States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth's Post-War America 9781623562960, 9781501323607, 9781623562434

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Philip Roth’s Post-War Americans on Trial
The trial in American culture
States of trial and the American Jewish man
The trial as a rhetorical space
Roth the American writer
1 Turning Sentences Around: Trial Th emes in Th e Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and Th e Anatomy Lesson
2 Before the Law: Operation Shylock: A Confession
Confession, genre and the law
Operation Shylock ‘Before the Law’
Pipik, Philip and ‘Inappropriate Speech’
Silence, censorship and loshon hora (evil speech)
‘Tampering with the Taboo’ and treachery
Conclusion: Operation Shylock as a ‘Trial-as-Writing’
3 Testing ‘Stories of Old’ in American Pastoral
The American Way and the post-war political consensus
The Levovs and ‘Stories of Old’
American inheritances and the pastoral
The trials of the American body
The body in extremis and the trial as a rhetorical zone
Conclusion: American Pastoral and the dynamic American body?
4 Undoing the Bildungsroman: Cold War Trials in I Married a Communist
Interrogating the American Bildungsroman
Becoming American: Identity as performance in Cold War America
Performing Americanness in I Married a Communist
I Married a Communist : Undoing the Bildungsroman
The Bildungsroman, ghostwritingand ‘I Married a Communist’
Ghostwriting, ghost writing and writing well
Conclusion: Fighting for the word
5 Spooking the American National Body in Th e Human Stain
Visibility, legibility and race in America
The secret of Coleman’s tattoo
‘Spooks’ and the spirit of sanctimony
The (in)visible self and the American national body
Coleman, the President and the contamination of the national body
Coleman-as-Monica
Conclusion: Opposing ‘total scrutability’
6 The Plot against America and the Trials of the American Constitution
The brotherhood of Roth: American fraternity examined
Regime of the brother: Nazism andpopulism in Lindbergh’s America
The Roth brothers and the failures of fraternity
Homestead 42 and constitutional unsettlement
The brother as conspirator and the conspiratorial text
Writing history in The Plot against America
Conclusion: Bodily loss in The Plot against America
7 Nemeses: Reworking the Trial for Post-War America
Conclusion
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

States of Trial

States of Trial Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America Ann Basu

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Ann Basu, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Basu, Ann. States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America/Ann Basu. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-296-0 (hardback) 1. Roth, Philip–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Masculinity in literature. I. Title. PS3568.O855Z57 2014 813’.54–dc23 2014018766 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6296-0 PB: 978-1-5013-2042-2 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6243-4 ePub: 978-1-6235-6831-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Philip Roth’s Post-War Americans on Trial

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Turning Sentences Around: Trial Themes in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson Before the Law: Operation Shylock: A Confession Testing ‘Stories of Old’ in American Pastoral Undoing the Bildungsroman: Cold War Trials in I Married a Communist Spooking the American National Body in The Human Stain The Plot against America and the Trials of the American Constitution Nemeses: Reworking the Trial for Post-War America

Bibliography of Works Cited Index

vi vii 1

19 27 51 77 103 129 155 169 177

Acknowledgements I would like to express my warmest gratitude to Carol Watts, for her patience and wise advice, and to Catherine Morley for her help and support. Many thanks to Derek Parker Royal, Ben Railton and Aimee Pozorski for supporting my book proposal and for their valuable comments on it. Special thanks to Velichka Ivanova, who first urged me to seek publication, and to Ben for all his help with editing the manuscript. To my family, Dipak, Jay, Laura, Tamara and Erik, my heartfelt love and thanks for being there and untiringly listening to, reading and commenting on my work as it progressed, and to my grand-daughter, Alita, just for being herself. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce, in a revised form, portions of the following previously published articles: ‘American Pastoral: The Post-War American Man on Trial’ published in Reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2011): 75–86. Revised portions of this essay appear in Chapter 3. Reprinted by permission of Presses Universitaires du Mirail. ‘Before the Law: Operation Shylock: A Confession’ published in Philip Roth Studies 8.2 (Fall 2012): 178–95. Revised portions of this essay appear in Chapter 2. Reprinted by permission of Purdue University Press. ‘The Human Stain and Spooking America with Ellison and Hawthorne: The Question of “the perfect word”’ published in Philip Roth and World Literature: Transatlantic Connections and Uneasy Passages (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2014): 47–65. Revised portions of this essay appear in Chapter 5. Reprinted by permission of Cambria Press.

List of Abbreviations Bound Communist Exit Invisible Pastoral Plot Shop Shylock Stain

Zuckerman Bound I Married a Communist Exit Ghost Invisible Man American Pastoral The Plot against America: A Novel Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work Operation Shylock: A Confession The Human Stain

Introduction: Philip Roth’s Post-War Americans on Trial

Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each with its own trial, and yet the very same that was so unutterably grievous to be borne. (The Scarlet Letter)

This book focuses on a group of five major late-career Roth novels – Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), the American Trilogy (American Pastoral [1997], I Married a Communist [1998], The Human Stain [2000]) and The Plot against America (2004) – that scrutinizes the links between American manhood and national identity in the post-war period and interrogates the mythology conditioning the American man’s response to himself and his nation.1 It shows that the concept of the trial – in the three interwoven but often conflicting senses of testing, suffering and experimentation – forms the core of these great later works, all of which place their American Jewish male protagonist under continual scrutiny as a defendant.2 The word ‘states’ in the title States of Trial describes both the ongoing but changeable conditions in which individuals may find themselves and the bounded space of the figuratively embodied nation, the United States, suggesting the tension Roth shows to be inherent in his protagonists’ self-making. I intend to probe the interrelated meanings of ‘trial’ in the five novels, showing how Roth connects the concept of the trial as a rhetorical space in which normative boundaries concerning American identity are under discussion with the meaning of the trial as a condition of bodily ordeal or suffering where bodily boundaries are under strain, giving rise to the third connotation of the trial as a state of experiment or transformation, which can equally be understood 1

2

Acknowledging that ‘America’ and ‘American’ are contested terms in that they refer to a larger continent, I nevertheless use them throughout since Roth himself characteristically speaks of ‘America’ rather than ‘the United States’. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English definition, the word trial means: (1) A formal examination of evidence by a judge, typically before a jury, in order to decide guilt in a case of criminal or civil proceedings; (2) A test of the performance, qualities or suitability of someone or something; (3) A person, experience or situation that tests a person’s endurance or forbearance. See Oxford Dictionary of English, eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson, 2nd rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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as literary transformation. My exposition is coupled with close textual analysis that aims at enhancing its readers’ understanding of how Roth’s writing generates its impact. These powerful works were published approximately four decades into a novelwriting career that began with Goodbye Columbus (1959), emerging during a period of intense creativity in the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century, when Roth’s literary powers will probably be judged as having reached their peak, and cementing his reputation as a great American writer.3 The American Trilogy has received critical attention on a number of occasions as addressing the ‘state of the nation’. But, I accord equal weight to the contributions of Operation Shylock and The Plot against America within Roth’s post-war project. All five works are activated by the concept of the trial as a foundational element in the history and culture of the United States and deal with processes of trial as they apply to individual American male self-making in its historical context. All these works critique American nationhood and notions of American identity since World War II by placing their Jewish male protagonists in a never-ending state of trial. Roth presents trials as being ongoing processes of debate, proceedings without a conclusive ending, occurring in liminal spaces where differing narratives about the defendant’s guilt or innocence are heard and where judgements are for the time being suspended. But he equally investigates their cultural significance as being centred on boundary maintenance in the sense that they attempt to maintain normative limits and to reach a conclusive verdict. Roth taps the trial’s cultural roots in America’s foundational mythology of regenerative and purifying mission, journey and redemption, to explore its workings in post-war American culture and its place in determining who is or is not ‘American’. He makes these processes of boundary breaching and maintenance evident in a symbolism of embodiment, showing how the trial-racked bodies of the novel’s central male characters are absorbed or rejected by a notional American national body. These novels test ideas of a wholesome male American body fully integrated with its environment. Their unwholesome bodily narratives often actively feature disorderly and treacherous women: agents who undo the male protagonist. This is the only scholarly work to explore at length the centrality to Roth’s work of the trial in a broad American context and to show its especial relevance to the later ‘state of the nation’ novels, which, many would argue, will form the backbone of Roth’s literary legacy. This work brings together several themes already present in Roth studies, fusing them innovatively to provide a coherent view of those later Roth works that are at heart concerned with post-war American history. A number of scholars, notably Debra Shostak and Derek Parker Royal, have written about the political and cultural critique contained in Roth’s ‘state of the nation’ novels. Debra Shostak, as editor of the collection Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot against America (2011), picks up on Roth’s antipastoral critique of American 3

Elaine Safer, for example, states that with the American Pastoral Trilogy, ‘Roth’s artistry has grown immensely with the addition of new layers of emotional insight and socio-political concerns’ (Safer, 2). Griel Marcus’s contention is that, ‘in 1997, [when American Pastoral was published] Philip Roth embarked on a series of books that would put his long and distinguished career in the shadows’ (43).

Introduction

3

innocence in his Trilogy (13), as does Royal in essays such as ‘Pastoral Dreams and National Identity in American Pastoral and I Married a Communist’ (2005, 195). Dan Shiffman, among others, points to Roth’s historical critique of contemporary America in an ostensibly antihistorical novel in ‘The Plot against America and History Post9/11’ (2009, 62–3). Others focus specifically on Operation Shylock’s preoccupation with the trial of John Demjanjuk, as does Idit Alphandary (2008). Scholars such as David Brauner and Ross Posnock have written, in regard to American Pastoral and The Human Stain, about the testing implications for American identity of boundarychallenged, impure and incontinent American bodies (Brauner 2004; Posnock 2001). Brauner has, indeed, specifically dealt with Roth’s use of the trial trope in one chapter of his recent work titled Philip Roth (2007). However, Brauner’s work here centres on Roth’s early portrayal of Nathan Zuckerman, the Jewish writer-protagonist of Roth’s Trilogy encompassing The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and a character later dubbed by Roth in an interview with Charles McGrath as his ‘alter brain’ (New York Times, 7 May 2000). Brauner is concerned with how Zuckerman is seen to be judged, by other Jews, as a Jewish man and a Jewish writer, linking this fictional scrutiny with a consideration of how Roth has himself likewise been judged; he is not so much concerned with the wider American dimension that is my main focus here. Roth’s views on writing and language have naturally drawn close attention from many scholars: Debra Shostak’s Philip Roth – Countertexts, Counterlives (2004) is an important example, arguing as it does for Roth’s multiplicity of oppositional narrative voices and strategies. My book’s take on Roth and the trial engages with, intertwines and pushes further all the above-mentioned lines of research to make original arguments about the distinctively American sources of Roth’s literary vision. These key novels establish spaces in which to consider how to speak about nationhood, citizenship and changing concepts of American identity. They also resonate with the voices of Roth’s American literary ancestors who have spoken on these questions: a legacy that Roth continually negotiates and to which he is adding his own. He has been raised in, and has also contributed much to an ongoing, manyvoiced American literary discourse, allowing other important voices to speak through his work even as he incorporates those voices into his own creations. In so doing, he often engages in competitive and appropriative literary acts of recognizing these literary predecessors. This process, which frequently challenges narrative boundaries, can be seen as a form of ghost writing, of which I will say more in the course of this introduction. Ghost writing, as will become clear, can present a positive allegory for self-making on a writer’s part even in the absence of a unified authorial self. This book studies in depth how the triple-stranded trial emerges thematically in Roth’s finest works about American identity and culture, ending with some notes about how Roth’s recent novels from Everyman (2006) to Nemesis (2010), all written in the post-9/11 era, confront the trials of ageing and death. The following introduction will briefly explain the trial’s historical roots in America and will then outline its importance to Roth, starting to examine how each individual strand appears in the selected works and indicating the ways in which Roth interlaces them. The final section of the introduction will look at how the trial concept develops in his earlier works,

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notably the first Zuckerman Trilogy. It will begin to show why the five novels upon which I am focusing – Operation Shylock, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain and The Plot against America – are so significant to any wide-ranging study of Roth’s work, and why Roth himself deserves his place as America’s greatest living writer.

The trial in American culture The trial can be seen as a key topos in American culture, not least in its canonical literature, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). The epigraph to this introduction points up how Hawthorne was reaching back into America’s Puritan inheritance in bringing forth the trial’s opposing yet related meanings of an optimistically inflected test of membership and worth, and a grievous ordeal. Hester Prynne’s mysterious letter ‘A’ stitched to her dress, and always worn by her, in distinguishing her bodily appearance also marks her ambiguous status in regard to the community; while marking her apart from it, the letter also separates her from those others like the ‘heterodox religionist’ and the ‘idle and vagrant Indian’ who are to be completely expelled (49). Hawthorne in this way brings together language and the body in the service of the trial; in an intrinsically sceptical, questioning view of American identity, he indicates Hester’s liminality and thus the fluidity of each element. Roth’s delving into the trial’s cultural roots in the United States, like Hawthorne’s, draws out the trial’s central importance within a covenantal mythology of regenerative mission, journey and redemption in the New World. The Puritan Peter Bulkeley characterized it as ‘God’s way of tryall by conditionall promises’, which Sacvan Bercovitch, notably, has traced from its early Puritan origins in the seventeenth century (qtd. Bercovitch 1993, 48). What Bulkeley called the ‘trial by mercy’ would bring about ‘regeneration through suffering’ (Bercovitch 1993, 51). Trial therefore became transformative, a sign of grace, instead of being merely punitive. This understanding of the trial bolstered the Puritan sense of divine errand or mission: a mission that severely tested them while driving their progress into the ‘new’ American real and spiritual landscape, seen simultaneously as a wilderness and as the Promised Land.4 Trial, as a process of constant scrutiny by the individual of his or her conscience, was also the means by which communal spiritual purity was maintained. But the concept 4

The reworking by American Puritans of the story of Exodus – the Old Testament Hebrews’ escape from oppression by a journey through the wilderness towards the Promised Land – was a rededication to a covenant that promised them the new land of America in return for their obedience to God and their devotion to His redemptive mission of creating a spiritual as well as an earthly New World. Bercovitch argues that, according to the rhetoric of the errand, the two previously separate spaces of wilderness and New Canaan were conflated by the first Americans into one space existing in both earthly and sacred realms as the Promised Land of America, to which they were always journeying on their vital errand to fulfill God’s covenant. The first space always had the potential to become the other. Thus the passage of trials that was the journey into a new land was infused with a dominant sense of mission and spiritual progress. Their deeds in the new land would make it a place of spiritual salvation and an earthly paradise for those who had been chosen for the errand. Through deeds, and by a process of trial, the wilderness would actually be transformed into the Promised Land populated by human beings approaching nearer and nearer to perfection (Bercovitch 1993, 12–16).

Introduction

5

of the trial embodied fundamentally contradictory perceptions among early Puritan communities: that salvation had to be earned by their physical and spiritual endeavours in the Promised Land, thus connoting the trial to be a process of testing that determined inclusion or exclusion from the Elect, but that at the same time they were an Elect, an already-saved (or ‘innocent’) and already-unified people pre-chosen for salvation by God. The assumption of already-existing unity thus masked the processes of inclusion and exclusion that actually constituted Puritan communities. In the face of ever-present communal divisions, the ideal of unity could be maintained by applying the concept of spiritual renewal, often figuratively translated as rebirth or the reinstatement of the new, pure, wholesome and innocent communal body. However, that body was always in danger of decay and disintegration, its constantly tested boundaries needing, but ultimately failing, to be defended by the body’s periodical regeneration. The trial was central to the foundational myth of regeneration within the Promised Land that continued to inspire later Americans’ efforts to create themselves as Americans in their new nation after Independence. Documents central to the culture, from the Declaration of Independence to the speeches of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, emphasize the creation of a new people fit, in practical and in spiritual terms, for the New World in the wake of the War of Independence.5 Some firm boundaries were set right at the beginning as to who would qualify for membership of the new people. The evolving sense of American national identity linked notions of regenerative and redemptive errand to a new Elect who were entitled to American citizenship and rights.6 The nation consequently continued to be disturbed by questions of boundary maintenance and breaching arising, significantly, from the position and claims of America’s black population and women, and also, during the first half of the twentieth century, from mass immigration, including the Jewish immigration. Unity, wholeness and regeneration continued to be developed as major themes in nineteenth-century literature and philosophy: Emerson and, then, Thoreau stressed man’s oneness with nature and worked on philosophies of spiritual and practical selfsufficiency as expounded in Emerson’s Self-Reliance (Essays: First Series, 1841) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). The frontier myth was centred on man in the wilderness and a sturdy male individualism celebrated in cowboy tales during the second half of the nineteenth century and personified somewhat earlier than that in James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo of The Leatherstocking Tales, written between the 1820s and the 1840s. Walt Whitman’s poetry too, while evoking bodily fluidity rather than boundedness, expressed the organic unity of man with his surroundings, a conception of bodily integration of man and nation. These currents in American literature, to 5

6

Laurence H. Fuchs has pointed out that, in correspondence with early American Jewish congregations, President George Washington ‘set two basic themes which no European leader had done before or has since. The first was that there was a relationship between the creation and the redemption of Biblical Israel and the establishment of the new promised land, the United States’ (Fuchs 1976, 183). This endeavour was central to the evolving – and profoundly contradictory – American democratic narrative. After the Bill of Rights in 1791, the word ‘American’ signified a people entitled to a set of citizens’ rights, such as the right to vote, thus excluding groups such as black Americans and Indians (who were denied the vote) from participation in the democratic narrative and therefore from the Chosen.

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which Hawthorne’s portrait of Hester Prynne implicitly runs counter, also contributed to a nineteenth-century pastoral mythology termed ‘Adamism’ (Lewis 1955), based on a symbolism of bodily wholeness, newness and innocence, evoking America as Eden and the American as Adam.7 The five novels considered here each weigh the freight of these political and literary legacies, while reflecting on the writer’s own self-making and role in questioning or furthering those legacies. The key group of later Roth novels on which I am focusing registers national disturbances taking place within the person of the protagonist: they persistently reach back to foundational historical and ideological contradictions regarding communal innocence and guilt, inclusion and exclusion and regeneration versus decay. They probe a symbolism of bodily wholesomeness generated by nationbuilding narratives such as pastoralism and Adamism that seek to link the American male individual to the nation. They thereby question ideas about American identity based on what Dana D. Nelson calls ‘undivided manhood’ (1998, 34). Nelson states that national manhood is ‘an ideology that has worked powerfully since the Constitutional era to link a fraternal articulation of white manhood to civic identity’, showing how this ideology addressed the ‘frictions and anxieties’ of the period after the War of Independence and how it has continued to influence conceptions of American identity (x). She argues that, after the War of Independence, a form of democracy that made genuine provision for divergent strands of political thought was pre-empted by the terms of the Constitution, which ‘convincingly and insistently circuited the ideal of political consensus through the similarly common ideal of a vigorous, strong, undivided manhood’ embodied in the president (34). Roth explores aspects of this democratic national imaginary that has often been expressed figuratively in a unified, white, wellbounded and wholesome male physicality that I call the American national body. He challenges that physicality through expressing a turbulence in his protagonists’ bodily states, which often extends itself to Roth’s presidential figures, whether it be Roosevelt Nixon and Kennedy in American Pastoral, Lincoln in I Married a Communist, Clinton in The Human Stain or the fictional President Lindbergh in The Plot against America. He portrays the symbolic American body always liable to attack by those deemed to be outside it: an attack figured as the dissolution of its boundaries either by (sexual or racial) contamination or penetration.

States of trial and the American Jewish man Roth writes about American men who are also, inescapably, Jews – typically giving his protagonists a background and upbringing very similar to his own. For Roth, being Jewish sets the terms of what he calls the individual’s ‘predicament’ as an American.8 7

8

See also Henry Nash Smith. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. (c.1950). These influential writers on the American Renaissance of the nineteenth century published their works during what would have been a formative period for Roth. This is a favourite word of Roth’s, cropping up in four of our five novels: see Pastoral, 240; Communist, 187; Stain, 43; Plot, 227.

Introduction

7

The symbolism of the Jewish body has tended to be threateningly fluid, with Jews often seen as being alien to the national corpus. So, all Roth’s men are perpetually on trial as Americans; as defendants they are what Robert Ferguson calls ‘threshold people’ in court (2007, 57). Ferguson continues, ‘[I]nnocent until proven guilty but on the cusp, defendants can never remain where they are’: so, as ‘threshold people’ they occupy a liminal position in regard to identity (57). And we can say that Roth employs Jewishness as a liminal identity. Being Jewish for Roth is one mode of being – to quote Victor Turner’s words describing liminal states in communities – ‘betwixt and between’ American and un-American (1995, 95). Jews, like other so-called new immigrants from Europe, were until at least the 1960s closely scrutinized and regarded with suspicion by more established Americans; they were given an in-between or liminal status as ‘trial members of the social compact’ (Roediger 2005, 84). Historically, in the West, and specifically in America from the nineteenth century, the Jewish body has been subject to a metaphor of disease and feared as a source of contamination. However, this model of the Jewish body has changed over time, especially rapidly in America during the mid-twentieth century, to approximate the contours of the American national body.9 In American Pastoral, for example, Seymour ‘the Swede’ Levov is, for the narrator Nathan Zuckerman, a species of Jewish scout or a liminal character, ‘the boy we were all going to follow into America’; his liminality bears directly on his later status as a defendant at trial (89). This in-betweenness gives rise to a characteristic oscillation between states of stasis and extreme fluidity that tests the unity of both the individual and national self. Roth’s Jewish protagonists, then, undergo trials in the sense of physical ordeal or suffering, where the body is threatened with disintegration or contamination. From early on in Roth’s career, his novels have dealt with bodily ordeals, as with his farcical take on a Kafka-esque theme of The Breast (1973), whose protagonist becomes a human breast. But later in his career, these bodily trials gain greatly in significance by being figuratively aligned with tests generated by historical and political processes, tests that act upon these men’s processes of self-formation as Americans. These trials arise in an attempt to establish firm ideological boundaries to the American national body, boundaries that have served to include or exclude individuals or groups from that body, but that are themselves always in a state of flux. Roth’s Jewish men characteristically find themselves at the centre of severe cultural conflicts that impact dramatically upon their self-perception and the process of their self-making; this allows their author to debate and negotiate the fractured and changing contours of American identity in general, so that, for example, the turbulent, impure, racially ambiguous ‘half-visible’ body of The Human Stain’s Coleman Silk, a black man passing as white and Jewish, presents the national body with an internal challenge based on racial division and changing racial politics (213). These novels rework the ‘innocent’ American of national mythology as a troubled individual who has a tormented and guilty relationship with his country. And, by charting the dynamics of the national body’s absorptive and expulsive movements 9

The attributes of the Jewish body in relation to national identities and masculinity are explored by Sander Gilman in The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge. 1991.

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in regard to Jewish men, Roth makes the Jewish self the key to understanding mid-tolate-twentieth-century American ideas about personal and national identity. The regenerative movement and concomitant trials with which Roth is primarily concerned, and to which these novels consistently return, is the one rooted in and immediately following World War II: the moment when, according to the narrator Nathan Zuckerman in American Pastoral, ‘Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together’ (40). This period was marked by a major realignment of international powers with the establishment of the Soviet bloc and the beginning of the Cold War era in American and international politics, and thus by a crisis of national identity. At this time, national unity entailed establishing a politics of consensus based on anticommunism, which meant that the socialist and communist radical strands in the national political life became unacceptable – in effect, un-American – as the normative boundaries regulating what was considered to be an ‘American’ identity changed, a shift, traced in I Married a Communist, giving rise to McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, or trials, set up to determine who was or was not ‘American’. Accompanying the exclusionary movement, though, was a regenerative, inclusive rhetoric that attempted to reinforce national unity, and minimize or mask racial, economic and social divisions, by promoting what was termed ‘the American Way’ as the carrier of core cultural values. The American Way represented a twentieth-century attempt to rework the unifying mythology of mission and regeneration for the wartime years and those immediately following the War.10 All five Roth novels with which I am concerned match that post-war narrative of rebirth and the associated hardening of the boundaries delineating American identity with counternarratives about the loosening of these boundaries or corporal decay, where Jewish manhood, even as it most closely replicates the American national body, works to dissolve a sense of well-integrated American manhood and a unified national identity. As we can see, all these novels embed the trial deeply in its historical and political context so as to address the question of who and what is an American; in so doing, they grapple with what it means to write about American history. In most of these works the protagonist’s trials are contextualized by significant historical scenes of trial. Additionally, all these novels exhibit a turning back or folding of the perspective from the latter end of the twentieth century to the 1940s. Operation Shylock’s action in Jerusalem at the time of the 1988 trial for the Nazi war crimes of John (or Ivan) Demjanjuk, a naturalized American, evokes not only the Holocaust but also Israel’s foundation in 1948 and the start of the fraught 60-year-long loyalty-straining and identity-testing relationship between the United States and Israel. American Pastoral moves between the post-war ‘upsurge 10

A recent study by Wendy Wall has examined the emergence of ‘the American Way’ as a popular term in the mid-1930s, greatly publicized by newspapers and magazines, notably by an essay contest in Harper’s magazine in 1937 with World War II looming. She notes that this term denoted ‘a profound sense of anxiety – an anxiety shared by Americans across the political spectrum – about national identity and unity in an increasingly threatening world’ (Wall 2008, 17). Wall tracks how the concept of an American Way informed a politics of consensus in the 1930s and 1940s and a language that stressed harmony and cultural plurality, but how at the same time it tended to maintain the status quo and to deny the very real economic and power imbalances that divided American society.

Introduction

9

of energy’ in the 1940s and the Congressional impeachment hearings against Nixon in 1973 after the Watergate investigations (Pastoral, 40). I Married a Communist, narrated by the elderly Zuckerman in the 1990s, revisits the 1940s to examine self-making in the days of McCarthyism’s Cold War patriotism and the HUAC ‘show-trial’ (Communist, 284). The Human Stain is set in the 1990s at the time of the Clinton impeachment for perjury (following his sexual misconduct with Monica Lewinsky), which is also the era of political correctness and the ‘speech wars’ that give rise to Coleman Silk’s ‘trial’ for supposed racial harassment, but shows how these issues stem from the racial and sexual politics of the earlier post-war period. Meanwhile, The Plot against America’s alternative scenario of the 1940s resonates with echoes of the post-9/11 Bush era. Its speculative premise – what if America in 1940 had been headed by a fascist-leaning president, Charles Lindbergh, and had stayed out of World War II – fantasizes a history that never was while simultaneously engaging with history as it has been. Roth’s scoping out of the post-war decades along with his ongoing backward turn to the 1940s strongly suggests that he believes World War II and its immediate political aftermath to have had a decisive impact upon modern American national identity, with the subsequent decades having all been swept up in it and experienced its workingsout. It equally suggests, in light of Zuckerman’s description of the 1940s as the inspiring moment when ‘Americans were to start over again’, that in Roth’s view, it was also the biggest moment for large-scale myth-making in modern times, with regeneration as the dominant, historically familiar theme, perhaps even the last such moment, America’s final story of rebirth (Pastoral, 40). The Plot against America, coming after the unravellings of Operation Shylock and The American Trilogy, can be seen as a decisive riposte to the regeneration myth: it sets up a fictional Lindbergh-dominated 1940s that is paranoid and melancholic rather than regenerative. It is an alternative history that interrogates the fundamental concepts of home and homeland in relation to two bodies, the male body and the body of the Constitution, registering the attacks on the national constitution that have actually occurred since the millennium. It not only joins its predecessors in rebutting post-war attempts at national myth-making but also comments scathingly on Americans’ failure to understand the ideology motivating their historical view: a failure that dooms them to repeat their mistakes. My inclusion of Operation Shylock: A Confession within this group of what might be called Roth’s ‘state-of-the-nation’ novels might at first sight be considered as strange. Published in 1993, it is often critically identified with the novels Roth wrote in the half-dozen years before it: The Counterlife (1986), The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) and Deception (1990), which all very consciously play with the concept of the writer writing about himself. The Counterlife rehearses a central theme of Operation Shylock, the American Jew’s relation to Israel, and also employs similar literary strategies, for example, establishing a precursor to Operation Shylock’s ‘missing’ chapter 11 in declaring that some of its pages are missing due to a struggle for authorship between its ‘co-authors’, Nathan and Henry Zuckerman. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography is a supposedly autobiographical narrative that comments on its own construction as fiction by means of a letter from Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s favourite protagonist, in which Zuckerman dismisses the possibility of autobiography

10

States of Trial

possessing truth or nonfiction status. It blurs generic boundaries somewhat as does Operation Shylock by claiming nonfiction status as an autobiographical work while otherwise behaving like a novel. Deception again centres on the performance of the act of writing, being like Operation Shylock a confessional account, a writer’s ‘confession’ of an extra-marital affair, later revoked as he asserts to his distressed wife, as he later asserts to his distressed wife who has read his manuscript notes revealing the affair, that it is nothing more than a literary work in progress. The story of marital deception is thus entwined with a study of the deceptive seductions of the writer’s craft so as to make the word ‘deception’, and therefore the narrative as a whole, ambiguous. While these earlier novels all engage with questions of American identity, they operate primarily within the world of individual subjectivity: a writer’s consciousness reflecting on itself and on the nature of writing. However, despite Operation Shylock’s apparent obsession with the writer and his impersonator – a double entity called ‘Philip Roth’ – and its location outside America in Jerusalem, it articulates a deep engagement with America’s turbulent and contradiction-filled post-war history and politics by querying the nation’s role in the foundation of, and its subsequent troublesome connection with, the state of Israel since 1948 and how that role has played into ideas about American national identity. In Operation Shylock: A Confession the testing of both normative and bodily boundaries in the context of post-war ideas about American identity becomes powerfully intertwined with the testing of the literary ‘laws’ of genre and therefore with the act of writing. Roth exploits the book’s label as a ‘confession’, generically betwixt and between fiction and nonfiction, to extend its limits as a literary work, continually provoking the reader to question its generic status. He thereby creates a liminal rhetorical space, or a space of trial, in which to speak of the controversial politics of national identity. There is evidence that Roth valued this novel more highly than any other of his previous works and was extremely disappointed when it failed to win an enthusiastic reception from critics and the public.11 The response was often somewhat dismissive, characterized by accusations that Roth was manifesting self-obsession by writing of ‘Philip Roth’ and an impersonating double.12 My approach here is to counter these critical claims and to accord it the respect I feel it deserves. Not only is Operation Shylock a major transitional work that links two important periods of Roth’s literary development, but it is here that the notion of the trial and the trial’s American roots fully assumes its importance. 11

12

See Claire Bloom’s autobiography, Leaving a Doll’s House. Here Bloom states that Roth ‘was more optimistic about this book than about any of his previous works. He talked about it incessantly. . . . His publishers, Simon & Schuster, his friends and his agent, Andrew Wylie, agreed that the book was, without a doubt, his masterpiece’ (1997, 201–11). That view was taken by a number of critics: for example, Michiko Kakutani was of the opinion that Operation Shylock reflected the ‘solipsism, repetitiveness and self-interest’ of the writer; criticisms that Kakutani declares ‘have been leveled at Mr. Roth’s work before’, and that he subsequently endorses (New York Times, 4 March 1993). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html? . . . retrieved 26 February 2009. See also Robert Alter, ‘The Spritzer’, New Republic 208 (5 April 1993): 31–4, and note Richard Brookhiser’s remark in ‘The Gripes of Roth’ that ‘Philip Roth’s latest book is about Philip Roth, so what else is new?’ (National Review, 29 March 1993).

Introduction

11

This book, as must now be clear, involves the study of how some of Roth’s most striking, if enigmatic, male figures attempt to construct themselves and are, inevitably, undone. Roth’s protagonists are almost invariably men, the sole exception to date being Lucy Nelson of When She Was Good (1967), a character whose frustrated efforts at self-making lead her baffled energies to seem almost demonic in their effects on those around her. In the group of novels upon which my book is centred, the most important female characters are usually also the most treacherous, often playing a key role in the disintegration of the male protagonist: Merry Levov, the daughter of the focal character Seymour ‘the Swede’ Levov in American Pastoral, or Ira Ringold’s wife, Eve Frame, in I Married a Communist, for example. Roth’s treatment of the women in his novels has, over the years, quite frequently drawn accusations of misogyny.13 Although Roth’s women are not my primary focus here, I have nevertheless tried to work out some of the interesting and perhaps unexpected ways in which the female characters intervene in the trials of the male protagonists rather than becoming enmeshed in a debate about misogyny. In American Pastoral, for instance, two confrontations with ‘disorderly’ women, Merry and her associate, Rita Cohen, mark out spaces of trial for the Swede, testing his bodily control and his control over language, bringing him to discover his own otherness. The Human Stain subsequently shows that the bodies of the ‘Jewish’ protagonist Coleman Silk and President Clinton’s Jewish lover, Monica Lewinsky, are alike in possessing qualities that are antithetical to the concept of the well-bounded American male body, thus allowing it to be contaminated by proximity to the racial and the feminine or feminized other. At certain points I address the problematic nature of his female roles, particularly in American Pastoral where feminism is aligned with violent radicalism in the context of the Vietnam era in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, exploring how the female characters test the boundaries of an American identity largely predicated on maleness is, I feel, a more fruitful way to study Roth’s presentation of women than levelling charges of misogyny against him.

The trial as a rhetorical space Roth’s states of trial are played out in rhetorical spaces created within his novels, where narratives of identity are tested. Robert Ferguson has elaborated the ways in which trial spaces are rhetorical spaces, where arguments and counterarguments, narratives and counternarratives are marshalled, interacting and conflicting in the process of examining the defendant’s behaviour (2007, 24). He also highlights the interplay, particularly in controversial trials, between the legal narratives of the courtroom and the nonlegal narratives generated by public reactions and media responses to the case (2007, 26–8). Controversial trials, such as the O. J. Simpson trial in 1994, 13

See for example Mary Allen’s criticism of When She Was Good in The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties (1976) and Janis P. Stout’s critique of The Great American Novel in ‘The Misogyny of Roth’s The Great American Novel’ (1986). See also Elaine Showalter’s review of The Dying Animal, ‘Tedium of the Gropes of Roth’, in The Times (27 June 2001).

12

States of Trial

can often therefore act as national barometers. Roth’s novelistic scenes of trial are likewise rhetorical spaces where, as in these courtrooms, ‘[national] order itself, and the norms that uphold it, are on trial’: where national ideological narratives are heard and interrogated, exposing the contradictions that produced the post-war moment of national regeneration, and the contradictions to which it in turn gives rise (Sherwin 2000, 69). For Derrida, ‘literature can play the law, repeating it while diverting or circumventing it. . . . It is on both sides of the line that separates law from the outlaw’ (1992, 216). Roth takes full advantage of this literary prerogative. His ambiguous narratives, not merely about disorderliness but themselves flirting with disorder in terms of structure and genre, work to break down older mythic stories about American identity that have assumed perfected (and thus closed) metaphorical states of being, exposing the extent to which their narrative concepts have been politically and racially loaded. The threads of these narratives and counternarratives – about order and disorder, purity and contamination, wholeness and fragmentation – and the debates they generate as they are subjected to political and cultural change over time, identify the trial as a dynamic process that problematizes efforts to ‘assign limits to deviance, identify acceptable otherness . . . place controls on the unknown, and publicize power’ (Ferguson 2007, 19). The trial space is therefore equally a liminal space. In speaking of the courtroom, Robert Ferguson refers to Victor Turner’s work on liminality as an attribute of communal ritual, saying that ‘“ liminality” supplies a zone for gauging deviance; it is the rhetorical space where questionable behaviour awaits examination and where fascination and abhorrence meet’ (2007, 24). Trial scenes are arenas in which the compulsion to hear competing narratives wrestles with the urge to artificially reconcile or to flatten contradictory narratives so as to reach a ‘fitting’, but artificial, conclusion. They are also zones where judgements are, for the time being, suspended, but where the urge to pass judgement that builds throughout the trial can be seen to be in conflict with the need to defer judgement. Contradictions are therefore generated that produce tension in the trial arena. In Roth’s novels, we notice these contradictions being worked out in the narrator’s desire to know and explain the protagonist set against the inevitability of getting him wrong. Founded as they are on contradiction, Roth’s narratives of trial are treacherous in nature, not only charged with a sense of betrayal among the characters whose stories they tell, but also demonstrating that the word itself cannot be trusted. They abound in unreliable protagonists – doppelgangers, impersonators, half-visible creatures and traitors – who act in a deceptive verbal landscape where meaning shifts and opposite meanings like ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ collide: where ‘getting people wrong’ is the only possible approach to getting them right (Pastoral, 35). Roth, however, sees the process of getting people wrong as a frustrating but still meaningful endeavour in itself: he indicates the potential for transformation, allowing us to view the trial as an ongoing experiment and to see the nation and thus ‘the American’ as being still in flux, still indeterminable. In the liminal spaces of his writing, Roth explores and tests language, persistently being alive to words’ alternative meanings and thus refusing to definitively capture

Introduction

13

the subject. He breaks generic boundaries in Operation Shylock to find an arena in which to speak about America’s relationship with Israel and the compromising effects it has upon individual American identity. In American Pastoral, he confronts the orderly and unified national narratives of the American Way and the pastoral itself with a disorderly narrative of the American berserk, creating scenes where the protagonist Seymour ‘the Swede’ Levov is brought face to face with disorderly women who reveal to him the inadequacies of his own belief in these ordered national narratives. I Married a Communist mobilizes sharply contrasting literary subgenres, the Bildungsroman and ghostwriting, to undo the protagonist’s process of self-making, demonstrating how Roth exposes the contradictions within the Bildungsroman – a literary passage of trials – by setting against it ghostwriting’s generic ambiguity and treacherousness. The Human Stain, continuing on a ghostly theme, centres on the scrutiny of one portentous word, ‘spooks’, which is the locus for testing debates concerning race, American citizenship and the politics of language. In The Plot against America, Roth plays on the meanings of the words ‘constitution’ and ‘home’ to expose the unsettled connection between man and nation. Since we will explore both ghostwriting and ghost writing in the subsequent chapters on I Married a Communist and The Human Stain with a focus on ghost writing as one means by which Roth creates transformative rhetorical spaces in his novels, some explanation of these terms is due. Ghostwriting, a form of literary impersonation, characteristically blurs the question of a book’s authorship by concealing the writer’s identity and enlisting the writer in the service of the book’s nominal author and subject. It therefore adds another layer of deceit to the construction of identity within the genre of autobiography, the questionable authenticity of which I will consider in the context of Operation Shylock’s deceptive claim to be an autobiographical confession. Despite the varying degrees of collaboration between ghostwriter and subject – a process that is usually undisclosed – the success of the autobiography rests largely on the success of the writer in disappearing, on the resignation of authorship to the named subject. The ghostwriter and the subject might successfully collaborate in such a way that the writer functions as an ideal auditor for the subject and thus allows for the production of a narrative that is well aligned with the subject’s own version of his/her life story. But this particular deception, unlike the many other deceptions of a written text, means that the ghostwriter’s scope for provocation and/or transformation is strictly limited: therefore the practice of ghostwriting is not usually one by which a serious writer can achieve literary fulfilment. However, the process can also become a power struggle between the authorial voices in such a way that the ghostwriter dominates and determines the identity of the named author and subject, ventriloquizing them so as to diminish or even extinguish what they have to say. However, ghostwriting, as Emily Miller Budick has observed, is a term that might also be applied to writing that acknowledges the influence of past writers who ‘haunt the writings of living writers . . . making them tell their stories’ (Budick 1996, 122–3). Budick appears to regard letting other voices speak in one’s text as a relinquishment of control over that text so that the writer is effectively sidelined and becomes a ghost; we will discuss this in the following chapter when it comes to The Ghost Writer.

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States of Trial

However, she also asserts that ‘Philip Roth understands ghostwriting as our condition in language’: a statement that perhaps implies a more active role for the writer, as well as reflecting Budick’s specific concern with the writing of the Holocaust in a way that does not degrade its sufferers (1996, 134). I am taking a different view: that Roth, like every serious writer, has an active, and indeed competitive, engagement with the voices of his literary forerunners, who come to us from the past but are still living in his texts. This engagement is essential to every serious writer’s development. This process can be called ghost writing, the two-word phrase that echoes Roth’s usage in The Ghost Writer. Finding and exercising a literary voice through ghost writing is what Helen Sword calls ‘the inevitably agonistic struggle between creative writers and their literary ancestors’ (Sword 2002, 32). Catherine Morley’s study of the epic in relation to Roth’s Trilogy makes use of Harold Bloom’s conception of apophrades or ‘the return of the dead’ to describe the connection with that ancestry. She notes that, for Bloom, in the strong writer’s work, ‘those dead writers and precursors who have gone before do not govern the work but are stationed within it to be manipulated by the writer’ (Morley 2009, 107). In a continuing process of collaboration, accommodation and competitive power play with ghostly literary presences, the serious creative writer orchestrates appropriative moves towards preceding writers’ work that are generative of new work and therefore transcend mere ventriloquism. To describe this activity as ghost writing is not only to recognize its multivocal and fragmentary nature but also to acknowledge the possibility of having a viable engagement with one’s literature and thence one’s history, even in the absence of a unified authorial self. It is perhaps one way in which, as Zuckerman’s college tutor Mr Glucksman urges him to do, the writer can fulfill the duty to ‘write well’ (Communist, 218), that is, without polemic but with dedication to the possibilities of the word, about an American identity that Roth, has shaped together with his predecessors and fellowcitizens. This form of writing is perhaps also a means of addressing concerns that the writer is being judged by his literary forebears: an anxiety that surfaces strongly in the first Zuckerman Trilogy and percolates through the later novels that are our main subject of study. It might be that the rhetorical zones we are about to encounter, with their criss-crossing, clashing narratives and their endless debates about identity, are also about the writer’s effort to keep the jury out in his own case: of refusing to submit to a final judgement. All these novels inevitably are infused with strong emotion as they register their inhabitants’ responses to their trials. Feelings of anger, guilt, shame and disgust continually erupt into view as the defendant or protagonist is called to account for the contradictions inherent within his self-making: contradictions that he has tried to negotiate away, and hide, from himself. One such emotion-laden moment is when Coleman Silk, furious at being chided by his white lawyer for sexual misconduct with a young woman, Faunia, insultingly calls his lawyer ‘lily-white’, just before Coleman’s hidden identity as a black man is revealed to the reader, his words therefore in retrospect acquiring a racial charge (Stain, 81). Coleman’s fury gives way to an overwhelming sense of humiliation and disgrace at his disorderly act of speech, which is set alongside

Introduction

15

the disruption to his corporal image. Another such eruption is the instant in American Pastoral at which the Swede’s father, Lou Levov, devastatingly receives a fork-jab full in the face, just missing his eye, from a drunken invitee to the Swede’s family table: the same instant at which Lou and the Swede see that the post-war New World in which they have believed has foundered under the political impact of the Nixon impeachment trial following the Watergate crisis (422). Roth’s five novels also elicit strong reactions from us as readers, befitting spaces ‘where fascination and abhorrence meet’ (Ferguson 2007, 24). They can provoke shock and disgust, often leavened with a laughter that acts as a release valve when tensions get dangerously high, as when the nemesis and namesake of Philip Roth the writer-protagonist in Operation Shylock, whom Philip nicknames Moishe Pipik, caps a fraught encounter of the two Philips in a hotel bedroom by exposing his unruly penis – stiffened by a prosthetic implant – in a final, crazed attempt to ‘prove’ his reality as Philip Roth (205). These rhetorical spaces invariably fascinate. They knock us off-balance, compelling us to revisit and to re-apprehend the scene. My fascination with Roth’s work began when I experienced a shock after finding out that the ‘Jewish’ Coleman of The Human Stain was a black man, a fact which Roth hides for the first 85 pages, and the revelation of which brought me up against my preconceptions about the character, reconfiguring the category of ‘what-is-Coleman’ and forcing me to turn back and re-read the pages to re-apprehend him. This act of revelation exposed the truth that when we read, we engage in what is described by Wolfgang Iser as ‘gap-filling’ or completing the meanings of the text from our own imaginations: an activity sedulously fostered but also problematized by Roth (1974, 289). In this, too, there is a resistance to ‘total scrutability’, the obsession with legibility, or knowing the subject: a strand in American culture originating, as Michael T. Gilmore shows, in the early Puritan tradition of spiritual and secular accountability, and surfacing in the later American preoccupation with setting out definitive rights and conditions of citizenship (Gilmore 2003, xiii). Roth’s work always induces in us ‘the inherent nonachievement of balance’, or oscillation, brought about by the contrary operations of establishing a consistent pattern from the written text before us and of being still aware of other temporarily excluded meanings or ‘alien associations’ (Iser 1974, 286). In this way, we are continually being brought to test our own judgements about these key novels.

Roth the American writer As Roth’s literary endeavour perhaps implies, he has never accepted the label of Jewish or Jewish-American writer, nor even American-Jewish writer. He is ardently, fundamentally, an American writer who has consciously claimed his place within – and now even at the head of – a mainstream literary tradition earlier represented by those such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. The Trilogy initiated by American Pastoral evokes Hawthorne’s presence throughout, with its narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, taking refuge in the Hawthorne territory of Connecticut; Roth quotes Hawthorne’s words in The Scarlet Letter about Puritanism possessing ‘the persecuting

16

States of Trial

spirit’ when he writes of America’s mania for purity in The Human Stain (2). Henry James is overtly mentioned in The Ghost Writer (1979), where repeated references are made to James’s short story dealing with the trials of writing, The Middle Years (1893). Joining Hawthorne and James in the American canon, as well as the greats Herman Melville, Edward Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, Roth’s position has recently been assured by the publication of a multivolume edition of his collected works in the Library of America series. At the same time, Roth has often been viewed from the perspective of a literary culture within but also somewhat at odds with that mainstream American tradition: a stream of Jewish writing emanating from second- and third-generation descendants of immigrants that has flourished since the War, making a forceful impact upon American literature. This sees Roth grouped with Saul Bellow and with writers such as Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Leslie Fiedler as one of the ‘Jewish intellectuals and writers . . . committed, almost to the point of obsession, to the responsibility of interpreting America to herself ’, as Sam Girgus puts it (1984, 6). In addition to the above-mentioned persons, Mark Shechner has traced Roth’s lineage as a Jewish writer back to earlier writers of the pre-war era, such as Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz and Lionel Trilling (Shechner 2003). Roth’s presence in these two groups underlines his significance in developing ideas concerning American identity through interrogating the contradictions and crises that have arisen from the concept of the United States as a united nation; it restates his importance in recording and interpreting the processes of change that have acted upon America since its national foundation. Debra Shostak rightly sees Roth as writing of Jewish selfhood throughout the course of his literary career as a ‘contested concept’, where there is no sense of ‘the normal’ (2004, 132). But selfhood as a contested concept extends further for Roth, because his ambiguous Jewish selfhood is a manifestation of American selfhood, which at the same time reveals the loosely bound nature of that selfhood; in other words, there is no sense of the normal when one speaks of American identity in general. At the start of the crucial period that preoccupies Roth, during the uncertain war years – which also happen to be Philip Roth’s own formative years – F. O. Matthiessen published The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), a work that was highly influential in establishing the American literary canon and, indeed, the discipline of American literary studies; it possessed what New Americanist Jonathan Arac has called a ‘centrally authoritative critical identity’ (Michaels and Pease 1985, 92).14 The title American Renaissance identified a moment of cultural rebirth in the 1850s when five men who by the twentieth century had come to be regarded as great writers – Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne himself and Melville – had produced defining works such as Emerson’s Representative Men (1850), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Whitman’s Leaves of 14

New Americanists such as Arac, Donald Pease and Sacvan Bercovitch, argued for understanding the development of canon formation as stemming from economic, political and social causes rather than from the operation of aesthetic principles alone.

