anything is possible” (46). This malleability, life’s susceptibility to reconfiguration, dominates “Basel”; even the final paragraph, which is Nathan’s final notebook entry about Henry’s old affair, recounts a stab at reinvention. It describes Carol’s attempt to rekindle her husband’s passion by picking him up at the airport one night clad, beneath “her alpaca-lined storm coat,” only in black bra, panties, and garter belt, a self-transformation that fails to

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

accomplish its aim because her husband “spots the price tag stapled to the garter belt, and sees in that all the desperateness of this startling display” (48). Zuckerman’s remakings, while they cannibilize past confidences and blend fact and fiction, are otherwise different only in degree from Carol’s “domestic fiction” or the other reinventions. Social behavior, what Henry James called our “exposed and entangled state,” demands the drapery of representation, and this “human gift for playacting” is not the enemy of achieving intimacy with others, but its basis. Yet our native theatricality does not slake our thirst for the real, that beckoning mirage of transparency, what Roth calls the “sanitized, confusionless life” of “pastoral.” In other words, the “will to adorn” (to borrow Zora Neale Hurston’s phrase) or, as Roth puts it, our propensity to engage in “the obsessive reinvention of the real that never stops,” keeps the unmediated, what is independent of our observations, forever out of reach (C 247). We have to live with our accounts of the real and with their inevitable frailty: “That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong” (AP 35). The “individual is always mistaken,” as Emerson says twice in “Experience” (Essays 484). Convinced, like Henry James, of life’s inherent artfulness, Roth is at pains to distinguish his foregrounding of artifice from the postmodern understanding. The latter is a theoretical position, a critique of the metaphysics of presence that grounds representation. This deconstructive critique regards “the real” as simply a linguistic effect—in narrative, language is all that happens, as Roland Barthes once said. In contrast, for Roth invention is all that happens; apart from “the things we cannot possibly not know,” the real is available to us as social convention, hence plastic and revisable (James, European 1063). “Life, like the novelist, has a powerful transforming urge,” Roth said in a 1985 interview: “we are writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time, contradictory but mutually entangling stories,” an activity that “constitutes our hold on reality” (RMO 161). Life and artifice endlessly interpenetrate, something the genre of the novel has been showing us since Don Quixote.4 “The true art of life,” says Emerson, is “to skate well” on the “surfaces” we live “amid,” rather than vainly to pursue “reality, sharp peaks

135

136

|

CHAPTER 4

and edges of truth” (478, 472). As if in concord with Emerson’s esteem for skating, Zuckerman says at the end of The Counterlife that “the whole idea of what is a self . . . is a very slippery subject.” This slippery remark (it puns on “subject,” a philosophical term for self ) helps explain the novel’s vertiginous formal and thematic commitment to unsettlement. Emerson, who believed that “only as far as people are unsettled is there any hope for them,” remarks the “evanescence and lubricity of all objects” (413, 473) and noted in his journal that “flowing is the secret of things & no wonder the children love masks, & to trick themselves in endless costumes, & be a horse, a soldier, a parson, or a bear, and older delight in theatricals” (Prose 573). “Flowing is the secret of things”—of nature and of matter and of humans’ mimetic faculty— and finds its apotheosis in Emerson’s relentlessly expanding Jacksonian America. He looks around to observe in “Circles” that “new arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics; fortifications by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam by electricity” (Essays 404). Emerson’s insight into the ubiquity of metamorphic flowing in his country’s human and capitalist economies brings together the ontological and historical, a fusion that prefigures the trajectory of Roth’s rendering of counterlife. In other words, the “slippery subject” of impersonation in Roth’s oeuvre will not remain solely in the realm of psychology and ontology. By the second Zuckerman trilogy, Roth aligns impersonation and history, not least because they share an inherent instability. The immediate historical impetus for counterlife is Roth’s sense of the 1960s as the “emergence of counterhistory” (a remark he made in 1973) when “what was imagined to be indestructible, impermeable, in the very nature of American things, yielded and collapsed overnight,” as if the sixties were a visceral initiation into and affirmation of what “Circles” evokes—the permanent revolution called America (RMO 77–78). Roth foregrounds the transition to history in chapter 2 of The Counterlife. There the querulous Henry, now a pistol-packing settler in Agor, chides the visiting Nathan for his novels’ wallowing in “Americanstyle psychiatric soul-searching” and “non-historical personal problems” (105). These elements, according to Henry, “belonged to the ‘narcissistic

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

past’ ” and are “unspeakably puny” now that Henry has become a dedicated Zionist (104–5). He soon enlarges his indictment: “beyond the Freudian lock you put on every single person’s life, there is another world, a larger world, a world of ideology, of politics, of history—of things larger than the kitchen table!” America, says Henry, is where our grandparents escaped Europe. “They were escaping history! Here [in Israel] they are making history! There’s a world outside the Oedipal swamp” (139–40). Henry’s arguments, while mocked by Nathan, have weight, as do those of Lippman, Henry’s ferocious Israeli mentor. Lippman is a tough Jew who tells Nathan, after deriding Norman Mailer’s romanticizing of criminality, “we do not have the luxury you American-Jewish writers have of indulging in fantasies of violence and force. . . . We do not dream about force—we are force” (127). On the visit to Henry and his friends, Roth does not stack the deck to give Nathan all the best lines. “The simple truth is I was outclassed,” Nathan remarks after nearly drowning at dinner in Lippman’s torrent of words (130). Indeed, to look ahead, on the evidence of the American trilogy, Henry’s critique is prescient and influential; like Nathan’s concluding rejection of pastoral, it helps reorient Roth’s late fiction, spurring it to leave behind narcissistic self-absorption—but not before The Counterlife debates and refines Henry’s argument. The rigor of the novel is its fidelity to the making of counterlife, to enacting bruising antagonisms out of which emerge revisions and redirections inside and beyond the book. In the novel’s interchapter, “Aloft,” Nathan challenges Henry’s exceptionalist account of America as a haven from history. “History doesn’t have to be made the way a mechanic makes a car—one can play a role in history without its having to be obvious, even to oneself ” (146). Henry before Israel, “flourishing mundanely in the civility and security of South Orange,” was also making history: “you too were standing in time and culture, whether you happened to realize it or not” (146). This passage critiques Henry’s claims first by saying that the postwar success of American Jews is itself a “world historical event on a par with the history you are making in Israel.” But Nathan’s subtler point is about “standing in time and culture” regardless of one’s awareness of doing so. “History claims everybody” whether they know or like it, to recall

137

138

|

CHAPTER 4

Roth’s recent remark about The Plot Against America. Roth calls this a “simple fact,” but in Nature’s nation it bears endless repeating. For surely his main protagonists are deaf to it. In stripping America of its “exceptionalism,” Roth retires the idealist hierarchy of the “real” versus artifice and retires too any refuge for the natural and pastoral to prosper and maintain privilege: in sum, in his American trilogy he inscribes the logic of counterlife on “anti”-American premises. Before returning to The Counterlife, I will give an overview of what it eventually precipitates—the historicizing of possessive individualism in the trilogy. To telescope the transitional status of the self in late Roth: by the end of The Counterlife “homo ludens” comes to understand itself as cast out of the Edenic idyll of “prehistory” and purity, out of the protective womb of timeless security. This postlapsarian state is reiterated at the end of The Human Stain, where one is set adrift on the vast surface of “the history that isn’t yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time” (336). To survive this proliferating quicksand, the self must learn to float and improvise counterlives by letting go the props of mastery. The “slippery subject” is the historical subject par excellence, for its adaptive suppleness is a seismic register of the contingent. Remain fixed to the anchorage of single, settled self-ownership and you will sink. Yet the romance of possessive American individualism insists on this anchorage. The insistence is not immediately discernible because the self declares its freedom with a liberating act of severance in the “great frontier tradition . . . the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard” (HS 334). Born of a “rapturous drive” to “become a new being,” the unfettered individual, as if finding lightness unbearable, funnels all that driving energy into the consuming project of perfecting its autonomy (334). The result is that the pastoral dream of a tabula rasa— a new start above or beyond history, time, and change—may end in the nightmare of stunted, static objecthood. This reversal is registered repeatedly in The Human Stain. Here note a small detail. “Mr. Determined,” as Coleman Silk’s sister Ernestine admiringly called her fiercely self-reliant brother, is, by the end, a moniker that denotes not a defiantly free subject but an object acted upon from without—shaped by

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

forces larger than he had ever reckoned with (343).5 This lurking inversion, visible in the ambiguity of “determined,” is deleted by the ideology of American selfhood—the individual’s sovereign immunity to social claims—a fantasy that remains at the center of our culture. 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.” The “right to define existence on the basis of your own authority,” says Quentin Anderson writing of Emerson, involves a “passion for isolation” (20, 18). This passion is abundant in the world of late Roth: Ira Ringold, Coleman Silk, Les Farley (The Human Stain), David Kepesh, Charles Lindbergh are all isolationists. And presiding at the center is Zuckerman and his “aloneness.” “It’s pretty damn monastic, the way you live,” remarks his old English teacher Murray (IMC 320). And when, after six nights of talking, they embrace for over a minute, it is hard for Nathan to let go—“the emotional demands of leaving a ninety-year-old,” laughs Murray (319). To feel the tug of attachment threatens to expose the fortress of self-determination as a precarious illusion. Because attachment socializes, it brings one into the slippery, flowing world of time and entanglement, forcing us to leave the fantasy of undivided oneness, the utopia of “sanitized, confusionless, life.” To make this transition from an “immutable” (as Coleman is described) to a “slippery” self of theatricality is to enter a world less susceptible to discipline and control, more exposed to hazard and risk (HS 171). Another way to describe this tension is that it comprises a collision between the canonical Emerson and his counterself; that is, between the self of mastery and the self of antimastery or what he calls “abandonment” and Roth calls “letting go.” The counter-Emerson for whom “flowing is the secret of things” is the Emerson of “Circles” and especially of “Experience,” where “all things swim and glitter” and he sets us on the ice to find our bearings. To skate well is to discover that “we thrive by casualties,” not by executive will (482–83). Consistent with this logic is Emerson’s remark in his journal that “liberty” is not unobstructed agency; rather, it “means the power to flow”: “becoming somewhat else is the whole game of nature, & death the penalty of standing still” (Prose 524). Nature’s incessant change and our own susceptibility

139

140

|

CHAPTER 4

to mood (we have no “security against moods!” and hence are “always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods”) tap the “energizing spirit” and nurture the capacity, in Roth’s words, to “run counter” to things, to contest, refashion, decenter (Emerson, Essays 586–87).6 Indeed, “becoming somewhat else” comes to count, by the end of The Counterlife, as Roth’s measure of human vitality in all his fiction to follow. He implies this early in American Pastoral, the first volume of the second Zuckerman trilogy. The “Swede,” we will recall, seems to have “something . . . on top of him that had called a halt to him. Something had turned him into a human platitude. Something had warned him: You must not run counter to anything” (23). Without countermoves and counterliving, imagination atrophies and leaves the self stunted in inert purity. Every pastoral moment ignites its “counterpastoral” in mockery and irony. The Swede begets Merry. “The construction of a counterlife,” Roth remarks, is a “manifesto for human transformation,” and though it has special relevance to specific historical moments such as the turn-of-the-century Zionist dream of a homeland “to reverse the very form of Jewish existence” (a context to which we will return), it is a manifesto without content. That is, it does not enunciate particular goals or argue substantive claims or doctrines (C 147). Rather, counterlife is revisionary practice—the act of turning or reversing—without preordained telos (147). Above all, the practice enacts and generates what Emerson calls antagonism—“the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits,” he famously says in “Experience” (483). By this he means that the mind, when powerful, is not bent on exclusion and the attainment of present certainty but embraces contradiction, discord and surprise, the waywardness of moods, the fact that “things are, and are not, at the same time” (585). “The truth about us is endless. As are the lies,” Nathan remarks, thinking of Coleman. We are “whipsawed by the inimical teeth of this world. By the antagonism that is the world” (HS 315–16). Antagonism, one of Emerson’s subtlest readers notes, “is the health of the whole world: its value is perpetual and to be preferred over synthesis or diluted compromise” (Kateb 5). Antagonism heightens flux by opposing “one-sided commitment” in favor of “exaggerated, tentative, constantly qualified and antithetical thinking” (Kateb 50). No sentence, says Emerson, “will hold the

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie” (585). The Counterlife doesn’t flinch from giving itself the lie: rather than simply celebrate flux, which would congeal it into a fixed principle, Roth sets his commitment to the incorrigible and slippery colliding against the effort to control. In other words, insisting that the agonistic demands of counterlife be primary, he stages the clash between mastery and antimastery. This tension is also made vivid in The Facts, where Roth solicits Zuckerman’s cutting critique; Nathan makes fun of his creator’s “relentlessly coherent narrative” and temperamental bias for “making everything signify something”: “hasn’t anything ever happened to him that he couldn’t make sense of?” (190). That bias informs even the vertiginous transitions of The Counterlife, the work, finally, of an adroitly manipulative novelist, a master puppeteer, an artfulness the novel exposes. The writing of a eulogy is, once again, the nexus of revelation. If Nathan in chapter 1 declines Carol’s request because he has written an antieulogy, the wrong words for the occasion, Henry doesn’t have any words at Nathan’s funeral; “Nathan had got the monopoly on words” (207). After the funeral, at Nathan’s apartment, Henry discovers not only drafts of the novel’s opening chapters but the eulogy Nathan’s publisher had delivered that morning. Nathan wrote it himself “for delivery in the event he didn’t survive the surgery, his own appraisal of himself, disguised as someone else’s!” (231). Nathan exerted his mind-control right down to the end over every egothreatening challenge! . . . controlling exactly how he was to be judged! Everyone speaking that bastard’s words, everyone a dummy up on his knee ventriloquizing his mouthful! . . . Everyone buried and mummified in that verbal lava, including finally himself—nothing straightforward, unvarnished, directly alive . . . instead everything important distorted, disguised . . . cooked up in this terrible solitude, everything selfcalculation.

And now having given impromptu the eulogy he declined to give in public, Henry concludes: Nathan’s was “a life spent hiding from the flux

141

142

|

CHAPTER 4

of disorderly life . . . a life lived out behind a life-proof shield of wellprepared discourse—of cunningly selected, self-protecting words” (231–32). “Unheard but eloquent” in his rage, Henry would seem to hold the moral high ground. And to strengthen that hold he compares himself, a dentist whose vocation depends on precision and accuracy, “a man who has dedicated himself to living with the facts” of “saliva, blood, bone, teeth,” to his brother, a man indifferent to fact and with a compulsion for “irresponsible exaggeration” (234, 236). But the scene ends with another startling turn, a toppling of the moral hierarchy upon which Henry has built his world. Having ransacked Nathan’s files and carried them to his car until he decides where to store them, Henry is “seething suddenly with remorse” at what he has done and “seething with outrage too, about ‘Basel’ more than anything—as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he’d got wrong” (236). Henry has philandered, Henry ten years before had been tempted to run away to Basel; and his rage at “Basel” (and eagerness to destroy it) is not simply at Nathan’s violation of confidences but his own guilt. Reading over Nathan’s story, Henry burns with shame: “he was stunned to see how little it had taken to bring him so close to squandering everything” (223). When he calls home and his loving, favorite daughter answers, “the very child whom Nathan had pictured playing her violin over Henry’s coffin” in “Basel,” Henry’s self-loathing is inflamed and he furiously displaces it onto Nathan and justifies his own theft of the manuscript: “He [Henry] had done the only thing there was to do. My brother was a Zulu . . . he was out to murder my whole family the way he’d murdered our parents, murder us with contempt for what we are” (238). Exhausted, shaken, Henry then pours the manuscript into a dumpster. But instead of this settling his emotions, they are only further unsettled. His inward transformation occurs next and is worth quoting in full: He [Nathan] was a Zulu, he thought, a pure cannibal, murdering people, eating people, without ever quite having to pay the price. Then something putrid was stinging his nostrils and it was Henry who was leaning over and violently beginning to retch, Henry vomiting as though he had broken the primal taboo and eaten human flesh—Henry, like a cannibal

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

who out of respect for his victim, to gain whatever history and power is there, eats the brain and learns that raw it tastes like poison. This was no squeezing out of those tears of grief he’d hope to shed the day before . . . this was a realm of emotion unlike any he had known or would wish to know again, this quaking before the savagery of what he’d finally done and had wanted to do most of his life, to his brother’s lawless, mocking brain. (238–39)

In this catharsis, the novel’s emotional climax, Henry and Nathan exchange places, and this transition reflects not the technical virtuosity of narrative legerdemain, but the mimesis of a moment of lacerating selfawareness. Now Henry becomes the savage who has destroyed his brother’s living creation, now Henry is acting in murderous hatred and lawless irresponsibility. The abrupt reversal, as abrupt as his move from New Jersey to the Judean Hills, places Henry in a new “realm of emotion” where all the usual demarcations are blurred and there are no bright lines between “irresponsible exaggeration” and sober facts, between suburban dentist and jungle cannibal. In reading Nathan’s words, Henry tastes the raw truth of complicity. In witnessing this moment of upheaval, the reader is implicitly invited to engage in antithetical thinking, to move in both directions, a practice whose imperative is to maintain the tension of perpetual “transit”—to adjudicate rival claims, to rethink and revise assumptions yet not to arrest the struggle by imposing Truth or synthesis. Running counter: this commitment to counterlife, to unsettlement, is what orients reading, art, and Jews. “Where was the Jew in him?” Nathan asks himself of the Swede (20). And then he wonders, “What did he do for subjectivity,” as if the two questions are the same. Earlier the questions merged together in Operation Shylock (1993), where Roth characterizes Jews as disputation incarnate and renders their subjectivity as a mockery of Western ideas of psychic “integration” and maturity: “Inside every Jew is a mob of Jews. The good Jew, the bad Jew. The new Jew, the old Jew. The lover of Jews, the hater of Jews . . . the defiant Jew, the appeasing Jew. The Jewish Jew, the de-Jewed Jew . . . a threethousand year amassment of mirrored fragments” (334). Given that in

143

144

|

CHAPTER 4

Roth’s second Israeli novel the native Jewish element is counterlife engorged, Operation Shylock makes The Counterlife seem almost genteel realism à la William Dean Howells. In it Roth extends his “instinct for impersonation” beyond “the realm of fiction” into life—he insinuates (but never “proves”) that he undertakes a spy mission for Israel (358). And what results from the “most extreme performance” of his life is a blurring of artifice and life that permanently fractures any reliable boundary between the two, a rupture whose tremors Shylock registers (359). Shylock plunges us into a maelstrom of relentless confusion, one “silly fucking mess” after another, starting with the book’s generic status: it is subtitled “a confession,” but is the first-person narration by a figure named Philip Roth nonfiction or fiction? Or a mix of both? (313). Actual people, including fellow novelist Aharon Appelfeld, appear and converse with Roth. The book’s last page, a nine-line “Note to the Reader,” intends to clarify: “This book is a work of fiction,” it begins, but its final sentence—“This confession is false”—cancels clarity as it leaves unclear to what “confession” refers. Philip Roth the narrator comes to Israel to put a stop to the activities of a man who looks like and calls himself Philip Roth, a double whom Roth the narrator will in turn double by later impersonating. Impersonating one’s impersonator; this is the vertiginous world of Shylock. The impossibility of cleanly dividing true from false reverberates on multiple levels, starting with the first thing we learn—that a Halcion-induced mental breakdown of the actual Philip Roth has left him with chronic “uncertainty as to what was real” (30). This condition is hardly assuaged by his faithful attendance at the Jerusalem District Court trial of John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker who denies he is guilty of sadistic crimes as a Nazi prison camp guard named Ivan the Terrible and whose smug smiles Roth finds maddening to decipher. Later in the book Roth offers another explanation for uncertainty: a lifetime of fiction making has blurred his sense of boundaries. Once, Roth says, “I ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction,” nothing, “neither reality nor myself, had been the same since.” He recalls with nostalgic longing his “life before impersonation and imitation and two-foldedness set in, life before self-mockery and selfidealization (and the idealization of the mockery; and the mockery of

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

the idealization; and the idealization of the idealization; and the mockery of the mockery) . . . back when what was outside was outside and what was inside was inside, when everything still divided cleanly” (218–19). But as we have seen, Roth does not ascribe the effects of the epistemological abyss into which fiction makers stare to postmodern playfulness or to their professional deformation. The abyss is Israeli reality. “I say the permutations are infinite in a situation like ours. . . . Nothing is secure.” Thus remarks the inscrutable spymaster and handler Smilesburger at the book’s end in New York when he announces the murder of an old friend of Roth’s, possibly a spy for the Palestinians or a counteragent for Israel, murdered by . . . who knows? Each side accuses the other (390). The Israeli aim, explains Smilesburger to Roth, is to “create an atmosphere in which no Arab can feel secure as to who is his enemy and who is his friend. . . . And if this is the case with those who live there, then it follows for someone like you, who lives here [in the United States], you know even less and get even more wrong. That’s why to describe your book, [Smilesburger has read the manuscript of Operation Shylock] laid in Jerusalem, as a figment of your imagination might not be as misleading as you fear” (390). But Smilesburger is self-interested in persuading Roth of its fictionality, for the former’s fear is that the book gets too much right, that it betrays Israeli secrets about PLO funding that Roth evidently gathered on a trip for Mossad to Athens. Hence he is trying to convince Roth to delete the final chapter. Roth elects to do so; we hear no details about the Athens mission. Instead, Roth ponders at length his motives in having agreed to undertake the dangerous assignment. Why did he venture beyond the page? “Was I succumbing at long last to a basic law of my existence, to the instinct for impersonation?” (358). One answer is no; his motive is the opposite of impersonation—his undeniable loyalty to Jews, his “secret vice” (388). But a single answer won’t suffice; never content with the simple, Roth is most drawn to his motive’s unknowability as the essence of his action’s fascination: “I really couldn’t see what was behind what I was doing, and that too may have accounted for why I was doing it: I was enlivened by its imbecilic side—maybe nothing was behind it. To do something without clarity, an inexplicable act, something

145

146

|

CHAPTER 4

unknowable even to oneself, to step outside responsibility and give way fully to a very great curiosity, to be appropriated unresistingly by the strangeness, by the dislocation of the unforeseen . . . No, I could not name for myself what it was that drew me in” (358). In this deeply Emersonian antiexplanation of an action left undepicted, Roth draws a “new circle,” is gripped by “the insatiable desire” to “forget” himself and “do something without knowing how or why,” to borrow Emerson’s words (414), a something whose basis is not masterful will but rather a letting go, feeling himself “appropriated unresistingly by the strangeness.” But before deciding to delete the chapter, Roth stands his ground in his meeting with Smilesburger at Barney Greengrass, an Upper West Side Jewish restaurant. Seeing disappointment in Smilesburger’s eyes, he wonders to himself, “must there not be a point, even in him, where manipulation stops?” (393). This question yearns for the comforting solace of the real, but repeatedly the book reveals the real’s raucous strangeness, especially in the post-Holocaust world. As Roth’s friend, the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, who as a child survived the camps, says: “my real world was far beyond the power of imagination . . . everything was so unbelievable that one seemed oneself to be fictional. . . . Reality is always stronger than the human imagination. Not only that, reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, out of all proportion.” But a novel, he says with regret, “cannot permit itself all that” (56, 86). Roth says of his friend: “Aharon and I each embody the reverse of the other’s experience . . . because . . . of the all but incompatible orientations that shape our very different lives and very different books and that result from antithetical twentieth-century Jewish biographies” (OS 201). Although Roth doesn’t specify precisely how they differ, one can infer that it hinges on what each permits into his novels. Appelfeld, who experienced the reality of the Holocaust as surpassing any imagination, forbids his novels from containing the hideous nightmares of his life. “If I remained true to the facts, no one would believe me,” he remarks; so Appelfeld must remove the story of his life “from the mighty grip of memory” (86). But the novels of Roth, the unscathed, third-generation American Jew, are unmarked by traumatic memory. Instead, everything

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

is permitted, and the virtual given of the novels is that, to borrow Appelfeld’s words, American “reality is always stronger than the human imagination.” For Roth, this fact serves not to sanctify Reality as the preserve of Truth but instead emphasizes that in its outrageous defiance of plausibility reality surpasses fiction. Nearly half a century ago, in what is still his most famous critical statement, Roth declared that American reality is so infuriating, stupefying, and sickening that the American writer has his hands full just trying to make it “credible.” The “actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist” (RMO 167–68). One such enviably bizarre figure, albeit not American, is Theodor Herzl, modern Zionism’s founder. The main plot strand of Operation Shylock concerns a “Herzl turned inside out” (203), a man who calls himself Philip Roth, author of Portnoy’s Complaint, and whom the Israeli press reports as going around Jerusalem promulgating a program of “Diasporism,” which urges a return of Israeli Jews with European backgrounds to “our ancestral Jewish Europe” (42). This reverses the course charted by the founder of Zionism. “Fearful of a second Jewish holocaust in the Middle East” due to Islamic anti-Semitism, this Roth argues that Zionism has outlived its usefulness and Israel should now be regarded as a temporary sojourn on the road back to Europe (32). This Philip Roth (later called Moishe Pipik) is named by the actual Roth as “my Jerusalem counterself.” Pipik is not only the counter-Herzl but is an homage to Herzl; in defending the outlandishness of his scheme, he has carefully studied and identified with the founder: “In his day Herzl too was accused of being a satirist and of making an elaborate joke when he proposed the establishment of a Jewish state. Many deprecated his plan as a hilarious, an outlandish fiction” (46). The references to Herzl in Operation Shylock make explicit what is implicit in The Counterlife—that the improbable figure of Herzl, deracinated fin de siècle cosmopolitan literary journalist, theater critic, and novelist abruptly turned messianic political leader, inspires Roth’s conception of counterlife. In a letter to Henry in Judea, Nathan attributes his brother’s sudden Zionist passion less to “feeling more profoundly Jewish,” or protest at American anti-Semitism, but rather as an “absolutely

147

148

|

CHAPTER 4

classical” instance of the Zionist effort “to reverse the very form of Jewish existence. The construction of a counterlife that is one’s own antimyth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation as extreme—and, at the outset, as implausible—as any ever conceived. A Jew could be a new person if he wanted to” (C 147). Herzl’s obsession with the Jewish problem is implausible because for most of his life he was, he confesses in his diary, “indifferent to [his] Jewishness.” He was a Hungarian-born Jew who embraced an identity as a German aesthete, full of the assimilated Jews’ embarrassed contempt for eastern Jews. But German anti-Semitism has “powerfully forced [his] Jewishness to the surface” (Diaries 109). Our enemies, he realizes, have ignited Jewish self-consciousness and unified Jews, whether we like it or not, and his alertness to this historical contingency is the basis of his Jewish identity. Roth has described his own Jewish identity in an analogously antiessentialist way: “to me being a Jew had to do with a real historical predicament into which you were born” (F 126). Herzl realizes that his sudden conviction that he has the “solution” to the Jewish Question will startle people: “I know it sounds mad; but in the initial period people will often think me mad until they realize with deep emotion the truth of what I have been saying” (110). As Herzl notes in his diary, he deliberately avoids filling those pages with the responsible practice of “self-criticism” that governs his literary work, because such discipline would “stunt” his ideas. Thus he lets “exaggerations and dreams” proliferate among “practical and political ideas” as a “mild intoxication” “necessary” to resist being “forced into the straitjacket of sober facts.” The facts would only attest to what is, whereas he employs a “possibilist” logic (to borrow Musil’s word) that envisions new men and a new world; “our poor people will be given new clothes. . . . There shall be something symbolic about these very clothes: You are starting a new life now!” (146). “To everyone, high and low, I say: No narrow-mindedness! In a new world there is room for all” (40). The “creation of new conditions” (“I presuppose a virginal soil”) in a new place propels his plans for mass emigration, plans that will not abide the inconveniences of actual limits (96). When asking for a report on the state of the Jews he notes: “this report, too, should not be timidly

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

statistical, but should, as far as possible, be rather free, lively, unconstrained, and idiomatic” (79). He connects his need to resist the discipline of fact to artistic impulse; “artists will understand this fully” (76). At the same time, Herzl calls his “solution” a “strictly scientific one” (111). “It would be an obsession if it were not so rational, from beginning to end. An earlier term for such a condition was ‘inspiration’ ” (96). A look into Herzl’s Diaries is a startling experience, almost as if the young aesthete Nathan Zuckerman circa My Life As a Man is peering out from its pages. Herzl’s opening entry (1895) reads: For some time past I have been occupied with a work of infinite grandeur. At the moment I do not know whether I shall carry it through. It looks like a mighty dream. But for days and weeks it has possessed me beyond the limits of consciousness. . . . [It] looks over my shoulder at my comically trivial journalistic work, disturbs me and intoxicates me. It is still too early to surmise what will come of it. But . . . even as a dream it is something remarkable, and that I ought to write it down . . . at least for my own delight or reflection in later years. And perhaps as something between these two possibilities—that is, as literature. If my conception is not translated into reality, at least out of my activity can come a novel . . . Title: The Promised Land! To tell the truth, I am no longer sure that it was not actually the novel that I first had in mind. (3)

The Diaries reveal the very moment when Herzl’s counterlife is coming to birth, his process of transformation from aesthete to political revolutionary in which neither commitment is sacrificed but rather the two are fused. His commitment to the primacy of invention and the exertion of human will is expressed in his investment in the novel in two senses, the literary form and the new political form he is proposing— the new life for Jews that emigration will create. If his idea fails to take flesh, he notes, “at least out of my activity can come a novel” (3). Later, after feeling rebuffed in his efforts, he writes: “Now the novel is again very much in my thoughts, because my plan will probably strike everyone as fiction” (192). For Herzl, both forms of the novel—political and

149

150

|

CHAPTER 4

aesthetic—are precarious forms of fiction that acquire truth only when they compel belief by capturing people’s imaginations. From the start of his diary he moves almost seamlessly back and forth from one form of the novel to another: “How I proceeded from the idea of writing a novel to a practical program is already a mystery to me, although it happened within the last few weeks. . . . It is in the realm of the unconscious. Perhaps these ideas are not practical ones at all and I am only making myself the laughingstock of the people to whom I talk about it seriously. Could I be only a figure in my novel?” (13). Elaborating his political dreams leads him to reflect: “Come to think of it, in all this I am still the dramatist. I pick poor people in rags off the street, put gorgeous costumes on them, and have them perform for the world a wonderful pageant of my composition” (67). Herzl’s “politics of fantasy,” in Carl Schorske’s phrase (164), where dream and deed mingle, suggest his indifference to purity or the natural. His animating belief is in reality’s plasticity, its susceptibility to being worked upon. Not surprisingly, Herzl, like two other theorists of counterliving, Emerson and Roth, esteems movement above all. As Schorske explains: His commitment as aesthete to the power of illusion affected his style as political leader. Like Goethe’s Prometheus, Herzl would shape a new race of men in defiance of reality and out of his power as an artistic creator. . . . Herzl set forth the dynamic of his politics of fantasy: “Great things need no firm foundation. An apple must be placed on a table to keep it from falling. The earth hovers in the air. Thus I can perhaps found and secure the Jewish state without any firm anchorage. The secret lies in movement . . . gravity overcome through movement.” Zionism would accordingly be not a party, said Herzl, not a part of a defined whole, but a movement—“the Jewish people on the move.” (164)

“The secret lies in movement”: the echoes of Emerson and Roth are striking in Herzl’s antifoundationalism, which sponsors the counterliving he improvised and invented while immersed in the flowing tides of history. But at the end of The Counterlife the practice of counterliving seems too demanding for an exhausted Nathan (“in fact” he is dead; we have

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

been reading his posthumously published novel). He is stranded in England with his pregnant wife who wants out of their marriage and his novel. After his closing critique of the pastoral and his praise of the slippery self, he seems brought to a standstill by two conflicting emotions. One emotion is allegiance to Jewish ritual; so he insists that his “unborn offspring” must undergo circumcision. Not only is this custom “everything that the pastoral is not,” but it also gives the lie to the “appealing idyll of living ‘naturally,’ unencumbered by man-made ritual” (323). Nathan reflects that only a few hours ago in Israel he had declared circumcision “irrelevant,” and now it is his “number one priority.” His “strong sense of difference” has been reactivated now that he is in England, a Jew among Gentiles. “England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks” (324). But then a counteremotion of melancholy emerges when he describes the Jew that England has made: “A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple” (324). This self-description unravels by the time it concludes; it is stillborn, disclosing a purely negative identity without context: “just the object itself.” Sadness suffuses his inertness and detachment. In the novel’s final, death-haunted, sentence, Nathan, after repeating Maria’s demand that she wants out of the fictive life, answers: “It may be as you say that this is no life, but . . . [it] is as close to life as you, and I, and our child can ever hope to come” (324). Roth here leaves us at the end with a primal paradox of reading—that a novel’s “life” is deathly: disembodied voices emanating from the grave—the page of printed words. Now an “object” on display, Nathan has ceased becoming, ceased being in movement, finally and ironically arrested as a static, pastoral Jew. His particular condition is part of a more general one: “Not even Jews, who are to history what Eskimos are to snow, seem able, despite the arduous education to the contrary, to protect themselves against the pastoral myth of life before Cain and Abel, of life before the split began” (322). Nathan has in mind the “belligerent, unillusioned little band of Jews” he met in Agor. However much Nathan admired the contempt of Lippman toward the “niceys and the goodies” (Jewish leftists who are uneasy with tough Jews), this Zionist and rhetorical steamroller dwells

151

152

|

CHAPTER 4

on the “high elevation of Hard Truth” from which he peers “nobly down upon self-deceiving mankind” (114). Nathan calls him Captain Ahab (264). Lippman’s ownership of truth and mastery (“we are not afraid to be masters,” he italicizes to Nathan) extends to a desire to promote the tough Jew at the cost of massively simplifying Jewish identity. Lippman and his group would erase Jewish “self-division”—the “selfpity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness”—would absolve it, “in short, of all the Jewish ‘abnormalities’ . . . whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew” Nathan knows (120). The “mob of Jews” inside every Jew would be reduced to one belligerent Jew of menacing certitude. Herzl was himself a mob of Jews—parvenu and pariah, self-hating and prideful, cosmopolitan and nationalist, quixotic and shrewd. His flagrant lack of the marks of authentic Jewishness was notorious in his lifetime: his relative indifference to Jewish religious, ethical, linguistic, or cultural heritage included a dislike of Israel, which on his one visit there in 1898 repelled him “by its filth and by its fanatical religious atmosphere.” He sought to create in Palestine a “mini-Europe” where German would be the lingua franca in a cosmopolitan culture. For these and other reasons Herzl outraged purists, such as the Russian Zionist Ahad Ha’am, a chief architect of a culturally organic spiritual Zionism. He condemned Herzl as an assimilationist, as a threat to the building of an authentic Jewish homeland where “harmony” and “wholeness” would reign (qtd. Zipperstein 191). According to Ahad Ha’am, Herzl was a false messiah who assigned to Judaism an instrumental rather than an intrinsic value (Kornberg 175–78). But in a reply to Ha’am, the writer Max Nordau, known as the “world’s second most famous Zionist after Herzl,” challenged the claim that Herzl was an assimilationist because he wanted Jews to create a modern, cosmopolitan European society in Palestine. In effect using the logic of appropriation as an alternative to assimilation, Nordau declared: we want to “remain as modern and cultured as we already are and as much as we can possibly become. In this we are not aping anyone, we are merely using and developing our own property: we have contributed more than our share to European culture, which is thus ours to the same degree it belongs to the German, French, or English.

T H E C O U N T E R L I F E A S P I VOT

|

We hold that there is no contradiction between what is Jewish—what is ours as Jews—and what is European” (qtd. Stanislawski 17). Herzl the inauthentic, cosmopolitan appropriator (“using and developing” cultural “property”) is clearly Roth’s kind of Jew; hence his invocation of Herzl as a tutelary spirit in his two Israeli novels (implied in the first, confessed in the second). When Nathan speaks of the “Zionist laboratory in Jewish self-experiment that calls itself ‘Israel’ ” and that is founded on “the power of the will to remake reality,” Roth could be summing up Herzl’s scandalous approach to the Jewish Problem (C 147). Not only his ease with reversal and artifice that makes the “construction of a counterlife” second nature, but the sheer audacity of his ambition and unashamed exposure of his mixed motives, grandiosity, and insecurities: all recommend Herzl to the novelist as a man who accepted the human stain as the only “way to be here.” But Herzl is significant apart from these aesthetic, performative reasons. He reanimates the Enlightenment rejection of the racist view of groups as collections of ineradicable traits (allegedly) ordained by God, nature, and biology. Eluding this determinist trinity with the ludic love of reversal, replacing the essentialism of tribalism with the fabrications of appropriation, Herzl draws as well on the Enlightenment understanding of human nature as malleable, shaped by environment and circumstance. The Jews, Herzl always insisted, were not a race, their deformations were not in the blood, and under new conditions they were capable of change and growth. “The secret lies in movement.” In short, Herzl’s “obsessive reinvention of the real” is not a refuge but an historicist practice. In his diary he points out that anti-Semites “lack historical understanding . . . do not see us [Jews] as an historical product. . . . They do not realize that we are what we are because they have made us that way amidst tortures . . . because the rulers forced us to deal in money. We cling to money because they flung us on to money. . . . All these sufferings rendered us ugly and transformed our character which had in earlier times been proud and magnificent” (9). “The Jews will adapt themselves,” he avers. “The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane,” remarks Nathan in The Human Stain (242). The fantasy of pastoral not only hides from history but also tends to foment violence because purists tend to preserve

153

154

|

CHAPTER 4

their purity by producing difference as degraded, dangerous otherness, a stigmatizing that often leads to scapegoating of sacrificial victims to fortify the boundary of self and other. This is one reason Nietzsche said that the only idea of culture that is not deadly understands culture as a “certain ‘style’ of life not given by nature or destined by history but formed of an assemblage of living institutions.” Commenting on this, Geoffrey Hartman observes that Nietzsche’s (and Herzl’s and Roth’s we could add) notion of culture as assemblage and style is a “beneficial and peaceable rather than militant concept [that] has become rare in modernity” (Fateful 6). This notion of culture describes as well the highest ethical reach of a commitment to counterlife as the overthrow of the ideology of nature and its “jargon of authenticity,” to borrow Adorno’s phrase. Roth will continue his exploration of the traps of pastoral in The Human Stain. Its titular phrase, we will see, partly suggests not only the health of impurity and “twofoldedness” but their enactment in impersonation—the saving human propensity for mimesis or mimicry, an inescapable gift that, paradoxically, is not restricted to the human but links us to nonhuman species. The stain is not essence but attachment.

5 Letting Go, or How to Lead a Stupid Life: Sabbath’s Nakedness

Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever. —John Landis, dir., Animal House; Roth, Sabbath’s Theater Baby, there is no protection. It’s all wallpaper. —Sabbath’s Theater

I

n his novel Deception of 1990 Roth briefly recurs to Nathan Zuckerman’s youthful reverence for E. I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer by inventing a character who is Lonoff ’s biographer. When he started the project, the biographer felt stymied because the protective family wanted a “pious memorial.” But a meeting with Zuckerman rekindled his inspiration; the novelist gave him a “sort of license to transgress.” Having himself once idealized the “fastidious hunger artist” and having worked through this fantasy, Zuckerman has now become “the great sanctioner” able to relieve the biographer of “this phony nobility” he has about Lonoff (D 96, 98). Recalling the obstacles the Lonoff family put in his path, the biographer works himself into a froth, or, rather a Rothian set piece, a hymn to art as outrage and impurity: “All that timidity [on the part of the Lonoffs], disguised as ‘discretion,’ about a man’s contradictions and pagan urges. The fear of desanctification and the dread of shame. As though it’s purity that’s the heart of a writer’s nature. Heaven help such a writer! As though Joyce hadn’t

156

|

CHAPTER 5

sniffed filthily at Nora’s underpants. As though in Dostoevsky’s soul, Svidrigailov never whispered. Caprice is at the heart of a writer’s nature. Exploration, fixation, isolation, venom, fetishism, austerity, levity, perplexity, childishness. . . . The nose in the seam of the undergarment— that’s the writer’s nature. Impurity” (96–97). This speech could stand as the epigraph to the novel Roth published five years later. Sabbath’s Theater is Roth’s raunchiest book but also the one that most makes the raunchy, the immature, and the literary virtually synonymous. Roth as well establishes a literary pedigree of the raunchy. Joyce and Dostoyevsky are reprised in Sabbath’s Theater, and Henry Miller, Pauline Reage, and others mentioned in passing as pioneers in the art of “talking dirty” (ST 218). And when the novel can’t find the pedigree, it invents one. “Enough reading and rereading of A Room of One’s Own—get yourself the Collected Works of Ava Gardner . . . elegance and filth, immaculately intertwined” (157). So muses homeless, sixty-four-year-old ex-puppeteer Sabbath after spending the night in the bedroom of an old friend’s daughter, an English major who is away at college. Although he doesn’t need the Joycean precedent to riffle through her underwear drawer and arouse himself, Sabbath will soon invoke Joyce in another context. Contemplating suicide, Sabbath imagines reading his newspaper obituary (“did nothing for israel” is the headline) and then his consciousness becomes filled with a procession of fragmented images and memories (194). About these the narrator comments: “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” (198). Here Roth salutes Joyce’s strategies for rendering subjectivity; Roth will adopt and modify the technique of free indirect discourse. I attributed the above passage to the narrator, but it could as plausibly be Sabbath referring to himself in the third person. Often the narrative voice when inside Sabbath’s mind shifts almost seamlessly from “he” to “I” (whereas conventional free indirect discourse retains a third-person narrator who mimes first-person thoughts and feelings). The relation of third and first person could be described as collaborative, a not inappropriate word given that Sabbath describes his lovers as collaborators (336).

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

This fluidity of movement abounds in the novel, reflecting a protagonist of “porous” subjectivity whose Nietzschean contempt (he worked for decades on a five-minute puppet version of Beyond Good and Evil) mocks the reified arrangements and identities that upholster bourgeois life (184, 194). Like the “half-flayed thing” that is Anne Frank the survivor in Zuckerman’s fantasy in The Ghost Writer, Sabbath too is stripped of protection, a raw witness not hobbled by the fortifications of congealed adulthood. A collection of has-beens—ex-husband, ex-son, ex-brother, ex-teacher—Sabbath is as bereft as Anne Frank, whose self-description recalls his own: “motherless, fatherless, sisterless, venge-filled, hate-filled, shame-filled” (GW 153). As we saw in chapter 1, Anne/Amy, the artist as enraged, “half-flayed thing,” comes to embody the fastidious Lonoff ’s counterself—everything that escaped his art’s “relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self” (56). Sabbath, an artist who never made any art, recovers the insatiable infant self (he has “the body of an old man . . . and the instinctive force of a two-year-old”) and with it an uncensored vision that detects the chaos churning about the edges of our most familiar domestic rituals (ST 335). He implores a friend to see that that all of us are “exposed,” “naked”: “We have no idea how it’s going to turn out” (344). This conviction, we shall see, is reverberant, linking Sabbath and his creator to a number of figures—Emerson, Mailer, Václav Havel, and Milan Kundera—with a similar sense of our naked vulnerability. As if inspired by his intense sense of the precarious, Sabbath finds in his life’s shambles the freedom of not having to please (332). “You’ve let the whole creature out, haven’t you?” the same friend observes in wary admiration (344). In letting out, Sabbath culminates the desire to savage maturity that Roth has been nurturing for over four decades. More important than Joyce in the novel is Yeats. In addition to the underpants, Sabbath finds in the college girl’s bedroom her lecture notes on “Meru,” from a poetry course. Sabbath reads the opening lines of the poem that the professor had printed out: Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace

157

158

|

CHAPTER 5

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 reality.

Beneath the copy of the poem excerpts from the class lecture have been dutifully transcribed: Yeats wrote the introduction to a “Hindu friend’s translation of a holy man’s ascent into renouncing the world,” and “the poem’s emphasis is on man’s obligation to strip away all illusion in spite of the terror of nothingness with which he will be left” (165). If Portnoy feels his life is being lived “in the middle of a Jewish joke,” Sabbath’s joke of a life is being lived as high modernist pathos, or at least as glossed in the classroom. Both the professor’s gloss and Yeats’s words quoted above distill the existential dilemma the novel depicts: an aging man “ravening, raging, and uprooting” the manifold illusions and rules upholding civilization, as he enters the “desolation of reality”—life’s helpless precariousness. Even while mocking its classroom domestication, Roth seems moved by the grandeur of the Yeatsian vision. Yet his novel’s protagonist has a genius for deflating any whiff of grandeur. The “great eloquence” at his command he most often uses for self-satire (331). For a moment, though, white-bearded, pot-bellied Sabbath imagines he is “like some holy man who has renounced ambition and world possessions,” and here he does indeed seem a descendant of one of the “hermits upon Mount Meru” whose “naked bodies” suffer “winter’s dreadful blast” (141, 165). In taking pains to bring Yeats’s poem and Sabbath into close proximity, Roth makes this master of deflation, this “fifties antique,” into a profane holy man—perhaps the only kind Roth would admire. He is imbued with the law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counter-thought, for every urge a counter-urge. . . . Too many urges, and that’s not even a tenth of the story. Mistressless, wifeless, vocationless, homeless, penniless, he steals the bikini panties of a nineteen-year-old nothing and, riding a swell of adrenaline, stuffs them for safekeeping in his pocket—these panties are just what he needs. Does no one else’s brain work in quite

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

this way? I don’t believe that. This is aging, pure and simple, the selfdestroying hilarity of the last roller coaster. (158)

This charts the upward arc in living’s law of fluctuation—the welling of optimism accompanying aroused desire, both proof that “for a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence” (247). But the kick of “hilarity” is also “self-destroying”—that is, it contains its undoing or counterurge of dissolution, the bass note of the law of living. Sabbath is “self-haunted while barely what you would call a self . . . without any idea what he now was or what he was seeking” (198). When he weeps, as he does increasingly as the novel proceeds, he feels “as though he were porous, as though the last that was left of the whole concoction that had been a self was running out now drop by drop” (184). Adrift, suicidal, living “a life with the dead,” Sabbath is haunted by loss. But cutting against this melancholy and saving the novel from bathos is his outrageous, insatiable, and shameless sexual appetite, his “hell-bent-for disaster erotomania,” as repulsive as it is comic (156). In this uneasy mix of moods and impulses, and in his porous, leaking, lustful self, holy man Sabbath is soul mate of another New Jersey wanderer—Whitman, especially the poet of “As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life.” He never mentions Whitman but shares his ear for the cries of the dead. Sabbath acquires poignancy, we will see, not from the predictable source—the primitive’s joyous affirmation of life is a cliché he scorns and enacts—but rather from his capacity to mourn. Barrel-chested, rough-and-tumble, “sexed-up” Sabbath is Roth’s first major character who is Jewish working class. And it takes that nearly oxymoronic juxtaposition of ethnicity and class to fill a long-term deficit in American fiction that Roth identified thirty years ago—the general absence of a Jewish male character of large carnal appetite whose lusts are unpunished. (Much of the comedy of Portnoy stems from Alex’s self-tormenting relation to his pleasures.) The Jew in American fiction is usually an embodied superego—a pure figure of dignity and rectitude—or is the suffering victim. And, Roth observes, when Jewish novelists—a Mailer or a Bellow—invent unrepentant macho

159

160

|

CHAPTER 5

figures, they are never Jewish. Roth describes the “I want, I want, I want” of Bellow’s Gentile, hoggish Eugene Henderson the rain king as the “voice of the id—raw, untrammeled, uncompromising, insatiable, and unsocialized desire” (RMO 262). Surely, Sabbath shares this voice. Henderson’s spiritual malaise (“I’ve just got to stop Becoming. . . . When am I going to Be?”) is healed on his psychic and literal journey into Africa (191). There Henderson, born into a wealthy and distinguished New England family, grows from “a Becomer” into a “Be-er” by listening to the advice of his African mentor, King Dahfu: “absorb” the lion into yourself and roar. “Do not be afraid. Let go of yourself. . . . Be the beast! You will recover humanity later, but for the moment, be it utterly” (267). In the middle of Africa Henderson is undergoing a (Wilhelm) Reichian regimen, including daily breathing and roaring exercises, to become less repressed and to relieve a spiritual cramp that in his view afflicts his “generation of Americans” who have gone “out in the world . . . to find the wisdom of life” (277). The importance placed on letting go and being the beast marks a notable intersection between Bellow’s 1959 novel and Roth’s later book. Equally striking are their differences. Since Sabbath hardly needs any help letting go, and has contempt for the therapeutic sensibility, he would have no patience for Henderson’s roaring training. Standing behind Henderson and Sabbath is Dostoyevsky, arch-priest of impurity, excess, outrage. For the first two generations of English and American modernists in the twentieth century he was the liberating presence, embodying the “everything is permitted” dictum of his character Ivan Karamazov. A Christian moralist forever drawn to those who would desecrate all norms, the novelist “went the whole gamut, from the abyss to the stars,” Henry Miller stated in 1934 (84). “As always in Dostoevsky, the amazing perspicacity is mixed with ugly perversity,” wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1930. “Nothing is pure . . . his moral hostility to the devil is mixed with secret worship of the devil. Dostoevsky is always perverse, always impure, always an evil thinker and a marvelous seer” (285). The next generation’s reverence for his audacity was undiminished. For Saul Bellow, writing in 1955, one of Dostoyevsky’s distinctive strengths was that “he does not conceal his prejudices. For him

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

the revelation of bias is a step toward the truth. . . . ‘Let us come forward as we are,’ Dostoevsky is forever saying, ‘in our native crudity. No disguises’ ” (It All Adds Up 44). As this chapter’s opening quotation from Deception instances, Roth’s novels are filled with nods to Dostoyevsky and his characters as figures of unbounded energy that mock propriety. The aging rake David Kepesh in The Dying Animal says of his son: “I am Kenny’s Karamazov father, the base, the monstrous force” (78).1 When Sabbath first reads Dostoyevsky he imagines “everybody going around with grudges and immense fury, rage like it was all put to music” (155). Like Lawrence and Bellow, Roth admires the perversity and self-exposure, but in particular “the primal chaos that most of all horrifies our ordinary consciousness,” to borrow the words of the influential philosopher and critic Lev Shestov, one of the first to emphasize the Nietzschean side of Dostoyevsky. As Shestov says in 1921: Dostoyevsky “lauds caprice, unconditional, unforeseen, always irrational, and makes mock of all the human virtues” (xxv). For Roth, Dostoyevsky’s embrace of chaos and caprice includes the novelist’s affinity for his evil characters. Svidrigalov whispers into his creator’s soul, to recall Deception; and Sabbath adds: “Rascal Knockoff. I thought: Dostoevsky fell in love with him” (155). As the truculent, irreverent poet Baumgarten puts it in The Professor of Desire: “for me the books count . . . where the writer incriminates himself. Otherwise, why bother?” (139). Dostoyevsky is Roth’s great predecessor in self-incrimination. We are already beginning to remark that in Sabbath’s Theater Roth attaches to his “obstinately peculiar” hero a number of literary precedents, named and unnamed in the text. An omnivorous reader ever since he graduated high school, skipped college, and shipped out to sea, Sabbath has “great eloquence at his command,” which he enjoys because people seem more easily to ignore how short he is when he is “linguistically large” (331). This eloquence partially redeems the painful irony that he had “paid the full price for art, only he hadn’t made any. He’d suffered all the old-fashioned artistic sufferings—isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical obstruction—and nobody knew or cared” (143). Even the above recital of Sabbath’s seafaring early years sets

161

162

|

CHAPTER 5

him in a literary—here Melvillean—grain. 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. Risking selfincrimination, Roth makes Sabbath his at least partial self-portrait as an artist. But more daringly, the novel also meditates upon the intimacy of the raunchy and the aesthetic, locating the origins of literary art in bodily, uncensored impulse and release. In effect, Roth’s aesthetic of letting go recovers its primal scene. To observe this, consider the details of Sabbath’s arrest in the fifties for naughty puppetry. Roth makes Sabbath the most minimal of artists, a finger puppeteer who works the sidewalks, drawing a crowd of the curious. And even art made by moving one’s finger on the street can easily conjure the raunchy. In 1956 Sabbath is busted for obscenity and indecency because one of his fingers exposes the breast of a young woman in the crowd. This is part of his act. “It’s my art,” he tells the arresting officer who had demanded his puppet license. “There is no license for a puppeteer,” replies Sabbath, “I carry my puppet between my legs.” The cop responds: “Watch it, shorty. I don’t see puppets. I just see fingers” (314). For Sabbath, the artistic finger is the public emissary of his penis, an identity the officer is eager to deflect (“I just see fingers”). Later, a chuckling desk sergeant tells the officer: “ ‘why don’t you leave the kid alone? He’s not a bad kid. All he did was his art.’ He’s still laughing. ‘Finger painting. Baby shit. What’s the difference? He has no record’ ” (316). Sabbath’s Theater is the fullest expression of Roth’s stake in letting go not least because he takes it back, as the above suggests, to primitive origins in genital and anal stimulation, in child’s play and the production of feces, sites where art is unimpeded release. Sabbath upon taking a “wonderful crap . . . bequeathed unto the bathroom a big, trenchant barnyard bouquet that filled him with enthusiasm” (337). Sabbath’s bathroom creation nicely literalizes what the woman he is trying to seduce had said of him the evening before: he has the “instinctive force of a two-year-old” (335). “Let it flow, let it go,” as Uncle Asher, the bohemian artist had implored, bestowing upon Roth the title of his first novel. “Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle” (LG 82). Apostle of release,

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

worldly cynic, unrepentant slob, and ladies man with a twenty-fiveyear-old mistress, Asher counsels: “wait and accept and learn to pull the hand away.” He believes that to “bottle” experience is to kill it, just as “marriage kills love,” an opinion that outrages his nephew, who is about to wed his college girlfriend. “Uncle Asher, you’re a dunghole, a toilet!” screams Paul Herz, an imprecation that, in light of the above context, underscores the primal authenticity of Asher’s artistic life. Paul concedes that “Asher was a free man; an eccentric perhaps, but free” (78). Uncle Asher is clearly an early version of Mickey Sabbath. And both figures derive from Roth’s own Uncle Mickey, his mother’s beloved only brother, a bachelor bohemian painter, musician, and professional photographer in Philadelphia and the only person of artistic bent on either side of the family (F 98, 119). Unambitious, sailing off to Europe and its museums whenever he could, Uncle Mickey never made much of a living and never married. His life and pursuits baffled Roth’s father, a man indifferent to art, a paragon of steadfast maturity, whose “capacity for renunciation and iron self-discipline” his son has called “extraordinary” (P 79). Early on, then, the stark correlation of immaturity and artistry, maturity and aesthetic indifference was present in the extended family. Roth’s mother attributed the “artistic proclivities” of her two sons (Sandy Roth is an artist in the advertising business) to the “genetic strain” that had determined her brother’s career. “And for all I know she was right,” remarks Roth (F 119). Sabbath’s Theater memorializes and renews the legacy of Uncle Mickey. Together he and his two pungent fictive kinsmen are exemplary figures for Roth of the aesthetic of rude truth, of freedom from having to please, the release of the impeded into flowing expression. Because Sabbath is the most exorbitant and uninhibited of these artistic exemplars, he pushes at the bounds of “normal” definitions of the human. “It’s never been easy to say what you really are, Mickey,” says his old friend Norman at whose posh Central Park West apartment (and in whose daughter’s bedroom) Sabbath is temporarily staying. “Oh, failure will do.” “But at what?”

163

164

|

CHAPTER 5

“Failure at failing, for one.” “You always fought being a human being, right from the beginning.” “To the contrary,” said Sabbath. “To being a human being I’ve always said, ‘Let it come.’ ” (152)

Later feeling “uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life,” Mickey remarks to himself: “say what you will about me, it’s been a real human life!” (247). As often in Roth, what counts as human being and human life remain open questions, and Sabbath insists on keeping them open, as he does everything else. When he offers failure as an identity, he immediately cancels it, resting secure only in the incessant act of fighting against preordained and sanctioned definitions of the human: “to affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted” (198). Roth (and Sabbath) are acutely aware that this oppositional stance is itself a cliché of modernism. “Isn’t it tiresome in 1994, this role of rebelhero. . . . Are we back to Lawrence’s gamekeeper? At this late hour? To be out with that beard of yours, upholding the virtues of fetishism and voyeurism . . . the discredited male polemic’s last gasp” (347). This is Norman’s understandably exasperated verdict upon his houseguest. Norman has just asked Sabbath to leave now that his wife Michelle, after Sabbath propositioned her, has found her daughter’s panties in his coat pocket. Was it the panties or the flirtation that decided her, wonders Sabbath, a matter to which we will return. The day before Norman’s critique, Sabbath had rendered a similar, if more sociologically nuanced, assessment of himself. In a discussion of why her husband (who was a producer of Sabbath’s early theatrical ventures in the fifties) has always admired him (“when you were young . . . he [Norman] says people couldn’t take their eyes off of you”), Sabbath remarks that the praise helps Norman “to justify having seated at your dinner table a nobody. . . . Who of your social class can take seriously someone like me?” He answers his own question: “a lot of well-bred people need their reallifer. . . . I’d been to sea. I’d been to Rome. Whores on more than one continent. . . . Showed ’em I’d escaped the bourgeois trammels. Educated bourgeoisie like to admire someone who’s escaped the bourgeois trammels—reminds them of their college ideals. When I got written up in the Nation for taking a tit out in the street I was their noble savage

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

for a week” (331). Sabbath is a “real-lifer” in the sense that he refuses the blinders by which most people live. Roth briefly salutes in the novel (and in The Dying Animal) another working-class noble savage—from Brooklyn rather than the Jersey shore—Henry Miller. Quintessential “redskin” (to recall Philip Rahv’s term), fervent disciple of Whitman, Miller brought an unprecedented raunchiness into American literature. Norman Mailer has said that “the irrigation Henry Miller gave to American prose” liberated the verbal energy of “books as different as Naked Lunch, Portnoy’s Complaint, Fear of Flying and Why Are We in Vietnam” (Genius 5).2 A look at the famous apocalyptic climax of Tropic of Cancer (1934; banned until 1961) reveals the proximity of Sabbath’s determined “affront” to genteel notions of the human and Miller’s rage against conformist humanity and embrace of the “inhuman,” akin to what I have been calling immaturity. To be human, declares Miller, “seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms” (85). Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. . . . I belong to the earth! . . . And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. . . . Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists. . . . Out of the dead compost [recall Bruno Schulz’s imagery] and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. . . . “I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times [Joyce]. I was thinking of him this morning . . . of his rivers and trees and all that world of night that he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. . . . I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly. (83–84, 86)

This flows on for pages, in Whitmanic rapture and embrace, as Miller evokes high modernism at one with the teeming energies of

165

166

|

CHAPTER 5

natural man amid the natural world. A touchstone passage for French theory (it is quoted and celebrated early on in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for its evocation of the delirium of desire that shatters the “capitalist barrier”), Miller’s manic words also evoke an antinomianism deep in the American grain (5, 133). “Flowing is the secret of things,” says Emerson, as we know from chapter 4. Miller, like Emerson, wants a perpetual present—“new discoveries, new horizons”—that washes away “biographies and histories, and libraries and museums” (85–86). He names Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and Rabelais as his lifelong exemplars (143). Miller’s “screech of defiance” also recalls Tom Paine, a revered figure of Zuckerman’s youth as recounted in I Married a Communist. Roth’s Tom Paine, a “champion of liberty” (as depicted in Nathan’s beloved Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast), is “savagely single-minded and unsociable . . . belligerent, unkempt, dirty, wearing a beggar’s clothes,” ancestor of another advocate of “human freedom,” Mickey Sabbath (IMC 25). Nathan is stirred by the famous and scandalous lines from The Age of Reason: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church . . . nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church” (IMC 26). Add the body and its secretions to this and some ecstatic chanting and we are not far from Henry Miller and his hymn to the “inhuman.” The Counterlife, as we saw in chapter 4, discloses the flowing world of tumultuous transition. The flow continues in Sabbath’s Theater, but its source is the human body, which is also the model for artistic expression. This mixing of artistic and bodily flowing recalls Henry Miller (“semen, blood, bile, words, sentences”). In making the literary continuous with, rather than elevated above, visceral experience, Roth enlarges his aesthetic of letting go, bringing together elements that, until Sabbath’s Theater, had hitherto eluded him. Roth has always, of course, loved the defiant American individualist, particularly the sexual outlaw. Yet Portnoy’s Complaint, his most outrageous book prior to Sabbath, seems curiously inhibited when juxtaposed both to the later novel and to Miller. The flow of bodily secretions is very much in evidence in Portnoy, yet literature appears not as the corporeal aesthetic of letting go but rather as an instrument of uplift.

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

One way to grasp the difference between Roth’s two most zealous libertines is to note that, like Sabbath, Alex Portnoy is a reader of Yeats. But when he recites “Leda and the Swan” to his girlfriend, the sexually acrobatic young model he calls the Monkey, it opens a “chasm” of class differences and reveals that Portnoy has a pet project—to be “a savior of shikses: if you liked Arthur Miller . . . you’ll just love Alex” (PC 173). The Monkey, who didn’t have much schooling back in Appalachia where she grew up, can barely spell; Alex, former editor of the Columbia Law Review, is, as he never stops reminding us, Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity in the Lindsay administration (“what I do for a living is I’m good”) (197). This “nice left-wing Jewish boy” is so guilty at being a bad boy—he scorns marriage, cherishes his bachelorhood of “endless” desires and lusts, is contemptuous of Jewish piety, and refuses to “bend to the bourgeoisie”—that Portnoy turns the insatiable Monkey into the displaced, external embodiment of his id. He allows himself to enjoy her on the condition that he sternly sermonize, admonish, and educate, that he, in short, become his parents hocking their randy son (241). Portnoy gives the Monkey a crash course in compassion, loading her up with uplifting tomes (by Dreiser, Baldwin, DuBois, Steinbeck, and the central text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which will speak in words and pictures to her origins in the “American laboring class”), “to save the stupid shikse; to rid her of her race’s ignorance; to make this daughter of the heartless oppressor a student of suffering and oppression. . . . Get it now? The perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy” (235–36). Of course all this moral elevation is satire at Portnoy’s expense; he is indeed the “uptight Jewish prick” the Monkey calls him, permanently arrested in his “endless childhood.” By the novel’s end he goes off to Israel and enrolls himself, rather than the Monkey, in “what is called an educational experience. I would improve myself, which is my way after all” (284). Perhaps because working-class Sabbath is from a tiny Jersey shore town where his dad delivered butter and eggs, he is spared Portnoy’s formative culture. That culture, nurturing a liberal therapeutic sensibility, equates virtue and success with unceasing striving in projects of upward psychic and economic mobility.

167

168

|

CHAPTER 5

It is not in sex but in a steam room with old Jewish men that Portnoy experiences a sense of letting go, of abandonment, of setting aside the frantic efforts of pushing forward. The one episode in Portnoy’s Complaint where Alex plunges into the subterranean flow is his memory of going as a boy with his father to visit the shvitz bath. Amid the “thick dense suffocating vapors,” he glimpses a world of flowing, undifferentiated nature. As the place “wherein the agonies that come of being an insurance agent, a family man and a Jew will be steamed and beaten from my father’s body,” the bath speaks to Alex of “prehistoric times . . . a time when above the oozing bog that was the earth, swirling white gases choked out the sunlight, and aeons passed while the planet was drained for Man. I lose touch instantaneously with that ass-licking little boy who runs home after school with his A’s in his hand . . . and am back in some sloppy watery time, before there were families such as we know them. . . . My father and his fellow sufferers . . . have returned to the habitat in which they can be natural. A place without goyim and women” (53–54). This Huck Finnish conclusion excludes Gentiles and women because in Portnoy’s unstated logic they are “sivilized” (as Huck would say) and require that behavior be refined and censored. Young Alex finds the shvitz bath liberating, for in its “prehistoric” world he saw his father as he never is at home: naked, manly, and unashamed: “if only I could have nourished myself on the depths of his vulgarity” and his “coarseness,” laments Portnoy (55).3 By the end he is more histrionic than ever but also, as ever, mercilessly accurate about his own psychic impasse: “The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving!” (284). In his frantic self-imprisonment (“Nothing but self ! Locked up in me!) Portnoy on the final page realizes what he needs most is a “pure howl, without any more words” (280). His concluding howl is his most Dionysian (and literary) moment; it joins him to Henry Miller and his “blood-curdling howl,” a phrase (also from Tropic of Cancer) that some suspect gave Allen Ginsberg his famous title “Howl” (Miller 86). From the perspective of the guilty pleasures of Portnoy’s Complaint, Sabbath’s Theater seems to have come a long way. Instead of Alex’s bid to be a Jewish Henry Higgins with frustrated impulses to find sanctuary

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

in male fraternity (baseball is another locus of this yearning), we have Sabbath and Drenka’s partnership in “licentious abandon” (ST 9). Married Sabbath has assisted his married Yugoslavian mistress “in becoming estranged from her orderly life . . . sanctioned for her the force that wants more and more—a force to whose urging she was never wholly averse even before Sabbath had come along” (9). Has Roth actually invented a woman at ease as a man with the tumult of desire? Well, yes and . . . The narrator adds: “inside this woman was someone who thought like a man. And the man she thought like was Sabbath. She was, as she put it, his sidekicker” (9). (Even her malaprops arouse him as “phonetic seduction”) (71). Rather than the smoking gun of male chauvinism, this statement, early on in the novel, suggests the depth of their shared connection that defies “orderly life” and stable categories. Their connection begins conventionally enough as teacher and student; Sabbath is a “teacher of estrangement from the ordinary,” and Drenka his most gifted pupil (27). But this is a hierarchy in name only and quickly dissolves; “instead of being joined by the contractual they were interconnected by the instinctual and together could eroticize anything (except their spouses)” (27). Their union is really a “countermarriage” that combines mutual, fierce attachment without the “contractual” notions of ownership or belonging (27). Their marriage is “counter” because founded on four anarchic monosyllables—“do as you like” (9). These words sponsor a polymorphous perversity of sexual appetites (Drenka does what she likes with multiple partners of both genders and “liked telling him about how much she had liked it”) and a variety of roles. Drenka is sidekick, partner, student, mother (her shape recalls for Sabbath the “fat little dolls” worshipped “under a dozen different names as the great mother of the gods”), lover, and, above all, “total blood brother” pledged in a “pact” baptized by their urinating on each other (5, 428). Amid this torrential promiscuity, identities are exchangeable, flowing, and porous: Drenka possesses a male carnality and love of pursuit; Sabbath at one point rhapsodizes, “I am Drenka!, I am Drenka,” “licking from his fingers” the “sperm” of one of her old lovers who has masturbated on her grave (she dies early in the novel) after placing a bouquet and drenching it. Unaware of their bespattered condition, Sabbath had

169

170

|

CHAPTER 5

put the flowers to his face after chasing him away (73, 78). Sabbath is present because of his own efforts to ejaculate at graveside, efforts interrupted by the rival lover’s arrival. The over-the-top outrageousness of this grotesque comedy leaves little doubt that “crudeness was the most distinguishing force” of a “countermarriage” that obliterates “orderly life” (27). The summit of disorder is Drenka’s having sex with four men in a single day and night. This escapade leaves her exhilarated but also (understandably) “unsettled” with “confusion”—“I did not know to whom I belong,” she tells Sabbath. “I would feel better,” says Drenka, “if I could take the confusion away . . . and make it just a sexual thing” (77). This marks Drenka’s difference from Sabbath; here she reveals that in fact she has not let go of the idea of belonging, and this produces in her a lamentable “confusion.” But for Sabbath “belonging” is a pillar of the “contractual,” is what cements marriage and other impediments to flowing. He savors the confusion that flowing releases, the confusion that attends the erotic license (“do as you like”) of their “prehistoric” (to recall Portnoy’s shvitz bath) “instinctual” interconnection. Confusion is the condition of their estrangement from the ordinary. Sabbath has sanctioned in Drenka “the force that wants more” as an end in itself and is enjoying the flow of this force (9). The question remains to be explored more fully: why is Sabbath so antagonistic to “orderly life” and so fond of confusion?4 The abundant flowing in Sabbath’s Theater—tears, words, semen, urine—enacts Sabbath’s porosity writ large. “I am flowing swiftly along the curbs of life,” Sabbath remarks. Leaky Sabbath is not another of Roth’s fortified isolatos. His “collaborator[s]” in sexual experiment are “indispensable to Sabbath’s life—it wouldn’t have been Sabbath’s life otherwise” (336). With Drenka he has managed to fashion an attachment that undoes any familiar sense of the word, one that thrives on, rather than arrests, chaos. Sabbath makes his claim of “flowing swiftly” in response to Norman’s accusation that he is pitching a musty sixties liberation philosophy that says “we are determined by our society to such an extent that we can only live as human beings if we turn anarchic . . . hasn’t that always been the pitch?” (347). The interrogative pressure Norman puts on Sabbath is vintage Roth counterpunching and has the useful effect of encouraging clarification of just what is

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

Sabbath’s “pitch.” Sabbath’s reply is, “you’re going to feel dashed by this, Norman, but on top of everything else I don’t have, I don’t have a pitch. You have kind-hearted liberal comprehension but I am flowing swiftly . . . I am merely debris.” Sabbath should be taken at his figurative word here (though what his words mean remain to be discussed), and we should be skeptical of Norman’s cynical dismissal (“What a pathetic, outmoded old crank you are”) because it simply bottles Sabbath in a contemptuous phrase and avoids his challenge to “liberal comprehension.” He is a threat to that comprehension because the self-actualizing agency of the liberal self as it moves ahead in an American social order geared (at least in theory) to opportunity, equality, and ceaseless progress (recall Portnoy, recall the Swede’s adoration of American triumphalism) is as irrelevant to Sabbath as it was to Melville’s Bartleby. Sabbath, too, prefers not to, only with more libido. A “pitch,” as in sales pitch, is the rhetoric of the can-do, “go for it” world of entrepreneurial capitalism. Whereas Sabbath, living in some remote mountainous corner of the Berkshires, has “simplified” his life; he wears the same clothes from the Army Navy store every day, and for years he had not read a paper or listened to the news if he could avoid it. The news told him nothing. The news was for people to talk about, and Sabbath, indifferent to the untransgressive run of normalized pursuits, did not wish to talk to people. He didn’t care who was at war with whom. . . . He did not even want to know who the president was of the United States. . . . Sabbath was reduced the way a sauce is reduced . . . the better to concentrate his essence and be defiantly himself. (126)

Sabbath reduced is monkish but not solitary; rather he is the “Monk of Fucking,” devoting himself to it the “way a monk devotes himself to God” (60). Having “futzed away the years with puppets and his prick,” promiscuous Sabbath has achieved a monk’s temporal dislocation; he is outside of human time, prehistoric, without “the need of his spiritual being for a clarifying narrative . . . free of the human need to find a strand of significance that will hold together everything” (38). Marriage and its commitments would be such a strand; hence the very idea of fidelity enrages him: “There is no punishment too extreme for the crazy

171

172

|

CHAPTER 5

bastard who came up with the idea of fidelity. To demand of human flesh fidelity. The cruelty of it, the mockery of it” (336). What fidelity shuts down—desire’s wayward upsurge, the excitement of the chance encounter—is the disruption of “orderly life,” the sowing of “confusion,” that Sabbath esteems as fleeting but sweet revenge against life’s unyielding trajectory to death. The repetitions and accidents of sexual pleasure are not loveless for Sabbath (he adores Drenka), but their pleasures are all the more piquant for being without consequence, for being only themselves, not extending outward to form a life story—“all these ejaculations leading nowhere” (396). “Caprice is at the heart of a writer’s nature,” to recall this chapter’s opening quotation from Deception. Sabbath’s life is imbued with this wayward aesthetic freedom of whim, what Emerson too extolled. He called a halt to his life’s narrative some time ago, when his first wife Nikki, a gifted but unbalanced actress, one day left him in 1964 and disappeared, never to be found. After that, he tells Norman, “my life was changed. . . . I couldn’t go forward at all. The idea of controlling anything went completely out of my head” (141). This begins to suggest what Sabbath means by “debris.” He is as helpless and weightless as debris left to the vagaries of fortune. Bitter experience has punctured the illusion of control, of mastery, of efficacy, core constituents of the “liberal comprehension” of selfhood. Letting them go, Sabbath has opted instead to lead what he calls a “stupid life,” a life of “nakedness” and of “chaos,” words he uses to describe his “inhuman” flowing life in Henry Miller’s sense, inhuman because unanchored to belief in coherence or to “creeds and principles.” “As for the ‘pattern’ governing a life,” he tells his recovering alcoholic second wife, who is deep in therapy, “it’s commonly called chaos . . . a pattern is what is printed on a piece of cloth. We are not cloth” (91). Ripping it away, Sabbath the “real-lifer” leads an unclothed life. Because he has “let the whole creature out” in maximal exposure, it has never been easy to say what he really is. If what Sabbath really is is elusive (“barely what you would call a self ”), what he does is not. “All I know how to do is antagonize.” Sabbath’s contrariness has fractured the relation of his words to experience: when he starts weeping as he recounts his life to Norman, whom he hasn’t seen in decades, “he could not even tell whether the crying was an act or the

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

measure of his misery” (143). Sabbath “didn’t believe a word he said and hadn’t for years . . . trying to talk sensibly and reasonably about his life seemed even more false to him than the tears—every word, every syllable, another moth nibbling a hole in the truth” (144). The dislocation between language and experience expresses his ease with the primacy of the performative, but also his distrust of the assumption that life is “logical and linear,” under our language’s control, inherently possessed of a “clarifying narrative” (135, 38). That was his mother’s premise. But then her son Morty, Sabbath’s adored brother, was killed in the war in 1944 and her life stopped going forward, all logic spent. “All her life she waited not only for Morty but for the explanation from Morty: why? The question haunted Sabbath. Why? Why? If only someone will explain to us why, maybe we could accept it. Why did you die? Where did you go? . . . why don’t you come back so we can continue with our linear, logical life” (135). When Nikki disappears and then, decades later, Drenka, after thirteen years of “countermarriage,” is diagnosed with cancer and dies six months later, his suspicion is affirmed that “there is nothing on earth that keeps its promise” (32) When we meet Sabbath, his second marriage barely alive, he has recently been fired from his last job as adjunct professor of puppetry at a local college, publicly disgraced for “gross sexual harassment of a girl forty years his junior.” Now he is “just someone who has grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions” (143). The stage seems set for that familiar scenario: the late-blooming resurrection of a burned-out case who rises phoenix-like from the ashes, usually with the help of some plucky young woman who brings him back to life. This is the plot line that The Human Stain plays a variation upon but one that Sabbath’s Theater flirts with only momentarily. Roth doesn’t deliver the goods, doesn’t make a “pitch”; his narrative meanders, and for every step forward, it takes two steps back into Sabbath’s past, since his is a life lived mainly “with the dead” (121). A typical moment of skewed temporality: drifting on a jag of memory, Sabbath suddenly stirs, realizing that “the present happened also to be in progress” (204). Even the most sustained present-tense swatch of narrative—the extraordinary final eighty pages when Sabbath visits the Jersey cemetery to buy a burial plot and then to kill himself—is rife with holes that expose the ever present past. The purchase completed,

173

174

|

CHAPTER 5

“now it was time to get a move on and get the damn thing [suicide] done, the great big act that will conclude my story . . . and so he was leaving Bradley Beach forever when there on Hammond Avenue materialized the bungalow that had been Fish’s” (376). Happening upon his centenarian cousin’s house, Sabbath is flooded with memories as he drives up. “I cannot commit suicide without saying good-bye to Fish” (381). After chatting with Fish, miraculously still alive, having outlived both his children, all alone yet self-sufficient, Sabbath finds a carton of Morty’s belongings, packed long ago by his mother, including his last five letters home. Opening the carton, which has been sitting half a century in Fish’s closet, he reads the letters; Roth has transcribed each one and also takes four pages to inventory the rest of the contents, as if the novel has become Sabbath’s scrapbook. This is the novel’s emblematic rhythm—forward momentum, the will to closure, disrupted by happenstance; the present is stymied by the intrusive past, death deferred by stubborn life (as stubborn as the still living Fish) with its detritus of detail spilling out, forming, in this case, the “impasto” texture of Fish’s cardigan. “Thickly caked with food at the front—particularly rich it was along the ribbon of the buttonholes,” the sweater has much in common with the sofa. “But his shirt seemed fresh and he did not smell. His breath, astonishingly, was sweet: the smell of a creature that survives on clover” (384). Partaking of minimal volition and linearity, the narrative mimes the velleities of Sabbath and the flowing debris with which he identifies, and respects his conviction that “there was no unsnarling an existence whose waywardness constituted its only authority” (108). Sabbath’s snarled life can only have an ending that doesn’t end: We leave him at Drenka’s grave, “ankle-deep in mud . . . with no one to kill him except himself. And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here” (451). Or, as Beckett’s Endgame concludes— “You remain.” In the face of this, defiance is all for “Sabbath antagonistes,” and confronted with the arrogant authority of death, hatred is an enlivening tonic. And so is the sheer strength of endurance embodied in cousin Fish. “The incapacity to die. Sitting it out instead. This thought made Sabbath intensely excited: the perverse senselessness of just remaining, of not going” (384).

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

In shaping a narrative that honors the authority of the wayward, the defiant, and the perverse, Roth honors as well the linguistic correlative— “words themselves finally freed from their daily duty to justify and conceal” (447). This refers to Drenka’s secret “sex diary,” discovered by her husband after her death. Sabbath ponders why she never threw it away. It takes will to do so, he remarks to himself, for “such diaries have a privileged place among one’s skeletons; one cannot easily free oneself of words themselves finally freed from their daily duty to justify and conceal.” In a larger context, to recognize the preciousness of words liberated from these obligations suggests the ambition of Sabbath’s Theater itself and of its titular hero—to discard the conventions of disguise that make for civilized life and instead to “come into the desolation of reality.” To recall Yeats’s words that Sabbath has read: “ravening, raging” against civilization’s “semblance of peace” that is “brought under a rule” by “manifold illusion,” Sabbath would come naked into reality like the “bare forked animal” Lear, whom he once played in a disastrous faroff-Broadway production.5 What propels Sabbath into a bruising collision with desolation is merely opening Marty’s carton and holding in his hand what his mother “had stored there of her older son’s”—pictures, letters, medals, an American flag with forty-eight stars. All this lacerates Sabbath: “the pure, monstrous purity of the suffering was new to him. . . . This was the passionate, the violent stuff, the worst, invented to torment one species alone, the remembering animal, the animal with the long memory” (403). He then heads to the shoreline at Bradley Beach, where he is transformed from a “walking panegyric for obscenity” into a figure of Whitmanesque pathos, the “baffled and balk’d” Whitman of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”: “I too am but a trail of drift and debris.” And as he wends the shore, hearing the ocean of life moaning, “endlessly” crying for its “castaways,” the poet enters into the spirit of that “sobbing dirge of Nature”: “I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d” (394). Sabbath too hears such voices. Walking the beach, he unfurls the flag, wraps himself in it and weeps, stopping “not until two hours later, when he returned from tramping the beach wrapped in that flag . . . crying all the way, rapidly talking, then wildly mute, then chanting aloud words and sentences inexplicable, even to himself.”