Introduction

17

Grass (1855) and Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Their signal achievement, according to Matthiessen, is that they all produced ‘literature for our democracy’ (xv). ‘In reading the lyric, heroic and tragic expression of our first great age’, Matthiessen declares, ‘we can feel the challenge of our still undiminished resources’ (xv). He thereby links the moment of renewal he has identified in the nineteenth century to the moment in the 1940s when the crisis of wartime, soon to be followed by the crisis of the Cold War, equally demanded a rhetoric of renewal.15 In defining this literary canon for the mid-twentieth century, Matthiessen inevitably sets his own boundaries, carries out his own processes of testing and imposes his own judgements as to what constitutes great American literature. His overview of what he calls the American Renaissance emphasizes the themes of wholeness and, of course, regeneration that have been shown to be recurrent in American culture. Roth can be seen to be querying this judgement: drawing on but critiquing what might be called the ‘wholesome’ aspects of the American Renaissance’s legacy and the critical legacy exemplified in Matthiessen, in applying the concept of the trial to post-war American culture. The nature of the Jewish contribution to Americanness, and indeed Roth’s specific contribution to his national culture, is perhaps best expressed in Roth’s conversation with Primo Levi in 1986, when Roth asks Levi to explain ‘the tension between your rootedness and your impurity’ as a Jew and an Italian. Levi returns, ‘I see no contradiction between “rootedness” and being (or feeling) “a grain of mustard”. To feel oneself a catalyst, a spur to one’s cultural environment . . . it is an advantage to belong to a (not necessarily racial) minority . . . don’t you feel yourself, you, Philip Roth, “rooted” in your country and at the same time “a mustard grain”? In your books I perceive a sharp mustard flavour’ (Shop, 13). There is undoubted truth in the observation that Roth novels, if not the man himself, are both within the grain and are also sharp and pungent granules within American culture: incisive, provocative and sometimes outrageous. Along with the best work of contemporaries such as Saul Bellow and John Updike, they can be said to have revivified the post-war American novel.

15

Arac has pointed out that the American Renaissance took place in a previous age of deep national division, the Civil War, and also noted that Matthiessen failed to integrate the Civil War into his overall understanding of the Renaissance, treating the Civil War rather as ‘a marker, dividing the American Renaissance from an age of rampantly destructive individualism’ (Arac, 97). Arac has commented that Matthiessen’s ‘rhetoric of “wholeness”’ in American Renaissance and his consequent underplaying of the counterthemes that were present, in particular, in Hawthorne’s and Melville’s work, had the effect of lending cultural legitimacy to the politics of the Cold War, and that it had a ‘nationalist force’ that belied Matthiessen’s own leftist and internationalist political stance (Arac, 91, 93).

1

Turning Sentences Around: Trial Themes in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson

The first Zuckerman trilogy, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, appeared approximately 20 years into Roth’s novel-writing career. Centred on Nathan Zuckerman who had already debuted as a character created by Peter Tarnopol, the protagonist of My Life as a Man (1974), the trilogy affords an excellent perspective on the developing constellation of major trial-related themes whose most impressive efflorescence is in the works on which we are focusing which include the second Zuckerman-related ‘American’ trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. It is with The Ghost Writer and the start of the first Zuckerman trilogy that the trial’s range of meanings connected with testing and experimentation – the straining of normative boundaries regarding American identity, bodily ordeals, and the testing of language limits – are coalescing firmly enough so as to start to produce Roth’s distinctive take on American male identity, although these themes clearly emerged as far back as Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and My Life as a Man. On reading the trilogy one cannot fail to be struck, from the outset, by how persistently the young writer, Nathan, is presented as a defendant, both as a man and as an artist: an interweaving of guilt-ridden personal and artistic identities mediated through the question of just what ‘say[ing] anything’ (Bound, 355) means that becomes ever more complex in Roth’s later novels. Zuckerman is possessed from the start by the feeling of being under judicial review: a sense of guilt that leads him in The Anatomy Lesson to declare that his books are an ongoing, self-justifying ‘public deposition’ (Bound, 500–1). In fact on the opening page of The Ghost Writer he writes of being ‘before the jury’ of the Manhattan literati concerning his choice of artistic mentor: E. I. Lonoff the middleaged Jewish writer of several bloodless, spare novels. Nathan is on the defensive here since the Manhattanites dismiss Lonoff as a figure whose time has passed (Bound, 3). But it is the favourable judgement of Lonoff himself that Nathan is after: recoiling from being harshly judged by family and community as a bad Jew following his short story ‘Higher Education’ – itself a tale to which a courtroom scene is central as two sides of a family fight over an inheritance – Nathan is looking to Lonoff not only as a

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States of Trial

literary judge but also as a moral arbiter who will countermand Father Zuckerman’s disapproving verdict. The 23-year-old Nathan who submits to the ‘canon law’ of literature embodied in Lonoff and the work of Henry James (Bound, 56), but who struggles against the laws of other Fathers, grows into the mid-thirtyish Zuckerman of Zuckerman Unbound, writer of the outrageous novel Carnovsky, a self-proclaimed ‘fugitive from justice’ after his wildly successful fictional eruption attracts violent accusations of pornographic antiSemitism (Bound, 230). More than this, he is a self-condemned traitor, a ‘[c]oldhearted betrayer of the most intimate confessions’ (Bound, 170) whose father dies from a stroke, unable to speak except to utter a half-formed word to his son that Zuckerman fears to be ‘Bastard’. As Zuckerman becomes physically immobilized by back pain, his creative voice is also, for a time, all but silenced. David Brauner points out the self-judging, self-punishing element in these trials: ‘the sentence that Zuckerman passes on himself is that he be prevented from pronouncing any sentences’ (2007, 37). In The Anatomy Lesson, set a few years later still, the pain-ridden Zuckerman has also been scathed by the critic Milton Appel’s ‘reconsidered judgment’ of Zuckerman’s literary ‘case’ in light of Carnovsky (Bound, 344–5) and becomes obsessed with formulating unsent replies to the magisterial Appel. As Zuckerman struggles for control over his body and his creative voice, Roth’s interrogation of the limits of his protagonist’s identity clearly starts to take its characteristic form, with speech and bodily boundaries both under pressure, testing Zuckerman’s integrity as an American man. In this first trilogy, it is in The Anatomy Lesson most of all that the trials of the body are most overtly linked with the trials of writing and with the possibilities of creating through writing an arena of trial in which narratives of American identity are tested. When the ordeal-racked Zuckerman of The Anatomy Lesson observes that associates are reading ‘the pain as his fifth book’ (Bound, 354) Roth is of course slyly noting that his own documented back pain has provided promising material for a novel. More importantly, and even though Zuckerman concludes that his pain is ‘not interesting and it has no meaning’ (Bound, 439) Roth’s conjuring of a disorder whose physical root cannot be traced allows him to examine from multiple angles that disorder in terms of a psychic breakdown involving Zuckerman’s American selfhood. Guilt and its expiation, loss, grief, shame, buried anger, frustration, rebellion or reluctant over-conformity are all proposed factors in producing a misshapen body that has been ‘warping at a steady rate since he was seven’ (Bound, 300). This distortion had begun, Nathan notes, with a slight twisting of the spine accompanying his left-handed writing of homework whose first subject was the history of New Jersey and Governor Carteret’s false promise of peace to the Hackensack chief, Oraton: an indicator that there is a link, manifested through the activity of writing, between ‘the massive historical pain’ that created the American nation and an American individual’s ‘pain in the neck’ (Bound, 399). Zuckerman strongly rejects the idea that his psyche has created the pain as a judgement for writing Carnovsky, as well as the suggestion that the pain might be a necessary test of the writer’s character. But Zuckerman’s assertion that, for a writer, ‘[a]ll of you [is] an enclosure you keep trying to break out of ’ and his doctor friend Bobby’s response that ‘[e]very construction that helps anybody is also a boundary’

Turning Sentences Around

21

(Bound, 442) restate the case that the testing of the body and the testing of the limits of language are interlinked and are also both at the root of American identity: they give the lie to Zuckerman’s enduring belief, at the conclusion of The Anatomy Lesson, that he can ‘escape the corpus that was his’ (Bound, 505). Clearly, the angst-ridden Jewish protagonist of the first Zuckerman trilogy is already testing the ‘undivided manhood’ of the American male. In this trilogy the linked challenges to identity construction posed by vulnerable bodies and unleashing one’s voice find expression in the theme of impersonation, which is a continuing major figure in Roth’s later works: a theme whose relation to both ghostwriting and ghost writing is explained below in connection with The Ghost Writer. With impersonation we are dealing with multiple selves and multiple voices that work against the notion of an individual selfhood possessing firm boundaries, especially as in Roth’s work those who are impersonated are themselves drawn to swap places with their impersonators. In Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman in New York bumps into a stranger, fellow New Jerseyite Alvin Pepler, the former celebrated Quiz Kid of a popular television show: a man obsessed by the idea that he has been betrayed and cheated out of fortune and recognition because the show was fixed in favour of a middle-class Goy contestant. Pepler, who seems to know all about Zuckerman’s family and background as well as possessing an intimate knowledge of all his literary works, becomes more and more like the writer’s doppelganger: as Zuckerman notes, ‘my pop self ’ (Bound, 245). Pepler is essentially a performer, even an artist: a dedicated talksmith who, Zuckerman soon discovers, doesn’t always tell the truth; the movie contacts he boasts about don’t actually exist. As the writer of the outrageous celebrity character, Carnovsky, a writer who has become something of a controversial celebrity himself, Zuckerman starts to feel a kinship with the garrulous, self-advertising Pepler who doesn’t, either, seem to know where to stop. ‘Oh, what a novel this guy would make!’ Zuckerman muses, before conceding: ‘What a novelist this guy would make!’ (Bound, 232). It isn’t long before Pepler is accusing Zuckerman of having stolen Pepler’s life story for Carnovsky: an unjustified charge that nevertheless doesn’t seem completely illegitimate in light of Zuckerman’s view of Pepler as promising comedy material for a future book. And Pepler reverses the act by writing about Zuckerman: a draft review describing him as the Marcel Proust of New Jersey, which he hands to Zuckerman to critique. So, one could say that they are impersonating each other in aiming to tell each other’s stories: engaging, comedically, in the acts of ghost writing we have described above. The Zuckerman-Pepler relationship in many ways appears to be a direct precursor of the connection, in Operation Shylock: A Confession, between Philip Roth and his namesake whom Philip nicknames Moishe Pipik, even down to the phonetic similarity of Pepler and Pipik. Pepler and Zuckerman, Pipik and Philip, are all striving for a selfcontrol and an integrity that they are never able to achieve: their Jewish difference is indicative that ‘all-American’ is an oxymoron. Crucially, Pepler and Pipik alike, while not necessarily telling the truth, speak to excess: an over-spilling of boundaries that resonates, for both Zuckerman and Philip, with the writers’ need to test the limits of their artistry and whether or not they should ‘say anything’. Our odd couples’

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movements of resistance and attraction to one another dramatize the internal conflicts that prevent them from becoming whole; at the point when apparently unlikely opposites are about to merge with one another the self as a construct is placed on trial. Pepler’s metamorphosis into Pipik, though, sees the character strengthen and deepen in Operation Shylock with the private investigator Pipik becoming an ‘agent of the law’ regarding Philip’s literary voice who poses a wider, more complex set of challenges to Philip, both as an American artist and an American man, than does Pepler to Zuckerman. It is perhaps in the trilogy’s opener The Ghost Writer that Zuckerman’s identityrelated trials make their most audacious turn with a take on impersonation by Roth that ranks in extravagance with that in Operation Shylock. When, on a weekend in 1956, the young Nathan Zuckerman goes to stay with his mentor Lonoff and his wife, Hope, at their house far out in the New England countryside, he meets a fascinating and attractive young woman, Amy Bellette. Realizing, after eavesdropping on a nighttime conversation between Amy and Lonoff, that they are emotionally involved with each other and possibly having an affair, Nathan channels his possessive feelings about both of them into a fantasy of Amy being Anne Frank. He imagines that, having survived the concentration camps, Anne Frank has reinvented herself as an American, Amy Bellette, in order to leave her past behind, only for her to realize on becoming aware of the publication of her old diaries that her beloved father Otto is still alive and that she herself has become ‘Anne Frank’, a revered (but decisively dead) figure. Nathan fantasizes that when Amy/Anne first hears about her book, she faces the dilemma of whether to own up to her old identity and be reunited with her father, or preserve the power of her authorship and the book’s power as a memorial to all the Holocaust dead in the only way she can, by continuing to be ‘dead’ herself. Amy-as-Anne is thus one manifestation of a ghost writer: for her work to be accepted as authentic she must sublimate her real identity and consent to be a ghost. As a ghost, though, her name simultaneously acquires great power; a power she berates herself for desiring. Nathan imagines her deploring ‘this seething passion to “come back” as the avenging ghost’ (Bound, 106). In this fantastic daydream Nathan imagines Anne as having impersonated Amy and then reverses that impersonation by envisioning a scene where Amy reveals to Lonoff that she is Anne but the sceptical Lonoff believes Amy to be mentally frail and making up the Anne persona. Nathan also writes of Anne’s figuring as two entities in connection with her diaries: ‘Anne Frank’ the author of the diaries, and ‘Kitty’, the unseen auditor to whom she responds in her writing. The Ghost Writer is, then, a truly dense web of impersonations. These multilayered performances of identity in The Ghost Writer test the novel’s putative genre, the traditional Bildungsroman or novel of identity formation. As well as resisting the coherence and unity of the Bildungsroman by enclosing narratives within other narratives and draining authority from the narratorial voice, the novel dissects the form to expose the contradictory forces at work within any individual’s attempt to build an American identity; we see this process at work again in I Married a Communist, where Roth once more tackles Nathan’s Bildungsroman, returning to an earlier point in Nathan’s development: his teenage years. In The Ghost

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Writer, where Nathan’s path to adulthood involves a quest for an artistic guide, the struggle to assert his manhood and to discover his own artistic voice by breaking away from the authority of a condemning father backed by Judge Wapter is set against his desire for reconciliation with his family and community. Working in the heat of this contradiction, Nathan himself can be seen as impersonating Anne Frank through his fictional projections of Amy as Anne in a way that some readers of Roth might find distasteful and disrespectful; even more so since Roth’s provocative scenario about Nathan’s manipulation of the Anne Frank legend is often played for laughs, with Nathan wildly imagining announcing his marriage to Anne to his awed parents. Nathan’s comically bathetic motive for invoking Anne is that he wants to lay claim to her historical and artistic gravitas to legitimate himself to his disapproving family and community as a man with impeccably Jewish credentials as well as a serious artist, being validated in their eyes forever through the unassailably Jewish status of his bride. These dreams of Nathan’s hint at a reconciliation of his family’s un-American origins with the Americanness he desires, and which he feels is encapsulated in Lonoff ’s rural life with Hope, the wife of old American settler stock. With Anne/Amy he imagines regenerating himself both as fully American and fully Jewish. Yet the contradictions involved in his self-making remain sharp, summed up in the contrast between Nathan’s outrageous reworking of the Anne Frank story and his sentimental daydreams of returning to astonish and impress his family by the news that he is to marry Anne/Amy. The contending forces at work on Nathan’s imagination produce an Anne Frank figure whose pre-war and American identities are irreconcilable and self-cancelling: she can only live in one identity by killing the other one. Roth’s emphasis here on insoluble contradictions being central to personal identity means that betrayal is a dominant motif, encapsulated in Nathan’s Anne Frank storywithin-a-story, where Anne as Amy betrays her father by concealing her identity. This betrayal echoes Nathan’s own betrayal of his father’s authority in his short story, ‘Higher Education’: a treachery which springs from the young man’s determination not to defer to his immigrant Jewish origins in finding a distinctive voice as an American writer. Roth himself, of course, becomes subject to accusations of precisely this form of treachery by producing the novelistic exploitation of Anne Frank’s name and life story implicit in the tale of Nathan impersonating and usurping the voice of Anne Frank in an audacious bid to assert his own artistic vision of her. Some contemporary critics saw the Anne Frank material as offensive: the reviewer in The Atlantic, for example, accuses him of exploiting ‘that little pile of bones on Belsen heath’ (October 1979, 108). The charges relating to the literary exploitation of Anne Frank, as an individual and an author, lead us back to questions of ghostwriting, or ghost writing. The Ghost Writer contains many references to other texts, real and fictional, which comprise the literary discourse into which Nathan is attempting to incorporate and assert his artistic voice. The most notable ones apart from the diaries of Anne Frank are Henry James’s The Middle Years, a short story featuring a dying author, Dencombe, who realizes that despite having dedicated his life to his art he will never write his masterpiece, and James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), another unconventional

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Bildungsroman whose Stephen Dedalus is a model for Nathan; both works, of course, very much about the trials of the writer: the struggle to express one’s voice. Roth, in irreverently comic mode, reminds us of the pillaging of literary traditions that every writer engages in to create their own voices: he pictures Nathan over-literally seeking the heights of artistic inspiration by standing upon The Middle Years on top of Lonoff ’s desk while pruriently listening in to the conversation in the room above him, between his artistic mentor Lonoff and the young woman with whom Zuckerman suspects him of having an affair. Emily Budick believes that ‘Zuckerman’s book’, the autobiographical Bildungsroman of Zuckerman, as distinguished from Roth’s book, ‘entangles its author in the process of ghostwriting-as-ventriloquism’ in regard to all the other writers within it, and that Zuckerman’s writing is disrespectful, certainly as far as the voices of the Holocaust represented by Anne Frank are concerned, in diminishing, even obliterating, those voices to further his literary ambitions (1996, 123). I would concur with Budick here, in the sense that Nathan’s reimagining of Anne’s story (his internalized fantasy which Zuckerman then ‘publishes’ as The Ghost Writer), featuring as it does Anne’s willed split from her father in the service of her text, very much makes it a vehicle for his own fears and hopes concerning artistic freedom. I diverge from Budick’s opinion, however, when she concludes that Roth himself in The Ghost Writer ‘permits the many ghosts of the past to talk to each other, and he, outside their stories, himself a ghost, merely ghostwriting them, listens’ (1996, 135). I agree, certainly, that Roth’s stance in relation to Anne accords her respect; but Budick’s view of how Roth acknowledges the voices speaking within his text seems to envisage the writer’s role here as being entirely passive: she states, indeed, that Roth’s language is ‘a transparent medium’ in the novel, a position which apparently overlooks completely not only the distinctive conversation with the figure of Anne but also the qualities of, for example, the humorous dialogues with James and Joyce that do so much for our appreciation of Nathan’s weekend with Lonoff, interactions full of a sharp observation and wit, and characteristically flavoursome language (1996, 132). Viewing the writing of The Ghost Writer actively as an attempt at ghost writing, a continuing artistic discourse in which different voices collaborate and compete, perhaps enables us both to defend Roth against accusations of Holocaust exploitation or disrespect and to avoid positioning him purely as a voiceless ghost or alternatively as a ventriloquist’s dummy; it grants him the power inherent in ghost writing, a power of which he is well aware and the parameters of which are up for debate in the novel. Much of The Ghost Writer’s actual value, as Patrick O’Donnell says, lies in Roth’s ‘essential concern with the limits of writing and fiction’, in its distinctive push at the boundaries of fiction and biography that additionally tests the limits of what is permissible when writing about a figure as charged as Anne Frank (1983, 365). What Roth seems to be doing here is querying the ethical basis of ghost writing: exploring the nature of the vital power balance between the writer and his or her literary ancestors in the most tricky of historical terrains. In addressing that topic, The Ghost Writer arguably raises serious questions about how any writer can approach the truth about the Holocaust and, in particular, about what the Holocaust can mean to an American.

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In initiating this discussion Roth enters into a relation with Anne Frank’s published work, which cannot ultimately be said to betray it, either by invalidating the central premise that the author is dead or by trivializing it into a comic fantasy. He clearly exposes the ways in which Anne’s authorial voice has been betrayed already by the book’s being accorded iconic (‘dead’) status and her public sanctification: in point of fact, Nathan’s Anne Frank extravaganza has been put into his head by Judge Wapter’s letter, whose postscript advises that Nathan should lose no time in going to see a Broadway production of the Anne Frank story. It is clear that Nathan is far from being the only American – Jew or writer – to interpret or seek validation from this most iconic of dead teenagers, as Roth wryly notes; he also raises the possibility that the Jews who are most likely to resent Nathan’s so-called desecration of Anne Frank might also be those who are most anxious to bend the Anne Frank story to their own purposes. In considering how Anne Frank’s changing identity might affect her relationship with her work, one could argue that Roth, quoting repeatedly from the text of the Diary, enters into an imaginative dialogue with this ‘impassioned little sister of Kafka’s’, as Zuckerman eagerly puts it, about the trials of authorship that casts a fresh light on her life as a writer, while resisting being exploitative (Bound, 121). The Ghost Writer however faces another indictment: of ghostliness as mere disappearance, where The Ghost Writer itself, like Nathan’s overwrought fabrications about Amy/Anne, simply vanishes in the light of day. Its layering of stories and its repeated questions about the authorial voice have prompted criticism that despite its complexities it is ultimately a flight of fancy without much to say and where it becomes impossible to sustain any debate about identity, artistic or personal. There is some truth in O’Donnell’s observation that, ‘Zuckerman’s fiction about Amy . . . is a textual hall of mirrors in which authors are reflected only as ghostly progenitors of texts that, themselves, threaten to vanish if authorship or parenthood is put under question’ (1983, 373–4). The texts of Roth’s ancestral writers James, Joyce and Anne Frank, are revealed to be ghostly fragments of what the older Zuckerman thinks he remembers of what the younger Zuckerman imagined one night long ago. And Roth’s The Ghost Writer disappears also, in that we are refused any sense of a ‘story’. An outcome of The Ghost Writer’s insubstantiality, representing as it does the gulf between Zuckerman’s own history and artistic voice and Anne’s voice and the history of Europe and the Holocaust, also muffles whatever deeper notes it might have to sound about his American identity and nationality. But we are on much surer ground when we come to the reprise of Nathan’s Bildungsroman in I Married a Communist’s dissection of McCarthyite America. I Married a Communist, the wholly American post-war tragedy of the downfall of Nathan’s mentor, Ira Ringold, springs from a clearly defined American political context enabling Roth to find a much more meaningful grounding for the drama of Nathan’s attempts at self-making. This, like all of the great novels we are about to explore, is where the question of the limits of what the writer can say becomes not about speaking into a whispering gallery of fictional texts, but comes up against historically determined juridical questions raised, for example, by the wording of the American Constitution and other national legal texts: words that determine what American identity means in terms of citizens’

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rights. The writer’s urge to ‘say anything’, then becomes about testing constitutional limits in all senses. Indeed, by the time he comes to write Operation Shylock, 14 years after The Ghost Writer, Roth, while conjoining a study of the contradictions central to personal male identity and the processes of writing about those contradictions, is also examining the pressing political and ethical issues that are testing the bonds between American personal and national identities, all under the rubric of the trial. As we shall see, Operation Shylock opens the door to a survey of American manhood and nationhood that transforms Lonoff ’s insular work of ‘turning sentences around’ (Bound, 13) into a study of all the meanings of the American protagonist’s ‘sentence’. The five Roth works we are about to explore all aim to prevent closure and to open, and keep open, literary spaces for continuing discussion and debate of some of the most pressing issues in contemporary American culture. They leave American identity still open to question. Unresolved cases, or trials which reach an unsatisfactory conclusion, continue endlessly to generate conflicting narratives. Roth’s novels, emerging from and grappling with the contentious material of American post-war history, seek a space where those conflicting narratives can be aired, but do not seek resolution. From this contradiction and conflict, Roth approaches as near as possible to what it means to be an American.

2

Before the Law: Operation Shylock: A Confession

In Operation Shylock: A Confession, published 4 years before the nation-defining American Pastoral, Roth, with greater skill than ever before, is comprehensively connecting all the different themes that we are about to explore, of boundary maintenance and breaching in respect of male and, importantly, of national identity. My contention is that Operation Shylock is the major progenitor of the novels of the Trilogy and The Plot against America in seeking for a way to speak about momentous aspects of post-war American history. It engages with the writer’s – and speaker’s – responsibilities in regard to both silence and speech, productively aligning boundary questions of literary liberty and license with questions of political liberty and license in regard to America’s relationship with Israel since its inception in 1948. Here, Roth thoroughly interrogates the concept of the trial as a rhetorical space, probing the nature of the American writer’s responsibility to write and to write well: to fight for the seriousness of the word even while unsure of the word’s truthfulness. Operation Shylock activates the notion of the trial on many intersecting levels throughout the book’s entirety, dealing with language as a field of power in addressing deep questions of how and from where the writer’s speech, and indeed silence, comes into being. It sets the shamelessness of ‘saying anything’ against the shamefulness of saying too little (Shylock, 338). We might also say of Operation Shylock that Roth the American writer himself, moulded by his literary inheritance, is placed in a state of trial and becomes preoccupied, in Jacques Derrida’s words, with negotiating his position ‘before-thelaw’ not just in literary terms but in terms of freedom of speech and censorship as well. Some of the political and cultural background to this ongoing process can be understood by tracing the course of the vociferous, fierce, even vicious, debate between the many unwavering American Jewish supporters of Israel – such as Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz and Alvin H. Rosenfeld (whose pamphlet ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism [2006] can be seen to have sparked a new round of hostilities between pro- and anti-Zionists) – and a number of fellow-nationals and Jews who have been fervent critics of Israeli policy in recent decades, from Noam Chomsky and George Steiner to the ‘dissidents’ whose writings are collected in Adam Shatz’s Prophets Outcast (2004). These dissenting writers have sometimes

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done so at substantial cost to their careers and reputations.1 Roth’s Operation Shylock respects and adds to this dissenting strain, conjuring states of trial in which the most treacherous, contradictory, downright outrageous but most timely speech about America’s controversial involvement with Israel is vocalized. This is arguably the most useful – and the most principled – service Roth could perform as a writer, deserving of the laudatory remark made in The Nation by his friend and reviewer Ted Solotaroff who also features in the book: Roth is ‘the one American-Jewish fiction writer who has gone where the new action is’ (7 June 1993). The actual literary provenance of Operation Shylock appeared to be on trial at the time of its publication when Philip Roth took the unusual step of asserting that the book – despite its bearing all the hallmarks of one of his novels – was a factual account of his activities in Israel in 1988. In an interview with Esther B. Fein he declares, ‘The book is true, I’m not trying to confuse you. . . . This happened’ (New York Times, 9 March 1993). Roth has customarily used his own biography in his work, as he does in the other works we will study, even creating an alternative childhood for himself out of the details of his own childhood in The Plot against America. However, Operation Shylock is the only work for which Roth – initially at least – claimed straightforward autobiographical status, and also the only one to spark such debate in the press at the time as to whether it dealt with fact or fiction. Faced with a sceptical response from journalists and critics to his claims of verisimilitude, Roth soon afterwards retreated somewhat from his position, issuing a statement saying, ‘Ambiguity is in the very nature of the book and cannot be resolved . . . readers should make their own decisions’ (Newsweek, 22 March 1993).2 This flare of media interest in the possible factivity of Operation Shylock somewhat unfortunately seemed to lend substance to the assertion by a number of critics that ‘Philip Roth is always writing about Philip Roth’ as Robert Alter put it in New Republic (5 April 1993). Yet, in naming Operation Shylock a confession, Roth paradoxically succeeds in transcending self-obsession. Here, he speaks, as in the major later works we will consider, about the crises and contradictions 1

2

Noam Chomsky might be seen to have paid the price of being one of the most high-profile critics of Israeli government policy. For example, Burton Levine, in his May 1988 interview with Chomsky, comments on American Jewish journals’ refusal to review or even to mention Chomsky’s important book on the Middle East, Fateful Triangle, even though it has attracted attention elsewhere. See Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics (1988: 527–8); and Adam Shatz, Prophets Outcast (2004) for dissident Jewish opinion on Arab-Jewish relations. See also Shatz’s assertion in ‘In Praise of Diasporism’ that ‘The Jewish establishment and Israel lobby have done their best to suppress the dissident tradition, and, where they have failed, to vilify it. In these efforts they have enjoyed lamentable success. Today most non-Jews take it for granted that to be Jewish is to support Israel unconditionally’ (Nation, 26 April 2004). Journalists made efforts to check the accuracy of the events described in the book and soon discovered anomalies: for instance, Aharon Appelfeld confirmed Roth’s interview with him but not that they had had conversations about a Roth impersonator. See Hillel Halkin’s ‘How to Read Philip Roth’ (Commentary, February 1994). According to Malcolm Jones, Jr, Ted Solotaroff, Roth’s friend who is described as being present in the concluding restaurant scene where Philip has the critical conversation with Smilesburger about concealing the book’s factual nature, confirmed that he was there but said that Roth was actually with the biographer Judith Thurman. See Malcolm Jones Jr, ‘Was He a Spy or Wasn’t He?’ (Newsweek, 22 March 1993). For other critical responses see also Max Apple, ‘Philip Roth Unbound’ (New Leader, 17 May 1993); D. M. Thomas, ‘Face to Face with His Double’ (New York Times Book Review, 7 March 1993).

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that have shaped post-war America and of the individual’s connection with his nation while placing these issues in the powerful, ever-troublesome international context of America’s connection with Israel since its establishment, a feat which makes the book deserving of more serious critical attention than was looked for by a number of reviewers. Operation Shylock: A Confession purports to be an account and an admission by Philip Roth of a visit to Israel made by him in January 1988, the improbable events of which had resulted in his agreeing to engage in a spying intrigue involving an encounter with Yasser Arafat on behalf of Israel’s secret service Mossad. The trip to Jerusalem, which Roth actually made in January 1988 for the purpose of a journalistic interview with the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, also sets the narrator Philip Roth (whom I will call Philip) on the trail of someone who is his double and who is impersonating him in Jerusalem. This second Philip Roth is drawing on Philip’s credit as a literary figure – and speaking in his name – to foster a campaign for Diasporism: the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European extraction back within the European Diaspora on the premise that the continued existence of Israel in its current form is untenable and will lead to intense worldwide conflict if not to nuclear war. Philip pursues and eventually confronts his elusive double (whom he nicknames Moishe Pipik or Moses Bellybutton), who then mysteriously disappears, at which point the writer Roth claims to have been recruited by the Israeli agent Smilesburger to carry out the eponymous Operation Shylock, a mission to discover which prominent American Jews are giving financial support to Palestinian organizations. As we will see, the ambiguities of Operation Shylock as a so-called confession allow it to play a transformational, boundary-breaking role in regard to the book’s placement within a literary genre; and to that end the types of literary negotiation performed by Operation Shylock: A Confession are analysed here in some detail by taking recourse to Jacques Derrida’s writings on genre and the ‘being-before-the-law’ of a literary work (1992, 187). But crucially, as I have indicated, this is more than a literary exercise, for the book’s ‘being-before-the-law’ – that is, its truth status – is brought into alignment with the trying of the extradited American citizen John (or Ivan) Demjanjuk in Israel for crimes against Jews in Nazi concentration camps, and the question of whether Demjanjuk is truly the Ivan the Terrible who committed those crimes. The debate raging in court as to the true identity of Ivan forms a background and an introduction to the questions of the identity of Philip Roth, questions which intensify as Philip and his double, Pipik, not only appear increasingly to resemble each other but even at times to merge identities, before Pipik mysteriously vanishes just at the point where, Philip claims, he himself is recruited by the Mossad agent, Smilesburger. The placing of Philip and Pipik in Jerusalem at the same time as the Demjanjuk trial – a trial at which the truth status of speech is critical but fundamentally contested, as Roth points out – suggests a more than merely playful approach to the questions of American identity raised by the political scenario in which Philip performs his gyrations in Israel. It suggests that the testing of Philip’s identity in Israel is ultimately a trial of his capacity to speak freely and truthfully about the vexed question of America’s consistent support for Israeli government policy in the post-war period, together

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with the potentially treacherous implications of supporting Israel for American Jews. The later part of the chapter thus deals with questions of free speech and censorship, explicitly connecting the book’s literary strategies with its political consciousness. Operation Shylock demands a form of intellectual activity from its readers that brings about their active engagement with the political questions the book raises about American-Israeli relations, in a way that could not be achieved by either a more conventional novel or a more traditional form of autobiography. A number of recent works of literary criticism, though not necessarily in complete agreement with Robert Alter’s views about Roth’s self-obsession, have viewed the primary focus of Operation Shylock as the examination of selfhood or subjectivity, allowing only a minor importance to the novel’s treatment of the political issues concerning American-Israeli relations that form the background to Philip’s and Pipik’s exaggerated, often ludicrous, chases around Jerusalem in search of each other.3 This accords, apparently, with the epigraphs appearing before the title page, the second of which is a quotation from Kierkegaard: The whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself. Existence is surely a debate. . . .

Yet, Roth’s strategies are aimed at enabling the novel to go beyond a solipsistic focus on the confessional self so as to grapple with the problem of determining the writer’s place in truthfully examining some of the most contentious contemporary political issues concerning Israel and the United States. The writer’s duty to break new literary ground becomes politically inflected as a duty to invoke the right to speak freely about America and Israel. But it also evokes the incipient treachery of speaking freely. The second half of the chapter will discuss these connected issues by examining two scenes in which Philip might be viewed as being placed in a state of trial by two ‘agents of the law’, Pipik and Smilesburger, when ‘the law’ represents a function of government and also is the law of genre.

Confession, genre and the law Confession, a verbal admission of wrongdoing, is also a primary ‘act of self-recognition’ inextricably tied to the modern sense of selfhood (Brooks 2000, 2). In America the confession has been given primary status as authentic evidence in a court of law, while in psychology the confessional discourse has gained a wide currency that many would argue has made it a dominant mode of speech in contemporary Western culture.4 Yet, its authentic status is always questionable due to the power relations that directly or indirectly constrain and shape it. The wrongful or forced confession is common in 3

4

Notably Derek Parker Royal, ‘Texts, Lives and Bellybuttons: Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and the Renegotiation of Subjectivity’ (2000: 48–65); Josh Cohen ‘Roth’s Doubles’ (2007: 82–93). See Brooks and Gill; also Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (2008).

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law enforcement, while in the realm of psychology its often ambiguous motives – not only guilt and shame but egoism and exhibitionism – taken together with unreliable memories and false memory syndrome have undermined its status. The confessant, as an ‘unreliable narrator’, inevitably gives the confession a fictional cast, turning it from a revelation of the secret truth to an ‘uncontrollable proliferation of narratives’ (Brooks 2000, 33) and the consequent production of a fictional self. The literary confession has often made free play with the confession’s ambiguities to challenge the tightly constructed, coherent self of the traditional autobiography. Susannah Radstone argues that ‘autobiography and confession emerge as limittexts of classic realism, since their foregrounding of the relation between narrator and narratee – between the subject of the enunciation and of the enunciated – puts the illusory unity of classic realism’s subject in question’ (Gill 2006, 172). Operation Shylock on one level continues this radical deconstruction of the self through testing the generic limits of autobiography. It is charged with fears of becoming undone, of losing possession both of self and of the story, having been written in the aftermath of Philip’s ‘bizarre emotional collapse’ due to the side-effects of the drug Halcion, which produced feelings of extreme panic, a conviction that his mind is disintegrating and a total inability to write; a collapse from which he is only just recovering (Shylock, 19). A Halcion breakdown was suffered by Roth in actuality, according to his then-wife, Claire Bloom, in her memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (1997, 194–7). Roth even teasingly has Philip say that he could ‘envision Operation Shylock, misleadingly presented as a novel, being understood by an ingenious few as a chronicle of the Halcion hallucination that, momentarily, even I . . . almost supposed it might be’ (Shylock, 361). However, as Roth must have known that his critics and readership would soon determine that the book actually was a novel, this remark of Philip’s appears to be a playful double bluff containing a red herring about his book’s chronicling his reallife Halcion days. My contention here is that it is something very different and of far wider import: Operation Shylock: A Confession heralds a decisive turn towards a broad historical consciousness taken also by the other major novels we will consider in the following chapters.5 Philip’s adventures with Pipik in 1988 are embedded within the politically tense contemporary Israeli scene and evoke its connections with US foreign policy in such a way as to raise serious and pressing ethical issues that genuinely concern the reader. Operation Shylock the ‘confession’ is a highly worked articulation of its own relationships with ‘the law’ in several senses that simultaneously addresses its own placement within a literary genre. And one could also say that Operation Shylock: A Confession problematizes and instigates the processes of both ‘self-examination and external policing’ like a religious confession, thereby provoking 5

Sabbath’s Theater (1995) published in between Operation Shylock and American Pastoral, marked a powerful return by Roth to writing about familiar territory in New York and its environs. Yet, in creating the freewheeling, aberrant, thoroughly idiosyncratic Mickey Sabbath, Roth refrains from establishing those wider links between the man, his country and his times that so thoughtprovokingly characterize the novels that follow. For this reason, and although there are connections to be drawn, I am not engaging with Sabbath’s Theater here, showing instead how the complex strands of Operation Shylock continue to be ravelled and unravelled in Roth’s subsequent great novels.

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its readers to judge its nature as a written work (Brooks 2000, 96). At the same time it is a highly productive, potentially genre-breaking work whose unconventionality also facilitates the consideration that certain received ideas of the American political establishment and mainstream public (and Jewish) opinion about American-Israeli relations are open to question. These ‘givens’ include: the unexamined belief that the loyalty expected of the American citizen and the Israeli citizen to their separate nations never conflicts with American support for Israel; that America should support Israel unconditionally; that Israel is not blameworthy in its response to Palestinian protest and the Intifada; and that to blame Israel for any of its actions would undermine its existence as a nation. Operation Shylock: A Confession vexes the question of its own existence as a literary work to uncover these knotty points where personal and national identities and loyalties merge and collide, and exposes the potential for deceit, betrayal and treachery inherent in these relations. Operation Shylock was published in March 1993 some months before the signing of the Oslo Agreement marking the Israel-PLO peace accord, during the governmental administration of Shimon Peres. The novel was thus presumably in preparation after the declaration of the first Intifada, during the uncertain time around the 1992 elections and in the run-up to Oslo.6 Its Epilogue refers to the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraqi missile attacks on Israel. However, Roth chose not to deal with that immediately contemporary period but with one several years earlier: importantly, a time coinciding with the closing stages of the Demjanjuk trial in 1988, which Philip is twice described as attending. That the Demjanjuk trial came about through the close cooperation of the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and Israel’s Ministry of Justice is emblematic of the strong existing link between America and Israel that Roth is evidently wishing to explore; he continues his preoccupation with the contradictions existing within the concept of a unified American identity by highlighting the scope for deceit and treachery that inheres in America’s relationship with Israel. Demjanjuk, ‘a big, cheerful palooka’ and a good American citizen who nevertheless has been identified by Holocaust survivors as Ivan the Terrible, among the worst of the Nazi’s mass murderers and thus the most deceitful of traitors, is a figure of fascination for Philip (Shylock, 61). Of course, in addressing the Demjanjuk trial, Operation Shylock also applies itself to questions of speaking and witnessing in relation to the Holocaust and of how we who ‘come after’, as George Steiner says, can begin to speak of its unspeakable events (1985, 4). Confession can come close to testimony; Susannah Radstone is among those who have commented critically on the ways in which these two forms approach and diverge from one another (Gill 2006, 6

The period directly preceding Oslo had seen a high level of tension between Israelis and Palestinians following the first Intifada which began in 1987 during Yitzhak Shamir’s right-wing government, and which the Madrid peace initiative and subsequent talks in Washington, D.C. had failed to defuse. It took the election of Shimon Peres in 1992 and George Bush Senior’s insistence that loan guarantees to Israel be linked to a freeze on Jewish settlements on the West Bank to obtain the Oslo Agreement: this unfortunately soon came unstuck, fatally undermined by the murder of the then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995 by a Jewish fundamentalist violently opposed to the peace process. This was followed by the election of Benjamin Netanyahu who declined to continue the peace process.

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166–79). Other scholars have recently begun to focus their attention on Operation Shylock’s approach to speaking of the Holocaust in the context of the Demjanjuk trial.7 What recent treatments of Operation Shylock have tended to omit is its consideration of speech in relation to present-day highly contentious debates concerning Israeli policy and American support for that policy, especially regarding Palestinians and the establishment of a Palestinian state – debates that have unrolled in the context of what has been called post-Holocaust or aftermath culture, what Alvin H. Rosenfeld terms ‘the post-Auschwitz imagination’ (Rosenfeld 1980, 65). This chapter will bear in mind these latter debates rather than questions of Holocaust representation. Operation Shylock reveals the American dimension of the momentous Demjanjuk trial in that Demjanjuk’s refusal of Ivan the Terrible’s identity, his refusal to confess, or rather his making a partial confession that does not implicate him in the Treblinka gassings, is an endeavour to maintain intact an American identity constructed during more than 30 years’ residence in the United States, but which has now become a fiction since his forcible denaturalization by America’s immigration service. Without admitting the persona of Ivan the Terrible he has nevertheless ceased to fit comfortably into that of John Demjanjuk, ‘good old Johnny the gardener from Cleveland, Ohio’, as revelations about the history he does admit to (as a guard at Sobibor) further smudge his all-American image (Shylock, 62). As Philip remarks of Ivan, ‘So there he was – or wasn’t’ (Shylock, 65). Though its causal factors are extremely unusual, Demjanjuk’s identity crisis, ridden with betrayal and treachery, anticipates in many ways the questions about the contradictory nature of post-war American identity and the impossibility of sustaining a unified American persona with which Roth becomes preoccupied.8 The novel relates this crisis of identity – for American Jews in particular – to the rifts and divisions caused by the complex interplay of American and Israeli nationalisms. Demjanjuk’s presence in Jerusalem as an American on trial underscores the fact that most of the main characters encountered by Philip in Jerusalem are either American or have lived for lengthy periods in America. Philip himself, his doppelganger Pipik, and Pipik’s girlfriend, Wanda Jane ‘Jinx’ Possesski, are all Americans abroad. Philip’s old Palestinian friend George Ziad has spent his youth and much of his maturity in the United States before returning to his ancestral homeland to mourn his father’s 7

8

See Idit Alphandary, ‘Wrestling with the Angel and the Law or the Critique of Identity: The Demjanjuk Trial, Operation Shylock: A Confession, and “Angel Levine”’ (2008: 57–74); Tamas Dobozy, ‘The Holocaust as Fiction: Derrida’s Demeure and the Demjanjuk Trial in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock’ (2005: 37–52); Kate McLaughlin, ‘“Dispute Incarnate”: Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, the Demjanjuk Trial, and Eyewitness Testimony’ (2007: 115–30). Demjanjuk appealed the trial’s guilty verdict and resulting death sentence. The decision was revoked, and he was freed, in 1993. Demjanjuk regained his American citizenship in 1998 only to be stripped of it again in 2002 after the US justice department became convinced that he was a war crimes suspect even if not identifiable as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. After investigating fresh evidence from the United States and Russia, the German special war crimes unit accused him of involvement in murders of Jews at Sobibor and sought his extradition from the United States to Germany. After appeals, he was deported to Germany on 11 May 2009, and tried in Munich. He was found guilty on 11 May 2011 and sentenced to 5 years but released pending an appeal. Still free and awaiting his appeal, Demjanjuk died on 17 March 2012, aged 91.

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sequestrated orchards. The Israeli agent Smilesburger first presents himself to Philip as an American supporter of Diasporism who (Philip thinks) has mistaken Philip for Pipik. Even when Smilesburger has revealed himself as an agent to Philip he seems a curiously un-located and international figure who seems just as much at home in the New York restaurant where he meets the writer at the end of the book as he does in Israel. Only Aharon Appelfeld, the Holocaust survivor, is quintessentially Israeli, distinctively ‘other’ to Philip. Smilesburger’s (successful?) arguments to induce Philip, first, to engage in spying on behalf of Israel and, secondly, to refrain from writing about any such spying episode, are framed in terms familiar to American Jews from their own sharp internal debates about the meaning of support for Israel and where Jewish loyalties should reside. Operation Shylock’s focus on the intense controversy surrounding these issues in the minds of Jewish and other Americans raises the prospect that the form of Diasporism that really matters to Roth in this work is not European Diasporism as espoused by Pipik, but the American Diaspora and its dilemmas within the broader context of arguments about American national identity. It is in this cultural context that the reader begins to appreciate the book’s sundry flights, its mood of playful seriousness and its gaps, omissions and silences. Nevertheless, we may still wonder how effective the book is in challenging an audience to ask itself some hard questions about its own beliefs and values, and whether the slipperiness of this ‘confession’ tends merely to refocus one’s mind on the inescapable ‘I’ of Roth the author. Is it like the confession lacking faith or grace, in Brooks’s words, ‘condemned to being nothing but the sterile, unending unmaskings of the underground “paradoxicalist”’ (Brooks 2000, 49)? Or, by occupying a space that we cannot finally read as autobiography but is at the same time not quite definitively fiction, does it productively channel Roth’s need to ‘tamper with the taboo’ regarding America and Israel (Shylock, 346)? To answer these questions we first have to bear in mind that these literary debates, if not the specific political ones, are crystallized in an essay by Jacques Derrida in his collection Acts of Literature (1992), titled ‘Before the Law’.

Operation Shylock ‘Before the Law’ Derrida considers the problem of determining what constitutes a literary text by conducting an exegesis of a very short story by Franz Kafka titled ‘Before the Law’ in his essay of the same name. Before coming to this story, Derrida’s essay lays down three ‘axiomatic beliefs’ about a literary text: a text ‘has its own identity, singularity and unity’, where its ‘boundaries or limits seem guaranteed by a certain number of established criteria’; ‘the text has an author’, separate from its fictional characters; and in the text ‘events are related, and the relation belongs to literature’ (1992, 184–6). As we are bound to observe, and as Derrida proceeds to explain, these criteria or axioms innately pose problems. In regard to the second axiom, of authorship, Derrida notes that there are some problematic works; he specifies the ‘“unfinished” work, that is, a work that seems to be missing a part of itself and where one cannot be sure

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as to whether it is accidentally or deliberately incomplete; and also works where the authors “are staged as characters”’ (1992, 185). One notes that Operation Shylock, with its ‘missing’ eleventh chapter and writer-protagonist Philip Roth, is in this problematic category on both counts. The third axiom, that the relation of events in a text should belong to literature, is intrinsically problematic in that it begs the question of who judges what ‘belongs to literature’, and according to what criteria?9 Derrida immediately identifies the question as one he cannot definitively answer, declaring his interest to be rather in how these questions are mobilized in his exemplary text ‘Before the Law’: that is, in how ‘this singular text . . . names or relates in its way this conflict without encounter between law and singularity, this paradox or enigma of “beingbefore-the-law”’ (1992, 187). Kafka’s brief story ‘Before the Law’ concerns a man who approaches a gateway marking the entrance to the place of the law, greatly desiring access to the law, or to be ‘before’ the law. He nevertheless spends his whole life sitting at the place that marks the entrance to the law (an open doorway guarded by a doorkeeper who tells him he cannot enter ‘yet’) without ever penetrating to the place of the law itself. No physical barrier is placed in the man’s way, but the doorkeeper functions as a distancing mechanism that perpetually postpones the man’s entrance to the place of the law. Before he dies, still at the doorway, he is told by the doorkeeper that the (forbidden) entrance exists only for him. Derrida’s exegesis plays upon the paradox that in English translation before the law can mean prior to the law – existing before the law comes into being in the same way as the title precedes the text – or it can mean directly in front of the law. The central question is of where the man – that is, we realize, the artist – is positioned in respect to the law, outside or within it, since he occupies an in-between place at the doorkeeper’s side. Moreover, is the doorkeeper a barrier to the law or conversely the law’s only or nearest representative? In what respect is the man who has decided and/or accepted his place at the entrance to the law actually making the law? These considerations bear upon the capacity of the artist’s work to create what Derrida has called a ‘perturbation’ within received ideas of literature. In Derrida’s eyes, ‘Before the Law’ is a literary text that comments on its own making and constitutes its own law. It ‘is the law, makes the law and leaves the reader before the law’ (1992, 210–11). In so doing it ‘retains an essential rapport with the play of framing and the paradoxical logic of boundaries, which introduces a kind of perturbation in the ‘normal’ system of reference, while simultaneously revealing an essential structure of referentiality (Derrida 1992, 213, original emphasis). Its narrative, Derrida argues, is purely about its own making as a text. To begin with, we should consider the relationship of the title Operation Shylock: A Confession with the text it entitles, in light of Derrida’s commentary on the relation 9

Derrida has already made some prejudgements about what literature is not for the purposes of his essay. He excludes ‘historical chronicles . . . or accounts that we encounter daily’, such as the straightforward record of an event. It is not therefore narrativity alone that constitutes literature; or fictionality alone, since Derrida argues that ‘[t]here are fictions . . . that are not specifically literary’ (Derrida 1992, 186–7). He also excludes ‘belles-lettres, poetry or discursive art, although these distinctions remain highly problematic’ (Derrida 1992, 187).