175

176

|

CHAPTER 5

“And all from only a single carton. Imagine, then, the history of the world. We are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief ” (407). Sabbath’s immoderate grief is a source of his disdain for any form of the moderate, the cardinal bourgeois virtue that, for him, bespeaks a desperate effort at control, an effort to escape being blindsided by experience. Confronting Norman, he tells him: “there is no protection. . . . What we are in the hands of is not protection. . . . Even you are exposed— what do you make of that? Exposed! Fucking naked, even in that suit! The suit is futile, the monogram is futile—nothing will do it. We have no idea how it’s going to turn out” (344). Or, as Whitman said in “As I Ebb’d”: “I perceive I have not really understood anything . . . and that no man ever can” (395). “Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end,” writes Wallace Stevens of “Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore. He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him” (Collected 150). Sabbath’s Whitmanic tramping and chanting and weeping enact Roth’s aesthetic of letting go as undefended openness. But Sabbath also turns letting go into a more active modality—as an art of life. This will next concern us. Sabbath’s insistence on our nakedness becomes the ground of his empathic imagination and heightened responsiveness to others. This fertile sense of exposure is made vivid in an earlier novel that takes nakedness as its master trope, particularly of the helpless vulnerability of men in combat. In Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) a platoon ambushed high on a mountain struggles to return to base, their trek slowed by the carrying of Wilson, a bleeding, dying soldier. When they stop to rest, his forehead is massaged by Brown, who until now has treated Wilson with only “amused condescension”: In the darkness, Wilson’s face seemed connected to him, an extension of his fingers. He swallowed once. An odd complex of emotions was working in Brown. Wilson’s cries of pain . . . made him worry about enemy patrols. . . . But it was more than fear; he was keyed very high, and every quiver, every painful gesture of Wilson’s body traveled intimately through Brown’s fingers, through his arms, deep into his mind and

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

heart. Without realizing it, he winced when Wilson winced. It was as if his brain had been washed clean of all the fatigue poisons of experience, the protecting calluses, the caustic salts, the cankers of memory. He was at once more vulnerable and less bitter. Something in the limitless darkness of the night, the tenuous protection of the grove, and the selfabsorbed suffering of the wounded man beside him had combined to leave him naked, alone, a raw nerve, responding to every wind and murmur. . . . For a few minutes he [Wilson] was more vital to Brown than any other man or woman had ever been. (537)

The “nakedness of his feeling” soon leaves Brown. But Mailer’s dilation upon it is powerful not only in its immediate context but also as a metaphor of the “raw nerve” of empathy, vulnerability, and selfabnegation required of the novelist as he enters into his characters. In the intense reach of his compassion, Brown as if dissolves into Wilson (“an extension of his fingers”), in the process losing all familiar, insulating, reference points; his “brain [is] washed clean” of the “protecting calluses” of experience and memory that might reduce or deflect the intimacy of connection. “Naked, alone, a raw nerve, responding to every wind and murmur,” Brown is stripped of reflex defenses and becomes akin to the “half-flayed thing” who is the radically bereft unflinching witness Anne Frank of The Ghost Writer. Sabbath too is such a witness. “I imbued myself with him,” Sabbath once said of Morty (300). And this power of imaginative intimacy is as keen in Sabbath as his sexual impulses. Or, more precisely, they are entangled. In other words, Sabbath’s hunger for sex, “his hard-on’s timeworn hopes,” produces not the obliviousness or instrumentality toward others that one might expect. Instead, it turns him “ever vigilant to all stimuli,” turns him, in short, into a “raw nerve” of receptivity. A remarkable observer and reader of human beings, Sabbath need merely glance at a gesture or expression to enter imaginatively and inhabit inner lives (291). And this blurring of boundaries is mirrored in the collaborative intimacy—the way that the third person seamlessly turns into the first person—between the narrator and Sabbath. This narrative technique allows Sabbath to practice in life his novelistic art of empathic observation. Given the epistemological premise governing Roth’s

177

178

|

CHAPTER 5

world—that “getting people right is not what living is all about”— Sabbath is not a truth teller stripping away illusion, in the venerable tradition of characters in Ibsen or Eugene O’Neill, say. Rather, he hazards the guesswork of interpretive embroidery (AP 35).6 Sabbath performs his most sustained act of sympathetic imagination when he teases out, from a few suggestive details, an inner life for Michelle Cowan, the prosperous periodontist and fiftyish wife of Norman. Sabbath does not meet her until dinner of the evening following his arrival at the Cowan apartment. But in his lascivious snooping on his first morning alone in their house, after a breakfast with “eight jars of preserves” laid out for him, Sabbath discovers deep in her lingerie drawer two envelopes, one with ten thousand dollars in cash and another with some old Polaroids of her in erotic poses. “Mementos of an old affair. Ready for a new one?” wonders the ever sex-keen Sabbath. His intriguing findings haunt his evocation of Michelle. Upon meeting her, “a nicely fleshed out woman very much in the mold of Drenka,” the first thing that draws him is her big, easy laugh. It sparks Sabbath’s extended riffing: Sabbath could tell from that laugh . . . that something had turned out wrong. In her laugh was the recognition that she was no longer in charge of the forces at work. In her laugh was the admission of her captivity: to Norman, to menopause, to work, to aging, to everything that could only deteriorate further. Nothing unforeseen that happens is likely ever again to be going to be good. What is more, Death is over in its corner doing deep knee bends and one day soon will leap across the ring at her as mercilessly as it leaped upon Drenka. . . . The laugh said that everything had shifted on her while her back was turned, while she was facing the other way, the right way, her arms open wide to the dynamic admixture of demands and delights that had been the daily bread of her thirties and forties. . . . The laugh said that she was sick of staying [in her marriage], sick of plotting leaving, sick of unsatisfied dreams, sick of satisfied dreams, sick of adapting, sick of not adapting, sick of just about everything except existing. Exulting in existing while being sick of everything— that’s what was in that laugh! A semidefeated, semiamused, semiaggrieved, semiamazed, seminegative, hilarious big laugh. He liked her, liked her enormously. . . . Sabbath understood her state of mind, her

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

state of life, her state of suffering: dusk is descending, and sex, our greatest luxury, is racing away at a tremendous speed . . . and you wonder at your folly in having ever turned down a single squalid fuck. (305–6)

And all from only a single laugh. Sabbath’s excess (only suggested above) is inseparable from his aim—to improvise, as would a stand-up performer, a life out of a laugh, to feel his way into another’s state of mind and suffering, amassing a welter of details as he goes, till their world emerges. He may be Roth’s greatest rhapsodist. At dinner, at Norman’s urging, Sabbath tells the story of his arrest in 1956 and charms his hosts. After, when he is back in the daughter’s room, Michelle knocks. She has changed outfits, from the “sham waifdom” of black tights and velvety top (“intended to awaken what fantasy in me?”) into a kimono. “He liked the extreme boyish way her hair was cut. . . . This look took a firmer hold on him than the first, the Central Park West Peter Pan. Something French now wafting around her. You get this look in Paris” (328). Michelle has come by to give Sabbath a prescription for pain (his puppet career has left his fingers arthritic). They start bantering and soon she offers to take his filthy clothes to the dry cleaner. Every indignity he had ever suffered seemed collected and preserved in the loose-fitting seat of those old pants. . . . But they did not appear to repel her, as he had momentarily feared while undressing. Of course not. She deals with dirt all day. . . . One schmutzig mouth after another. Schmutz is her métier. Crud is what she works away at with her instruments. Drawn not to Norman but to crud. . . . Seeing Michelle so enthrallingly kimono’d, his schmutzig clothes balled up under her arm—and with her geisha boy haircut lending just the right note of transsexual tawdriness to the whole slatternly picture—he knew he could kill for her. Kill Norman. Push him out the fucking window. All that marmalade, mine. So. Here we are. The moon is high, somewhere there’s music, Norman’s dead. And it’s just me and this betitted pretty-boy in his flowered kimono. Missed my chance with a man. . . . Wonder what it’s like. Ask her, she’ll tell you. The only other people who fuck men are women. (330–31)

Before long they are flirting, and when Sabbath invites her into the bedroom, she responds, “Unbridled excess knows no limit in you . . . but

179

180

|

CHAPTER 5

I suffer from a severe predilection not to ruin my life” (333). Yet she admires his freedom to “express” himself (what “most people don’t do”) and soon lets her forehead rest on his and then invites him to her office on Saturday for a “periodontal probe.” He whispers, “ ‘God, I’m fond of adultery aren’t you?’ He dared to take her face in his crippled hands and to trace the boyish haircut around at the neckline. . . . He would never let her get away. Here was Drenka, only instead of the colloquialisms . . . speaking charmingly humorous, delectable English. Drenka, it’s you, only from suburban New Jersey instead of Split [her home in Yugoslavia]. I know this because this high degree of excitement I experience with no one but you—this is your warm body resurrected! Out o’ the grave. Morty next” (336). But when he opens his bathrobe to “introduce her to his hard-on” (“they should meet. ‘Behold the arrow of desire,’ said Sabbath”) she recoils: “ ‘Not now,’ she warned” (336). By next morning, Michelle has come to her senses, jolted back into reality by the panties she finds stuffed in his pocket. All hopes of resurrection abruptly vanish. Sabbath is less upset at her change of heart than its cause: “I can’t believe the panties did it. I can’t believe this truly superior aging woman could have been daunted by that,” and he denounces the possibility as “true depravity, this genteel shit!” (343). He feels much better about Michelle when he discovers in his jacket pocket an old paper cup full of change he had collected when begging on the subway the day before, reciting his lines from Lear. “The cup did it. Of course. The beggar’s cup. That’s what terrified her. Ten to one the panties took her to a new edge of excitement. It’s the cup she shrank from, the social odium of the cup went beyond even her impudence. . . . Here at last was degradation without a single redeeming thrill. At the beggar’s cup Michelle’s daring drew the line” (348). That the cup was the likely deal-breaker assuages Sabbath (“probably she wasn’t wrong”) because it allows him to preserve his respect for her “stature.” “There was stature in this woman. Mockery. Play. . . . a certain physical poise, the poise that is the purest expression of her sexual freedom” (335). And the cup bothers even Sabbath: “Was how far he had fallen with that cup entirely clear to him? (348). I have quoted at exorbitant length (but still only skimming the chapter’s forty-seven pages) because Sabbath’s “letting the whole creature

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

out” is a performance whose very meaning resides in being immoderate, (relatively) indifferent to economy and selection—elements in the making of factitious order—and immersing himself in the mess of experience as it spills over with glancing meanings, flickering moments of human exchange, abrupt surges, and losses of opportunity. This overflow and byplay forms the “rhapsody” of “sensory fullness” evoked in and through Sabbath’s naked receptivity. His act of letting go is grounded on nothing more than abandonment to the freedom of speculative fantasy and desire that will never know the facts but forges its own truth, weaving it out of a density of detail, range of emotions, web of private associations expressed with a lyric intensity whose cadences and rhythms are the hum of Sabbath’s “voluptuous attention” (201). He creates and conveys a verbal universe of manic immediacy, appreciation, desperation, obsession, all born of the one desolating fact not to be dodged—that “everything is racing off at a tremendous speed” (306). Scenting the anarchy emanating from the Polaroids and the stack of cash, Sabbath is above all moved by the fragility leaking in around the edges of Michelle and Norman’s plush, settled life. “I do like this couple. I think the more I come to understand the chaos churning about here, the more I admire how he holds it together. . . . He’s got his hands full. There is something in her that is always threatening to undo it all, the warmth, the comfort, the whole wonderful eiderdown that is their privileged position” (346). Sabbath wonders why Norman, who is on Prozac (“not a dick friendly drug”), bothers to stay in the marriage, the institution Sabbath most abhors. But his contempt dissolves, overruled by the force of his empathy, as he imagines his way into what sustains them. “The past, for one thing. So much of it. The present—so much of it. . . . The repose when all is well. Somebody there while you wait for the biopsy report to come back from the lab. No time left for settlements and lawyers and starting again. The courage of putting up with it instead—the ‘realism.’ And the dread of no one at home. All these rooms at night and no one else home. . . . I never learned that: work it out, ride it out, cool it down” (346). As Norman hands him his stuff to leave, Sabbath says with complete seriousness, “You live in the world of real love” (346). And as he is about to depart, Sabbath will affirm his

181

182

|

CHAPTER 5

respect for his friend and for that world of “real love” which, unlike Sabbath’s monkish life of sexual delirium, is located in, not outside of, time. Despite all of Sabbath’s outrages, loyal Norman is on the phone arranging a bed for his old friend at Payne Whitney. This gives Sabbath a chance to take the Polaroids and the cash from Michelle’s drawer. He shuts her escape hatch. Michelle, he reasons, “must renounce this callow quarrel with life’s limits” and accept that “marriage is not an ecstatic union.” And “he must think selflessly only of Norman now. . . . The man to save was Norman—he was the indispensable one. And the power to save him is mine. The deed will crown my visit here. . . . I am called to enter the realm of virtue” (350). Drenched in burlesque and impurity like all the motives of self-dramatizing, self-mocking Sabbath, his desire to save Norman from the pain of ever discovering Michelle’s secrets is nevertheless also earnest. Suddenly in an unprecedented role, Sabbath here is the voice of realism, a teacher of limits. He enters the world of virtue after being moved by a glimpse of “the world of real love.” Though alien from both, he still affirms them, but lingers with neither, for he is on the way out, making “haste for his car and the Jersey shore, to arrange there for his burial” (351). Michelle’s money will pay for his plot. The existential nakedness that Mailer and Roth esteem as a condition of empathic creativity and that Sabbath enacts is akin to the “primordial nakedness” that Václav Havel discusses in Letters to Olga. Before the playwright became the first president of the Czech Republic, he studied phenomenology, particularly versions influenced by Levinas and Heidegger. During his years in prison (1979–83) Havel developed his ideas in letters to his wife Olga. One recounts watching on television a weather forecaster who suddenly panicked when something went wrong in the studio. She was left speechless, “exposed to the view of millions” in “all the primordial nakedness of human helplessness” (322–23). This incident, says Havel, “reveals and presents to man his own primordial and half-forgotten vulnerability, throws him back into it, and abruptly reminds him that he, too, stands alone and isolated, helpless and unprotected and that it is an image of his own basic situation, that is, a situation

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

we all share, a common isolation, the isolation of humanity thrown into the world, and that this isolation injures all the same way” (323). He adds that the stranger’s plight floods him with an “absurdly powerful compassion” and sense of “responsibility.” Sabbath’s keen attunement to our primordial vulnerability derives from his boyhood fantasy of the opposite—of immortality. Living as a boy “two short streets from” the Jersey shore, Sabbath absorbed the rhythms of the “booming, silent, limitless sea” and its primal repetitions framed by sand, ocean, horizon, sky: all exuded a sense of “endlessness”—“name a month” and they—his family—had “no end to the stockpile” of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. “He’d grown up on endlessness and his mother—in the beginning they were the same thing” (30–31). The “endlessness” does not end “naturally” but with a telegram. Morty’s death, then his mother’s death in life, ejects Sabbath from the prehistoric and into time, as if “struck from the float forever held in solution,” as Whitman describes the birth trauma in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” With Drenka, she of the “uberous breasts” and shaped like the “great mother of the gods,” Sabbath repeats the pattern: he finds “endlessness” and then, again, loses it. Thrown back into the world, Sabbath renews his sense of how “helpless and unprotected” we are in our “common isolation” that “injures us all the same way.” Yet most of us flee the precarious. In telling Sabbath, “the immensity of your isolation is horrifying,” Norman tries to localize it, as if trying to restrict to Sabbath what his friend has discovered to be lurking everywhere, no matter how barricaded and defended we are. “Fucking naked, even in that suit!” to recall Sabbath’s roar at Norman. Sabbath’s sense of being “thrown into the world” (Havel, after Heidegger) sharpens his intuition of “our permanent ‘nakedness,’ ” which is inextricable, for him, from another fact—that the lives we lead are “stupid.” And “anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it. Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind. There is nothing personal in it” (204).7 Or, as Whitman says in “As I Ebb’d”: “I perceive I have not really understood anything . . . and that no man ever can.” Whitman, the poet of nakedness who implores us to “undrape,” dwells with nonunderstanding. As does Sabbath. And to cover

183

184

|

CHAPTER 5

up our “existential nakedness” by “devoted service to a given project,” remarks Havel, is the quickest way to elude the precious sense of the ungraspable, to elude the “exhausting, lifelong openness to questions” of the “meaning of life” and the “mystery of Being” (Olga 364, 363, 224). This kind of lofty rhetoric would be anathema to Sabbath. The nakedness he embodies finds a source in the “uncontrollable tenderness” he feels for his own “shit-filled life” (247). The strangeness of that infantile juxtaposition—“tenderness” and “shit”—can stand as Sabbath’s idiom for expressing the “mystery of Being.” Tenderness, like so much in the novel, overflows, leaking out to become the very medium of his openness. It inevitably breeds its counterurge—Sabbath “ravening, raging, and uprooting” on the heath. Near the end he gives in to blind “gorilla” rage after facing one more ejection from “an orgasmic haven” as he arrives home to find his much-neglected wife in bed with another woman (441). The Dionysian Sabbath seems about to surrender to chaos. Working the borderline, at the point of maximum clashing antagonism, where ordinary notions of the human are abolished and remade, Mickey Sabbath is the most unfettered expression of Roth’s aesthetic sensibility. The author leaves a signature of his stance in a small exchange, face to face, between Sabbath and a street person on Astor Place, a man with “blurred muzzy eyes . . . at the twilight edge of sanity” who is “bereft of any desire to see.” “It’s just a job, man— somebody’s got to do it,” he mutters. What’s the job, Sabbath asks. “Bein’ a borderline case,” the man answers (205). American literature’s most concentrated distillation of the inadmissible “rude truth,” Emerson’s “Experience,” notes that “the life of truth is cold, and so far mournful,” but implores that “we must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous” (Essays 490). One of the referents of “poverty” in this passage is “self-trust,” which Emerson finds poor because it submits to “our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors” (490). Emerson’s “selftrust” is frail as well when compared to philosophic liberalism’s brisk foundational belief that the possession of a freely chosen “plan of life” constitutes maturity in a person (Appiah 6). To possess a project (a plan) is to possess a (mature) self, and this confident equation anchors

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

American liberal individualism.8 Skeptical of all anchors, Emerson counsels stoical acceptance of our limited powers of self-trust and control and of the possible illusoriness of our life plans. That our lives are stupid and naked, hostage to what arrives without warning because we see only “mediately,” and that things slip our grasp especially “when we clutch hardest,” are notions largely inadmissible because emotionally (and politically) intolerable. They must be shouted down, especially in the contemporary United States, by a transmogrified liberalism’s progeny— proponents of the “just do it” ethos of untroubled self-empowerment. Roth finds compelling the adamant American individualists who are too busy exerting their sovereign will to mastery to grant the fact of our poverty. He devotes his other late major work, The Human Stain, to depicting Coleman Silk’s artfully defended self. Silk’s is the counterlife to Sabbath’s flowing mess of a life. Whereas Coleman harbors a secret that insulates him from intimacy (until late in life), Sabbath is a man without secrets (even his phone seductions are taped and made public in his community, and Roth provides a transcription that runs as a twentypage footnote) and his wayward existence is virtually the opposite of Coleman’s unerring ascent up the ladder of professional success. One way to articulate their distinct configurations is that Sabbath understands his life as a problem, not as a project: “the problem that was his life was never to be solved. His wasn’t the kind of life where there are aims that are clear and means that are clear and where it is possible to say, ‘This is essential and that is not essential’ ” (108). Juxtaposed, Sabbath and Silk appear as two extremes—the naked and the defended. What can ameliorate the severity of this stark contrast and find access to the realm Emerson praises as the “mid-world” where we skate on surfaces? One answer, to be pursued in the next chapter, is Roth’s admiration for, and Coleman’s embrace of, being “game.” One of Roth’s strengths is his antitherapeutic worldview, and it would be a mistake to see Sabbath as offering an implicit corrective to Coleman or vice versa. Both characters enact disparate modes of American individualism, each is an “unalterable animal” of “unalterable necessity” (in the words of Wallace Stevens that Roth used over forty years ago as the epigraph to Letting Go). Perhaps what most differentiates Sabbath from Silk is that Coleman learns only late what Sabbath

185

186

|

CHAPTER 5

learned early on—the impersonal fact that we lead stupid lives. Until he meets Faunia and “lets the whole creature out” unfurled, Coleman regards his life as an artifact, sculpted by decisions and acts produced by his executive will. That this understanding is at once brave and deeply inadequate is part of the perplexing irreconcilability that Silk will grapple with in a novel that is framed by the terms of Greek tragedy. The Human Stain starts, in an epigraph, with Oedipus’s question to Creon in Oedipus the King, “what is the rite of purification?” The answer is provided in the novel’s final chapter, entitled “The Purifying Ritual.” The epigraph and the chapter title are sharply ironic, for Roth, as we know, is skeptical, to put it mildly, of purification. It breeds deadly violence, and attracts those allergic to “everything that flows,” those who can “no longer bear the spectacle of life’s outrageous chaos and mysterious fertility” (Havel, Living 173). Fittingly, the figure of lethal intolerance and purifying ritual presides over a frozen pond. The words of Havel quoted above are part of his critique of the utopian sensibility with its “desperate impatience” that “drives . . . compulsively to construct and impose various projects.” The purpose of the utopian is “to make sure that, at long last, things will be clear and comprehensible, that the world will stride onward toward a goal, finally putting an end to all the infuriating contingency of history” (173). In other words, the utopian visionary pursues a fantasy of transparency first hatched by the dream of Cartesian rationality; Havel calls the latter the “grand self-delusion of the modern spirit” (159). Fueled by blind certitude, utopians—Havel mentions Robespierre, Lenin, and Pol Pot—cast the “cold” light of “objective” reason upon any mystery or ambiguity, insisting on the “mental short-cut” and the “clarity of the pamphlet” in their impatience to impose their projects. In the process, man is transformed from a naked, questioning being “into an existing answer” (174). Havel’s critique of Enlightenment rationality informs his portrait of the dissident’s “distinctive central European skepticism,” a portrait that clearly resembles the sensibility of “mature immaturity” examined in the genealogy of chapter 2. Careful to avoid a dichotomy pitting the dissident against the utopian, Havel notes that “a trace of the heroic dreamer, something mad and unrealistic, is hidden in the very genesis

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

of the dissident perspective. In the very nature of things, the dissident is something of a Don Quixote” (192).9 As the resemblance to Quixote would suggest, the dissident is not immune to utopian imagination; indeed within him is “the germ of utopianism” (192, 175). “Visions of a better world and dreams about it are surely a fundamental aspect of authentic humanity,” and without this “transcendence of the given” human life loses meaning (175). But this “germ” contains a “devilish temptation” that if left unchecked can end up “degenerating” and enslaving one to an abstraction—a “project for a better world.” Often, megalomania ensues, followed by zealous indoctrination of the masses.10 The ambition of the “fanatic of the abstract project, that practicing Utopian,” in Havel’s words, produces what his countryman Kundera calls “idyll” and their friend Roth calls “pastoral.” All three authors are preoccupied in their various ways with anatomizing the utopian impulse that, in Kundera’s words, wants “to leave nothing but an unstained age of an unstained idyll” (Book 33).11 Havel’s critique is in texts published in English in 1985 (“An Anatomy of Reticence”) and 1988 (Letters to Olga), and Kundera’s relevant texts are from 1980 (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and 1984 (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Given Roth’s deep familiarity with these writers and the political context of their thinking, it seems reasonable to suggest that their antiutopian skepticism helped inspire his own rejection of American pastoralism at the conclusion of The Counterlife in 1986 and has oriented his major novels ever since. Outside Czechoslovakia, other Eastern European intellectuals were making similar points. The Polish dissident Adam Michnik in Letters From Prison (translated in 1985) spoke of the dangerous “Manichean simplicity”—“the curse of captive peoples“—that divides the world between “maggots and angels,” a mentality that is lodged deep in the Polish romantic tradition (194–95). The heroic rebel, ready to die a martyr, “denies the value of compromise,” favoring instead “self-idealization. . . . Seeing maggots in the cowed population, he ‘angelized’ himself and his friends, fighters for a sovereign and just Poland” (196, 194). These angels, often justifying their actions “with the jargon of . . . a socialistuniversalist utopia,” are “already sowing the seeds of future hatred. . . . And the angel who is not criticized, the angel who is convinced of his

187

188

|

CHAPTER 5

angelic character, may metamorphose into the devil. . . . Read The Possessed” (197). Roth’s own diatribes against “Manichean simplicity” in Sabbath’s Theater and The Human Stain are familiar and inevitably lack the urgency and immediacy of his Eastern European contemporaries (American identity politics, after all, is hardly in the same league as totalitarian occupation). I Married a Communist is the most direct assault on the intellectual abasement, the moral and political gullibility, required to be an American member of the Party from the late thirties to midfifties. And in Sabbath’s Theater he writes that ideologies traffic in blatant polarities; “the holder of the ideology is pure and good and clean and the other is wicked. . . . The ideology institutionalizes the pathology” (274). Although contempt for purist politics clearly links Roth to the Eastern European dissident sensibility, a subtler continuity among Roth, Havel, and Kundera is founded on their esteem of nakedness and recognition of the inevitability of leading a “stupid” life. I want to suggest that Kundera’s notion of the “planet of inexperience,” the original title of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and expounded in that novel and in “Sixty-three Words” (in The Art of the Novel) is a distinctive version of what Roth will later call “stupid life” and Havel describes as “existential nakedness” (Letters 364). And Kundera’s planet bears an uncanny resemblance to the world Emerson discloses in “Experience.” “Inexperience,” says Kundera, is a “quality of the human condition. We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from a previous one . . . even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience” (Art 132–33). Kundera makes this a motif of his novel, first rehearsing it soon after the opening, where Tomas is perplexed about what he should do with Tereza: He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural. We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. . . . We live everything as

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal of life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture. (8)

Our irremediable inexperience makes human beings “unbearably light.” Sabina realizes this when she grasps that “the thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being—was that the goal?” (122). Man’s “fateful inexperience” is also what makes history “light as individual human life, unbearably light” (223). With this Kundera implicitly dismisses the ponderous certitude of Hegelian-Marxist historicism and its “ ‘geometric conception of the future’ . . . that would like to have assurances in advance through science about the future, without running any risk.”12 What are the prospects for maturity if we are like actors going onstage cold, if the “first rehearsal of life is life itself ”? Given that maturity is funded by the steady amassing and assessing of experience, it seems forever out of our reach. Tomas imagines that “somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again” and imbued with the lessons of their previous life experience. “And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.” But since we are stuck on the first planet, the planet of inexperience, “we can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power?” (224). Sabbath shares Kundera’s and Tomas’s doubts about attaining maturity, shares especially their sense of being stalled (in Sabbath’s words) in “this always-beginning, never-ending present” (204). Whereas Kundera and his character are calmly resigned, Sabbath finds “repugnant” the “inexhaustibility of the present.” “You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever”: both novels, Kundera’s and Roth’s, can agree on that bit of folk wisdom, for each is compelled in its own way by the unbearable lightness of the perpetual present. Sabbath, like Kundera and Havel, would detect a

189

190

|

CHAPTER 5

flight from the fact of our endemic immaturity, our “inexperience,” in those electing to pursue “the relatively undemanding duty of devoted service to a given project” that provides one with a specious sense of mastery (Havel, Olga 363). For instance, Tomas knows an editor who acts “as though history were a finished picture rather than a sketch” (223). Belief in the “finished picture” assumes coherence and control and predictability—all elements required for executing projects. But they unravel in the weightless air of the “planet of inexperience.” Or if they cohere it is by dint of luck, a capacity to improvise, and by a willed forgetting of fragility. Strangely enough, yet not so strange, on this weightless air and planet is where Emerson’s “Experience” uneasily, woozily, finds itself, unable to “shake off the lethargy now at noonday” (471). We realize with a shock that the gliding, sliding, swimming, and skating that suffuses Emerson’s opening pages describes our unbearable lightness of being on the “planet of inexperience.” “Where do we find ourselves?” are the first words of “Experience,” and this disorienting query initiates the essay’s oblique and casual passage, depicting a world and a self weirdly unmoored, adrift in a place where “all things swim and glitter” and “we thrive by casualties.” The “results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable,” for although we crave “reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth” as boundary lines to guide us and as seedbeds of wisdom that might nurture us, they seem always beyond our grasp (471–73). As we stumble along slippery surfaces, “all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.” Emerson teases out the deathly randomness instilled in the casual: “we thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual” (473). If in “Circles” the self ’s fluidity is a cause for exuberance, in “Experience” mutability is shadowed by the unmovable fact that “the whole frame of things preaches indifferency” (478). Life seems immune to our designs, and all we can count on is the unaccountable. Suddenly at risk is the Enlightenment assumption of man’s dominion over experience. “Experience” exposes as self-flattering fantasy our normally taken-for-granted belief that from the rigors of experience we create the ballast of hard-won, communicable, reliable, wisdom. Early on Emerson writes: “We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. . . . All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ’tis wonderful

S A B B AT H ’ S N A K E D N E S S

|

where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day” (471). For much of the essay, grief (at the death of his infant son) is the “subject-lens” through which Emerson views experience as a ceaseless, sliding procession. That grief would accentuate this careening movement is at first paradoxical, for grief would seem to be one of those “sharp peaks and edges of truth” that will provide the anchorage we crave. After all, grief is deemed to be experience saturated with meaning, a crucible that forges strength, wisdom, maturity. In sum, grief is assumed to be a supreme teacher; it introduces us into reality. Or so Emerson believed. But grief ’s prestige is more the spur of histrionics (“people grieve and bemoan themselves”) than anything else. The sharp peaks of truth turn out to be “scene-painting and counterfeit.” In the essay’s most famous words, Emerson confides: “the only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. . . . I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature” (473). Instead of providing anchorage, grief reveals the quicksand of nonmeaning normally hidden by the merciful quotidian routines of the midworld. Grief ’s scripted glibness—it “plays about the surface”—exposes the usually concealed fact that experience is neither friend nor teacher, nor a repository of painful but redemptive lessons in living. We project these meanings into experience, as if desperate to populate the vacancy of its stark, casual indifferency. Grieving Sabbath at the shore discovers nothing save how “immoderate” is grief; “staring into the sea and up at the sky and seeing nothing and everything and nothing,” he reaches no sharp peaks and edges of epiphanic illumination (407). The chronic self-befuddlement (“If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know!”) that Emerson would have us accept as our lot is Kundera’s attitude as well (“not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural”). Kundera’s conviction of our vulnerability, our endemic “inexperience” and “lightness” as we “live everything as it comes, without warning,” tallies with Emerson’s exposure of selfhood as little more than a “flux of moods,” of ghostly gliding on life’s surfaces. These glimpses into the “quicksand” (Emerson) that lurks in supposedly solid foundations and anchorages are “unbearable.” So is the power of chance in our lives. “We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of

191

192

|

CHAPTER 5

our life may be something light or weightless,” says Kundera’s narrator; “we presume our love is what must be” (35). Though Tomas refuses the comforting notion of fated necessity that would drape over the unflattering power of “absolute fortuity,” his refusal gives him little solace. The dynamism and morale of capitalist economic and political life require that bleak recognitions such as “the anchorage is quicksand” or that we live on “the planet of inexperience” be kept offstage, available only to those willing to “hold hard to this poverty.” Or to those willing, such as Nietzsche, to “delight in blindness.” “ ‘My thoughts,’ said the wanderer to his shadow, ‘should show me where I stand; but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love my ignorance of the future’ ” (Gay Science 230–31).13 Yet even Emerson, who tells us that “the individual is always mistaken,” adds that nevertheless “something is done; all are a little advanced,” projects are convened, nakedness is clothed (484). Indeed, Emerson can not live solely with the “cold” truth and seeks recourse in the “middle region . . . the equator of life,” where we live between the extremes of the “thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation” (480). Reading Emerson and Kundera together suggests that “Experience” might be retitled “Inexperience” and that the words turn out to be synonymous for both writers. Reading Sabbath’s Theater with Kundera and Emerson prepares for The Human Stain; Coleman Silk will come to learn that he dwells, with Mickey Sabbath, Nathan Zuckerman, and their creator, on the planet of inexperience. The slippery world of Roth’s late fiction is shaped in part by the radical skepticism of two thinkers from vastly different times and places, one an antinomian living in a mid-nineteenth-century laboratory of democracy, the other a dissident in exile from totalitarian occupation in Eastern Europe. The currents of both flow into and help propel a capacious late-twentiethcentury cosmopolitan’s art of appropriation.

6 Being Game in The Human Stain

I call him thus [the Huzza Porpoise] because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. . . . Full of fine spirits, . . . they are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. —Moby-Dick, “Cetology”

“

W

e could have great times as Homo Ludens and wife, inventing the imperfect future. . . . All it takes is impersonation,” quips Nathan Zuckerman to Maria at the end of The Counterlife (321). Nathan’s playful remark about man the player sums up his plea to become emancipated from myths of the natural, pastoral’s “idyllic scenario[s] of redemption.” The novel that is about to conclude—replete with vertiginous acts of literary artifice and self-conscious self-fashioning—has exuberantly enacted and affirmed Nathan’s late hymn to homo ludens. The Human Stain (2000) renews and enlarges the emphasis on man’s propensity for play, for mimicry and invention, but in a key more somber and searching and capacious. Here the costs of conceiving identity and artifice as synonymous are weighed, as the limits and illusions of freedom inscribed in extravagant, adamant self-making are revealed. And experimental ventures in self-unmaking—opening the self to less brutal and entrapping modes of being—suddenly emerge near the end of the protagonist’s life.

194

|

CHAPTER 6

Ralph Ellison too found fascinating improvised modes of selfunmaking, inspired by the subtle poetry of invisibility. Like The Human Stain, the novel that pays it homage, Invisible Man is a cumulative work of the synthetic imagination, a palimpsest of literary and cultural appropriation and allusion ranging across time and space. And both novels, as if providing the athletic complement to their author’s imaginative mobility, present as a stance of maximum power the image of a boxer displaying nearly balletic suppleness. Ellison’s, who appears only once, in the prologue, possesses a “slightly different sense of time” that enables him to “slip into the breaks” or “nodes” inside the “swift and imperceptible flowing of time” (8). By abjuring straight-ahead mastery, by never quite being on the beat, he eludes his opponent, the odds-on favorite, and ends up knocking him flat. Roth’s supple boxer, the young Coleman “Silky” Silk, is a master of counterpunching and rolling with the punch, qualities that will serve him well in his later effort to slip the bonds of racial ascription and become an invisible black man. To enlist in the project of passing, with its endless need for vigilant secrecy and deception, is to recognize that “our life is a war” and one must live with one’s “head in the lion’s mouth,” to borrow the famous deathbed phrases of the grandfather in Invisible Man. He is an “odd old guy” whose haunting words—including the demand to “overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins”—itch at the narrator’s ears and cause all “the trouble” (16). The effect on the narrator is to keep him perpetually “running,” as his anxious dream discloses at the end of the novel’s first chapter. “Play the game, but don’t believe in it,” counsels another sage, the brilliant, deranged Vet. The gnomic, unsettling riddles offered up to Ellison’s unnamed protagonist present an imperative to be game, to remain in agile, offbalance alertness. “Being game. . . . Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game” is a capacity Roth too esteems (HS 340). Something akin to it emerges in Stanley Crouch’s Ellisonian account of Roth’s central contention in The Human Stain—“that American life, regardless of color or religion or money, always finds itself at odds with the wildness at the center of the national soul, the anarchic impulses that only achieve vitality when there is enough grace, however hard-won, to get past our penchant for destruction. Achieving that grace takes time and a willingness

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

to endure the punches that others feel it their duty to lay on” (34).1 Attaining the anarchic vitality of “grace” or of being “game” becomes the achievement of homo ludens in The Human Stain. As Crouch suggests, grace in Roth requires time, even patience, and is, finally, more than perpetual “running.” Ellison’s protagonist also grasps this; he hibernates in his hole, “trying to put it all down,” exultant with creative ferment (579). Although he swears that “even hibernations can be overdone” and pledges to emerge, invisible man at the end remains solitary and underground (581). Coleman Silk, in contrast, eventually comes out of hiding, risking intimacy with another person, and his gameness is what immaturity matures into when it embraces undefended immersion in the present moment and attunement to the precarious. The Human Stain also asks its readers to be game, invites them to tap their own capacity for interpretive play. Roth in effect encourages this by foregrounding the power of language in a number of scenes that dramatize intense acts of reading, as if to inspire our own. When Coleman receives the “everyone knows” anonymous letter exposing his affair with Faunia, he and Nathan “appraised the choice of words and their linear deployment as if they’d been composed not by Delphine Roux but by Emily Dickinson” (HS 39–40). The preacher’s intoning of “the word ‘valiant’ ” in reading an excerpt from Julius Caesar at the funeral of Clarence Silk strips away his son Coleman’s “manly effort at sober, stoical self-control,” a rare lapse from his unflappable “impregnability” (107). Soon after “valiant,” the words of a poem sent by Steena Palsson, Coleman’s first love, so intrigue him that “at the desk in his room, he battled into the morning with the paradoxical implications” of her writing (114). Later he subjects her farewell letter to “numerous rereadings” and hears in it a “subaudible apology” (126). Perhaps only fittingly, Coleman’s life is undone by a single word. This time it is “spooks,” and it ignites a campus scandal that becomes a personal disaster. The prominence of language and of acts of analytical scrutiny in The Human Stain alert us to the impact words have, including, as in “spooks,” their incorrigible consequences that take on a life of their own, beyond our control. They alert us as well to the solicitations that

195

196

|

CHAPTER 6

artifacts great and small make upon us, demands that are analogous to what brings this novel into being—Nathan feeling “seized” by Coleman’s “story” (337). Their short friendship becomes the basis of Nathan’s empathic reinvention of Coleman’s life in art. I will eventually dilate upon the crucial moment at graveside where the novel is born. But here I want to show how Roth’s dense weave of literary allusion is not to be regarded as ornamental or the occasion for scavenger hunts but functions rather as a vehicle of solicitation, inviting us to pursue clues, hazard guesses, make connections, activities analogous to how Nathan reconstructs Coleman’s life. In repeating scenes of reading where characters are seized by language and literature, seized, that is, by the claims of otherness, the novel foregrounds the process of creating meaning as intersubjective, even if the other has to be reclaimed from death and imagined back into being ( just as a mute text has to be made to speak). In a novel where the intersubjective is not a given but achieved—Nathan must be wooed out of his isolation, Coleman must be weaned from the insulation of his secret—Roth invites his reader to engage with otherness by pursuing textual moments that expand or open out in ways that defy control, a submission to the possible but unprovable that encourages being game. Consider the workings of one allusion that initially seems straightforward but upon further scrutiny exfoliates into a model of volatile experience that ensnares both reader and character in The Human Stain. Late in the novel we learn that Delphine Roux , the twenty-nine-yearold French feminist colleague of Coleman’s at Athena College, was once seized emotionally by Milan Kundera after hearing him lecture in Paris; “basking” in his insights, she and a friend felt “infected” by the “Kundera disease.” His “playfulness did not appear to be frivolous, not at all. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting they loved. There was something trustworthy about him. His Eastern Europeanness. The restless nature of the intellectual. That everything appeared to be difficult for him” (261). Delphine admires not only his work but his “poetically prizefighterish looks,” and turns him into a moral ideal, on occasion calling him to mind to “ask his forgiveness” (266). Roth is having a bit of fun at Delphine’s idolatry but is also is saluting his friend Kundera. And other things are going on as well. Her crush on the “prizefighterish” Kundera

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

echoes another—Delphine’s fascination with a former prizefighter, a “snub-nosed, goat-footed Pan,” Dean Coleman Silk. He is the man who hired her and with whom she bitterly clashes, eventually exposing his affair with Faunia. But these are surface connections; less visible ones emerge when we examine “Lost Letters,” the opening story of Delphine’s favorite, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. “Lost Letters” concerns Mirek, a dissident Czech scientist who has never believed in the Communist “idyll of justice for all,” a “realm of harmony” that requires the liquidation of any discordant element, including the cropping of pictures and imprisonment of dissenters (11). As an opponent of the state, Mirek had years earlier lost his job when he refused to “renounce his convictions”; he found work in construction, avoided prison but is often followed by the police. We first meet him as he is meticulously preserving documents, diaries, and lists of his activities from the earliest days of the Russian occupation. Dismissing the alarm of friends who fear he is making himself vulnerable to arrest, his reasoning is impeccably heroic: “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (4). The police do indeed seize his cache of papers, and Mirek, “who had been drawn irresistibly to the idea of prison,” is sentenced to six years, and though his son and ten friends are also sentenced, Mirek seems fulfilled: the Communists “wanted to efface hundreds of thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his whole body on that idyll, like a stain” (33). But the story is more complicated than a portrait of a martyr to memory. And its resonance with Roth’s novel exceeds the clearly shared interest in staining pastoral idylls. Mirek has for many years been “in love with his destiny” and even finds his ruined career “noble and beautiful. . . . His connection to his life was that of a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. It is an inviolable right of a novelist to rework his novel. If the opening does not please him, he can rewrite or delete it” (14–15). The potential moral ambiguity of this attitude becomes clear when Mirek seeks to confiscate his old letters to a former lover, a homely, still devout Party member. “That a piece of his life remained in Zdena’s hands was unbearable” (25). So are his fleeting memories of his love for her. At one point the narrator intrudes: “I call on that memory

197

198

|

CHAPTER 6

to linger awhile” and discovers that it turns out Mirek wants to “efface her from the photograph of his life” because he is ashamed that he once loved the ugly Zdena. So he has erased her, rewriting history “just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind” (30). In Mirek, Kundera has created a thoroughly ambiguous protagonist— at once the “stain” on the Communist “idyll” and yet the purist who is bent, like his despised enemies, on airbrushing out whatever does not fit. The narrator is intent, however, on staining Mirek, intent on drawing out the irony, for us at least, of Mirek’s flight from the (personal) past in the name of keeping the (political) past alive. In The Art of the Novel Kundera notes that Mirek’s belief that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” is “often cited as the book’s message. This is because the first thing a reader recognizes in a novel is the ‘already known.’ The ‘already known’ in that novel is Orwell’s famous theme: the forgetting that a totalitarian regime imposes. But to me the originality of Mirek’s story lay somewhere else entirely,” that is, in the contradiction of his character’s struggle (Art 130). “Before it becomes a political issue,” says Kundera, “the will to forget is an anthropological one: man has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past” (130). “Lost Letters” charts the tension between these different meanings of the will to forget. The protagonist of The Human Stain is, like Mirek, a master of selfrevision. What Kundera says of Mirek could be said of Coleman: “his connection to his life was that of a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel.” This striking resemblance, like the notions of idyll and stain, clearly anticipates The Human Stain. And there are other intersections. Kundera’s active narrator who intervenes on behalf of memory and stains Mirek’s purist project of forgetting prefigures Nathan’s recovery of Coleman’s life of immaculate insulation and exposure of his secret. But perhaps most notable is the disruption of expectation Kundera has built into “Lost Letters,” a certain shiftiness achieved by baiting his story with the “already known”—Orwell’s theme of the power of memory— that evidently has diverted readers from discerning Mirek’s compromised plan. What seems like a tale of heroic resistance turns out to concern a self-divided protagonist. Mirek remains stubbornly oblivious to

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

his contradictions; indeed, now under arrest he “could not imagine a better ending for the novel of his life” (33). The story’s last lines, noting the prison sentences handed down to his son and circle of friends, underscore the perfect solipsism of his aesthetic relation to his life. In sum: 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. Such unsettlement is particularly apt for The Human Stain because it is fascinated not only by Mirek-like self-fashioning but also the boomeranging contradictions that emerge when one vows, as Delphine, a self-described Cartesian, vows, to be “the author of my life.” Her abrupt reversal from subject to object (which Isabel Archer also suffers) is mirrored in the pronoun shift from the active “I” to the subjected “she”: “I will construct myself outside the orthodoxy of my family’s given, I will fight against the given, impassioned subjectivity carried to the limit, individualism at its best—and she winds up instead in a drama beyond her control” (273). The sudden loss of control, a slipperiness also observed in “Lost Letters” via Kundera’s feinting with Orwell, becomes in The Human Stain the leitmotif of the novel. This lability starts on the level of the sentence, threading itself through a wealth of narrative and descriptive detail, turning the title phrase inside out, accumulating thematic significance. At the fluid center is the smooth counterpunching boxer “Silky” Silk, adept at both “slipping the punch” and “rolling” with it, a suppleness that extends to his smooth and seamless transition from black to white. He is master of the art of passing and its “sliding relationship with everything” that is the liberating opposite of the “tyranny of the we” that burdened his father’s generation of race loyalists (108). Yet all his crafty, graceful movement in the service of control is eventually tripped up by the equally artful counterpoint of accident and reversal—ironic life at its slippery work. So Coleman will come to bruising awareness of the traps hidden in the fine art of passing and suffer as well other twists of fortune, suffer them as blind spots, for he has encountered premonitions of them. Peripeteia haunts the classical Greek drama he reads: “freedom is dangerous,” “nothing is on your own terms for long,” and “how easily life can be one thing rather than another” (145, 125).