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between Kafka’s title ‘Before the Law’ and its following text. Derrida points out that the titular phrase ‘Before the Law’ is repeated in the story’s first sentence immediately below the title: ‘Before the Law stands a doorkeeper’ (1992, 189). Though these two phrases are identical they do not bear an identical relation to the overall text. The title words establish the text’s claim to singularity as part of the provisions of copyright law. They are outside the fictional narrative but still denote the text: thus they ‘belong to literature’ but they are not in it – they stand before it. The first three words of the story’s opening sentence are within the main narrative and obviously function as such; they introduce and locate the character of the doorkeeper within the narrative. The words ‘Before the Law’ are thus on either side of an invisible line between title and text and, playing on the paradoxical meanings of ‘before’, trouble the relation of title to text, tending to displace the title from its position outside the text to one within it. If we now turn to the title Operation Shylock: A Confession and its text, we see it at play in ways that admittedly do not exactly replicate, but nevertheless respond to, Derrida’s interpretation of ‘Before the Law’. The titular Operation Shylock refers to what we are told in the text is an intelligence operation undertaken by Philip Roth the writer; but this operation never actually appears in the text. Therefore the main title of this work names an invisible object in the text, something that is never present and we cannot be sure ever existed. Meanwhile the subtitle, A Confession, denotes an act that has already been shown to be deeply unreliable. Thus both title and subtitle individually and jointly negate their own purpose, which is to distinguish the literary work by naming it in the sense of saying ‘what it is about’. In other words, Operation Shylock: A Confession does not entitle the work – the entitling words vacate their own space. Moreover, like the title ‘Before the Law’, it straddles the ‘line’ between itself and its text, proceeding to draw attention to the gaps in that textual content. Similar straddling operations are performed by Operation Shylock’s ‘Note to the Reader’ and the ‘Preface’. The Note to the Reader appears on the last page of the book after the conclusion of the narrative, rather than before the title page as normal. It begins by saying ‘This book is a work of fiction’, and ends by saying ‘This confession is false’. The claims established by the subtitle A Confession and the Note therefore already appear to be contradictory and puzzling. But the Note’s textual format and positioning within the overall work could suggest that it is a continuation of the book’s narrative content rather than a separate entity. If so, ‘This confession is false’ would apply to the whole text, suggesting that it is indeed a fiction. But, if the Note is accepted as having a status outside the main text, then it is its claim for the book as fiction that is dubious. The reader is thus unable to relate these claims at all. We might infer, then, that the Note is a production of the fictional Philip rather than Roth the author, especially since it is listed on the Contents page. These textual waters are further muddied by the Preface to Operation Shylock, which purports to describe the circumstances of the book’s composition and whose second paragraph states, ‘The book is as accurate an account as I am able to give of actual occurrences that I lived through during my middle fifties and that culminated, early in 1988, in my agreeing to undertake an intelligence-gathering operation for Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad’. The caveat ‘as accurate . . . as I am able

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to give’ immediately raises suspicions as to its good faith, especially when contrasted with the much more unambiguous wording of the longer third paragraph that accurately summarizes the progress of the actual Demjanjuk case to date (which Roth has given as 1 December 1992). Additionally, the textual presentation of the Preface poses status questions similar to those raised by the Note to the Reader. The Preface is brought within the compass of the text as a whole by its pages being inclusively numbered instead of following the more usual rule for prefaces of being unnumbered or distinguished by Roman numerals as opposed to Arabic. But – and this is unusual in any book by Roth – the Preface is then separated from the first chapter by a heavily bordered page marking Part One of the work, which thus firmly signals a severing of the Preface text from the rest of the narrative. Yet, given the uncertainties already arising from the Preface and its true relation to the text, this divider seems designed to be a red herring. It even seems to furnish early evidence that the reader might be being deceived and that both the Note to the Reader and the Preface are productions of Philip, a fictional character, rather than Roth the author. Also, like the Note, the Preface is listed on the Contents page. All in all, we can note several clues in the book’s layout and presentation that this text is highly tricky even before we take on the burden of the text itself and approach the conundrum of its ‘missing’ eleventh chapter. This ‘deleted’ final chapter, which is supposed to have preceded the Epilogue, is said to be a description of Philip’s spying adventures in Athens and elsewhere, deemed by Smilesburger ‘to contain information too seriously detrimental to his agency’s interests and to the Israeli government to be published’ (357). Philip relates how, after much argument and heart-searching, he follows Smilesburger’s admonition to ‘Let your Jewish conscience be your guide’ and, in a manner he has never anticipated, withholds the content of ‘Chapter Eleven’ (398). Operation Shylock now becomes a ‘confession’ that lacks its most crucial component: the chapter that, so we are told, details Philip’s illicit activities on behalf of a foreign power and, by foregrounding his Jewish conscience, puts into question his loyalty as an American. The grave potential consequences of these divided loyalties have already been alluded to by Pipik in his invocation of Jonathan Pollard, a (real-life) ‘American Jew paid by Israeli intelligence to spy against his own country’s military establishment’ (81). Yet the information that would provide the key to whether Philip – or Roth – has committed the deepest of crimes against his American identity, the treacherous actions that would warrant the confession, is precisely that information which is never provided. The reader is asked to accept, moreover, that the ‘missing’ chapter is the one that, by its very absence, confirms the confessional narrative as genuine. In this important sense the title Operation Shylock actually generates gaps in the text that it entitles. Operation Shylock, then, performs functions comparable to Derrida’s ‘Before the Law’. It makes play with literary frames and ‘the logic of boundaries’, drawing attention to the system of rules that constitutes it as a literary text even as it perturbs and challenges that very system. It is, therefore, a highly self-conscious work that is continually commenting on its own making, always exceeding itself so as to perpetually challenge the reader to respond to it as a text. In so doing, it maintains the distance

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between itself and ‘the law’, which Derrida sees as intrinsic to the literary work, keeping itself removed from judgement (or in an ongoing state of trial) by those selfsame acts of ‘being-before-the-law’. As exemplified by its relation of title to text, it is forever ‘before’ itself in both the same senses as in ‘Before the Law’. It therefore seems to perform the same type of operation on the literary level as its perplexing of the ‘Philip Roth’ persona does on the level of identity. The disjunctures and inconsistencies created by Roth in Operation Shylock bring about gaps in the reader’s knowledge of what constitutes and what has produced this ‘confession’, if indeed it exists as a confession at all. The reader must thus always actively engage with Operation Shylock in a conscious effort to determine its place in regard to ‘the law’. As Brooks points out, ‘literary scholars know . . . [that] a “gap” . . . demands to be filled and activates the interpreter’s ingenuity’ (Brooks 2000, 13). This sense that Operation Shylock is never about what it purports to be about gives a subversive alternative meaning to Philip’s claim for the factual truth of his story, ‘this was no book’, since the reader always has to look for ‘the book’ elsewhere (Shylock, 180). Straight after these enigmatic words of Philip’s, Roth implies the contrast between the ‘non-book’ called Operation Shylock and Aharon Appelfeld’s novel Tzili, the book Philip’s impersonator, Pipik, has been reading as he waits for Philip to return to his hotel bedroom. The book titled Tzili is a novel, a fiction describing the ‘harshest reality’ of a young Jewish girl who survives the Holocaust by going into hiding (Shylock, 85). Though Appelfeld is himself a survivor whose experiences have been similar to those he depicts in Tzili, he has chosen to write the book as a fiction because the work of imagination is ultimately more believable than an account of his life. By following the laws pertaining to fiction, where, in Appelfeld’s own words, ‘[t]he exceptional is permissible only if it is part of an overall structure and contributes to an understanding of that structure’, Appelfeld has created a novel that is at once true to its literary genre and also articulates an artistic ‘truth’ that no attempt at ‘the story of my life’ can effectually attain (Shylock, 86).10 Fiction, in other words, is ‘true lies’, revelatory of a deeper form of truth than the purely factual. The book – that is, the novel Tzili – is antithetical to Operation Shylock, which does not fully demonstrate believability or acceptability as a novel. There is no doubt as to Appelfeld’s claim to sole authorship of Tzili whereas, as we have seen, Roth continually tries to blur the issue of his own authorship by designating his book as non-fiction or as ‘the story of my life’ then repeatedly resigning his claim to full narrative control of ‘his’ confession. As Philip concludes, ‘I am not writing this thing. They are. I don’t even exist’ (Shylock, 155). As these words indicate, the unambiguous authorship required for writers both of novels and autobiographies naturally goes hand in hand with a distinctive personal identity and a recognizable, distinguishable name. When Pipik insists that he, too, is named Philip Roth, declaring ‘I’m listed in the book, man’ (meaning the directory), he shakes Philip’s indisputable claim to be the author of Operation Shylock by bringing into the public domain a name which copyright law requires should be singular (203). 10

‘Philip Roth’s’ interview with Appelfeld in this section of Operation Shylock is extracted from Philip Roth’s own interview with the writer, which appeared in the New York Times on 11 March 1988 and is reproduced in Shop Talk, 24–8.

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The words ‘this was no book’ thus not only pertain to Operation Shylock’s failure to define itself, but also refer to a failure of authorship that brackets Operation Shylock with another inauthentic creation put into Philip’s hands: the ‘diaries’ of Leon Klinghoffer, the Jewish tourist murdered in 1979 by Palestinian terrorists by being thrown over the side of his cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. These so-called diaries, Philip later discovers, have been faked at the request of the agent Smilesburger and used as propaganda to draw Philip into espionage. We might logically conclude from this that Operation Shylock is ‘no book’ because it is a faked production like the ‘Klinghoffer diaries’: authored by someone other than the one whose name appears on the title page. It is deceitful in many of the ways in which we will see Eve Frame’s propagandistic ghostwritten autobiography, I Married a Communist, to be deceitful in Chapter 4. Alternatively, if we take Philip’s words at face value, Operation Shylock as a true account of events is ‘no book’ because it is not literature and therefore cannot attain artistic truth; it is subject to the vagaries of real life and thus lacks coherence. And yet in Operation Shylock we have a work that critics have unanimously, though not without caveats, judged to belong somewhere in the realm of literary fiction. Operation Shylock, then, persistently evokes the liminal state of its own being-before-the-law as it plays with its status as an autobiographical confession. Here, Roth’s manipulation of genre categories recalls Alastair Fowler’s comment that ‘genre is much less of a pigeonhole than a pigeon’ (1982, 37). In the same way as Derrida envisages ‘Before the Law’, Operation Shylock is potentially transformative; indeed, I am arguing that Operation Shylock is a prime example of the transformative literary text in Derrida’s vision of it, exerting a ‘subversive juridicity’ which, often playfully, examines and reframes the law of the literary work (Derrida 1992, 216). All these boundary questions concerning what the writer is permitted to say in what circumstances and in what literary form are foregrounded by Operation Shylock’s blurring of the line between fiction and fact. Roth’s purposeful and playful zigzagging of the line is intended to loosen the hold of the categories governing differing literary forms so as to free up a transformative space where taboo subjects may be more freely discussed. Consequently, to discover what Operation Shylock is actually speaking about is also to determine what space it is occupying as a created work; it is thus to engage with its ‘being-before-the-law’ and the process by which it pushes the boundaries of the law. We should now look carefully, with all the above considerations in mind, at two specific scenes in Operation Shylock that reveal Roth’s intensive negotiations about what the writer can and cannot say. The first scene occurs about halfway through the book and depicts a strangely intimate encounter in Philip’s hotel bedroom between himself and his nemesis, Pipik, in which Pipik reveals to Philip his history and background as a private investigator or agent of the law. The second scene begins with Philip’s abduction and confinement in an empty classroom, which leads to a meeting with a very different agent of the law: the Mossad agent Smilesburger. Both scenes are confessional in nature: in one, an evidently unwell and vulnerable Pipik opens himself up to Philip about what has inspired his crusade on behalf of Diasporism; in the second, Philip makes his own confession to an absent Pipik that he has treated his double with arrogance and disrespect, before finally according him the name of Philip Roth just prior to his

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important confrontation with Smilesburger. Both scenes of confession are, crucially, twinned with debates on the prohibition or prescription of language that articulate issues of censorship connected with literary genre and demonstrate the transformative power of literature. We will closely examine the above-mentioned two episodes in Operation Shylock, considering Pipik and Smilesburger as potential ‘agents of the law’ (of genre) in regard to both Philip the protagonist and Roth the writer.

Pipik, Philip and ‘Inappropriate Speech’ In the hotel scene with Pipik, as whenever this talkative doppelganger of Philip’s is involved, Operation Shylock’s ‘being-before-the-law’ is compromised by an overproliferation of speech that multiplies narratives and overspills the boundaries demanded of fiction. A move into excessive Pipik-speech occurs in the psychological contest between Philip and Pipik in Philip’s hotel bedroom as Philip bids to deny Pipik the chance to solidify himself in an identity as ‘Philip Roth’. To that end Philip has already nicknamed his double Moishe Pipik, after a mischievous make-believe character from a family anecdote who has always ‘just gone out’ and so is never where he is supposed to be. Pipik has entered Philip’s hotel bedroom by tricking the desk clerk into believing that he is the writer himself; Philip finds him occupying the bed as he enters the room. To convince Philip of his genuine identity as the private investigator Philip Roth, Pipik embarks on a verbose speech of self-explanation and self-justification, which appears to multiply his personae; he is, ‘the Philip Roth who went up to the desk manager at the Palmer House and showed him my badge . . . the Philip Roth who . . . would say I was a floral-delivery person . . . the Philip Roth who rushes into the room with his Minolta and gets his pictures before they know what’s happened’ (Shylock, 197). His declarations regarding identity end, ironically, by reinforcing this second Philip Roth’s slipperiness and propensity to deceit. These claims resemble a confession on Pipik’s own part and also seem to create the self that confesses. Pipik seems to be endeavouring to construct himself as Philip Roth by confessing his deeds as Philip Roth. Pipik’s words thereby demonstrate their capacity to deceive. This protean quality, proliferating Roths manifested as proliferating Pipik-speech, is also evidenced in Pipik’s letter sent to Philip after their first meeting in Jerusalem. This concerns Pipik’s own ‘being-before-the-law’, raising essential boundary-questions about his identity, being written in a scattergun style in which every sentence opens out several different options: Dear Philip, I enraged you/you blitzed me. Every word I spoke – stupid/wrong/unnatural. Had to be. Been dreading/dreaming this meeting since 1959. Saw your photo on Goodbye Columbus/knew that my life would never be the same. Explained to everyone we were two different people/had no desire to be anyone but myself/wanted my fate/hoped your first book would be your last/wanted you

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to fail and disappear/thought constantly about your dying. IT WAS NOT WITHOUT RESISTANCE THAT I ACCEPTED MY ROLE: THE NAKED YOU/ THE MESSIANIC YOU/THE SACRIFICIAL YOU. MY JEWISH PASSIONS SHIELDED BY NOTHING. MY JEWISH LOVING UNRESTRAINED. LET ME EXIST. (Shylock, 87)

The letter refuses a narrative, failing to cohere. Its language does not persuade: it is marked by inappropriateness. Even as it demands, in its one clearly formulated sentence, ‘LET ME EXIST’, it reveals the instability of its author’s identity. A striking feature is its final capitalized claim: ‘I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS’, a strange declaration in such a prolix letter. It seems to reflect Pipik’s wish to be active in spreading Diasporism, distinguishing (mere) words from acts, emphasizing that words can shield the writer from events and so distance him (Philip) from his principles. Pipik wishes to establish that other, active, identity for himself. Yet this perverse claim projects Pipik as being ‘Philip’ and ‘not-Philip’ – ‘you’ and ‘not-you’ – at one and the same time. We may be led to wonder whether and how Pipik’s being ‘the [Philip] that is not words’ is connected with Operation Shylock’s being or not being ‘a book’. To answer this question, we return to Derrida’s ‘Before the Law’ and the man waiting beside the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper is simultaneously at the man’s side and interposed between the man and the law; not of the law but nevertheless an agent of the law. He seems to exist within as well as without the would-be entrant to the law, in this the relation between Pipik and Philip (‘you’ and ‘not-you’) parallels that between the doorkeeper and the man, although neither Pipik nor, later, Smilesburger stand in directly for the doorkeeper. Rather, the doorkeeper and the doorway itself appear to metaphorically realize all the limits on literary activity, internal and external. The writer needs to be at the open doorway, between states, a position interpretable as being just at the point where literary meaning coalesces. At the open doorway, though, meaning is also just about to unravel. Pipik, then, is an agent against whom Philip struggles to maintain the coherence demanded of a literary prose work, that is, ‘the book’. Pipik is language about to run amok: multiplicity and indeterminacy. His Diasporist arguments oscillate between persuasiveness and spinning off into pure farce, what Philip calls ‘a mad plausibility’ (Shylock, 191). Mad plausibility, or Pipikism, becomes a quality informing Operation Shylock as a whole. Philip worries that as long as Pipik is present he will never be ‘free of myself […] I will dwell in the house of Ambiguity forever’ (307), because the Pipik-speech that he seems to have internalized (the equivalent of Diasporism in its sense of ‘dispersion’) will prevent him from gaining that correct distance from the artistic ‘law’ that would enable him to establish firm authorship over his writings and would also ensure that his works properly pertain to literature. Operation Shylock’s play with boundaries and framing devices appears to have opened up a rhetorical space in which Philip, despite all his resistance, becomes Pipik, giving voice to the Diasporist views that he has previously dismissed. It is also a space in which Pipik’s identity, despite his protestations to the contrary, becomes purely words, a literary phenomenon conditioning the existence of Philip’s authorial self.

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The issue of promiscuous or inappropriate speech immediately arises at the beginning of the second scene under consideration, when Philip is taken away by his abductors from outside the courtroom where the Demjanjuk trial is taking place. His captors’ first words to him are: ‘Don’t shout’, followed by: ‘Don’t speak’ ‘You speak too much’ ‘You speak to everyone’ ‘You speak speak speak’ ‘speak speak speak speak speak speak’- (Shylock, 308)

These excessive charges of excessive speech follow an episode where Philip has visited his Palestinian friend George Ziad and, assuming Pipik’s mantle on a bizarre whim, has lectured George and his family at length on the benefits of Diasporism. Speaking to Palestinians has brought upon Philip the charge of speaking ‘to everyone’ and speaking ‘too much’. In this context, ‘too much’ speech is the same as inappropriate speech: speech in the wrong place or to the wrong people. At the same time, it is Philip’s credibility with important Palestinian political figures that the Mossad wishes to exploit, so as to further Israeli interests by flushing out Jewish contributors to the Palestinian cause. Philip’s compulsion to give other narratives their head – to reverse Pipik’s act of impersonation by becoming Pipik’s impersonator and serving as a mouthpiece for Pipik’s Diasporist ideas – arises from his stated need to ‘just say everything’ as in the archetypal act of confession (156). This urge to say everything seems to imply an affirmative answer to Philip’s question about the responsibility placed upon the writer of non-fiction: ‘are there no limits where there’s no disguise’ (377)? But to say everything might also be to speak to excess, speech that, far from playing a constructive and curative role as looked for in psychoanalysis, atomizes any sense of selfhood and, instead of dispelling guilt, disperses guilt throughout the narrative. Confessional narratives can proliferate alarmingly as the urge to confess – the psychological need to confess – sustains a guilt-driven ongoing process of disclosure. Philip’s proliferating confessional speech aims to open up a space in which to discuss the grave political issues upon which it bears: it provokes the reader’s response by mounting a challenge to the ‘givens’ of Israel’s and America’s own sense of national identity and the relationship between the two nations. His speech seems to wish to draw us in, making us complicit in the confessional act and thus changing our status from confessors to co-confessants, perhaps to instigate a counter-confession from us of sins of omission or commission in regard to our thinking on these political matters. This is especially true of the American reader who must confront their sense of themselves as loyal Americans in light of this most prickly and treacherous of topics. It seems intended to ‘pass on a taint, to produce a general contamination’ (Brooks 2000, 166). In this respect Operation Shylock: A Confession performs the act invoked by Derrida: it ‘leaves the reader before the law’ since the reader must confront his or her own placement in relation to the question of how the book functions and what literary – and cultural – space it occupies.

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But then silence is imposed on Philip by his abductors when he is brought to a classroom where he is left alone. He is faced with Hebrew words written on a blackboard, which are familiar from his childhood Hebrew classes but which he can no longer read and are now simply, as he sees it, writing backwards. He is thus doubly silenced in being left alone with speech that is alien to him but that nevertheless exerts an old authority over him, compelling his attention. The subjugation of his will is reinforced by his environment: he is placed in the psychological position of a pupil awaiting an absent but immanent teacher whose vacant chair conjures that authoritative presence. The door to the classroom is shut but not locked, so Philip is in theory free to leave, but fear of the consequences makes him afraid to exercise his free will and to walk out or to jump from the first-storey window. This environment evokes both a (potential) scene of judgement, recalling the ‘conflict without encounter’ of ‘being-before-the-law’, and a confessional scene with both legal and religious overtones. With Philip’s will oppressed, and always conscious of a surveillant presence who might be ‘beyond the reach of any appeal’, he starts to speak aloud (316). Not knowing who his captor might be but picking what he believes to be the most likely possibility, he speaks to Pipik. He initially supplicates his double: ‘Do you hear me’ (317)? He proceeds to admit that he has not treated Pipik with sufficient respect. He offers to submit himself to Pipik’s judgement: ‘you’re in charge in every way’ and asks for forgiveness both for taking the cheque intended for Pipik and for wantonly sleeping with Pipik’s girlfriend Wanda Jane (318). So, seemingly in a condition of disempowerment in which he feels a certain form of speech is demanded of him, Philip performs a confessional act. This forced speech would initially appear to breach the conditions of ‘being-before-the-law’ since it represents an invasion of that in-between space in which the writer and his literary text exist. However, the circumstances of this confession are productive of contradictions that, for the time being, sustain Philip’s liminal state. First there is the paradox that, though Philip is being held against his will, he might also be seen as freely confessing, since he is alone in the classroom with limited clues as to how to behave and thus chooses to interpret his conditions as requiring a confessional performance. Secondly, Philip’s response as a writer also generates a paradox. He is like other confessants who produce a false confession in confessing what he thinks his supposed listener, Pipik, wants to hear. Being, though, one who spends his life manipulating words, Philip speaks in an even more self-conscious manner than usual, weighing up every element of his ‘confession’ for its possible efficacy on Pipik and its cost to his own integrity. As Philip remarks to himself, ‘no-one could have spoken much more adroitly. . . . I had said more or less what he wanted me to say while still saying what was more or less true’ (319). In sum, Philip is carrying out a series of negotiations that mimic the literary negotiations of the ‘more or less true’ through which a writer activates his ‘being-before-the-law’. The production of this false confession replicates in a single scene the multifarious manipulations of speech that make up Operation Shylock as a whole; and the classroom scene demonstrates in a number of ways why the confessional form emulates the state of ‘being-before-the-law’ and how it is as treacherous as it is productive for its writer and readers.

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At the crux of the scene Philip experiences an epiphany as he realizes that to ‘atone’ to Pipik he must recognize him as Philip Roth; he therefore proceeds to name him as Philip Roth aloud. This episode, whose religiosity reaches the point of absurdity as Philip admits to ‘trespassing against’ his double, is in some sense a response to Pipik’s own eccentric confession to him, and its farcicality disguises a serious point (319). Philip’s naming of Pipik as ‘Philip Roth’ can be seen to definitively bring this other Philip into existence, constituting his identity through an exercise of ‘interpellative power’ that conjures the subject into being (Butler 1997, 34). As social beings we do not exist, according to this line of thinking, unless and until we are socially recognized, accepted and named by others. Butler stresses how power operates in this formation of the subject, opining that we are, in effect, ‘formed in subjugation’, or by an act of ‘foreclosure’ that tends to determine in advance how and when we can speak, even of ourselves (1997, 27). This power operation has already been evident in Philip’s nicknaming of his double as Moishe Pipik, since by this name he disarms and reduces his doppelganger. Pipik has resisted this reductionism by naming himself as Philip through the process of making a confession. Now, by Philip number one’s renaming of Pipik as ‘Philip Roth’, the flow of power is reversed as the first Philip acknowledges that both their subjectivities have equal value, if, indeed, their subjectivities have not already become one single subjectivity. In effect, Philip number one submits to sharing space with Philip number two. At this point in the narrative it becomes clear that Pipik is not Philip’s adversary here; Philip has instead been set up by Smilesburger and it is this second agent of the law who has constrained him. But, as we have noted, Philip faces Smilesburger having on some level incarnated Pipik and, having already vocalized the Pipik-speech that we have identified with excessive and inappropriate speech, now internalizes it. Inappropriate speech or ‘just saying anything’ has now, at least for the time being, become identified with Philip’s freedom to speak and, by extension, his freedom as a writer. Yet Pipikspeech is ‘free of uncertainty and without a trace of conscience’ (Shylock, 156). The scene with Smilesburger that is about to follow aligns literary questions of liberty and license concerning generic boundaries, with questions of political liberty and license; it thus productively unites Derrida’s ‘being-before-the-law’ – a literary state of trial – with a testing of the notions of free speech and censorship that takes the literary questions, about the power to speak, over into the political sphere, in the context of America and Israel.

Silence, censorship and loshon hora (evil speech) When Smilesburger enters the classroom Philip is on a ‘verbal track’, studying the ‘Klinghoffer diaries’, which he has been given by the mysterious book-dealer, Mr Supposnik (Shylock, 321). His attention is still characterized by compulsion, albeit inner compulsion, because he has convinced himself that he will only be freed from captivity once he has completed the literary composition requested of him by Supposnik, an introduction to the diaries preparatory to their publication, imbued

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with the ‘correct Jewish outlook’ (327). Philip is still silent. One dimension of Philip’s silence is that the entire classroom scenario is designed to facilitate a judgement by Mossad on whether Philip can keep his mouth shut to good enough effect to carry out a spying operation in the service of Israel. But even after Smilesburger unexpectedly enters the room, Philip for some time maintains a strict silence from mixed motives of confusion, surprise, fear and suspicion. In this wordless state he listens to the agent as Smilesburger lays down the law against ‘the sin of Jewish speech’, that is, tale-bearing or loshon hora (evil speech), which Smilesburger calls the Jews’ prime defect. The agent explains that the Chofetz Chaim, a religious sage who, Smilesburger explains, ‘formulated the detailed laws of speech for our people’, has decreed that tale-bearing is forbidden: ‘This is law!’, Smilesburger declares (333). The crime of loshon hora should be counteracted by silence. Philip’s own response to the prohibitive commandments articulated by his captor is twofold: he wants to continue what has now become a tactical silence, ‘the bedrock on which I was building my self-defense’; yet, under the injunction to silence, wants ‘so much to speak . . . that I felt ready to jump not from the window but from my own skin’ (339). This half voluntary state of silence recalls Pipik’s declaration, ‘I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS’. Previously, Philip has subjectified Pipik by naming him so, but has subsequently given voice to Pipik’s words on Diasporism and ends by bringing Pipik within ‘the domain of speakability’ first by fully recognizing him and then by absorbing his identity and thus his opinions (Butler 1997, 133). By Philip’s now remaining silent he might also be seen to merge with Pipik as the one ‘that is not words’. Silence, of course, can be ‘a site of potential resistance’: an active refusal to say what is demanded of one, implying its opposite, the active insistence on saying what one chooses to say (Butler 1997, 137). The choice to speak, as well as the choice of words, can in this way become an act of aggression or of resistance: speech – for example, speech inciting a harmful act – itself becomes ‘injurious conduct’. Butler instances in this connection the right-wing Israeli rhetoric that perhaps encouraged the assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 (1997, 20, 22). To speak or not to speak thus takes on a political significance that collapses the distance between the writer and the event: that distance which Pipik has earlier criticized. To use and, sometimes, to withhold words is an act with consequences and one which can be subject to judgement; it thus counters Pipik’s earlier charge that words are less than acts. In this passage with Smilesburger, Philip’s ‘being-before-the-law’ is ultimately compromised where ‘the law’ is aligned with the ‘law’ against loshon hora. At this point silence vies with speech (although ultimately the struggle is between silence and literary expression, because ‘the law’s’ demands are exerted on Philip’s future written work). Philip is not directly face to face with the law of loshon hora because he is as yet accused of nothing and has said nothing, but is nonetheless compelled by it in being confronted by it in a situation where his attention is being coerced. Judgement is temporarily withheld but at the same time implied because behind Smilesburger’s amiable storytelling is a concealed demand that Philip write nothing that could incur the sin of loshon hora: that is, Philip is being judged for a sin he has not yet committed.

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He now no longer resembles the one at the doorway, ‘a subject before a judgement which is always in preparation and always being deferred’, but has already been found guilty (Derrida 1992, 205–6). Derrida’s look at the boundaries of what constitutes literature touches but does not dwell on censorship; but this issue now becomes apparent when we interpret the scene with Smilesburger in light of Philip’s ‘being-before-the-law’ as a writer. The battle in Operation Shylock between the withholding of speech and over-communicativeness is ultimately being fought on the ground of freedom of speech as it intersects with ideas of literary genre. In terms of the confessional act it addresses whether or not Philip, while being held in an environment where speech is demanded of him, will submit to the preconceived story laid before him, the story of the ‘good Jew’ giving service to Israel. The confession intersects with speech censorship not only in that certain speech is demanded but that certain speech is simultaneously forbidden: the full account of Philip’s activities for the Mossad and, by extension, an account of the state of affairs in the Middle East running contrary to the Israeli and American received accounts of who should accept blame for it. The strictures against loshon hora would bring Philip closer to judgement as a writer in a way that would destroy his ability to occupy the in-between space that characterizes ‘being-before-the-law’. This implied act of censorship – or perhaps self-censorship – would therefore hinder his ability to produce work that can exceed its own boundaries to become transformative by speaking about forbidden topics. Speech that observed the law regarding loshon hora could only be utilitarian, always directed towards a given aim as, Smilesburger admits to Philip, is his own work for Israel. The agent’s speech, then, is highly invested. The speech of a Smilesburger tends to a single purpose, which, however, remains hidden. It too, of course, is a highly political act. What separates a Smilesburger from a Philip Roth is that Smilesburger serves – and aims to coerce Philip to serve – a sole interest, namely that of the State of Israel. The ‘law’ relating to loshon hora would effectively gag Philip as a writer and prevent him from realizing the ‘daring to tamper with the taboo’ for which Smilesburger himself recognizes Philip’s work has become known (Shylock, 346). In arguing this point, however, Operation Shylock shows itself to be cognizant of the fact that a writer who is too politically invested risks compromising his or her creative freedom and therefore jeopardizing the transformative potential of their work; they risk producing propaganda instead of literature. After Philip’s quitting Smilesburger, and Israel, to return to ‘everything that is selfwilled’, Roth presents us with the conundrum at the heart of Operation Shylock: the question of whether or not Philip has deleted that revelatory chapter 11 (348). The bid by the State of Israel to stand in judgement over Philip’s work is made explicit in his final meeting with Smilesburger in New York where they contest the rights of ‘Chapter Eleven’. At stake is not only the right to publish the facts of Philip’s activities for the Mossad, but also the underpinning rights of Pipik’s voice-in-Philip, that is, the freedom to speak about Diasporism without it being anathematized as loshon hora or the sin of treachery against Israel. For Philip to have avoided retribution by censoring his own work would risk producing ‘fake’ literature like the propagandistic ‘Klinghoffer’ diaries.

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Smilesburger’s dismissal of Pipik-speech as balagan, meaningless mayhem, only masks the intention to control ‘the domain of speakability’ so as to eliminate Diasporism completely from the domain of political speech. Bringing together Philip and Smilesburger in New York stresses the deep American interest in these matters rather than the censorship being confined to a concern of the State of Israel. It seems that in both nations Noam Chomsky’s words on propaganda in a democratic system equally apply: ‘no one is punished (in theory) for objecting to official dogma. In fact, dissidence is encouraged. What this system attempts to do is to fix the limits of possible thought . . .’ (1979, 38). Roth’s search in Operation Shylock for the place of speech in the problematic context of Israeli and American politics is an attempt to unfix those limits. As Philip later recalls, his early and continuing creed as a novelist is that ‘the writer redefined the permissible. That was the responsibility’ (Shylock, 377).

‘Tampering with the Taboo’ and treachery Operation Shylock: A Confession mobilizes two opposing impulses. One is to ‘just say everything’, as Philip puts it when he ventriloquizes Pipik’s Diasporism in a voice ‘without a trace of conscience’ (Shylock, 156). Saying everything is, of course, the purpose of the confession; but here, instead of the conscience being cleared by speaking freely, truthfully and openly, the limits of conscience are overborne by promiscuous and deceptive speech. The countervailing movement is towards saying nothing, or speechlessness, an absence marked by the book’s many gaps and the silences burgeoning under the sign of loshon hora. Silence, too, can deceive. The two impulses meet each other in Smilesburger’s request to Philip to commit the act of self-censorship that would result in, as Philip terms it, ‘[c]alling fiction fact’ (387). Philip signifies by this phrase that his ‘factual’ autobiographical confession would become a fiction were he to be silent on chapter 11. The resulting fiction, labelled fact, would consequently ‘undermine everything’ (387). Smilesburger’s response is that Philip should ‘call it fiction instead’, an option which Philip vigorously rejects. Ought he to, Philip responds sarcastically, ‘publish Operation Shylock as – as what? Subtitled “A Fable?”’ At Smilesburger’s disingenuously enthusiastic response, ‘Excellent idea. A subjectivist fable. That solves everything’, Philip replies, ‘Except the problem of accuracy’ (391–2). At this moment, Philip conceives of Operation Shylock as a bulwark against what he sees as Smilesburger’s work, which is ‘the inculcation of pervasive uncertainty’ (394). Yet, as we have established, the subtitling of Operation Shylock ‘a confession’ instead of ‘a fable’ still fails to confirm its accuracy, engendering the ‘pervasive uncertainty’ that has been shown to inhabit the confessional form and similarly to constitute the ‘beingbefore-the-law’ of a literary work. The question, finally, is where the freest expression actually lies – in the speaking, in the withholding or somewhere in between. Have the invocations of loshon hora (to whose law Philip may or may not have submitted) automatically the side-effect of producing Pipik-speech, or balagan? Is the Diasporism by which Philip temporarily becomes possessed therefore a haunting of the ‘domain of speakability’, a form of

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‘impossible speech’, which, for example, implicitly challenges what can be said in the context of Israel (Butler 1997, 133)? Or should we take it that Operation Shylock: A Confession in total is an example of impossible speech? And if so, does it effectively negotiate the ‘law’ relating to literary works to open up a space for tampering with the taboo, or are its negotiations no more than evasions, an exercise in fence-sitting that declines into mere self-indulgence, or, even worse, promiscuous speech that lacks all conscience? In a 1993 Tikkun symposium on Philip Roth’s Diasporism, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi uncompromisingly believes the latter: ‘what Diasporism amounts to here [is] the privilege to try out any role, any character, without paying the consequences of identity’. After thus aligning Philip with Roth and Roth with Diasporism, Ezrahi adds sardonically, ‘[a]nd the Israeli Jews themselves: After all these years, they don’t look much like victims anymore . . .’ (41). The implication that Operation Shylock unfairly criticizes Israeli Jews tends to bolster Anita Norich’s charge in the same symposium that Operation Shylock’s Diasporism ‘posits Israel as perfectly negotiable’ (45). According to this view, the book is not negotiating itself a space in which to speak of the situation in Israel but negotiating away the very existence of Israel. This strand of opinion also tends to find that to criticize Israel risks threatening its existence. Judgements like these find Roth himself guilty of betrayal, that is, of the worst kind of loshon hora. But Operation Shylock’s essential value lies in its being a heretical work, one which plays with and disturbs the established meanings and functions of the trial as pertaining to boundary establishment and maintenance, which slips its literary boundaries while also perturbing the process of moral judgement. It is on multiple levels a treacherous work also, for example, in its airing of American Jews’ vexed loyalties. Roth’s take on betrayal in Operation Shylock is also embodied in Jonathan Pollard, an ‘American Jew paid by Israeli intelligence to spy against his own country’s military establishment’, one of the ‘Diaspora Jews’ invoked by Smilesburger who ‘constitute a pool of foreign nationals such as no other intelligence agency in the world can call on for loyal service’ (Shylock, 384). The still greater betrayal, for Jews, is to raise the traditional spectre of the evil-speaking and therefore treacherous Jew in connecting (as does Smilesburger) ‘twofaced fifth-column Jews’ with the worst kind of loshon hora, and then envisaging Israel as ‘the full flowering of the Jewish genius for loshon hora’ (337, 343, original emphasis). Accordingly, Jews – both in Israel and the American Diaspora – are congenitally treacherous, a statement, one would think, to rival some of the most enthusiastic expressions of anti-Semitism. But Roth complicates matters when Smilesburger links treacherous speech with misplaced speech, saying, ‘[i]nappropriateness is the Jewish style. Awful’ (332, original emphasis). As we have noted, inappropriateness of speech has already been linked, via Pipik, to the notion of semantic excess and also to the ‘creative subterfuge’ of the writer (346). So we return to the familiar Rothian notion that creative writerly speech is also speech laden with betrayal. Here Roth’s point seems to be (if we accept that Smilesburger, in this particular context, is speaking for Roth) that treacherous speech might also be the freest possible speech. If inappropriateness is the Jewish style, and if Jews without loshon hora would be (merely) ‘nice goyim’, are we, in Roth’s own opinion perhaps, looking at a people who are simultaneously uniquely treacherous and uniquely with potential to find

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that space where the freest speech – or literary expression – is located (Shylock, 336)? These would be dangerous qualities to possess, and a contentious and provocative subject about which to speak. This view of Jews and of Jewish speech seems to inform Philip’s final impression of Smilesburger, that he is, ‘my kind of Jew, he is what “Jew” is to me, the best of it to me. . . . Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. The this-worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. . . . The injury. The impairment’ (394). But this overtly provocative description of ‘the Jew’ (a reconstituted Shylock) is central to a more complex view of identity on Roth’s part than it might appear. First, Smilesburger’s ‘impairment’ foreshadows the discoveries of The Human Stain regarding general human frailty and deception. Even more importantly, the problematic persona of Smilesburger and its conjunction of ‘lying’ with ‘truthfulness’ productively perplexes the question of loshon hora in regard to free speech. For Smilesburger, quite consciously, commits loshon hora himself, flouting the very law he has been trying to invoke. He thus knowingly relinquishes the cloak of moral authority and truthfully reveals that he serves the venal, self-interested aims of the Israeli state. This is perhaps the most unpalatable heresy of all Operation Shylock’s heresies, especially for Americans: that naked self-interest, not morality, informs the actions of the state, just as clearly for America as for Israel.

Conclusion: Operation Shylock as a ‘Trial-as-Writing’ Operation Shylock’s being or failing to be ‘a book’ is part of the process by which it alternately constitutes and deconstitutes itself as a literary work in order to realize its own ‘being-before-the-law’. It resists occupying a defined literary space by assuming its potential as literature to transcend the bounds of literary genre. Judith Butler’s comment on language in general is that it ‘remains alive when it refuses to “encapsulate” or “capture” the events and lives it describes’ (1997, 9). Operation Shylock’s supposedly tenuous grip on its own language and narrative structure actually furthers its ambitions to be a turbulent and self-questioning text. But it is simultaneously a highly political text, testing, in the heat of America’s engagement with Israel and the wider Middle East, the contention that in the person of the Jewish writer, evil speech, or loshon hora, and free speech most creatively become one and the same. We might take the book as the nearest Roth can come to a ‘loyal service’ to his country, America, while filling the measure of Kafka’s words, ‘I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea, and in which I not only felt myself at the boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general’ (qtd. Solotaroff, Nation, 7 June 1993). In Operation Shylock Philip conducts a quest for his ‘place of speech’ as a writer who happens to be also American and Jewish. His ‘confession’ perpetually unfixes the place of speech, keeping it always before-the-law. It creates a transformative space between fiction and fact, compelling the reader to keep actively searching for the place of Operation Shylock as a created work. It elucidates in evermore intricate and creative ways the confession, censorship and the ‘being-before-the-law’ of the writer. Roth, in

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fact, realizes Operation Shylock as a ‘trial-as-writing’. He sets the reader on a journey in search of the places in which speech might come to judgement, suggesting what that might mean in the context of Israeli-American relations during the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Operation Shylock: A Confession, then, opens the way to the American Trilogy and The Plot against America: works that collectively, many would argue, have cemented Roth’s reputation not only as a great American writer but also as a great writer about America.

3

Testing ‘Stories of Old’ in American Pastoral

American Pastoral, the first of what is now known as the American Trilogy, demonstrates Roth’s highly fruitful turn towards his home country that was joined to a sense of national history missing from his earlier work, where the prime focus had been on the individual subject in his personal situation. The novel scrutinizes, and finally dismisses, an ideology of America as a unified and ordered entity in which the (male) individual is fully integrated with the nation, rejecting both the pastoral mythology of bodily wholeness, order, innocence and perfectibility initially personified by the focal character, Seymour ‘the Swede’ Levov, and the regenerative trial-based post-war narrative of the American Way to which his father, Lou Levov, is devoted. It shows how a moment of national regeneration and political consensus after World War II disintegrates into the divisive politics and violence of the Vietnam era. Roth links this movement from order to disorder with the rapidly changing gender relations during this period, embroiling the Swede in a disorderly counternarrative activated through females, in particular his daughter, Merry, a violent radicalist. Roth’s interrogation of one narrative by another creates trial scenes for the Swede where he verbally confronts his ‘un-American’ antagonists: testing but transformational rhetorical spaces that bring him to understand himself as disordered and fundamentally in error. American Pastoral was well received by critics on publication.1 Derek Parker Royal convincingly argues that although the idea of America has always existed in Roth’s work, ‘in the American Trilogy, what he has done has been to write the individual subject into the fabric of history . . . he illustrates that identity is not only a product of, but also a hostage to, the many social, political and cultural forces that surround it’ (2005, 186). Brian McDonald posits that the Trilogy ‘charts the fate of the idea of the individual in America, dramatizing the impact that the contingencies of history and provisionalities of politics have had on the extraordinary lives of [Roth’s] three protagonists’ (McDonald 2004, 27). For McDonald, the novel is concerned with the ways in which America’s historical and political legacies of individualism and liberal democracy have been played out and perplexed post-war, although I would say that

1

The Kirkus Review called American Pastoral ‘elegiac and affecting’ and ‘some of the best pure writing Roth has done’ (1 February 1997). Michael Wood in his review for the New York Times commented that the novel ‘is a little slow’, but that the ‘mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you only have to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated’ (20 April 1997).

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Roth is tapping just as much into other important legacies: America’s national myths and narratives about itself. Royal argues for the American Trilogy’s development out of Sabbath’s Theater, stating that ‘Sabbath’s Theater is in many ways a turning point in Roth’s career, one in which, having mastered the labyrinthine games of postmodern narrative, he confronts head on the chaos of contemporary America as well as the artist’s role in it’ (2005, 186). Royal therefore implicitly labels Operation Shylock, which directly precedes Sabbath’s Theater, a postmodern narrative and not one concerning itself seriously with contemporary America, although he does mention Operation Shylock’s ‘diasporic musings’ as forming part of an American project existing in Roth’s work as a whole (2005, 186). But, while accepting the case for the vibrancy of Sabbath Theater’s return to American territory, Operation Shylock, as I argued in the previous chapter, is simply too important a part of Roth’s American project to discount when approaching American Pastoral and the others in the Trilogy. We might indeed speculate that with the Trilogy Roth was teasing out threads perhaps too densely woven in Operation Shylock: threads knotting together post-war personal and national identity with masculine bodily consciousness and the act of writing with its inherent limits and boundaries. American Pastoral, undoubtedly, is grounded in the past of Roth’s childhood following World War II. This may well be a past in which it is easier to gain a foothold than in the ultra-tricky territory of Philip’s and Pipik’s Jerusalem in 1988. That it is far from rocksolid ground, however, quickly becomes evident, one reason being that it is viewed in memory 45 years later by the narrator Nathan Zuckerman’s much older self. American Pastoral begins by evoking an exhilarating moment of national regeneration immediately after the War, emanating from an enduring cultural belief in the possibility of national unity. This belief was sustained by a Cold War politics of consensus where the American Way became a means, during the 1940s and 1950s, of refreshing Americans’ belief in their common purpose.2 The novel’s main action spans the 1960s and ends during the turbulent days of the Watergate hearings in 1973 after the nation had been split by anti-Vietnam protests and violent radicalism. It entwines the divisive politics of the Vietnam era with the emergence of second wave feminism 2

Perry Miller in Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (1965) and Sacvan Bercovitch in American Jeremiad (1978) have influentially traced the impact upon the American Way of an energetic Puritan rhetoric of errand or mission which reframes the story of the Hebrews’ journey to the Promised Land. An influential book by Will Herberg first published in 1955, largely a paean to the American Way, frames it in terms of religious tolerance. His book refers to the Puritan roots of the American Way and precedes Miller’s and Bercovitch’s more considered approaches to the influence of Puritanism on American culture. Herberg defines the American Way of Life as the ‘common religion’ of American society based on a tripartite American faith where the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths were seen as holding most core beliefs in common, and as politically ‘compounded almost equally of democracy and free enterprise’ (Herberg 1983, 264). Wendy Wall shows how the Advertising Council and the United States Information Agency worked to promote the American Way just after the War and in the 1950s by campaigns like the American Economic System campaign in the late 1940s and the People’s Capitalism exhibit from 1956. Their visions of a democratized, humane American capitalism were intended to combat the threat from communist propaganda; calls for real social change on issues like race and economic inequality from union leaders or others, who also participated in these campaigns, were ignored or muted. Splits in the American Way were thus always present but concealed.

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and rapidly changing gender relations during that period in order to evoke images of the beleaguered American male personified in the Swede. Zuckerman’s story about his childhood hero, the Swede, revisits these periods of post-war history from the standpoint of the1990s, when Zuckerman is an elderly man in his sixties. The novel consequently continues, like Operation Shylock, to present a reflective view of the postwar past, a view that implicitly counters both the American Way’s progressive ethos and the timeless ahistorical pastoral with which the book is preoccupied. American Pastoral scrutinizes and finally dismisses a mythology of origins perpetuating an ideology of America as a unified entity in which the (male) individual is fully integrated with the nation. The novel tests narratives of American identity predicated on unity, order and perfectibility in its portrayal of the Levov family, which has been in thrall to its ‘stories of old’ (Pastoral, 236). Two main types of synthesizing narratives about Americans are dissected here. The first narrative, wholeheartedly subscribed to by Lou Levov, the Swede’s energetic second-generation immigrant father, is of Americans as travellers or pilgrims on a pathway. For Lou the right way has always been the American Way. This historic American narrative of a Way founded on a notion of continuous progress defines the limits within which Lou acts and the limits of his beliefs. It is predicated on trials, in the sense of controlled boundaries or test limits, which determine who is, or is not, American, by setting conditions for assimilation to immigrants like Lou’s parents. Lou’s son, the Swede, is the third-generation product of the Levovs’s triumphant journey through and into America. The second unitary myth of American origins scrutinized by American Pastoral is the eponymous pastoral by which the Swede himself is enchanted: the vision of a natural American completely in harmony with his surroundings. This mythological narrative puts into play a symbolism of bodily wholeness, an organic unity of man and nature that evokes America as the Garden of Eden and the American as Adam.3 The reigning motif is thus one of innocence: an innocence that fosters a sense of unthinking entitlement to the rights and privileges of being American. Entitlement to American identity is assumed by the third-generation Swede, growing up just after the War when Jews were well-established in America, rather than looked on as earned as in the progressive model embraced by his father. In American Pastoral, then, powerful mythological strands underpin Lou’s adherence to the American Way and the politics of the New Deal and his son’s embrace of the pastoral. These narratives offer a seductive vision of unity, stability, order and purity. The pastoral is predicated on the ideal body of the perfect man, while the American Way assumes continuous progress towards a national state of unity and thus perfection. Both strands nonetheless reflect the tensions existing when white, middle-class American men have been led by the terms of the American Constitution to identify with one another to the exclusion of those of 3

The pastoral, evoking an Edenic vision of America based on images of expansive virgin territory, spiritual newness and innocence, present in Puritan views of America as New Canaan or New Eden, re-emerges in the nineteenth-century transcendentalism shaped by Thoreau and Emerson, giving rise to what R. W. B. Lewis calls an Adamic model of manhood in which man is essentially innocent and fully integrated into his surroundings (1955, 5, 28–9).

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a different class, gender or race; but their imagined fraternity fails to function because the nation is actually founded on competitive individualism. The downfall of the third-generation Swede demonstrates that these stories or myths have buttressed an ideology that is shown to be failing; as the novel concludes, ‘the old system that made order doesn’t work anymore’ (Pastoral, 422). The novel therefore undoes a powerful – and male-centred – ideological vision of what it is to be an American. It achieves this by means of a counternarrative about disorder represented by what Roth calls ‘the indigenous American berserk’ (Pastoral, 86). Roth’s counternarrative springs from and responds to America’s orderly narratives, exposing the contradictions internal to each of the ‘stories of old’ about national identity and the contradictions between them; Roth thereby creates not only rhetorical spaces where rival narratives are heard and tested but also spaces where, in Richard Sherwin’s words about the courtroom, ‘order itself, and the norms that uphold it, are on trial’ (Sherwin 2000, 69). Importantly, the American berserk is activated through women, a prime example being the fourth-generation Merry Levov, the Swede’s daughter, who becomes involved in political radicalism in the late 1960s and consequently carries out bomb attacks, which kill four people. The Swede is eventually forced into confrontation with the American berserk personified in two young women: Merry and the radicalist Rita Cohen. A close examination of two key passages involving Merry, Rita and the Swede will reveal that the novel works to place the Swede in a state of trial by marking out a space in which discussions about language and power operate, testing his ideas about his identity. As Ferguson notes, courtrooms are ‘compulsive generators of texts’ and the novel’s prose displays this compulsive quality, generating a rhetorical excess or rampancy associated with its depictions of the American berserk (2007, 25). This excessive, proliferative quality is produced and rhetorically harnessed by Roth as a form of psychotic language – an expression of the fragmented berserk – to interrogate and break down myths of American origins dependant on the symbolism of wholeness and purity. American Pastoral, like all the novels discussed here, exhibits Roth’s predilection for focusing on a strong male character whose story is in some way paradigmatic of Roth’s chosen post-war period. In thinking about how the fate of the novel’s focal male protagonist Seymour ‘the Swede’ Levov is central to Roth’s portrayal of the post-war American, we will continue to explore the multiple interrelated meanings of the trial for Roth: as constitutive of and setting limits to American identity; as a state of bodily and mental testing or suffering; but at the same time a rhetorical space that exists as a liminal, potentially transformative, zone. States of trial in American Pastoral are formulated at once as trials of the physical body and of what might be called the national body, where the body works as a metaphor for the American nation. In placing the Jewish Swede in a state of trial, Roth exposes the concealed conditions regulating the American’s relation to America, a relation that, according to the foundational mythology which has influenced the Swede, is free, open and natural. The televised questioning of President Nixon during the Watergate hearings that preceded his resignation and could be said to have put his presidency on trial forms the background to the novel’s third and

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final section. The Swede’s trials, contextualized by Watergate, synecdochally reproduce what can be seen as a time of trial for America in the Vietnam era.

The American Way and the post-war political consensus ‘Let’s remember the energy’, says American Pastoral’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman. Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious. Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together. (Pastoral, 40)

We therefore might see this moment in the mid-1940s as part of an energetic, coordinated, all-embracing movement inspired by the reinvigorated national sense of mission that defined the American Way. But Roth sounds an early warning note in his description of that moment as one of ‘collective inebriation’, a state which, of course, never lasts long and which hints at the fragile, fantasy-ridden nature of the journey upon that Way, a journey in which some Americans have been left far behind. The American Way promoted a harmony expressed in terms of religious tolerance, where the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths were seen as holding the most core beliefs in common; a welcome view for families like the Levovs.4 But seeing the American Way in terms of common American values meant that the conflicts issuing from economic inequality or from race, for example, tended to be disguised rather than tackled head on. Cold War anti-communism and anti-statism shaped the politics of the American Way, not only galvanizing conservative Americans but also compromising the leftist liberalism or ‘state-centered liberalism’ (Bell 2004, 202) that existed just after the War. New Deal liberals, and most civil rights campaigners who had come to see reform in terms of improvements in individual liberties, subscribed to anti-communism by 1950. The broad left-liberal movement had splintered as those who favoured a more ambitious program of social democracy and state expansion directly after the War were attacked as communists and politically sidelined. These developments make it possible to see how the rhetoric of the American Way disguised the divisive nature of the political thinking behind it. Post-war American Jews for the most part were strongly acculturated and were committed to the American Way.5 They had overcome most discriminatory barriers by 4

5

Unsurprisingly, this theme has preoccupied a number of American Jewish academics and writers: see for example Sam B. Girgus’s The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture (1981) and Milton R. Konvitz’s Judaism and the American Idea (1980). A study conducted by the Division of Scientific Research of the American Jewish Committee found that second- and third-generation Jews had rapidly acculturated to their surroundings during the first few decades of the twentieth century. It reported on the rapid social mobility and geographical spread that spoke of a very successful adjustment to American life (Sklare et al. 1955, 205–22).

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the mid-twentieth century, with limiting quotas in higher education and barriers to the professions having fallen by the 1960s.6 Nevertheless, despite Jewish adherence to the American Way they still risked being identified as the harmful ‘other’ at times when notions as to who was or was not American hardened under the pressure for national unity. The politics of the American Way compromised the Jews who were working within the post-war consensus in more than one respect; many found not only that their liberal views were circumscribed and perplexed by anti-communism but also that they too had become subject to the persistent stereotype of the Jew as treacherous Red.7 The national divisions created during this period in the name of national unity – divisions further excavated by Roth in I Married a Communist, the novel sequential to American Pastoral and discussed in Chapter 4 – are thus already implicit in that upsurge of energy that inspires and animates Lou Levov, the young Swede Levov, and his junior, Zuckerman. Very soon after the War, the sustenance of national unity came to necessitate a reinforcement of national boundaries from which emerged the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism. The HUAC trials, with their crude and strident demands for national loyalty that equated communist leanings with un-Americanness, could be said to foreground the mechanisms of exclusion that purify the nation at times of crisis. In fact, the narrative of an American Way inevitably rests on what is defined as un-American. As the Swede’s daughter Merry grows towards maturity, American Pastoral explores the legacy of the Truman doctrine and the Cold War in the cataclysmic events that define the Vietnam era.8

The Levovs and ‘Stories of Old’ The Swede’s father Lou Levov is a striving son of Jewish immigrants whose energies seem tailor made to a trial-centred progress originating in the struggles of the Old Testament people ‘for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between’ (Pastoral, 11). Like many Jews, Lou has responded to the narrative of America as the Promised Land, a goldene medinah where it is possible to start anew. He has invested himself politically in New Deal America, his overwhelming loyalty to the Democratic Party reflecting the fact that Jews were firmly part of Roosevelt’s Democratic project. In Franklin D. Roosevelt he sees a strong president who he believes unites America within a political framework in which working men and minorities receive their due as Americans and can advance to prosperity. Lou is inspired culturally by the regenerative and unifying values of the American Way that provide what seems to 6

7 8

Housing and employment restrictions against Jews were disappearing though still in force until the 1960s. Discrimination against Jews in the professions was declining in the 1950s and rapidly so in the 1960s. Surveys reported anti-Semitism at much lower levels in the 1960s than in the 1940s (Dinnerstein 1994, 156–60). Svonkin notes ‘the traditional stereotype identifying Jews with communism’ (Svonkin 1997, 113). President Harry S. Truman in 1947 established a foreign policy of Soviet containment rather than detente that became known as the Truman Doctrine, supporting Greece and Turkey with economic aid to prevent their coming within the sphere of Soviet influence. This was often judged by historians to mark the beginning of the Cold War.

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be a secure route into an American identity.9 The zeal with which Lou sets himself the task of succeeding in America leads him to engage in gruelling labour at the noxious work of tanning leather, then to long and arduous years of building up from scratch the glove-making business that the Swede will inherit. Lou’s early struggles – or trials – are transformative, in two senses: first, they bring about worldly success; secondly, they transform the Jewish immigrant into the American as he imbibes the ideological principles underpinning the American Way. Central to this process for Lou is the belief in the narrative of continuous progress towards a state of material success and happiness in which the fortunes of each successive generation will exceed the last. His business is given its impetus by a large wartime order for gloves and comes to fruition during the Roosevelt years. The novel describes Lou’s creation of his son’s American inheritance in the political context of New Deal liberalism, as Lou carefully tutors Seymour in the workings of the family business. The Levov glove business is one where industrial capitalism is tempered with benevolence and whose familial structure of ownership – with the craft of glove-making being passed from father to son – is echoed by the father and son teams within the workforce and between the paternalistic Lou and his workforce. The family is envisaged as a binding agent that draws private and work life into a unified American national identity. Glove-making is itself a figure of the ideal ‘fit’ between man and nation. After World War II, the lifting of the lid on both war-time restrictions and pre-war discriminatory quotas against Jews enables Lou to thrust the Swede into the heart of the American pastoral dream. The young Swede is described by Zuckerman as being a blond, blue-eyed Viking of a man, very different in appearance from his Jewish contemporaries at Weequahic high school; he seems effortlessly at one with America. To Zuckerman and his friends, the Swede is ‘the boy we were all going to follow into America, our point man into the next immersion, at home here the way the Wasps were at home here’ (89). The baseball metaphor is telling; a familiar theme in Roth’s work, celebrated in The Great American Novel, is the embrace of baseball as the essentially American and Americanizing sport, by which Jewish boys demonstrate their national allegiance and transcend their Jewish origins in a common American identity.10 To Zuckerman, the Swede’s appearance and 9

10

The economic and social renewal promised by Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration established in 1933 was allied with a drive for spiritual renewal in the minds of American Jews as well as Protestants and Catholics. As Beth Wenger reports, the NRA’s provision for a 5-day working week, for example, was seen by the synagogues as a way of maintaining the religious observation of the Sabbath day (Wenger 1996, 179). Andrew R. Heinze, in Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the 20th Century alludes to a possible model for the Swede: the baseball star Hank Greenberg, whom he calls one of the ‘two Jewish “heroes” of postwar America’ (Heinze 2004, 211). Roth specifies Greenberg as the player supported by the Jewish boys in his early short story The Conversion of the Jews (1959). It is intriguing that the other Jewish ‘hero’, Bess Myerson, was a beauty queen, as is the Swede’s wife, Dawn, and that, according to Heinze, ‘the fame of the baseball star and the beauty queen converged in September 1945, when the Miss America pageant and the American League pennant race seized the nation’s attention’ (Heinze 2004, 211). This true story of the Jewish baseball star and the beauty queen is very likely to have been the imaginative touchstone for Roth’s triumphantly American coupling of the Swede and Dawn, the ex-Miss New Jersey.

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the sport at which he excels perform the same unifying function, being a tangible sign of his Jewish family’s progress upon the American Way and his apotheosis as fully American. Tellingly, though, in being a ‘point man’ into America, the Swede appears as a species of Jewish scout to his juniors and thus a liminal figure from the beginning, even though he is paradoxically perceived as completely at home in America. American Pastoral charts the Swede’s move into the pastoral heart of America, a spatial movement and a psychological moment just preceding the temporal shift of post-war America into the polarizing radical politics of the 1960s when visions of political and social order propounded by the American Way are under attack. The Swede thinks of his relocation to rural Old Rimrock as the culmination of the Levovs’ journey upon the American Way: the still point at which he assumes an ‘unconscious oneness with America’ (20). The oneness of the Jewish journey with the American journey up till that point is marked by the Swede’s identification of his locality, Morris County, with his uncle, Morris Levov (although the Swede’s architect, Bill Orcutt, a Wasp of old-established American ancestry and a lifelong local resident, personifies the disjuncture between the two Morrises). The Swede’s apotheosis in Old Rimrock is the culmination of ‘[t]hree generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people’ (237). The fantasy of being the agrarian folk figure Johnny Appleseed nourishes the Swede’s perception of the American man as a wholesome being whose person subsumes all constituent variants of the American and thus all potential conflict.11 He wishes to lose himself in the persona of one who ‘[w]asn’t a Jew, wasn’t an Irish Catholic, wasn’t a Protestant Christian – nope . . . just a happy American’ (316). In other words, he sees himself, true to the Adamic myth, as being without limits. As Lewis puts it in describing the American hero of the nineteenth-century American Renaissance, the model was ‘Adam before the Fall. Adam was the first, the archetypal man. His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent. The world and history lay all before him’ (Lewis 1955, 5). In desiring the pastoral the Swede subscribes to a myth whose organicism refuses to recognize the potential for division. His ‘Swedian innocence’, reflected in the perfection of his baseball genius, seeks a home for itself in the innocence of the American pastoral at Old Rimrock (Pastoral, 4). But ‘innocence’ for Roth is rarely more highly charged than when he subjects the pastoral to scrutiny. According to Lewis, the pastoral mode, centred as it is on the myth of the new man alone in the New World, is implicitly free of history. As a consequence, the pastoral presents itself as being free of trials. It is a condition of pure entitlement, in which no sense of boundaries exists; accordingly neither does the possibility of transgression. The pastoral claims an innocence that belongs to a prelapsarian, unchanging state, outside any historical context. The paradox is that the Swede’s sense of entitlement derives from the realized promise of his family’s process of assimilation; assuming his entitlement, however, entails overlooking his family origins 11

Matthiessen states that the figure of Johnny Appleseed, based on John Chapman (1775?–1847) became ‘a frontier saint, almost a god of fertility’, and that he was an established part of the Adamic myth (Matthiessen 1946, 641).

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as immigrants and outsiders who have endured the Depression and war. The farm in Old Rimrock, founded in a past for which the Swede acknowledges no responsibility, is the centre of his ambitions for life in a pastoral that does not recognize its own history and thus its own limitations. Pastoral innocence implies an absolute right to impose judgement on others at no cost to oneself. This is a right Roth allows to none. American Pastoral, like all his work, demands the presence of the defendant, one who is potentially guilty.

American inheritances and the pastoral We must not forget that the Swede enters rural New Jersey partly to escape from troubles that are already brewing on the national horizon and are becoming evident in his hometown of Newark both in economic pressures on his factory and in the threat of racial conflict. His move reflects his desire to avoid conflict and contradiction and to ‘slide through’ life, as his brother Jerry puts it, a desire which has led him to continue to adhere to liberal consensus politics at a time when that consensus has definitively broken down (276). The Swede’s move to the pastoral scene in Old Rimrock allows him to leave unexamined the ideological parameters within which he has made major decisions about his life: he has no consciousness of what constitutes ‘freedom’ in his new territory and of what the boundaries of his American selfhood includes and excludes. He therefore lacks the intellectual or psychological resources with which to comprehend his beloved daughter Merry’s teenage transition from obedient daughter to bomb-detonating terrorist during the Vietnam years. Furthermore, his inability to see through the mythology of the pastoral to a clearer appreciation of his place in American history has prevented his development into fully mature manhood. ‘Something was on top of him that had called a halt to him’, Zuckerman muses about the Swede, a perception of stasis that is not attributable solely to the traumatic effect of Merry’s violent acts (23). One realizes, in fact, that stasis is already inherent in his retreat to the pastoral. The deluded Swede in fact possesses an acutely contradictory view of America that results in an attempt to reframe artificial or constructed images of the nation as natural. The farm epitomizes his desire to live a life ‘most simple and most ordinary . . . right in the American grain’ (31, original emphasis). That desire accords with another tenet of Adamism, that the ‘natural’ American is at once the exceptional (because only) individual and the most ordinary (because representative) of men.12 This resolution of the exceptional and the ordinary in the image of the American man underpins Zuckerman’s reflection that the Swede appeared to have resolved ‘[c]onflicting Jewish desires . . . the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different . . .’ (20). The figure of the natural American masks this conflict in a symbolism of organic wholeness that allows for no 12

Emerson’s Representative Men (1882) envisages great men in history as also representative of the common man and develops a philosophy of man in harmony with nature.

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internal contradiction. In appearing to free him of ‘the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals’ the pastoral allows the Swede to escape the exclusionary implications of this debate about identity (85). The internalized limits under which the Swede has actually been operating as an American man are figuratively realized in his creation of a bounded area of his garden at the centre of a small stand of trees, in which he places his daughter Merry’s swing, an area which functions as a space of trial for Merry. His artful reconstruction of the landscape sets unconscious and anxious boundaries to what he intends to be the outdoor throne of his perfect American child: In the fall – just as he had always planned it – he’d be sure to get home from work before the sun went down, and there she would be – just as he had planned it – swinging high up over the fallen leaves encircling the maple by the front door, their largest tree, from which he’d first suspended that swing for her when she was only two. (Pastoral, 326)

The swing is hung at the ‘heart’ of the ‘old maple trees he loved’, trees that are regularly sprayed, fertilized and pruned (326). The giant trees are protected against rough weather by ‘four cables forming a rough parallelogram against the sky’ and lined with lightning rods that are ‘inspected annually, just to be on the safe side’ (326). It is as though the space geometrically enclosed by the open roof and the vertical lines of the lightning rods constitutes a tightly controlled, unified area within which, for the Swede, a truly American identity resides. This area, though he believes it to be natural and to epitomize the pastoral America he loves, is obviously highly demarcated and rigorously protected, or defended in a manner of which he is entirely unaware. In other words, its wholeness is constructed, not natural. The Swede has assumed American manhood in the same way, by unknowingly internalizing its boundaries. The artificial Eden of the Swede’s garden poses a question about American identity and patrimony in regard to his father – daughter relationship with Merry. By setting Merry on her swing at the heart of the garden, by preparing the American ground of Old Rimrock for his daughter, the Swede has unconsciously set the same boundaries for Merry as he has unwittingly accepted for himself: those boundaries constructed by the race, class and gender expectations of suburban Wasp America in the 1950s. In effect, he has set for her the conditions of trial through which she should become American, predicated on his belief in perfectibility: she must be the perfect, innocent child. The Swede imagines Merry to have passed the test of Americanness represented by innocently swinging in this ‘natural’ arena and merging, like him, with the pastoral. Yet, as the vision of Merry’s trees is conjured by the Swede only in memory, the perfect child can exist only in fantasy. His recollections are shown to be mere nostalgia: the swing is empty and Merry is long gone. Her transgressions have brutally exposed the Swede’s futile orchestration of the space within his garden. Merry violently repudiates his expectations, putting herself firmly beyond the boundaries of what her father considers to be an American by her activities as a bomber. Just as the Swede distances himself from his father Lou’s cultural and political inheritance by

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embracing the pastoral, so also does Merry disrupt the pastoral myth and then rupture it altogether by breaking out of the scene. When she violates that Edenic garden space she deeply disturbs the Swede’s sense, not only of her identity, which he now views as un-American, but the integrity of his own identity, of which he feels entirely bereft. In fact, the Swede’s situation recalls the words of Horace Bushnell on innocence, that there is ‘no condition of trial which after all is seen to be so utterly forbidding and helpless as just this state of Adamic innocence’ (qtd. Lewis 1955, 54). Roth thereby exposes the ‘condition of trial’ within the supposedly trial-free American pastoral. By interrogating the figure of the Swede, Roth reinstates accountability at the centre of personal and national American identity, consequently opening up possible discussions about retribution. The question as to whether or why the Swede suffers retribution raises yet more questions about how American Pastoral views cultural inheritance and, as one would expect from Roth, is open to more than one interpretation. One might ask if the Swede’s trials or sufferings after the bombing are retributive. If so, might they arise from the sins of the fathers being visited on their children? The Swede could be said to have been guilty of rejecting his father’s (still distinctively Jewish though Americanized) inheritance to embrace goyish America by moving to Old Rimrock and marrying a shiksa, Dawn. Could the Swede’s suffering, in fact, stem from his rejection of his father Lou’s Jewish inheritance and his refusal to hand on that inheritance to his child? Lou is disapproving of his son’s move to Old Rimrock, of his refusal to attend synagogue on high holidays and, most of all, of his reluctance to instruct Merry in the Jewish faith. The disagreement between father and son expresses a tension in the father – son relationship that is ever-present in Roth’s novels, surfacing in the earlier Zuckerman Trilogy The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, and being implicated in the trials and betrayals of I Married a Communist and The Plot against America.13 Victoria Aarons has made an argument that would support a reading of the novel showing the Swede’s – and Merry’s – fate as the consequence of his refusing a Jewish inheritance. Aarons makes her argument in the context of the covenant of Abraham, ‘a cultural ethos’, she says, ‘that became diluted, dissipated, a conspicuously American context’ (2005, 16). Aarons’s original covenant is the covenant of the Old Testament Hebrews, which by implication is firmly distinguished from the American Puritan covenant based on the concept of errand with its embedded notions of continuous progress and spiritual perfectibility. She sees the spirit of the Hebrew covenant as haunting American Jewish writers, including Roth, who have departed from its specifically Jewish religious tenets in the process of becoming assimilated Americans. Aarons describes their ambivalence in regard to the notion of covenant as a source of 13

The father – son relationship is not dealt with at any length here, though it has been a research focus for a number of scholars. For discussions of this important theme in Roth’s work, see for example: Matthew Wilson, ‘Fathers and Sons in History: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife’, Prooftexts 11 (1991): 41–56; Charles Berryman, ‘Philip Roth and Nathan Zuckerman: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prometheus’, Contemporary Literature 31.2 (1990): 177–90; Andrew Gordon, ‘Philip Roth’s Patrimony and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Jewish Sons Remembering Their Fathers’, Philip Roth Studies 1.1 (Spring 2005): 53–66.

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conflict and contradiction in their work. She contends that, ‘the promise configured by the covenant and entrusted to Abraham becomes in this literature an artefact of fantasized desire, but one that shows itself to be the source of uneasy play’ (2005, 21). The unattainability of the Jewish promise and the Jewish past evokes, for Aarons, ‘the kind of loss that ironically can only be filled by reinventing or reimagining the past’, a past conceived of as a history of covenantal bargaining by which the Jewish self is shaped (2005, 23). Jewish self-making for her is founded on the contradiction that is the attempt to identify with a Jewish inheritance at the same time as denying it. Aarons’s reasoning would therefore lead to the conclusion that American Pastoral indirectly expresses the loss of the Hebrew covenant in envisaging the hollowing-out of the Swede’s existence and his life as ‘an incognito’ (Pastoral, 23). The novel would then conjure a sense of his sin as being visited on his daughter, Merry, in that her rootlessness is responsible for her subsequent violent actions. The loss of his daughter could be seen as his punishment for breaking the Hebrew covenant. The Swede himself actually contemplates this possibility in his struggles to understand the origins of his predicament, when he muses, ‘His father was right. That was what happened. They raised a child who was neither Catholic nor Jew, who instead was first a stutterer, then a killer, then a Jain’ (386). But, I would argue, Roth does not ultimately allow the reader to accept this reasoning. He makes it clear that the painful sense of loss which the Swede experiences, and of which losing Merry is emblematic, emanates from the loss of a specifically American past in which subsequent generations of Levovs have invested themselves – that fantasized past which we have seen as being comprised in the post-war moment of rebirth when ‘Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together’. That energetic motion unites the concept of the Jewish journey to the Promised Land with that of the journey on the American Way at a particular historical moment. American Pastoral acknowledges both movements and their historical context and, I would argue, critiques both equally. Roth’s point appears to be that the last moment at which a widespread belief in national unity was possible was that moment during and just after FDR’s presidential terms when American aspiration, politics and history coincided to make the American dream realizable for many white, middleclass Americans including, by that time, a large number of Jews. Their assimilation, however, has left other groups still excluded from full American citizenship, a fact unacknowledged by either father or son. It is the ‘fantasized desire’ belonging to that post-war moment – and this loss of belief – upon which Roth is commenting. Lou’s credo of the American Way differs from the Swede’s pastoral in important respects, but both credos founder on their shared, unquestioned belief in a world where completely new beginnings are possible. Roth probes their weaknesses in regard to history: the pastoral myth aims to dispense with history entirely while the American Way rewrites it in a progressivist mode. Roth undoubtedly appears to be making sardonic reference to the biblical concept of the sins of the fathers being visited on the children in the spectre of the daughter Merry. However, while agreeing that American Pastoral brings back the concept of retribution to the process of American self-making I would argue, unlike Aarons, that the sins

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of the fathers, for which both the Swede and Lou have invited retribution, are sins of omission, or their forgetting of American history, more than their forgetting of Jewish history. Roth certainly evokes the Levovs’ difference as Jews; that difference, though, functions as a means of exposing the ways in which American identity has historically been constructed and serves to remind us of the artificiality of its boundaries in regard to all Americans, rather than producing a sense of a lost alternative Jewish identity to be mourned. Moreover, American Pastoral often seems to argue that life is sometimes a condition of inexplicable suffering; it avoids making the kind of final judgements that lead directly to retribution, as would be suggested by its preoccupation with trials as liminal zones. But this novel also suggests the possibility that the Levovs’ sufferings, rather than reflecting a loss of Jewish heritage, are a consequence of their shirking their responsibility as Jews and Americans to remember the inherently exclusionary nature of American identity.

The trials of the American body It is when the Swede’s sense of wholeness is destroyed that his identity is hollowed-out and he feels that he ceases to exist as an American and, indeed, as a man. As I have indicated, American Pastoral dissects on a number of levels the symbolic bonds that are intended to unite the American man’s sense of identity with his nation. To achieve this Roth makes repeated reference to bodily sufferings so as to undo the symbolism of bodily wholeness. The Swede, to begin, with feels supremely comfortable within his own skin, his sense of physical wholeness symbolizing that sense of national unity that has been present in the post-war renewal of spirit. However, as events begin to tell on the Levov family, bodily trials begin to threaten that sense of a unified self. ‘He was our Kennedy’, says Zuckerman, evoking at one and the same time the iconic properties shared by the Swede and his president – his ‘exuding American meaning’ – and the darker fate to come (83). With the Swede, bodily trial manifests itself as a sense of internal division that makes him a ‘riven charlatan of sincerity’ whose mask-like face conceals the ‘tormented inner Swede’ under the pressure of experiences he has no means of comprehending and is unable to process (206). The Swede’s physical derangement, ultimately evidencing itself in the prostate cancer that kills him, mirrors the Levovs’ family breakdown: the traumatic and irreversible estrangement from his daughter; the growing distance between himself and his wife, Dawn; and the diminishment of his father, Lou, involving fatal challenges to Lou’s, and thence the Swede’s own, paternal authority. These splits in familial unity are reflected also in the malfunctioning of the familyrun and family-structured glove business within the wider context of the 1960s’ urban breakdown, racial violence and extremist politics. The Swede’s mask symbolically mirrors the masking functions of both pastoralism and the American Way as forms of mythological thinking that seek to conceal deep and continuing racial and social divisions behind a homogenized and physically well-bounded image of the American individual.

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A sense of a nation in long-term decay, the spectre of national manhood, is embodied in the men of the Swede’s generation who, 30 years after the War, are succumbing to the ravages of prostate cancer. The Swede eventually dies of prostate cancer while Zuckerman himself has been left impotent and incontinent by prostate disease. Prostate cancer is clearly operating here as a concentrated metaphor for a contemporary American national body fragmented by the Vietnam War and assailed by political corruption. Roth is drawing upon the accumulated metaphorical meanings of cancer prevalent in American culture to indicate an insidious form of social degeneration issuing from an uncontrollable spread of disease, the American berserk in its pathological form.14 The race riots that are shown to devastate Newark in the year 1967, ‘the days and nights when Newark was on fire’, are clearly another potent attack on the boundaries of the national body (162). Later, I will investigate the disruptive effects of race on unifying national narratives as Roth sees it in The Human Stain. However, this chapter is focused on how, in drawing a portrait of the failing masculine body, American Pastoral explores the ways in which women threaten the national integrity during the period of Vietnam and Watergate. Roth records, first and foremost, the subversive impact of Merry’s body upon the American national body. An early harbinger of trouble is Merry’s childhood stutter: an imperfection that dismays the whole family and resists the most strenuous attempts by the whole family at amelioration, as her parents and then a language therapist struggle to control her unruly tongue. Christopher Eagle’s recently published essay examines the links between Merry’s stuttering, societal gender norms, political agency and violence, arguing that ‘Merry . . . use[s] her stutter performatively as a means to resist and eventually attack her father’s adherence to social norms’ (2012: 20–1). Merry’s halting speech is a prime marker of a bodily disorder that later also becomes visible in excessive weight gain in her teenage years. Further to Eagle, her speech disorder undermines her father’s attempts at ‘orderly’ speech exemplified by his language about boundaries and fear of boundary-breaching, which he displays when dealing with his teenage daughter’s increasingly rebellious behaviour: he tells Dawn they must ‘draw the line.’ Merry has gone ‘out of bounds’ (Pastoral, 103, 71). Velichka Ivanova powerfully argues in a study of Roth’s The Dying Animal that Roth’s work is engaged in ‘tracking the struggle of the masculine self to preserve its wholeness against a female other perceived as a threat’ and that it thereby exposes, rather than reinforces, the misrepresentation of women in male-dominated society (2012, 32). American Pastoral’s overriding concern with masculine wholeness is likewise undoubtedly linked to gender norms and the female threat to masculine normativity; but in addition, like its companions in Roth’s American Trilogy, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, it firmly links masculine normativity to a male-inflected 14

The extent to which cancer has operated as a metaphor for social disorder and disintegration and contamination in later twentieth-century American and Western culture, not least in the 1960s and 1970s, has been charted by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor. President Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, refers to the Watergate coverup as a ‘cancer on the presidency’ (Kutler 1997, 247). Cancer makes a metaphorical appearance in the literature of this period, notably in An American Dream (1965), Norman Mailer’s novel of a culture in decay.

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American national identity that is equally under threat. Merry’s unruly physique and vocal presence indicates her resistance to assuming the American identity marked out for her by the Swede. Her troubled physical self comes to symbolize her status as an ‘outsider’ and her subversive role within the family. The compromised bodily state of one whom the Swede had visualized as the perfect American child evidences a dual relationship to the national body. In one sense it provides further evidence of national physical deterioration, and – when it emerges that Merry has been raped while on the run – of national vulnerability by having been violated. Yet, given that the wellordered national body has been historically conceived of as a masculine entity, closely linked to a citizenship from which women were historically debarred, Merry’s bodily presence has another, more sinister, function: it threatens the national body by being a contaminating agent, a vector of disease originating outside that body, seeking to penetrate and destroy it.15 The novel places the symbolic threat posed by the female body in the historical context of an era of violent radicalism like that which characterized Patty Hearst’s involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. It reprises and redefines the debates current at that time about the extent to which the female engagement with extreme violence was autonomous or not, therefore raising the complex question of how feminism and radicalism were related to each other in posing a threat to national unity. The factor most urgently prompting this question in Patty Hearst’s case was her emergence and subsequent deviation from the long-established, wealthy, influential – and thus definitively American – Hearst family, a factor which places her threat to the national body as emanating from deep inside that body. Roth raises a similar spectre in visualizing Merry as working from within to reveal the incipient fragility of American identity, also drawing on the otherness and ambiguity of her Jewish inheritance from her father to test further the boundaries of the American body. Therefore the afflictions, or trials, of Merry’s contentious female body are symbolically aligned with tests (an alternative meaning of ‘trials’) to determine who is, or is not, an American. The Swede, in the final pages of the novel, imagines Merry as a marauding alien, a ‘veiled intruder’, come back to finish the destruction of the Levovs by breaking back into the family circle out of which she has previously broken (421). Insiders have become outsiders by jumping the line and are now succeeding

15

The ambiguity about the significance of the female body is highlighted by Dana Nelson. She has pointed out that ‘“America” is repeatedly invoked specifically as a “woman” to portray a passive and even sickly body’ (Nelson 1998, 42). In the nineteenth century, the period with which Nelson is concerned, the suffering female body of America was usually represented as needing men’s protection and male intervention to be cured. Nelson quotes from The Federalist Papers and debates about the Constitution to substantiate her argument that the national body was regarded as being properly managed by men and that disorders of the body were characterized as feminine disorders. The feminine body is thus conceptualized as needing to be protected and cured. Yet, claims by women to equality at that period were represented as the national body turned monstrous and requiring the reassertion of the masculine order to regain its proper shape. In this context, women’s bodies are thus conceived of as alien to, and therefore as threatening, the national body (Nelson 1998, 42–3).

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in inserting themselves again, by force, into American national life. ‘The outlaws are everywhere. They’re inside the gates’, the appalled Swede realizes (366). This language of boundary-breaching and contamination characterizes an era in which those who have been deemed to be outside its scope violently claim their place within the nation. The bombings destroy the orderly narratives of identity that have sustained both the Swede and Lou. The violence of the bombings exists beyond both men’s ideological frameworks and so, for them, is un-American. Jerry is the one member of the Levov family to acknowledge its existence and, though with bitter sarcasm, to accord Merry her American identity: ‘[y]ou wanted Miss America? Well, you’ve got her, with a vengeance – she’s your daughter!’ (277). Merry’s actions are incomprehensible to the Swede, their violence being unamenable to any of his attempts at a controlling narrative. Yet, as his brother Jerry says to Zuckerman, ‘He [the Swede] took the kid out of real time and she put him right back in’ (68). Merry is both the victim and the agent of contamination; she stands for an America that has turned on itself in the post-war decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The keynote of the novel is treachery, expanding in significance from the personal, to the familial, to the national scale, destroying unity on every level. But it is in Roth’s consideration of female treachery and violence in particular that the bleakness of American Pastoral’s vision becomes fully apparent. The ‘disorderly’ women of American Pastoral lead the way in perpetrating those betrayals which unleash the subterranean violence and accelerate the attrition of the Swede’s America. Merry is betrayal incarnate, exploding both family ties and community cohesion in Old Rimrock with her acts against the state. Her self-proclaimed associate, Rita Cohen, a girl of a childlike stature who claims to be able to put the Swede in touch with his runaway daughter and who initially evokes a paternal response from him, enacts a cruel and repellent seduction routine in front of him that betrays and mocks the father – daughter relationship between him and Merry. Roth’s characterization of the young women in the novel in general favours the Swede’s bewildered perception of them as ‘girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably extremist, completely unsociable’ (255). Female treachery dominates American Pastoral’s concluding section ‘Paradise Lost’ in which the Swede and Dawn are hosting a dinner party during the summer of 1973 at the time of the televised Watergate hearings, when the Nixon presidency has been put on public trial for corruption (his impeachment only subsequently averted by his resignation). On that same day, 10 years or so after Kennedy’s pristine image has been replaced by Richard Nixon’s smudged one, the Swede has finally tracked his ruined daughter to a derelict area of Newark and has learnt from her that her childhood therapist, Sheila Salzman, a woman whom the Swede trusted and also had a brief affair with after the trauma of Merry’s disappearance, had secretly sheltered Merry after the bombing. On his return home, shaken and sickened by his discoveries, the Swede finds out at the dinner party that Dawn is conducting an adulterous affair with their Wasp neighbour, Bill Orcutt, completing the wreckage of his family life. Orcutt’s alcohol-sodden wife, Jessie, seals the psychological downfall of the Levovs by stabbing the Swede’s father Lou just above the eye when Lou tries to help her. Betrayal by these women is a sign that an American ideology reliant on a myth of unified masculinity

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has reached the point of failure. But is Roth’s berserk, ‘the real American crazy shit’, transformative (277)?16 Or is this disorderly quality in American Pastoral in fact a primarily negative phenomenon? The following section will attempt to find answers to this question by analysing two key passages in American Pastoral in which the Swede encounters the subversive female body and exploring their relation to the ‘American berserk’ as manifested by women’s sexuality and women’s violence in the 1960s and 1970s. In these passages the Swede is held up to view and made accountable by being confronted by female agents of the berserk. These passages work as spaces of trial, being liminal spaces where ‘fascination and abhorrence meet’ (Ferguson 2007, 24). The fascination and abhorrence are experienced both by the Swede and the reader to whom his immanent guilt is being revealed. These rhetorical spaces in the novel produce a dynamic equilibrium holding the Swede in stasis and exposing him to view. He resembles a courtroom defendant, one of the ‘threshold people’, whose inquisitors attack his sense of himself as an innocent, unaccountable being and bring him face to face with his own delusions and failings (Ferguson 2007, 57). In this new role, the Swede becomes liable to disorderly feelings of intense guilt, disgust and shame, which become elements of his undoing. These strong emotions are derived from the Swede’s sense of shock at being brutally confronted by a narrative conflicting with his own. They decentre him and dispossess him from his sense of self, putting him momentarily in the position of the other one in the encounter. The reader meanwhile has to process the disturbance created in them by these scenes by realigning their own views of the Swede, and of the Swede’s America.

The body in extremis and the trial as a rhetorical zone The Swede’s verbal confrontations are firstly with Rita, an angry young woman who claims to be in contact with Merry and through whose agency the Swede hopes to reach his daughter, and subsequently with Merry herself. The first scene is redolent of sex, the second of death: both are forces that have the power to destroy any human constructions of order. These confrontations, operating as vectors for the ‘indigenous American berserk’, thoroughly unnerve and decentre him. The energy emanating from such scenes is produced by Roth’s usage of rhetorical devices – his exertion of authorial control over the literary scene – to express the forces of disorder that remove agency from the Swede and place him on trial. Such scenes function in the novel as rhetorical zones ‘where fascination and abhorrence meet’ in a double sense: they not only function this way internally to the text, inducing these reactions from the Swede, but also reach out from the text to induce these states in the reader. Appropriate to scenes conjoining states of fascination and abhorrence, they evoke the body in extremis and the disgusted response to the body. 16

These are Jerry’s words to the Swede when the Swede rings him to confide his grief at the circumstances in which he finds his daughter.

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The emotional forces that have suspended the Swede are accompanied by a deprivation of speech that takes away the Swede’s capacity to impose a narrative upon the scene. When the possibility of adhering to his customary ordered narratives is removed, he is stripped of his sense of identity. More than that, the sense of failure that arises from his being deprived not only of the potential for action when he cannot persuade Merry to come back home but also of verbal agency, brings him face to face with the possibility that he has been in error; his previous assumption of innocence is thus replaced by an intimation of guilt. In the Swede’s meeting with Rita in a hotel room to hand over ten thousand dollars intended for Merry, in the hope of receiving information as to Merry’s whereabouts, he is already in a dubious position because he knows he could be accused by the police of aiding and abetting a murderer. Then Rita, a childish-looking and manipulative young woman, enacts a cruel and repellent seduction scene in which she sprawls on the bed in front of the Swede, legs apart, cynically offering him her body and its aromas: ‘Step right up and take a whiff. The swamp. It sucks you in. Smell it, Swede. You know what a glove smells like. It smells like the inside of a new car. Well, this is what life smells like. Smell this. Smell the inside of a brand new pussy.’ . . . There was so much emotion in him, so much uncertainty, so much inclination and counterinclination, he was bursting so with impulse and counterimpulse that he could no longer tell which of them had drawn the line that he would not pass over. All his thinking seemed to be taking place in a foreign language, but still he knew enough not to pass over the line. (Pastoral, 146–7)

The treacherously playful invitation to ‘step right up’ directs the Swede to oblivion in ‘the swamp’ of sexuality, an oblivion to which in self-disgust he cannot help physically responding, though he makes no move. Rita’s repeated demands that he should ‘smell it’ gain a cruel irony from her grossly distorted usage of his own phraseology when, while she had earlier been posing as a student unconnected to Merry, he had shown her around his glove factory and jocularly compared the smell of the leather glove to a new car. Her language therefore subverts the glove’s metaphorical significance of the close fit between the individual and the nation, replacing it with disorienting and distasteful (to the Swede) sexual imagery. The urgency of her invitations to smell her secretions and the urgency of his nauseated desire to do so erupt in the staccato phrasing of the first paragraph and its repetitions of ‘smell’ that invoke the other, forbidden, word ‘pussy’. The text here evidences disjunctures and gaps that conjure in their very silences the extent of the Swede’s distraction. The following paragraph displays a contrasting sentence length and extended phrasing, denoting the Swede’s loss of certainty and his bewildered immersion in that uncontrollable moment where everything is ‘so much’. The paired opposites – ‘inclination and counterinclination’, ‘impulse and counterimpulse’ – express contradictions that immobilize him and expose his burgeoning sense of guilty complicity with his

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tormentor. He is still aware of boundaries that are continuing to shape his behaviour but scarcely has the strength consciously to apply them, or the wit to know whether or not it is he himself who has ‘drawn the line’. His senses are almost, but not quite, overwhelmed by her ‘fecund smell’ and by a countering wave of repulsion. Faced with what Rita calls ‘life’, a zone as alien to him as ‘a foreign language’, he can only retreat before he disintegrates altogether. His simultaneous states of ‘inclination and counterinclination’ create a form of charged equilibrium, a wordless state of tension only broken when the Swede is able to leave the room. When the Swede finally meets his estranged daughter, Merry, however, all restraint breaks down after learning that she has killed four people in bomb attacks rather than being responsible for the single murder with which he has spent years trying to come to terms. Merry now personifies the body at its most tormented: skeletally thin, ill, filthy and reeking. The culminating blow for the Swede is that she has been raped. She tells her disbelieving father that she has become a Jain and that she has ‘done with craving and selfhood’, as a token of which she has now covered her face with a veil (251). Struggling with disbelief that the veiled person before him, the one who has murdered four times over, can be his daughter, he forcibly removes the veil and grabs Merry’s tongue, willing her to speak to him. Yet, true to her declaration that she has done with selfhood, and recalling her earlier embracement of her childhood stutter, she refuses speech, her unwashed body instead issuing forth a gut-wrenching, debased testimony to ‘the lowest human smell there is’ (265): Her foulness had reached him. She is disgusting. His daughter is a human mess stinking of human waste. Her smell is the smell of everything organic breaking down. It is the smell of no coherence. It is the smell of all she’s become. She could do it, and she did do it, and this reverence for life is the final obscenity. He tried to locate a muscle in his head somewhere to plug the opening at the top of his throat, something to stop him up and prevent their sliding still further into the filth, but there was no such muscle. A spasm of gastric secretions and undigested food started up the intestinal piping and, in a bitter, acidic stream, surged sickeningly onto his tongue, and when he cried out, ‘Who are you!’ it was spewed with his words onto her face. (Pastoral, 265–6).

As in the scene with Rita, the sense of these paragraphs opens up from the Swede’s visceral response to Merry’s bodily smell. Again his fear and disgust arise from the apprehension of what is beyond his control, of the lapse into incoherence threatened by ‘everything organic breaking down.’ We have already seen that Merry’s outraged body and outrageous actions signify for him the dissolution of the organic family unit. The Swede’s sense of self, we know, has been predicated on a belief in the organic and psychological unity of his own body and mind in symbiosis with the country of his birth; thus the decay of the organism once more functions as a metaphor for national decay and confronts him with the limits of his conception of identity. The Swede’s revulsion at Merry’s embodiment of this uncontrollability, this breaching of

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boundaries, leaves him unable any longer to contain his own bodily reactions. Roth induces a visceral response in us readers ourselves with his engrossment of the text by the physical spasm. The sense of Roth’s own verbal excess here in contrast to the paucity of the actors’ speech, the alliterative shock of the piled-up imagery of ‘spasm’ and ‘spewed’, ‘gastric secretions’ and sickening surges, generates a mixture of distaste and fascination in us that resonates with the Swede’s physical unease. The Swede has seized Merry’s tongue in a bizarrely intimate act, demanding of Merry not just the confirmation of her physical reality but also that she utters an assertion that she belongs to him, not only as his flesh and blood but also by being innocent of murder. In this way he tries to assume control of an identity-threatening situation by gaining control of both Merry’s speech and her body, as when previously he and Dawn had tried to subdue her childhood stutter by subjecting her to years of therapy. Paradoxically, he demands speech from her even as he prevents her from speaking by holding her tongue, since it is not her voice he wishes to hear, but the echo of his own. As Merry finally rejected therapy by embracing her stutter, so she now refuses speech to the Swede, denying him the self-affirmation he craves of her. The answering stench that issues from her paradoxically asserts her connection to him even while affirming his appalled sense of what he perceives to be betokened by her bodily impurity, that is, her fundamental guilt. His instinctive physical response to her and his vomited question, ‘Who are you!’ are a gut rejection of her, yet admit a human affinity – and a shared guilt – that he has not allowed himself to acknowledge. In that moment he feels all the ‘shame of masquerading as the ideal man’ (174). The depiction of extreme emotions in these rhetorical spaces might lead them to be understood as manifestations of trauma. These emotions are present in the meeting of impulses of disgust with waves of attraction and curiosity in the Swede when he is with Rita and the shock of recognition behind the spasm of revulsion he experiences with Merry. These two traumatic moments with Rita and Merry could be conceived of as the Swede’s experience of what Walter Benjamin has called the ‘expressionless’, ‘the moment in which life is petrified, as though spellbound in a single moment’ (qtd. Felman 2002, 13).17 As Shoshana Felman notes, the expressionless connotes not only speechlessness but also ‘death, trauma and petrification’ (2002, 13). The overpowering imagery of the decaying body in the second scene, invoking the trope of bodily degeneration that informs American Pastoral as a whole, envisages death as the cessation of speech: a death that claims the Swede also in the form of a petrification of the self 20 years before he develops prostate cancer. But the expressionless also manifests itself in the Swede’s

17

This is a quotation from Benjamin’s early essay, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’. A few writers have in recent years productively brought together trauma theory and the law. Shoshana Felman, for example, thoughtfully describes the effects of immensely traumatic events on the juridical processes of the trial in the case of the Eichmann trial in 1961, when the witness known as K-Zetnik, a writer who survived the camps during the Holocaust, collapsed on the stand when about to testify against Eichmann. In this context she comments, ‘Literature is a dimension of concrete embodiment and a language of infinitude that . . . encapsulates not closure but precisely what in a given legal case refuses to be closed and cannot be closed. It is to this refusal of the trauma to be closed that literature does justice’ (Felman 2002, 8).