199

200

|

CHAPTER 6

Shiftiness and reversal, both startling and subtle, are the very stuff of The Human Stain. For instance, many read it as a meditation upon race in America, but race is, arguably, closer to the status of Orwell in “Lost Letters”—“the first thing a reader recognizes,” an “already known.” More pivotal than race in explaining Coleman is “the gift to be secretive” that he possesses; indeed, his self-understanding equates having a self with having a secret. “It’s like being fluent in another language,” he says of the latter.2 This gift for secrets is a gift for fluency and is the source of the “sliding relationship with everything” that Roth makes the thematic and stylistic spine of the novel (135–36). I will look at some manifestations of this wayward motion by first providing an overview of the novel. Then Nathan’s graveyard pledge to tell Coleman’s story will become a recurring reference point, for that scene entwines the novel’s birth with the power of being game. This latter theme will open out to reveal Roth’s exuberantly inventive engagement with his nineteenth-century predecessors. Roth makes the seeds of that engagement quite visible in the text. A colleague eulogizes Coleman as an “American individualist” who, in the tradition of “Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau,” resisted the “coercions of a censorious community” (310). And lonely Zuckerman in the Berkshires wishes he could “find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased” (44). Zuckerman does find sustenance in The Scarlet Letter, both in general ways—linking Puritan censoriousness with its contemporary resurgence during the ClintonLewinsky scandals—and in more particular ones—reworking “The Minister In a Maze” chapter that narrates Dimmesdale’s inner reversal, the “revolution” that incites him to do “wicked” things. The textual presence of reversal and volatility includes a relaxing of the aggressively phallic masculinity usually found in Roth’s novels. As if reanimating something of Mickey Sabbath’s sexual ease and curiosity, Roth early on shows that heterosexuality is less defensively homophobic here. Such are the implications to be drawn from the odd spectacle of a now impotent Zuckerman, at sixty-five a reclusive, incontinent, “helpless eunuch” after prostate surgery, dancing the foxtrot with a

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

bare-chested man of light yellow skin, who is “still trim and attractive” at seventy-one. “There was nothing overtly carnal in it, but because Coleman Silk was wearing only his denim shorts and my hand rested easily on his warm back . . . it wasn’t entirely a mocking act” (26). Zuckerman relishes the “unexpected intimacy” of their “human connection” and feels as if he has met his “soul mate.” Still a “seductive,” “boyish soul,” a “goat-footed Pan,” Coleman puts on Sinatra singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and dances Nathan “right back into life” (24–25, 45). What this pagan tableau of relaxed male courtship suggests is a desublimation in which pleasure and play replace sexual compulsion. This less frantic mode of desublimation is rare in Roth’s work, indeed is distinctly absent, for instance, from Portnoy’s portrait of a tabooshattering momma’s boy, or from The Anatomy Lesson’s quixotic and penitential search for the real. In their near hysterical devotion to being bad, the heroes of the two earlier novels paradoxically retain a boyish commitment to purity, to the myth of pastoral and its nostalgia for the “womb-dream of life” “before the split began” (C 322). In contrast, The Human Stain proposes in effect a desublimation free from the consolations of pastoral. Unlike pastoral, the human stain does not imply a prelapsarian moment that begs for recovery. It simply testifies to the fact that “we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here” (242). The stain “de-idealizes the species” by keeping us “everlastingly mindful of the matter we are” (37) and leaving us potentially less vulnerable to fantasies of purity. Roth enacts this de-idealization by creating a plot that is faintly ludicrous in places, including the dance of Coleman and Nathan, and the central flashback that recounts Silk’s self-invention. Both episodes are set, that is, on the brink of a “precipitous absurdity,” in the words of Zuckerman’s onetime neighbor Hawthorne, who was describing the precarious position of the writer of romance. What keeps Roth from crossing over the brink is an amplitude of novelistic detail and command of multitudinous facts. These ground a plot that is as willfully contrived and as compelling as his protagonist. Roth leaves the stain of verisimilitude even on events that are (in a phrase describing

201

202

|

CHAPTER 6

Coleman’s passing) “flavored with just a drop of the ridiculous, the redeeming, reassuring ridiculous, life’s little contribution to every human decision” (132). Roth’s commitment to the brute materiality of the human makes it apt that the most ineluctable kind of “sliding” and reversal—the simple fact of Zuckerman’s aging—helps liberate Nathan from the manic narcissism of his youthful incarnations. The melancholy of age and illness encourages his own subjectivity to fade into the background, as he turns his recessive presence into artistic advantage. His self-effacement nourishes his sympathetic imagination, which in turn feeds his mimetic capaciousness and becomes a lens of remarkable precision. A selfeffacing narrator in American Pastoral and more visible as Murray’s interlocutor in I Married a Communist, the first two books of the trilogy, Zuckerman in The Human Stain dramatizes his emergence from the solitude of renunciation. Receptive to Coleman’s “allure”—“an allure that I could never quite specify”—Zuckerman lets this human connection bring him back to life and to art, as he becomes imaginatively at one with his friend (“Coleman Silk’s life had become closer to me than my own”) and compelled to tell his life’s secret story. If the young Zuckerman had taken Henry James as his model of ascetic (and Gentile) devotion to high art, now at last he achieves his Jamesian calling. Zuckerman approximates something of Lambert Strether’s power, in The Ambassadors, of sympathetic identification (“I seem to have a life only for other people”) and imaginative appropriation. And Coleman, like Strether an aging widower, follows in his own anarchic fashion the famous imperative of James’s hero: “Live all you can.” Given the younger Zuckerman’s thirst for raw, unvarnished life in The Anatomy Lesson, Coleman’s vitality would naturally be seductive to the older Nathan. “Free to be abandoned . . . because there is no future,” Silk is enjoying a last fling (facilitated by Viagra), an intense affair with a thirty-four-year-old (apparently) illiterate cleaning woman (33). Faunia Farley is “not deformed by the fairy tale of purity,” and her laconic, calm, voice is free of sanctimony. Exuberant at discovering the pleasure of intimacy and being unburdened of his double life, Coleman will watch Faunia dance him into a new understanding of time, one freed “from the ridiculous quest for significance” (171). And he dances

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

with Zuckerman as part of his unexpected renewal of passion. Silk’s abandonment dissolves the fury that has gripped him following a disastrous turn in his career and life. Two years earlier, charges of racism had abruptly upended Coleman’s professional life as a college dean and professor of classics. He had uttered the word “spooks” in class (“Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”), referring to two perennially absent students he later learns are black (6). In his small college community, where his ambition and success have made him unpopular, he is bereft of defenders, deserted by friends. His estrangement from his children increases, and when his wife dies amid the tumult of the scandal, he becomes vengeful and misanthropic. He soon encounters more trouble when an enemy on the faculty—Delphine—threatens to make public his ongoing affair. Her efforts become moot when Faunia’s ex-husband, a psychopathic Vietnam veteran who has been stalking the couple, forces them off the road into a fatal car crash. Thus when the novel begins Coleman is already dead, and it ends with Zuckerman resolved to get the facts. But the more Zuckerman learns the more elusive becomes the meaning of Coleman’s passing as a Jew. “How petty were his motives? How pathological? . . . did he ever relax his vigilance, or was it like being a fugitive forever?” (334). The questions pile up without answer. Coleman never apologized, never explained, insulating himself in his secret as a way to cast off his various pasts. At seventy-one, in the midst of his last fling, he believes he has found “the freedom to leave a lifetime behind.” Fifty years earlier, he had repudiated his birth family for a life of passing, and then he repudiated in effect the family he created by keeping his secret from his wife and four “perfectly white” children. But what remained intact, unrepudiated, is the secret, which is, finally, nothing less than his core Silk self. This is evident when Coleman flirts with the notion of telling his wife: “he would tell the mother of his four children who their father really was” (177). While seemingly subversive, passing is actually a salient instance of self-imposed purification, a subjection of the core self to a disciplinary project of control and subtlety. These very qualities had helped make “Silky Silk” an excellent college boxer. The art of boxing in fact becomes

203

204

|

CHAPTER 6

his model for passing, for they both require a slipperiness and poise that affords him the pleasure of being “counterconfessional” in the same way he enjoys being a “counterpuncher” (100). But passing requires still more: the willingness to “murder” his loving mother “on behalf ” of his intoxicating sense of freedom. Only by meeting this “test” can he “be the man he has chosen to be” (139). In his lethal fantasy of autogenesis, Coleman imagines he has turned himself into a “cunning self-concoction . . . a product on which no one but he held a patent” (129). Determined to choose his affiliation rather than suffer ethnic or racial ascription, Silk insists he is passing only because he wants to be free, “not black, not even white . . . nor was he staging some sort of protest against his race” (120). What he feels compelled to surmount is “ancestor worship” in any form, including his brother’s life commitment to advancing the race. Seeking to be neither black nor white, Coleman shrewdly elects a third possibility—the equivocal form of whiteness that is postwar American Jewishness. Roth is careful to specify the historical moment when it is plausible that Coleman’s will to radical self-determination merges with becoming a Jew. “The act was committed in 1953 by an audacious young man in Greenwich Village, by a specific person in a specific place at a specific time” (145). From that time and place emanated the rising cultural significance of Jewish intellectuals, writers who challenged genteel decorum by flaunting “the disputatious stance, the aggressively marginal sensibility, the disavowal of community ties.” This is how Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson had described his own models of conduct and thought (479). To be part of the “postimmigrant generation” was to be granted a ticket out of the ghetto, set free to think critically, without the baggage of other ethnic groups with their “Old Country link and a strangling church,” or WASPs with their blind loyalty to the American way (480). Majoring in classics at NYU in the early fifties, Coleman is part of a Greenwich Village circle of people who assume all along that he is a Jew. “Who was he not to go along for the ride,” thinks Coleman of his good fortune to be present just at the moment when “taking on the ersatz prestige of an aggressively thinking, self-analytic, irreverent American Jew reveling in the ironies of the

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

marginal Manhattan existence” is not so reckless as it might have seemed (131).3 Roth presents Coleman’s decision to pass as a practical solution to his quest for self-invention rather than as ratifying a cultural/racial identity politics that equates blackness with body, sexuality, and suffering, Jewishness with mind and virtue. This tidy opposition informs the most notorious fifties discussion of blacks and Jews, Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” and the consequence is that Mailer’s effort to blacken the Jew into a hipster-outlaw comes at the cost of a (by now) embarrassing racial primitivism. In The Human Stain Jews are gifted in athletics (a Jew initiates Coleman into the world of boxing), while black people are widely cultured and classically educated. Coleman (prepassing) is valedictorian of his high school class in East Orange, New Jersey, and one day his parents (“a model Negro family”) receive a visit from a Jewish doctor whose son is a close second in the class. Dr. Fensterman offers a bribe if Coleman will throw his final exams. Concealing their outrage, Mr. and Mrs. Silk politely decline. Mr. Silk is a DuBoisian figure who dwells in the deracialized “kingdom of culture,” loves Shakespeare, encourages his son to learn Latin and Greek, and serves as his intellectual model. Trained to excel in body and mind, Coleman fashions himself into a “heretofore unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America’s historic undesirables” (132). Roth’s careful disruption of expectations serves two entwined purposes: for one thing, it makes credible Coleman’s belief that his decision is more about freedom than race. For another, it defuses the predictable pathos and melodrama that usually attends the novel of passing. The locus of this pathos is typically the passing character (often called a tragic mulatto in turn-of-the-century parlance) who suffers the guilt of race betrayal, having naively imagined that “joy and freedom . . . seemed to be inherent in mere whiteness,” in the words of the heroine of Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929; 14). In Fauset’s tough-minded antitragic mulatta novel, the brash heroine’s decision to pass in Greenwich Village is, like Coleman’s, less a betrayal of race than an assertion of modernist individualism, a “joke upon custom and tradition” (108). But even Fauset’s novel concludes with the heroine’s self-revision (she

205

206

|

CHAPTER 6

realizes that freedom is not inherent in mere whiteness), confession (of her secret), and reconciliation (with her family). This cathartic, reintegrative trajectory is conspicuously absent from Coleman Silk’s life. Not only is The Human Stain a novel where the main character fabricates an identity, but Roth foregrounds the artful fabrication that is the novel itself. He presents Zuckerman narrating the moment late in the book when he decides to write The Human Stain: “not quite knowing what was happening, standing in the falling darkness beside the uneven earth mound roughly heaped over Coleman’s coffin, I was completely seized by his story, by its end and by its beginning, and, then and there, I began this book” (337). Giving himself up to this impulse is a mimetic response to a comment made earlier that day by Ernestine, Coleman’s earnest, sensible schoolteacher sister. After spending the afternoon telling Nathan in detail the story of her brother’s early life growing up black in East Orange, she remarks: “One can do only so much to control one’s life.” This draws the moral of her brother’s “harshly ironic fate”—the fact that his carefully composed life of subtle deceit was “undone by a word”—“spooks”—that “no one even speaks anymore” (333). Both Nathan and Ernestine find compelling the disproportion between Coleman’s “heroic conception of his life”—his ruthless expunging of his past—and the banality of what tripped him up. “Blindsided,” Nathan twice calls Coleman’s undoing, “blindsided by the uncontrollability of something else entirely” (335). Blindsided himself by the force of his friend’s story, Nathan is left “standing alone in a darkening graveyard,” his imaginative powers suddenly summoned to enter “into professional competition with death.” “Out there at his grave, where everything he ever was would appear to have been canceled out by the weight and mass of all that dirt if by nothing else, I waited and I waited for him to speak” (338). Nathan waits to pick up a “vibration” that will spark his mimicry of voices and cadences and begin weaving a tissue of questions, guesses, assumptions, and inferences into a narrative of a life. In this strangely urgent moment that demands Nathan risk “a cast of the imagination, made in sound” (to borrow from Wallace Stevens), the frail intangibility of the mind’s creative power collides with the stolid dumbness of dirt and death, as the artistic impulse to preserve presses back against the oblit-

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

erative pressure of burial. Death has seized Coleman, just as earlier it almost took Nathan. But the latter has survived and is left to try to take Coleman back, to thwart his return into the earth. Roth has arranged here a stark, primal collision between life and art. But, as always in his work, life and art also intermix and mingle. The graveside “competition with death” inspires Nathan to reveal “how all this began”—both how Coleman and Faunia’s affair began and how the making of The Human Stain began. These two beginnings turn out to have much in common and to tell a good deal about the conditions and motives enabling the making of life and art. But they also clarify a difference that the novel has earlier dramatized—a difference between two understandings of how art and life and freedom are entangled. One is Coleman’s art of being white, which ends up imprisoning him in his secret, and the other is his late affair with Faunia, where he is “freed into the natural thing,” “free to be abandoned” (32–33). The contrast, however, does not reduce to artifice versus nature because the “natural thing,” for Roth, is itself a mode of artifice, with its own elusive rhythms and rigors. It is a difficult thing to acquire. “I waited and I waited for him to speak.” Standing alone at the graveside, Nathan at last hears an inaugural vibration—Coleman asking Faunia what was the worst job she’d ever had. The answer Zuckerman imagines for her is a graphic recollection of being paid a hundred dollars an hour to clean up a cabin where a man had blown his brains out with a shotgun. Faunia had been enlisted by a friend for this grisly work, a friend who knew she had a “strong stomach” and could “handle things.” But even Faunia needs a mask and almost gags: “Blood on the walls everywhere. Ba-boom, he’s all over the walls, all over everything. . . . I had to put on a mask, because even I couldn’t take this anymore. Also chunks of bone on the wall, stuck in with the blood. Put the gun in his mouth. Ba-boom. Tendency to get bone and teeth out there too. Seeing it. There it all was” (339). Her friend bails out, but Faunia stays and gets through it by “playing amateur detective.” She starts snooping around the cabin to find a motive for the suicide. “I wanted to know why.” After checking the medicine cabinet and finding it full she concludes he hadn’t been taking his medication. Here Coleman interrupts: “How do you know this?” She replies: “I’m assuming. I don’t

207

208

|

CHAPTER 6

know. This is my own story. This is my story” (339). What is beyond doubt is the blood; “the blood sticks. You could not possibly get the blood off the floor. Towel after towel after towel. Still had that color. Eventually it turned more and more a salmon color, but you still couldn’t get it out. Like something still alive. Heavy-duty disinfectant—didn’t help. Metallic. Sweet. Sickening. I don’t gag. Put my mind above it. But I came close” (339). She is in the cabin cleaning for five hours. Zuckerman’s “cast of the imagination” that initiates The Human Stain is bloody but evocative, a dreamlike compressing and displacing of many of the novel’s crucial themes and images into a dense cluster of analogies, literal and allegorical. Nathan imagines Faunia as in effect enacting a version of his own graveside stance: in the midst of carnage, she refuses to succumb to death—merely to clean up a bloody mess—but instead distills from it a “story,” reconstructing it through guesswork. (Les Farley, Coleman and Faunia’s killer, speaks more than he knows when, in the final scene, he asks Nathan if he writes “whodunits.”) As well, her immersion in gore literalizes what Nathan has just been pondering—the brutality of Coleman’s severance from his mother, an act Nathan likens to “the savagery in The Iliad [Coleman’s favorite book] . . . each murder there . . . a more brutal slaughter than the last” (335). Coleman’s act of self-sculpting requires a figurative violence that grows uncontainable. He starts by excising his future from his black family but then must also excise his past from his white family. Coleman’s erasures leave him as if a fugitive perpetually on the run, faced with the anxious task of walking the narrow plank of the present. He keeps his precarious balance, living an “even-keeled life” for four decades, holding together his “white” self and “black” secret. Coleman images the rigor of attention that passing demands as the drawing of a firm line beyond which no “incriminating impurity will be permitted to breach” (79). The strain of upholding his purist project has left Coleman a “blotting out,” in short, the very “spook” whose mention unravels his life (213). “Spooks” names with uncanny aptness what Coleman’s selfmaking engenders—his status as “not just an unknown but an uncohesive person” (333). Zuckerman remarks this as he admits his frustrating inability to answer the question, “how did such a person as Coleman

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

come to exist? What is it that he was?” (333). Or to turn Coleman’s fateful question in on himself: “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” (6). No unequivocal answers are possible because Coleman Silk, having fortified himself against experience, has made himself into an abstraction. Fittingly, “Spooks” is the title he gives his “self-justifying memoir,” of which he writes only a draft before abandoning it (19). Although he is a man who in 1953 seized his historical moment, he is making a very old mistake.4 With the fatal simplicity of all romantic individualists, he imagines his will is sovereign. Like those other immaculate idealists Isabel Archer and Jay Gatsby (and, closer to home, Hawthorne’s obsessive self-masker Reverend Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil”), he has been true to his platonic conception of himself. And this fidelity disembodies him—“somewhere there’s a blank in him,” notes Zuckerman (213). That void expresses his spectral status, one that afflicts other keepers of secrets: “Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost!” says Hawthorne of the forest reunion of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. “Art thou in life?” they ask each other; “it was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and bodily existence” (188). Ghostlike, Coleman glides through his schematic life, as if the murderous “savagery” he first inflicted on his mother when he threw his origins overboard boomerangs upon him. But then he meets Faunia, and with their affair the “onslaught of freedom” commences. This freedom, however, is carefully hedged and precarious; for Silk it perpetually threatens to descend into the humiliating “Aschenbachian madness” of Death in Venice, Mann’s tale of amour fou. At one point, he decides to end the affair and calls to tell his eldest son, but the latter’s condescending response enrages Coleman and brings him closer to Faunia. For her, freedom derives, paradoxically, from a “life of irreversible futility” (171, 233). She locates freedom within that futility when she describes herself as “the woman who doesn’t want to own anything” (232). Having been dominated by men, she now abhors ownership that breeds violence. Instead, Faunia finds that “the pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you” (232). Her boxing idiom (“contender”) is apt; Faunia’s desire for a fellow contender—someone

209

210

|

CHAPTER 6

as resilient and disabused of idealism as she—attracts the ex-boxer. Faunia, whose life is perpetually at loose ends, embodies “all he has missed by going in the opposite direction” (164). Now that he has abruptly reversed course, Coleman finds himself “stuck” with the havoc of raw life, “the untransformed, unforeseen . . . the woman who is Faunia is the unforeseen” (170). But Faunia is not merely brute contingency, all that defies the neat artistry of narrative and of self-making. She creates her uncultivated rawness: “Being stupid Faunia—that’s my achievement, Coleman, that’s me at my sensible best” (234). Like that other connoisseur of the stupid, Mickey Sabbath, she intuits the nakedness that sanctioned conventions vainly seek to hide. Faunia’s “being stupid” is one of her inventions, just as she plays “amateur detective” in the bloody cabin. There she acts as a proto-novelist, in touch (literally) with human interiority, with bone and brain and blood, and she scrubs an ineradicable stain, a literal incarnation of what, earlier, she had called “the human stain.” Her tone of voice when she uttered the phrase—“without revulsion or contempt or condemnation” or even sadness (242)—is perfectly in synch with Nathan’s understanding of the stain as having nothing to do with sin, redemption, or disobedience: “It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent.” So all of Faunia’s efforts to eradicate the blood in the cabin are to no avail and thereby confirm her understanding of the human stain as permanent. The blood is “like something still alive” (319). Coleman’s listening to Faunia’s telling of scrubbing and affirming the human stain coalesces into a visceral bolt of feeling that pierces his defenses, an epiphany of love and trust. “Because he loved her at that moment, imagining her scrubbing the blood. It was the closest he ever felt to her. Could it be? It was the closest Coleman ever felt to anyone! He loved her. Because that is when you love somebody—when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game. He had no reservations about her. None. . . . He trusts her—that’s what it is. He trusts her: she scrubbed the blood off the floor. She’s not religious, she’s not sanctimonious, she is not deformed by the fairy tale of purity. . . . She’s not interested in judging—she’s seen too much for all that shit” (340–41). And then Coleman tells Faunia his secret.

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

In all his years of marriage, and even when the last of his four children had been “born perfectly white,” Coleman had kept his secret. He had been tempted to tell Iris, his wife, tempted “to surrender the diligence, the discipline, the taking the measure of every last situation,” but he resists the surrender. Yet what, exactly, would Coleman be surrendering to? (179). An answer is supplied inadvertently by a friend of Coleman’s wife upon discovering her husband’s adultery. “Where is the intimacy,” the friend asks, “when there is such a secret?” (178). Given Coleman’s equation of self and secrecy, intimacy has been the inevitable casualty of Coleman’s watchfulness. Or, more precisely, his watchfulness, which assumes that life is a “battle” requiring one be armed with “mistrust,” makes intimacy the enemy. For years he and Iris slept in separate rooms. And late in life Coleman tells his sister that “there was a lie at the foundation of his relationship with his children,” one of whom openly despises him (321). About his secret, the laconic Faunia says to Coleman that she figured it out “ ‘a long time ago’ . . . [and] didn’t really seem to care. And she didn’t run away. . . . It sounded just like life to her” (341). This phrase concludes Nathan’s graveside invention contrived on the spot in “professional competition with death.” After this, the novel draws rapidly to a close. Nathan is invited by Ernestine to Sunday dinner at the Silk house in East Orange. On the way he discovers, off the side of a remote mountain road, Les Farley’s pickup truck and sees a man fishing in an ice hole in the middle of a frozen lake. Nathan is so obsessed with writing Coleman’s story that he abruptly suspends the “laws of caution” hitherto ruling his hermetic life and ventures a confrontation with Coleman’s killer, face to face on a remote pond. After much bad-faith banter, confirming Farley as both clever and psychotic, Nathan promises to send him a copy of The Human Stain once it is finished. The bloody mess of a cabin and the pristine icy mountain lake are the novel’s two successive final images and present an emphatic antithesis, the hideous chaos of the one, the serene beauty of the other. Yet the latter is redolent of death—there fishes the solitary killer in prideful possession of his frozen “secret spot.” And the former is a fertile incubator of life and art. Inside the bloody cabin that Nathan has Faunia

211

212

|

CHAPTER 6

contrive into being for Coleman, art emerges and love, both nurtured by the revelation of being game. Coleman’s trust now makes irrelevant the anxious caution required by his old art of passing. In his act of imagination at graveside that conjures the cabin Nathan competes with death by, paradoxically, miming it. The cabin scene images art not as death’s opposite but its displacement or deflection into a less lethal force, a force of unsettlement—of notions of autonomy, of absolute knowledge, even of bodily integrity (brain is splattered on the walls). This letting go echoes the correlation in Sabbath’s Theater of art with the unimpeded release of evacuation. Art as a force of unsettlement peels away protective defenses, leaving the “half-flayed thing” that for Roth is a primal metaphor of art, as we have noted in earlier chapters and will encounter again in discussing Philip Guston in chapter 7. The only epistemological certainty is what we gather from “amateur” guesswork, which, in turn, is the source of story making. Unsettlement also encourages a letting go of the affect structure of autonomy and certainty—compulsion and defensiveness—replacing it with ways of being that do not “clutch,” do not “bottle” experience into formula (or the self into a project), but instead “let it flow,” let it erupt without plan or control. These quoted words are by now the familiar ones of Uncle Asher, whose plea in Letting Go finds new inflections in Sabbath’s Theater and again in The Human Stain. Uncle Asher’s urgent imperative “Don’t clutch!” and his avowal, “I’ll take the shape the world gives me” (82–83) have Emersonian echoes. “The most unhandsome part of our condition,” says Emerson in “Experience,” is “when we clutch hardest” and objects, in their “lubricity,” “slip through our fingers” (Essays 473). This image of desperate clutching Stanley Cavell reads as an emblem of Emerson’s “interpretation of Western conceptualizing as a kind of sublimized violence” that can only be overcome (or deflected) by “the achievement of a form of knowledge” that Emerson calls “reception”: “All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get” (Cavell, Conditions 39; Emerson 491). He enacts his receptive passivity when he summarizes his essay, invoking “Surface, Surprise . . . Reality . . . these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me” (491). Uncle Asher’s and Emerson’s preference for letting go and reception (whose more active modality Emerson calls “abandonment”) is distinct from the other understanding of art in The Human Stain, Coleman’s art of passing. This practice shapes and fortifies the invented self by and through rigorous discipline. Yet the enforced regimen limits its efficacy. For all the “beautiful calibration of his deceit,” Coleman’s project of self-making operates as if by a “mechanical key” protruding from his back “by which he had wound himself up to set off on his great escapade.” “Once you set the thing in motion, your art was being a white man,” says Nathan, musing ambivalently about his friend (337, 345). What limits Coleman’s subtle calibration to the merely mechanical, to being a windup toy, is the smothering of impulse by devotion to routine and regularity; hence Coleman is said to live within “the protection of the walled city that is convention,” though in the savagery of his severance from the past he is also “entirely beyond” the walls of convention (335). The immediate object of that severance, Coleman’s mother, discerns the reversal lurking within her son’s ruthless act of will; she grimly observes: “You think like a prisoner. . . . You’re white as snow and you think like a slave” (139–40). Like his brother Walter, who, in his fury at Coleman, “froze everything in time” by forbidding their mother from ever contacting her son and vice versa, Coleman too freezes himself in the absolutism of his imperative (326). Mrs. Silk’s “long speech about his autonomy” and Walt’s rage both attack Coleman from what can be called a communitarian perspective that is premised on the primacy of the (racial) We. Roth implies this by embedding Mrs. Silk’s long speech within her recollection of the “intricacy of the family’s American genealogy,” starting with the settlements of black people in Lawnside and Gouldtown, New Jersey, in the mid–nineteenth century. “Through his mother, Coleman learned the maze of family history” and as a child he experienced it firsthand each year at the annual family reunion in Gouldtown with two hundred relatives (143). From Mrs. Silk’s perspective, to dismiss this enfolding web of connectedness as “ancestor worship” is to think like a slave—a pariah outside community, degraded,

213

214

|

CHAPTER 6

bereft, compelled to fend for oneself. Only as part of a group to which one remains loyal can one be free of the prison of solitary selfhood. So runs Mrs. Silk’s implicit logic. The present chapter also finds Coleman’s individualism wanting—not for dismissing communitarian values but because the compulsive vigilance of its self-ownership stunts affect and the capacity for the intersubjective. My critique is on behalf of being game as an openness to otherness that is grounded in nothing more or less than the precarious present. Although Roth’s novels are usually regarded as bleakly cynical and despairing, The Human Stain and Sabbath’s Theater improbably, but intensely, portray the efficacy of art and love when nourished by a certain stance toward the world. Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick, invokes that stance, or one close to it, when he speaks of the spirit of “godly gamesomeness” in saluting the “Huzza Porpoise”: “they are the lads that always live before the wind” (Penguin ed., 156). Their animal, uncontainable exuberance gives a clue to why for late Roth what defies death is not simply artistic creation but creation imbued with the spirit of being game. Nathan’s description of the pianist Yefim Bronfman is pertinent. He plays Prokofiev “at such a pace and with such bravado” that he seems to crush the piano: “he doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing . . . everything there out in the open.” Hearing the music banishes Nathan’s earlier musing about death: “Nobody is dying, nobody—not if Bronfman has anything to do about it” (HS 210). In immediate rebuke of the “ecstasy of sanctimony” abroad in the land in the Clinton-Lewinsky summer of 1998, Roth celebrates the bravura openness of art and the animal vitality of “gamesomeness” (2). These values also become catalysts in Sabbath’s Theater and The Human Stain for improvising a Nietzschean revaluation of the Judeo-Christian heritage. Roth offers a new moral vocabulary—stupid, naked, stain, and game, for instance—that is sponsored neither by the Hebrew God (“infinitely alone . . . monomaniacally the only god there is”) nor the “desexualized Christian man-god” but by pagan Greek polytheism. Nathan invokes the latter immediately after Faunia’s remark on the human stain; creatures such as Zeus are fully “reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection”—“a god of life if there ever was one. God in the

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

image of man” (242–43). All that “capricious, sensual” Zeus “wants to do is fuck,” as if a Greek version of Mickey Sabbath, who himself is more than once hailed as “the great God Pan” (as is Coleman) (ST 275; HS 25). Under this pagan aegis (as Coleman the classics professor might have told Faunia) we accept that our lives are “unprotected” or “naked,” shorn of the traditional scaffolding of “grace or salvation or redemption.” Thus the leap from the Greeks and their “god of life” to late Roth’s world of “quicksand” on the “planet of inexperience” turns out to be no leap at all. The ardor of “gamesomeness” brings ancient and contemporary together. What makes this quality so reverberant for Roth, we shall see below, is its genealogy, both within his oeuvre and in canonical American literature. Withering under the reign of absolutes and the routine of convention while flowering in extremity, gameness lets the moment take its impress, moments when survival is at stake and all bets are off. It makes a virtue of the fact that we live amid the unbearable lightness of the perpetual present and forsakes the crutch of stock response, especially the defensive reflex that evades the recalcitrance of experience by setting it in the vise of moralism or routinized histrionics (“people grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say,” to recall Emerson’s “Experience,” his profound brief for being game). The virtue of gameness includes dispositions and strategies that, like the virtue of accuracy according to Bernard Williams, “resist the pleasure principle,” resist, that is, self-deception and “the gross need to believe the agreeable” (125). In other words, to be game is to be alert to the massive cultural bias towards sentimentality, the customary, and self-congratulation with its various modes of inertia, reflex, and habit deeply imbibed and socially encouraged, modes that constitute for many the comfortably complacent basis of personal and moral identity. A deflationary or skeptical stance expressed on the body and in language (“all the social ways of thinking, shut ’em down,” says Faunia, dancing), gameness has an element of ascetic rigor, as Williams suggests above, but, unlike accuracy, does not wholly abjure the pleasure principle. Rather, it finds pleasure in experience dislocated from routine. In sum, to be game involves a mix of impulses that produces a mode of engagement not readily categorized. For Roth, being game is an ethical

215

216

|

CHAPTER 6

and aesthetic imperative that imbues the making of art and life with vitality, and hence is crucial for a novelist who would step into “professional competition with death.” Being game could be understood as Roth’s version of “negative capability,” to borrow Keats’s famous phrase, beloved to the point of piety by Lionel Trilling and other celebrants of ambiguity in the postwar high culture of Roth’s coming of age. Keats means the capacity to stay in mysteries and doubts without any irritable striving after fact. “Negative capability” encourages a kind of stoic calm that in Roth’s rendering accrues erotic intensity. “Calm” is Faunia’s (at first) unlikely word to describe the effect of her dancing unclothed in front of Coleman. “I can make him calm like this, he can make me calm like this. All I have to do is just keep moving.” She tells him: “I’m dancing in front of you naked with the lights on, and you’re naked too, and all the other stuff doesn’t matter. It’s the simplest thing we’ve ever done—it’s it” (228). The calm and the lights and the nakedness strip away distractions and let the moment live: “this is only what it is,” she urges him to remember: “don’t fuck it up by thinking it’s more than this.” To think it is more is to “diminish” oneself into a “sentimental sap,” she warns Coleman (231). The calm is paradoxical; for if to be game exposes the psyche and the body to risk and hazard as it opens the clenched fist of maturity—of proprietary and protected individualism—calm ensues by surrendering to, rather than fearing, that risk. Hence her imperative to “just keep moving,” as if continual motion creates undifferentiated experience that avoids congealing into sentiment, as if her dancing enacts acceptance of time’s flow by being at its mercy. The athleticism of former boxer Silky Silk makes him the perfect sparring partner. Keeping in motion also keeps Faunia in flight from memory, specifically the pain of her children’s death. In this scene Roth develops his sense of being game (though without invoking the word), as a mode of being possessed of distinct rhythms and rigor. Faunia instructs Coleman: Yes, I’m teaching you. But don’t look at me now like I’m good for something other than this. Something more than this. . . . Don’t take it somewhere else, Coleman. This is all we’re here to do. Don’t think it’s about

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

tomorrow. Close all the doors, before and after. All the social ways of thinking, shut ’em down. Everything the wonderful society is asking? The way we’re set up socially? “I should, I should, I should”? Fuck all that. What you’re supposed to be, what you’re supposed to do, all that, it just kills everything. I can keep dancing, if that’s the deal. The secret little moment—if that’s the whole deal. That slice you get. That slice out of time. It’s no more than that, and I hope you know it. (228–29)

Despite her life of futility, she dances, thinks Coleman, “without the idealism, without the idealization, without all the utopianism of the sweet young thing, despite everything she knows reality to be” (233). The relaxing of the superego of social obligation for the sake of here and now tallies with Emerson’s emphasis (in his very different idiom) on the moment. The “only ballast I know is respect for the present hour,” he writes in “Experience.” The capacity to “finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. . . . Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today” (478–79). In the scene of Faunia’s calm-inducing dancing Roth flirts with and revises a few cultural clichés, existential bravado for one, that hallmark of stoic masculine American heroism. If, according to a minor title of Mailer’s, “tough guys don’t dance,” Roth’s tough girl does. And Faunia’s urging that all the doors be shut, the better to concentrate on the moment, recalls the passionate hermeticism of the liaison in Last Tango in Paris (involving, as in Roth, an older man and a younger woman). Coleman Silk is hardly unaware of the familiar script he and Faunia are writing: “that the primal seems a solution is not news,” he notes; “it always does” (170). But Roth also revises the script, not least by having the boldest badge of Faunia’s primal nature, her illiteracy, turn out to be artifice. She with her “sharp Yankee” face and New England uppermiddle-class birth, feigns illiteracy as part of the downward spiral of her life. Leaving home at age fourteen, she runs through an assortment of jobs—waitress, farmer, prostitute, janitor. Nathan muses on Faunia’s

217

218

|

CHAPTER 6

strange deflationary pretense. “But why? A source of power? Her one and only source of power? . . . Think about it. Afflicts herself with illiteracy . . . Takes it on voluntarily. Not to infantilize herself, however, not to present herself as a dependent kid, but just the opposite: to spotlight the barbaric self befitting the world” (297). She becomes “the kid who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone, and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on, unintimidated, is enormous and yet whose purchase on life is minute” (164). Faunia’s pretense of illiteracy develops her capacity for savvy survivalism, which gains strength in its self-exposure. At the same time, however, Faunia’s illiteracy also heightens her affinity with the “human stain.” Illiteracy immunizes her from the solicitations of textual representation, in particular written language’s rage to order, its tendency to drain the refractory from experience, to, in effect, purify it of human stains. Her body, as in the scene of her dancing, speaks as intensely as her spoken words. But by making her illiteracy feigned, Roth is able to resist the temptation to sanctify the primal as a “solution”; by avoiding an embrace of primitivism he avoids a whole train of naive assumptions, including erecting the prelinguistic (or whatever resists representation) as the ultimate ground of value. Instead, illiteracy is part of Faunia’s art—it is a mimetic response to her battered life, a strategy of aggressive contempt, inward and outward, “to spotlight the barbaric self befitting the world.” Faunia utters the phrase the “human stain” about Prince, a crow she loves. Orphaned and twice abandoned, Prince is now caged in a local Audubon Society, where Faunia visits and fantasizes about becoming a crow and marrying him. The visits began after her two children had died (in a fire likely set by her ex-husband), and Faunia, having twice attempted suicide, was still “looking for ways to leave the human race” (239). Her intimacy with Prince functions as a kind of liminal space of suspension between the human and animal, and her “marriage” to the crow declares her radical alienation from human hope, what she terms contemptuously “the fantasy of forever.” Her affair with Coleman, with its adherence to the moment and its prohibition on believing it is “something more than” the immediate, approximates her kinship with

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

Prince. In sum, Faunia’s is a terminal gameness, the other side of “the tragedy of her strangeness” (208). Faunia’s intimacy and identification with Prince, like her pretense of illiteracy, cuts two ways: at first it appears simply to permit Faunia to revel in the primitive and dramatize her alienation. But simultaneously her identification with the crow, like her illiteracy, does nearly the opposite—it works to protect her from the lure of the natural or authentic. Prince turns out to be an artist. Faunia finds Prince compelling not as a figure of nature but as a misfit, a wild bird unsuited for the wild since he has been hand-raised by humans and made into a pet. He caws, but “not in a true crow caw but in that caw that he had stumbled on himself and that drove the other crows nuts” (243). Prince has devised his caw by imitating the schoolkids that visit and imitate him. Explains his keeper: “That’s his impression of the kids. The kids do that. He’s invented his own language. From kids” (243). Like Nathan, Faunia, and Coleman, Prince participates in the unstoppable circulation of mimetic and inferential impressions; his mimicry of mimicry infers and fashions a voice. “I love that strange voice he invented,” remarks Faunia “in a strange voice of her own.” Here, in her mimetic receptivity to Prince, Faunia unwittingly underlines the novel’s animating technique—the impersonations Nathan assembles into a collocation of invented voices. This orchestration culminates what a younger Nathan Zuckerman had declared at the end of The Counterlife: “I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.” The Human Stain ratifies this abolition of the self as a “natural being” rooted in a solid core of fixed identity. Yet here Nathan renovates the theater of the self, not to repudiate his commitment to the primacy of impersonation but to open it out, to include the fact that the elemental impulse to imitate—the mimetic faculty—is shared by man and beast. The bond of mimesis means, in effect, that Art lurks in the heart of Nature; and this mingling topples the primordial opposition between them, the opposition that grounds the always lethal “fantasy of purity.” Prince’s mimicry leaves him a misfit among his own species. Whenever he leaves his cage to fly around, crows attack him. The keeper tells Faunia that Prince “doesn’t have the right voice. He doesn’t know the crow language,” and Faunia responds: “That’s what comes of being

219

220

|

CHAPTER 6

hand-raised . . . that’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain.” Nathan then dilates about Faunia’s enigmatic comment: “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.” One of the oddities of this pivotal scene is that an animal elicits Faunia’s (and Nathan’s) epiphany of the human stain, a statement that purports to define the human condition, to declare what “we” humans do. If read out of context, the “human stain” would seem a phrase that unequivocally defines the “we” by setting off the human species’ distinction and distinctiveness. But in the novel the phrase does precisely the opposite—the “human stain” links us to the animal; stains, trails, imprints are common to both species. This equivocation makes sense when we consider that if the “stain” were understood to function as an absolute, as an essentialist term of immutable difference, it would embody the very “fantasy of purity” that it is intended to rupture. The phrase, in other words, to enact its slippery ubiquity, rather than marking a limit, must embody transit or transfiguration. (What clusters lexically around Faunia’s name—faun and fauna, and Faunus, Roman god of animals—enacts this movement in miniature.) The mimetic impulse (as Prince reveals) is precisely that nexus of reciprocal imitation or exchange, is a practice that crosses boundaries and species, destabilizes reference. In sum: inhabiting the “human stain” is the stain of mimesis, its disruptive energies unraveling Roth’s titular phrase from within. In pushing the concept of a strictly human stain to the edge of coherence, opening it to the nonhuman, Roth enacts the experience of volatility, a commitment to unsettlement that he shares with Kundera and Emerson.5 Now we see another reason why Nathan links the human stain to the Greek gods—they live in a world where metamorphosis is the only law. Zeus, for instance, wants to have sex “not merely in his own form but, even more excitingly, as himself made manifest as beast.” Nathan thinks the Greek Zeus, “anything but alone and anything but hidden,” a fitting god for dancing Faunia, with her imperative to “just keep moving.” If Prince is a strutting, black category mistake—described as a “crow that doesn’t know how to be a crow”—Coleman Silk is a human version, a black man who won’t be a black man. After arriving at Howard

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

University abruptly to discover “he was a Negro and nothing else,” Coleman rejects “the tyranny of the we and its we-talk” (108). Analogously, Faunia is a middle-class woman who refuses to be one, a Yankee daughter of the Puritans who insists on a white-trash life. Her rejection of her original class membership is not an act of political solidarity with the lumpen but an act of aggressive disaffiliation from any collective “we” with its expectations about “what you’re supposed to be . . . supposed to do.” Instead, she grasps freedom as gameness; when she takes up with Coleman, they are both in it “for the ride”: “not for learning, not for planning, but for adventure” (33). Prince too is game, radically game, and this draws Faunia. “The thing about them [crows] is that they’re all practicality.” They travel light, are fearless, never worry, and just go (168–69). “If there’s death, they’re there. . . . I like that,” she reflects, perhaps recalling her own experience in the blood-drenched cabin. Standing in front of Prince’s cage, she fantasizes about coming back as a crow and sometimes believes she already is one. In their last meeting, she even puts her ring, a gift from Coleman, in the cage, as a token of their being engaged. “We’re meant for each other,” she tells him: “a crow who really doesn’t know how to be a crow, a woman who doesn’t really know how to be a woman . . . Marry me. You’re my destiny, you ridiculous bird,” she whispers to Prince, “whose lustrous blackness beneath her hand was warm and sleek like nothing she had ever fondled” (247). She seals her intimacy with Prince by humming, “imitating the bird” after it had hummed to her and “exploded with its special noise”: “Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw. Right into her face” (244). “Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow?” So little Pip in MobyDick babbles in mimicry, with his “unearthly idiot face”; soon he will mime a limb, as he begs Ahab if he can act as his Captain’s second leg (“use poor me for your one lost leg . . . so I remain a part of ye”). “The little negro Pippin,” by nickname Pip, is the cabin boy who survives abandonment at sea, suffers a “strange sweet lunacy,” and is the one person on the Pequod for whom Ahab has affection (450, 475). Not long after his near drowning, Pip pops up when Queequeg, ill and assuming death imminent, stoically prepares his coffin. “Queequeg dies

221

222

|

CHAPTER 6

game! I say; game, game, game! But base little Pip, he died a coward” (523). Roth has placed Pip, the loneliest figure in American literature, on the far horizon of his novel. Game, game, game, caw, caw, caw: in his frantic repetitions, Pip shares some of the human and animal language of The Human Stain. “Left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk!” in the endless ocean, Pip experiences an “intolerable” “awful lonesomeness.” The extremity of his dilemma leaves Melville’s narrator Ishmael at a loss for words: “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” (453). Ishmael falters here, a preliminary indication of the linguistic disturbance that will mark Pip’s own agitated speech in the wake of his traumatized survival. What Pip has suffered is an ontological dislocation so severe that it fractures his psyche—“the sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul”—and he registers the severance of soul from body by addressing himself in the third person. And addressing himself as if dead (“Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long,” he implores Queequeg). Pip’s indeterminate status—“not drowned entirely” in Melville’s eerie phrase—leaves him permanently estranged in the aftermath of having been “carried down alive to wondrous depths” where the “unwarped primal world” glided before his “passive eyes” and then bobbing up to live (453). He has achieved what Faunia sought—an existence at once within and outside the human race, a stance of uncanny elusiveness that resists any single description or category; “crazy-witty,” Ahab calls him, and his shipmates call him mad, though in his insanity he possesses “heaven’s sense,” and Ahab reveres his “holiness” (454, 567). Pip is a madman who doesn’t know how to be a madman. Why has Roth invited Pip to circulate, however improbably, at the margins of The Human Stain? The invitation is a way to engage the “great American novel,” the one that Hemingway is shown to be preoccupied with surpassing at the start of Roth’s own novel of that title (1973).6 At Coleman’s funeral, the principal eulogist puts Coleman in company with Melville, along with Hawthorne and Thoreau, as exemplary “American individualists” (311). But unlike the eulogist, Roth, like his predecessors, does not simply revere “American individualism” but subjects it to skeptical scrutiny. Like them, Roth anatomizes the orthodoxy of individual-

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

ism’s cardinal tenet—the self-mastery of self-possession—and reveals its compulsive hostility to relation. As we have seen, Roth and Nathan expose the limits and costs of Coleman’s self-making, but also depict its unmaking, the abandonment of propriety that allows him to shed his defensiveness. Something like Coleman’s two modes of selfhood are found in MobyDick, distributed between the monomaniacal Ahab and the melancholy, insouciant, “gamesome” sole survivor Ishmael. Pip—who is both Ahab’s only friend and the herald, as Ishmael notes, of Ishmael’s own “like abandonment” at sea—functions as a kind of pivot between these disparate modes of being (454). So Pip’s inferential presence in The Human Stain is a way for Roth to engage Melville, much as Nathan, early on in the novel, wishes he could have known his onetime Berkshires neighbor, Hawthorne. And engaging Melville also salutes Ernestine, Coleman’s schoolteacher sister, who tells Nathan that “in East Orange High they stopped long ago reading the old classics. They haven’t even heard of Moby-Dick, much less read it” (329).7 Pip’s solitude amid the “heartless immensity” of ocean enacts, as Sharon Cameron has noted in the most searching discussion of this character, “the antithesis of a Narcissus fall in which the self is lost in fusion with the universe. In Pip’s fall, self and world are rent, opposites turned toward each other” (26). Although Pip knows firsthand the stark terror of the world’s indifference, his response, Cameron argues, “is not to become heartless himself ” but rather to “mourn his fate” and in his pervasive grief to “complete” Ahab’s pervasive rage. These characters are “halves of the same consciousness.” “It is precisely this grief . . . that Ahab will find intolerable.” Grief is never expressed by Ahab, except once, fleetingly. And though Ahab feels that Pip touches his “inmost center” and is “tied” to him “by cords woven” of his “heart-strings,” Ahab will banish Pip below deck and reject his extraordinary offer to act as a second leg. Ahab’s rejection of Pip, says Cameron, repudiates not only their particular relationship but “the fact of relationship itself.” Instead, “grief is purged from the body, is that feeling rage will not have in its midst, because it threatens the uniformity of conception it would both invade and divide” (29). Nothing must dilute Ahab’s tenacious commitment.