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apprehension of the ‘foreign language’ that is Rita’s outrageous sexual gesture, and the suppressed energy of the conflicting impulses to which he speechlessly responds. Nevertheless, Roth’s prose at these points in the novel seems perhaps more productively to connect with debates on language and power in regard to the construction of the individual subject; they can, for example, be understood as challenging what Judith Butler calls the ‘domain of speakability’, which constitutes the subject in language, a language that springs from ‘the normative exercise of power’, a field of (political and legal) power controlling the limits of what it is possible to speak about (1997, 133–4). Speech that is seen as being outside this ‘domain’ is disregarded or is labelled as a form of madness. The ‘berserk’, of course, implies madness. Rita and, ultimately, Merry are both perceived by the Swede as mad because they have crossed the line of what he finds acceptable, the line separating the American from the un-American. Their lack of control, the madness manifested in their stuttering identities, as one might put it, makes them also subversive of the ordered structures that have constituted the Swede’s personal identity and his sense of belonging to a united nation. Rita’s and Merry’s speech therefore appears to the Swede as psychotic, or what Butler calls ‘“ impossible speech” . . . the rantings of the psychotic that the rules that govern the domain of speakability produce, and by which they are continually haunted’ (1997, 133). Rita is described as appearing ‘frighteningly psychopathic’ and thus as incapable of responding to reason; for the Swede she represents the ‘something he could not name’ (Pastoral, 142, 147). Merry’s refusal to speak, her refusal to endorse the Swede’s view of her, can likewise be seen as subverting the ‘domain of speakability’. These women’s speech, or their withholding of speech, counters the Adamic myth that has helped to sustain the Swede’s sense of self by refusing sovereignty to the language of Adam, the first man and creator of language whom F. W. B. Lewis terms ‘the poet par excellence . . . naming the elements of the scene about him’ (1955, 5). Merry’s ‘madness’ detaches the Swede from an American persona he has believed to be natural. When the Swede feels conscious of the limits of his identity, and then feels those limits collapse, the knowledge of their artificiality is thrust upon him as he becomes aware of its concealed normative boundaries. Once those boundaries are exposed the Swede can recognize that he is the result of a process of self-construction and can see himself as potentially ‘other’. He recognizes his affinity with Merry at the same time as he realizes the extent of her difference from him. The sense of boundaries being breached and of limits overstepped shatters the Swede’s Edenic state just as it revokes the vision of political and cultural consensus that has motivated Lou Levov. The gaps, excesses and bizarre dynamism of Roth’s ‘psychotic’ language in the above passage replicates the subversiveness of the ‘American berserk’. Roth thus creates spaces in American Pastoral where close attention is paid to the limits of ‘the law’ in the sense of the limits of order in American identity construction. They are dynamic, spellbinding spaces that test the capacity of language itself to represent experience. They speak of the disorderly but are ordered literary spaces in which narratives concerning American identity are repeatedly tested by, for example, making room for discourses about language, power and trauma that can disrupt those narratives. The Swede’s encounters with Merry and Rita occur at the boundaries of the

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law of the land, in that he risks becoming an accessory to Merry’s crimes by concealing her whereabouts from the police. They simultaneously occur at the boundaries of his own American identity, jolting him into a sharp awareness of the presence of the ‘other’ deep within the American heartland. Richard Sherwin talks about ‘the anxiety that haunts the law’ when ‘the Other bears witness to law’s lack . . . an anxiety-inducing reminder of a debt that must be paid’ (2000, 260–1). American Pastoral confronts the Swede with the ‘other’ in a space of trial where his guilt becomes immanent. These scenes ultimately bring together the trial’s multiple meanings: liminality and the (temporary) suspension of judgement; the activity of ‘the law’ in the imposing and testing of limits; and the suffering that comes with undergoing an ordeal. American Pastoral’s rhetorical spaces do not resolve conflicting narratives as does the judicial procedure of an ordinary courtroom. The novel summons up and puts into play mythological fictions concerning identity that have long been extant in American culture, so as to subject them to scrutiny and dissipate them, rather than reconciling them. In so doing it generates its own self-conscious fictions that refuse a claim to binding authority; on the contrary, while speaking about the betrayals that have permeated personal and national life in America and split the nation, culminating in Merry’s treacherous acts against the state, it presents itself as a treacherous text. The plot’s forward motion, for example, is repeatedly interrupted because the novel’s temporality is fragmented and dispersed as the Swede’s consciousness alternates between the immediate, unbearable present and the remembered and lost past. It is not clear whether its narrator, Zuckerman, has effectively swallowed up the Swede by making up his story from limited and unreliable evidence, or whether Zuckerman himself progressively disappears into the Swede’s point of view as the novel proceeds. In this way American Pastoral seems to function like the public spaces of debate around controversial trials. Controversial or notorious trials ‘enter mainstream culture as hallmark events’ marking ‘deep normative conflicts of the time’ where public unease and fascination with the acts that have necessitated the trial create a cloud of speculation, a crowd of deceitful extra-narratives, sustaining a furious debate outside the actual trial zone, and often impacting upon the trial itself (Sherwin 2000, 70). American Pastoral creates an arena for debate centred on the violent disruption by young women of unitary narratives of American identity. This debate is vigorously opened up by Roth and left open to further question. Evidently, though, Roth’s representations of an American berserk associated with women and the Vietnam era can be construed as deeply negative. Roth’s alignment of the 1960s and 1970s with the American berserk, personified in Merry and Rita and erupting socially in the race riots witnessed by the Swede in Newark, emphasizes the re-emergence of violent, chaotic, destructive elements envisaged as endemic to American culture, but to the exclusion, it might appear, of outcomes productive of beneficial social and political change.18 Such a representation of the era tends to 18

This is despite the advances of the Civil Rights movement in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Act (1965) and the very real gains experienced by minority groups – including, of course, Jews – following the relaxation or abolition of the barriers imposed on entry to employment, higher education and the professions.

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forego any sense of these decades as transformational. Roth demonstrates in I Married a Communist that his protagonist’s growth to manhood through a ‘passage of trials’ entails both perpetrating and suffering betrayals as an integral part of self-making. Roth there engages with a tradition of the Bildungsroman that conceptualizes a path to manhood in which betrayal, though guilt-ridden and painful, stands also as a key formative experience. But in American Pastoral betrayal seems to be an agent of unmaking rather than a formative experience, the betrayals perpetrated by women being of a particularly destructive nature. Roth is drawing ironically on visions of Eve’s original betrayal of Adam in representing the wreckage of the Swede’s pastoral Eden; but his fall from innocence, though inescapably necessary, is in no way fortunate. The Swede is so shattered by his knowledge that in later life he is portrayed as having been frozen behind a mask, unable to overcome the betrayals that have been visited upon him. Especially does American Pastoral’s apparent connection of extreme radicalism and emergent feminism in that decade display a reluctance to view women’s self-making as being in any way constructive. None of Roth’s treacherous women seem to engage in a meaningful self-making despite their supposed ‘thirst for self-transformation’ (254). Even the striving and aspiring Dawn tries to eliminate her past by having cosmetic surgery and thus erasing her history from her face. Treachery is indeed a keynote of the novel for all the characters, including the Swede himself who at the novel’s end is overwhelmed by the feeling that he has betrayed Merry by inadvertently revealing her whereabouts to Sheila and his brother Jerry who might now give her away to the police. But at the same time one might well feel that Roth invites a more sympathetic hearing for the male voices, particularly those of the Swede and Lou, than the female ones. It might be argued that ultimately Roth’s treatment of American Pastoral’s disorderly ‘dangerous girls’ – and women – fails to allocate them enough conceptual space to fully explore their role within the post-war American historical framework. Additionally it is possible that in reinforcing a sense of rupture between the generations and within the American national body conjured up by the American berserk, it views Merry and Rita as part of a ‘lost’ generation swept up in an incomprehensible and vicious phenomenon that has run America aground in chaos. However, Roth’s position perhaps becomes somewhat clearer on an examination of the concluding dinner party scenes of 1973. The dinner-party conversation moves from the ongoing Watergate crisis to the recently released film Deep Throat starring the porn star Linda Lovelace and featuring explicit scenes of oral sex, the like of which have not been previously viewed by the general public. The unstated link between the film and the political crisis lies in the nickname Deep Throat, which references the film, having been accorded to an unidentified informant in the Nixon administration who has implicated the president himself in the Watergate cover-up. The film sparks a heated conversation between the disgusted Lou and the lecturer Marcia Umanoff, a provocateur with a malicious edge, as to whether Linda Lovelace is a figure of degradation or of a liberated empowerment that is giving Lovelace ‘the time of her life’, as Marcia puts it (361). The debate as to whether Lovelace’s sexual acts in the film are indicative of empowerment or disempowerment also implicitly concerns itself with

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the speech acts of the secretive Deep Throat against the Nixon regime.19 The questions of Merry’s acts of violence and the related subsequent acts of betrayal perpetrated by everyone closely associated with her, questions constantly in the Swede’s mind and therefore forming the unspoken backdrop to this conversation, are thus positioned in the same frame as Deep Throat’s verbal riposte to the political corruption of the Nixon presidency and the sexual licence in Deep Throat. These treacherous acts form a matrix with the televised ‘trial’ of Nixon: they help to define the parameters of discussion about individual and collective responsibility for the events that have brought about not only the fall of shibboleths but also the era of a disgraced democracy. As Bill Orcutt says of the recent cultural changes they exemplify, ‘I think everybody here is wondering what the limit is’ (365). None of these acts is morally unambiguous; not even the Deep Throat who speaks out against the Watergate cover-up is free of taint, since he speaks in secrecy and is later revealed to be associated with the Nixon administration.20 The important point is that, for the Swede, Merry’s violent acts are reintegrated into the social and political context from which they have sprung; they have now become part of ‘reality’ instead of being a crazy, incomprehensible phenomenon. Merry opens his eyes to the actual in the harshest manner. ‘The daughter has made her father see’, Zuckerman declares near the end of the novel, and Lou is aptly brought to the same understanding by receiving a stab wound just above the eye from Bill Orcutt’s drunken wife, Jessie (418). If the Swede’s fall from innocence had been at all fortunate, it would have been at this moment of realization; but this conclusion is vexed, as has been noted, by his failure to profit from it in later life. Nevertheless American Pastoral by exposing the reality of the American berserk restores a historical perspective to what seem like random, inexplicable events of violence. The bombings are therefore shown to be not the uniquely destructive acts that the Swede has taken them to be; but neither do they herald the complete disappearance of the old political order in the way that Merry, Rita and other ‘dangerous girls’ might wish. Roth instead envisages the American berserk as the flip side of narratives of the American Way and pastoral innocence, an aggressive response to an aggressively divisive history, but a response that springs from the same ideological basis as that old order. The Swede has noted about girls like Merry and Rita that there is ‘something terrifyingly pure about their violence and the thirst for self-transformation’ (254). Roth here picks out two key features – purity and the urge to self-transformation – that have been apparent both in New World pastoralism and the American Way. These girls are, then, aiming to transform themselves; figuratively portrayed as re-entering the very American body they have just rejected, they are unconsciously subscribing

19

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If we ask how Roth might be intending the connection between the two Deep Throats to be read, it is hard to ignore the possibility that he is making sardonic reference to a contrast between a revelatory act of speech and an act that entails gagging. It is also probable that he is indirectly remarking on the limits of feminism by referring to the deep divisions that started to split second wave feminism during the 1970s over the issue of pornography. In 2005 he was revealed to be the deputy director of the FBI, William Mark Felt, Sr.

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to the same ideology, expressed in the language of purity, innocence and newness, which they are simultaneously working to discredit and destroy. This observation is borne out by the Swede’s realization that, ‘in his uncensored hatred of Nixon, Lou Levov is merely mimicking his grand-daughter’s vituperous loathing of LBJ’, both Lou and Merry believing that national evils are personified in one man (299). The crux of the matter is that both Lou and Merry Levov display the same mistaken belief that the American people are essentially innocent. This perception of Merry sets her actions in perspective while also tending to negate the subversive power of the American berserk. Roth’s historical perspective however presents a complex view of the novel’s female characters, making the argument that his view of women is misogynistic difficult to sustain.

Conclusion: American Pastoral and the dynamic American body? American Pastoral constitutes a disorderly response to beliefs in new beginnings, historical meta-narratives and coherent American narratives of identity. The novel seems to emit an energy that belies the bleakness of its vision. When seeking the key to that dynamism we have to refer once more to its literary qualities, the energy of its language. Roth’s controlled but ‘disorderly’ prose unleashes the dynamism that potentially exists in redrawing the lines that demarcate entitlement to residence within the American body. It generates a central contradiction regarding the self by conceiving of it as decaying, fragmenting and petrifying but at the same time changeable and turbulent, always in the process of becoming something other. In Zuckerman’s – and Roth’s – words, ‘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’ (Pastoral, 35). American Pastoral generates its charge from its sense of wrongness, from its conviction that nothing and no one can be taken for granted, that nothing ever remains in its place. By undoing the mythological narratives based on perfectibility that have shaped the Levov family it realizes a vision of the Swede’s essential wrongness, charting his movement from a position of unthinking innocence to one of uneasy guilt as he tries to come to terms with the lies and evasions that have sustained his view of himself. In so doing it puts into play against each other the huge contradictions arising from the anxious post-war attempt to contain potentially violent national divisions by imposing a sense of a unitary identity, contradictions that have shaped American post-war culture and whose currents and countercurrents throw up a multitude of unpredictable events like the domestic social unrest, the shootings and bombings of the Vietnam era and the race riots that devastate Newark in 1967. Roth’s literary zones of trial are aligned with trials that are controversial and public phenomena, being preoccupied with discussing the limits of ‘the law’ regarding

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American citizenship and as places where ‘order itself, and the norms that uphold it, are on trial’ (Sherwin 2000, 69). The scenes of American Pastoral possess the ongoing trial’s liminal qualities, belonging to a state where judgement must for the present be suspended; the defendant Swede, as a ‘threshold person’, is forced to recognize the conditional nature of all forms of American identity. Here in these spaces neither guilt nor innocence can be finally allocated to one particular subject; for Roth the ‘human stain’ of guilt is always immanent.

4

Undoing the Bildungsroman: Cold War Trials in I Married a Communist

In I Married a Communist (1998), Roth circles backwards from American Pastoral’s concluding scene, set in the dog days of Vietnam and the Nixon impeachment, to focus on the period of his own youth during and just after the regenerative post-war ‘upsurge of energy’ invoked by American Pastoral. The sense of bodily disturbance imbuing American Pastoral continues to be manifested throughout I Married a Communist’s depiction of growing up in America during the Cold War, when betrayal is ‘the accessible transgression, the permissible transgression’ and deceptive and treacherous language characterizes the deep national divisions of the era (Communist, 264, original emphasis). These divisions are personified in the fragmented persona of Ira Ringold, Nathan Zuckerman’s admired mentor, radio star and secret communist. Roth reflects here upon the impact of the McCarthyite ‘decade of betrayal’ upon American culture and identity formation through comparing the literary form of the Bildungsroman (where the hero undergoes a passage of trials before he is fully socialized) with the potentially treacherous form of ghostwriting where authorial voices are in contention with each other (264). In exploring mid-twentieth-century American manhood and national identity he therefore expands on the importance of the trial to self-making in America, continuing his project of probing and dismantling American cultural narratives about national integrity and unity, purity and innocence. I Married a Communist, unlike American Pastoral where Zuckerman the narrator rapidly fades from sight, foregrounds his formative years which coincide with the height of McCarthyism, years revisited and reinterpreted by the elderly Zuckerman decades afterwards. The novel describes how the process of American self-making, modelled for Nathan by Ira, is dominated and distorted by Cold War politics at a time when the personal is invidiously intertwined with the political. I Married a Communist develops the premise, as Roth explains in a pre-publication interview for Houghton Mifflin in 1998, that ‘betrayal is built into life. It’s built into virtually every choice’. In telling the story of the Jewish Ira’s rise and downfall during the era of the McCarthyite ‘show-trial’, Roth explores the paradox that the treacherous Ira, who performs multiple and contradictory identities including impersonating the mighty figure of Abraham Lincoln, is paradigmatic of American selfhood at this period (Communist, 284).

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Roth self-consciously and sceptically utilizes the Bildungsroman tradition to depict Nathan’s coming of age in post-war America, exposing its already-existing but submerged qualities as ‘the most contradictory of symbolic forms’ (Moretti 1987, 10, original emphasis). Roth evokes the Bildungsroman in his interview for Houghton Mifflin saying that, ‘one of the repeated situations or, if you like, themes of the book – aside from its primary theme, which I think is betrayal – is . . . education’. The novel makes it clear that by education Roth means the young protagonist’s life-education aided by certain chosen mentors as in the Bildungsroman: the journey to manhood, which is strongly marked for Nathan by his early mentor Ira. The novel thus demonstrates an engagement with that tradition’s predication on the acts of betrayal that accompany the protagonist’s life-choices and stresses the Bildungsroman’s innate deceitfulness as a form in that it promulgates a vision of a nonexistent unified self, created through the artful act of writing. I Married a Communist’s approach to the Bildungsroman takes account of its overly synthesizing attempts at defining the individual, locating it within a national cultural framework that encompasses not only canonical nineteenth-century works such as Thoreau’s Walden but also subsequent twentieth-century novels of formation featuring, and often written by, first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants. In so doing, Roth comments on what could be seen as a resurrection of the genre by American writers from the beginning of the twentieth century up till the 1950s, after mass immigration had created a need among many incomers, including substantial numbers of Jews, to know how to define themselves as Americans. Nathan’s Bildungsroman registers the impact of the Cold War period’s strongly nationalistic and exclusionary responses to the threat of national fragmentation. Nathan’s youthful betrayal of his father’s authority and finally of his relationship with Ira as his intense involvement is followed by disillusionment are thus framed by the more portentous political betrayals that split the nation and are most in evidence at the HUAC hearings and the public denunciations associated with those trials. I Married a Communist consequently interrogates the Bildungsroman’s nature as a passage of trials. In the classical Bildungsroman this passage is a process whereby the young protagonist encounters obstacles which are at the same time aids to formation; in overcoming and adapting to these obstacles the young man progresses towards maturity. In I Married a Communist, though, the word ‘trial’ bears an additional and complex burden of meaning associated with Ira’s catastrophic fall from prominence after being outed as a Communist by his wife, Eve Frame, thereafter being blacklisted from media work and ostracized socially and politically, even by his former comrades. In light of these events, the trial becomes associated with the public trials of doubtful legitimacy emerging from the interaction of the de facto trial hearings of HUAC with the public debate surrounding the investigations, a debate stimulated by distorted media representations. The novel shows how these inflammatory nationalistic discourses intersect so as to create a rhetorical space, or an arena of trial, which institutionalizes injustice by stigmatizing some Americans as outsiders and encourages fellow-Americans to inform on each other. I Married a Communist thus replaces the Bildungsroman’s benign rendering of the trial as the means to harmonious social

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integration with a notion of the trial that is deeply exclusionary and fundamentally treacherous and that stymies personal growth. Roth shows how deceitful language permeates these spaces of trial under McCarthyism, visualizing them as arenas where identities are performed by manipulating certain clichés and stereotypes concerning American identity. Crucially, also, Roth counters the Bildungsroman with another form: ghostwriting, a multi-vocal and, one might say, generically deceitful form in which the voice of the actual writer is meant to remain unheard in being put to the service of the named autobiographical subject and his or her preferred life story. Eve Frame incriminates her husband, Ira, by allowing her autobiography, the eponymous ‘I Married a Communist’, to be ghostwritten by her influential Wasp friends Bryden and Katrina Van Tassell Grant, who wish to advance Bryden’s political career by mounting a sensational exposé of Ira’s politics. In exposing Ira’s American identity as an ‘act’, ‘Eve’s book’ also aims to incorporate the Jewish Eve into an American identity that has been redrawn in stereotypical and hence exclusionary Cold War terms, at the same time ruinously stigmatizing her husband, Ira, as a Jewish traitor to America, going as far as to obliterate his claim to American identity. The book, an all-but-invisible presence of which we see only the preface text, functions even more deceitfully than the norm in that, rather than producing Eve as author and subject, it seems to actually invert generic expectations by presenting her as a ghost, framing her through Katrina’s and Bryden’s right-wing Wasp identity and stridently anti-communist worldview. By exploring how Roth uses the generic ambiguities of ghostwriting to expose the internal contradictions of the Bildungsroman, revealing the deceptions intrinsic to both forms, we will continue to investigate how he scrutinizes and interrogates American identity at times of historical crisis. But I Married a Communist also brings us to imagine the writer, whether Nathan Zuckerman or Roth himself, building an identity by engaging not in ghostwriting but rather, as the introduction to this book explains, in a creative and competitive dialogue with earlier writers that can be given the two-word term, ghost writing. In exploring Roth’s ghost writing as a literary construction, and its role in identity construction, I again refer to The Ghost Writer, a work that we know also evokes the Bildungsroman and is the first to feature Zuckerman as the protagonist, considering how I Married a Communist differs from it in figuring the connection between American identity and the act of writing.

Interrogating the American Bildungsroman In I Married a Communist Roth interrogates the process of identity formation that has been embedded in the Bildungsroman tradition, in the context of the especially tense ongoing debates about American identity during the Cold War period. The classical Bildungsroman utilizes the concept of the journey to symbolize the individual’s selfconscious attempt to achieve what Shaffner calls ‘the goal of formation prior to death’ by undergoing the trials of experience (1984, 18). The archetypal Bildungsroman

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narrative envisages its young (usually male) protagonist leaving the society into which he is born so as to undergo a period of education or apprenticeship under the aegis of various mentors, which will enable personal growth and make him fit to enter the wider society as a mature man. However, the Bildungsroman distinguishes itself from other similar types of novel such as the German novel of education in that, the term ‘apprenticeship’ notwithstanding, the Bildungsroman hero engages primarily in selfformation rather than being subject to a programme of education by others. The focus on the unified individual is embedded in the form itself, in that it is univocal in having a single narrator and a single protagonist. That focus is predicated on the subject’s harmonious integration with society; however, he achieves and demonstrates maturity by exercising personal choice about the terms on which he re-enters society. This assumes a conflict in the Bildungsroman between the need for direction that inspires the search for a mentor and the goal of self-formation, already suggesting a contradiction within the maturing process and setting up the conditions for later betrayals within the Bildungsroman, a process with which Roth’s novel is preoccupied. The contradictions internalized in Ira and deeply affecting his protégé Nathan resemble the contradictions informing the Bildungsroman that Franco Moretti has charted in his study of the form. Moretti traces its nineteenth-century development and twentieth-century disintegration under the growing pressures of modernity, noting that the contrasting elements of mobility and interiority are both central to the classical Bildungsroman.1 He sees it as torn by its simultaneous operations of classification (the resting point of maturity) and transformation (the continual journey) and argues that ‘socialization itself consists first of all in the interiorization of contradiction’ (1987, 10). By the twentieth century the European Bildungsroman had ceased to exist because society’s contradictions were simply too great to sustain its assumptions about the progress of a life as the unfolding of a coherent narrative providing order and unequivocal meaning in the life of the protagonist. In response to the fragmentation of the forms of modern life, the advent of modernism altered decisively the literary form through which meaning manifests itself in the novel. This means that the traditional European Bildungsroman had declined as a literary form many years before Nathan’s post-war adolescent years of which Roth writes, and even longer before Roth wrote I Married a Communist in 1998. Yet Roth evidently sees the Bildungsroman not only as a genre that has historically influenced American selfmaking, but as one still worth examining, even if to deconstructive intent. His paying such close attention to the Bildungsroman appears to be due precisely to his interest in scrutinizing the contradictions that have vexed American nation-building and the American mythology of nationhood – a mythology that, as we saw in the previous chapter, demanded the production of the American man as a unified being regardless of Americans’ actual diversity or the conflicting interests of differing groups within society. 1

Moretti argues that the Bildungsroman came into being as a response to the economic and cultural changes of modernity that presented the European middle classes with expanded opportunities and the challenge of adapting to new roles (1987, 26–7). He does not clearly define interiority but equates it with ‘inner dissatisfaction’ generated by unexpected hopes for a future different from one’s forebears (1987, 5).

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The Bildungsroman, being centred on the relation between the developing individual and his society, could operate as an imaginative vector for nationalistic attitudes and values; as Martin Japtok says, the Bildungsroman, together with the autobiography, provided ‘fertile ground for nationalist tendencies, since nationalism, too, imposes a kind of order onto chaos by appearing to provide clear boundaries’ (2005, 24). Japtok also notes that these forms ‘prosper in an environment of crisis or instability and are indeed a response to these conditions’ (23–4). The classical Bildungsroman hero, someone who achieves a harmonious relationship with his social environment, was arguably a particularly desirable, if unattainable, figure in turbulent times. Roth’s interest in dissecting the Bildungsroman, then, can be understood as a part of his endeavour to expose the historical and cultural contradictions that both stimulated American attempts at the form and prevented its effective realization. Roth’s ironic late-modernist approach to the Bildungsroman draws it into an engagement with the intense and complex internal conflicts inherent in modern post-war American self-making. The adolescent Nathan enthusiastically accepts ‘the America that was my inheritance’ at the hands of Ira: an inheritance that is clearly a literary inheritance as much as anything else (Communist, 189). His legacy adds, to Nathan’s early love for Thomas Paine and Norman Corwin’s radio plays, a reverence for the novels of Howard Fast such as Citizen Tom Paine (1943) and Freedom Road (1944) and war novels like The Young Lions (1948) and The Naked and the Dead (1948), novels of ‘[h]eroic suffering’ that allow him to align his patriotism with his somewhat undefined but broadly leftist political sympathies (25). Nathan’s inheritance reminds us that since America has been historically considered a project in a way unlike any other place has been, efforts unprecedented elsewhere have been made to produce a sense of national identity largely aided by an intense and varied national literary output. Early on, Benjamin Franklin, nicknamed the first American, set out to develop his own character by listing the Thirteen Virtues, later to be widely circulated as a model for other aspiring Americans. One distinctive strand of an American Bildungsroman tradition that evolved somewhat later, in the mid-nineteenth century, existed in the work of Emerson with its notion of self-reliance and sequential steps to selfdevelopment. It was also evident in the transcendentalist strain represented by Thoreau and encapsulated by Walden’s emphasis upon leaving established society for a period to undertake a spiritual journey in search of fundamental values that imbue life with meaning. While neither of these classic works is strictly speaking a Bildungsroman, they are both centred on the self-education and development of the individual in a way that resembles the Bildungsroman; indeed, The Walden cabin as a site of bildung reappears as Ira’s rural shack at which Nathan spends one or two formative summers. The cataclysm of the Civil War meant that literary forms were urgently needed to make the notion of America comprehensible to its citizens; subsequently literature was required to respond to the impact of the mass immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The American novel, with its mass appeal and its capacity for addressing individual self-making by articulating a range of individual choices within their wider social and historical context, was one important literary vehicle for guidance

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in the task of self-formation. A substantial number of these novels, from the end of the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century, were novels of formation that could be termed Bildungsromane.2 These could be seen to have special importance for the ‘new immigrants’ of the twentieth century – such as the Irish, Italians and Central and Eastern European Jews – in providing models of the American individual that could help to form a basis for assimilation and adaptation to their new nationality. Novels actually written by new immigrants or by the second, largely Americanized generation, furthermore, played a significant role both in becoming American and in vocalizing the anxieties and tensions experienced by those engaged in that process. Roth repeatedly shows us in I Married a Communist, as in American Pastoral, that twentieth-century Jewish immigrants demonstrated a high level of commitment to the enterprise of becoming American. The centrality of the Bildungsroman to I Married a Communist doubtless comments on the fact that the Jewish American experience both necessitated and helped to produce the modern American Bildungsroman written in English – the foundational language of Jews’ new identity – as a means of transmitting certain values central to the process of becoming American. This is evidenced by the many Jewish novels of education published from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, reflecting the European Bildungsroman tradition with which Jewish immigrants were already familiar.3 Key among their core values was a belief in creative adaptability as informing American individualism, a belief also expressed as the value placed on writing itself in constructing the individual.4 But at the same time novels about becoming American were often also sharp social critiques of America. Novels of the 1920s and 1930s were quite often radical in tone, written by those who espoused socialism or communism in the then-vital strain of leftist American radicalism.5 These modern novels of formation, insofar as they were also conduits for attempts to work through some of the above-mentioned contradictions, put pressure on and distorted the classical Bildungsroman tradition of the previous century by depicting the often brutal conflict between immigrant dreams of self-making and harsh American realities. After the War, though, as we see so clearly in I Married a Communist, the social contradictions that had impelled so many immigrants to write about life in America were intensified even further by the 2

3

4

5

See J. Tasker Witham (1964) on the number and importance of novels of formation in the mid-twentieth century. Bernard Sherman’s study of the Jewish-American education novel defines it as ‘an extended work of fiction by a Jew about a Jewish youth who is undergoing his initiation into the American urban experience’. Sherman comments that the ‘education novel exactly reproduces the central experience of American Jewry: the movement from the enclosed shtetl . . . with its highly ordered and pervasive moral system . . . to the exacting demands of an industrial society’ and finds that approximately 80 such novels had been published by 1960 (Sherman 1969, 20, 24). Important earlier examples are Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Island within (1928), Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1934) and Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938). Illustrating this point, Witham notes that ‘by 1930 the autobiographical novel of a developing writer had become a commonplace in American literature’ (143). This novel of artistic formation, the Kunstlerroman, an offshoot of the Bildungsroman, is as much Roth’s preoccupation as the Bildungsroman in general. Novels such as Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930).

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demands upon the individual of Cold War nationalism. Severe contradictions faced the individual at this time, when extreme conformity was expected in the political arena yet at the same time a nationalistic individualism was evoked, which was consciously set against what Hoover called ‘Red Fascism’, or Communism’s so-called annihilation of individual choice (Griffith and Theoharis 1974, 178).

Becoming American: Identity as performance in Cold War America Exploring these post-war doubts and contradictions concerning the interplay between individual and national identity, I Married a Communist reflects on some of the anxieties of the 1940s and 1950s regarding individual integrity and authenticity as Roth continues to probe the normative boundaries relating to American masculine identity through a symbolism of bodily wholeness or fragmentation. An ongoing twentieth-century debate as to the nature of the individual involved opposing views of the authentic self: traditionalist ideas about the possession of inborn or natural qualities versus ‘the American functionalist ideal . . . the adaptable individual in an evolving society’ (Heinze 2004, 141). The accompanying preoccupation with identity as performance, entering popular debate with books such as David Riesman’s widely influential The Lonely Crowd (1950), also permeated some well-known works of fiction, raising fresh questions about the authenticity of the individual, which Roth’s novel reinterprets and reinvestigates.6 Post-war anxieties concerning control of the young were also related to these questions.7 The prime novel of adolescence of the Cold War era, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), captured the uncertainty about how to authenticate American identity: its young protagonist Holden Caulfield is preoccupied with ‘phoniness’ as performance. Holden, being surrounded by phonies, searches for 6

7

In Riesman’s influential book, misgivings about performed identities and a consequent lack of authenticity in regard to self-making were entangled with questions concerning social conformity. Riesman posited the replacement during the course of the twentieth century of what he called the ‘inner-directed’ man, the self-made, self-motivated, energetic and entrepreneurial character who, he argued, had dominated America’s expansionist phase in the nineteenth century, by the more passive, absorptive, but adaptable, figure of the ‘other-directed’ man, one who changed himself by mimicking others around him. By mid-century, he argued, the change from the first model to the second had become well-advanced (Riesman 1950). Behavioural scientists such as Erich Fromm and Andras Angyal identified psychological problems that, they argued, stemmed from the social and cultural pressures of capitalism and that brought about adolescent over-conformity and a failure to mature, preventing the development of a healthy, creative, authentic self. See Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941) and The Sane Society (1956). See also Andras Angyal, Foundations for a Science of Personality (1941). Yet at the same time, some Americans, especially Conservatives, feared that American youth was excessively individualistic and out of control seeking to overturn established social values. Witham notes the many novels about juvenile delinquency published in the 1940s and 1950s: for example Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (1956), Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes (1947), Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942) and Evan Hunter’s The Blackboard Jungle (1954). He traces a broad strand of critical opinion that sees these narratives of deviance and rebellion as symptomatic of the age (Witham 1964, 16–21).

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a mode of being that is ‘true’ while acknowledging that he is ‘the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life’ (Catcher, 20). In this cultural context Roth continues his caustic commentary upon the ‘innocent’ American in I Married a Communist.8 Fears and anxieties concerning young people at this period also often characterized the public attitude towards relatively recent Americans, those immigrant first and second generations who, in the eyes of many Americans, and especially in the tense Cold War years, did not appear to be American enough. Fears of betrayal by ‘other’ Americans that permeated this period were one highly negative response to this uncertainty as to the meaning of American identity. American Jews often provided both a voice and a focus for the misgivings about American authenticity. Thinkers like Otto Klineberg and Abraham Myerson, who stressed the impact of social and cultural factors upon the individual, held that ‘the Jewish immigrant . . . exemplified the kind of adaptability that life in urban America demanded’ (Heinze 2004, 141). Given contemporaneous perceptions of identity, this meant that, like the American adolescent, the American Jew is not only a typical American protagonist but also an object – and self-object – of unease. Roth proceeds to take this argument further in I Married a Communist to indicate that Jews who performed Americanness were in many ways paradigmatic of all Americans and to excavate the betrayals and selfbetrayals implicit in this mode of self-construction. As we have observed, being American became an even more charged concept in the political climate of the Cold War. Conservatives, as did Richard Nixon in the 1950 California mid-term elections, successfully cast the central issue as the fight between the American Way of Life, that harmonizing narrative we considered in the previous chapter, and communism. Questions supposedly of personal choice, like choosing when and how to speak, became inherently treacherous because the Cold War fear of communism, having created a political atmosphere in which America’s long-standing politically leftist tradition was no longer considered to be patriotic, set up bodies like HUAC to turn former friends and comrades against each other and coerce them to speak against each other. The close of The Catcher in the Rye hints at what might be the cost of ‘telling’, when Holden admits to being ‘sorry I told so many people about [his story]. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. . . . Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody’ (Catcher, 220). A significant comment, perhaps, when the novel’s political hinterland is taken into account and the betrayal of authorship’s ‘telling on’ others acquires an additional treacherous weight. At this period American identity was put to the question in an unanticipated way for American radicals and liberals – including the Jews who made up a significant proportion of these groups. I Married a Communist comments on the political betrayals emanating both from the later Truman government and from those on the Left, like Ira; but it also implicates those who voted for the Wallace candidacy in 1948, splitting the liberal constituency, and the New Dealers who couldn’t recognize the limitations of New Deal politics. Left-liberal politics became even more charged when 8

Ihab Hassan comments that American fiction at this time expressed ‘the felt contradictions which history imposed on the American tradition of innocence’ (Hassan 1958, 313–15).

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welfare state liberalism became vulnerable to the charge of being anti-American in the predominating conservative public discourse. Sam Girgus argues that the valid choice for liberal Jews – and one which was made by many – was to subscribe to ‘the individualistic values of liberal democracy and . . . the importance of maintaining free institutions’ by repudiating communism, whatever, one might add, the contradictions internal to the phrase ‘liberal democracy’ in the McCarthyite era (1984, 110). According to Jonathan Bell, ‘the 1950 Democratic campaign was Cold War liberalism at its most extreme’, as every candidate tried to present Democrats as more anti-communist than the Republicans (2004, 212). These political manoeuvres to expel socialist and communist elements from American liberalism permanently weakened the whole liberal movement and constituted a form of political treachery that mirrored popular conservative-inspired fears of the Red under the bed, the all-American individual turned traitor. When traitors could be behind the most familiar American faces, questions of authenticity disturbing American post-war culture were urgently brought to the fore. Roth captures the moment and the crux of the question in his portrait of Ira as a doomed American hero enacting the role of Abraham Lincoln, a man who poses the conundrum of whether he possesses an authentically American identity or is merely an impersonator – a fake American.

Performing Americanness in I Married a Communist Nathan first sees Ira Ringold when Ira performs as Abraham Lincoln at Nathan’s school in 1948.9 Dressed in costume and strongly resembling Lincoln in height and bearing, Ira delivers some of the national icon’s most celebrated words: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural speech. The importance of the rendition is stressed by Ira’s brother Murray, Nathan’s teacher, who later in class emphasizes Lincoln’s language in the Inaugural, the concluding sentence of which is ‘as noble and beautiful a sentence as any American president, as any American writer, had ever written (a long, chugging locomotive of a sentence, its tail end a string of weighty cabooses . . .)’ (Communist, 18). As inferred by Murray’s linkage of the presidency and writing, Lincoln’s words have acquired a profound significance beyond the political realm, as part of the historic body of language that has defined America’s existential purpose as the first modern democratic nation. The ‘long, chugging locomotive of a sentence’ was, Roth implies, as much an engine of progress as those railroads that opened up the American West. The focus in the novel on speech and listening seems to invite comments like Christopher Looby’s that ‘vocal utterance has served, in telling instances, as a privileged figure for the making of the United States’ (1996, 4). Looby contends that in some key respects the nation has been ‘spoken into existence’ through vocalized texts like Lincoln’s (1996, 22). The deep formative impact of American 9

The choice of the Lincolnian persona is telling; Lincoln’s role in the most deeply divisive moment of American history, the Civil War, and his equivocal approach to reinterpreting the Founders’ ideas in the American Constitution in relation to equality mark him as flawed and emphasize America’s foundation on division rather than unity.

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speech is expressed by the older Nathan when he says, ‘Occasionally now, looking back, I think of my life as one long speech that I’ve been listening to . . . the book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am, the answer surprises me: “Listening”’ (Communist, 222). But that ‘one long speech’ gives way to a ‘book of voices’ presupposes a multi-vocal nation, and thus a nation where voices may be dissonant. I Married a Communist explores the pitfalls of an assumption that the nation speaks with one voice in its portrait of Ira as an American who contains and conceals many voices. Rather than demonstrating one harmonious American identity, Ira is split into many; according to Nathan, who does not yet see all the manifestations of Ira, he is a ‘trinity of Iras, all three of him – the patriot martyr of the podium Abraham Lincoln, the natural, hardy American of the airwaves Iron Rinn, and the redeemed roughneck from Newark’s First Ward Ira Ringold’ (23). When Nathan first becomes acquainted with Ira, the trinity of selves recalls a Holy Trinity of overlapping American selves serving as avatars of the one unified all-American self, conjured by the rhetoric of the American Way. But the older Zuckerman’s reappraisal, after he understands the secret parts of Ira – the violence and the deception – comprehends the real fragmentation and insubstantiality of the man. The novel’s structure itself, unlike the classical Bildungsroman, assumes multivocality since Ira’s elderly brother Murray acts as a secondary narrator to Zuckerman. Murray’s story about Ira is, moreover, interwoven in such a way with Nathan’s story that the novel could be said to have two protagonists, Nathan and Ira; Roth thus continues to undermine the structure of the traditional single-subject Bildungsroman. Ira’s multiplicity problematizes authenticity: he must, as Moretti says, ‘act’ in order to ‘be’ rather than ‘act’ in a certain way because of who they ‘are’ as do the heroes of the classical Bildungsroman (1987, 106). Ira’s ‘acting’ emphasizes the staged nature of his identity. His act demonstrates that he speaks in order to be and also that – heightening questions as to authenticity – his act takes the form of ventriloquism because he unquestioningly voices the speech of others: Lincoln, most importantly; but also the lesser national figures and folk heroes he impersonates on the radio; and, most secretly and dangerously, the voice of his Communist guide and mentor Johnny O’Day. The vocal mechanics of Ira’s act are on display to the unquestioning Nathan when Ira discloses to him a notebook compiled by O’Day containing 20 points to aid Ira in his speaking performances. The notes recall Franklin’s’s 13 steps to self-making and thus invoke an American Bildungsroman tradition; the difference is that Ira’s steps to public speaking are not only second-hand but are taken at the prompting of the communist O’Day. These second-hand directions are later reproduced for Nathan when developing his writing style. As Zuckerman remembers, ‘I’d begun keeping my journal in imitation of Ira, who’d begun keeping his in imitation of Johnny O’Day. The three of us used the same brand of notebook: a dime pad from Woolworth’s’ (37). The ‘dime pad’, alluding perhaps to the popular dime novels of the day, hints at the intellectual cheapness of the activity; ironically, O’Day cautions Ira against cliché but at the same time formulates sample sentences for him to copy. But, more importantly, Roth’s language here is a hit at the political cheapness, the lazy populism, that has

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resulted in leftist Americans, and Ira himself, buying into a homogenizing vision of American manhood very similar to that propounded by Cold War conservatism, when they uncritically accept and acclaim visions of him performing as the allAmerican Iron Rinn. Ira’s radio persona Iron Rinn propagates the post-war myth of the ‘common man’, the wholesome, unified being whose Adamist variant Roth has atomized in American Pastoral. In I Married a Communist Roth shows how the spirit of the common man, popularized by radio writers such as Norman Corwin, is made to represent a democratic commonality that can harmonize and unite both left-liberal and conservative strands of public opinion about the nature of American identity. The stirring language of Corwin’s radio plays soaks into Nathan’s mind during family evenings round the radio.10 He thrills to Corwin’s ‘high demotic poetry’ in On a Note of Triumph (1945) eulogizing the ‘little guys’ who fought in World War II (39). The play’s democratic vision of ‘all the little just men pulling together’ overlays Nathan’s schoolboy impressions of Thomas Paine (41). But On a Note of Triumph actually owes less to Thomas Paine than to Howard Fast’s sentimental rendition of Paine; Corwin’s play is a similar expression of leftist populism that glorifies American manhood and asserts national superiority. According to the older Zuckerman, the play’s language is ‘an effusion of words bubbling straight up from the American heart into the American mouth, an hourlong homage to the paradoxical superiority of what Corwin insisted on identifying as absolutely ordinary American mankind; “far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free”’ (41). This language of the American heart (rather than the head) again evokes Emersonian self-made manhood, the American Bildungsroman ideal of masculinity, which Ira also reworks as Iron Rinn; Roth highlights at the same time how it serves nationalistic purposes by helping to build a sense of national exceptionalism. Listening to Corwin inspires the 15-year-old Nathan to experience the enchantment of being American in ‘participating through the tongue that Norman Corwin spoke’ by writing his own radio play, a wildly propagandistic piece titled The Stooge of Torquemada, whose style has been strongly influenced by Ira’s shop-worn notes on speaking (39). The older Zuckerman can, however, dryly appreciate how Corwin’s work has contributed to an American chimera, ‘the reality of the myth of a national character to be partaken of by all’ (38). Ira’s manufactured and unsustainable persona Iron Rinn, shadowed by the figure of the American as secret communist, not only reveals the split signification of the ‘common man’ but also highlights the incipient parody of those performances in which Ira ventriloquizes Abraham Lincoln. Voiced by Ira-as-Iron Rinn, Lincoln becomes an unstable figure, combining the most highly patriotic connotations with those most destructive of nationhood, and the American hero with the secret traitor, 10

Roth has spoken, in the Houghton Mifflin interview accompanying the publication of I Married a Communist about the influence on his own boyhood of Corwin, the radio writer. The appearance of snippets from Corwin’s On a Note of Triumph exemplifies the manner in which Roth often, in the Trilogy, uses popular culture to evoke a sense of place, time and voice; another example, in The Human Stain, is his use of jazz music.

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one continually merging into the other.11 This depiction of Lincoln materializes Lincoln’s own instability as a unifying national figure when it is recalled how his stance on slavery divided the nation during the Civil War, an instability that has been subsequently glossed over in America’s national mythology but threatens to reveal itself again in Ira’s figuration of Lincoln. This process is shown at work in the early performance that later leads Ira to become Iron Rinn and the Lincoln of the airwaves – his stage performance at a union hall in Chicago as Abe Lincoln himself: Ira was onstage for a full hour as Lincoln, not only reciting or reading from speeches and documents but responding to audience questions about current political controversies in the guise of Abraham Lincoln, with Lincoln’s highpitched country twang and his awkward giant’s gestures and his droll, plainspoken way. Lincoln supporting price controls. Lincoln condemning the Smith Act. Lincoln defending workers’ rights. Lincoln vilifying Mississippi’s Senator Bilbo. The union membership loved their stalwart autodidact’s irresistible ventriloquism, his mishmash of Ringoldisms, O’Dayisms, Marxisms, and Lincolnisms (‘Pour it on!’ they shouted at bearded, black-haired Ira. ‘Give ‘em hell, Abe!’). (45)

Ira’s performance illustrates his belief that in vocalizing Lincoln he is also producing himself as the all-American man. But Zuckerman’s account of Ira’s performance draws attention to what Harry Berger, Jr has called the ‘charged’ relationship of theatrical or rhetorical performance with the performativity of language (2005, 498). ‘ The theatrical performativity of verbal self-representation’, Berger says, ‘encloses speakers in whatever alienating identities they desire or imagine themselves to possess’; but, ‘the two senses of performativity tend to part ways’ when speakers cannot control all the meanings of the language they employ and their speech acts instead escape and exert control over the speaker (2005, 499). This happens to Ira when he channels his socialist propaganda – his ‘mishmash of Ringoldisms, O’Dayisms, Marxisms . . .’ – through the Lincoln persona on stage, incarnating Lincoln as something other, a Lincoln who condemns the Smith Act of 1940 (which compelled the registration of aliens and made it illegal to advocate the forcible overthrow of the government), and a Lincoln who supports price controls. First, he is not intellectually in control of the ideas he is trying to propagate and thus is not fully aware of how his populist language is cheapening the currency of Lincoln’s language as well as his own status; it is neither an accurate representation of Lincoln nor a politically informed act of speech. Secondly, Ira does not realize how the Cold War political context is making visible 11

In rendering Ira/Iron Rinn as Lincoln, Roth is utilizing the cultural multiplicity of the Lincoln image that brought about his incarnation as a ‘hero symbol’ of the Left between the 1930s and the 1950s. Norman Markowitz comments that New Deal communists replaced politics with mythology when ‘they substituted a loose kind of populist nationalism for a socialist analysis and strategy for America. In the late 1930s, for example, communists opened meetings with “The Star-Spangled Banner”, announced that Communism was the Americanism of the twentieth century, and adopted Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as hero symbols’. See Norman Markowitz, ‘A View from the Left: from the Popular Front to Cold War Liberalism,’ in Griffith and Theoharis, 93–115 (98).