223

224

|

CHAPTER 6

Ahab’s banishment of Pip and grief is an extreme version of Coleman’s coldness, his willfulness that requires turning his back on his mother forever. This is the ultimate test of becoming “the man he has chosen to be,” and Zuckerman makes plain its brutality: “there was no explanation that could begin to address the outrage of what he was doing to her. . . . He was murdering her . . . murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom!” (138). We have noted the consequences—Coleman’s secret empties him, leaves him a blank, ghostlike, as if a “spook” to himself. Ahab’s “unachieved revengeful desire” wreaks a similar toll. So beyond control is Ahab’s “one supreme purpose” that it has “by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own” (219). This demonically autonomous “purpose” resides like a parasite in Ahab, draining him of life: “Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself ” (220). Ahab is preeminently a man with a consuming project. The incubus of unfettered autonomy in the form of a “supreme purpose” turns him into a zombie who sleeps “with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms” (219). As is often observed, Ishmael seems of markedly different disposition than Ahab. An easygoing democrat, suspicious of hierarchy, content to float and drift in reverie, Ishmael has no animating project or “supreme purpose” in life. Yet he is also susceptible to Ahab’s obsession because Ishmael “loves to sail forbidden seas” both mentally—his reveries at times express a morbidity verging on the suicidal—and literally. Whenever he feels too morbid, he ships off as a sailor. For Ishmael, “meditation and water are wedded for ever,” and early on he explains the urge reflective men have to ship out to sea as akin to the “story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all” (5). This image is “the key” also in the sense that as the novel’s first figuration of imperiling quixotic pursuit, it

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

limns Ahab and predicts the doom inscribed in his hunt for the white whale. The conundrum Ishmael implicitly faces is how to pursue a life of meditative reverie—“deep earnest thinking”—without meeting the fate of Narcissus (and Ahab). Ishmael “solves” it by accepting the “phantom of life” precisely as “ungraspable,” a shadow rather than substance. Ishmael’s respect for the ungraspable instances his philosophic skepticism, which distrusts the definitive or complete or masterful: “Small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught” (157). Ishmael’s skepticism coexists with his being a selfdescribed “Platonist,” most so when he is perched at a “thoughtengendering altitude” up in the crow’s nest, where he is often assigned to watch for whales (172). There he grows absent-minded, lost in the immateriality of reflection to the point of becoming lulled into an “opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie,” as if confirming his belief that “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God” (117). Ishmael’s propensity for being perennially “at sea,” lost in thought, floating on intangible, purposeless waves of speculation, collides, of course, with the profit motives of the whaling voyage. Since whales “must be seen before they can be killed,” the “sunken-eyed young Platonist” will “never make you one pint of sperm the richer,” so oblivious is he “to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise” (172). Ishmael confesses that he “kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I.” Equally threatening to the Pequod’s financial success is Ahab’s obsessive hunt for Moby Dick. Chief mate Starbuck will say: “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee”? (177). In sum, Ishmael’s philosophic, absent-minded purposelessness and Ahab’s obsessive private purpose are both antagonistic to the instrumentalism of (Starbuck’s) capitalist rationality. Melville implicitly identifies with Ishmael’s stance when, in a famous letter to Hawthorne, he says that “irresponsibility” is “my profoundest

225

226

|

CHAPTER 6

sense of being.”8 In confessing the inadmissible, Melville means in part to demystify that allegedly natural basis of American maturity—the mastery of Cartesian individualism. Its arrogance relies on repressing the subterranean urges of irresponsibility and irrationality that complicate imperial selfhood. Ishmael mocks such delusions of sovereignty: “Who ain’t a slave,” he remarks early on, as he redefines mastery to be at best a provisional role granted by the “stage managers, the Fates,” who cajole us into the “delusion” that “unbiased free will and discriminating judgment” guide our choices (6–7). Ishmael’s matter of fact attitude about our precarious and frail powers of self-mastery expresses not despair but fellowship; for him, slavery’s ubiquity engenders communion: “so the universal thump [administered by the old sea-captains] is passed round and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content” (6). While finding in Ishmael’s absent-mindedness, his sociability, and his epistemological skepticism a way to escape the selfannihilating quest for absolute mastery and control, Melville does not embrace Ishmael’s “irresponsibility” as an alternative. Rather, Ishmael will be saved in the end by a mediating third stance, one that finds a creative sublimation of irresponsibility in “gamesomeness” embodied in the act of writing. Melville dramatically portrays this stance at the end of Moby-Dick. As he had remarked when describing Pip’s ordeal, Ishmael suffers a “like abandonment.” Amid the wreckage of the Pequod he alone lives; “for almost one whole day and night,” Ishmael drifts at sea buoyed up by Queequeg’s coffin, “floating on the margin,” relaxing the purposive will. For all his “romantic, melancholy” moodiness and dreaminess, Ishmael is also imbued with the spirit of “godly gamesomeness.” This spirit, which Ishmael also dubs a “genial, desperado philosophy,” is second nature to sailors, he says, for they are constantly exposed to danger and incipient disaster. Tempered by “extreme tribulation,” sailors banish the grim and earnest demeanour of the conventionally responsible and instead welcome the ludic, the “free and easy” stance in which one takes the whole “universe for a vast practical joke” at one’s own expense. A psychic calm ensues wherein “nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing” in this stance of stoic aplomb (247). In his capacity for letting go and floating and in his love of the “landless”—all

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

that is hazardous, unfinished, and flowing—Ishmael is the consummate survivor. This, as The Human Stain suggests, is a way of saying he has the makings of a great novelist. As Nathan Zuckerman discovers, writing puts one “in professional competition with death” and functions to disinter and recover those consigned to oblivion. Indeed Ishmael is saved by a text; Queequeg’s coffin that buoys him up has inscribed on it drawings and figures, making it a “riddle to unfold.” And writing Moby-Dick will be for Ishmael the one productive economy he will sponsor, an economy not of mastery but of the ineffable, the equivocal, the orphaned. He sets down in black and white the immateriality of his thoughts and feelings while undermining the authority of the text he is making. Thus the novel remains a draft of a draft, as the responsibility of definitive authorship is continually deferred. In other words, the text that Ishmael, a self-described orphan, will create will itself be orphaned in the sense of floating unanchored to a prior, single, or authoritative reading or meaning, instead remaining “ungraspable.” Orphan, a crucial word in Moby-Dick and the final one, refers to man’s unmoored spiritual and earthly estate and is metaphorically linked to texts—artifacts whose meanings are “unsolved to the last” (524). In figuring the text as orphan, Ishmael inscribes skepticism into his economy of literary production and thwarts the resurgence of mastery and domination. Ishmael takes pleasure in remarking that not only artifacts but even “the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings” resists the analysis of the greatest physiognomists and exposes “human science” to be but a “passing fable” (380). Melville’s skepticism is in tune with Roth’s own frequent hymns to the error intrinsic to human knowing. This acknowledgment is antithetical to the brisk certitude of much identity politics—the righteous assumption that “everyone knows.” This last phrase is Delphine Roux’s, and occurs in the anonymous letter she sends Coleman: “everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age” (38). Professor Roux, who teaches French, is threatening to expose him and further ruin his reputation on the heels of the “spooks” affair. First branded a racist, he is now a misogynist. “Everyone knows” becomes

227

228

|

CHAPTER 6

Nathan’s mocking mantra for righteous, intolerant conviction, the pious moralism that shackles artistic vitality and propagates the “banalization of experience” by crushing the particular and enthroning the abstract (209). But what especially gets under Nathan’s skin about the notion that “everyone knows” is its aggressive presumption of mastery. “You can’t know anything” is Nathan’s counterpunch, and it starts his internal rebuke of the aptly named Delphine Roux. Her certainty reflects the oracle at Delphi, but oracles, alas, are ambiguous, both infallible and only reputed to be infallible, an irony that especially attends the French sense of the word in Larousse, as Michael Wood has pointed out (7–8). Delphine’s pretense of mastery triggers in Zuckerman a flood of deathly images, for death is what we at once know and don’t know, know as inert abstraction but not as implacably advancing chaos—“the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs” (208–9). His sense of external ambush by the “train of events” then gives way to a spontaneous and uncontrollable hymn to death invisibly invading the body. Observing the concert audience at Tanglewood, Nathan as if acquires x-ray vision of the “ceaseless perishing” that is “working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn’t stop myself ” (209). Then the pianist Bronfman appears, and his playing is so compelling—“he doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing”—that morbidity and death are banished: “Nobody is dying, nobody” (210). This three-paragraph sequence illuminates how Roth negotiates the relations among art, death, and knowledge. Not only Bronfman’s superbly game performance but his not letting the “piano conceal a thing” has, for Nathan, the effect of deflecting death. In the previous paragraph Nathan had envisaged “the billions of murderous cells” on the march. “I couldn’t stop myself,” he says of his own compulsion not to conceal a thing, to give to the abstract fact of finitude urgent words and imagery that protest the foreclosure, the smothering, of experi-

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

ence, embodied in “everyone knows.” In other words, in the face of death—biological or moral or imaginative—Nathan and Bronfman both pursue an art of unconcealing, of nakedness, that brings to musical or literary expression “the sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant—superabundant—detail of life, which is the rhapsody” (52). Here Roth seems in touch with the Platonic sense of the “rhapsodist” as being “carried out” of himself, the primal letting go that art triggers (Plato 221). Roth’s “rhapsody” joins the endeavors of pianist and novelist and equates the passionate intensity of an open musical form with Nathan’s commitment to a mimesis of plenitude that saturates his narrative with a “blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography” (22). The details are not in the service of abolishing confusion with the antidote of clear and certain knowledge, but instead they will expose “the pointless meaningfulness” of life (52). This exposure resists the hollowing out of experience by allegory and tidy parable, reductions that those addicted to “virtue-mongering” inflict in their need to inhabit a priori abstractions as if they were life (153). According to Delphine Roux, for instance, Faunia “was the prototype of female helplessness,” and thus Coleman must be brought to account for exploiting her (194). “Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist” (290). Even his own children regard him as an “open-andshut-case” (175). “Dad, everyone in Athena knew,” his eldest son tells him on the phone, referring to his affair with Faunia.9 The mimetic, as Adorno and others conceive it, offers the force of particularity, even when fixated in fetishism, to express the human demand for the concrete and the incommensurable in response to modernity’s diminishment of experience under the reign of abstraction and instrumental reason.10 As we have seen, high modernism’s resistance to the fungible is a line of force clearly relevant to Roth. One of the stylistic signatures of his mimesis is exorbitant detail, as if he is seized— “couldn’t stop” himself—by the rhapsody of turning or tuning language to a taut pitch of seemingly limitless reach and precision. As if

229

230

|

CHAPTER 6

the bliss of “endlessness” that Sabbath experienced in familial oneness finds its aesthetic correlative in this plenitude of detailed vision. In its rigorous level of craftsmanship, Roth’s achieved verisimilitude permits the teeming blur of the everyday to crystallize into the particular. Crows, for instance, become, under Faunia’s gaze, not merely symbols of her alienation or simply the “ugly scavenger[s]” most regard them to be, but beautiful: “Oh, yes. Very beautiful. Their sleekness. Their shades. It’s so black in there you can see purple in there. Their heads. At the start of the beak that sprout of hairs, that mustache thing, those hairs coming forward from the feathers. Probably has a name. But the name doesn’t matter. Never does. All that matters is that it’s there. And nobody knows why. It’s like everything else—just there” (167). Like Faunia’s insistence on being in the moment, her attention to detail honors the minutiae of simple thereness, and is a kind of linguistic gameness that defeats the syntheses of significance: “this is only what it is . . . don’t take it somewhere else,” to recall her words to Coleman (229). One of Nathan’s most striking rhapsodies is devoted to none other than Delphine Roux. Coleman’s enemy and former colleague is a Yale doctorate, a brilliant émigré student of French literary theory with a thesis on “self-denial in Georges Bataille,” and a tiny life at tiny Athena College that provides her no end of frustration and pained bemusement. Disliked by her provincial feminist colleagues (“because she has an air of chic, they feel she hasn’t read enough learned journals”) and the subject of rumor and gossip as a single woman on a faculty of mostly married men, Delphine responds with biting eviscerations of them all. With a precision of observation about the absurdities of campus life in the nineties that recalls Randall Jarrell or Mary McCarthy in the fifties, Delphine draws satirical portraits of her colleagues and sends them to her friends in Paris. Nathan not only treats us to her wit but brings us into Delphine’s world: elite French schooling and intellectual ambition, an overbearing mother spurring her daughter’s need to surpass her by emigrating and to become the author of her own life, the lonely disappointment in America and excursions to New York that only sharpen it, her colleagues’ jealous assaults on her integrity and self-possession.

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

All of these slings and arrows have created in Delphine Roux strengths and foibles and an interior life that Nathan’s imagination renders with sympathetic complexity. Thanks to this careful rendering Delphine emerges as emphatically not a caricature. Yet she herself is addicted to caricature, and the rage sublimated in her satiric gift for the exaggerations of lampoon will eventually emerge uncloaked in her response to Dean Silk and Faunia. Some years before the scandal, when the dean had first appointed her, he congratulated himself on the hire, on being open-minded to her brainy, if arid, theorizing, her “Ecole Normale sophistication,” and her “all encompassing chic.” After he retires as dean and returns to teaching, they clash. Delphine dislikes what she regards as his passé humanism that is insensitive to students who take a “feminist perspective on Euripides.” Before long her contempt boils into uncontrollable fury when she discovers his relation to Faunia and assumes, without evidence, that it is one of sadistic misogyny. When Delphine’s constricted imagination of Coleman is juxtaposed with Nathan’s imagination of Delphine, the difference points to the domain of art in the novel—“the cast of the imagination” accomplishing an act of empathic, exploratory invention. But Roth’s point is not invidious—to congratulate Nathan’s empathy and condemn Delphine’s caricatures. Rather than drawing a dichotomy, Roth has Nathan’s patient evocation of her interiority ultimately disclose affinity between Delphine and Coleman. Nathan’s “rhapsody”—based on accumulated hunches—about Delphine is the way Roth earns (makes plausible) what would otherwise be entirely too pat and predictable a suggestion—that her rage at Coleman is the product of her thwarted love for him. From the start, their intellectual dueling suggests an attraction that is part of a deeper bond. They are ensnared in the same paradox: determined to expand the self ’s freedom, they have instead shrunk it. Here is Delphine: “Decountrified, isolated, estranged . . . in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces defining her as the enemy. And all because she’d gone eagerly in search of an existence of her own. All because she’d been courageous and refused to take the prescribed view of herself. She seemed to herself to have subverted herself in the altogether admirable effort to make

231

232

|

CHAPTER 6

herself ” (272). Delphine, in sum, has arrived at that grim irony already inhabited by her enemy and secret sharer, Coleman: “There is the drive to master things, and the thing that is mastered is oneself ” (273). This crisp summary of the dialectic of enlightenment articulates a trap whose bait is the deluded belief that life is wholly subject to our rational arrangements. Her name enacts her undoing: her Delphic pretense of omniscience comes to rue. In reflecting on life’s unfairness, Delphine muses that “at its heart [it is] very mean and vengeful, ordering a fate not according to the laws of logic but to the antagonistic whim of perversity” (272). Delphine had written in her job application, “I arrived at Yale very Cartesian.” And she remains so. Making her own version of Coleman’s mistake, she ends up as he does, “blindsided by the uncontrollability of something else entirely” (335). As a counter to Descartes, Delphine might have heeded the radical skepticism of masterful selfhood voiced by Bataille, the subject of her dissertation, who believed that “history is lived when one does not know how it will come out” and that the drive to construct the future (like the effort to make the self ) in “the way an architect oversees a project,” has the effect of arresting time. “The project is the prison,” Bataille remarked (qtd. Hollier 55, 61). To assume otherwise—to believe in projects as instruments of control—is to assume that one’s life is plastic to one’s exerted will, available to be “beaten down into a predictable essence.” This stance of domination requires a foe to be vanquished—for Coleman, it was “the tyranny of the we and its we-talk” (124). Coleman’s initial “we” is his family, specifically his “father who had been making up Coleman’s story for him” and then the “we of Howard” and black bourgeois respectability (107). For Delphine, the “we” is her distinguished lineage, a family history particularized in “her mother’s fixed-forever overshadowing shadow.” To elude it she went to America to reinvent herself, but in vain; now the shadow “blocks her return,” leaving Delphine “exactly nowhere” (277). The “great heroic struggle against” the chosen “we” is doomed because it houses an infantile fantasy of omnipotence, of self-birth, of an immaculate conception outside of time and place. As Nathan puts it in his final ruminations about Coleman’s blind spot:

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

The man who decides to forge a distinct historical destiny, who sets out to spring the historical lock, and who does so, brilliantly succeeds at altering his personal lot, only to be ensnared by the history he hadn’t quite counted on: the history that isn’t yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time and grasped better by the future than it will ever be by us. The we that is inescapable: the present moment, the common lot, the current mood, the mind of one’s country, the stranglehold of history that is one’s own time. (335–36)

What Coleman had not counted on was the “we” being nothing so palpable as Clarence Silk or Howard University but as ungraspable as seconds “ticking off . . . accruing a minute at a time,” ceaselessly proliferating. Coleman acted as if he dwelled in “the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect” from whose fortified vantage he would methodically eliminate all obstacles to freedom. But this kingdom of mastery is not ours to rule; “power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will” (Emerson 482). Roth’s ticking clock, indifferent to the clutching fingers of control, keeps before us the minute-by-minute present moment in its dumb facticity, and his passion for saturating narrative in detail honors this thereness. And yet the novelist’s passion inevitably seeks not only to honor but to master—to contain—the spillage of unraveling time between the covers of a book. As if recognizing this irreconcilable contradiction, Roth’s mimetic plenitude dialectically joins reception and mastery: witness Nathan as he listens at the graveside for a cadence to weave into narrative, Faunia as she calmly dances in the naked moment because there is no future. Both hear an intricate rhythm of immersion within detachment, a cadence that Coleman, all engorged will, insulated in his self-described “narcissistic bubble,” was deaf to until he met Faunia (19). In a remarkable homage to many of the literary ancestors with whom he has engaged throughout The Human Stain and the two other volumes of the American trilogy, Roth ends the novel with a single canonical image that ripples out to form a palimpsest of references to American

233

234

|

CHAPTER 6

literature. Having ventured onto frozen Dragonfly Pond with Les Farley and his menacing auger, Nathan heads back to land, and concludes with a panoramic view. He sees an “icy white” lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a piece of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an Arcadian mountain in America.

This tableau opens out to embrace, amid the lake’s icy white purity, a Gatsbyesque vision of the fresh green breast of the new world, Thoreau’s wintry Walden Pond, where the ice is sixteen inches thick, Poe’s Arctic explorer Arthur Gordon Pym amid snow of “perfect whiteness,” Melville’s meditation in Moby-Dick on the “whiteness of the whale,” and from the same novel Queequeg’s illiterate X signature.11 “It’s a clean place” watched over by God, says Les, at home on the ice. But to the spooked Nathan, wondering if he’ll make it safely back to his car, the surrounding icy whiteness is doubtless less an enchanting refuge than an image of the “dumb blankness, full of meaning” that Melville speaks of in “The Whiteness of the Whale,” a blankness in which “lurks an elusive something . . . which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood” (205). The teasing, ungraspable meanings limn the condition of skepticism that is a given in Roth’s world: “there really is no bottom to what is not known,” Nathan had earlier declared, and this echoes Thoreau’s famous discussion of the (alleged) “bottomlessness” of Walden Pond, another ripple from the final frozen tableau. Inevitably, death also lives at the heart of this pastoral of entrancing simplicity and purity. The location that Zuckerman intrudes upon is Farley’s special “secret spot”—“away from man, close to God.” Farley is the frontier individualist (he despises those who “live in cities . . . the craziness . . . the congestion”), one of those “wild men” whom Thoreau sees fishing in “The Pond in Winter” chapter of Walden, men “who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their

B E I N G G A M E I N T H E H U M A N S TA I N

|

townsmen” (188). “It’s nice to have a secret spot,” Farley tells Nathan. Here emerges the tie between Coleman and his killer; both are guardians of secrets, the consuming imperative of vigilance that afflicts the American isolato. This imperative can produce within the American solitary an anarchic energy close to rage, as Stephen King knows (The Shining), and as Zuckerman’s nineteenth-century Berkshires neighbor knew. In The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale’s vigilance in maintaining his double life is strained near breaking—“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true”—and almost unravels after his passionate reunion with Hester (215). With “unaccustomed physical energy” he hurries home through the forest, at every step “incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with the sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse” (216). Dimmesdale doesn’t quite let the brute out, though he nearly utters “blasphemous” suggestions to the deacon and wicked words to children, and yearns to dally and trade oaths with a “drunken seaman.” Of Dimmesdale’s “profounder self ” of “ravenous appetite” we are permitted only these tantalizing glimpses. He soon dies, as he makes public confession of his secret. Coleman Silk confesses privately to Faunia, letting his “profounder self ” emerge from the cocoon of his secret, even as his secret sharer Les Farley shadows him, soon closing in. “How accidentally a destiny is made . . .” (HS 32, 125).

235

7 The Two Philips

American Abstract art is a lie . . . to cover up how bad one can be. Unwilling to show this badness, this rawness. It is laughable, this lie. —Philip Guston

A

consideration of Philip Roth and immaturity is bound to find the novelist’s important friendship with the painter Philip Guston (1913–1980) hard to resist, for reasons that will soon become apparent. A distinguished New York abstractionist in the late forties till the early sixties, Guston is best known today for an act of apostasy—beginning in 1970, in the work of his final decade, a period that coincided with his meeting Roth, he outraged critics and friends alike by breaking with formalism and its ban on recognizable subject matter. In canvases that litter empty landscapes and crowded interiors with bloated figures and heaps of body parts, Guston’s late works render a comic or nightmarish world of cartoonish grotesques who compel uneasy fascination. By the time of his death, critical opinion and the art market were already reversing their initial judgments, and today Guston’s turn to figuration is regarded as a momentous event in postwar American art. The painter’s dramatic about-face (which also, it turned out, had crucial continuities with his personal and artistic past) was grounded in increasing frustration with what he called abstraction’s “purity”; that frustration together with his pursuit of “badness” and “rawness” (as the epigraph above indicates) makes Guston’s kinship with Roth unmistakable. Indeed, the uproar over Portnoy actually brought the novelist and

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

painter together precisely at the moment when both men were suffering the consequences of having assaulted the canons of respectability that had earlier won their allegiance. But to best appreciate what they shared and how they helped shape one another’s aesthetic investment in immaturity, in the unbalanced and the inappropriate, a sketch of the larger context is needed. This is welcome, for it will permit a glance at some of the gaudiest episodes in the modernist career of immaturity. The node of energy that ambushes the appropriate, immaturity taps the unsocialized and above all disrupts form in its social, aesthetic, and psychic meanings: the elevated domain of culture as inherited entitlement, of decorum (“good form”), of the formal purity—the autonomy—of the artifact, and (analogously) of the self as immaculate fortification, enclosed, anchored, bounded. Unmentioned until now is a certain line of force in the performing and visual arts—its source is the avant-garde of fin de siècle Paris—that unleashes some of the most aggressive enactments of immaturity. The Parisian avant-garde’s zeal to épater le bourgeois, to bring the elevated low, commences with “the banquet years” (in Roger Shattuck’s famous phrase), the late 1890s epoch animated by the “revaluation of the very idea of maturity” (31). Among those propelling this revaluation was Alfred Jarry. Like Rimbaud, Jarry was a legendary potache—half brat, half genius—whose lavish self-mythologizing included his boast of being cashiered out of the army after a few months for a chronic condition—“precocious imbecility” (qtd. Shattuck 198). His schoolboy revenge upon a despised obese physics teacher became the basis of Ubu Roi, his scandalous play about an immense, ridiculous, bloodthirsty Polish king. In 1896 at the uproarious premiere of Ubu Roi the opening line—the words “Merdre” “shite”—unleashed pandemonium, inspiring one member of the audience, W. B. Yeats, to later note in his autobiography, “what more is possible? After us the Savage God” (qtd. Shattuck 209). As if explicating Yeats’s remark, an incensed Parisian reviewer declared: “A new type has emerged, created by an extravagant and brutal imagination, more a child’s than a man’s” (210). The two-performance run of Ubu Roi was a delirious harbinger of what emerged a generation later as the more programmatic scandalizing by Dada and surrealism in Paris, Zurich, and Berlin, circa 1917. “We

237

238

|

CHAPTER 7

were all in our twenties and ready to defy all the fathers in the world in a way that would rejoice the heart of Freud’s Oedipus” (Richter 49). This comment by a Dadaist captures the spirit of both enterprises. All the fathers were of course contained in that imprecation “the bourgeoisie” with its goal of making the world “congealed, immutable, and definitive” (Tzara; Motherwell 403). Hence “to surpass oneself in naivete and childishness—that is still the best antidote” (Ball; Motherwell 53). In openly declaring war against authority, decorum, and taste, imposing a “harsh necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity,” Dadaists desacralized Art, toppling it from the throne of fetish and commodity, running together art and life, subjecting both to the free play of chance and the unconscious (Tzara; Motherwell 75). The suspension of control and reason eventually helped inspire the postwar emergence of such progeny as the theater of the absurd and, in the United States, the action painting of abstract expressionism. Yeats’s “Savage God,” as if provoked into existence by the spectacle of hideous King Ubu, presided over a reversal, says Shattuck, of “all attitudes and techniques that have made the arts beautiful and instructive and adult.” To illustrate, Shattuck summarizes a series of answers to a question—“Who is the complete man?”—that had been posed since the Greeks (32, 31). “From the Greek devotee of arête to the Christian ascetic to the Renaissance courtier to the seventeenth-century honnête homme,” each answer assumes that “adult qualities of self-control preponderate over those of the child. But after romanticism, and starting long before Freud, a mood developed which reexamined with a child’s candour our most basic values. . . . With Rimbaud a new personage emerges: the ‘child-man,’ the grownup who has refrained from putting off childish things. Artists became increasingly willing to accept the child’s wonder and spontaneity and destructiveness as not inferior to adulthood” (31).1 This was one route to what T. J. Clark has described as the “modernist exploration of an Other to bourgeois experience”— the “primitive, childish, deviant—lunatic, chaotic, otherwise beneath contempt” (Farewell 306).2 In postwar America, outrage ensued when one painter began throwing, pouring, flinging, and dripping paint on a canvas tacked up not on the vertical plane of the easel but nailed down to the floor that he

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

crouched over and walked upon making his random markings, leaving the canvas unprotected from whatever detritus—buttons, cigarette stubs, coins, glass, and the like—found its way in. The outrage directed at Jackson Pollock’s kinetic act of horizontal art making, where accident seemed messily to mingle with purpose, was not confined to philistine cries that children with finger paints or dogs or cats could do better. Fellow artists accused Pollock of making his drip paintings by urinating on the grounded canvas. Influenced by the automatic writing favored by the surrealists in their effort to release the uncensored impulses of the unconscious, Pollock “in the name of the unconscious wished to strike against form”—aligned, by gestalt psychology, with the “viewer’s upright body”—and “thus against the [vertical] axis of the human body.” “But equally in the name of the unconscious, Pollock needed to strike against culture,” as Rosalind Krauss remarks. Pollock undermined the two together by attacking the “verticality of the axis the body shares with culture” (Bois and Krauss 94–95). In refusing the vertical, Pollock refused the very move, according to Freud, that reorients man “away from the animal senses of sniffing and pawing,” away from the ground where touching and seeing are linked, and toward the purified, distanced activities of the erect being—sublimation and domination— supervised by the reign of the visual and the optical, “the look” (Krauss 363–64). But Pollock’s act of lowering has rarely been accepted and valued in all its baseness. Indeed, the dominant aesthetic criterion of the day— Clement Greenberg’s formalist purity—championed Pollock but at the cost, according to Krauss, “of sublimating Pollock,” lifting him and his canvases up off the ground and onto the wall. Greenberg’s was a “full redemptive gesture, the raising of the work from off its knees and onto the grace of the wall in one unbroken benediction, the denial of wild heedlessness in order to clear a space for the look, the look that will (in its very act of looking) create order, and thus create painting—‘sophisticated’ painting” (362).3 Andy Warhol, argues Krauss, was one of the few to be skeptical of this domesticating move from disorder to order, from nature to culture. Warhol recognized and saluted Pollock’s lowness; his “most transgressive reading” of Pollock, says Krauss, was the “scatological one, in which the gesture that a standing man makes by

239

240

|

CHAPTER 7

spilling liquid onto a horizontal ground is simply decoded as urination.” Warhol’s “piss paintings” of 1961 (he claimed this date, but the paintings were reproduced only in 1976), visually quite stunning, were created by inviting friends to pee on the surfaces of immense canvases set on the floor covered in metallic paint; “the uric acid creates the whorls and halations of what can often resemble the action painter’s gesture” (Bois and Krauss 102). Let Warhol’s urinary tribute to Pollock’s momentous violence against the elevated and refined stand as a masterpiece of immaturity in its most flagrant mode, taking its place with Portnoy as an audacious sixties performance of phallic aggression. I link Warhol and Roth to “the culture crime of desublimation” (to borrow a phrase from The Anatomy Lesson 567) to introduce my main concern: Philip Guston’s later, less notorious but subtler act of desublimation. He turns from the confinements of “sophisticated painting,” as dictated by Greenberg’s version of abstract expressionism, to paint figures suffused with the free-floating anxiety emanating from “the inexhaustible conundrum of himself ” (Zaller 89). Feelings long canalized into the introspection of abstraction came tumbling out; indeed, one painting, Painter’s Forms II, depicts an open mouth that has vomited forth a mess of rubbery limbs. Filling his canvases with raucous and uncouth imagery until they are dense with (barely) human body parts often claustrophobically entangled, Guston obsessively reiterated his cast of characters and motifs in painting after painting. Most disturbing is the disembodied, one-eyed, mouthless, noseless bowling ball of a head, the artist’s unflinching self-image. Less viscerally than his old high school friend Pollock, but with equal determination, Guston brought himself low. “I got sick and tired of all that purity. I wanted to tell stories,” was Guston’s much quoted explanation for his new style, the remark a jab at Greenberg, whose watchword was purity (qtd. Mayer 153).4 One critic described the dominant image of the work in the early seventies— hooded Ku Klux Klan figures—as Ubuesque “buffoon bullies, cousins of Alfred Jarry’s blundering tyrant, Ubu Roi” (Storr 53).5 Some observers, including his close friend the composer Morton Feldman, believed Guston had gone over to pop art, the movement that had rescinded the

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

abstract expressionist ban on imagery. But actually Guston, in mixing the brutal and comic and confessional, was up to something unclassifiable, something certainly not assimilable to the dehumanized, glossy, infinitely reproducible imagery of a Warhol or Lichtenstein. A “startling abdication,” his friend and perhaps subtlest critic Ross Feld wrote of Guston’s turn from abstraction; “storms raged around him instantly,” as friends and critics felt betrayed by his unveiling, in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, of “raw, discomforting, puzzling and liberated works” (Feld 24–25). Hilton Kramer in the New York Times believed Guston was slumming and dubbed him a “mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum” (qtd. Mayer 154). With his always simmering anger, resentment, and “self-flagellation” now brought to a boil, Guston enlarged his “abdication” to include a permanent move with his devoted, long-suffering wife Musa (also the name of their one child, a daughter) from the city to the small Catskills town of Woodstock, New York. He had owned a house there for twenty years and there, says Feld, “impiety, impurity, and the plainly embarrassing were raised up high and celebrated, not swept away or covered up” (46). Not surprisingly, Guston had always been at odds with the purist Greenberg, who had dismissed him as a “romantic” artist. Greenberg is Guston’s Irving Howe—a censorious authority whom the artist turned into a useful catalyst of creative rage. Under Greenberg’s strict regime, “keeping your attention firmly fixed on formal elements . . . would prevent you from making banal naturalistic associations, such as between Jackson Pollock’s skeins of paint and the tangled branches of tress.” If you made such associations, “then it was assumed that there was something wrong with the way you looked at painting” (Flam 10).6 Guston as early as 1960 said in an implicit critique: “there is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art: that painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually defined its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is ‘impure.’ It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting’s continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden” (qtd. Mayer 141). As Ross Feld was to guess and Guston confirm, the painter had always been an ambivalent abstractionist, feeling stymied by the taboo on imagery: “I knew it at the time but couldn’t tell anyone” (qtd. Feld 84).

241

242

|

CHAPTER 7

Instead, as he often said, he had smuggled images into his abstract work. So in the final decade the smuggling ceased and his paintings became a long-sought release, which accounts, says Feld, for their “aerated freedom . . . the quality of escape from a prior commitment” (83). And Guston was emphatic about what he was escaping to: “My spirit needs matter—a medium—which resists the peaceful—balanced resolution of forms and spaces. I need a medium,” he wrote to Feld in 1978, “through which I can show myself—to myself—concretely—tangibly—what I am—what my condition is. Unlike a monk, my self or mind-self is not my medium . . . Corporeal. Fleshly. Is this what it is then, to be an artist?” (qtd. Feld 52). In his late abandonment to the corporeal, Guston seems a character out of a late Roth novel. At last unburdened by the yoke of purity and “balanced resolution,” he was “left only with [his] own perversity. Yet I must trust this perversity,” he wrote to Dore Ashton in 1969, after renouncing the “lie” of abstraction—“a lie to cover up how bad one can be. Unwilling to show this badness, this rawness” (qtd. Balken 93; qtd. Mayer 170). Such avowals of perversity, badness, and rawness sound like the watchwords of Mickey Sabbath and of Coleman Silk in his last year. As should already be apparent, one of the waves Guston is riding is a kind of immaturity that bears striking affinities to Roth’s most subtle and venturesome mode of letting go—where imbalance, excess, and the unsocialized become sources of energy turned toward experiments in “letting the beast out of the bag.” When he met Guston, the novelist hadn’t yet achieved this transformative letting go, this deeper immaturity that, as we have seen, would come to characterize his major fiction after The Counterlife in 1986. Roth called him a “drastic artist,” bestowing a term of praise (qtd. Mayer 245). And in coming to know Guston in the very throes of living this release agonizingly, joyously, furiously, Roth absorbed a powerful example that in time would prove propulsive. Or so I will argue. A classmate of Pollock’s at Manual Arts High School in twenties Los Angeles, Guston, unlike his friend, never graduated and acquired on his own a deep and comprehensive knowledge of art history. He started out in the thirties as a political muralist; his other paintings of that period

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

include sinister, hooded Klansmen (The Conspirators) who were a memorable presence in the Southern California of his childhood. In the early forties Guston was still a figurative painter but had turned inward, to lyrical evocations of the hermetic, theatrical world of childhood games. Martial Memory and If This Be Not I, with their groups of masked, melancholy urban urchins, are his famous works of this period. By the late forties Guston became an elegant and celebrated abstractionist in New York, with light brushwork of distinct delicacy (often described as “buttery”) that separated him from (and made him less celebrated than) those who in their stylistic dynamism and grandeur had abandoned the brushstroke: from his friend Pollock, from Franz Kline, and also from the airy sublimity of Mark Rothko in his major phase. Indeed, Guston was sometimes called the “abstract impressionist.” By the midsixties his art had reached an impasse. Then came his leap of abandonment. Leaving behind both formal elegance and abstraction, Guston spent the seventies, the last decade of his life, in a state of near incessant productivity, fueled by a sustained surge of manic depressive energy that before it wore him out (he died of a heart attack a year after being warned he had to cut down on drinking and smoking) led him radically to revise his art and to reconnect with its originary impulses. If Guston in the fifties had been “the craftsman who had submitted himself to the discipline of meditation before each stroke,” writes Robert Zaller, “now [he] invoked a counterdiscipline of spontaneity, akin to the automatic writing of the Surrealists” (81). He created a new iconography that seemed at once inward and outward, private and public, a nightmarish and comic world that reached back to his boyhood love of newspaper cartoon strips. Presiding over his recurring figurative imagery for about four years (1969–73) was a hooded Klansman and his henchmen, imagery as if resurrected from the thirties. These figures hung out in furnished rooms and drove around amid landscapes littered with dismembered body parts: grotesquely thin, hairy legs with arthritic kneecaps and feet thickly booted. In the background of one Klan painting, Courtroom, a garbage can is stuffed with wooden boards and a pair of upright legs with their ubiquitous black heavy shoes. In the foreground, a large red hand floating in space points an accusing finger squarely at

243

244

|

CHAPTER 7

the unruffled, blood-spattered, cigar-smoking, white-hooded hood. The pervasive sense of lawlessness in America of the sixties is one meaning projected by the Klan figures, who had returned to visibility amid the civil rights marches of the early part of the decade. Guston’s break with his artistic past entailed reentering his personal past, where the hoods, we will see, harbored deeper anxieties for the painter. The other haunting signature image in Guston’s late work is a Cyclopean head, peeled or skinned, (often) bandaged, a lima-bean head (think, anachronistically, of a one-eyed Homer Simpson) sometimes solitary, surveying a shoreline (Head ), sometimes bunched en masse eyeball to eyeball with other bodiless heads at the edge of the sea (Group in Sea). And once (in Web) it is lying flat at the water’s edge as if a beached whale, its huge eye staring down in a puddle of blood, to the right its blank-faced, thick-braided partner (the recurring figure of his wife) stolidly present, facing out to sea. Above them both, at the top of the picture plane, two hairy spiders have begun casting their webs on these helpless, inert figures. In addition to the body parts, often heaped death-camp style, were piles of junk, the detritus of a working artist’s studio: smoldering cigarettes and thick cigars, garbage cans and lids (often used as clashing shields by outthrust hands colliding in combat, as in Aegean), old encrusted paintbrushes, naked lightbulbs and dangling cords, empty booze bottles, hobnailed boots in piles, clunky boot soles, spider webs, mounds of cherries—all rendered in chunky outline and swollen expressionist brushstrokes. “I wanted stronger contact with the thickness of things,” Guston once said of his late manner, as a way to open up the abstractions to the stolid thereness of daily life, most immediately the chaotic ferment of the studio (qtd. H. Cooper 35). That teeming space was continuous with larger, national turmoil: the political upheavals of the sixties— especially the regime and downfall of Richard Nixon—deeply agitated Guston. As almost a sideline from his easel painting, Guston revived his childhood cartooning skills in drawings that capture Nixon and his cronies (sometimes hooded) in a series of savagely obscene caricatures. They numbered eighty and were published only posthumously.7 The thickness and weight Guston craved seemed to find gratification in turning Nixon’s phlebitis into the visible bodily and metaphorical site

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

of his nefariousness. In “The Phlebitis Series” the painter portrayed with hilarious and hideous exaggeration the tuberous swelling of the president’s lower right leg and foot lanced with bandages, an exposed humiliating appendage he is condemned, Ahab-like, to drag along. Guston’s one oil painting of Nixon, the deliriously grotesque San Clemente, captures the president on one of his joyless, business-suited and blackshoed walks along the Pacific. Three horizontal bands—a large block of pink sky, and narrower planes of gray waves and a saffron beach—form nature’s stage on which Guston has placed a most unnatural figure—an agonized creature with a hunted look on an inflamed face of angry red. With distended jowls and nose, hairy, sagging and testicular, so heavy in fact they seem to account for his painfully horizontal posture, Nixon stares out at us defiantly. A plump self-pitying tear is poised to roll down his face, his engorged right leg is a roadmap of popping veins, and his garter still holds up his tattered socks out of which stick swollen toes. In a book that was one of Guston’s favorites, The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens famously said that “it is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality” (36). Guston’s inner violence was less protective than porous, provoked by outward violence to press deeper into the maelstrom of American reality. That reality encompassed the general political and moral ugliness of the times including what his paintings exuberantly, if disturbingly, savor—the low-rent quotidian world of junk or “crapola.” The last word is Roth’s to describe what first brought him and Guston together in 1969. In a short memoir of their friendship, Roth emphasizes their “shared delight” in “crapola,” the panoply of roadside attractions—billboards, garages, diners, junk and body shops—that they frequented around Woodstock (S 135). Taking pleasure in the crap of the everyday became, says Roth, a potential means of a liberating “self-subversion” from their shared devotion at the altar of high culture. Crapola emerged not only as an alluring subject (for pop artists as well) but as a “tool in itself: a blunt aesthetic instrument providing access to a style of representation free of the complexity we were accustomed to valuing” (135).

245

246

|

CHAPTER 7

Coincidentally, Roth had beat a retreat from New York to the same patch of rural life; in the novelist’s case he came to Woodstock seeking shelter from what Portnoy had bequeathed—his “new reputation as a crazed penis” (132). In four years of rural tranquility Roth wrote what he called a “cluster of uncharacteristically freakish books”—The Breast, The Great American Novel, and Our Gang, his satire about Nixon—that were “dedicated to shaking off ” the “vast newfound audience” that Portnoy had won him (133). He succeeded. Save The Breast, these works are among the least successful, commercially and aesthetically, of his career. The two Philips were both passionate Nixon haters, and the novelist’s satire and the painter’s caricatures were fed by a symbiotic exchange of outrage. Guston was particularly intrigued by The Breast (1972), Roth’s fantasy of an English professor who turns into a female breast. He delighted Roth with eight drawings inspired by incidents in the novella. Guston depicted Roth’s “beached mammary groping for contact,” and the shape’s impact on the painter’s later art is clear, given the beached and bodiless shaved head that is the icon of his own presence. Indeed, Roth concludes his memoir by noting this sense of kinship: “Coincidentally, Philip . . . represents himself in his last paintings as someone who also endured a grotesque transformation—not into a thinking, dismembered sexual gland but into a bloated, cyclopsian, brutish head that has itself been cut loose from the body of its sex” (138). If Guston the freestanding head has been severed from the body of his sex, his condition inversely complements that of his friend’s, the self-described “crazed penis.” Philip the cyclops and Philip the penis: these remnants testify, if only too literally, to the “self-subversion” Roth spoke of above. And in this context the “tool” both Philips embraced—the “blunt aesthetic instrument” of “crapola”—all that is unapologetically reduced, crude, and raw—became a tool not only to assault aesthetic “complexity” but also bodily wholeness. As detached body parts, head and penis become detritus, crapola. This reduction was not an end in itself but a ground-clearing step—a dismantling of respectability as bodily integrity—in a larger process of artistic renewal, one that was in “the early stages of not quite knowing what” is happening, and hence, said Roth, replete with a “liberating feeling” (S 136).

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

The Breast depicts a freakish bodily transformation as a mimetic response, indeed tribute, to literature’s transformative power, an imperative summed up for generations of postwar humanists in Rilke’s command “you must change your life,” the concluding line of “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.”8 Roth reprints the poem as the novella’s end; David Kepesh, his English professor protagonist, hopes that his ordeal “will at the very least illuminate these great lines for those of you new to the poem—particularly the poet’s concluding admonition, which may not be so elevated a sentiment as appears at first glance” (B 88). The irony here, founded on the blurring of literal and figurative “change,” structures the discomfiting comedy of the book as a whole. Roth honors Rilke’s injunction by making Kepesh’s love of literature the seeming cause of his metamorphosis. Yet simultaneously, in his ironic play upon “change,” Roth also mocks the idealization of literature embodied in the “elevated” reputation of Rilke’s injunction, deflating its moral grandeur by submitting it to absurdity with the help of Ovid and Kafka. Roth’s response in The Breast to the exhortation to change was largely penitential; in effect he castrated his raging penis of a self to become, via Kepesh, a “big brainless bag of dumb, desirable tissue, acted upon instead of acting” (66). With his tongue at least partly in cheek, Roth in a 1972 interview said he hoped his fable of a man’s reduction to a helpless object would be a sop to feminists, “particularly those who have been sensitized by the women’s movement, who will feel a certain kinship with my hero and his predicament”—of having been “turned totally into a ‘sexual object’ both to himself and others” (Searles 61). David Kepesh (in his first of three incarnations in Roth’s fiction) attributes his transformation to, in effect, a professional deformation: “I got it from fiction,” he tells his psychiatrist.9 “The books I’ve been teaching . . . ‘The Nose’ and ‘Metamorphosis.’ ” Having loved “the extreme in literature” and idolized Kafka and Gogol, “virtually hypnotized by the imagery and the power,” Kepesh explains his transformation as his “leap. Made the word flesh . . . out-Kafkaed Kafka . . . after all . . . who is the greater artist, he who imagines the marvelous transformation, or he who marvelously transforms himself. . . . Great art happens to people like anything else. And this is my great work of art!” (B 60, 81–82). Kepesh here, as we will see, unwittingly provides a way to

247

248

|

CHAPTER 7

understand the artistic transformation that the friend of his creator was undergoing. Guston’s effort, as Roth put it, to “overturn his history as a painter” was already under way as Roth was writing his novella of transformation. As if pushing to an extreme Roth’s desire to find “a style of representation free of the complexity we were accustomed to valuing,” the painter sought a style of representation free of all that his history as a painter had taught him to revere—beauty, elegance, formal coherence, and aesthetic appeal. To set aside (or at least redefine) these particular conventions by submitting them to “a medium through which I can show myself to myself,” was his aim, as he told Ross Feld (52), a medium “corporeal” and “fleshly” that would transport him out of Art with a capital A and back into life, the “lowest of genres,” as Zuckerman describes his goal in The Anatomy Lesson. Guston’s transformation, like Kepesh’s, comprised a “leap” from thought (one who “imagines” transformation) to enactment (one who transforms himself ). In making the word flesh, Guston was fulfilling his own version of “the dream of painting” that abstract art had long been pursuing. That dream, as T. J. Clark puts it, is of a “purely visual totalization in painting—of escaping from words into seeing and being” (Farewell 253).10 The impossibility of the goal is what makes it inspiring. Indeed, Guston, fortunately, could not jettison the beauty and elegance he had earlier revered, as was manifest to anyone who saw the comprehensive fifty-year career retrospective in 2003. Here is how Guston described his own dream or “leap” beyond convention into “being”: in the sixties, he recalled in 1978, I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home . . . going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. I thought there must be some way I could do something about it. I knew ahead of me a road was laying. A very crude, inchoate road. I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid. . . . Wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt. (Qtd. Mayer 171)

This statement implies a complex psychic journey, from an immediate feeling of self-condemning helplessness in the face of grim political

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

realities (“What kind of man am I”?), a feeling exacerbated by obedience to the self-referential dictates of his aesthetic at the time, to an anticipated resolution (to “do something about it”) to occur not directly in the present but deferred—to be attained by embarking on an inward exploration to recover the wholeness of childhood (“as I was when I was a kid”). In sum, Guston runs together present and past, adult and child, political and private. And by insisting on the inseparability of domains usually kept apart he provides a clue to the density and strangeness of his late imagery: its thickly textured expressionist style and mottled color bear the weight of figures existing on multiple, entwined planes. Five years later the burned-out Zuckerman of The Anatomy Lesson would express a less complicated yearning to break free analogous to Guston’s sense of impasse: “I can’t take anymore of my inner life. . . . I’ve had it. . . . I want an active connection to life and I want it now. I want an active connection to myself. I’m sick of channeling everything into writing. I want the real thing, the thing in the raw” (AL 602, 610). These cravings announce Zuckerman’s move beyond the fussiness and fastidiousness of his adored mentor in The Ghost Writer, Lonoff, who is content to turn sentences around all day in the monastic quiet of his country house. Roth has said that The Ghost Writer “has a lot to do with Philip,” a connection explored below (qtd. Mayer 176). In The Anatomy Lesson Nathan actually abandons novel writing; Guston, before his breakthrough, toyed with abandoning painting until he found a way to reach the “raw” in and through art. “Great art happens to people,” says Kepesh, and great art happened to Guston once he escaped absorption in adjusting a red to a blue, a formalist concern that kept him feeling “split.” In breaking out to tramp a Whitmanian journey along a “very crude, inchoate road,” Guston would practice art that would itself be both action and event—what “happens to people.” This demanded a blurring of boundaries between the literal and metaphorical, life and art. Such a crossing had been the liberating goal of “action painting,” in the famous phrase of Guston’s friend Harold Rosenberg, who in 1952 coined it to describe the artist’s new relation to the canvas “as an arena in which to act.” In leaving abstraction and fashioning his own version of action painting, Guston in

249

250

|

CHAPTER 7

effect was finding space, as it were, apart from both Greenberg and Rosenberg, the two most influential, starkly opposed, proponents of abstract expressionism. And Guston called his road of escape “crude” because, finally, he wanted to make art that would expose him naked in public. “American Abstract art,” he wrote in an unpublished statement, is a “mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. . . . It is an escape from the true feelings we have, from the ‘raw,’ primitive feelings about the world—and us in it. In America.” Warming to this Whitmanic theme, Guston continues: “Where are the wooden floors—the light bulbs—the cigarette smoke? Where are the brick walls? Where is what we feel—without . . . good intentions? No, just conform to the banks— the plazas—monuments to the people who own this country—give everyone the soothing lullaby of ‘art’ ” (qtd. Mayer 170).11 Stripping off the mask and revealing oneself would not only lead to a recovery of the raw quotidian but also grant Guston his wish to “be complete again.” Robert Zaller has made an analogous point in more formal terms about Guston’s desire to fuse thought and feeling, to make the word flesh: “What Guston was attempting to produce [in his late work] is perhaps best described as an icon, an object in its own right and not merely the image of one: the pictorial equivalent, in its density and command of space, of sculptural form. . . . He wanted to create forms that would seem not pasted up on the picture plane but carved out of it. . . . His aspiration was not merely to represent the objects of his craft but to create them” (83). The technique of Guston’s late work does not emerge ex nihilo but retains evidence of his sumptuous abstractions of the fifties, as I suggested earlier, with the happy consequence that the ugliness of the rubbery limbs and heavily outlined figures is challenged and modified by being set within ample fields of lush, heavily impastoed color, often in luminous hues of pink, red, and blue. Indeed, critics regard some of Guston’s compositional arrangements as nods to his former New York school colleagues. For instance, compositions that tend toward horizontal division can be read as invoking a typical Rothko format, say, or Guston’s vertical arrangements are seen as referencing Barnett Newman. And upon these allusive compositions and fields of color Guston as if doodles into abrasive life his ragtag clown troupe out of Fellini,

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

one of his favorite directors. In symbolically defacing or deflating the high seriousness and spiritual yearning of the abstractionists (several of Rothko’s late paintings hang in a chapel in Houston), Guston is making what a critic has called “sublime ripostes to their much vaunted sublimity,” a mocking of their “easy piety” (qtd. Mayer 153). But Guston’s mockery or deflation is above all directed at himself. And in escaping high seriousness he runs into his own sense of existential dread, a mood that that will pervade his late work, turning its comedy mordant. Alluding in his last decade not only to former colleagues but to his own former style, Guston creates a dimension of self-critique and personal complicity that is disquieting and compelling, especially when we note the vehicle of this autobiographical impulse—the whitehooded Klan figure. In one of his best-known late works, The Studio, the hooded figure is painting at an easel; and what he paints is his selfportrait. In the far left corner of the studio, partially behind the white canvas being painted, are visible two rectangles, black and red, tacked on the pink wall, suggesting Guston’s earlier, abstract canvases.12 And the very presence of the Klan figure reprises in expressionist rendering imagery that dominated The Conspirators of 1930. Self-reference is the subject and action of The Studio, which layers its allusions as in Chinese boxes. “These are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind the hood” (qtd. Mayer 148). How do we understand Guston’s sense of complicity? And how to explain the return of the hood after four decades? “Maybe I’m fascinated by evil,” was Guston’s explanation (qtd. Balken 94) After all, the Klan had haunted him since he was a boy in Los Angeles. Another time he remarked: “What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot?” (qtd. Mayer 148). Guston’s insinuated sense of intimacy with evil perhaps accounts for the move from the Klan figure he depicted when an outraged leftist muralist in the thirties to the Klan selfportrait of the early seventies. But the question remains—why the shift from condemnation of, to identification with, the hooded presence? The answer inevitably returns us to the enabling premise of his late painting—his insistence on removing the “mask” and surmounting “the fear of revealing” “ ‘raw,’ primitive feelings.” The immediate paradox is

251

252

|

CHAPTER 7

that Guston “unmasks” precisely by identifying with the masked (Klan figure). This is the condition of his breakthrough back into life that at last puts an end to the “lie” of abstraction (qtd. Mayer 170). Embracing the masked is an acceptance of the past—for the Klan is a childhood memory; and his last decade stirred up powerful recollections of origin. “Oh, it is all so circular, isn’t it,” as he told Dore Ashton in 1974. He went on to say that his recent work had returned him to his youth— “all the memories. . . . I want to ‘paint’ of things long forgotten” (qtd. Mayer 12). He had not only the Klan’s but his own masks to remember and paint. Guston’s descent into memory recovers both the truth of the mask and the truth that he masked, or, more precisely, the truths he masked: he was born Philip Goldstein, the son an immigrant Russian Jew from Odessa. His father, a failed, depressed junkman in Los Angeles, committed suicide, and eleven-year-old Philip discovered the body hanging by a rope in a shed. The traumatic family history he occasionally mentioned to close friends; the fact of Jewishness he and his wife kept close. His own daughter did not know about “Goldstein” until she was in college; as Musa Mayer notes in her memoir, I was “more shocked by the concealment than I was by the change itself ” (22). I later knew, says Musa, “that my father had felt tremendous regret about having changed his name, that in his eyes it had been a shameful, cowardly act” (229). In 1976 Guston asked Dore Ashton, who was writing the first biographical study of him, not to mention his parentage or ethnicity. But four years later he was delighted when Ross Feld, in a catalog essay, wrote that the painter was born Philip Goldstein. So in the last year of his life the secret was finally, officially, made public. Comments Feld: “he’d always felt awful about the name change, he explained to me, and now at long last it was time to admit it in public” (91). Philip had erased Goldstein at the age of twenty-two, an act coincident with moving, at Pollock’s urging, to New York. Not long before the move, the brother he was closest to had died in a car accident. After moving east he seldom saw his mother or any other family. “He even went so far as to repaint the signatures on some of his early paintings,” his daughter notes (Mayer 22). She wonders: “Was my father—heroic figure that he was to me then—in some way ashamed of being Jewish? . . . Or

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

was he after something else entirely, a sort of assumed identity, like the masked children in the paintings of the forties?” (22). Her second guess—that he was after “something else entirely”—seems probable. For the “darkly, Jewishly, Don Juanishly handsome” Guston was not really casting himself in that familiar melodrama of the deracinated Jew passing as Gentile (S 134). His speech was full of Yiddishisms, he observed some Jewish holidays, “and had no problem,” said Feld, “about seeing as well as presenting himself as a doubt-ridden cerebral Jew painter” (92). So his self-naming seemed to have another purpose than passing. The deck-clearing move to sever ties and go east was Guston’s version of “the drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving,” as Roth writes of Coleman Silk, with whom Guston shares, if not passing, a passion for self-invention. And the painter’s quite understandable need to “start fresh . . . to free himself from the past” of “enormous grief,” as his daughter put it, had something of what Roth called the “energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands” (Mayer 23; HS 342). Some of this severity (if not “cruelty”) emerges in an unpublished autobiographical reflection that Guston composed two years before his death (and published by his daughter in her 1986 memoir) in which he recalls as a boy hiding from his family in a closet illuminated by a single lightbulb: “It was so good to be away. I was happy in my sanctuary. When I was seventeen, I left home and went to the other side of the continent. After a lifetime, I still have never been able to escape my family. It is true that I paint now in a larger closet; much, much larger with many lights. Yet nothing has changed in all this time. It is still a struggle to be hidden and feel strange—my favorite mood. Or to put it more precisely, to live my life as a stranger or to be vacuumed up by family. Such a choice. To breathe or not to breathe” (qtd. Mayer 24). Especially in these final sentences with their harsh opposition between death within family and “life as a stranger,” are remarkable echoes of Coleman Silk’s “hunger to leave the house and be transformed. To become a new being. To bifurcate” (HS 342). As Coleman and Guston both discovered, the tidiness of this “choice” is illusory, as is the purification ritual of making a fresh start; both are bound to become stained in the final act of the drama.

253

254

|

CHAPTER 7

Philip Goldstein’s reinvention as Philip Guston was less a way to pass as Gentile than to live his life as a “stranger,” a status that not only helped cloak painful origins from public view but allowed him to live the freedom of artifice—masking—that in an artist can enlarge the imagination’s empathic reach. Masking is second nature—this is the truth that If This Be Not I (Guston’s most famous early work) proposes in both its title and its group portrait of ragtag children costuming themselves, as they push back against the pressure of the surrounding urban squalor. Masking also encourages what for Guston counts as the precious aesthetic quality of strangeness. “Their work is strange, and will never become familiar,” he said of his revered predecessors Picasso and de Chirico (qtd. Mayer 233). Guston insured strangeness in his own work by making obsessive imagery saturated in associations and meanings past and present, public and private, a mixing he produced in the act of painting; only then might he elude the recognizable. As he told Harold Rosenberg, one produces the “simply and only recognizable” by painting with a “preconceived” image in mind: “the artist had a thought and proceeded to paint the thought. . . . The trouble with recognizable art is that it excludes too much. . . . I want my work to include . . . doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognizing it” (qtd. Ashton 131–32). Guston seeks to be open to the conflicting motives to mask and reveal, to lower the guard of the preconceived and let the uncalculated emerge: “It’s the unsettling of the image that I want” (qtd. H. Cooper 61). In his final decade Guston’s unsettled imagery registers the return of the repressed: what he had severed himself from becomes the raw material, the stockpile of images, into which he will delve and impose form. To the (literal and figurative) corpses he left behind in California—his father and brother (who died of gangrene with his legs mangled)—he added the corpse of his mother, upon whom he shut the door when he moved east. All three helped form the stacks of bodies and legs and heads ubiquitous in his late work. This is part of the anonymous urban wasteland of clutter and “crapola” that defines Guston’s new world, which, appropriately enough, derives from and honors his junkcollecting father. That ghost presides as if the tutelary spirit of this harried world where figures huddle in the blackness of night at the rising

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

water’s edge. And in making the studio the epicenter of this teeming mess, Guston symbolically revisits the closet, the originary site of solitary estrangement and creativity. But the closet/studio also mutates into the shed of his father’s suicide, his act of hanging symbolized by a naked hanging lightbulb and chain, imagery that dangles down in nearly every Klan painting situated indoors, sometimes displaced into the elongated pole of a lamp or the hanging cord from a window shade, as in By the Window of 1969. This relatively uncluttered painting is eerily death haunted; the hooded Klansman sits facing us in a wooden chair in front of a window, his thick right hand holding the ubiquitous smoking cigar, the left hand cradling his towering, tilted, robed head, its black outline thickening markedly around the throat and neck, as if a rope or noose has been placed there and its pressure has produced the head’s leftward tilt. Accentuating the impression of a noose is the dangling window cord hanging above the sloping head as if continuous with the heavy black rope suggested at the base of the neck. Much of the sitting Klansman’s white-robed trunk is left unpainted on the right to further tip our attention to his sloping, left-leaning posture. The implication of a rope echoes The Conspirators of 1930, where a thick rope looms in the background, hanging over a wooden post, as massively robed Klansmen stand conferring in the foreground. Behind the back of one of them, pushed closest to the viewer’s immediate vision, hangs another rope dangling from a truncheon in his fist. Ropes and masked malevolent men are much on the mind of the seventeen-year-old Guston, just as they will be five decades later. His last years unpack all the grieving that had been buried, as Sabbath unpacks his dead brother’s box of mementoes and wends his weeping way along the Jersey shore. The painter’s “unsettling” of the image is, ultimately, grounded in paradox, for it is achieved by closing the circle and gaining “wholeness.”13 “I really love only strangeness, but here is another pile of old shoes and rags, in a corner of a brick wall—in front, a sidewalk. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it before, but I forgot” (qtd. Mayer 12). This statement blurs together familiarity amid strangeness, expressing Guston’s mixed impulses: to engage his “raw” and “primitive” feelings about the past,

255

256

|

CHAPTER 7

including his sense of “badness” and shame, while estranging those feelings through the mediation of form. Guston distributes this double impulse—to distance and to reveal—in the two signature images of his last decade: the masked hoods and the bodiless, raw head. The masked Klan figures initiate the change in Guston’s style but depart by 1973, as if they have accomplished their purpose—the vehicle for representing his sense of guilt and complicity about his painful past. Thus Guston in effect works through to a psychic resolution. No longer needing to wear the mask, he drops it, revealing the nakedness beneath. Exposed is the primitive, battered, shaved head, an image that had appeared as early as the late sixties but which now will come to the fore. The head, “more helpless than a fallen infant yet as dangerous as an exploded grenade,” is “not the unique locus of subjectivity in a world of objects but an object itself,” says Robert Zaller. “Unmasked, the hidden head reveals everything and nothing . . . a peeled surface that is nothing more than raw exposure, unhealed wound. There is nothing more to seek: what lies beneath can only be deeper wound” (88). “I felt flayed. I felt as though the skin had been peeled away from half my body. Half my face had been peeled away.” So declares Amy Bellette/Anne Frank in the “fiction” Nathan creates of the writer who survives with an agonized sense of vulnerability and “seething passion” and returns as an “avenging ghost” (GW 152, 157, 148). Guston’s head returns us to The Ghost Writer, published a year before the painter’s death. “In the world,” Roth told Musa Mayer, “they all thought” Malamud or Singer was the model for Lonoff, but actually “The Ghost Writer has a lot to do with Philip” (qtd. Mayer 176). “And certainly I thought of Musa” and “their situation. I did know something about being alone with a mate and this art obsession. It’s like being a religious zealot.” The parallel between Guston and his wife Musa’s isolation up in Woodstock and Lonoff ’s relentless practice of his solitary craft as Hope Lonoff grows increasingly miserable goes only so far. Unlike Lonoff, Guston had a wonderful gregariousness that was entwined, remarked Roth, with a “terrible loneliness. It was crushing. He was alone in his work. . . . He couldn’t leave the cave in which he hibernated because his nerves were too subtle for the travail outside. He was too wounded” (qtd. Mayer 176–77). Guston had long made his wound the fount of his art;

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

indeed Leo Steinberg, in a famous description of Guston’s 1950s abstractions, described his palette as a “narrow range of shades of red. . . . Color of blood; not of blood spilled or smeared, but still investing the live tissue, lying bare here like a universe expanded from a surgeon’s cut” (283). That bloody universe is the domain of both his abstract and figurative work and is where Head (1975) resides; Guston bathes the head in dark blood and sets it freestanding and solitary in profile upon a soft pink horizontal plane, the contrast accentuating its serenity and starkness; above it hovers a bloody sky. The bleeding wound out of which Guston makes his messy, visceral art, abstract and figurative, is what distinguishes him from Lonoff and what aligns him with Anne Frank. Lonoff embodies an antiseptic maturity; the renunciation that rules his circumscribed life extends to his art: “the tiniest impulse toward amplitude or self-surrender, let alone intrigue or adventure” felt by his characters, is “peremptorily extinguished by the ruling triumvirate of Sanity, Responsibility and SelfRespect” (GW 15). The older writer inspires young Nathan’s reverence, prompting in this “highbrow-in-training” a “son’s girlish love for the man of splendid virtue.” He adores his mentor’s “scrupulosity” and “severity” and “relentless winnowing out” of the rapacious, insatiable self (56). With his hero worship a shield to deflect the hunger of his own ambition and rage at his own father, Nathan is paralyzed by idealization. He leaves it to his scandalous invention—Anne Frank passing as Amy Bellette—to embody a counterself to Lonoff ’s frozen maturity and to release in her torrential monologue the infantile, uncensored self of maximal receptivity that is the lifeblood of creation for both Roth and Guston. To create this counterself of immaturity is to take the “leap” and “make the word flesh” (to recall David Kepesh’s words), to incarnate, that is, the wound and the rage and the exposure that nurtures art’s capacity to trigger change—both in the maker and in the beholder (or reader). In sum, The Ghost Writer “has a lot to do with Philip” because it honors what Guston achieved coincident with his friendship with Roth—a counterself that was the condition for renovating his art, a counterself discernible in the words Roth gives Anne Frank—a “motherless, fatherless . . . half-flayed, seething thing.” The novelist observed firsthand

257

258

|

CHAPTER 7

Guston’s struggle to live in Lonoffian isolation and obsession while finding a way to make very un-Lonoffian art. In 1974 Guston excitedly wrote Dore Ashton: “I must quote you something from an essay by Evgeny Zamyatin: ‘No revolution, no heresy, is comfortable and easy. Because it is a leap, it is a rupture of the smooth evolutionary curve and a rupture is a wound, a pain. But it is a necessary wound: most people . . . do not have the strength to wound themselves . . . to come out into the open air and start anew.’ ” Guston adds: “I jumped out of my skin, as you can imagine, when I read this” (qtd. Ashton 183–84). Roth also likely heard these lines from Guston; and observing as well the flayed head in the paintings and also his wounded friend’s resurgence, the novelist let these impressions partly inspire his own heresy—hauling saintly Anne Frank back from the dead, enraged. The Ghost Writer pays tribute to Guston as Lonoff/Anne, but his richest appropriation of the painter had to wait as Roth matured into a deeper immaturity. This immaturity, which would uneasily mingle extravagance and effacement, commenced in the next decade. First were the tentative steps, in The Anatomy Lesson, of Zuckerman’s own repudiation of Lonoffian restraint. But Nathan’s schtick-based antics were too close to the bad-boy antics of Portnoy to make The Anatomy Lesson a new departure. Going forward seemed to require something of the rupture that Guston had made. Roth’s “solution,” as we know, was to make of his very dilemma the subject of a novel. The Counterlife enacts that rupture, upending the conventions of the realist novel while marking a farewell to the raucous domestic comedy of Zuckerman family life by opening out (via Henry’s hegira) to the larger historical context of self and collective remaking that counterlife incites. The Counterlife’s renunciations in turn set the stage for Zuckerman’s self-abnegation in the American trilogy. Age of course assists this effacement, for Nathan has long since outlived the uproarious narcissism of his youth and, now solitary, has turned himself into a recording instrument, a “receptacle,” as if heeding Uncle Asher’s plea from long ago. “You have got to be a receptacle,” urged Asher; be a “tube with no plugs at either end,” as he had described his surmounting of the clutching self maniacally imposing its designs upon experience (LG 83). Fidelity to the act of capacious listening allows Nathan to bring to imaginative life the

T H E T WO P H I L I P S

|

stories of Coleman Silk, Swede Levov, Ira and Murray Ringold. Although Sabbath’s Theater dispenses with Zuckerman, Mickey Sabbath’s emotional and literal nakedness continues Roth’s commitment to empathic receptivity. Since Patrimony (1991) and reaching a climax in Everyman (2006), death has been a palpable presence throughout Roth’s corpus and inspires a rare pitch of imaginative daring in Sabbath’s Theater and The Human Stain. Sabbath is a sustained dirge and in The Human Stain Nathan’s graveside epiphany summons him to tell Coleman’s tale. The preponderance of loss seems to release in the novelist an unprecedented energy to explore a long-pondered legacy, one variously embodied and imparted by Uncle Asher, Anne Frank, and most viscerally, urgently, by Philip Guston: the letting go of propriety in the face of aging and death, the unmasking that reveals the flayed self as an open channel attuned to otherness. In engaging this richest mode of immaturity one accepts Guston’s “necessary wound” and embraces the “raw I” of the young Coleman Silk. The phrase at first comprised his emblem of “impregnability” but migrates by the novel’s end to the naked opposite, and this reversal from closed to open epitomizes the crucial move in late Roth. In both novels Roth retains his signature sexual rawness but complicates it: sexuality mingles with death, and both join with grieving to create an intensity, even urgency, of passion laced with stoicism that brings adults together. Even Nathan starts dancing—with Coleman. At last in Roth’s work, sex is released from the largely solitary adolescent register to which it had been long confined and opens into some approximation of love: Coleman and Faunia, Sabbath and Drenka. “Every third thought shall be my grave” is the epigraph from The Tempest that heads Sabbath. But the sense of ending is leavened by an exhilarated exuberance amid desolation, qualities that suffused the painter’s last decade as well. By 2000, the “self-subversion” that Guston and Roth had practiced years before to regenerate their art had, for the novelist, at last found its drastic, appropriate form.

259

Coda “The stars are indispensable”

U

ncle Asher, as readers hardly need to be told by now, is Roth’s most reverberant character in my view, and thus perhaps an inevitable figure to help conclude this study. We have just heard his plea for openendedness. It turns out that his celebration of the “flow” rather than the “bottling” of experience is part of a larger effort: “What I’m in favor of is getting back in tune a little bit with nature,” he tells his nephew Paul Herz (LG 429). Asher waxes cosmic about his gospel of serenity: “I’m talking about taking a nice Oriental attitude for yourself. . . . Ungrasping. Undesperate. Tragic. Private. Proportioned. So on down the line. . . . Nobody owes nobody nothing. That’s the slogan over the Garden of Eden. That’s what’s stamped on all our cells. . . . The first principle you should never forget” (429–30). Invoking a “nice Oriental attitude,” Asher seems almost to be pointing to Buddhism as the source of his view that looks beyond local and “circumstantial thinking” to what he calls “universals.” To Paul, his twenty-three-year-old anguished, guilty nephew on the verge of divorce, his uncle seems to be advocating a “withdrawal of people from people. A kind of moral isolationism.” Murray Ringold makes more or less the same accusation against Nathan at the end of I Married a Communist. Murray asks his exstudent why he lives alone up in the Berkshires: “why don’t you have the heart for the world?” He doesn’t buy Nathan’s answer that he prefers solitude—“I don’t think for a moment the exuberance is gone,” Murray retorts—and urges him to “get out from under whatever’s the problem. To give in to the temptation to yield isn’t smart” (315). For Murray, to submit to the “temptation to yield” is to lose oneself in the

“ T H E S TA R S A R E I N D I S P E N S A B L E ”

|

“utopia of the shack in the woods.” But yielding also suggests something other than rustic oblivion; it echoes the perennial aspiration in Roth that Uncle Asher first announced—of letting life flow, becoming ungrasping and undesperate, in attunement with nature. As if (once again) heeding Asher, Nathan reanimates this cosmic context in the novel’s final pages. If letting go begins in bodily release, it ends in the starry firmament. After leaving Murray for the last time and with their final exchange— “ ‘tell me what it is.’ ‘What what is?’ ‘Your aloneness’ ”—lingering in his mind, Zuckerman settles on the deck of his house and remains there till dawn, reflecting on his new fascination with astronomy. His implicit answer to Murray is that his “aloneness,” his yielding, is not a stunting of life but its vast enlargement, a letting go of “everything but what was needed to live on and to work with,” and attainment of a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. He has learned to chart “antiquity’s great constellations” with the help of the “Sky Watch” column in the Sunday New York Times: “soon that was all I cared to look at in that thumping loaf of newsprint and pictures,” and soon he discards the rest of the paper and then the daily Times as well (321). Untethered to man-made temporal markers, he spends each night, weather permitting, lost in the stars, looking at them before going to bed. He recalls anew that as a boy his mother told him when people die they go up to the sky and live forever as stars. Recollecting this fantasy of immortality triggers the epiphany that comprises the novel’s final paragraph; Zuckerman inventories the novel’s main characters, nearly all of them tormented and deluded and resentful when alive, and now all dead. In death, they are “free of the traps set for them by their era.” Then he turns to the stars: Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. . . . There is no betrayal. There is no idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience nor its absence. . . . There is no discrimination or lynching or Jim Crow, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice. . . . There is just the furnace of Ira and the furnace of Eve [his former wife] burning at twenty million degrees. . . . What you see

261

262

|

CODA

from this silent rostrum up on my mountain on a night as splendidly clear as that night Murray left me for good . . . is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand. The stars are indispensable.

This passage—lyrical, cosmic, tender—is unlike any in Roth’s oeuvre, a moment of equilibrium and calm, of “getting back in tune a little with nature,” to borrow Asher’s words. The moment crystallizes into powerful relief Nathan’s mood of self-surrender and release that presides over the American trilogy. And it anticipates the “pure and peaceful” wintry tableau that concludes The Human Stain. But unlike that later scene, where murderous intimations bubble beneath the serene surface, this is neither an ironic nor a pastoral moment. Here Nathan gains access to a vision in which error and antagonism have ceased, avoiding pastoral’s regression to harmonious oneness, because among the stars he transcends the human and the anthropomorphic, leaving behind any comforting semblance of one’s own image engraved on the nature of things.1 Where Uncle Asher looked to something resembling Buddhism, Zuckerman and his creator turn to another system of thought that decenters the human perspective with its striving to control nature. Without mentioning him by name, Roth approaches the radical immanence of Spinoza. Spinoza strips the universe of such man-made projections as purposes, goals, obligations, trends, in effect enlarging to cosmic dimensions Emerson’s insight that the “frame of things preaches indifferency.” Or, as Asher bluntly put the demystified, “ungrasping” “Oriental attitude”: “Nobody owes nobody nothing.” God neither hates nor loves mankind and is unmoved by our hate or love of him. In the monism of Spinoza’s “divine substance” God and Nature are one. “The knowledge of God just is the knowledge of Nature in its broadest dimension” (Nadler 189). Human beings are merely finite modes of nature, entirely subject to its laws, and Nature is indifferent that we are part of it. “Everything that is, is natural . . . there are no natural ends, and hence

“ T H E S TA R S A R E I N D I S P E N S A B L E ”

|

in particular there is no end natural to man,” as Leo Strauss notes of Spinoza (156). The Promethean urge to dominate, extolled by Descartes and Bacon, evaporates in Spinoza and with it goes entrapment in the “dialectic of Enlightenment.” Instead of pursuing the boomeranging drive to master nature, we should seek to understand our embeddeness within it. Equanimity in the face of indifference is to be desired. Spinoza attaches to nature neither beauty nor ugliness, neither order nor confusion, good nor evil. These qualities do not exist in nature, are not real in themselves, but are human creations, products of our imagination (the source of anthropomorphic projection that breeds belief in revealed religion and other superstitions). Hence the impossibility, in Spinoza’s universe, of an exclusionary logic of contrast (the Jews, therefore, are not a chosen people), whose basic paradigm of identity/difference foments envy and resentment and fuels racism (“there is no discrimination or lynching or Jim Crow, nor has there ever been”).2 In inscribing the laws of God not in the Bible but in nature, in annulling the transcendental separation between man and God, Spinoza’s immanence eliminates invidious contrasts and all other forms of hierarchy with their production of envy. Between mind and body, for instance, Spinoza finds that “there is no incompatibility and no competition”; they are “both valid and indispensable” systems of explanation; “each is independent of the other and complete in itself ” (Hampshire, qtd. Smith 85). What results, to borrow Roth’s words, is “the colossal spectacle of no antagonism.” The irony that Roth, of all people, is upholding “no antagonism” as an ideal is counterintuitive, understandable as a glimpse at a metaphysics largely alien to his fictive world and for that reason compelling. It is a metaphysics, as Spinoza says in his Ethics, that is useful in our social relations, for it teaches us neither to hate, despise, ridicule, nor to be angry nor envious. Above all it teaches contentment with what one has. Hatred and guilt, for Spinoza the “two archenemies of the human race,” hasten man’s “internal death”; as an antidote, his philosophy offers “a new vision, a new appetite for living,” says Gilles Deleuze. He adds: “In the reproach that Hegel will make to Spinoza, that he ignored

263

264

|

CODA

the negative and its power, lies the glory and innocence of Spinoza” (12–13). No wonder Nietzsche saluted him as a “precursor,” remarking “my solitude . . . is at least a dualitude” (qtd. Yovel 105). The Spinozist quality of Zuckerman’s solitude and his epiphany that I have been arguing for is not what critics had in mind when they dubbed Roth early in his career the Jewish American Spinoza for betraying the Jews and being excommunicated by “self-appointed Guardians of the Jewish heritage”—Irving Howe among them (Omer-Sherman 193). In Operation Shylock George Ziad, a Palestinian intellectual and formerly a suave graduate school friend of Roth’s now given to mammoth rants, says to the novelist that “the conspiracy against you in the Jewish press began at the beginning and has barely let up to this day, a smear campaign the likes of which has befallen no Jewish writer since Spinoza. Do I exaggerate?” (OS 136). In The Facts Roth describes his Yeshiva debate (which Ellison attended) as his “excommunication” (F 127). Roth’s alleged crime, beginning with “Defender of the Faith,” was said to be the propagation of vicious anti-Semitic stereotypes worthy of the Nazis.3 The reasons for Roth’s excommunication turn out to bear rich Spinozist affinities in ways ignored at the time. As his hymn to the stars suggests, Roth is compelled by and salutes the philosopher’s equanimity in the face of cosmic indifference. As well, Spinoza’s radical thinking set him outside the moderate mainstream Enlightenment of Newton, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. Spinoza and his followers “sought to demolish the foundations of Revelation, authority, and tradition while at the same time consciously undermining the legitimacy of monarchy and aristocracy. The ultimate goal of its endeavors, its very raison d’etre, was to emancipate society and the individual from bogus bonds of authority and by doing so reinstate human liberty” (Israel 703). Throughout Europe, Spinoza’s naturalism was a scandalous, forbidden philosophy whose ethical relativism was eagerly adopted by a panoply of thinkers to sponsor philosophical and erotic libertinism. For those grappling with such questions as “why live in dread of divine retribution for profligacy, adultery, and debauchery if one can live entirely free of remorse and dread of the day of judgment?” Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom proved invaluable (Israel 66). Roth’s sexual outrageousness and pleasure in effrontery are born of this rude severance from authority.

“ T H E S TA R S A R E I N D I S P E N S A B L E ”

|

The preceding claim is not as exaggerated as it sounds. For Spinoza’s influence was pervasive thanks to his status as not simply a philosopher but as a cultural icon. As Steven Smith remarks, he was an icon “on whom novelists and poets could project all the aspirations of modernity. . . . From Bialystock to the Bronx, Spinoza came to symbolize the emancipated or secular Jew, free from tradition and authority, determined to live life on its own terms” (xxv–vi). Particularly avid Spinozists were those whom Isaac Deutscher famously described as nonJewish Jews—Heine, Marx, Freud, among others. Roth belongs to the American branch of this party, as does Saul Bellow, whose Herzog writes to Spinoza. Spinoza’s naturalism also underwrites (unlike Nietzsche) the commitment of his political thought to liberal democracy. He was the first philosopher, notes Leo Strauss, “who was both a democrat and a liberal” (155). Unlike Hobbes, who views nature as the violent antithesis of civil society, Spinoza regards nature as a model of democratic equality; in nature no one is set above others. And “democracy is declared better than monarchy and aristocracy because it is the ‘most natural form of state, approaching most closely to that freedom which Nature grants to every man’ ” (Israel 271). The liberal state will be neither Christian nor Jewish. In his eloquent preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Leo Strauss sketched the consequences for culture and religion in the late eighteenth century under the impact of Spinoza’s naturalist democratic liberalism: He showed the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of Church . . . whose rulers were not priests or pastors, but philosophers and artists. . . . The new Church would transform Jews and Christians into human beings— into human beings of a certain kind: cultured human beings, human beings who because they possessed science and art, did not need religion in addition. The new society . . . emancipated the Jews in Germany. Spinoza became the symbol of that emancipation which was to be not only emancipation but secular redemption. (156)

Spinoza’s cultural ideal of Jewish emancipation, later called bildung, is not one that Strauss is endorsing; indeed the ideal became intensely

265

266

|

CODA

controversial in light of its hideous betrayals in Germany of the 1930s. But from his summary we can discern the lineaments of the modern secular ideal of cosmopolitanism that abolishes hierarchy and invidious contrast and the rival clash of identity claims. This ideal is partly why Karl Jaspers called Spinoza “the first human being to attempt to become a citizen of the world” (Jaspers and Arendt 139).4 In other words, Spinoza adumbrates for the liberal state something approximating the “kingdom of culture” ideal of equal access and free appropriation that is precious to Ellison and to Roth. Comprising that global literary space, to recall Roth’s phrase about the Newark library, was “property held in common for the common good,” and he regarded “the idea of a public library” as the most “civilizing” of notions (RMO 217). Those wags who branded the novelist after Portnoy the “Baruch Spinoza of the spermatozoa” spoke more than they knew.

Notes

Preface 1. In addition, immaturity and rudeness are artful, impersonal strategies in other domains. For instance, in professional basketball, a black player may refuse “to play the part of a nice guy who puts white people at ease,” and some observers (often white) celebrate this “being bad” as a liberating trashing of bourgeois decorum. For one such celebrant, according to Stanley Crouch in The Artificial White Man, “ ‘fuck you attitudes’ and ‘cool’ are the ultimate achievements,” the expression of a “willful adolescence” : “ ‘he [the rude player] is as bad as we’d like to be, if we ever got good at being bad.’ ” Crouch calls this extolling of black rudeness a primitivism that, among other offenses, relies on a simplistic equation of the middle class with an ethos of “overweening sweetness.” This ignores “an alternative vision of middle-class vitality” that, Crouch argues, is founded, for instance, on recovery of the vigor of vulgarity that “Jews and others may have lost in the transition from the peasantry to the bourgeoisie.” This recovered “vibrancy” encourages “a way of facing life that could provide richer ways of resisting exterior boredom and sterility than retreating into adolescence” (85, 88). In effect, what Crouch is suggesting here is a creative immaturity (as opposed to “willful adolescence”) that earlier he calls “grace.” The word emerges in a discussion of The Human Stain that I quote from in chapter 6. Crouch’s “grace” is akin to what I will be calling (following Roth) “being game.” 2. In 2000, Roth compared the regionalism of Faulkner and Saul Bellow, and his account, stressing as it does a wariness of the traps of ethnic and regional particularism while acknowledging its power to engender “impassioned” prose, clearly applies to Roth’s own career. Noting that Bellow’s literary appropriation of Chicago occurred only in his third novel (as Faulkner took several novels to work up to Yoknapatawpha County), Roth writes: “I wonder if at the outset Bellow shied away from seizing Chicago as his because he didn’t want to be known as a Chicago writer, any more, perhaps, than he wanted to be known as a Jewish writer. Yes, you’re from Chicago, and of course you’re a Jew—but how these things are going to figure in your work, or if they should figure at all, isn’t easy to puzzle out right off. Besides, you have other ambitions, inspired by your European masters . . . and such ambitions don’t include writing about the neighbors gabbing on the back porch” (S 159).