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the disconnection between his speech and the mythology of American manhood he is trying to represent. The ‘charged relationship’ between his speech performativity and his performance therefore results in his speech working against his claims to symbolic value. Ira’s performance, one might conclude, rather de-authenticates Lincoln than authenticates Ira; it seems as if ‘Abe’ has been assigned the ‘alienating identities’ of the stage performer. Moreover, when the audience shouts ‘Pour it on!’ to ‘Abe’ it is unclear which of the two figures is the ventriloquist and which is the dummy. In other words, one wonders whether the language of Lincoln transmits legitimacy as an American to Ira, or whether alternatively Ira’s language produces Lincoln as the subversive outsider. In presenting these images of the American male, Roth prompts us to conclude that the ‘American’ himself is a deceptive and unstable construct, an identity which is above all learnt and performed in language and which is capable of changing from moment to moment as meanings of Americanness shift. One of I Married a Communist’s most direct engagements with post-war literary legacies and cultural debates in regard to performing American identity concerns Arthur Miller’s novel Focus (1945), a key part of Zuckerman’s literary inheritance as Zuckerman is much later reminded by Murray Ringold, his former teacher and Ira’s brother. Ira had presented this favourite novel of his to the 16-year-old Nathan in 1949 to extend his literary education. As Zuckerman recalls, Focus concerns the allegorical Mr. Newman, ‘a cautious, anxiety-ridden conformist in his forties – too cautious to become actively the racial and religious bigot he is secretly in his heart’ (Communist, 153). After Newman has to start wearing glasses though, he finds that they unexpectedly emphasize the shape of his nose to make him look like a Jew; he subsequently faces anti-Semitism exuded by everyone from his mother to his employer, who demotes him for his appearance. The hostility unleashed by his slightly altered appearance materializes his own covert anti-Semitism and turns it back against him. Miller’s novel against anti-Semitism emphasizes the instability of so-called racial categories and endorses the concept of American identity as performance, where becoming American (or un-American) means acquiring or discarding surface attributes. Focus, then, opposes essentialist ideas of the self, while also expressing ambiguity about how much scope the individual actually has for creativity in regard to selfmaking; it also personifies the Jew as the American. It thus works for Roth as a literary lens by which to scrutinize and critique ideas about self-making – and the role of the Bildungsroman – in relation to the political and social climate of the 1940s and 1950s, which shaped the development of his literary voice. Matthew Frye Jacobson in Whiteness of a Different Color (1998) engages in a close study of Focus to explain the way in which ‘the Jew’ has been ‘made’ in the United States, serving as a lesser category of American against whom discriminatory practices can justifiably operate in the allocation of limited economic and social resources. Being Jewish thus means functioning as the despised ‘other’. A key part of Jacobson’s argument regarding Focus is that ‘“ being forced” and “posing” are the chief conditions marking the Jew’s movement in the social world’ (1998, 193). The Jew, that is, performs his identity, being entirely dependent on the perception of others towards him for his own knowledge

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of and estimation of himself. Focus’s ‘Jewish’ Mr Newman (his surname is of course suggestive) fundamentally resembles Ira in that they both exist through the act of performance; both men challenge the notion of authenticity as well as the optimism of liberal views about the creative and adaptive individual. However, Roth’s portrait of Ira not only considers the influential mid-twentieth-century concept of the performative self but, as we have just seen, also takes into account later ideas about language performativity that post-date Focus and add another layer of complexity to his study of Ira. Roth again touches on the theme of embodiment to question identity when Nathan’s early impression of Ira as ‘a giant wearing glasses’ is picked up later in the novel in regard to how Ira performs American identities (Communist, 18). Ira’s resemblance to Arthur Miller’s spectacle-wearing Mr Newman in Focus now becomes apparent. Ira demonstrates a similar propensity to change his aspect, acquiring and later discarding American personae just as Newman acquires unwanted Jewishness by donning his glasses. Roth endorses Miller’s expression of American identity as performance, focusing on how American identity is always a construction rather than a given; as Murray says, ‘You want to . . . pretend you’re somebody else? Fine. You’ve come to the right country’ (Communist, 157). Murray reads from Focus out loud to Zuckerman, ‘He [Newman] was not this face. . . . He was him, a human being with a certain definite history and he was not this face which looked like it had grown out of another alien and dirty history’ (Communist, 155). Miller’s irony – which Roth underscores here and which grew even sharper in the years after Focus was published – is that America’s obfuscatory relationship to its own history, its tendency to mythologize its past, means that its harmonizing narratives of American identity are not based on a well-understood ‘certain definite history’ such as Newman claims for himself, but upon uncertainty and misinformation about the past and the continual fear of ‘alien’ intrusion. Roth additionally brings out the irony of Ira’s efforts to submerge himself in these same misleading national narratives. Ira does not feel defined by being Jewish; he sublimates his secular Jewishness as well as his communism in the persona of Iron Rinn, his manifestation of the American common man. He gives Focus to Nathan as an exemplary text against anti-Semitism, a treatise against rejecting the ‘Jewish face’ (he also presents it to his wife, Eve, a closet Jew who detests certain stereotypical Jewish features). But at the same time Ira fails to see how Iron Rinn operates to deny and exclude the image of his own ‘Jewish face’, only being aware of that face in the mirror when he is exposed in public by the scandal that destroys him. Roth stresses that Ira’s Americanness lies in the very contradictions that have arisen from American history, in the uneasiness with which his personae (the communist Ira Ringold, the all-American Iron Rinn and the historic national icon Abraham Lincoln) sit together. He is ‘unflaggingly one being in secret and another in public and a third in the interstices between the two’ (Communist, 235). In fact, it is his contradictory nature that has drawn the young Nathan to him; it is Nathan’s belief in ‘the sanity of an expansive, disorderly existence’ in Ira that strikes such a chord with the boy who senses that his own life and work will be fuelled by openness to contradiction and the

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disorderly (232). We see that, like Newman, Ira is a liminal figure whose aspect changes depending on the context in which he appears, one moment being unquestionably American and at the next moment alien and untrustworthy. Ira’s performativity on the one hand demonstrates the creativity and adaptability that should, Roth appears to argue, characterize the modern American individual: qualities indispensable to ‘an expansive, disorderly existence’. At the same time, its populist ventriloquism evidences a lack of solidity and a deceptive quality that opens it to accusations of inauthenticity in being inimical to the maintenance of a consistent, unified view of national identity. In the context of the Cold War and McCarthyism when difference has become intolerable and everyone must subscribe to ‘the reality of the myth of a national character to be partaken of by all’, Ira’s inconsistencies are incompatible with being considered a patriotic American. Despite his best efforts to perform patriotism as Lincoln and as Iron Rinn, Ira’s self-making becomes stigmatized as inauthentic and un-American. Looking to Ira as a model at the ages of 15 and 16, Nathan remains unaware of the concealments that mark Ira’s self-making, his lying about his membership of the Communist Party and, too, his past violence, ‘all the brutish American stuff that Corwin left out’, which has led him to murder a man (49). Eventually he realizes that Ira’s clashing personae have betrayed each other. In the wake of Ira’s exposure as a communist, he is accused of being a bourgeois phoney and class traitor by his puritanical former comrade O’Day: [a]lways impersonating and never the real thing . . . he impersonates being a man along with everything else. . . . He’s a fake and he’s a dope and he’s a traitor. Betrayed his revolutionary comrades and betrayed the working class. Sold out. Bought off. Totally the creature of the bourgeoisie. Seduced by fame and money and wealth and power. (Communist, 288–9)

But for the outraged American public Ira becomes the personification of all the hidden communist traitors who endanger the nation, his enmeshment in popular culture only deepening his treachery. There is an almost apocalyptic dimension to his treachery; as Murray puts it, ‘[t]his was Abe Lincoln. It was very easy to grasp: Abe Lincoln as the villainous representative of a foreign power, Abe Lincoln as America’s greatest twentieth-century traitor . . . Iron Rinn was Everyman’s Communist traitor’ (282). Murray’s words here pinpoint the allegorization of his brother that has occurred in the mind of the public. In his eclipse, Ira has been transmuted finally into Iron Rinnas-Abe Lincoln: he has been overwhelmed by the mythology which had seduced him. Roth thus conveys the scale of the impersonation, but he also reveals the two-way nature of the betrayal that has taken place, reversing the attribution of guilt; America, personified as its icons Iron Rinn and Lincoln, has betrayed Ira rather than Ira having betrayed America, in an age when betrayal is ‘the accessible transgression, the permissible transgression’ for patriotic Americans (264). Roth’s contention seems to be that the treacherous excesses on both sides are outgrowths of this moment in American history. The ‘alien and dirty [that is, treacherous] history’ of the Jews, which Newman repudiates in Focus, is inalienably part of America’s history in I Married a Communist.

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Roth shows that Ira, precisely as traitor and impersonator, is the most deeply American of men: he is American contradiction personified. This, finally, is what Nathan learns from him.

I Married a Communist: Undoing the Bildungsroman Roth’s reworking of the Bildungsroman and its associated passage of trials fatally disturbs the form itself as it perplexes the concept of self-making in I Married a Communist. The social alienation that has progressively afflicted the Bildungsroman hero in modernity is taken to extremity by Roth’s depiction of the impact upon American individuals of the deep historical contradictions inherent in American Cold War nationalism where the pathological need for a unified identity is confronted by the reality of difference and dissent. In the classical Bildungsroman passage of trials, trial appears as ‘an opportunity: not an obstacle to be overcome while remaining “intact”, but something that must be incorporated, for only by stringing together “experiences” does one build a personality’ (Moretti 1987, 48). In other words, trial, like error, is a means to growth, part of an organic process by which the individual becomes integrated with his surroundings through daily experience. But the trial for Roth here cannot be a means to growth, since trial in the context in which he writes operates purely as a process of stereotyping and exclusion. The trial instead comes to indicate a psychological paralysis that stalls individual growth. Moretti emphasizes that the opposing principles of movement and stasis, transformation and classification, of youth and maturity, betray each other, and that the young Bildungsroman hero might sense in the implied stasis of maturity a betrayal of his youthful energy and dynamism. But the ubiquity of betrayal in Roth’s novel means that the protagonist must experience the trial only as betrayal. Furthermore, the betrayals envisaged in the novel are always much more than the personal betrayals committed by the young as they move towards one set of influences and away from another. The personal and the political are interwoven so finely here that, as Nathan’s angry and distressed father understands in fearing that his son’s attachment to Ira is endangering him, personal choices such as friendship can have the most profound and treacherous, even life or death, consequences. The traditional Bildungsroman incorporates error as a means to enlightenment and growth, but Nathan, though he experiences moments of clarity as he grows to understand Ira, undergoes no final apotheosis, rather an awareness of being in a state of continual error, because he cannot know the true meaning of events or be sure of what constitutes an authentic identity. Roth has consequently truncated the bildung element of Nathan’s Bildungsroman, opting for a state of suspension. Roth problematizes identity formation and its underpinning process of choice by describing the protagonist as being enmeshed in a ‘predicament’ (a term Roth frequently uses). In the dictionary definition of ‘predicament’, the word’s origin is given as ‘something predicated’ or categorical. Its current meaning is ‘a difficult, unpleasant or embarrassing situation’, or, one could say, ‘a fix’ (Oxford, 2005).

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The process of self-making in I Married a Communist inevitably brings about these awkward and painful fixes. One of the key themes of the classic Bildungsroman is that errors of choice, and the overcoming of obstacles springing from them, inevitably constitute a part of the path to growth. Its movement is from the experience of being in error to the mature state of having found the correct path, a movement that assumes perfectibility. Roth’s ‘predicament’ runs counter to the notion of perfectibility and subverts choice. As ‘something predicated’ – or the fix – it possesses a static quality that defuses the dynamism of choice. However, its connotations of the ‘difficult or embarrassing situation’, an unsought, unplanned event, also imply fluidity in the senses of the accidental and the random. This second interpretation equally undermines the notion of choice. Roth’s invocation of the predicament draws on these contradictory significations to envisage the protagonist shuttling between states of fixity and fragmentation or fluidity instead of experiencing the steady movement towards maturity of the Bildungsroman. His presentation of identity as performance, or the production of multiple, contemporaneous and conflicting selves, also connotes sudden shifts between stasis and movement by contrasting the rapid changes associated with playing varying roles with the fixity of the performer captured at a still point, or caught in the spotlight as it were. Performance in I Married a Communist thus conjures a mode of being that precludes organic development and the concept of the essential self.

The Bildungsroman, ghostwriting and ‘I Married a Communist’ We therefore see that, just as Roth dismantles the narratives that support both nationbuilding and the construction of a masculine personal identity, so does he examine and take apart the literary forms through which such narratives are rendered and understood. Roth undoes the Bildungsroman in I Married a Communist, undermining it using its own conventions; but he also effectively mobilizes against it a text within a text, Eve’s ghostwritten autobiography, ‘I Married a Communist’: a work which, though deadly, is aptly enough invisible, apart from its preface, an extract from which appears below. This innately treacherous work of ghostwriting, a form whose deceptions have been outlined in the introductory chapter, is a text doubly overwritten by Eve’s powerful friends the Grants, where Eve’s personal animosity against her adulterous husband, which inspires her wish to expose his misdeeds in print, is channelled by them into a sensational, career-advancing political hatchet job: it is designed to help Bryden Grant, already a member of HUAC, to run for office in the future Republican administration of 1952. The book estranges both its ostensible subject, Eve, and the Grants’ intended object, Ira, from themselves, turning them into ghosts. The book sets out to destroy Ira’s career and reputation by exposing him politically and personally in the most distorted and sensational manner. In effect, it unjustly writes him out of existence.

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‘I Married a Communist’ initiates a trial by media that leads directly to Ira’s blacklisting and thence to unemployment, political obloquy and social disgrace. This malign combination of media and legalistic trials results in Ira’s being denuded of those American personae that he has been at such pains to develop over the preceding years. As Murray tells Zuckerman, Ira after the book is ‘stripped right back to the Ira who’d dug ditches in Newark’ and redefined in terms of the working-class, poor immigrant background he had transcended (Communist, 123). In the classical Bildungsroman the protagonist’s self-making is shown as being an organic process of growth: it is cumulative and cannot be undone, whereas Ira’s bildung is now reversed. Ira, to begin with, is an uneducated figure burning with undirected aggression. It is Ira’s performances of Americanness that have made him into the man he has become just before the book comes out. Roth is clearly suggesting that most self-attributes are acquired and continuously validated through repeated acts of performance, which are now denied to Ira when he is removed from public view. The novel shows that in being reunited with what Murray calls his ‘first self ’, Ira, far from being re-authenticated, has been greatly diminished (123). The destructive impact of ‘Eve’s book’ upon Ira is so great that it constitutes the supreme act of betrayal in a novel that is predicated upon betrayal in all its forms (the name Eve is an obvious backward reference to American Pastoral’s evocation of female treachery in Eden, while her surname Frame hints both at the actress Eve’s performed American identity and at her ‘framing’ of Ira).12 According to Murray, ‘the book was a bomb that had been thrown’ at Ira; an attribution that inevitably recalls the bomb planted by Seymour ‘the Swede’ Levov’s daughter, Merry, which annihilated Seymour’s sense of identity (281–2). In the age of McCarthy where betrayal is the keynote, the ghostwritten ‘I Married a Communist’ is perfectly in tune with the times. The moral dissembling of its gossip-mongering content is matched by its dissembling of authorship. Its formal deceitfulness makes it possible for Bryden and Katrina Grant to hijack the book and to use it as a vehicle for Bryden’s underhand political purposes. But it also serves Eve’s own purposes to the extent that it allows her to go her length in betraying her husband while distancing herself from her own treachery. Even better, it allows her to retain her moral purity by framing her revelations as a patriotic act, and then to protect herself from any future accusations of disloyalty to America by shoring up her own American credentials at the cost of Ira’s. This act of betrayal has fatal consequences not only for Ira’s sense of self but Eve’s too, even though she seems unaware of the diminishment suffered by her identity when she accedes to the exploitation of her name and reputation. What might appear to be Eve’s supreme triumph over both Ira and her personal circumstances proves instead to be self-annihilation. She soon becomes ostracized by her circle of media friends and contacts after the book appears, hardly performing in public subsequently. And since Eve is described as pure performance, her disappearance from the media means her disappearance from her own life. She has consistently aimed to sever herself from her origins through her acting; now she has allowed herself to be submerged in the artful 12

See Debra Shostak on betrayal with regard to Ira and Eve (Shostak 2004, 152, 179, 252–4).

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creation of her autobiography. When that image is later rejected by those around her she loses all her substance: there is ‘nothing left of her’ (312). Roth again brings together and pressurizes the concepts of the trial and betrayal already existing within the Bildungsroman, when he depicts Ira’s self-making being undone by ‘Eve’s book’. The trials of self-making become associated with Ira’s ruinous trial by media and, more widely, the de facto trials enacted at the HUAC hearings which have defined the process of becoming American as inextricable from political and personal betrayal. ‘I Married a Communist’s’ allegations start a frenzy of newspaper comment and speculation, which leads to a hunt by local New Jersey investigative journalists for ‘evidence’ of Ira’s communist treachery, gleaned in interviews with his neighbours, which are subsequently followed up by the FBI and used against Ira when he is blacklisted from the radio and other media soon afterwards. The ghostwritten book is a key contributory strand to the misinformed public debate which surrounds and influences Ira’s ‘trial’ by blacklisting: a debate which still reverberates at Murray’s HUAC hearing a few years later resulting in his being sacked from his teacher’s post. Eve’s ‘I Married a Communist’ creates a rhetorical space of trial concerning Ira’s Americanness, at the intersection of this public debate about identity and the official investigations by HUAC and the FBI. According to Robert Hariman there is a questionable distinction between the legal discourse within a trial setting and the popular discourse outside the trial. Hariman argues for a multistranded discourse that combines the two categories and that he terms the public discourse, a discourse having generic characteristics (1990, 22–3). But it is evident in I Married a Communist’s description of the atmosphere surrounding the HUAC hearing that, for Roth, the distinction between legal and popular discourses here has been obliterated to the detriment of American justice. ‘Eve’s book’ in serving up ‘moral disgrace as public entertainment’ thus resembles the HUAC ‘show-trial’ in being an occasion for both a test and a performance of American identity at which justice cannot be delivered (284). As Murray tells Zuckerman (and Murray is clearly in the role of trusted narrator or alternative authorial voice here), ‘McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace . . . Joe McCarthy’s The Free and the Brave – that was the show [and the show-trial] in which my brother was to play the biggest role of his life’ (284). In the same way as the HUAC hearings produce a caricatured performance of Americanness, identity as an agglomeration of certain voiced attitudes, so does ‘Eve’s book’ produce her as the loyal American by a series of statements constituting her as opposite to the un-American Ira. The deceitfulness that permeates the very language in this act of ghostwriting may be seen to work against the Bildungsroman – which assumes the authentic voice of both author and subject – in a similar way as ‘I Married a Communist’ itself works against Ira’s selfconstituting performances as Lincoln. The artificiality of Eve’s own performance of Americanness is repeated in the ventriloquism involved in the replacement of Eve’s own voice by that of the Grants. Performance in this context becomes pure parody, the antithesis of authenticity as far as Roth is concerned. Murray says of Eve, ‘[s]he became

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the instrument of the Grants’ will. She was run by those two just like an agent’ (291). The term ‘agent’ not only provides extra linkage between Eve’s performed identity, her instrumentality, the book and the politically tense context in which both operate, but also reverses the burden of guilt; for Murray, not Ira but Eve is now the treacherous impersonator and spy. The hackneyed language of the preface to ‘I Married a Communist’ works as effectively to demonstrate the policing of American identity during McCarthyism as does the formulaic questioning at the HUAC hearing – ‘Have you now or have you ever been [a member of the Communist Party]?’ – to which Murray is later subjected (6). The clichés in ‘Eve’s book’ display a performance of stereotypes that consistently work to estrange Ira from his American citizenship. The preface sets up and identifies Ira as the traitor determined ‘to tear down the American way of life’ (244). That man was the radio actor Iron Rinn, alias Ira Ringold, card-carrying member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and American ringleader of the underground Communist espionage unit committed to controlling American radio. Iron Rinn, alias Ira Ringold, an American taking his orders from Moscow. (Communist, 244–5)

Ira’s popular public persona, Iron Rinn, is here repeatedly replaced by his private designation, Ira Ringold; his private persona is then presented as secret and sinister by the use of the term ‘alias’. That is, the ‘hidden’ face of Iron Rinn is Ira Ringold the secret communist, every American’s bugbear, visibly marked out by being a ‘cardcarrying’ communist. Rather than working with like-minded individuals he is ‘the ringleader’ of a ‘Communist espionage unit’, seemingly a covert organization that, in the best tradition of American populist paranoia, is dedicated to taking over the entire American broadcast media. In the extract’s final outbreak of cliché, Ira is ‘an American taking his orders from Moscow’, thus one who is stigmatized as un-American, a communist spy. The language of the memoir is thus overtaken by the language of the propaganda sheet. By naming Iron Rinn as Ira, moreover, the preface text achieves another, unstated, objective. Ira Ringold’s distinctively Jewish name allows a linkage between communist and Jew that right-wing populist anti-Semitism has been consistently alleging at this period. As Murray comments, ‘under the moral guidance of the Grants . . . Eve could transform a personal prejudice into a political weapon by confirming for Gentile America that, in New York as in Hollywood, in radio as in movies, the Communist under every rock was, nine times out of ten, a Jew to boot’ (274). Furthermore, by constructing Eve as the patriotic ‘American actress’, that is, by placing her in the opposite category to the traitor Ira, the book obliterates Eve’s own Jewishness, completing the escape from her origins that has been underway since her girlhood. ‘Eve’s book’ thus perpetuates the stereotype of the Jew as dangerous outsider, as essentially un-American. The book’s populist language, a vital component of the trial by media to which Ira has been subjected, not only reflects the populism of the political context from which it springs, but also, ominously, performs an important function attributed to the legal

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trial: it works to ‘assign limits to deviance’ and to ‘identify acceptable otherness’ in a way that is subsequently accepted as legitimate by the FBI and HUAC (Ferguson 2007, 19). So, according to Roth, the book-generated media trial and the McCarthyite ‘showtrials’ have become part of the same public arena, demonstrating a dangerous interpenetration of legal and extra-legal areas of discourse and providing a prime example of how populism operates in American culture. Murray is doubtless speaking for Roth in saying that McCarthyism is, ‘the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere’ (Communist, 284). ‘Eve’s book’ defines Ira as an outcast by what J. L. Austin called illocutionary acts of speech: speech which has appropriated the executive force of the legal trial (qtd. Butler 1997, 3). The book’s labelling of Ira as ‘a communist’ thus ensures that Ira will be definitively blacklisted from the radio and never broadcast again. As we have seen, an arena of trial is formed by the intersecting discourses constituted by the book, the feverish speculation to which it gives rise, the FBI involvement in the debate and the HUAC-inspired actions of Ira’s broadcast station. This arena exhibits the meeting of fascination with abhorrence identified by Ferguson as permeating spaces of trial, epitomized above all by the book’s sensationalist language. But, for Roth, the end result of Ira’s trial by the (treacherous and unjust) word is that, rather than Ira’s receiving a valid judgement of guilt or innocence, the meanings attached to him become suspended in a way I have argued is characteristic of Roth’s work; final judgement is thus withheld as Ira’s many contradictory meanings are held up for examination.

Ghostwriting, ghost writing and writing well Eve’s ghostwritten autobiography appears to be not only an example of poor writing for Roth, but also a form of writing as injustice. He makes clear that the degraded quality and the unfairness of the writing are interlinked. The Grants exploit Eve’s impulse to let rip against Ira and ‘say it all’, in a favourite phrase of Roth’s (Communist, 149). But saying it all is very different from either saying it well or conveying the truth. The shamelessness – and the excitement – of saying it all has preoccupied Roth in many of his novels, notably in Operation Shylock, which we have considered in light of the production and the withholding of speech. As I have noted, the same concern about the cost of ‘telling’ appears at the close of The Catcher in the Rye. In ‘Eve’s book’, though, the want of restraint or balance, thoughtfulness or intellectual discrimination, makes the shamelessness of saying it all highly dangerous in that it is deeply inequitable. Roth sets against this language the speech of Murray as witness, recorder and second narrator of events, given the ‘exacting task’ of reckoning fairly and avoiding ‘too much error’ (77). Yet the imaginative writer’s calling to ‘say it all’ implicitly conflicts with Murray’s role as witness and therefore creates a tension between that role and Zuckerman’s as writer-narrator. Murray himself makes the implicitly critical remark to Zuckerman that, ‘About a man, as your fiction tells it, everything is believable’ (162). We are thus reminded that Zuckerman has the final, controlling voice in the narrative and that it

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is an unreliable one; he is, after all, imagining scenes at which he has not been present, writing at Murray’s prompting but not confining himself only to what Murray tells him. In this way Roth returns to the ever-present question in his work of whether the writer is responsible to the need to record accurately or to the demands of his imagination. Roth ultimately envisages betrayal as inseparable from the act of creative writing itself. Nevertheless, the vital lesson Nathan learns as a budding writer – a lesson learnt from his college tutor Leo Glucksman and which speeds Nathan’s emotional separation from Ira – is that good writing is not blindly responsible to politics but to itself. As Glucksman says, ‘The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I’ll tell you how to do it – write well!’ (218). When we speak of what it means to write well, we turn to ghost writing rather than ghostwriting. As we have noted, Zuckerman’s writerly sensibility has been formed by his exposure to literature, ‘the book of voices’ to which he has always been listening and responding. He, like his creator, Roth, has been merged in and has also contributed to an ongoing, many-voiced American literary discourse, allowing other important voices to speak through his work even as he incorporates those voices into his own creations. Roth’s transmutation of ghostwriting into ghost writing suggests that Nathan can finally be more successful than Ira in building an American identity by being a writer who learns to write (and thus to think) well. Furthermore, as we have already seen, writing well becomes an act of justice in granting to alternative narratives the space to be heard, even while judgement must be suspended. I Married a Communist casts an interesting light on The Ghost Writer concerning the connection between American identity, history and writing; we appreciate Roth’s literary development in the later novel’s enhanced capacity to depict the relation of the American individual to his historical times. In I Married a Communist, published nearly 20 years after The Ghost Writer, Nathan’s ‘book of voices’, from Lincoln to Arthur Miller, has created a flow of discourse in which his voice can productively participate, one which, in fact, demands his response. Here, The Ghost Writer’s angst and feverish comedy give way to the weight and confidence that mark Roth’s dialogue with his literary ancestors in these later works. A proof of Roth’s later confidence in the exercise of ghost writing is where he marks the development of the writer (and, one feels, his own development) by creating an interesting link between the young Nathan’s Anne Frank and the older Zuckerman’s Ira, at precisely that point where the notion is raised of the individual’s identity being conditioned by the trial. This is betokened by Roth’s invocation of Kafka’s The Trial (1925) in The Ghost Writer. The morning after Nathan’s fantasy about Amy and Anne, just before leaving Lonoff ’s house, he talks to Amy about Anne’s connection to Kafka, declaring ‘What he invented, she suffered. Do you remember the first sentence of The Trial? . . . It could be the epigraph for her book. “Someone must have falsely traduced Anne F., because one morning without having done anything wrong, she was placed under arrest”’ (Ghost, 122). Here, in an act of literary ghosting which places Anne in Kafka’s world, we have what I am arguing is Roth’s customary projection of the Jewish defendant at trial, ‘falsely traduced’ or betrayed, innocent of the crimes for which they have been accused, yet still immanently guilty of deception and betrayal themselves, because their self-

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making has embraced performance and (literary) impersonation. Present, too, is the sense of the Jew being at one with a nation, yet always at risk of being ‘other’: Nathan’s projection of Anne has her thinking that her family’s Chanukah ceremony, ‘a ceremony lasting about ten minutes . . . was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not even take that much. It took nothing – that was the horror’ (Ghost, 104). In The Ghost Writer, though, Nathan cannot ultimately rewrite Anne’s story as one of survival and American assimilation and so perhaps, despite its daring flights of fantasy, the novel falls short; but in I Married a Communist his creator, Roth, embeds Ira’s turbulent life within America’s turbulent history to present Zuckerman with a compelling and thoroughly American drama of self-making. The ‘nothing’ it takes for the Jew to be accused in wartime Amsterdam is successfully reworked in I Married a Communist as the ‘nothing’ separating Ira the Jew in glasses, the Jew of Arthur Miller’s Focus and the impersonator of Abraham Lincoln, from the fellow-Americans from which he finally becomes catastrophically divided.

Conclusion: Fighting for the word In I Married a Communist Roth unites a powerful study of an exceptionally troubled period in American post-war history with a portrait of the American individual that has the trial and betrayal at its heart, linking both these tropes by debates concerning performed American identities. He dissects the traditional Bildungsroman to comment ironically, and often caustically, on how the American desire for self-invention and self-scrutiny has been shaped by the perceived need at a time of Cold War nationalism to unify the nation by enforcing a narrower definition of American identity in the face of existing diversity. American self-formation has seldom before been subject either to such narrow introspection or to such powerful contradictory forces. The story of Ira’s failed attempts to perform American identity comments on how American identity has characteristically been performed or projected rather than being an innate or natural attribute, and on how it is consequently always prone to fragment when the ideological assumptions about nationhood which condition self-making are put under pressure in times of national crisis. By having the Jewish Ira represent ‘the America that was my inheritance’ for Nathan, Roth at once places the (treacherous) Jew at the heart of American identity and underlines the conceptual fragility of national identity in those turbulent times when the Jew’s place in America risks becoming compromised. Roth posits that the obsession with achieving an authenticity dependant on unity is the most dangerous American delusion. Roth shows that, in failing to manage the contradictions entailed in becoming American, Ira’s story is the story of American self-making. The Bildungsroman in I Married a Communist is distorted by tonal irony and by foregrounding contradiction rather than resolution as determining the process of self-making. It is multivocal rather than univocal, doubling both the protagonist and the narratorial selves. Its narrative is truncated by arresting its progressive movement towards maturity and thus preventing resolution in the form of the protagonist’s harmonious integration with his social surroundings. Roth not only twists the classical

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Bildungsroman in unwonted directions but also exploits its already-existing internal contradictions, exaggerating its contrasting qualities of mobility and stillness – qualities that give it a balanced rhythm – to evoke a stuttering, arrhythmic movement. This spasmodic quality – alternately frenetic and frozen – stymies notions of selfmaking as organic growth and progression. Roth concludes his novel not with the calmness of successful resolution but with paralysis, as movement in I Married a Communist gives way to a stasis figured metaphorically as the cabin in the woods. For Ira, and also eventually for Nathan, the cabin’s connotations become self-confinement and impotence rather than the practice of bildung in the tradition of individualism represented by Thoreau’s Walden. This halting movement mirrors the fundamental contradiction underlying the drive for a unified American persona underwritten by notions of perfectibility and progress and the counterdrive towards fragmentation of self and nation. The contradictions which condition efforts at self-making in I Married a Communist function to produce constant acts of betrayal. The potential for betrayal in the Bildungsroman, which has been noted by Moretti, that is, the betrayal of youth which is always implied by maturity, is deepened and darkened in Roth’s novel until betrayal is imbricated with every aspect of individual development and every relation with others, both personal and political. In a period when betrayal of fellow-Americans is encouraged as the patriotic way of life, America in Roth’s eyes is a place where selfmaking is a process of producing the individual as a traitor. Ira is the most American of men not only in the embodiment of contradiction but in his treachery as well. In I Married a Communist, ghostwriting as a subgenre of autobiography exhibits the same qualities of performance and impersonation that inform the narrative as a whole. By visualizing ghostwriting as a literary form which undoes the Bildungsroman, Roth counters the concept of the unified self in literature and raises similar questions of authenticity about the author of the literary work. Ghostwriting of the most malign type dominates the latter part of I Married a Communist and demonstrates how it is possible for an authorial voice to be both incorporated and submerged, in a literary act of self-making that is simultaneously an illocutionary act of betrayal which destroys a man. Ghost writing, however, might be seen as a positive allegory for self-making, while still propounding the view that American self-making is the construction of a narrative rather than a natural process and that the narrative contains multiple selves who might be at war with each other and betray each other. The ghostwritten ‘I Married a Communist’, the doubly treacherous echo of I Married a Communist, is a performance of Cold War populism, which interacts with its social and political context in such a way as to create a public discourse – or an unconstitutional space of trial – in which Ira is caught and marked as unacceptably Other. ‘Eve’s book’ is an act of writing as injustice, an injustice of which its marshalling of cliché and stereotyping is paradigmatic. Against the malicious and destructive voices that have produced this book is set the voice of Murray as a conscientious narrator and witness who seems to come closest to representing a trustworthy voice in the novel. But the presence of Zuckerman as the co-narrator is a constant reminder that the voice of the writer is always ultimately unreliable.

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By imagining Zuckerman as a ghost writer, Roth emphasizes the power play between Zuckerman and the numerous influences to which he has been exposed and questions the authoritative role of the single author. When it comes to Roth’s own authorship, I Married a Communist, as does the earlier The Ghost Writer, plentifully evidences the many literary voices that comprise Roth’s artistic inheritance. The panache with which Roth plunders this inheritance and continues to shape a legacy testifies to the fruitfulness of this continuing debate of artistic voices. As Debra Shostak observes, ‘[l]ike any novelist . . . Roth must depend on the power of imaginative identification, on the possibility that one can invent and impersonate others and that there is some redeeming value in doing so’ (2004, 128). Both novels delve into the meanings of the trial as a part of America’s historic and artistic legacy; but I Married a Communist’s rendition of the trial takes place on American ground and mobilizes the many voices of Nathan’s American inheritance in ways that ultimately make it more substantial and successful than its predecessor The Ghost Writer. Roth argues that the imaginative writer’s best defence is to ‘write well’. To fight for the seriousness of the word, therefore, is the only means by which justice can ever be attained – a lesson that Roth evidently believes has been forgotten during and since the era of McCarthy. If, as it appears, Roth’s definition of writing well is to write thoughtfully taking full account of the complexities and subtleties of meaning in language, then writing well is the closest an imaginative writer can come to writing justly, an act performed by I Married a Communist itself.

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Spooking the American National Body in The Human Stain

In The Human Stain (2000), the final volume of the Trilogy begun by American Pastoral, Roth invests the trial-racked self with spookiness or ghostliness, where physical disembodiment interacts with racial attributes. The Human Stain’s exploration of American identity under pressure exhibits Roth’s characteristic preoccupation with the authority of the word itself, as he makes the language debates that bound the protagonist’s arena of trial coalesce around one word: ‘spooks’. That word, used unadvisedly by the protagonist, the academic Coleman Silk, to describe two absentee (and black) students whom he has never seen in class, initiates a claim of racial harassment by those same students who have understood ‘spooks’ to be a racial slur, leading to college disciplinary hearings or ‘trials’ that pull together legal, political, public and literary discourses around that loaded term. The case brings about Coleman’s resignation and withdrawal from public life, and indirectly causes his scandalous and ultimately fatal involvement with Faunia Farley, a young female janitor at his former college, Athena. Roth here repeats the retroactive movement we have been exploring, from the last decade of the twentieth century back towards that nationalistic post-war regenerative moment, demonstrating how the events that eventually stymie Coleman originate from the racial politics and culture of his and Roth’s youth in the 1940s. The Human Stain presents the travails of ‘the perfect word’ in connection with a literary forebear also possessing a compelling, and ‘spooky’, vision of how human imperfection – the human stain – manifests itself in language: Invisible Man (1952) authored by Ralph Ellison (Stain, 84).1 Roth’s panache in plundering this inheritance and in continuing to shape an American literary legacy once more testifies to the fruitfulness of his ghost writing. Roth portrays the enigmatic Coleman by employing the tropes of visibility and invisibility, culturally linked in meaning as they are with light and darkness and so with purity and impurity: Coleman’s indeterminacy makes him ‘half visible’ (Stain, 213). Roth uses these paired tropes to meditate on what is seen and what remains unseen, or only partially seen, in mid-to-late-twentieth-century American culture, above all, the crucial buried – or ghostly – topic of race. They express America’s racial history

1

Roth has himself acknowledged Ellison’s influence on his novel.

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and the cultural configurations of the 1990s – racial identity politics, sexual politics and the preoccupation with politically correct language – which have engendered the harassment claim against him. We later learn that Coleman’s adult life and personality have been constructed around a secret; he is not the white Jewish academic his Athena College colleagues (and Zuckerman) have thought him to be, but a light-skinned black man who has chosen to ‘pass’ racially and to delete his family background and history from the record. Investigating American racial and sexual tensions as they intertwine within Coleman’s deceptive persona during the Clinton years, Roth shows how, despite Jewishness being only Coleman’s ‘cover’ identity, Jewishness continues to be at the centre of American identity. In showing how Coleman chooses to become Jewish and thus white, Roth demonstrates that Jewishness has historically intersected with questions of race in the United States, in that Jews have undergone a process of assimilation to cultural whiteness, and highlights the contribution of that process to the hardening of the colour line during the period of Coleman’s youth in the 1940s. Although Roth has consistently denied that The Human Stain is about Jews, he employs Jewishness as a liminal identity capable of states both of visibility and invisibility, thus as ideal for the half visible Coleman as well as for explicating changing notions of racial identity affecting the perception of the ‘white’ American individual. The Human Stain additionally reveals how Roth links the symbolism of visibility and invisibility with legibility and illegibility in regard to American citizenship and identity, so that the half visible Coleman is simultaneously hard to read. Roth therefore continues to express the importance of a historic body of written texts to America’s sense of nationhood as he shows how race, in particular, intervenes to determine the legibility, or visibility, of its citizens. However, Roth mounts a protest against ‘total scrutability’ of the self in that The Human Stain finally resists the concept of legibility as the overwhelming drive in American culture (Gilmore 2003, xiii). Bearing further on themes of nationality Roth contextualizes Coleman’s time of trial using another, almost contemporaneous and highly controversial, reallife trial: President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings for perjuring himself about his sexual misconduct with Monica Lewinsky. The novel shows how the language of contamination that is applied to Coleman, as to Clinton, springs from a mania for purity, which is still rampant, influencing ideas about personal and national identity in late-twentieth-century America. While exploring some of the resonances of Invisible Man within The Human Stain it becomes apparent that, though Ellison’s novel aims to define the meanings of blackness in the American context, Roth alternatively gives a rendition of what it might mean to be white in America. I concur with Timothy Parrish, in his important study of Invisible Man’s influence on The Human Stain, that Invisible Man is a great source of invention for Roth, but diverge from Parrish’s view that The Human Stain is either a commentary on Ellison’s life and career after Invisible Man or a form of sequel to it. Instead, I would suggest that Roth is sounding out what Ellison’s novel says about racial blackness, so as to explore the tricky topic of racial whiteness, showing how shifting notions of whiteness perplexed post-war ideas of American identity. Ellison’s invisible man asserts that he

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is ‘not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe’, but ‘a man of substance, of flesh and bone’, his invisibility residing in the perception of others who deny his reality (Invisible, 7). Ellison thus delineates the shadowy contours of America’s nightmare, its fear of attack by black people who have been violently oppressed and excluded; his ‘spook’ references that of Poe his literary forebear, while crucially differing from it in aiming to define American blackness. Now Roth, in turn, produces a compelling literary exploration of what it might mean to be white in America.

Visibility, legibility and race in America Visibility and legibility have become entwined as American cultural metaphors, saliently as regards American citizenship. Michael T. Gilmore points to a shared desire for legibility from the time of the nation’s foundation when the founding documents set out the rights and terms of citizenship. To be a citizen was to be both legible and visible: to have one’s American identity and rights acknowledged and on view in print. We can see how visibility and legibility have become associated with whiteness, then, since it has been the prerogative of white Americans much more than black Americans to have benefited from unequivocal citizenship status; we have observed how links have been drawn by scholars like Nelson between American citizenship and the visible white male body. In addition, writers and thinkers such as James Baldwin have conceptualized whiteness as a product, that is, rather than whiteness being a fixed attribute, white status has been accessed by different groups through economic and social processes that have political causes. For Baldwin in his essay ‘On Being White . . . and Other Lies’, whiteness is produced as in a ‘whiteness factory’ (qtd. Roediger 2005, 103). Ellison’s Invisible Man imagines a whiteness factory producing visible whiteness and invisible blackness in the scene where Ellison entangles his hapless protagonist in the process of manufacturing white paint. The task of the unnamed hero/narrator is to make a factory’s white paint whiter by adding ten drops of ‘dead black’ liquid to the paint mix (Invisible, 163). The stain of black paradoxically produces ‘Optic White’, the ‘purest white that can be found’, according to the foreman, a paint destined for national monuments and capable of covering ‘just about anything!’ (164). The bewildered hero, left to himself in this task and puzzled by the illegible codes on the paint additive labels, adds the wrong ingredient (a paint remover) and sparks the foreman’s wrath by turning out grey paint. But when he subsequently adds the correctly coded ingredient to the ‘impure’ mixture to produce the same shade of grey paint as before, foreman Kimbro accepts the mixture as pure white. This lengthy episode symbolizing race perception, racial codes, legibility and the uses of power in the America of the 1930s, envisages a human stain which is situated in an incontestable reality of racial mixing and impurity while the reality is denied by a racially skewed perception which codes some Americans as ‘white’. David R. Roediger, writing about the process by which ‘new immigrants’ of European extraction achieved whiteness through assimilation during the course of the twentieth century, also equates whiteness with visibility in the sense of those being recognized as whites visibly, or legibly, owning the right to full citizenship with all

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its benefits.2 Citizenship became ‘a narrative of ascent’ into visibility; in the United States ‘the law made this ascent racial as well as civil’ (2005, 61). Roediger states, for example, that the courts in regard to European migrants, ‘almost always automatically granted their full whiteness in naturalization cases . . .’ whereas Asian migrants such as the Chinese and Japanese, for example, were much less likely to be awarded this status (61). In other words, Europeans’ legal whiteness is recorded and their identity made legible, thus visible. According to Baldwin’s view, ‘new immigrants’ would be consumers of whiteness; it is a visible sign of new immigrants’ status as Americans. However, the symbolism of whiteness does not always operate in quite this way; it is not always linked with visibility. Sander Gilman when writing of American Jews, for example, speaks of their desire to be part of the white majority and argues that Jews strongly desired invisibility within the majority culture because ‘visibility meant being seen not as an individual but as other, one of the “ugly” race’ (Gilman 1991, 193). Likewise, according to Matthew Frye Jacobson, for a ‘new immigrant’ to be white is for their status as citizens to be unquestioned, thus for whiteness to be ‘so entwined with ideas of citizenship as to be invisible’ (1998, 23). We may gather from the above that writers who have invoked visibility and invisibility as metaphorical tropes for racial and national identity have often engaged with one half of the dyad rather than both halves. It is significant therefore that Roth terms Coleman half visible; he investigates the condition of whiteness as pertaining to both states simultaneously, or as possessing a flickering quality arising from the rapid transition between states, avoiding assigning either visibility or invisibility to whiteness or to blackness exclusively. Coleman, over the years, tends to move in and out of visibility as his ‘hidden’ black side, firmly suppressed to begin with, erupts in his choice of language (his usage of ‘spooks’, for example) many years after his first decision to ‘pass’ as white. Crucially, the ambiguity of identity that first designates him as white but eventually makes him only half visible becomes available to Coleman specifically through his decision to ‘pass’ as a Jew. This liminal status – the fluidity of which is apparent to him as Jews’ ‘whitening’ into American citizenship progresses during his boyhood years – offers Coleman a way out of a racial blackness that in the 1940s is disbarring him from his full rights of citizenship and limiting his educational and career potential.3 The Jewish desire to become American, 2

3

A ‘new immigrant’ is one from a different European background to America’s founding migrants who were overwhelmingly English, German, Scandinavian or French: mainly Irish, Italians, East European Jews and other ‘Eastern’ Europeans such as Poles and Hungarians migrating to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. New immigrants were not at first straightforwardly regarded as ‘white’ but became perceived to be white due to acculturation in the second and third generations. Naturalization, almost always accorded to immigrants judged by the courts to be racially ‘white’, by a circular logic often actually accorded whiteness to those of previously indeterminate status. Jews and other European immigrants were increasingly labelled as distinct ‘ethnic’ groups but as part of the ‘white’ races, and benefited from the naturalization process (Roediger, 61). Gilman points to nineteenth-century changes in European discourses about Jews that move from attributions of ineradicable difference from the host population to arguments for both physical and cultural adaptations, which make them indistinguishable from the host community. For example, he quotes Rudolf Virchow’s study of German schoolchildren published in 1886 that showed Jewish children, after one or two generations of assimilation, sharing identical physical characteristics with their German compatriots. However, Gilman highlights contradictions in the ongoing perceptions of Jews that contrast chameleonic, adaptive characteristics with an ‘essential’ nature that was usually cast negatively (1991, 177–8).

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commented upon in previous chapters, has been accommodated by a culture that has accorded Jews, to a greater degree than blacks, welcome as citizens. Coleman’s first awareness of a potentially liberating Jewish status comes when his parents are asked by Dr Fensterman to encourage Coleman to flunk a grade subject so as to allow the Fenstermans’ son to be valedictorian, thus to gain entry to medical school in fulfilment of the restrictive quota conditions on Jewish students. Even such limited access is impossible for black students like Coleman. Though he refuses the Fensterman request outright, his understanding of the possibilities of being Jewish leads the fairskinned Coleman to slip into a Jewish identity when, as a young boxer, he trains with the Jewish coach Doc Chizner and is introduced as his protégé. His boxing nickname ‘Silky’ (or slippery) signifies his first easy slippage between identities, which hardens, with marriage, into an identity as a white, Jewish academic tutor in Classical Studies. That this transformation happens when it does, during the 1940s at the time of World War II and in the wake of the New Deal, is highly significant. It is at this very time, in the wave of anti-fascist sentiment evoked by the War against Hitler and New Deal initiatives on employment, welfare and housing offering inclusivity to ‘new immigrants’, that Jews become definitively ‘white’ American. Roediger argues that ‘the New Deal was radically inclusive of new immigrants and that this dynamic was also part of its racial politics’ (2005, 203). In fact, Philip Rubio calls F. D. Roosevelt’s reform initiatives the ‘New (White) Deal’ (2001, 90), while some right-wingers, tellingly, called it the ‘Jew Deal’ (qtd. Dinnerstein 1994, 109).4 The New Deal for example, encouraged the establishment of housing zones that tended to be against racial mixing and brought about segregated white and black housing areas, confirming the previously somewhat anomalous racial designation of ‘new immigrants’ as ‘white’. The status of blacks in certain respects therefore became even more separate and unequal in this period, as ‘new immigrants’, including many Jews, became absorbed into white America at the expense of the blacks, while also absorbing American racial attitudes as a condition of the ‘whitening’ process. Coleman’s need to be ‘not black, not even white – just on his own and free’, that most deeply American of individualistic urges, is thus actually made in the context of intricate racial politics and hardening racial categories that give the in-built betrayal of his decision a further twist (Stain, 120). Coleman jumps ‘over the ethnic fence’, as Sanford Pinsker puts it (2002, 475), in emulation of his boxing coach Doc Chizner and other New York Jews whose assimilation in the post-war 1940s is being marked by ‘an aura of cultural significance’ and cultural confidence evident to Coleman in their humour and intellectual bravura (Stain, 131). For Coleman, the excitement and the power derive from what is hidden, from his ‘secret’. According to Gilman and Jacobson, he desires invisibility just as Jews have desired invisibility as part of the unquestioned and unquestionable majority so as not to be visible as the black ‘other’. But the reverse aspect of Coleman’s logic of invisibility is that when, decades afterwards, Coleman protests to Zuckerman that a racist is ‘everything that he wasn’t and could never be’, 4

By the 1960s Jews had assumed white status. James Baldwin, writing in The Fire Next Time (1963), affirmed that even in his childhood more than 20 years previously, and knowing of Jews’ biblical identification as Hebrews and location in Egypt, he ‘thought of them only as white’ (47).

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these negative self-definitions cannot serve to defend him because they cannot reveal what he is (11). On the contrary, Coleman’s being part of the white majority inevitably brings with it the other side of the dyad, the visibility attached to being a white American citizen with a full set of rights and legal entitlements. Coleman’s white and Jewish self ascends into visibility during his service in the US Navy, his marriage to the Jewish Iris and his illustrious career as a tutor and, later, dean of Classics at Athena. But visibility inevitably entails risk, and Coleman’s visibility eventually traps him decades later after the development of identity politics and the redrawing of racial lines contingent on black political self-definition. Coleman, then, has made a Jew of himself to slip the boundaries of his blackness and render himself ‘free’, but finds himself trapped in the last years of his life in two differing though related predicaments generated by the Jewish designation and others’ reading of it. One appellation, ‘Jewish-and-white’ visibly exposes him to judgement by students and staff as ‘white-and-racist’. The second, ‘Jewish-and-other’, makes him visible by exposing his ‘Jewish’ difference, evoking suspicion from the Athena academic establishment, and hatred from Les Farley, Faunia’s ex-husband and Coleman’s alleged murderer. The liberating ambiguity at first embodied in Coleman’s Jewish identity is subsequently denied him as he becomes subject to what Roth sees as an obsession with the categorization and ‘total scrutability’ that resides in ‘politically correct’ language. Under this rubric, Coleman Silk the racial enigma becomes ‘racist white professor’. The urge to repudiate this systematic labelling may well be what induces Coleman to bare himself to Zuckerman. The urge to reclaim his unknowable self, to ‘let the force out’ of the box into which he himself has helped to confine it, is also the main motive for his relationship with Faunia (32). But at this point Coleman cannot retrieve invisibility. He dies as a Jew – as the visible ‘other’. Only at his death does he become invisible, and such invisibility can be no more than effacement. Unable to name himself as black or to own the label of white and racist, Coleman comes to inhabit the realm of the unspeakable. The secret of his race however gradually becomes apparent through a series of clues dropped by Roth during the first 85 pages of The Human Stain; clues that are, like Coleman, half-legible or half-visible, only fully comprehended on re-reading the text of those early pages. The first is the small tattoo marking Coleman’s previous service in the US Navy. The second is an anonymous letter accusing him of impure dealings with Faunia. The third is Coleman’s hastily spoken epithet ‘lily-white’ to his white lawyer (81), and finally the word ‘spooks’ itself and the debate it generates. All these clues bring together half-visible bodily figurations with half-legible speech configurations; they challenge both bodily and speech boundaries by asserting states of half-visibility regarding identity that put the term ‘American’ under pressure.