268

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S x i i i – x v i i i

3. Speaking of Roth’s critics, here I will mention three books on the novelist that are happy exceptions to the pigeonholing inclination, though their interests are very different from mine. See those by Hermione Lee, Mark Shechner, and Debra Shostak. The last two contain extensive bibliographical information as well. 4. As chapter 3 discusses, Leslie Fiedler used the term “post-modern” in 1965 to designate the youth culture and the taste for extremity that marked its literary sensibility. 5. For another view of these complicated matters that can only be sketched here, see Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets. She argues that the 1970s represented only a “modest blossoming of experimentalism in American high literature” that soon “faded in the face of the pressing need, during the 1970s, to identify and manage social change via fiction . . . to organize, explain, describe and ultimately control the events of this confusing time . . . [and to] smooth the integration of these potentially explosive tendencies into mainstream American culture” (84). From this pattern of domestication she excepts Toni Morrison’s magical realism—reduced to a “marker of ethnicity”—and Pynchon. I think Nelson simplifies in order to advance her larger (more interesting) thesis that representations of religious and transcendental experience are taboo in American high culture (characterized as vigilantly pragmatist, rationalist, and realist) and relegated to mass entertainment, which becomes the feverish site of displaced religious impulse. 6. John Barth, for instance, in the early eighties remarked of Roth: he seems “to rush back into the arms of nineteenth-century middle-class realism as if the first half of the twentieth century hadn’t happened” (qtd. Shostak, Philip Roth 296). Evidently, Barth had missed The Breast (1972), a Kafkaesque fable, and The Great American Novel (1973); the latter’s foregrounding of linguistic exuberance at the expense of representation makes it arguably Roth’s one sustained embrace of antirealism and also his weakest book. 7. One should also be skeptical of Roth’s claims that The Counterlife owed nothing to postmodern experimentalism. A balanced view of the matter is James Wood’s in a recent piece on the contemporary (and perennially embattled) status of American realism: Roth’s novel was “an unexpected testament to the success of avant-gardism” and “took just what it needed from postmodern narrative games in order to make a fundamentally metaphysical argument about the different ways of living, and narrating, a life” (23). 8. To be fair to Bellow, his last novel, Ravelstein (2000), was an often brilliant and warmly elegiac portrait of friendship. 9. For instance, in his recent Everyman Roth rewrites the medieval morality play of the same name. 10. To be carried away by “rhapsody” returns us to Plato; in Ion he stresses that the “rhapsodist,” who stands between the poet and the audience, relaying the poem, is “carried out of ” himself in transport when he chants, a letting go of personal identity that inspires his hearers also to be “carried out” of themselves (221). This self-transport, akin to what Roth calls “letting go,” expresses the root motive and power of art for Roth, as we will see in several of the following chapters. I am grateful to Gregg Crane for the Plato reference.

N O T E S T O PA G E S 4 – 8

|

Chapter 1 1. The Romantic cult of childhood, notes Roger Shattuck in his classic The Banquet Years, challenged subsequent generations to revaluate “the very idea of maturity.” And “after romanticism, and starting long before Freud, a mood developed which reexamined with a child’s candor our most basic values: beauty, morality, reason, learning, law” (31). Shattuck examines the careers of four exemplars (Henri Rousseau, Alfred Jarry, Eric Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire) of the fin de siècle French avant-garde, an epoch that “had begun to revise its concept of maturity” and devalued “adult qualities of self-control” (31). I touch on Jarry again in chapter 7. Bohemianism, which begins in France in the 1830s and thus historically precedes the avant-garde, has been described in terms of Erik Erikson’s concept of “moratorium,” a “temporary release from the demands of social maturation,” as Jerrold Seigel has noted (56). 2. That the cosmopolitan has the power to unsettle is evident, for instance, in a bit of verbal jousting in The Portrait of a Lady: “He’s what’s called a cosmopolite,” Isabel Archer says of Ralph Touchett, her expatriate cousin, to her friend Henrietta Stackpole, who is impatient with Ralph’s suave elusiveness in response to her demand of identity (does he consider himself American or English). But Isabel’s explanation only exacerbates Henrietta’s qualms. Pondering cosmopolite, the stern American moralist Miss Stackpole replies: “That means he’s a little of everything and not much of any,” as if by definition the cosmopolite evades definition (81). I discuss some contemporary theories and practices of the cosmopolitan in an article, “The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism.” 3. This mode and lineage of black antiproprietary cosmopolitanism is the subject of my Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. For a critique of assimilation along the lines I indicate see Philip Fisher, Still the New World. Ironically, in his afterword to his turn-of-the-century play The Melting Pot, which is usually read as offering, in its titular image, the most famous paradigm of sacrificial assimilation, the author Israel Zangwill highlights appropriation: “the process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished” (qtd. Bornstein 13). This part of Zangwill has, alas, been largely ignored. 4. Cosmopolitanism is usually assumed to express a leisure class dilettantism. This assumption is historically suspect. As historian Peter Brown has noted, as early as the second-century Roman Empire, cosmopolitanism flourished not among the aristocracy and governing classes, “who prided themselves on preserving the ancient particularities of their home-towns,” but among the striving lower classes seeking “wider horizons,” “humbler men” who welcomed “the erosion of local differences through trade and emigration, and the weakening of ancient barriers” (60). 5. The image of James sketched here is the subject of my The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity.

269

270

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 0 – 1 6

6. To clarify: Descartes “is a founder of modern individualism, because his theory throws the individual thinker back on his own responsibility” (Taylor 182). Descartes’s “science of the subject in its general essence” interrogates itself to discover universal criteria. Antithetical to this aim and method is Montaigne’s mode of individualism, which seeks, says Charles Taylor, “to identify the individual in his or her unrepeatable difference” (182). Montaigne was one of Emerson’s intellectual heroes, as chapter 2 discusses. There we will return to the divergences between Descartes and Montaigne. 7. It should be added that in the same letter, Emerson concedes that by the end of life understanding will have proved to be the more reliable bearer of truth. My bare sketch leaves out the often observed fact that Emerson’s use of reason misunderstands Kant’s notion, a perhaps inevitable result of Emerson’s reliance on Coleridge’s own misunderstanding. But as Barbara Packer notes, “few of Coleridge’s American readers knew The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), and most were happy to use Coleridge’s terms as if they were Kant’s” (355). See Packer for a splendid intellectual history of the period. See also Lawrence Buell (61) on Emerson, Coleridge, and Kant, and David Van Leer (4–5) for a summary of how commentators have described Emerson’s misuses of Kant. 8. As Joan Richardson vividly puts it: Emerson “restored to the ‘aesthetic’ theorized by Kant the body and blood it had when the Greeks uttered ‘aisthenomai’: I feel, sense” (“Emerson’s Moving Pictures,” 15; manuscript). 9. In addition to the Huck and Isabel modes of immaturity is what Roth calls “being game” (see chapter 6), which combines insouciance (Huck) and immersion (Isabel) with intimate engagement. 10. Note the following caveat borrowed from a commentator on Adorno: “Nothing is wrong in abstraction itself; it is a necessary feature of any conceptual practice. However, when the results of abstraction are . . . reified as independent, then the forms of knowing and reasoning that result are themselves a mastering of the object, approaching the object as nothing other than what the concept determines it to be, hence as merely a token or case or example of what is already known” (Bernstein 203). Adorno’s critique of abstraction is strikingly akin, as I have shown elsewhere, to William James’s notion of “vicious intellectualism”; both men are describing the workings of scientism and modernization, two of the forces that incite the counterthrust of artistic modernism. 11. Chapter 2 continues constructing a constellation that gathers around “immaturity” in Western intellectual history. Here I will list two precursors to Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment. Most familiar is Freud’s 1939 analysis of the discontents of the unhappy consciousness in civilization; Freud, in turn, is drawing on Hegel and especially Nietzsche. The latter notes: “Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects . . . all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought!” (Genealogy 62). Each posits his own version of the dialectic of Enlightenment. In response to postmodern critiques of Enlightenment, contemporary intellectual historians warn of the dubiousness of assuming a single project—specifically the rationalizing project of Descartes and Bacon—to be the essence of the Enlightenment. The “mainstream of

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 7 – 1 8

|

the European Enlightenment,” notes Mark Lilla, was “skeptical about inflated claims for reason, pessimistic about its power to change the human condition, and preoccupied with its contradictions” (5). Major recent works by Jonathan Israel (Radical Enlightenment), Sankar Muthu (Enlightenment against Empire), and J.G.A. Pocock (Barbarism and Religion) present a much more variegated Enlightenment. 12. The subject of immaturity and women and minority writers is complex, and my discussion is only a sketch that might be revised and enlarged in various directions. 13. The vexed relation of women to maturity is evident in Kant’s 1784 benchmark definition, quoted earlier, of Enlightenment as “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity.” He goes on: “Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and the courage to use it without the guidance of another. . . . Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men . . . gladly remain immature for life and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians” (58). The “entire fairer sex,” notes Kant, is discouraged by these guardians from taking “the step to maturity.” As scholars have pointed out, unlike our word immaturity, the German word for immaturity has primarily a legal, not a psychological meaning and is closer to our word minor—those without a legal right to speak for themselves. Women of any age, children, and the mentally incompetent are, of course, regarded as legally immature in Kant’s day, and “must be represented in any legal proceeding by a guardian” (63). So women, legally deprived of maturity, are in need of enlightenment. Kant would, evidently, like to set himself up as the enlightened guardian of women (Green 297). Within a month of Kant’s essay, his philosophical opponent J. G. Hamann wrote a friend critiquing Kant’s implication that those in need of enlightenment are themselves at fault, since their immaturity is said to be “self-incurred.” The truly lazy and cowardly ones are, according to Hamann, the enlightened guardians, “among whom is Kant himself ” (Schmidt 293). Kant is blaming the victim; guilt should be removed from the immature and placed upon the guardians. Hamann remarks that “the self-incurred immaturity is just such a sneer as he makes at the whole fair sex, and which my three daughters will not put up with” (Schmidt 148). As a commentator explains, Hamann shows that “Kant’s linkage of guilt with the social status of immaturity amounts to a slander against women, who thus come to stand for all those deprived of a political voice” (Green 298). 14. Roth’s investment in the unbalanced would seem to be inimical to his literary realism, an aesthetic that since its late-nineteenth-century inception in the United States has been the traditional preserve of balance (as opposed to the affective extremism of sentimentalism or the biological determinism of naturalism). But because he does not privilege it as the sine qua non of artistic responsibility, Roth enjoys a flexible (nonprogrammatic) relation to realism, playing with its expectations, pursuing exhilarating excess of detail and verbal aggression. And the commitment to exorbitant detail as “rhapsody” becomes itself a theme in The Human Stain, as I discuss in chapter 6.

271

272

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 9 – 3 2

15. Roth was writing in response to a rabbi who had accused him of not offering a “balanced portrayal of Jews as we know them” (RMO 198). Chapter 3 will recur to this matter. 16. “The artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself,” says novelist Peter Tarnopol of My Life as a Man, articulating a dictum he most honors in the breach (240). 17. “The simple truth [is] that Philip Roth is always writing about Philip Roth,” declared Robert Alter in 1993. It would be hard to find a more typical response (qtd. Shostak, 8). But this seems to eliminate aesthetic distance and turn Roth into a compulsive autobiographer in the guise of a novelist. I recur to Cynthia Ozick’s remark, in reference to Bellow’s Ravelstein: “when it comes to novels, the author’s life is nobody’s business” (qtd. Podhoretz, “Bellow” 41). 18. In another turn of the self-reflexive screw, Roth lifted Tarnopol’s quotations of Spielgovel’s essay from one that his own therapist had published on his analysis of Roth (see Shostak 163). 19. In the gloomy Everyman, his most recent novel (as of 2006), the inveterate Rothian impulse to affirm the possibility of change by rewriting the plot of one’s life is replaced by the protagonist’s “stoical maxim” (repeated twice) that “ ‘there’s no remaking reality. . . . Just take it as it comes’ ” (5). What comes to this seventy-one year old, unnamed character afflicted by an ever-worsening heart condition is mostly the humiliation of “impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing” (161). Unlike Coleman Silk or David Kepesh, both of whom become attached to younger women, the thrice divorced protagonist, a guilt-ridden former adulterer, fails in his late efforts to connect, thwarted in “his longing for the last great outburst of everything” (134). Like Mickey Sabbath, he visits a run-down New Jersey cemetery where his dead are buried and speaks to them, finding his “deepest pleasure” when he communes with the “bones” of his parents: “the bones were the only solace there was to one who put no stock in an afterlife” (170). This single consolation recalls the novel’s ur-text, the medieval allegorical drama Everyman, where the main character, abandoned by everyone but Knowledge and Good Deeds, moves from despair at Death’s intrusive arrival to gradual acceptance. Roth’s everyman, similarly abandoned, finds that his communion with “the words spoken by the bones” exhilarates him as nothing has in years (181). To the extent, then, that he hears bones speak (an event rendered not as metaphorical but as literal), he engages in the “remaking of reality” that his stoicism and the novel’s stark materialism had declared impossible. And the biblical echo (“Can these bones live?” God asks Ezekiel as he looks upon the Valley of Dry Bones) complicates his contempt for religion as mere “baby talk” (51). This flicker of change and renewal is soon snuffed out, however. Although feeling “buoyant and indestructible,” as vital and “unscathed” in body as a boy, he nonetheless dies under the knife: “Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start” (182). So the novel

N O T E S T O PA G E S 3 3 – 4 8

|

concludes, as death has the last word but not before the body (its bones) has spoken, a medium for meaning as much as it is putrefying matter. 20. In giving Anne Frank a new life and then imagining that he marries her, Nathan knows that he is creating “so much fiction, the unchallengeable answer” to the Judge Wapters of the world, those hometown Newark Jews who are upset about a satirical story he has written and who have charged Nathan with betrayal of his people (GW 171). “Who dares to accuse of such unthinking crimes the husband of Anne Frank!” But Nathan also knows that his revenge fantasy is only that; “far from being unchallengeable, far from acquitting” him of their charges and restoring him to “cherished blamelessness,” his resurrection of and marriage to Anne Frank will seem to his Jewish elders “a desecration even more vile” than his originally offending story. Chapter 2 1. Michael T. Gilmore (174–75) was the first to connect Ellison to The Human Stain. Eric Sundquist, in Strangers in the Land, his book on blacks and Jews, briefly brings Roth and Ellison together. In chapter 6 I sketch how Invisible Man and Roth’s novel intersect. 2. In explaining Howe’s animus, Mark Shechner provides a useful political context— Howe’s distaste for the New Left and the “New Sensibility” led him to “vent upon Roth his rage at events taking place elsewhere in the culture”; the novelist was never formally part of these movements, though Portnoy made him a cultural radical (49–50). 3. The fact of Nathan’s densely textual origins—the fictive creation of the fictive novelist Tarnopol—should caution the many readers who read Nathan as a transparent surrogate for Roth. 4. Though tempting to select this moment as the reductio ad absurdum of aestheticism, there are many rivals for this prize in My Life As a Man. As if the world has shrunk to the size of a classroom (the sites, not accidentally, of the only unalloyed pleasure and fulfillment in the novel), the novel is saturated in critical interpretation; virtually every character discusses Tarnopol, his work, or his life; even Salinger’s deadly earnest English majors Franny Glass and Lane Coutell, from Franny and Zooey, are brought on (now married and helping to edit a West Coast literary magazine funded by Tarnapol’s wealthy sister Joan) to weigh in, as part of the relentless production of critical discourse—stories, diaries, letters, psychiatric case-studies, student papers. “Two can play this writing game,” snarls Tarnopol’s psychotic wife late in the novel after showing him her humiliating short story about their marriage, but “two” hardly suggests the plethora of analysts in the novel. 5. The distaste of overt judgment is evident in Roth’s reply to an interviewer who asked if his American trilogy was a “report card” about the state of the country: “I wanted to find out what a novel would have to be like in order not to be a report card about America but a work of fiction about America” (McGrath 10).

273

274

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 1 – 5 6

6. For an instance of reductive historicism (prior to new historicism’s advent in the 1980s) recall Irving Howe’s famous critical judgment against Roth discussed earlier in this chapter. Howe, as I noted, indicted the novelist for a “thin personal culture.” This impoverishment occurs, argues Howe, when an author “comes at the end of a tradition which can no longer nourish his imagination” or when he, “through an act of fiat, [has] chosen to tear himself away from that tradition.” This “severe predicament” forces the writer (i.e., Roth) into “self-consciousness, improvisation, and false starts; but if he is genuinely serious, he will try, like a farmer determined to get what he can from poor soil, to make a usable theme of his dilemmas” (“Roth” 80). The stoic farmer he salutes as a model of heroic perseverance exposes not only Howe’s organicism but his determinism as well—one is stuck with the soil one has. Absent is any notion of imaginative or literary agency that might liberate one from “poor soil,” “thin culture,” or dead traditions and open a space for appropriation of other, more congenial models. 7. My generalization about contemporary skepticism of modernism as oppositional is most pertinent regarding literary scholarship. Other fields of modernist study stress resistance and refusal. T. J. Clark in his much-admired book on modern painting, Farewell to an Idea (1999), for instance, remarks, “Modernist painters knew the market was their element . . . but by and large they could never escape the notion that art would absolve or transfigure its circumstances and find a way back to totality” (11–12). “There is a line of art stretching back to [Jacques-Louis] David and [Percy] Shelley that makes no sense—that would not have existed—without its practitioners believing what they did was resist or exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist” (364). 8. In a recent essay, Adam Phillips also notes Trilling’s praise of Hemingway’s “foolish postures” and apropos of it shrewdly remarks that “it is the imaginative cost of not leaving oneself open to ridicule that haunted Trilling, and that was perhaps integral to the fate of the Jewish critics of Trilling’s generation. What breaks out in the fictional heroes—though not heroines—of Bellow and Roth and Mailer are the more brazen performances of the self that Trilling could only resist” (173). 9. Richard Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism was the first to emphasize Emerson’s acts of troping or turning most dramatically against his own key words. For a striking instance of Roth’s own act of titular troping—of the notion of the human stain—see chapter 6. 10. See Sheldon Wolin on Descartes and Tocqueville (89). Descartes, to be sure, is only one expression of this condition of monadic individualism. It breeds a radical apartness that David Bromwich has called the “American psychosis”; he locates its origins, plausibly enough, in the unworldly ideals of Puritanism, particularly as expressed in the most famous early ex-communicants—the antinomian Anne Hutchinson and the separatist Roger Williams. The latter was the “discoverer of a conscience to which all society is an encroachment,” sentiments that apply equally to Hutchinson and, two centuries later, to her heir Emerson (40).

N O T E S T O PA G E S 6 4 – 7 1

|

11. Like Adorno, that other great champion of immaturity, Gombrowicz was forced into exile by the Nazis. The circumstances of Gombrowicz’s exile befit his fascination with whim and perversity. In early August 1939 he took an ocean liner vacation to Buenos Aires. But when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, the ship was ordered to return home at once. Gombrowicz couldn’t decide what to do. After coming on board with his two suitcases, he suddenly left the ship, and remained in Buenos Aires, knowing no one, without Spanish, and with almost no money. He ended up staying until 1963, carving out a precarious Bohemian existence, always writing and publishing in European journals. After the war, he resisted returning to Poland because of the Communist regime, and died in the south of France in 1969. His three-volume diary is one of the major works of his exile. 12. In Shop Talk, Roth discusses Bruno Schulz with Isaac Bashevis Singer. In addition, he threads the legend of the death of Bruno Schulz through his Prague novella The Prague Orgy (1985). “He shot my Jew, so I shot his,” is how the Schulz-like author’s Nazi murderer explains the death (718). In fact, Schulz, a high school art teacher in a provincial Polish town, was murdered by a Gestapo agent jealous of another Nazi’s patronage and protection of Schulz. When Schulz’s protector shot a Jewish dentist who had been protected by the Gestapo, the latter then killed Schulz. Roth changes some of the details, including the year of death, but his allusion to Schulz is unmistakable. For a biographical portrait of Schulz see Regions of the Great Heresy by Jerzy Ficowski. Two years after The Prague Orgy, Cynthia Ozick dedicated her Schulz novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, to Roth. In Roth’s novella, Zuckerman comes to Prague, enticed by the flattery of the son of the dead Schulz-like writer (Sisovsky), to retrieve a lost trove of manuscript pages. Nathan wonders why he is so determined to retrieve the pages he has never read: “what’s the motive here? Is this a passionate struggle for those marvelous stories or a renewal of the struggle toward self-caricature? Still the son, still the child, in strenuous pursuit of the father’s loving response (Even when the father is Sisovsky’s?)” (767). As the coda to the trilogy, of which The Ghost Writer is the opening novel, The Prague Orgy’s thematic continuities are clear. 13. Bataille’s definition is quoted as the frontispiece to Formless: A User’s Guide by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. My discussion is based on pp. 24–25, 79. 14. In Adorno’s classic “The Essay as Form” (which reveals a profoundly Emersonian approach to the subject) he says that the essay, in rejecting the goal of clear and distinct ideas and indubitable certainty, is a “protest” against the rules established by Descartes’s Discourse on Method (Notes 1:14). Adorno describes the essay as a form that employs general concepts while abjuring the demand for their “strict definition” because this demand has long served to “eliminate . . . the irritating and dangerous aspects of the things that live in the concepts” (1:12). He seeks to preserve these aspects by creating an “open intellectual experience” that incites the “reciprocal interaction of its concepts” (1:13). 15. While Dostoyevsky applauds his protagonist’s contempt for rationalism and determinism (as we will discuss), he is not holding up underground man as a model.

275

276

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 7 1 – 1 0 0

Rather, the Christian Dostoyevsky regards him as a warning, his perversity indicative of the evil that resides in freedom not enclosed within a frame of Christian values. 16. Morris Dickstein notes that Dostoyevsky’s antihero “proved irresistibly attractive to black and Jewish writers alike” in the 1950s and cites as examples Chester Himes’s If He Hollers, Let Him Go and Bellow’s Dangling Man (56). 17. We will see in the next chapter that James’s rich passion for extremes and for the risk of moving in “both directions” speaks, I think, most intimately to Roth’s own combative sensibility. 18. Suburbia, cradle of maturity, was the enemy to urban radicals such as Norman Mailer; writing in the Village Voice in 1956, he quoted his late friend the psychoanalyst Robert Lindner (author of The Fifty Minute Hour, an important critique of American therapy) who loathed the “widespread psychologizing” that defined and lauded “maturity” as “passivity” and “domestication” (Advertisements 304). 19. In the course of an incisive review of Helen Vendler’s recent Eliotic elevation of maturity in Coming of Age as a Poet, David Rosen discusses Eliot’s “seizing on maturity as an inherent poetic good” (93). 20. In the decade following his stern call to adult responsibility in An End to Innocence, Fiedler had migrated to a more sympathetic view of leftist culture, and by the seventies would be famous as a celebrant of the “new sensibility.” Like Roth, Fiedler was a son of Newark and had his own complex and fertile relation to immaturity. I discuss this in “Leslie Fiedler’s Innocence.” 21. Fiedler provides a slightly different rendition of Roth’s line. Chapter 3 1. For a description of the ritual at the Ford plant see Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity. The locus classicus of sacrificial assimilation is Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot (see chapter 1, note 3), which Theodore Roosevelt saw and applauded as confirmation of his 1893 address “True Americanization,” which warns that “the man who does not become Americanized, nevertheless fails to remain a European, and becomes nothing at all” (26). 2. The natural human art of masquerade is a theme that Roth will splice onto the subject of racial identity in The Human Stain. This novel could be said to crown Roth’s kinship with Ellison, for it is the story of an invisible man—Coleman Silk—a black man who spends his adult life impersonating a Jew. 3. I have argued for a distinction between separatist pluralism and what I call pragmatist pluralism (this latter form is shared by Roth and Ellison) in Color and Culture. The appropriation model of pragmatist pluralism combats a reductive tendency— promulgated by anthropology, embedded in separatist multiculturalism, and deeply influential upon literary study—to regard cultures as self-contained systems, discrete bounded groups—monads, in short. An antiproprietary view assails this notion of

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 0 1 – 1 2 4

|

“culture” regarded as a fixed entity possessed of “the qualities of an internally homogenous and externally distinctive and bounded object.” This monadic presumption, in the words of the anthropologist Eric Wolf at the start of his famous book Europe and the People Without History, propagates a “false model of reality,” one that conceives “the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls” (6). Wolf ’s effort is Ellison’s as well—to recover what the “global pool hall” obstructed—the fact that cultural groups are incessantly forming and reforming in mutually constitutive interchange with each other. 4. The question of who is a real Jew will of course become a matter of intense debate in later works such as The Ghost Writer and The Counterlife. 5. A close runner up would be When She Was Good, which will be discussed later in the chapter. 6. See Wisse 319–20 and Rubin-Dorsky. The latter writes that the novel “is a cautionary tale of Jewish renunciation”; the Swede has failed to take advantage of the opportunities in the United States for self-transformation, specifically “for creating authentic Jewish lives” (96, 101). For the neocon response see Norman Podhoretz, who excitedly wrote of American Pastoral: “I myself, and many other people too, detected in this book a born-again Philip Roth whose entire outlook on the world had been inverted” (“Adventures” 34). 7. To be precise, the novel makes an implicit contrast between repulsive Jewish female sexuality—Rita Cohen and Merry Levov—and Gentile beauty—the adored Irish Catholic princess Dawn Levov. This nasty gender politics is an index of the Swede’s fetish of the assimilative ideal. 8. Adamant in her solitude and distrust, Lucy is found frozen in “Passion Paradise,” where teenagers go to make out. When her corpse is found, frozen to her cheek is a sheet of lined paper—a valentine’s letter from her ne’er-do-well father to her mother declaring his undying love (and pledging to return once his prison sentence is up, which he does at the opening of the novel, part of which is set five years after Lucy’s death). Lucy, right before storming out in a fury to her eventual death, had seized the letter from her mother as the latest proof of the latter’s regressive fixation on her feckless spouse. Years before, Lucy had said of her mother: “Love is what’s wrong with her. She’s so weak . . . insipid” (145). As her simultaneous proximity and obliviousness to “Passion Paradise” and the valentine’s letter suggests, Lucy is blind to the durability of love, no matter how imperfect, and to how love explains the endurance of her parent’s deeply flawed bond. 9. For more on Bromwich’s argument see chapter 2, note 10. 10. Just as the Emersonian imperative of truth demands mobility, so does the Ellisonian vision of democracy. In the United States, “theoretically, social categories are open, and the individual is not only considered capable of transforming himself, but is encouraged to do so. However, in undertaking such transformations he opts for that psychic uncertainty which is a condition of achieving his potential, a state he yearns to

277

278

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 2 7 – 1 3 5

avoid” (Collected 503–4). Democracy offers the freedom to improvise, but this imperative of transformation requires the difficult art of living in uncertainty. Chapter 4 1. In note 10 of chapter 7 I summarize the pursuit of the real—the quest to reach “not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself,” in Wallace Stevens’s phrase—as a cultural ideal. 2. Declares Tarnopol: “My model of reality, deduced from reading the masters, had at its heart intractability,” reality “obdurate and recalcitrant” (MLM 194). 3. Some critics insist that Roth in The Counterlife is in thrall to postmodern trendiness at the expense of Jewish authenticity. Says one, “the ‘lesson’ of The Counterlife may well be that the endlessly multiplying and fracturing freedom of postmodernism is not a viable paradigm for a people with a strong communal sense of the ‘self ’ and a special understanding of history” (Omer-Sherman 230). 4. For an account of this ludic tradition of the novel, where the author enjoys “absolute proprietorship over” his fictive world, see Alter 17. A famous description of Don Quixote bears quoting here in light of The Counterlife’s playing with the sanctity of the real by equating it with the written and revisable. Michel Foucault calls Don Quixote “the first modern work of literature . . . because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature.” Of Quixote himself Foucault writes: “His whole being is nothing but language, text, printed pages, stories that have already been written down. He is made up of interwoven words; he is writing itself, wandering through the world among the resemblances of things” (49, 46). In the novel’s second half, textuality achieves another self-reflexive dimension as Quixote becomes a literary figure, meeting characters who have read the first half. Notes Foucault: Cervantes’s “text turns back upon itself, thrusts itself back into its own density, and becomes the object of its own narrative” (48). In another well-known essay on Don Quixote by Carlos Fuentes, “Cervantes, Or the Critique of Reading,” collected in a book Fuentes dedicated in part to Philip Roth, he writes: “As if he foresaw all the dirty tricks of servile literary naturalism, Cervantes destroys the illusion of literature as a mere copy of reality and creates a literary reality far more powerful and difficult to grapple with: the reality of a novel is its existence at all levels of the critique of reading. The moral message of Don Quixote, instead of being imposed from above by the author, thus passes through the sieve of the multiple readings of multiple readers who are reading a work that is criticizing its own artistic and moral propositions. By rooting the critique of creation in the creation itself, Cervantes lays claim to being one of the founders of the modern imagination” (68). Fuentes goes on in another essay to name The Counterlife as a novel in the open, incomplete, self-reflexive tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and the Diderot of Jacques the Fatalist, a lineage that, as Fuentes says, Milan Kundera has emphasized (87) (see chapter 2).

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 3 9 – 1 6 5

|

5. The perfecting of autonomy that can end up transforming a self into a static object—“Mr. Determined” in the “acted upon” sense—I have ascribed to the romance of American individualism. By the end of chapter 5 and in chapter 6 I will associate this objectification with construing the self as a project, a conception, not surprisingly, also evident in the political philosophy of liberalism. For instance, J. S. Mill in On Liberty stresses the importance of freely choosing “one’s plan of life” as inseparable from individuality (qtd. Appiah 280, 5). By cultivating what is individual, writes Mill, “human beings become a notable and beautiful object of contemplation.” Mill equates maturity with the chosen life plan, the “consolidation of fleeting preferences into steadier purposes,” as Anthony Appiah puts it; he goes on to quote Mill: “a ‘character,’ says Novalis, ‘is a completely fashioned will,’ and that will, once so fashioned, may be steady and constant” (qtd. 7). Appiah grants some justice to the charges of critics who find the notion of “plans of life” too determinate and overly rationalistic. The objectification explicit in Mill is implicit in other—nonliberal—views of self-fashioning, in Nietzsche’s praise for the capacity “to ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art,” and in the late thought of Foucault, who emphasizes creating “ourselves as a work of art” (both qtd. Appiah 18–19, who is not linking them as I do). As the next two chapters will show, Roth finds compelling the aesthetic power and audacity of self-making and the spectacle of its unraveling. The latter occurs when the self, caught in the traps that inhere in too adamant an effort at self-invention, abandons its proprietary relation to itself. Roth’s double fascination is one reason that the politics of his late novels are difficult to discern. 6. I should make clear that neither the canonical nor the “counter-Emerson” explicitly encourages a socialized or relational view of the self. “The eternal problem of attachment,” in other words, remains (DA 105). The key distinction is the notion of self as anchored and closed (the canonical Emerson) or as flowing and metamorphic (“counter-Emerson”). This latter Emerson has the potential to form attachments because it is responsive to the tumult of the external world. Late Roth could be said to pursue this potential. Chapter 5 1. Old Karamazov also recalls Sabbath, not only his sexual appetite but his capacity simultaneously to expose and theatricalize his nakedness. As Dostoyevsky’s narrator comments: “Old liars who have been play-acting all their lives have moments when they get so carried away by their posing that they indeed tremble and weep from excitement, even though at that same moment (or just a second later) they might whisper to themselves: ‘You’re lying, you shameless old man, you’re acting even now, despite all your “holy” wrath’ ” (73). Later we will remark Sabbath’s propensity to weep while noting his performance of weeping. 2. Frank Kermode, in his review of the novel, also quotes Mailer’s tribute to Henry Miller. See also Warner Berthoff ’s discussion of Miller.

279

280

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 6 8 – 1 8 7

3. On one level of course Portnoy has nourished himself—witness his book-length monologue. On another, he has only become a classification in the psychoanalytic literature; the first thing we encounter in the novel is an entry called “Portnoy’s Complaint” that concerns a guilty relation to vulgarity and sex. 4. For some critics, the novel narrates an oscillation between eros and thanatos, past and present, and what drives Sabbath is a displacement of his own “thanantic desire into the erotic.” That is, “Sabbath understands his desire as uncompromisingly erotic” and is unable, “at least up to the time of the narrative’s present events, to see that he has done so out of a terrible fear of loss.” See Debra Shostak’s “Roth/CounterRoth” (128–29). Shostak concludes that the novel contains “startling paradoxes,” including “thanatos is eros” (138). The conjoining of eros and thanatos is clearly important in Sabbath and in the novel as a whole. More subtle is Roth’s rendering of this in imagistic counterpoint. For instance, the urine that deliriously seals his and Drenka’s “pact” reappears in her hospital deathbed as the “juice flowing out of her . . . oozing out of her yellow onto the pads, and . . . into the irrigation bag” (ST 424). This counterpoint occurs in Everyman as well; the protagonist’s erotic attachment to his third wife repeatedly centers on her “hole,” her anus, that recurs later as the grave, the “hole, six-foot deep” (111, 176). 5. At several points in the novel, Sabbath quotes from Lear while begging on the subway and mocking his own literary grandiosity. 6. In underscoring Sabbath’s “art,” his novelistic practice of rhapsodic empathy, I seek to qualify James Wood’s emphasis on Sabbath’s bitter nihilism, his Céline-like “nihilistic blasphemy” that, unlike satire, “seeks to overturn life itself ” and “is not over until life itself is over” (“Monk” 209). 7. In her treatise Stupidity, Avital Ronell describes a number of the modalties of stupidity, including a “structure of exposure” entailing risk (as in Hölderlin, for whom the poet steps “naked into life”) and self-release: “the poet ventures forth undefended, brave, like Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy, whose adventures take him through an unnarratable safety zone where, inexplicably immunized and protected, he has encountered the greatest danger” (9). Related to this immunity is the beatific version of stupidity: “enveloped by a narcissistic certitude,” stupidity “may be as close as we mortals can come to plenitude. Replete in itself, immune to criticism, without resistance or the effort of negativity, stupidity contains a sacred element: it is beatitude” (44). These qualities of invulnerable serenity are qualities Sabbath projects onto life and death; the novel’s ending testifies to his sense of life and death’s infuriating stupidity, unruffled plentitude: Sabbath, “blindly engulfed by the alien, inland woods, by the rainmaking trees and the rainwashed boulders,” finds that he cannot die (451). 8. The stress on life plans is J. S. Mill’s. Appiah defends Mill from critics who find “plans of life” implausibly rationalistic by noting that Mill did not regard them as fixed but shifting and that later in life he stressed “experiments in living” (9). 9. Havel’s improbable rise to president has often been called quixotic. Roth describes him as such in the course of calling Havel’s public image “the very epitome of the foolish, high-minded intellectual who doesn’t understand real life” (S 70).

N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 8 7 – 2 0 5

|

10. As if the antidote to such overreaching, the dissident sensibility, in Havel’s portrayal, is full of irony, self-irony, and black humor and desires “to desecrate the altar.” The dissident has a “fear of pathos and sentimentality, of overstatement and of what Kundera calls the lyric relation to the world” (Living 180, 183). A capacity to make light of and rise above oneself, qualities that ridicule taking oneself too seriously, are anathema to the deadly earnest, bloated Stalinist aesthetics of the utopian fanatic. 11. Roth expresses his admiration for Havel in Shop Talk, 70, in the course of an interview with Ivan Klima. The same volume includes Roth’s conversations with Kundera, whose exile to France and international fame made him a controversial figure for Czech intellectuals who stayed at home, working and suffering. Havel discusses his differences with Kundera in a book of interviews, Disturbing the Peace, 171–80. 12. “Geometric conception” is Bataille’s phrase, and the rest of the sentence is Denis Hollier’s gloss (55). 13. Nietzsche’s “delight in blindness” and love of “ignorance of the future” were often quoted by Bataille, notes Hollier, who goes on to say of the opposite effort: “to will the future . . . to submit it to planning and projects, to wish to construct it, is to lock oneself into a devalorized present that is airless and unlivable. ‘The project,’ according to Bataille, ‘is the prison’ ” (60–61). Chapter 6 1. Well known as an exponent of Ellison’s literary and aesthetic and musical views, Crouch describes Roth’s novel as “a symphonic investigation of loss, of the immutable and indelible blues of being alive” (37). And he is also attuned to the palimpsest quality of The Human Stain: “the novel is rooted in Hawthorne, Melville, Twain [presumably Pudd’nhead Wilson], Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner and Ellison” (34). 2. My emphasis coincides with Amy Hungerford’s argument that in Coleman Silk, Roth is “creating a character whose true identity has nothing to do with race— understood either biologically or as a social construction” (143–44). Instead, it is “the inherent secrecy of individual consciousness that defines who Coleman ‘really was’ ” (145). In stressing secrets against the many readers who have eyes only for race, I, like Hungerford, am taking my cue from Roth’s own emphasis: “Could it be because who he [Coleman] really was was entirely his secret?” Nathan asks rhetorically about Coleman’s early experience of passing while a boxer (100). 3. Doubtless a touch of pardonable romantic nostalgia simplifies Roth’s sketch of the New York Jewish intellectual milieu. One might add that even the vaunted freedom of the bohemian scene had not altogether abolished ethnic/racial divisions of cultural labor. Negroes were assumed to know about jazz, just as Jews were assumed to know how to write book reviews, remarks Anatole Broyard in Kafka Was the Rage, his memoir of postwar Greenwich Village. Broyard is pertinent here as a likely model for Coleman Silk. A transplant to New York from New Orleans, Broyard was a light-skinned black man who passed as white (but not as a Jew) his entire adult life, only, like Coleman, to

281

282

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 0 9 – 2 2 9

be outed posthumously. Significantly, Roth resists duplicating a division of cultural labor, as if honoring Broyard’s (and Coleman’s) own eluding of expectations. In Broyard’s case he started as a jazz expert in Partisan Review and two decades later became an influential book reviewer in the New York Times. In Strangers in the Land, his study of black and Jewish literary relations, Eric Sundquist discusses in relation to The Human Stain Broyard’s 1950s essays on identity and authenticity. 4. The mistake is one Nietzsche identified in 1886—“the desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense . . . the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society.” Nietzsche condemns this as a “rape and perversion of logic” (Beyond Good and Evil 28). 5. In undoing his own effort to define the human stain, Roth performs an act akin to Emersonian reversal (troping), as he turns against a privileged piece of language. “Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance?” asks Emerson in the middle of “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s “derisive rejoinder,” as Richard Poirier describes it, is “a rejection of his dependence on the phrase that serves as his title” (28). In Poetry and Pragmatism, Poirier stresses the pivotal importance of troping in Emerson’s writing, which aims to enact, rather than merely describe, his struggle with language’s inevitable betrayal (or purifying) of reality. 6. Hemingway dismisses Moby-Dick as all “about blubber” after a Vassar English major tells him “it was about Good and Evil” (30). Roth’s novel reduces all to baseball: “Who is Moby Dick if not the terrifying Ty Cobb of his species?” And Ahab is the “unappeasable” Leo Durocher (45). 7. Is it an accident that Ernestine’s lament about student neglect of Moby-Dick comes as she expresses impatience with Black History Month (her students told her “that for Black History Month they would only read a biography of a black by a black”) and that black Pip is Roth’s initial entry into Moby-Dick? While Roth clearly sympathizes with Ernestine’s dislike of the cultural segregation of Black History Month, later in their conversation when he confesses he has heard of neither Matthew Henson nor Dr. Charles Drew, he explains his ignorance by telling her he was not exposed to Black History Month as a youngster (329). In other words, Roth also sees the positive moment in highlighting cultural particularism—it opens the cultural field even as it forecloses intellectual inquiry in other ways. Never one to leave a pregnant detail alone, Roth finds the “harshly ironic fate of Dr. Drew”—the man who discovered how to prevent blood from clotting died in a car accident by bleeding to death, refused admission to a “white” hospital—resonant with Coleman’s ironic fate. 8. See the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, p. 545. We know that Roth read Melville’s letter because in 1973 he reported that he was inspired by the declaration, “I have written a wicked book” that appears a few lines before Melville’s admission of “irresponsibility.” In chapter 2, I quote Roth’s quoting of Melville. 9. That his own children have so reduced him is the cruelest, because most personal, blow Coleman suffers. But that reduction has a certain justice, for it reflects his own blotting out of his biography—his withholding of the facts of his origin. Roth suggests

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 2 9 – 2 3 9

|

this parallel in the remarkable scene earlier mentioned in passing—of Coleman on the phone with his son—a scene ultimately more disturbing than comic. When Jeff, his eldest, a college professor, on the phone repeats rumors as fact about Faunia’s (alleged) abortion and suicide attempt, Coleman explodes, enraged that his son never asked him the facts and was so willing to “absorb the first rumor.” Jeff hangs up on him, but “Coleman didn’t need Jeff to keep going.” He is launched on a rant, a “sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have an ungrateful child” rant, whose self-pity focuses on the shock of how his children could be so lacking in basic understanding of their father. “All the preschool. All the reading to them. The sets of encyclopedias . . . All the stuff we did, and then to come back at me with this mentality?” And then his internal monologue takes the inevitable turn: “Answering your questions. Your every question. Never turning one aside. You ask about your grandparents, you ask who they were and I told you.” And for two pages he internally rehearses his vivid fabrication, for instance, how “Silberzweig,” the Russian patronymic, became Silk upon emigration (but the one surviving relative, Uncle Jack, “never took the changed name” and therefore Coleman could never find his address). Displaying the capacity he shares with his creator for effortlessly inventing detail, Coleman pauses only by the rant’s end to acknowledge to himself that all his crafty lies—“the original boilerplate,” as he calls his cover story—might be bound up in his children’s estrangement. Though dismissing his thought as “irrational,” Coleman links the “brooding anger” of his most openly hostile child Markie (always most eager for knowledge of family history) “with his own secret” (174–76). Trapped in the facility of his fiction making, Coleman has become blind to the cost of his lies, as he gropingly begins to see. The scene ends with him agonized and in tears. 10. One of Adorno’s classic statements of this theme is his essay “Veblen’s Attack on Culture” in Prisms. 11. Geoffrey Hartman has noted the Thoreauvian echoes: “it is as if Roth . . . was rewriting Thoreau’s eulogy of White Pond and Walden, those absolute places of peace and purity,” though the “ominous encounter” between Farley and Nathan “is utterly different from anything in Walden” (Scars 36). Chapter 7 1. Recall Picasso’s famous remark that as a boy he painted like Michelangelo but it took him years to learn to paint like a boy. 2. While these modes of being “have provided art with good raw material,” notes Clark, “they are no kind of basis for conflict with, or criticism of, the bourgeoisie, which possesses descriptions and practices far and away more powerful, because more differentiated, than anything modernism can come up with” (Farewell 307). 3. Krauss’s stress on Pollock’s assault on verticality should be viewed with some reservations. John Golding (not apropos of Krauss) notes that many of Pollock’s early (1947) and most successful drip paintings are upright in format. And T. J. Clark (apropos of Krauss) remarks of Pollock’s physical procedure: “the picture was put on