The secret of Coleman’s tattoo Coleman’s tattoo becomes apparent to his neighbour and new friend Zuckerman when he visits Coleman on a warm summer night to find him bare-chested. Un-coincidentally,

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this is the same night upon which Coleman shows Zuckerman the draft he has just jettisoned of a book he has been working on for 2 years: an ‘exposé’ of the process by which his academic position has been made untenable by the charges of racism involving two former students. On the night he exposes his tattoo he repudiates his own writing, telling Zuckerman, ‘[p]age after page, it is still the raw thing. It’s a parody of the self-justifying memoir. The hopelessness of explanation’ (19). The writing aims to make Coleman’s rendition of himself visible but without success. He cannot impose meaning upon the flow of events. Worse, the draft has been written in response to that ‘racist’ label, risking further legitimating the epithet. Although Zuckerman cannot know it at that moment, Coleman’s ‘US Navy’ tattoo is the first clue to his half-visibility: to his complex past and the secret of his racial ‘passing’. It is ‘a tiny symbol to remind me’, Zuckerman recalls, ‘why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong’ (22). The tattoo is fittingly positioned between legibility and illegibility: the message conveyed by its words is beset by countersignifications that subvert it. Coleman’s mark – one manifestation of his human stain – is a ‘small, Popeye-ish, blue tattoo situated at the top of his right arm, just at the shoulder joining – the words “US Navy” inscribed between the hooklike arms of a shadowy little anchor and running along the hypoteneuse of the deltoid muscle’ (21–2). Imitating Coleman himself, the tattoo flickers in and out of visibility. Inked upon his skin, it ostensibly marks that skin as American and white: a badge of service in the US Navy, in which blacks, at that time (World War II) cannot serve visibly but only in menial capacities such as cleaning. The tattoo asserts Coleman’s claim to visible American citizenship; its symbolic attachment to the cartoon figure of Popeye the sailor, the archetypal American ‘little guy’ to whose right arm the Navy anchor popularly belongs, evokes the national image of the sailor as plucky, strong in a crisis – and indubitably white. The anchor’s ‘hooklike arms’ conjure a tenacious embrace, like Coleman’s own embrace of this American identity. Yet the tattoo is acquired just after Coleman, on shore leave and looking for sex, is recognized and exposed as a black man, gets beaten up and thrown out of a whorehouse catering exclusively for whites, then gets blind drunk to blot out the disgrace of exposure. This paradox is evoked by a subsequent word ‘shadowy’, which muddies the solid, stable image of the anchor, allowing Coleman’s claim to whiteness to bleed away into uncertainty. That night is the closest he ever comes, in life, to losing his claim, because he is picked up by shore patrol the following morning and viewed as an errant white sailor who has been ‘properly tattooed in the bargain’ (183). He finds himself with a tattoo that seems to have surfaced involuntarily on his body; a mark signifying all that is Coleman. Roth’s repeated use of the verb form ‘inscribed’ carries multiple senses: of a mark that is both embedded and indelible, not merely skin-deep but on the ‘deltoid muscle’ and of a symbolic figure containing hidden meaning. The ostensibly scrutable inscription ‘US Navy’ is cancelled out by the other buried meanings of the tattoo. ‘Inscribed’, as a passive verb form, indicates that Coleman, despite his extreme individualism and his wish to exercise total control over his identity, is subject to imposed conditions regarding racial designation; he is obliged to disappear because he cannot be consistently visible and remain Coleman as he wants to see himself. The verb hints, too, at Coleman’s

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objectification, whether as a Jewish white man produced by the ‘whiteness factory’ or as a black man for whom the tattoo replicates the mark of slavery. Either way, as Roth implies, he loses his individuality. No one realises what ‘bargain’ – with American whiteness – the ‘proper tattoo’ actually represents. As Roth puts it, ‘it was the sign of the whole of his history, of the indivisibility of the heroism and the disgrace. Embedded in that blue tattoo was a true and total image of himself ’ (184). In other words, the tattoo inscribes visible whiteness, but also blackness, both invisible – the black identity that Coleman has hidden – and visible – the exposed blackness that Coleman has stamped on his arm as a badge of his own ‘disgrace’. The other side of the coin, the heroism, exists both in the visible dimension as the service to his country and in the invisible dimension as a black man’s supreme effort to transcend his history. The characteristic quality of the tattoo is turbulence – the turbulence of the worst night of his life when his blackness is exposed – and of all that underlies the turbulence: Coleman’s instability of identity, the power of his secret. The turbulence evokes the continual turns from visibility to invisibility that mark his existence. To Zuckerman, the tattoo in plain sight many years later is as unreadable as Coleman’s rejected writings. It cannot be a simple marker or ‘giveaway’ as Timothy Parrish seems to imply by stating ‘[t]he tattoo marks Coleman as black’ (2004, 439). Parrish enlarges on this by saying, ‘[i]t marks not his race itself but the history he carries because of his race, or its perception . . .’, but this is still a reduced perspective of the multiple meanings carried by Coleman’s US Navy mark (2004, 439). The tattoo is Coleman’s personal indicator of the novel’s eponymous human stain, the indelible marker that pervades the essence of each human being and that in Coleman’s case asks a question about race. It embodies, but also defies, what Jacobson calls ‘the centrality of race as an organizer’ in American life (1998, 179). The human stain within Coleman stems from his multiplicity and from his capacity for being wrong – it, too, is heroism and disgrace combined.

‘Spooks’ and the spirit of sanctimony Emerging first from his shadowy tattoo, Coleman’s ‘spookiness’ – his secret blackness – continues gradually to become apparent, mediated through a series of gnomic phrases seeming to erupt from places where language eludes scrutiny, places that seem, like the tattoo, to lie somewhere between legibility and illegibility. The first of these obscure yet revelatory messages to confront the reader is the anonymous letter Coleman receives about 2 years after his resignation, soon after he has started a secret affair with Faunia. The letter, giving Coleman to understand that knowledge of the affair is becoming known, is in language that is stark, morally prescriptive and accusatory, written in the same spirit of sanctimony as the one that fuelled the outcry against President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky that very summer. This puritanical moralizing strain in American culture ‘maintains widespread jurisdiction by masquerading itself as something else – as everything else . . . infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women’s rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish

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ethical sensitivity’ (Stain, 153). The narrative voice (presumably Zuckerman’s voice which we can take to stand for Roth’s voice here) is disapproving of this ‘dominatrix in a thousand disguises’, shaped now as identity politics enforced through the policies and language of political correctness (153).5 The message is: One sentence long, subject, predicate, and pointed modifiers boldly inscribed in a large hand across a single sheet of white typing paper, the twelve-word message, intended as an indictment, filling the sheet from top to bottom: Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age. (Stain, 37–8)

Coleman’s close analysis of the handwritten note, later confirmed by an expert, leads him to conclude that it has been sent by Delphine Roux, his former departmental chair who had been among the first to call him to account for his unacceptable usage of ‘spooks’. The condemnatory catalogue of ‘pointed modifiers’ asserts that the writer knows exactly who Coleman is, what he has been doing, and that his actions are morally wrong. At first sight, then, the message seems unambiguous. However, the phrase ‘Everyone knows’ is distinguished by being in printed rather than cursive script, in a partial attempt to disguise the hand. This oddly detached and mystified phrase consequently seems fraudulent, therefore casting a dubious light on the excessive claims of the remainder of the note. Seeming initially to possess ‘the menacing aggressiveness of an anonymous indictment’, the message’s legibility, and so its power, dissipates the more one considers that break between the opening words and the remainder (39). Even though the letter disturbs Coleman, it becomes evident that its language cannot legitimately define him and Faunia, because its moral categorizations are at once too wide and too narrow to describe their actions. It comes nowhere near comprehending a relationship that, as Coleman describes it, is primarily sexual yet also a mutually sustaining and fulfilling comradeship. Although the letter’s language attempts to ‘maintain jurisdiction’ over moral boundaries, it gives away its bedrock Puritanism masquerading as a concern for sexual equality, revealing its own fraudulence. Like Coleman’s tattoo, it is a message about unknowing rather than knowing. What the phrase ‘Everyone knows’ actually signals is that there is a deep mystery, not about the note’s writer, whom we have good reason to think has been immediately 5

According to William L. O’Neill, the current term ‘political correctness’ was first introduced to the general public by Richard Bernstein of the New York Times in an October 1990 article. Debates over political correctness were prevalent on academic campuses in the 1990s, connected, for example, with initiatives to recruit more students and staff from minorities, often through racebased admissions policies. Many universities developed complex protocols regulating speech and behaviour in regard to minorities and women, including codes prohibiting ‘hate speech’. The enforcement of politically correct language had implications for freedom of expression which were fiercely debated on campuses and in the media at that time (O’Neill, 135–55).

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unmasked, but about Coleman, even though his inner self has been supposedly ‘outed’. The message references Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a fiction of Puritan America, where the condemnatory letter, A, originally sewn onto Hester’s dress to signify that she is an adulteress, becomes gradually blurred in meaning so that years later it can be understood as A for Angel or Able. Coleman similarly proves to be someone other than his designation, as his chronicler Zuckerman discovers only after Coleman’s death. Brian Harding’s 1990 introduction to the OUP edition of The Scarlet Letter observes that it is ‘a story of the difficulty of reading both letter and [Hester’s judicial] sentence, when the authority that imposed the meaning is problematized’, a comment that Roth makes just as true of The Human Stain (viii). The verbal eruptions punctuating the text of the novel continue to reveal what Coleman has kept hidden for decades. The next part-revelation comes when Coleman visits his lawyer Nelson Primus after receiving Delphine’s letter and being harassed by Faunia’s violent ex-husband, Les Farley. The self-righteous Primus castigates Coleman for rashness regarding Faunia, whereupon Coleman angrily says that he never again wants to see Primus’s ‘smug fucking lily-white face’: an outburst that astonishes Primus and Coleman himself (Stain, 81). Primus wonders, ‘Why “lily-white”’ (81)? Coleman afterwards muses, ‘[f]irst “spooks”, now “lily-white” – who knows what repellent deficiency will be revealed with the next faintly antiquated locution . . . that comes flying from [Coleman’s] mouth’ (84)? The ‘faintly antiquated locution’ places ‘lily-white’ in the fairly recent past, probably therefore his boyhood, an inference strengthened by the emotional charge implicit in its ‘flying from his mouth’ completely unforeseen. Then, too, the ‘repellent deficiency’, taken with ‘lily-white’ and understood in the context of America’s racial history, hints at Coleman’s racial origins. We can, moreover, clearly understand the words’ specific relation to Coleman’s race if we recognize the resonance between ‘lily-white’ here and in Invisible Man. Ellison’s ‘invisible’ black protagonist’s ‘desirable conduct’, his youthful meek acceptance of racial discrimination and his eagerness to please whites, is praised by ‘the most lily-white men of the town’, ‘lily-white’ being Ellison’s sardonic reference to deceit and hypocrisy (Invisible, 18). The hidden ambiguity of Roth’s ‘lily-white’, the descriptor for the white Nelson Primus that is also the secret signifier of Coleman’s blackness and his own hypocrisy, is echoed by another submerged reference to Ellison’s novel, the name Primus – given by Ellison to an elderly poor black evictee, Primus Provo, a representative of the first generation of freed slaves – which Roth transfers to the lawyer, a member of the white elite. Roth thus provides his moralizing ‘lily-white’ lawyer Primus with a black literary forebear, additionally mining the racial connotations of another ‘perfect’ but treacherous word ‘lily-white’ that Ellison has explored before him: ghost writing at its finest.6 The sense of America’s black voices speaking in The 6

‘Lily-white’ is not the only language resonance between The Human Stain and Invisible Man. For example, as a youngster, the invisible man at a boxing contest sees a blonde white dancer, a ‘fair birdgirl’, obviously symbolizing America (Invisible, 20). Roth’s Faunia, resembling a Puritan goodwife, similarly evokes white America, also identifying herself with a bird: ‘I am a crow . . . I know it!’ (Stain, 169). But again Roth complicates the link, since Faunia identifies with the bird’s blackness, being distanced from white America by her class and her illiteracy.

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Human Stain is reconfirmed by Zuckerman’s meeting Coleman’s sister Ernestine after his death, and finding out from her about his early life within the family and about his fateful decision to ‘pass’. The final intimation about Coleman’s race – which immediately precedes the direct disclosure to the reader of his previously secret blackness – arises from Coleman’s recalling his defence of his usage of ‘spooks’ at the college hearing: ‘For the thousandth time: I said spooks because I meant spooks . . . if we look in the dictionary, what do we find as the first meaning of “spook”? The primary meaning. “1. Informal. A ghost; spectre.”’ ‘But Dean Silk, that is not the way it was taken. Let me read to you the second dictionary meaning. “2. Disparaging. A Negro.” That’s the way it was taken – and you can see the logic of that as well: Does anybody know them, or are they blacks whom you don’t know?’ ‘Sir, if my intention was to say “Does anybody know them, or do you not know them because they are black?” that is what I would have said’. (Stain, 84–5)

This pedantic discussion about the dictionary definitions of ‘spooks’ reinforces the argument that propriety, in its current form of political correctness, is predominantly concerned with policing language boundaries. Likewise, Coleman’s disciplinary hearing, as a form of trial, is predicated on finding a definitive truth and reaching a clear decision as to guilt or innocence. As Ferguson says, ‘[a] courtroom account flattens the “narrative desire” or search for meaning in a story’ and ‘reduces everything said to one overwhelming concern: guilty or not guilty as charged’ (2007, 13). Similarly, but illegitimately, in Roth’s view, the language of political correctness recognizes only the terms guilty or not guilty, white or black, racist or not-racist. But the above extract also makes clear that Coleman himself is overly preoccupied with maintaining strict language boundaries; like his accusers he adheres to his preferred dictionary definition of what are fluid and awkward concepts pertaining to physical presence and race. He claims that 50 years ago (before he began to pass as white) he had known the pejorative meaning of ‘spook’, but that he had ‘wholly forgotten’ it (Stain, 6). The distance Coleman has placed between himself and his racial inheritance is thus reflected in his insensitivity to troubled and mutable concepts of race. In sticking to the primary dictionary definition of ‘spook’ Coleman effectively endorses the visibility, legibility and boundedness of his (white) self, overlooking how language pertaining to that self contains multiple, ‘surplus’ meanings which can come back to haunt him. Indeed, the irony is plain since Coleman could himself, of course, be termed a ‘spook’ according to both definitions. Accused of racism, Coleman becomes trapped by his own visibility as a white man and condemned during the college hearings by the same addiction to legibility and categorization that he has embraced as a citizen and an academic. But, while the college hearing displays him ostensibly at his ‘whitest’ (fixed as a white racist), it simultaneously reveals his hidden blackness. When Coleman tries to substantiate his position by asserting to the college hearing panel that he would have said, ‘do you not know them because they are black?’ if that is what he had meant, the significance of his words is very different from their

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intended meaning, given the impending revelation about Coleman’s racial origins. As we discover immediately after this verbal exchange, Coleman is not after all Jewish and white, but a black man. His words, viewed in close retrospect, change so as to suggest that it is he himself who is not known to be black, because he has chosen to hide that fact from everyone. To repeat his words more accurately, he was also not known because he was black: his decision to ‘pass’ was motivated by the inaccessibility of full citizenship to black Americans, who have not historically been ‘known’ in the sense of recognized. Their non-citizenship has produced the racial invisibility exemplified by the protagonist of Ellison’s Invisible Man. This aspect of Coleman’s ‘spookiness’ returns us to the combined themes of ghostliness and legibility. Because Coleman has to hide his blackness and pass as white, his words can be understood to mean that he can never be fully known, even to himself: he is forever half-visible, or ‘spooky’, haunting the racial contours of his nation. Coleman’s spookiness, though, is somewhat different from that of the invisible man who asserts that he is ‘not a spook . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone’ (Invisible, 7). The invisible man explains that his invisibility resides in the perception of others who deny his reality so that he becomes a phantom in other people’s minds, ‘a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy’ (7). Ellison here combines race and the phantasm to delineate the shadowy contours of America’s nightmare – the fear of attack by its violently oppressed and excluded black people. The difference between Invisible Man and The Human Stain is that Coleman seems to become a phantom in his own mind. He is, in a sense, haunting himself because his repressed racial identity is now returning through the medium of his verbal slip-ups; his sporadic inability to control his speech recalls Merry’s stuttering speech in American Pastoral and Ira Ringold’s unwittingly subversive speech in I Married a Communist. Coleman’s refusal to cooperate with the disciplinary process, resigning before its completion, leaves him in a liminal position: as Ferguson observes, ‘[i]nnocent until proven guilty but on the cusp, defendants can never remain where they are’ (2007, 57). Coleman’s liminal defendant status parallels his racial liminality as a Jew and his hidden status as a black man, his flickering, half-visible turning ‘on the cusp’ between states of blackness and whiteness. Ferguson’s intimation of a progressive movement to a final judgement is unavailable to Coleman. His turbulence evokes an image of trapped movement, like a wasp in a jam-jar, an intense oscillation between states. This quality might be perceived as increasing Coleman’s potential to disturb the racial status quo; that clearly appears to be his function for readers of The Human Stain. However, when we consider Coleman’s quest for self-determination we find that this flickering in and out of visibility under two racial designations results, after all, not in a liberating fluidity but in his entrapment at a succession of still points under the limited and limiting scrutiny of others. After his resignation, Coleman begins to seem more like a spy in Athena than a fellow-citizen and compatriot. His abiding ‘thrill of leading a double life’ hints at the potential for cultural sabotage always present in his liminal racial status but obscured

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by his deception and his absorption in college life (Stain, 47). By evoking this additional meaning of ‘spook’ as a spy in regard to Coleman, Roth continues to situate betrayal and treachery at the core of American identity. The confrontation with Nelson Primus serves not only to reveal Coleman’s spookiness, or less-than-whiteness, but also makes manifest his act of betrayal in denying his race and disappearing from his family circle. Coleman the spy can be perceived not only as a traitor to other black Americans but as treacherously threatening to white Americans as well: he personifies the traitor within. Like the grandfather of the invisible man, Coleman is, ‘a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country’; a ‘sleeper’ ready to rise when the time is right (Invisible, 17). But unlike the invisible man who hides beneath the white world in his cellar, Coleman assumes the role of the internal ‘other’ within the white world, a role similar to that played by ‘Swede’ Levov and Ira Ringold. In this way Coleman’s secret ‘spookiness’ becomes aligned with his assumed Jewish-American identity; his racial secret therefore allows another exploration, along a somewhat different trajectory, of what Roth appears to see as the Jew’s ever-liminal, potentially disruptive and treacherous but nevertheless representative status in American culture.

The (in)visible self and the American national body So far, I have concentrated primarily on how Coleman’s ‘spookiness’ relates to the closely associated questions of race and language use, such as politically correct language. Roth’s focus on Coleman’s half-visibility to address these questions has of course implied states of bodily presence or absence and the breaching of bodily boundaries. Spooks inevitably invoke disembodiment; we have seen how the dematerialization of the body is experienced by Coleman as the weightlessness or hollowness that accompanies the imposture committed by him in ‘passing’. Coleman’s attempt to be fully himself leads him to spend his adult life perpetrating an imposture, which, it is ironically implied, deprives him of identity altogether. This might seem to be true of Coleman particularly in the sense that he has taken on the mantle of the Jew without subscribing to any of the Jewish cultural practices or bearing any of the weight of Jewish history. This hollowness in Coleman becomes apparent when, on the point of marriage, he tells his mother she won’t be able to see him anymore (invisibility in the most practical, and devastating, of senses). Coleman at that moment suffers the fearful perception that his choice of the Jewish Iris Gittelman as a life partner is motivated solely by her ‘sinuous thicket of hair that was far more Negroid’ than his and thus by ‘the explanation that her appearance could provide for the texture of their children’s hair’ (Stain, 136). The realization that his choice is purely a corollary of his performance of Jewishness makes him feel so depleted that he describes himself as ‘the emptiest of men’ (137). The weightlessness of Coleman’s past progressively infects his relationship with his children and entirely estranges him from his youngest son. Coleman’s impersonation of Jewishness, added to Roth’s lack of detail as to how Coleman actually functions

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culturally as a Jew, underlines an approach to identity that sees race or ethnicity as a set of unstable categories having no intrinsic meaning. Consequently Coleman, like Roth’s other protagonists, illustrates how performing one’s identity risks making one liable to being determined solely by others’ judgement, a drawback that nullifies the attempt at self-determination which has originally prompted that performance. Coleman’s instability of identity, expressed in images that disrupt the language of bodily wholeness and its connection to white maleness, represents another phase in Roth’s critique of the narrative of American national identity. I will now more directly consider the ways in which Coleman’s being a ‘spook’ threatens the nationalistic language of masculine embodiment, exploring how Roth handles tropes concerning the sexual contamination of the male body. The Human Stain describes a loosening of physical boundaries associated with Coleman’s ageing process and, more importantly, expressed in an impurity or contamination that entangles his failure to keep intact his white racial boundaries with his male sexuality. The language of wholeness, purity and contamination has always, in American culture, been entangled with a male sexuality permeated by fears of racial miscegenation. Coleman’s relationship with the white Faunia is charged with the knowledge of racist concepts of sexual contamination. Coleman is an unseen and highly dangerous contaminant to white America, due to his potential to breach racial boundaries and thus to realize their fears of racial mixing. The novel’s titular human stain is Roth’s take on both the inevitability of miscegenation and the propensity of the sexual drive to breach the boundaries of propriety in regard to sexual conduct. Just as the nation has often been represented symbolically by the figure of the wholesome male body, the nation’s efficient functioning or otherwise has often been expressed in terms of health and disease, and also of contamination. A unified body maintains its boundaries, thus to remain whole and healthy it has been necessary to decide what are the threats to the body, or its intruders, and how to exclude them.7 What I have called the American national body encompasses the notions of national unity being organic and displaying a harmonious relation of constituent parts to a whole voiced by those attempting to evoke a sense of nationhood since the nation’s founding era. It is evident that the concept of the American national body is fundamentally connected with exclusionary gender-based as well as racial ideas about national identity, as with contestations over who should be entitled to full American citizenship, with its voting rights and other legislated and documented rights and freedoms. This means, as we have already discovered, that these contests over the national body involve not only questions of visibility and well-boundedness, but also 7

To a nation founded on racial division that historically coded its citizens as white, racial ambiguity undermines the unity of the American nation and must be resisted. Since racial mixing obviously operated through sexual liaisons between Americans of different races, metaphors of racial and sexual contamination often converged in the discussion of groups seen as extraneous to the American national body and needing to be expelled. As Roediger points out, ‘[t]he often medicalized metaphor of “unwanted invasion” applied to both groups [blacks and immigrants] though at differing frequencies’ (2005, 51).

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of legibility, as we perceive from Roth’s persistent linkage of these tropes in regard to national identity. As our survey of national manhood has suggested, the nation is symbolically materialized in the purified, invulnerable and scrutable white male body, able to defend itself against whatever threatens its integrity; it has above all been personified in its president. The integrity of the American national body is queried by Roth through his evocation of the presidential body of Bill Clinton in connection with Coleman’s contentious body. Coleman’s contrasting manifestations as alternately visible and invisible are also re-envisaged as the contrast between one who possesses a well-controlled, compact and firm body (appropriate for the American male citizen) and one who has an uncontrolled, loosely bounded and soft body (and who thus might let in, or even become, the dangerous intruder). The keynote, once again, is betrayal, of the American national body and of the physical body itself. The connections Roth establishes between Coleman and President Clinton in regard to sexual and racial impurity, their differing but closely related embodiments of the human stain which have indirectly led to them being placed ‘on trial’, are the key to the novel’s commentary on American culture and the last outbreak of ‘the ecstasy of sanctimony’ of the twentieth century (Stain, 2). What impact might the half-visible self have on the integrity of the masculine national body; and how does the language of visibility, invisibility, liminality and fluidity impinge upon the language of wholeness, purity and contamination in Roth’s fictional responses to American myths of nationhood? Coleman’s physical body as we see it at the start of The Human Stain is apparently compact, youthful, vigorous and strong. Moreover his features are without the stereotypically Jewish large nose and under-sized jaw regarded as undesirable by the American and European goyim; as Zuckerman notes, he is ‘the small-nosed Jewish type with the facial heft in the jaw . . .’ (15). Importantly, that body is firmly bounded and well controlled. Coleman’s early, brief but successful, career as a boxer has been distinguished by great skill, natural dexterity and aptitude both mental and physical. Altogether, Coleman’s physical self, from his youth onwards, has ostensibly fitted the bodily ideal of the white American male citizen as conjured in literature and in the works concerning the condition of American manhood, which were common from the nineteenth century onwards. Early scholarship on citizenhood after the Declaration of Independence links white male citizenship to the defence of the new nation: ‘someone who could help put down a slave rebellion or participate in Indian wars’ (Jacobson 1998, 25). Whiteness and maleness is thus associated with the citizen’s duty to exclude undesirable and unwanted elements, and so maintain the body politic (those who were entitled to vote and to stand as political representatives, thus who by definition were white and male).8 It is 8

Discursive parallels have consistently been drawn between the United States as a geographical entity with distinct territorial boundaries, the American body politic and the individual American male body. Immigrant intruders might be kept out as by the 1924 bill that virtually ended immigration for a period. But the resident black population and America’s history of miscegenation have made the nation’s internal racial boundaries impossible to police, hence the overwrought quality of calls for segregation and exclusion.

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Coleman’s capacity as defender, one recalls, that is visibly summoned by his US Navy tattoo. It is vital that such citizens maintain their self-possession, or control of their own physique, in a new democracy whose political and geographical boundaries must be actively defended. Historically, not only have black Americans been regarded as unsuitable for American citizenship, but they have also been seen as ‘anti-citizens’ (Roediger 2005, 175). Coleman’s assumed quality of whiteness is therefore a crucial addition to his other bodily qualities of firmness, control and responsiveness in substantiating his claim to American citizenship. The apotheosis of Coleman’s desire for Americanness comes during a visit to the military academy at West Point where, at 16, he boxes victoriously as a white fighter. Coleman believes that his physical strength, self-discipline and vitality at this ‘patriotic center’ are perfectly matched to the surrounding images of strong fighting men and to a heroically anthropomorphic natural world: to ‘the iron faces of the cadets’ and to the mountains which are the scenic expression of ‘his country’s unbreakable spine’ (Stain, 101). Coleman appears to himself to be the embodiment of his desired country in a place where ‘his sixteen-year-old’s fantasy . . . matched perfectly the official fantasy’ (101). In fact there seems to be a dual process at work whereby not only is Coleman incorporated into America but he actually incorporates America into himself in an ecstasy of self-love – America is ‘just Coleman Brutus “Silky” Silk carried to the millionth degree’ (101). This dialectic of incorporation, though, can never be total. Coleman’s supposed solidity of self is belied by its tendency to fragment, disintegrate and disappear. His desire to: ‘become a new being. To bifurcate’ clearly challenges the language of wholeness and unity attached to his aspirations at West Point (342). His bifurcation is unavoidable given his past and his need to escape it; but it inevitably endangers the very boundaries of selfhood he intends to maintain. The difference coded in his genes resides as a continual threat, not only to his white identity but also to the homogeneity of the American body of citizens which has accepted him as a member. Coleman’s sister, Ernestine, describes his concealed genetic inheritance as ‘an unexploded bomb’ whose shockwaves affect not just his family but also the community of which he has been part (320). The reference to the bomb takes us back again to Merry Levov’s devastating bombing of her local community in American Pastoral as well as the bomb explosion that is Eve Frame’s ghostwritten book in I Married a Communist. The unexploded bomb of Coleman’s genes, indivisible from his humanity rather than being produced by explosive acts, is however an even more potent challenge to the concept of a homogenous masculine national body. Roth’s changeable protagonist Coleman is therefore revealed as incorporating the dialectic of American racial exclusions and inclusions, so that his very body becomes a space of trial. Roth shows how the exclusionary ideology expressed in the concepts of purity and impurity is worked out in the arena of sexual continence and incontinence. He approaches the often difficult and clouded subject of race in America by demonstrating how the nation’s mania for sexual purity is fundamentally grounded in racist ideology. The portrayal of Coleman’s sexually scandalous

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behaviour thus indicates his wider potential to expose the internal disturbances in the national body.9

Coleman, the President and the contamination of the national body Roth compares Coleman’s ‘loose’ and mutable bodily narrative to that of Bill Clinton’s sexually ‘loose’, polluted (and polluting) body. In fact, Coleman Silk seems to function in The Human Stain somewhat as President Clinton has functioned within American culture according to Melissa Deem, who argues that, ‘[a]ttached to Clinton’s body are all the anxieties engendered by post-1960s US racial and sexual politics’ (2001, 407). Clinton has been identified with the 1960s’ era of ‘permissiveness’ by many of his critics on the right who have cited his evasion of the Vietnam draft and failure to deny youthful drug use, as well as his later sexual misdemeanours, as signs of a degeneration also perceptible in his politically liberal stance towards minorities. Indeed, commentators on the Clinton presidency, such as Deem, have noted Toni Morrison’s assertion in ‘The Talk of the Town’ that Clinton was ‘our first black President’ (New Yorker, 5 October 1998). Coleman and Clinton therefore share both racially and sexually inflected, turbulent and treacherous bodily conditions that are dramatically heightened in each case during the period of the presidential impeachment. So once more Roth connects critical phases of post-war American history – the upheavals of the 1960s, and the culture wars accompanying the anti-Clinton conservative backlash of the 1990s, rooting them in the crisis of identity immediately after the War during which Coleman is motivated to ‘pass’ as Jewish and white. Roth explicitly connects the sexual scandal caused by Coleman’s affair with Faunia Farley to the more portentous and far-reaching scandal that is President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his subsequent impeachment proceedings.10 As I have previously indicated, the presidential body has always been of major concern to its citizens. On the symbolic level he has always embodied the American nation. The title of President itself conveys central aspects of this embodiment.11 It has always been essential to 9

10

11

This linkage between race and sexual behaviour dominated the reaction to O. J. Simpson’s highprofile trial for the murder of his wife, Nicole, in 1994. The extensive, sensationalist media coverage arose not only from Simpson’s celebrity status but also from the racial and sexual overtones of their mixed-race marriage. The trial and his acquittal also ‘expos[ed] . . . the deep gulf that still remained between black and white Americans’ (O’Neill 2009, 269). The majority of blacks believed he was innocent while the majority of whites believed him guilty. This media furore prefigured the treatment of the events surrounding the Clinton impeachment attempt (O’Neill 2009, 269–70). The reason for Clinton’s attempted impeachment was his perjuring himself in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case for lying about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky; but his sexual indiscretions with Lewinsky were for many of his accusers the prime focus of their moral indignation. The word ‘president’ is a symbolic constellation signifying, firstly, that the nation is analogous to a corporate enterprise, treated by law as an individual; secondly, that its powers are centralized in its executive branch, with relatively weak countervailing powers vested in Congress and in the Senate; thirdly, that the executive is represented by one individual who symbolically embodies the nation.

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Americans that their president is above reproach as the prime representative of their democratic order and the guarantor of its health. In an important sense, he is purity made visible (Gilmore 2003, 10). Thus images of wholeness, whiteness, incorruptibility and bodily control merge in the symbolism of the purified presidential body; for many Americans, especially those conservatives who are most likely to invoke America’s traditional unifying national narratives, sexual scandals risk damage to the nation as great as political or financial corruption. And Clinton’s sexual indiscretions evidence a national moral pollution that is played out metaphorically as physical contamination. Clinton’s sexuality, like Coleman’s, evidences a lack of self-control that threatens the national body’s boundaries and thus its fundamental viability. Indeed, Roth plays with the imagery of bodily life and death in regard to Clinton’s sexual embarrassments: ‘Bill Clinton’s secret emerged in every last mortifying detail – every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data’ (Stain, 2). Roth immediately after this evokes another defiled American body – the shamed Miss America forced to abdicate following a sexual scandal concerning nude pictures in Penthouse magazine – comically underscoring Clinton’s matching ‘Mr. America’ status. Continuing in the mode of comic bathos, Roth refers to America’s ‘purity binge, when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security – was succeeded by cocksucking’ (2). He thus sardonically equates the national threat of terrorist violence to the loss of bodily control and endangerment of the national body occasioned by the emissions made visible on Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress – Clinton’s human stain. Roth describes those that call for Clinton’s impeachment as ‘eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch’, re-imposing control upon the national body by not merely symbolic but literal castration, as called for in real life by the columnist William F. Buckley, whom Roth names (Stain, 3). Yet the language of castration attacks on a visceral level the masculinity personified in the president who should embody ‘the . . . common ideal of a vigorous, strong, undivided manhood’ (Nelson 1998, 34, emphasis added). Rituals joining purification to bodily mortification and even mutilation may re-impose a masculine sense of self-discipline and order but are simultaneously demasculinizing, as Roth implies. In fact, Roth appears, in his account of both Clinton’s and Coleman’s trials, to be commenting on an American unease about masculinity that is related to the discourse about American racial identity, citizenship and the national body This theme is pursued in the novel’s second Clintonian episode, in which Coleman listens, unseen, to three young male Athena College lecturers discussing the impeachment. One of the men opines that ‘Bill Clinton is not the man they say he is’ because he has failed to dominate Monica enough to stop her talking about their liaison (Stain, 146). The speakers agree that other ‘stronger’ American presidents like Kennedy, Truman, Nixon, ‘even Eisenhower’, would have succeeded in shutting up a woman like Monica (149). Clinton, they believe, is ‘Playing it not by his rules, but by hers . . . It’s all wrong’ (149). This conversation reinforces the perception of Clinton as a ‘soft’ president. His ‘loose’ bodily demeanour, though it issues from what many might see as behaviour typical of the powerful male, also displays a lack of masculine control that indicates a

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feminized self. As Deem puts it, Clinton has suffered ‘the loss of masculine privilege through intimate publicity’ which has been partly brought about by his perceived feminization due to his support, for example, of reforms in support of women and minorities (2001, 413). For the male speakers in the novel, the status of president should confer the masculine power to breach the rules of sexual propriety, as presidents like Kennedy have previously done. Clinton’s feminine qualities appear in what the speakers perceive to be his excessive caution: the acceptance of the moral regulation attached to his symbolic role, instanced in his shame-faced attempts to ‘draw the line’ in his liaison with Monica (Stain, 150). For these men, the unwarranted efforts to assert moral propriety by imposing private sexual morality upon the public domain of the courtroom in the Clinton affair are inspired by feminism and are seen as feminizing and weakening the presidential body. Coleman’s response to the lecturers’ conversation about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair suggests a corresponding feminization of Coleman. He makes no contribution to the discussion; he is a passive observer and remains unseen. His reaction to their words is mixed; he at first thinks of the speakers admiringly as ‘tough guys’ who might have supported him if they had been at Athena at the time he was accused of racism, but then quickly dismisses them, however not for their views on the affair but because he judges them to be all talk and no action (153). From Coleman’s point of view, therefore, these men are not masculine enough to defend him. Coleman’s position here seems to be a classically feminine one, of the passive, silent body awaiting strong male defenders – a far cry from his previous classically active male roles and another reminder that, in the wake of his humiliating racism trial and its associated ageing effects, he is no longer a contender at Athena. So Coleman, as ever, presents an ambiguous picture: he is envisaged as less-than-masculine, though it is unclear how much he personally continues to subscribe to the masculine bodily ideal which he no longer represents.

Coleman-as-Monica The ramifications of the Monica Lewinsky affair appear to challenge the masculinity of the national body; and Monica Lewinsky herself seems connected with that challenge. Monica can be seen as a White House insider – as an intern she is a part of an American political entity of great importance to the national body politic – but given its historically masculine political culture she can also be represented as an internal threat to that body. Monica’s political and personal closeness to Clinton means that she can be perceived as infiltrating and influencing the national body, personified in the president, in a way that her accusers find unacceptable. The lecturers’ conversation has already raised the question of whether a national body where women have become active at the heart of government is sufficiently masculine. Monica could perhaps therefore be seen as a contaminant to the national body not only as an agent of sexual corruption but in respect of her potential to exercise undue political influence, especially given the resentment caused by the breach of male entitlement posed by her gender. Roth makes this explicit when Monica is named by one of the lecturers as ‘Big Mouth’; this

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capitalized epithet indirectly references two earlier scandals of the 1970s which link sexual and political corruption and which surface in American Pastoral: the porn film Deep Throat that brought notoriety to its star Linda Lovelace; and the later political leaks issuing from a member of the Nixon administration at the time of Watergate, who was labelled Deep Throat after the Lovelace character (Stain, 148). But the lecturers’ conversation also indicates that Monica’s dissolute nature might simultaneously derive from her Jewishness. Roth sets up the connection just before the ‘Big Mouth’ epithet appears, when one of the speakers calls her ‘the most exhibitionistic Jewish girl in the history of Beverley Hills, utterly corrupted by privilege’ (147, emphasis added). This reference to Monica’s being Jewish takes place during a discussion which also pulls in not only her gender but also her youth (she is a member of that ‘dopey culture . . . proud of its shallowness’ and full of an unmerited sense of entitlement), and her class – her ‘privileged’ upbringing (147). In this exchange, Roth seems to be creating a network of adverse definitions of Monica which mark an angry response of middleclass Wasp men to the advancement on, and threatened penetration of, the American national body by predatory females and ambitious post-immigrant Jews. The Big Mouth epithet plays upon stereotypes not only of the loose-mouthed female but also of the insufficiently controlled, extravagantly loud Jew. This view of Monica as a treacherous Jewish insider/intruder, betraying her president and making him vulnerable to attack from his political opponents, combines unfavourable images of Jews, pre-dating World War II, as sources of disease and deformity in relation to the American national body with the later view of them as assimilated bodies. It also recalls Coleman’s father’s more hopeful view of Jews as ‘Indian scouts’ (97). The sense of penetrative threat is actually voiced by one speaker in the metaphorical context of Monica taking the national temperature: ‘She stuck a thermometer up the country’s ass. Monica’s U.S.A.’ (148).12 Monica is a female – and Jewish – sign of the times and of unwelcome changes pressed upon the national constitution by women and minorities. The ambiguous vision of Monica as simultaneously insider and outsider in relation to the national body, its potential corrupter and betrayer, conjures up a strange symbiosis between her and Coleman. Roth embeds the questions about Coleman’s masculinity in his identity as a Jew. Coleman’s nickname Silky’ – his slippery quality – echoes those mutable, chameleonic attributes of the Jewish male that militate against the hard-bodied, well-defined and visible masculinity of the ideal American male. This mutability has historically led to Jewish men being labelled as effeminate or at any rate as less-than-masculine, as Sander Gilman has explained in Jewish Self-Hatred (c.1986). It is also notable that the arguments which in the not-too-distant past have deemed women to be unworthy of suffrage or other aspects of full citizenship – that they are lacking in control, over-emotional and incapable of exercising reason at higher levels – are similar to the ones used to exclude some groups of low-status men, notably blacks but also Jews, from full participation. Thus debates about race or 12

The italicized U.S.A. refers to the subversive novel of that title by John Dos Passos (1938). Roth aligns the concepts of physical possession of the nation with its possession by force of language, or by the process of ‘interpellation’.

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ethnicity and gender intersect to produce fears about who exactly might jeopardize the health of the American national body. The double-ended process of incorporation we have seen between Coleman and his America has become a more disruptive operation of penetration and counterpenetration involving Coleman and the national body. So, while Coleman is seen by Roth in some respects as bearing comparison with Clinton in being a soft-bodied male contaminated by sexual scandal, Coleman’s assumed status as a Jew, the racial cover for his hidden blackness, makes him the invisible traitor within the American national body and thus disconcertingly like Monica. Roth’s reading of this late-twentieth-century American allegory seems to have constituted Coleman as both parties in the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. Roth portrays Coleman and Monica, or Coleman-as-Monica, as having invaded the presidential or national body, their invisible bodies threatening to become visible and thus disrupting established notions of the integrated national body by showing that this controlled white male body is actually permeated by racial and gender difference. By inviting a comparison between the disruptive male and female bodies The Human Stain avoids situating its betrayals predominantly in the female body as happens with American Pastoral’s ‘dangerous girls’. Roth also, I would argue, interrogates the notion of treachery here even more effectively than in either American Pastoral or I Married a Communist by coding it in Coleman’s genes and thus making it intrinsic to American embodiment. The Human Stain therefore works much of the time to dissolve American myths about masculinity; but it also sometimes hesitates on the edge of nostalgia for an older masculine model of an American national body often represented in Roth’s work by Franklin D. Roosevelt; a model loudly praised, as we have seen, by the Athena lecturers to whose position Coleman reacts ambivalently. Roth’s position here may certainly be described as detached from the lecturers’ enthusiasm for ‘tough guy’ masculinity. He does not straightforwardly endorse the lecturers’ assumption that feminism is responsible for the threat to Clinton and, by extension, to liberal politics. The novel’s Coleman – Clinton – Monica triangle, symbolizing as it does a complex interplay of racial politics, sexual politics and party politics in the Clinton years, signals that feminism is far from being the only movement to exert what might be regarded as being undue pressure on the public domain and the language of public discourse. Rather, it shows American moralism to stem from complex interactions between feminism, racial identity politics, collusive liberalism, the scandal-mongering, mediafed populism that embraces ‘moral disgrace as public entertainment’ and the rightwing conservatism that has aimed to unseat Clinton and halt liberal reforms: all those forces which have constituted Coleman’s state of trial (Communist, 284). In this way Roth exposes the power play that informs the language of morality as all these different interest groups assert jurisdiction over that language. Nevertheless, Coleman does feel American propriety to be a feminized quality, ‘a dominatrix in a thousand disguises . . . tyrannical and “de-virilizing”’ (153). The gendering of ‘American propriety’ as ‘de-virilizing’ and as a ‘dominatrix in a thousand disguises’ is thought-provoking, alluding to women’s historical role in enforcing social regulation upon men, and upon men’s ambivalence to a role which they have at once required of women yet impatiently rejected. The novel also connects American

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propriety’s contemporary manifestation as political correctness with what has been called the ‘victim culture’, which has arisen, some feel, from identity politics, with the perverse effect of disempowering minorities by painting them as passive victims of history and circumstance with no agency to change their conditions. For Roth the passivity linked with claiming victim status seems to be joined to an urge on the part of those who determine victim status and allocate benefits to patrol the boundaries of decorum to ensure an entitlement is deserved by its recipient. Roth seems to feel these developments are damaging to the (masculine) self and codes them as feminine. Consequently, one might wonder whether The Human Stain to any extent reflects a desire to restore the masculine bodily boundaries it works so hard to erode. Zuckerman’s meditation on the president’s body suggests a traditional rendition of the masculine figure when Zuckerman daydreams of a ‘mammoth banner’ draping the White House in the manner of the iconic Christo wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin; the banner bears the words, ‘A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE’ (3).13 This affirmation of the presidential body by Zuckerman (so often employed as Roth’s ‘alter brain’) at first seems to deflate the notion of the president as embodying the nation, since it reduces the president to the level of an individual human being (McGrath, 7 May 2000). Yet the mammoth banner with its phallic properties might appear to re-inflate the masculine and white symbolism of the president in the process of making a point about the national body being reunited with its sexual aspect. The question would then be: Does Roth’s human being continue to be written as the wholesome American citizen, with all the inclusions or exclusions that legibility implies? However, the Christo-style banner is also suggestive of something very different but closely connected with the themes we have been pursuing of visibility, legibility and race – the shrouded ghostly figure of the ‘spook’, and possibly also the white robe of the Ku Klux Klanner. The Human Stain does, in the end, seem less expressive of a desire to restore masculine visibility and bodily boundaries than of bringing human ‘spookiness’, in all the senses we have explored, home to the White House in contemporary America.

Conclusion: Opposing ‘total scrutability’ The Human Stain presents ‘the jumble, the mayhem, the mess . . . life, in all its shameless impurity’ (Stain, 3). Moral propriety, Roth seems to say, operates by enforcing an excessive legibility, aiming to close down debates over what is morally acceptable by insisting on ‘conventionalized narratives’ of closure such as at the close of the legal trial (147). That categorizing imperative, the lust for purity, has also ideologically sustained America’s racial segregation and its fundamental injustices. Roth contests the word ‘appropriate’ as a ‘current code word for reining in most any deviation from 13

Christo is a Bulgarian-born American artist, whose signature work consists of temporarily wrapping in fabric large structures, including buildings. In 1995, during its restoration, he famously wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin, which now houses the German Parliament: a container for the newly unified democratic German ‘body’.

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the wholesome guidelines’, whether that appropriateness be exercised as the control of speech or sexual behaviour, or as racialized politics be it the traditional politics of exclusion or identity politics (152). The Human Stain explicates the not-alwaysexpected overlapping of American political conservatism, bedrock puritanical moral righteousness and the language of political correctness, showing how all these cultural strands rely on the oppressive use of ‘total scrutability’ to monitor the boundaries of national life. In common with Ellison’s Invisible Man, The Human Stain resists the drive towards legibility: it finally refuses to define what-is-Coleman. Coleman’s contentious body tests the myth of the unified and wholesome white American male body by bringing to it the contaminating human stain of racial and sexual promiscuity, thus dissolving the national body from within. The close connection Roth establishes between Coleman and the figures of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky further exemplifies what he sees as the uncertain state of the national body in regard to race and masculinity. The dissolution of the nation’s bodily boundaries might simultaneously make space for the unknowable, thus for change; yet it risks the chaos of utter formlessness. America’s controlling narrative risks total illegibility. Coleman’s sons try to impose a closed narrative about their father at his funeral; they are determined to re-impose order and control upon a life story which they believe has gone desperately awry. The funeral narrative aims posthumously to reinstate Coleman within the Athena community by ignoring Coleman’s affair with Faunia and thus disregarding her death; by accepting that his death was an accident rather than murder; and, most crucially, by burying him as a Jew, that is, with his whiteness confirmed. Hence the complexity of Coleman’s story would be flattened and obscured by the family whitewash, betraying his memory. However, despite his family’s best efforts, Coleman’s life story recalls a telling point of Ferguson’s about trial narratives: that failed trials (trials where there is doubt about the judgement) generate fiction (2007, 262–3). Ferguson is speaking about the difference between the legal and ‘official’ story produced by the trial result and the nonlegal narratives which surround controversial cases, persisting in fuelling discussion well after the trial result has been announced. Coleman’s racial harassment hearing is a failed trial, followed by moralistic speculations about his behaviour and reputation – communal fictions which his family intends to replace by the ‘official’ version of his life story at the communal ritual of his funeral. The story’s incompleteness nevertheless generates another narrative to challenge it – Zuckerman’s – a narrative whose own unreliability, however, makes it also treacherous. Inevitably, given the gaps in his story, Zuckerman’s novel about Coleman is a re-creation of the man as a product of Zuckerman’s need to understand him; it occludes him behind Zuckerman’s perception of how he might have been. So, on a purely textual level too, Coleman is at once a visible and an invisible presence, both legible and illegible. A related example of the impact on trials of a moralistic public discourse is the debate over Clinton’s deposition in court that he had not perjured himself by denying he was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky. As Andrew D. Weiner says, when ‘the President’s lawyers tried to make the case that what the President did does not fit the

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legal definition of perjury, editorials in major newspapers mockingly dismissed their arguments as merely “legalisms”, apparently on the theory that since we all “knew” that he had lied, these attempts to draw meaningless distinctions could only be meant to confuse us’ (2001, 179). This takes us back to the ‘Everyone knows’ of the anonymous message to Coleman and draws attention to the wider political context of this public surveillance of private morals. Roth certainly critiques the mingling of the private realm with the legal realm in the Clinton/Lewinsky case, while demonstrating how some of the most critical debates relative to contemporary American culture, concerning the uses of power in language, politics and the law, are produced in that crossover realm between the private and the juridical. At the same time Roth hints at oppositional forms of language generated outside the courtroom being the most effective way to achieve justice in the sense of a fair hearing. The Human Stain’s evocation of ‘spookiness’ in connection with political correctness and the language of race raises pertinent questions concerning the relation between free speech and what has been termed hate speech. In previous chapters I have referred to the question of how language might have the ‘interpellative power’ to constitute the individual subject (Butler 1997, 2), indicating how Roth exposes the incipient contradictions and disconnections between language and actions, as in Ira Ringold’s subversion of his performed American personae by his uncontrollable speech acts. The disjunction between speech and the act it portends has ‘auspicious implications’ according to Butler, since ‘it begins a theory of linguistic agency that provides an alternative to the relentless search for a legal remedy [for hate speech]’ (1997, 15). While Butler is of course highly sensitive to the ‘on-going subjection’ that is produced by the interpellation of the subject, she argues for ceasing the attempt to ‘maintain jurisdiction’, as Roth himself puts it, over hurtful and hateful acts of speech, positing that to ‘insist on the gap between speech and conduct . . . is to lend support for the role of non-juridicial forms of opposition, ways of restaging and resignifying speech’ (1997, 23, 27, emphasis added). The Human Stain suggests not only that the language of racial categorization and discrimination has persistently worked to disempower black Americans, but also that the language of political correctness has a similarly damaging result. This damage occurs because politically correct language, too, operates on the basis of rigid discriminations between races and so is wholly inadequate to encompass thinking about American identity as racial identity; in fact, it is denigratory even to those groups it is nominally trying to support. It enforces ‘total scrutability’ as continual boundary checking of language acts, taking no account of the productive gaps that open up in-between categories: gaps that indicate, not the ‘diversity’ of identity politics, but the full range of human diversity. In The Human Stain, Roth is engaged in ‘restaging and resignifying speech’ to imaginatively oppose racially categorizing language. Roth achieves this resignification by finding ‘the perfect word’, ‘spooks’, to draw the symbolic pairings of visibility/ invisibility and legibility/illegibility around that central theme of race (Stain, 84). Just as importantly, he engineers that series of partial revelations of Coleman which prompts a second reading of the text in light of what the reader comes to know about

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Coleman. That is, Coleman’s story simply cannot be understood by one sequential reading or as a series of categorical moves: only through the process of interpretation and reinterpretation can it begin to be comprehended. Roth is embedding in his text, then, the ‘restaging and resignification’ upon which the opposition to the oppressive force of language depends. He consequently brings the reader to understand and accept the need to always get someone ‘slightly wrong’. In evading closure of Coleman’s story, Roth, as he has often done before, extends his novel’s metaphor of bodily disintegration to the narrative’s own framework, leaving its challenge to American history and mythology still at work culturally. By keeping Coleman’s story unresolved, increasing the re-interpretative obligation on the reader, Roth perhaps maximizes its power of re-signification and thus its oppositional potential. Coleman’s aim in living is to place himself beyond all judgement in never being accountable to history or to a people. But Coleman’s Jewish identity, a form of performance, works to make his existence subject solely to others’ morally judgemental perceptions of him, instead of freeing him from their judgement as he has wished. Zuckerman speculates that Coleman is perhaps ‘merely being another American’ in the arrogance of his individualism and the audacious lengths to which he has gone in the pursuit of happiness (Stain, 334). The novel is, on one level, a meditation on how much is gained, and how much lost, by the individual in such a pursuit. Roth demonstrates in Coleman’s turnings of the self between whiteness and not-whiteness, visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, that either side of these opposing states can promise power to the individual, but that each ultimately tends to disempowerment as the self inevitably becomes bound by the limitations of time, place and its own vulnerable and stained humanity. The Human Stain’s turning point upon the word ‘spooks’, along with its capacity to expand outwards to explore public discourse on subjects of the deepest interest, demonstrates Roth’s supremacy as a writer. He joins Ellison in testing ‘the perfect word’, while debating with him the clouded subject of race in America. Coleman once more evidences Roth’s tenet that ‘getting people right’ is finally impossible; that their vitality and the narrator’s success lies in ‘getting them wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again’ (Pastoral, 35). The Human Stain, finally, places Coleman’s illegible ‘spookiness’, his racial turbulence, at the heart of the nation that has forced him to become half-visible.