283

284

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 4 0 – 2 4 8

the floor to be worked on, but I think it was always being read on the floor as if it were upright, or in the knowledge that it would be. To pretend otherwise [as Krauss does, according to Clark] would have been naïve, and Pollock was never naïve about painting. Not for him the delusive idea that one might solve the problem of uprightness and orientation in art by literally upending the depiction and having it be ‘flat’ ” (Farewell 325). 4. “Purity in art consists in the acceptance . . . of the limitations of the medium,” wrote Greenberg in 1940, a pronouncement that became canonical (qtd. Clark, “Clement Greenberg” 76). And in a retrospective summary statement twenty-one years later he wrote that by the late nineteenth century, in response to mass taste threatening to reduce the major arts to entertainment, “each art had to determine, through the operation peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. By doing this, each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure.” The arts necessarily became vigilantly self-critical, eliminating “every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of every other art. Thereby each art would be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. ‘Purity’ meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance” (Greenberg 102). If one applied these words to the realm not of art making but of self-making, the young Coleman Silk would have heartily concurred. 5. Storr is enlarging upon Lawrence Alloway’s original comparison. 6. As Flam points out, “recent studies suggest that Pollock’s drip paintings were sometimes begun as figure compositions.” 7. Debra Balken has collected these with an excellent introduction in Philip Guston’s Poor Richard. 8. For instance, the Rilke line was a favorite touchstone of Randall Jarrell. And William Gass uses it to conclude his famous essay “In Terms of the Toe-Nail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.” Roth uses the line in The Ghost Writer, and it served as the title of the first draft of The Counterlife (Shostak, Philip Roth 286 n. 23). More directly relevant, Ross Feld alludes to it in a letter to Guston thanking him for the gift of a painting: “I don’t know how I will live with it except to be changed by it—and that little Rilkean strategy has been in effect ever since I first came across your work years back” (156). 9. Roth also uses the phrase “professional deformity” to describe Guston’s and his own obsessive relation to creation. In acknowledging that neither he nor Guston had any choice but to be “drastic” artists, he remarks: “It’s not a matter of romantic agony, but just a form of professional deformity” (qtd. Mayer 245). 10. The “dream of painting” Clark describes is also the dream of a major trajectory of American literature, of reaching “not ideas about the thing but the thing itself,” to borrow Wallace Stevens’s title. Chapter 4 discusses Nathan’s pursuit of the real in The Anatomy Lesson as a quest he shares with William James. Stevens’s (self-consciously ironic) pursuit of the thing itself, the word made flesh, was earlier enunciated by Emer-

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 5 0 – 2 6 3

|

son, who remarks of the immediacy of Montaigne’s style: “cut these words, and they would bleed.” In her important book on “the natural history of pragmatism” from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (from which I derive my examples here), Joan Richardson argues that the quest for incarnating words in things animates pragmatism as it unsettles the Cartesian subject/predicate distinction. In another cultural context— contemporary representation of the Holocaust—“incarnation” is the word Claude Lanzmann, creator of the documentary Shoah, uses to characterize his film. What representations of the Holocaust must do, according to Lanzmann, is in effect abolish representation and transmit the horror itself. My example derives from Walter Benn Michaels’s discussion in The Shape of the Signifier (140–41), which analyzes in a wide array of contexts the problematic contemporary insistence on incarnation at the expense of representation, what Michaels calls the privileging of experience and cultural identity. 11. Guston’s hymn to the quotidian is a theme of Whitman’s but also Emerson’s, who seeks a poetry that will “sit at the feet of the familiar, the low” (Essays 69). 12. Robert Zaller also notes these “rectangular patches” as suggesting Guston’s own past work, but Zaller reads them as “a gesture toward an abstraction that has not been renounced but is incorporated in the new style, just as Guston had always claimed that images were present in his most formally abstract compositions” (86). Zaller’s essay and Feld’s book are the most probing and subtle accounts of Guston’s final decade and have stimulated my own responses. Night Studio, the memoir of Guston by his daughter, Musa Mayer, is an indispensable portrait of the artist. 13. Harry Cooper has tied the Klan rope of the thirties to the death of the father. Expressing an Oedipal wish, Guston assumes guilt for his father’s suicide by identifying himself with the Klan and its lynching. The return of the hoods four decades later testifies to Guston’s guilt, but this time, claims Cooper, the hoods are an “especially harsh act of penance for daring to have made illusionistic images, an attack by the artist on his own eyes, at least concealing and blinkering if not blinding them. . . . If so, what better means than a hood?” (48). Coda 1. One could argue that Roth’s transcendence of the anthropomorphic is qualified. His concluding line that “the stars are indispensable” implies they are “indispensable” to us. And the “furnace of Eve burning at twenty million degrees” could be read as imaging a fantasy of incinerating revenge against the unsympathetic former wife of the novel’s protagonist Ira. 2. Zuckerman looking up at the stars and being gripped by what I am describing as a Spinozist epiphany recalls the famous ending of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Spinoza of Market Street.” There old Dr. Fischelson, a lifelong Spinoza scholar, “looked up at the sky. The black arch was thickly sown with stars—there were green, red, yellow, blue stars; there were large ones and small ones, winking and steady ones. There were those that were clustered and those that were alone. . . . In the chaos of nebulae primeval

285

286

|

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 6 4 – 2 6 6

matter was being formed. . . . Yes, the divine substance was extended and had neither beginning nor end; it was absolute, indivisible, eternal, without duration, infinite in its attributes. Its waves and bubbles danced in the universal cauldron, seething with change, following the unbroken chain of causes and effects, and he, Dr. Fischelson, with his unavoidable fate, was part of this” (24). See Steven Smith for an interesting reading of this passage (165–67). 3. Spinoza’s crime, punished by a “Cherem”—a ban or excommunication, was disrespect for Moses (Spinoza denied his authorship of the Pentateuch), denial of the revealed sanctity of the Bible, and denial that Jews are chosen and thus distinct from Gentiles. Spinoza was reviled as a traitor but, significantly, never converted to Christianity. 4. Ironically, Jaspers extolled Spinoza to his friend and former student Hannah Arendt, who had little use for the philosopher and despised the notion of world citizenship and the bildung ideal. She was splendidly educated under the auspices of this ideal but, like many German intellectuals of her interwar generation, Arendt by the 1930s rejected it as nurturing a self-deceiving assimilationism—the belief that “Jews could exist as ‘pure human beings’ outside the range of peoples and nations”—and encouraging unworldly self-cultivation and interiority at the expense of political awareness (Arendt, Jew as Pariah 75). That awareness would have alerted German-Jews to their increasingly precarious position in a society where National Socialism was gaining control in the 1930s, effortlessly destroying the cosmopolitan ideals of Spinoza, Lessing, and Goethe. Those who abided in bildung Arendt scorned as parvenus for embracing conformism and anonymity as a way to blend in. To Jaspers’s praise of Spinoza, Arendt countered with Heine “because he was a poet the way Spinoza was a philosopher, and he was a revolutionary as well” (Jaspers and Arendt 199), lucidly “undeceived by this nonsense of ‘world-citizenship’ ” (Arendt, Jew as Pariah 75). She called Heine “the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew. He is the only outstanding example of a really happy assimilation in the entire history of that process” (74). For her, Heine was one exemplar (lighthearted, nontragic) of the Jew as “pariah,” Arendt’s term of praise for those who refused the conformity and self-deception of parvenu status. Her rejection of the ideal of bildung, the basis, for instance, of the DuBoisian “kingdom of culture” ideal of deracialized freedom, perhaps encouraged her myopia about a correlative ideal—civil rights for black Americans. That democratic principle guided the efforts of black parents to integrate public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1956 even at the risk of exposing their children to violence. In a famous, bitterly controversial essay on Little Rock, Arendt mistakenly described these political efforts as those of social climbing parvenus, an ascription that Ralph Ellison curtly rejected as blind to the “ideal” of “sacrifice” these parents had embraced. Arendt later apologized privately to Ellison for her grievous misunderstanding: “It is precisely this ideal of sacrifice which I didn’t understand” (Warren 343; Young-Bruehl 316). Arendt’s own complex (indeed tormented) relation to both poles of her notorious pariah/parvenu dualism is fascinating, worthy of a novel by Roth, who knew her in New York.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Christian Lenhardt. Boston: Routledge, 1985. ———. Hegel: Three Studies. Trans. S. W. Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. ———. Notes to Literature. Vols. 1 and 2. Trans. S. W. Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–92. ———. Prisms. Trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972. Alexander, Edward. “Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: A Literary Friendship.” New England Review 25, no. 3 (2004): 20–75. Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Alvarez, Al. “The Long Road Home.” The Guardian, September 11, 2004, 17. Anderson, Quentin. Making Americans. New York: Harcourt, 1992. Appiah, Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Arendt, Hannah. The Jew as Pariah. New York: Grove, 1978. Ashton, Dore. A Critical Study of Philip Guston. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Atlas, James. Bellow. New York: Random House, 2000. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1984. Balken, Debra. Philip Guston’s “Poor Richard.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Bataille, Georges. “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.” The Bataille Reader. Ed. F. Botting and S. Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Bellow, Saul. “The Art of Fiction.” Paris Review 36 (1966): 48–73. ———. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Penguin, 1996. ———. Herzog. New York: Penguin, 1996. ———. It All Adds Up. New York: Penguin, 1995. Bernstein, J. M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Berthoff, Warner. A Literature Without Qualities. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.

288

|

WO R K S C I T E D

Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Bois, Yves-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone, 1997. Bornstein, George. “The Afro-Irish-Zionist Alliance.” TLS, March 4, 2005, 12–13. Bromwich, David. “The American Psychosis.” Raritan 21 (Spring 2002): 33–63. Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity. New York: Norton, 1989. Broyard, Anatole. Kafka Was the Rage. New York: Vintage, 1997. Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Cameron, Sharon. The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque, N.M.: Living Batch Press, 1989. Cheever, John. The Journals. New York: Knopf, 1991. Clark, T. J. “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art.” Pollock and After. Ed. Francis Frascina. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Cooper, Harry. “Recognizing Guston.” Philip Guston: A New Alphabet. Ed. Joanna Weber. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2000. Crouch, Stanley. The Artificial White Man. New York: Basic Civitas, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977. Dickstein, Morris. Leopards in the Temple. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1990. ———. Notes from Underground. Trans. Michael Katz. New York: Norton, 2001. DuBois, W.E.B. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. Ellison, Ralph. Collected Essays. Ed. John Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995. ———. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1982. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. ———. Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. Porte and S. Morris. New York: Norton, 2001. ———. Selected Letters. Ed. Joel Myerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Fauset, Jessie. Plum Bun. Boston: Beacon, 1990. Feld, Ross. Guston in Time. New York: Counterpoint, 2003. Ficowski, Jerzy. Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait. Trans. Theodosia Robertson. New York: Norton, 2003. Fiedler, Leslie. An End to Innocence. Boston: Beacon, 1955. ———. A New Fiedler Reader. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999.

WO R K S C I T E D

|

Fisher, Philip. Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Flam, Jack. “Space Men.” New York Review of Books, April 26, 2001, 10–14. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1973. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Fuentes, Carlos. Myself with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1988. Gilmore, Michael T. Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Gombrowicz, Witold. Diary. Vols. 1 and 2. Trans. Lillian Vallee. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988–89. Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd. New York: Vintage, 1960. Green, Garrett. “Modern Culture Comes of Age: Hamann versus Kant on the Root Metaphor of Enlightenment.” What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Ed. James Schmidt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” The New Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. New York: Dutton, 1966. Habermas, Jürgen. Philosophical-Political Profiles. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Harrison, Thomas. Essayism: Conrad, Musil, Pirandello. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Hartman, Geoffrey. The Fateful Question of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ———. Scars of the Spirit. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Havel, Václav. Disturbing the Peace. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. Letters to Olga. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Knopf: 1988. ———. Living in Truth. Ed. John Vladislav. London: Faber, 1989. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Herzl, Theodor. The Complete Diaries. Trans. Harry Zohn. Vol. 1. New York: Yoseloff, 1960. Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Howard, Gerald. “Pynchon from A to V.” Bookforum, Summer 2005, 30–40. Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1984. ———. “Philip Roth Reconsidered.” Modern Critical Views: Philip Roth. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. James, Henry. The American Scene. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.

289

290

|

WO R K S C I T E D

———. European Writers and the Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. Letters. Vol. 1. 1843–1875. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. ———. Letters. Vol. 4. 1895–1916. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Norton, 1975. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. ———. Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. ———. Writings: 1902–1910. New York: Library of America, 1987. Jaspers, Karl, and Hannah Arendt. Correspondence, 1926–1969. New York: Harcourt, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Ed. James Schmidt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Kateb, George. Emersonian Self-Reliance. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, and Anti-Christ. New York: Vintage, 1968. Kermode, Frank. “Howl.” New York Review of Books, November 16, 1995, 36–38. Kornberg, Jacques. Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Krauss, Rosalind. “Greenberg on Pollock.” Pollock and After. Ed. Francis Frascina. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper, 1988. ———. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Aaron Asher. New York: Harper, 1999. ———. The Joke. New York: Harper, 1993. ———. Life Is Elsewhere. Trans. Peter Kussi. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. Testaments Betrayed. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper, 1995. ———. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper, 1999. Lawrence, D. H. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers. Ed. E. McDonald. New York: Penguin, 1978. Lee, Hermione. Philip Roth. London: Methuen, 1982. Leonard, John. “A Child of the Age.” New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000, 6–9. Lhamon, W. T. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Lilla, Mark. “What Is Counter-Enlightenment?” Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment. Ed. J. Mali and R. Wokler. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003. Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller. New York: Grove, 1976. ———. The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart, 1948. Mattessich, Stefan. Lines of Flight. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

WO R K S C I T E D

|

Mayer, Musa. Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston. New York: Penguin, 1990. McGrath, Charles. “Zuckerman’s Alter-Brain.” New York Times Book Review, May 7, 2000, 8–10. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Penguin, 1992. ———. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2002. Menand, Louis. “The Irony and the Ecstasy.” New Yorker, May 19, 1997, 88–94. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Michnik, Adam. Letters from Prison. Trans. Maya Latynski. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Miller, Henry. On Writing. New York: New Directions, 1964. Milosz, Czeslaw. The Land of Ulro. Trans. Louis Iribarne. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. ———. The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Trans. Donald Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003. Motherwell, Robert, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. New York: Vintage, 1996. Muthu, Sankar. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. Trans. Michael Scammell. New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. Invitation to a Beheading. Trans. Dimitri Nabokov. New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, 1980. Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. ———. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2002. Packer, Barbara. “The Transcendentalists.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Vol. 2, Prose Writing, 1820–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Phillips, Adam. “Lionel Trilling’s Concentrated Rush.” Raritan 21 (Spring 2002): 164–74. Plato. Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Pocock, J.G.A. Barbarism and Religion. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2003. Podhoretz, Norman. “Bellow at 85, Roth at 67.” Commentary, April 2000, 35–43. ———. “The Adventures of Philip Roth.” Commentary, October 1998, 25–36. Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

291

292

|

WO R K S C I T E D

Posnock, Ross. Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. “The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism.” American Literary History 12 (Winter 2000): 802–18. ———. “Leslie Fiedler’s Innocence.” Bookforum, Summer 2003, 30–32. ———. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Ransom, John Crowe. The World’s Body. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Richardson, Joan. A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Edwards to Stein. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Ronell, Avital. Stupidity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Roosevelt, Theodore. “True Americanism.” The Works of Theodore Roosevelt. National Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1926. Rosen, David. “Maturity and Poetic Style.” Raritan 24 (Spring 2005): 81–97. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. 1997. New York: Vintage, 1998. ———. The Anatomy Lesson. 1983. In Roth, Zuckerman Bound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. ———. The Breast. 1972. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. ———. Deception. 1990. New York: Vintage, 1997. ———. The Dying Animal. 2001. New York: Vintage, 2002. ———. Everyman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. ———. The Facts. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. ———. The Ghost Writer. 1979. In Roth, Zuckerman Bound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. ———. Goodbye, Columbus. 1959. New York: Bantam, 1973. ———. The Great American Novel. 1973. New York: Bantam, 1974. ———. The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ———. I Married a Communist. 1998. New York: Vintage, 1999. ———. Letting Go. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1997. ———. My Life as a Man. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1974. ———. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. ———. Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. ———. Portnoy’s Complaint. 1969. New York: Bantam, 1970. ———. The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. ———. The Prague Orgy. In Roth, Zuckerman Bound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. ———. The Professor of Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ———. Reading Myself and Others. 1985. New York: Vintage, 2001. ———. Sabbath’s Theater. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. ———. Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. ———. “The Story Behind The Plot Against America.” New York Times Book Review, September 12, 2004, 10–12.

WO R K S C I T E D

|

———. When She Was Good. 1967. New York: Bantam, 1969. ———. Zuckerman Unbound. 1981. In Roth, Zuckerman Bound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. “Philip Roth and American Jewish Identity: The Question of Authenticity.” American Literary History 13 (Spring 2001): 79–107. Salinger, J. D. Franny and Zooey. New York: Bantam, 1964. Scanlan, James. “The Case Against Rational Egoism in Notes from Underground.” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (July 1999): 549–67. Schmidt, James, ed. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Schorske, Carl. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. New York: Vintage, 1981. Schulz, Bruno. Letters and Drawings. Trans. Walter Arndt. New York: Harper, 1988. Schwartz, Delmore. Selected Essays. Ed. D. Dike and D. Zucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Searles, George, ed. Conversations with Philip Roth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Seigel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris. New York: Penguin, 1987. Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France. New York: Vintage, 1968. Shechner, Mark. Up Society’s Ass, Copper. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Shestov, Lev. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche. Trans. Bernard Martin. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969. Shostak, Debra. Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. ———. “Roth/Counter-Roth: Postmodernism, the Masculine Subject, and Sabbath’s Theater,” Arizona Quarterly 54 (Autumn 1998): 119–42. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. The Spinoza of Market Street. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. Smith, Steven. Spinoza’s Book of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin de Siècle. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Steinberg, Leo. Other Criteria. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1969. ———. The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage, 1951. Storr, Robert. Guston. New York: Abbeville Press, 1986. Strauss, Leo. Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. Sundquist, Eric. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. New York: Norton, 1992. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

293

294

|

WO R K S C I T E D

Trilling, Diana. The Beginning of the Journey. New York: Harcourt, 1993. Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture. New York: Viking, 1968. ———. The Liberal Imagination. New York: Anchor, 1953. Van Leer, David. Emerson’s Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Warren, R. P. Who Speaks for the Negro? New York: Vintage, 1966. Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996. Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Wisse, Ruth. The Modern Jewish Canon. New York: Free Press, 2000. Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Wolin, Sheldon. Tocqueville between Two Worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Wood, James. “The Blue River of Truth.” New Republic, August 1, 2005, 23–27. ———. “The Monk of Fornication: Philip Roth’s Nihilism.” The Broken Estate. New York: Random House, 1998. Wood, Michael. The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Wright, Richard. Later Works. New York: Library of America, 1991. Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Spinoza and Other Heretics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Zaller, Robert. “Philip Guston and the Crisis of the Image.” Critical Inquiry 13 (Autumn 1987): 69–94. Zipperstein, Steven. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Index

Acker, Kathy, xi Adorno, Theodor, xii, 8, 15, 16, 21–22, 69, 74, 84, 154, 229, 270n10, 275n11, 275n14, 282n10. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment; Horkheimer, Max Allen, Woody, 71 Alter, Robert, 272n17, 278n4 Anderson, Quentin, 139 Appiah, Anthony, 184, 279n5, 280n8 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 269n1 Appelfeld, Aharon, 146–47 appropriation. See Roth and appropriation; Ellison and appropriation; Henry James and appropriation Arendt, Hannah, 266, 286n4 Arnold, Matthew, 53 Ashton, Dore, 242, 252, 258 assimilation. See Roth and assimilation Bacon, Francis, 15, 263 Baldwin, James, 88–90, 96, 167 Balken, Debra, 284n7 Barth, John, xv, xvi, 268n6 Barthes, Roland, xv, 135 Barthelme, Donald, xv Bataille, Georges, 65, 66, 230, 232, 275n13, 281nn12–13 Baudelaire, Charles, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 174 Bellow, Saul, xiv-xvii, 13–15, 159, 160–61, 265, 267n2, 268n8, 272n17, 274n8, 276n16

Bergson, Henri, 69 Bernstein, J. M, 270n10 Berthoff, Warner, 279n2 Bois, Yves-Alain, 66, 275n13 Bornstein, George, 269n3 Bowles, Jane, 16–17 Broch, Hermann, 66 Bromwich, David, 118, 274n10, 277n9 Bronfman, Yefim, 214, 228–29 Brown, Norman O., 43, 84 Brown, Peter, 269n4 Broyard, Anatole, 281n3, 282n3 Bruce, Lenny, 22 Buell, Lawrence, 270n7 Burgess, Anthony, 50, 84 Burroughs, William, xv, 84 Calvin, John, 85 Cameron, Sharon, 223 Cartesianism. See Descartes, Rene Casanova, Pascale, xiii Cavell, Stanley, 55, 212 Cervantes, Miguel de, xii, xiii, xvi, 19, 135, 187, 278n4 Cheever, John, xv, 79 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, 72, 73, 74. Chicago, University of, xvi, 7, 51 Chopin, Kate, 17 Clark, T. J., 238, 248, 274n7, 283nn2–3, 284n3, 284n4, 284n10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10

296

|

INDEX

Cooper, Harry, 285n13 Cosmopolitanism, 3–9, 192, 266, 269nn2–4. See also Roth and cosmopolitanism counterlife. See Roth and counterlife Crane, Gregg, 268n10 Crouch, Stanley, 194–95, 267n1, 281n1 Dada, 54, 237–238 David, Jean Louis, 274n7 David, Larry, 71 deChirico, Giorgio, 254 Deleuze, Gilles, 166, 263 Descartes, Rene (and Cartesianism), xii, 10, 11, 15, 56–60, 63, 186, 199, 226, 232, 263, 264. 270n6, 274n10, 275n14, 285n10. See also Adorno, Theodor Deutscher, Isaac, 265 Dewey, John, 59 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 15, 32, 232, 263. See also Adorno, Theodor; Horkheimer, Max Dickstein, Morris, 44, 83, 276n16 Diderot, Denis, 63 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, xvii, 19, 40, 70–72, 74, 75, 156, 160–161, 275nn15–16, 279n1 Dreiser, Theodore, 101 Du Bois, W.E.B., xii, 5, 88, 89, 286n4; The Souls of Black Folks, 88, 167, 205 Eliot, T. S., 80, 82, 90, 276n19 Ellison, Ralph, 5, 7, 71, 90, 91, 94–99, 124, 266, 273n1, 277n10, 281n1; and “aesthetic idealism,” 98, 286n4; and appropriation, 5, 7, 42, 82, 88–100; and “appropriation game,” 5, 92; and blood thinking, 90; and identity politics, 95; and ludic, primacy of, 94; and Roth, 5, 7, 42, 91, 94–99, 124, 194–5, 266. See also appropriation; cosmopolitanism; Roth and pastoral; natural, myth of the Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xi, xviii, 8–11, 55–58, 68, 75–77, 123, 124, 270nn7–8, 274n9, 277n10, 282n5, 284n10, 285n11; and becoming (flux of ), 68, 69, 77, 119, 125, 127, 135–36, 190–92, 220, 262; and canonical vs. anticanonical Emerson, 9, 55, 75, 139,

279n6; and letting go (abandonment), 9, 50, 54–57, 76, 135–36, 146, 184, 185, 190, 192, 212–213; and Roth: xi, 7, 8, 9, 42, 54–57, 70, 127, 135–36, 139–41, 157, 212–13, 215, 217, 220; and rudeness, xi, 50, 54, 61, 75–77, 184, 191; “Circles,” 9, 76, 77, 136, 139, 140, 190; “Experience,” 9, 70, 75, 77, 86, 127, 135, 139, 140, 141, 184, 185, 190–92, 212, 213, 215, 217; “Montaigne,” 55, 58 Erasmus, 19 Erikson, Erik, 269n1 Euripides, 231 Fast, Howard, 167 Faulkner, William, xi, xiii, 2, 4, 90, 93–94, 267n2, 281n1 Fauset, Jessie, 205 Feld, Ross, 241, 242, 248, 252, 284n8 Feldman, Morton, 240 Fellini, Federico, 251 Ficowski, Jerzy, 275n12 Fiedler, Leslie, xv, 80, 83, 84, 99, 276nn20–21 Fisher, Philip, 269n3 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 209, 281n1 Flam, Jack, 284n6 Flaubert, Gustave, 3, 94 Ford, Henry, 22 Foucault, Michel, 50, 278n4, 279n5 Fourier, Charles, 55 Frank, Anne, 32, 33, 92, 130, 157, 273n20 Frank, Otto, 35 Frank, Robert, 81 free indirect discourse, 114–15, 156 Freud, Sigmund, 52, 53, 65, 79, 136–37, 238, 265, 270n11 Freedman, Jonathan, 53 Fuentes, Carlos, 278n4 Gaddis, William, xv gameness, or being game. See Roth and gameness (being game) Gass, William, xv, xvi, 284n8 Gauguin, Paul, 6, 100 gender and immaturity, 16–20, 271n12, 271n13; see also Roth and women

INDEX

Gilmore, Michael T., 273n1 Ginsberg, Allen, 168 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 5, 88, 90, 286n4 Goffman, Erving, 19 Golding, John, 283n3 Gombrowicz, Witold, 9, 16, 61, 63–66, 72, 80, 84, 85, 87, 126, 275n11 Goodman, Paul, 81 Greenberg, Clement, 239, 240, 241, 284n4 Guattari, Felix, 166 Guston, Philip, xviii, 37, 124, 212, 236, 240–246, 248–259, 284n8, 284n9, 285n11, 285n12, 285n13; Aegean, 244; By the Window, 255; The Conspirators, 243, 251, 255; Courtroom, 243; Group at Sea, 244; Head, 244, 257; If This Be Not I, 243, 254; Martial Memory, 243; The Phlebitis Series, 245; San Clemente, 245; The Studio, 251; Web, 244 Ha-am, Ahad, 152 Habermas, Jurgen, 16. See also Adorno, Theodor; Frankfurt School Hamann, J. G., 271n13 Harrison, Thomas, 69 Hartman, Geoffrey, 154, 283n11 Havel, Vaclav, 9, 63, 157, 182–84, 186–90, 280n9, 281nn10–n11 Hawkes, John, xv Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 54, 90, 117–18, 200, 201, 209, 222, 225, 268n3, 281n1; and Roth, 12, 42, 54, 90, 116–18, 200, 201, 222, 225, 226, 235; The Scarlet Letter, 90, 116–117, 235; “Young Goodman Brown,” 117 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 21, 263, 270n11 Heidegger, Martin, 182, 183 Heine, Heinrich, 265, 286n4 Hemingway, Ernest, xi, 2, 4, 53, 79, 88, 89, 222, 281n1, 282n6 Herzl, Theodor, 125, 126, 147–50, 152–3 Himes, Chester, 276n16 Hitler, Adolph, 29 Hobbes, Thomas, 265 Hoffman, Abbie, 13 Holderlin, Friedrich, 280n7

|

Hollier, Denis, 281nn12–13 Horkheimer, Max, 15 Howard, Gerald, xv, xvii Howe, Irving, 41, 42, 92, 264, 273n2, 274n6 Hungerford, Amy, 281n2 Hurston, Zora Neale, 16, 135 Hutchinson, Anne, 274n10 Ibsen, Henrik, 178 immaturity, xi–xii, 3–9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 57–87, 237, 270n11; See also gender and immaturity; Roth and immaturity individualism. See Roth and individualism isolation, (isolationism and the isolato), 23, 25, 27–31, 46–48, 116–17, 139, 182, 235 Israel, Jonathan, 271n11 James, Henry, xviii, 5, 7, 8, 9, 20, 54, 61, 77–78, 123, 124, 135, 202, 269n2, 276n17; and appropriation, 5–6, 21, 90, 93, 97; and immaturity, 8, 11–12, 14, 15, 19, 42–43, 78, 56, 85, 87, 94, 118, 119, 121; and Roth, 5–9, 42, 43, 54, 61, 85, 90, 93, 94, 97, 114–16, 118–123, 135, 199, 209; The American, 121; The American Scene, 8, 97; The Golden Bowl 114–15; Portrait of a Lady, 6, 11–12, 14, 18–19, 85, 86, 93, 116, 118–121, 123, 199, 209; A Small Boy and Others, 8 James, William, xviii, 60, 69, 70, 78, 127, 128, 270n10, 284n10 Jarrell, Randall, 230, 284n8 Jarry, Alfred, 237, 238, 240, 269n1 Jaspers, Karl, 266, 286n4 Joyce, James, xiii, 40,155–56 Jung, Carl, 78 Kafka, Franz, 22, 66, 78, 247 Kant, Immanuel, 9–11, 26, 270n7, 271n13 Keats, John, 216 Kermode, Frank, 279n2 Kerouac, Jack, 13, 16, 83 Kierkegaard, Soren, 7, 51 King, Stephen, 235 Klima, Ivan, 281n11 Kline, Franz, 243

297

298

|

INDEX

Kramer, Hilton, 241 Krauss, Rosalind, 239, 275n13, 283n3, 284n3 Kundera, Milan, xii, xiii, 3, 9, 61–63, 66, 67, 70, 157, 183–84, 186, 187–92, 196–99, 278n4, 281nn10–11; and Roth, xi, 3, 9, 61–63, 157, 188–90, 196–99, 220 Lanzmann, Claude, 285n10 Last Tango in Paris, 217 Lawrence, D. H., 18, 37, 46, 160–61, 164 Leonard, John, 30, 31 Lessing, Gotthold, 286n4 letting go. See Roth and letting go Levinas, Emanuel, 182 Lhamon, W. T., 81, 82, 90 liberalism, 171, 184–5, 279n5 library. See public library Lichtenstein, Roy, 241 Lilla, Mark, 271n11 Lindbergh, Charles, 22, 23, 27, 28; See also The Plot Against America Lindner, Robert, 276n18 Locke, Alain, 5 Locke, John, 264 Lowell, Robert, 80, 81 Lukacs, Georg, 69 Mailer, Norman, xv, 3, 4, 17, 83, 137, 157, 159, 165, 176–77, 182, 205, 217, 276n18 Malamud, Bernard, 3, 4, 256 Malraux, Andre, 90 Mann, Thomas, 110, 209 Marcuse, Herbert, 32, 43, 80 Marx, Karl, 265 Mayer, Musa, 241, 252, 256, 285n12 McCarthy, Mary, 230 McCullers, Carson, 16, 17 Melville, Herman, xv, 8, 12, 23, 40, 42, 49, 54, 56, 70, 80, 162–63, 171, 214, 281n1, 282n8; and Roth, 8, 12, 42, 49, 54, 70, 200, 214; Moby-Dick, 54, 70, 214, 221–27, 234, 281n1, 282n8 Menand, Louis, xviii Mencken, H. L., 35 Mercer, Johnny, 104

Michaels, Walter Benn, 285n10 Michnick, Adam, 187–88 Mill, J. S., 279n5, 280n8 Miller, Henry, 156, 160, 165–68, 279n2 Milosz, Czeslaw, 71, 72, 74, 76 mimetic (ludic), 15–17, 94, 193, 229 Montaigne, Michel de, xviii, 55, 58–59, 57–61, 67, 69, 285n10 Moore, Marianne, 79 Morrison, Toni, 268n5 Musil, Robert, 66–72; and Emerson, 68 Muthu, Sankar, 271n11 Nabokov, Vladimir, xiii, 19, 67, 71–74, 110 National Book Award, xvii natural, myth of the, 45, 49, 97–98, 102; See Roth and myth of the natural; Roth and pastoral, Nelson, Victoria, 268n5 new criticism, 73, 274n6 new historicism, 50–51, 274n6 Newman, Barnett, 250 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 9, 52, 55, 57, 63, 67–69, 76, 154, 157, 161, 214, 265, 270n11, 279n5, 281n13, 282n4 Nixon, Richard, 244, 245 Nordau, Max, 152 Oedipus the King, 186 Omer-Sherman, Ranen, 278n3 O’Neill, Eugene, 178 Orwell, George, 198–200 Ovid, 247 Ozick, Cynthia, 272n17, 275n12 Packer, Barbara, 270n7 Paine, Tom, 166 Pan, 201, 205, 197 pastoral. See Roth and pastoral Peirce, C. S, 60 Penguin Writers of Eastern Europe, 64 Phillips, Adam, 274n8 Picasso, Pablo, 254, 283n1 Plath, Sylvia, 16, 17 Plato, 229, 268n10

INDEX

Pocock, J.G.A., 271n11 Podhoretz, Norman, 272n17, 277n6 Poe, Edgar Allan, 74, 75, 234 Poirier, Richard, 274n9, 282n5 Pollock, Jackson, 239, 241–43, 252, 283n3 Popular Front, 51 Posnock, Ross, 269n2, 276n3 postmodernism. See Roth and postmodernism Pound, Ezra, xvii public library, 5–6, 89–91, 98, 100, 102, 266 Pynchon, Thomas, xv, xvi, 81 Rabelais, 58, 61, 63, 66, 166 Rahv, Philip, 118, 122, 165 Ransom, John Crowe, 73, 74 Reagan, Ronald, 28 Reage, Pauline, 156 Reed, Ishmael, xv rhapsody. See Roth and rhapsody Richardson, Joan, 270n8, 285n10 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 32, 247, 284n8 Rimbaud, Arthur, 71, 237, 238 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, xv Romanticism, 4, 10 Ronell, Avital, 280n7 Roosevelt, Theodore, 276n1 Rosen, David, 276n19 Rosenberg, Harold, 249, 254 Roth, Philip —and appropriation, xiii, 5, 6, 7, 8, 42, 53, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93–102, 115, 123, 192, 194, 266, 267n1, 269n3, 276n3. See also Ellison, Ralph; James, Henry —and assimilation, 5, 7, 28, 41, 53, 88–93, 90, 92, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 116, 269n3, 277n7, 286n4 —and cosmopolitanism, 3–9, 192, 266 —and counterlife, xiv, 26, 34, 36, 37, 42, 48, 55, 109, 121, 125–28 130–32, 134, 136–38, 140–44, 147–50, 153–54, 158, 159, 169, 170, 257, 258 —and gameness (being game), 26, 32, 48, 63, 70, 132, 185, 194, 196, 200, 210, 214–16, 219, 221, 226, 228, 230 —and immaturity, xi–xiii, xvi, xviii, 2–3, 4, 8,

|

9, 11–12, 15, 16, 17, 37, 38, chapter 2 passim, 39, 40, 43, 54, 61, 63, 64, 70, 79, 87, 118, 123, 156, 163, 165, 186, 189, 190, 195, 216, 237, 240, 242, 257 —and individualism, modes of possessive; (masculine self-sovereignty, autonomy, self as project), 8, 11, 15–17, 26, 27, 29, 32, 34–35, 44, 45–46, 47–49, 50, 54–55, 56, 57, 76, 77, 79, 80, 86–87, 102, 103, 107–108, 112, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 126–127, 138–39, 171, 172, 184–86, 193, 198, 200, 203–206, 208–10, 213–17, 222–28, 232–35, 257, 279n5 —and letting go, xiii, 8, 21, 22, 26, 37, 48–49, 51, 54, 70, 84–87, 103, 120, 121, 122, 138, 139, 146, 160, 162, 163, 166, 168, 170, 172, 176, 181, 184, 212, 213, 226, 229, 242, 259, 261 —and lightness, 87, 138, 188, 189, 190, 215 —and literary relation to. See Ellison, Emerson, Hawthorne, James (Henry), Kundera, Melville, Whitman —and the mimetic (ludic), 11, 19, 27, 45, 102, 129–30, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 193, 202, 206, 208, 212, 218, 219, 227 —and myth of the natural, 20, 25, 45, 50, 97, 101, 109, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138, 150, 154, 193, 219, 226, 262, 263 —and nakedness (flayed self ), 34–35, 37, 152, 155, 157, 158, 168, 172, 175, 176, 181, 182, 183–86, 188, 192, 210, 212, , 214–16, 218, 229, 233, 250, 256, 257, 259 —and pastoral, (critique of ), 26, 28, 30, 35, 36, 46, 49, 50, 55, 63, 83, 90, 91, 101–3, 105–8, 110, 111–13, 116, 118, 129, 137, 138, 139, 140, 151, 153, 154, 187, 193, 197, 201, 234, 262 —and postmodernism, xvi, 131, 135, 145, 268n7, 278n3 —and rhapsody, xiii, xviii, 113, 179, 229–31, 268n10 —and stupidity 119, 121, 172, 183, 185, 186, 188, 210, 214, 280n7 —and utopian thinking, 46, 47, 48, 63, 103, 112, 118, 138, 139, 186, 187, 217 —and women, 17–20, 24. See also gender and immaturity

299

300

|

INDEX

Roth, Philip (continued ) WORKS: American Pastoral, xvii, 4, 21, 24, 49, 90–91, 102–17, 140, 171, 202, 277nn6–7 —The Anatomy Lesson, xi, xvi, 4, 40–45 passim, 92, 127–30, 133, 201–2, 204, 240, 248, 249, 258, 284n10 —The Breast, xvi, 32, 78, 246–8, 268n6 —The Counterlife, xvi, 1, 2, 4, 20, 30, 38–42, 45, 49, 63, 103, 105, 124, 125–27, 129–44 passim, 147, 148, 150–53, 166, 187, 193, 193, 219, 242, 258, 268n7, 277n4, 278nn3–4, 284n8 —Deception, 155, 161 —The Dying Animal, 4, 17, 23–24, 27, 31, 32, 161, 165 —Everyman, 4, 43, 44, 259, 268n9, 272n19, 280n4 —The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, xvii, 6, 8, 19, 20, 35, 36, 37, 41, 78, 79, 86, 90, 93, 94, 95, 141, 163, 264 —The Ghostwriter, 4, 8, 22, 24, 32–35, 37, 43, 62, 119, 155, 157, 177, 249, 256–59, 275n12, 277n4, 284n8 —Goodbye, Columbus, 6, 42, 90, 91, 98–102 —The Great American Novel, 12, 246, 268n6, 273n20 —The Human Stain, xiv, xvii, 18–21 passim, 24, 26–28 passim, 31, 32, 42, 48–50 passim, 53, 54, 57, 63, 66, 69, 70, 74, 98, 99, 103, 138–40, 153, 154, 173, 185–6, 188, 189, 193–225, 227–235, 242, 253, 259, 262, 267n1, 271n14, 272n19, 273n1, 274n9, 276n2, 281n1, 281nn2–3, 282n3, 282n5, 282n7, 282n9, 283n9, 283n11, 284n4 —I Married a Communist, 24, 26, 27, 46–48 passim, 51, 52, 62, 88, 89, 103, 166, 188, 202, 260–62 —Letting Go, 6, 8, 24, 42, 48, 49, 90, 118, 119, 121–123 passim, 212, 213, 258, 259, 260–62 —My Life as a Man, 20, 45, 86, 87, 94, 149, 272n16, 273n4, 278n2 —Operation Shylock, xiv, 2, 4, 7, 19, 40, 42, 50, 17, 78, 101, 126, 128, 143–47 —Patrimony, 23, 259 —The Plot Against America, xvii, 3, 4, 19, 22, 24, 27–31, 33, 34

—Portnoy’s Compaint, xv-xvii, 2, 4, 12, 17, 19, 24, 40, 41, 45, 49, 50, 66, 71, 84, 85, 128, 147, 158, 159, 166–68, 170, 171, 201, 236, 246, 258, 266, 273n2, 280n3 —The Prague Orgy, 275n12 —The Professor of Desire, xvi, 25, 26, 42, 44, 161 —Reading Myself and Others, xiv, 2, 3, 5, 12, 19, 21, 26, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 51, 53, 54, 95, 96, 121, 135, 147, 160, 272n15 —Sabbath’s Theatre, xiii, xvii, xviii, 4, 15, 18–21, 24, 32, 44, 52, 53, 57, 66, 103, 112, 119, 155, 156–85, 188–92, 200, 210, 212, 214–15, 242, 255, 259, 272n19, 280nn4–7 —When She Was Good, 85, 90, 116–18, 277n5 —Zuckerman Unbound, 20, 126, 130 Rothko, Mark, 243, 250, 251 Rousseau, Henri, 269n1 Salinger, J. D., 3, 79, 273n4 Sanders, Ed, xv Satie, Eric, 269n1 Schechner, Mark, 268n3, 273n2 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 80 Scholem, Gershom, 41 Schorske, Carl, 150 Schulz, Bruno, 9, 64, 65, 80–81, 84, 275n12 Schwartz, Delmore, 71, 80 Seigel, Jerold, 269n1 Selby, Hubert, xi Shakespeare, William, 5, 19, 44, 175, 280n5 Shattuck, Roger, 237, 238, 269n1 Shelley, Percy, 274n7 Shestov, Lev, 161 Shostak, Debra, 268n3, 280n4 Simon, Neil, 1, 2 Singer, I. B. 256, 275n12, 285n2 Smith, Henry Nash, 83 Smith, Steven, 265, 286n2 smugness, as transhistorical given, xviii Sollors, Werner, 276n1 Sontag, Susan, xv Spinoza, Baruch, 262–66, 285n2, 286nn3–4 Stein, Gertrude, 16, 285n10 Steinberg, Leo, 257 Stendhal, 102

INDEX

Sterne, Laurence, 63, 278n4 Stevens, Wallace, 176, 185, 206, 245, 284n10 Storr, Robert, 284n5 Strauss, Leo, 265 stupidity. See Roth and stupidity Sundquist, Eric, 273n1, 282n3 Susann, Jacqueline, 19 Swift, Jonathan, 40 Tate, Allen, 73 Taylor, Charles, 270n6 Thoreau, Henry David, 56, 80, 167, 200, 222, 234, 283n11 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 10, 56 Toulmin, Stephen, 57–59 Trilling, Diana, 53 Trilling, Lionel, 51–53, 62, 71, 79, 216, 274n8 Twain, Mark, 11, 30, 82, 168, 270n9, 281n1

Vidal, Gore, xv Vonnegut, Kurt, 84 Warhol, Andy, 239, 240 Whitman, Walt, xi, 8, 14, 44, 54, 56, 159, 165, 166, 175, 176, 183, 249–50, 285n11; and Roth, 44, 54–55, 159, 174–75, 183 Williams, Bernard, 215 Williams, Roger, 274n10 Wisse, Ruth, 277n6 Wolf, Eric, 277n3 Wolin, Sheldon, 274n10 Wood, James, 268n7, 280n6 Wood, Michael, 228 Wordsworth, William, 280n7 Wright, Richard, 35, 88, 89, 91

Updike, John, xv utopian thinking, 46, 49, 186–88

Yeats, William Butler 157–58, 162, 175, 237–38 Yeshiva University, 36, 94, 99 Yiddish literature, 41

Van Leer, David, 270n7 Vendler, Helen, 276n19

Zaller, Robert, 243, 250, 256, 285n12 Zangwill, Israel, 269n3, 276n1

|

301