6

The Plot against America and the Trials of the American Constitution

Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004), set in a fascist-leaning 1940s America that is disturbingly strange but strangely familiar, is one of his most profound – and pessimistic – reflections on his post-war nation. In this novel Roth continues, but disrupts, that circularity we have noted in his American Trilogy. The Trilogy persistently returns to the 1940s as the point of origin for a scrutiny of the Vietnam era, the McCarthyite period and the time of the Clinton impeachment. The Plot against America, alternatively, stays in the 1940s almost throughout; but creates another version of the 1940s where America becomes subject to an extreme right-wing, fascist-leaning and anti-Semitic political administration headed by President Charles Lindbergh. In this way, the novel produces an imaginary parallel to the historical 1940s, which it transforms into the prime location for the disturbances to democracy that Roth has already shown to have historically plagued the nation in the subsequent decades. Published in the wake of 9/11, the novel’s social and political landscape reflects a pathology that, felt many critics who reviewed it, owed a great deal to the atmosphere of fear and suspicion triggered by the anti-American terrorist acts of 2001, a fear sustained by the US government’s coercive response to those acts.1 The narrative opens in Philip Roth’s own hometown of Newark in 1940 – the year before America, according to our history books, entered World War II on the side of Britain and the Allied forces – and is centred on a fictional Roth family consisting of 7-year-old Philip, his older brother, Sandy, and their parents, Herman and Bess Roth.

1

Steven G. Kellman sees parallels with the ‘climate of fear’ after 9/11 (113) in ‘It Is Happening Here: The Plot against America and the Political Moment’ (2008, 113–23). Matthew S. Schweber detects a response by Roth to populism and America’s ‘enduring conspiratorial tradition’ (135), tracing it through to 9/11, in ‘Philip Roth’s Populist Nightmare’ (2005, 125–37). See also Gabriel Brownstein ‘Fight or Flight’ (Village Voice, 27 September 2004) and Jonathan Yardley ‘Homeland Insecurity’ (Washington Post, 3 October 2004). Roth himself, though, cautioned an interview against making direct comparisons between the Lindbergh administration and the second Bush administration, saying that it would be ‘a mistake’ to read it as ‘a roman a clef ’ (New York Times, 23 September 2004). As does this book, most scholarly studies resist direct parallels between Plot and post 9-11 America; some move away almost altogether from such comparisons, such as Catherine Morley’s, ‘Memories of the Lindbergh Administration: Plotting, Genre, and the Splitting of the Self in The Plot against America’ (2008, 137–52) and Gurumurthy Neelakantan’s ‘Philip Roth’s Nostalgia for the Yiddishkayt and the New Deal Idealisms in The Plot against America’ (2008, 125–36).

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Philip’s imaginary childhood unfolds in an America which at this crucial point in its history has elected not Franklin D. Roosevelt (as actually occurred in 1940) but the anti-war isolationist and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh as president. The Plot against America subsequently reveals a nation in an ever-intensifying state of cultural and political disorder that impacts upon the US Constitution and tests the meanings of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’. Roth works out this disorder figuratively through charting its disturbances to male fraternal bodies, as he examines the consequences for the fictional Roths of living in a nation from which they increasingly feel estranged. He explores the warping of the bonds between them and their nation under the pressure of anti-democratic and innately anti-Semitic measures enacted by the new Lindbergh administration: measures fostering a reciprocal fear of conspiracy or ‘plots’ between Jewish-Americans and other Americans and, indeed, creating a culture of conspiracy. Indeed, the narrative is dominated stylistically and tonally by paranoia and melancholia, two historically associated maladies.2 The conspiratorial mind-set reflected in the novel emerges historically from a cultural paranoia that, many have argued, has grown in response to the rapidly changing, uncertain and anxiety-producing conditions of modern life. And, according to Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, a paranoid conspiratorial mode of thought ‘represents an old and recurrent mode of expression in [American] public life’ that ‘while it comes in waves of different intensity . . . appears to be all but ineradicable’ (1966, 6).3 Paranoia manifests an obsession with seeking out patterns of ‘hidden meanings that lie just beneath the surface’ of often bewildering events, thereby justifying the paranoid’s suspicions that they are preplanned and connected (Siegel 1994, 6). The unifying national narratives that Roth has consistently interrogated, such as the American Way and pastoralism in American Pastoral, can be seen to contribute to a paranoid vision of the world in that they always require a feared and suspected ‘other’. Paranoid thoughts are ‘acts of interpretation gone awry’ (Freeman 2008, 88). But a paranoid-seeming thought might in fact be correct, as Roth reveals near the novel’s conclusion when Lindbergh’s plane disappears leaving America in the hands of an acting administration, which does indeed conspire to impose an unconstitutional jurisdiction over the nation, and thereby eventually justifies the Roths’ long-standing fears. The novel shows how the concept of legible citizenship provided by the Constitution becomes obscured by an increasingly paranoid national narrative. 2

3

Paranoia is defined as (1) ‘a mental state characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically worked into an organized system. It may be an aspect of chronic personality disorder . . .’ or (2) ‘unjustified suspicion and mistrust of other people’. Its usage here relates more closely to the second, demedicalized, definition. Melancholia is ‘a feeling of deep sadness’ secondarily defined as a pathological condition of ‘severe depression’ (Oxford Dictionary of English). Paranoia has been historically associated with depression and neurosis, its association tending to change from neurosis to psychosis during the course of the nineteenth century (Freeman 2008, 20–1). Hofstadter does not see the paranoid style as confined to America, nor does he choose to delve into its historical causes, but he suggests that ‘certain features of our history have given the paranoid style more scope and force among us than it has had in many other countries of the Western world’ (7).

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Instead of examining the drawbacks of excessive legibility as did The Human Stain, it asks what happens when citizens like the Roths, whose status has been unquestioned and who have been at home in the culture, can no longer ‘read’ what is happening in their nation so their everyday life becomes a foreign language distorted by paranoia. The novel expresses how legibility fails not only in official texts but also in cultural and historical signs and symbols, and even the nation’s geographical landscape, emphasizing most of all the political threat to the legibility and impermeability of the American Constitution as a ‘sheltering wall of legal assurances’, which is ultimately the Roths’ only protection (Plot, 338). This chapter explores how the Roths’ new cultural illiteracy constitutes a space of trial that is actualized by the ramifications of a new legislation titled Homestead 42: legislation that aims to disperse Jews throughout the country by redeploying their workplaces and homes, thus splitting Jewish communities and nullifying their voting power. Recalling that the concept of democracy is founded upon the notion of brotherhood, the novel articulates a crisis of fraternity through its paranoid and melancholic construction of the young Jews growing to manhood in Lindbergh’s America, showing how the bonds among Philip, Sandy, their adolescent cousin Alvin and Philip’s friend and neighbour, Seldon, are put under an increasing strain. The failing sense of fraternity among these vulnerable boys reflects the maiming of the American democratic body politic under Lindbergh, the archetypal ‘brother’, whose homogenizing image, proliferating nation-wide through the modern media, relentlessly excludes alternative images of democratic community. Damaged fraternity produces the paranoid figure of the brother as a conspirator: a double-sided, treacherous figure exemplified in the Roth youngsters, which nevertheless envisions American and Jewish identities as being inextricably interlinked. The flickering turns between the identities of the brother and the conspirator echo the paranoid double focus of the novel: the turning between the states of normal everyday life, or homeliness, and growing estrangement from that life, or unhomeliness. Roth demonstrates how the brother/conspirator figure is symptomatic of a fundamental democratic deficit that generates, and is itself intensified by, paranoid thinking. At the same time, this treacherous figure exhibits Roth’s customary emphasis on the self as being multiple, ever-changing and turbulent. In drawing this disturbing portrait of America, The Plot against America grapples with writing a history that never happened, yet still has historical resonance; it can be seen as recycling the paranoid and conspiratorial vapours pervading the later Republican decades and especially post-9/11 America through this earlier ‘history’. In so doing, Roth expresses the notion that a crisis of national identity emerging from the wartime years has brought about and sustained a vicious post-war cycle of fear and conspiratorial thinking that threatens damage to the Constitution. The chapter will ask whether or not the novel’s interlinked motifs of paranoia and conspiracy partake of conspiracy theory (the universalization of the conspiratorial plot) considering how the novel engages with Fredric Jameson’s concept of ‘the social totality’ as a conspiracy (1992, 5). This concept is an expression of the conspiracy theory which Jameson describes as emanating from ‘the widespread paralysis of the collective and social

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imaginary’ and as a characteristic creative response to the ungraspable complexities of late capitalism (1992, 9). We will investigate how the novel might be engaging with and critiquing what Jameson calls the ‘conspiratorial text’ and how, finally, it might be moving beyond conspiracy theory by identifying the causes of what its last chapter title labels ‘Perpetual Fear’ (1992, 2).

The brotherhood of Roth: American fraternity examined ‘We were a happy family in 1940’, Roth writes at the start of the narrative, evoking an as yet untested Jewish-American nucleus of father, mother and two sons all wellembedded within their national surroundings (Plot, 2). Their familial and cultural harmony is expressed by their speaking American English that sounds ‘more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton’ than that of their co-religionists in nearby New York (4). The Roths have even played a minor role in their national mythology, since Mrs Roth has conceived her elder son, Sandy, on the very day in 1927 that Charles Lindbergh completed his record-breaking nonstop solo flight from Long Island to Paris, a flight affirming the connection of two democratic republics founded on the ideal of fraternity. The young Lindbergh thus becomes part of the Roths’ family mythology, in a synthesis of personal and national achievement and aspiration recorded at a later date by Sandy himself, a gifted young artist, in a drawing ‘illustrating the juxtaposition of those two splendid events’ (5). The 7-year-old Philip, a keen stamp collector – his hobby inspired by the ruling genius of his family and the nation, ‘the country’s foremost philatelist, President Roosevelt’ – also possesses an image of Lindbergh’s triumphant flight in the form of one of his most prized and valuable stamps (1). The spirit of brotherhood, seemingly personified in the youthful American aviator, firmly unites Sandy with his younger brother, Philip, when Sandy uses the design of a commemorative Arbor Day postage stamp in Philip’s collection as the basis for a prizewinning poster celebrating Arbor Day. The poster portrays three children planting a tree; one is black, a figure inspired by Philip’s stamp of Booker T. Washington. The inclusion of the black child where none existed on the original Arbor Day stamp already comments on national exclusions prior to the events that will so greatly affect the Roths. Nonetheless, at this point the Roth boys’ reception and reproduction of this iconography besides expressing their brotherly unity also indicates the all-butindelible link between themselves and the nation. Yet Roth shows how the two begin to pull apart almost as soon as that link has been registered, when Lindbergh is chosen as Republican candidate on a populist anti-war, isolationist and incipiently antiSemitic ticket after making a radio campaign speech referring to American Jews as warmongering ‘other peoples’ (13). The novel subsequently charts the results of the transfer of national power from the fatherly figure of FDR, who symbolically projects national authority and control through the practice of philately, to the boyish yet dominant figure of the aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. It is during

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this new Lindberghian era that Philip and his older brother, Sandy, growing to manhood with American aspirations embodied in male role models like those celebrated on the national postage, now experience for the first time the meaning of exclusion from the national life. Philip’s father’s credentials as a citizen have already started to be eroded by the time the family visits Washington in November 1940, just after Lindbergh’s election. The Roths seek reassurance from the familiar iconography of the historic landmarks of American democracy such as the US Capitol and the White House, wishing to be confirmed as citizens at the ‘very heart of American history’ in the face of their own growing doubts about their status (58). However, Roth’s narrative ‘makes illegible the American landscape’ to their eyes, in Lauren Berlant’s words about Hawthorne’s work (1991, 34). When they enter Washington they accidentally drive along the approach to the Capitol, the historic centre of American government and law-making, only to be turned back and escorted away by a policeman on a motorbike. After that, they are ejected from their hotel on spurious grounds. Subsequently, at the Lincoln Memorial, their admiration of the Gettysburg Address is ruined when Herman Roth is called ‘a loudmouth Jew’ by another tourist for denigrating Lindbergh (Plot, 65). To add to their alienation from the cultural landscape, their view of these familiar landmarks is obscured and distorted by the sight of Lindbergh’s plane overflying them while other Americans cheer their new president. Silently, they have ‘no choice but to stand there like patriots and watch with the rest of them as it banked and flew back over George Washington’s home’ (75). In becoming estranged from the American landscape the Roth family loses its place within the culture. From being citizens who are also tourists they become tourists who are outsiders, not at home in their own country. The sense of exclusion from full citizenship impinges most directly on Herman Roth who, as a man, for reasons we have previously outlined, has had a more immediate sense of expectation to that entitlement. Continuing to follow Gilmore’s argument about the legibility of American culture – the deep-rooted concern with texts deemed central to the culture being visible and available for scrutiny – we can observe that the Roths’ inability to correctly ‘read’ the iconography of their national monuments in the new age of Lindbergh signifies their exclusion from the national body. Their estrangement from the cultural mythology that emanates from the Washington monuments to imbue the American sense of self is communicated by Herman Roth’s despairing observation that other Americans now ‘live in a dream and we live in a nightmare’ (76). After the Lindbergh nomination Sandy chooses to keep his portraits of Lindbergh, hiding them under his bed rather than destroying them as he has told his parents. Only Philip is party to this first serious deception that Sandy has practised upon his parents. The uneasy sense of secrecy that now unites the two brothers also marks a growing division of outlook between the boys. Philip continues to follow his parents in fearing and distrusting Lindbergh (though continuing to guard his valuable Lindbergh stamp), even as Sandy appears to accept the possibility of a Lindbergh presidency with equanimity. The Lindbergh persona embodies the tensions that

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begin to divide these brothers even as they temporarily unite in guilty association; the linked themes of fraternal breakdown and fraternal conspiracy now start to come into play.

Regime of the brother: Nazism and populism in Lindbergh’s America Lindbergh’s image combines the power and authority of the future president with the energetic urgency and transformative power suited to an icon of a nation founded upon the ideals of democratic fraternity, making him irresistible to the majority of his countrymen, among them Sandy Roth. Lindbergh, the ‘legendary American man’s man who gets the impossible done by relying solely on himself ’, taps into and exploits the highly individualistic and aggrandizing mythical representations of American manhood we have previously considered (30). Lindbergh is portrayed as a man of few words whose appeal rests largely upon his celebrity and his archetypal status; his carefully crafted populist image is broadcast visually nationwide by means of news photography and film. Lindbergh takes to the extreme Barbara Hinckley’s point that the American president is always portrayed as acting alone: ‘[n]ot only is the president the chief symbol of the nation, he is the only one’ (1990, 48). To most Americans in the troubled year of 1940, Lindbergh exceeds even the heroic status he achieved in 1927 to become almost god-like. His daring and assertive flights seem to unite a sense of supreme leadership with the trope of the journey underlying the progressive mythology of American nationhood. Lindbergh’s significations of youthful, strong, well-bounded virility not only perfectly express the concept of undivided manhood whose nationalistic connotations and internal contradictions we have been exploring, but weld it even more firmly to a fraternal representation already implicit in a modern democracy. Lindbergh’s undivided manhood possesses an extra symbolic dimension in his mastery of the air: he is able to assert the identity of his own active body with the national body by flying across the country to claim it as his own, showing off his ability to police its geopolitical boundaries so as to defend it from whoever might threaten its integrity. These flights enable an immediate and authoritative communication between the would-be president – a former airmail pilot – and other Americans denied to the static figure of FDR the philatelist. Roth contrasts Lindbergh’s activity to the immobility of Roosevelt who is literally the sitting president, while also drawing attention to the generational contrast between FDR the national father and Lindbergh the nation’s brother. His flights are at the centre of Lindbergh’s publicity machine, a machine which has seamlessly integrated a dynamic political campaigning strategy with a series of celebrity-focused popular spectacles thus enabling a supremely successful figurative unification of man with nation. The machinery of flight now becomes an indicator within the narrative of a totalizing culture that is fostering the atmosphere of paranoia and conspiracy.

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The postage stamp, emphasizing nationhood through the national icons and events it commemorates, is utilized by Roth as a signifier throughout the novel for the untoward changes in the concepts of national authority, legitimacy and power relations as America’s leadership passes from Roosevelt to Lindbergh.4 Just before that political transition, the images on the postage, seen in Philip’s anxious dreams, become unstable and threatening. ‘When I opened [the stamp album] to my 1932 Washington Bicentennials . . .’ Philip recounts, ‘Washington wasn’t on the stamps anymore . . . instead of a different portrait of Washington on each of the twelve stamps, the portraits were now the same and no longer of Washington but of Hitler’ (43). Worst of all, and what makes Philip wake up screaming, is that on his scenic 1934 National Parks set of ten stamps, ‘across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika’ (43). The fantasized alteration in the national postage expresses the contamination of what Jameson calls the ‘collective or social imaginary’ (1992, 9). The unreal yet allencompassing quality of these images produced by conspiratorial thinking is signified by the phantasmic swastika superimposed upon the national postage in Philip’s dreams, vanishing in plain sight yet still present to the spectator as an after-image. It reflects a paranoid state in which, as Ronald K. Siegel notes, ‘[p]erceptions change as if the world were being covered with hostile graffiti drawn with a black marker pen’ (1994, 11). The infection of the national postage – the instability of its meaning – similarly brings about a symbolic change in Philip’s prized stamp celebrating the famous journey of Lindbergh’s plane, the Spirit of St Louis. The image of the plane, shown in conjunction with the map outlines of the American, British and Irish coastlines, and with an arrow showing the direction of movement towards France, could seem to metamorphosize in the mind’s eye from an innocuous image of an expedition to an ominous portent of an invasion of Europe. One might surmise that the invisible network created by Lindbergh’s lines of flight across America – a communications network resembling what Jameson calls an ‘x-ray of functional mediations in space’ – comes to represent a conspiratorial power grid that impresses a fascistic stamp upon the nation (1992, 13). Roth’s sinisterly mutating stamp iconography conjures a paranoid vision of the world in which one is constantly observing signs and interpreting them as conspiratorial portents and connects it with a political culture dedicated to the image rather than to the word. The change in import of the postage stamps’ iconography after Lindbergh’s election feeds into a narrative of endangerment, which soon expands to encompass most aspects of everyday life for the Roths. Their subsequent fear that the entire postal system is compromised and that the family’s letters will fall into the hands of the FBI is symptomatic of the conspiratorial thinking that increasingly dominates the Lindbergh 4

The postage stamp is of course a prime image bearer for the nation, and it has consequently been shrewdly noted that ‘stamps are far from being ideologically innocent or politically neutral. Their design is more akin to a site for the resolution and expression of social and political conflict and the promotion and embedding of behavioural and ideological norms’ (Deans and Dobson 2005, 4).

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landscape in its latter stages. The postal system is a particularly powerful example of this kind of representation because it is a national network, which is nevertheless intensely personal and local in significance, uniting the nation’s inhabitants by making its deliveries to every door in the nation and fostering a sense of community.5 The novel thus alludes to the fact that conspiracy culture expresses itself as the proliferation of modern communication systems and the fear of their contamination by hostile elements.6 The novel’s ambiguous description of the Lindbergh image portrayed on Philip’s stamp and Sandy’s poster is as a ‘virile hero. A courageous adventurer. A natural person of gigantic strength and rectitude combined with a powerful blandness’ (Plot, 25, emphasis added). It is in his deconstruction of the ‘powerful blandness’, or sameness, of Lindbergh’s all-American image, that Roth begins to reveal the paranoid streak within fraternity, and the dangers of fraternity when it comes to sustaining democratic nationhood in America. The Plot against America in fact presents us with a study in an American brotherhood that is subject to the gravest of tensions. For Nelson, national manhood is ‘an ideology that has worked powerfully . . . to link a fraternal articulation of white manhood to civic identity’ (1998, ix). ‘Fraternity’ is seen to be a construct rather than a biological relationship among siblings; it is concerned with the civic bond among males rather than with the purely familial bond. As Jacques Derrida says in The Politics of Friendship, ‘[t]he relation of the brother engages from the start with the order of the oath, of credit, of belief and of faith. The brother is never a fact’ (2005, 159). But, at the same time, fraternity signifies a kinship that entails a sense of familiarity, a recognition of selfhood in the person of the chosen brother. Therefore, underpinning the concept of fraternity that is embedded in democracy is the assumption of fundamental sameness, a certain notion of equality which is inscribed in a close relationship between males where both parties resemble each other and reflect to the other his own image. It partakes of what Derrida calls a ‘double singularity or dual’ (2005, 276). As such, it might be said to derive from the ‘narcissistic projection of the ideal image’ of self, or Lindbergh’s ‘normalcy raised to heroic proportions’ (Derrida 2005, 3; Plot, 53). According to this narcissistic model, what Derrida terms ‘the original friend’ is only to be found in fraternity (2005, 150). It is therefore distinct from what Derrida is seeking by the term ‘friendship’, which would evoke an alternative concept of community by embracing the ‘other’. Within modern democracies, and certainly in the United States, fraternity has been conceived of as a union of equals which has been intrinsically linked to, and limited by, maleness and whiteness, and has thus exhibited a narcissistic drive towards sameness. Such a model is self-evidently exclusive of others; furthermore, narcissism can be seen to reflect paranoid traits. Narcissism and paranoia share an intense focus on the self and a grandiose vision of the self, which are also features of Lindbergh’s cultish celebrity 5

6

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, set in a conspiratorial landscape during the 1960s, employs the postal system as a key element in that landscape. See for example Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Culture, from Kennedy to the X-Files (London; New York: Routledge, 2000) on the symbiotic link between contemporary entertainment and political media and the culture of conspiracy.

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status; a vision sustained by the new president’s many admirers.7 In The Plot against America it is Roosevelt, not Lindbergh, who articulates a more inclusive fraternity by referring to Americans as ‘fellow-citizens’ and who invokes the classic texts guaranteeing previously established rights of citizenship (Plot, 28).8 Undivided manhood, collapses this respectful distance into narcissism and operates in a mythological realm that taps into national fears and prejudices against the ‘other’. Moreover, the strains on fraternity occurring in a nation with a capitalist economy, which in practice encourages competitive individualism, eventually render it ineffective and unrewarding even for its greatest beneficiaries. Bearing these linkages in mind, an American fraternity centred on the figure of Lindbergh produces a hollowing-out of fraternal representation. Brotherhood is betrayed and distorted in two ways: firstly, it becomes paranoid as the Lindbergh administration fosters the conviction that conspiracies or ‘plots’ are being fabricated by others to engineer its betrayal and downfall. The administration’s political moves implicitly deny fraternity to America’s Jews, so that their status turns from ‘original friend’ to the enemy within. The young ‘brothers’ in the novel are consequently transformed into co-conspirators who also, moreover, begin to turn against and betray each other. Secondly, in a related move, brotherhood becomes suffused with melancholy, a paralyzing sense of enduring loss and sadness. According to Freud, melancholia represents a loss that is ‘withdrawn from consciousness’ but nevertheless results in an unexpressed ‘mental constellation of revolt’ (1957, 245, 248). This condition originates in hostility towards the object from which the loss emanates (in this case, the ideal of fraternity itself), but which hostility is then turned in upon the self in a sometimes suicidal manner. This melancholia permeates the narrative of The Plot against America, forming a second current of its theme of failing brotherhood. As we now know, the fraternal ideal’s urge towards sameness, described by Derrida and related by Nelson to American national manhood, is identified by both writers with a narcissistic homogeneity, which has been shown to be connected with paranoid inclinations. Translated into political terms, it is possible to see how a democratic state which gives in to a homogenizing populism can be transmuted into a fascistic state which displays pathological symptoms; it is this process whose operation Roth charts in The Plot against America. The populism that sweeps Lindbergh to power in 1940 contains fascistic elements. His candidacy is supported by America First, a far-right organization with broad-based support across the nation; by radical rightwing demagogues like Charles E. Coughlin who openly believe in theories of Jewish conspiracy such as the Illuminati; and by the media on network radio and popular 7

8

Christopher Lasch’s key work The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations describes the connections between narcissism and the cult of celebrity (1978, 21–2, 33, 84, 231–2). Indeed, in Roosevelt’s evocation of citizenship we begin to approach Derrida’s concept of ‘friendship’ rather than fraternity as the model for democracy. As a relationship marked by respect and responsibility towards each other, appreciative of a certain distance between the parties rather than being governed by the longing for the self-image, ‘friendship’ can recognize the friend as ‘other’ yet still exist within accepted and regulated boundaries of community such as the legal (and legible) framework of citizenship.

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magazines. For the representatives of the far right, as well as for many other Americans, the Adamic traits I have considered in the chapter on American Pastoral combine with the celebrity status engendered by his flying prowess to make Lindbergh at once the representative man and a mystical presence – the ‘man with the magic’ to beat the sitting president (Plot, 13). In uncertain times, with war looming, the novel shows Americans reacting to the losses innate to a democracy under strain by seeking the certainty of unambiguous meanings and simple explanations for complex situations. This leads to the propensity to accept the false certainties of a Lindbergh administration. The centring of meanings upon the presidency, taken to the extreme in the popular responses to Lindbergh, reflects the atmosphere of paranoia that starts to sweep the nation with the imminence of war. The prospect of American involvement in a global conflict compounds the nation’s isolationist tendencies and gives rise to conspiratorial fears which result in America’s Jews being scapegoated as destructive war-mongers and potential traitors. The democratically elected Lindbergh, in the service of maintaining America’s borders inviolate against an outside world at war, immediately allies himself with Hitler in a neutrality pact and begins to create national ‘bodies’, or organizations, such as the Office for American Absorption (OAA) located within the US Department of the Interior, whose function is to neutralize or to expel difference as manifested in the nation’s Jews. And so, as the nation moves out of the aegis of Roosevelt the philatelist and comes under the sway of Lindbergh the former airmail pilot, the young Philip’s troubled imagination sees the deadening standard of the swastika imposed upon all the varied American icons figured on his postage stamps, objects which are stripped of childish and domestic connotations pertaining to the ‘hobby’ and which ‘emerge as vehicles for identity creation and propagation, and as mechanisms for regime legitimation’ (Deans and Dobson 2005, 6). Lindbergh is the keystone of a national unity that recapitulates all the most exclusionary aspects of undivided manhood. Thus does Lindbergh’s image at once promise and betray the ideal of fraternity implicit within American democracy.

The Roth brothers and the failures of fraternity The fraternal bond within Philip’s family starts to fray when Sandy becomes involved with the ‘Just Folks’ programme promoted by the OAA. Sandy leaves Newark to spend the summer with farmers in rural Kentucky; returning home he has become Philip’s ‘brother in disguise’ (Plot, 91). Taller, blonder and more muscular, with a Kentucky twang, Sandy now seems closer to the white manhood of middle-American youth conjured by Lindbergh’s own appearance, demeanour and ‘flat, midwestern’ accent than to the other Roths (29). His adulation of his host, Mr Mawhinney, and his adoption of his son, Orin, as his best friend speak eloquently of the distance travelled from his own family. Philip’s stilted and uneasy conversation with Sandy the ‘stranger’ back in their shared bedroom underlines the rift in a brotherly consciousness that, though

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foreshadowed by their shared guilt over their preserved images of Lindbergh, has previously been unquestioned. Philip’s brief, timid enquiries are answered by Sandy with a lordly superiority that assumes more than simply an older brother’s authority. Sandy’s Kentucky-inflected demotic augurs an Americanness that seems, as with his new habit of eating pork products, to inherently reject the Americanness from which he has come, setting up a speech barrier between him and Philip: ‘Pork chops. They’re good too. They’re great. I don’t really know why we don’t eat it’. ‘Because it’s stuff from a pig’. ‘So what? Why do you think farmers raise pigs? For people to look at ’em? It’s like anything else you eat. You just eat it, and it’s really good’. ‘You going to keep eating it now?’ ‘Sure’. (Plot, 98)

Sandy’s identification with President Lindbergh’s ideal of manhood indicates a move away from his family, which exaggerates and complicates puberty’s outward trajectory by radically changing the model to which he aspires, as the Roths are simultaneously being excluded from the national life, an exclusion fearfully anticipated by Sandy’s father after the Lindbergh inauguration, given Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic comments and their experiences in Washington. Philip’s closest relationship with other boys and young men after Sandy’s return from Kentucky is not with his own brother but with his wounded cousin Alvin who has lost a leg fighting with the Canadian forces against the Germans and who moves in with the Roth family at almost the same time as Sandy comes back. Philip also starts to associate with his neighbour Seldon, a boy whose father is ill and later dies, and who has no other friends but Philip. These figurations of loss and disability mournfully register the loss of the healthy and happy brotherly relationship that has previously existed between Philip and Sandy. They also prefigure the severance from the national body of America’s Jews, a process that starts to happen almost as soon as Lindbergh is elected with the creation of the OAA; the effect of this in the novel is double-edged, so that the symbolic disablement of the Jewish body entails the mutilation of the national body as a whole. The challenge to and overthrow of Roosevelt’s administration – figured as paternalistic with its emphasis on welfare and support of communities – in favour of the narcissistic and exclusionary rule of Lindbergh, is followed by growing familial stresses among the Roths. The fatherly role of Herman Roth is progressively undermined as Sandy and his live-in cousin Alvin oppose him with increasing boldness. At the same time, the youngsters can take no support from each other or pleasure in one another’s company. Philip and Sandy have become estranged, while Sandy and Alvin’s relationship expresses an unspoken antagonism caused by their political differences. Sandy – Philip’s ‘brother in disguise’ – and Alvin, the ‘traitor’ to America who has fought the Germans in the Canadian forces and thus against the American national interest, now openly appear to each other as counterconspirators rather than as brothers. Only Alvin and Philip establish a somewhat uneasy relationship based on

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Philip’s need for a brother-substitute and characterized by the mournful activity of Philip being taught by Alvin how to care for the stump of his missing leg, an activity by which Philip expresses his guilt for Alvin’s loss and into which he pours the nurturing spirit that he senses is now starting to disappear from the household, and specifically from his fraternal relation to Sandy. Increasingly feeling cut off from the national mainstream, Philip eavesdrops on that alien world: with his friend Earl, he begins after school curiously to follow male strangers home into Christian areas of Newark they wouldn’t normally enter, and spy on them. Understanding that ‘the guarantees of citizenship no longer fully extended to them’ and that his father’s American identity has become clouded, he becomes perforce a conspirator against Americans he could once have utilized unselfconsciously as models (225). The boys’ stalking develops the novel’s conspiratorial trope by conceptualizing them as budding spies going after American secrets. Their childish conspiracies reproduce in miniature the figure of the conspiratorial Jew that is embedded in anti-Semitic representations of Jews as communists or alternatively as financiers plotting to dominate the world financial system and that underlies their designation by Lindbergh as ‘other’ peoples. But the boys’ game becomes real when Philip is followed and questioned by an FBI operative about Alvin’s political allegiances. The ‘spy’ now becomes the spied-upon in a two-way conspiratorial move that makes Philip feel like ‘a little criminal because I was a Jew’ (167). These scenes herald the latter days of the Lindbergh presidency when conspiracy seems to be everywhere and the categorical boundaries of conspirator and conspired-against begin to completely break down; but before that happens they indicate the alienation suffered by Philip’s family, now being entrenched in law by the provisions of Homestead 42. As this law begins to bite, the very concept of ‘home’ begins to take on the attributes of a scene of trial for the Roth family.

Homestead 42 and constitutional unsettlement Homestead 42 covertly aims to resettle Jewish employees and their families in an American heartland that contains few other Jews and where Jewish communal cohesion and voting power will be nullified. Its exclusionary function starts to become evident in the very title of the legislation. The definition of ‘homestead’ is, ‘a house, especially a farmhouse and outbuildings’ (Oxford Dictionary of English). Its primary connotations are therefore rural rather than deriving from the urban surroundings to which immigrant communities like the Roths’ forebears have traditionally gravitated. A further historical dictionary definition applied to North America is, ‘an area of land (usually 160 acres) granted to a settler in the West as a home’. This second definition of ‘homestead’ nostalgically evokes the foundational mythology of America upon which the Lindbergh image is deliberately based. The very word homestead is, therefore, alien to the Roths’ conception of home, as befits a measure like Homestead 42, which is actually designed to remove them from their comfortable, familiar surroundings. When we probe the etymology of ‘homestead’ a bit further we discover that the original

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Old English definition is ‘a settlement’. Considering the historical connotations of ‘settlement’ in relation to Jews, one recalls the former Russian Pale of Settlement: an area to which Jewish inhabitants were restricted. Since they could not go beyond the Pale, by the same token they could never consider themselves completely at home within the Pale, since their place of residence was not a question of free personal choice as with other citizens, but had been determined for them by the authorities. In Russia, rights of residence thus became a test boundary of entitlement to full citizenship, as they are about to do for the Roths and other American Jews. Lindbergh’s Homestead 42 is, then, freighted with ambiguous, not to say ominous, associations from the outset, even though the measure is ostensibly intended to free Jewish-Americans from what the Jewish apologist for Lindbergh and head of the OAA, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, patronizingly calls ‘historical fears’, by encouraging greater assimilation into what the administration regards as the American mainstream (Plot, 241). Herman Roth is informed of his impending relocation in a letter from his employer written in compliance with a ‘request’ from the OAA though couched in terms of the freedom of choice and accessibility of opportunity consistent with a democratic society. Quoting the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up the American West to white settlers by granting them the defining 160 acres of ‘unoccupied public land’, the letter claims that the new Homestead program . . . is designed to give emerging American families a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move their households, at government expense, in order to strike roots in an inspiring region of America previously inaccessible to them. Homestead 42 will provide a challenging environment steeped in our country’s oldest traditions where parents and children can enrich their Americanness over the generations. (Plot, 204–5)

The Roths have been selected to move to Danville, Kentucky, population 6,700. Reflecting their new state of cultural estrangement, the Roths, initially at least, demonstrate confusion about how this letter should be read, differing widely in their interpretations. Sandy takes the letter’s euphemistic and jargonistic language, redolent of the advertising mail-shot, at face value as describing an exciting, horizonwidening offer. He is delighted by Danville’s proximity to the Mawhinny farm where he has previously enjoyed the Western lifestyle, whose Americanness is being lauded and promoted by the new government. To Sandy, his mother’s suspicious and fearful response to the letter seems redolent of an Old World neuroticism characteristic of ‘frightened, paranoid ghetto Jews’ (227). His father Herman’s initial reaction is a blend of unease and resignation: ‘it could be worse. . . . We will wind up living out there just about the way we live here. . . . Big companies transfer people all the time’ (206, 208). But his wife, Bess, sees that illegitimate government interference is driving this proposed transformation in their lives: ‘The government cannot do this. They cannot force people to pick up and go’ (208, original emphasis). As a citizen and as a father, Herman Roth has been ‘rendered impotent by his company’s having obediently joined hands with the state’ (209).

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The disguised function of the letter, which Bess Roth finally articulates, is to entrench a legal exclusion of the Roths from full citizenship in that they are being discriminatorily denied free choice of residence in breach of previous rights. Its language however, tries to gloss over this exclusion by employing the rhetoric of equality of opportunity and crudely mobilizing cultural myths about their nation. The exhortation to Jewish families to ‘strike roots’ and to ‘enrich their Americanness’ in the West discounts their firmly existent American roots, including their embrace of American democratic constitutional ideals, and the richness born from their own American immigrant history in its urban Eastern centre. Now, according to the subtext of the letter, the so-called emerging American families are being effectively repatriated back in time to the first immigrant generation to arrive in nineteenthcentury America: the time, un-coincidentally, when the myth of the American West was being created and forged into a part of the national myth of origin, while the residential rights of the West’s original inhabitants were being overridden. By being proffered the dubious promise of an American inheritance grounded in myth, the Roths are denied the American inheritance that is rightfully theirs. In light of the fact that only Jewish employees and their families are affected by Homestead 42, its provisions are entrenching Jewish inequality and are further, newly legalized proof that the guarantees of citizenship no longer fully extend to them. Faced with a discriminatory law, the Roths turn to the Constitution for moral support. Bess asserts that Homestead 42 is ‘not in any constitution that I ever heard of. . . . This is against the law. Everyone knows it is against the law’ (208, original emphasis). ‘The law’ as Bess Roth understands it appears to be an ideal or perfectly democratic law expressed by the American Constitution, as distinguished from the practice of the law evidenced in the enabling legislation of Homestead 42, which she implicitly repudiates as corrupt. She is asserting her belief in the primacy and visibility, or legibility, of America’s foundational laws regarding equal treatment of its citizens: her belief, as Gilmore puts it, that ‘the Constitution makes the polity’s structure legible to ordinary men and women. It abstracts the government into a readily available form that anyone can examine’ (2003, 49). Yet, as Michael Foley points out, ‘[i]n reality, the constitution is replete with anomalies, gaps, and areas of utter unsettlement which, even after two hundred years of adjudication, remain as unsettled as ever’ (1989, 126). Neither are the workings of the Supreme Court clearly legible in that they are not readily available to American citizens, with all except the relatively few cases explicitly addressing constitutional provisions being turned away, and also in that ‘[j]udicial consistency is unknown; final authoritative judgments are unavailable’ (Foley 1989, 126). Furthermore, the Court has over time been deeply integrated with the overall political structure of the nation, with appointments to it being made on a politically partisan basis by the administration of the day. Foley’s argument is that the American Constitution needs ‘a strategic element of indeterminacy’ to ensure the agreement of enough of the population within their different interest groups ‘to render the constitution politically viable’ (1989, 126). On the other hand, we are faced with untoward historical gaps and exclusions in the Constitution in regard to racial equality, for example. Additionally,

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what Foley calls ‘abeyances’ in the Constitution might, as he contends, assist in its smooth application but also mean that it provides insufficient guidance as to the exact powers of the executive, in the person of the president, in times of crisis such as during the threat of war.9 In Roth’s Lindberghian America, therefore, the ambiguous ‘areas of unsettlement’ within the Constitution have been exploited and exacerbated by an administration that has not only won power by a landslide but has also arrogated wartime powers to itself, ordering 2 years’ compulsory military training for 18-year-olds, for example; its moves are, moreover, approved of by the vast majority of Americans. In this political atmosphere that is pandering to populism and fears of war, few people but Jews are objecting to the unprecedented and unwarranted governmental incursions upon individual rights in the areas of employment and residency, which have been applied to none except the Jews. The Roths’ one available legal remedy, suing (as the young Philip suggests) in the Supreme Court which still retains its former legal powers, is fraught with the difficulties outlined above, with the result that redress for the Roths and other Jews is unlikely. All this gives force to Sandy’s adolescent retort to his mother’s declaration that Homestead 42 is illegal: ‘Yeah . . . why don’t we sue the United States of America?’ (Plot, 208). Bess Roth’s assertion that ‘everyone knows’ what is the law in a democracy naturally assumes a shared political morality or a democratized public discourse that will keep any political and legal changes within strict limits. But her words also inevitably evoke the voice of public morality in The Human Stain, the ‘everyone knows’ that we have studied in Chapter 5. ‘Everyone knows’ in The Human Stain assumes a shared and unchallengeable moral discourse, an assumption which Roth exposes as fallible and even pernicious. In The Plot against America, however, Bess’s words do more than emphasize the Roths’ own condition of unknowing, in their dislocation from the culture and its law as it now stands; they also bring a sense of profound loss at this democratic insufficiency. Whereas The Human Stain moves away from legibility, associating it with Gilmore’s total scrutability, The Plot against America outlines the other side of the argument: it demonstrates the value of legibility as an essential feature of membership in a functioning democracy while at the same time marking the fragility of its gaps, silences and general permeability. Roth consequently reinforces the value of a culture based on the word rather than the image: on the historic provisions of the Constitution rather than on the treacherous visual archetypes represented by Lindbergh. The historical and political conditions that have produced Lindbergh, then, are also testing the limits of the Constitution and, therefore, of American democracy.

9

Foley asserts that despite the image of America’s political culture being of ‘full constitutional explicitness’, it actually functions as much by ‘circumvention, evasion and equivocation’. Supreme Court judgements usually fail to explicate the Constitution because they tend to be based on previous patterns of judgement rather than on the constitution itself. Because the Supreme Court ‘is well aware that its function and powers lie in the gaps of the constitution and in the crevices of the public’s political consciousness’ it ‘provides just enough answers to satisfy the belief that the constitution is accessible’ but in actuality it has ‘almost invariably been the chief agent for managing constitutional abeyances in the American system’ (1989, 117–19).

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Through Homestead 42, the ‘areas of utter unsettlement’ within the Constitution are projected into the Roths’ home life, threatening it too with a radical unsettlement that mocks the accepted sense of the word ‘homestead’. We see that the very meanings of ‘home’, ‘community’ and ‘Americanness’ are now becoming unsettled: the Roths, like sufferers of paranoia, have entered ‘a different realm of being, one that tilts the world ever so slightly’ (Siegel 1994, 19). The assimilative measures of the OAA seem to demand that, as Herman Roth fears, Jews must cease to exist as Jews within America. However supporters like Rabbi Bengelsdorf vociferously maintain that OAA programmes and other similar measures are merely ‘inviting Jews to enter as far into the national life as they like’ (Plot, 111). Some Jews under Lindbergh are persuaded that all is well, leading Sandy to answer his father’s despairing question ‘How can this be happening in America’ by asserting that ‘nothing is happening in America, nothing’ (196, original emphasis). Yet under Homestead 42 the Roths are on trial for their identity as an overweening body politic impinges upon traditional legal rights. As ‘home’ becomes an alien concept, so does the Constitution of their homeland suffer a breach in its ‘sheltering wall of legal assurances’ (338). The ramifications of ‘Homestead 42’ are compellingly reminiscent of the present-day Homeland Security.10 Herman Roth only escapes being resettled by leaving his job to do poorly paid manual labour for his elder brother, whose graspingness imparts yet more ambiguity to the concept of fraternity. The conflicting interpretations of events caused by their new illiteracy precipitate violent political arguments and moral conflicts within the Roth family, a challenge to the paternal role of Herman Roth from the household’s young men that introduces physical violence into the family for the first time that the bewildered Philip can remember. The antagonism starts from Herman’s and his son Sandy’s contrasting interpretations of the new presidency and its implications for Jews concerning the existence or nonexistence of a ‘plot’ against them on the part of the Lindbergh regime. Sandy, who is convinced that the aims of the administration are benign and that his parents’ fears stem from an ethnic narrowness of outlook, is hit across the face by his mother for calling his father a dictator worse than Hitler when he forbids Sandy to represent the Just Folks programme at the White House in front of the German minister von Ribbentrop; she hits him a second time for calling them both ‘ghetto Jews’ (193). The ambiguity now yawning at the centre of the Roths’ family life – an ambiguity they sense at every level of existence, from the deceitful and misleading language of their relocation letter from the OAA to the Constitutional unsettlement, which threatens to leave them unprotected – lends a paranoid aspect to their circumstances and surroundings. The instability of meaning in the Roths’ daily life starts to produce a flickering quality in their perception of events: an oscillation between two modes of comprehending their daily experience that is characteristic of a conspiratorial mind-set. One mode of perception functions on the everyday level where life proceeds almost normally; the other operates on the paranoid level where a conspiracy by government agencies 10

The Office of Homeland Security was created after 9/11 and announced in President Bush’s address to Congress and the nation on 20 September 2001.

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against the Jews comes into play. Fredric Jameson has observed that, in narratives driven by conspiracy theory, the ‘cognitive function of the conspiratorial plot must be able to flicker in and out, like some secondary after-image’: this flickering is a key attribute of the conspiratorial text (1992, 9, emphasis added).11 Jameson explains that the flickering quality – which arises when one’s awareness of a conspiratorial plot is raised momentarily but repeatedly from the unconscious to the conscious level – operates in real life as conspiracy theory when we try to find ways of representing to ourselves the hugely complex global network existing in late capitalism, which is at once omnipresent and mostly invisible. On the allegorical level, when translated into fiction or other art forms such as film about which Jameson primarily writes in this connection, the ‘conspiracy’ exists as ‘a potentially infinite network’, which can only momentarily be seen for what it is (1992, 9). Roth engineers this flickering or oscillation within the narrative, for instance depicting Herman Roth engaging in what has been the normal activity of letter-writing when he decides to contact Walter Winchell as a last hope of remedy for his family’s troubles, but then failing to send the letter because Bess persuades him that he can no longer trust the US Mail. Within the paranoid landscape where ‘nothing occurs’ the opposite possibility always exists that everything malign is happening (Karl Kraus qu. Jameson 1992, 9). The Roths are stymied by news gathered from the mass media, where a surfeit of information with conflicting meanings paralyzes them. In this way, the novel echoes Jameson’s idea of the paralysis of the national imaginary and alludes to the fact that conspiracy culture expresses itself as the proliferation of modern communication systems and the fear of their contamination by hostile elements. We see how a similar paralysis affects Philip as, bereft of ways to construct an identity, he withdraws into the world of imagination, enacting fantasy scenarios of escaping from family troubles by running away, which he cannot successfully replicate in real life. Paranoid slippages in interpretation frustrate the Roths’ endeavour to make sense of their surroundings by imposing a mental grid upon their physical environment as they move around it, that is, trying but failing to engage in what Jameson calls ‘cognitive mapping’ (1992, xiv).12 Roth the writer creates geographical spaces in the novel that continually change signification, eluding engagement with their Jewish inhabitants in a way that heightens both the melancholy and the paranoid qualities of the narrative. We have seen how the panorama of Washington DC does not retain a historically fixed, reassuring meaning associated with the Roths’ American homeland but wavers with the passing of Lindbergh’s plane, transforming itself into alien territory. Philip performs 11

12

The conspiratorial text according to Jameson is an artistic expression of ‘a geopolitical unconscious’, which unsuccessfully ‘attempts to refashion national allegory into a conceptual instrument for grasping our being-in-the-world’ under the conditions of late capitalism. The conspiratorial text uses conspiracy ‘as a narrative structure capable of reuniting the minimal basic components: a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility’. In the conspiratorial text there is no existence outside the world of conspiracy (9). Colin McCabe’s introduction to Geopolitical Aesthetic in the 1992 edition contains a good explanation of cognitive mapping as being ‘a way of understanding how the individual’s representation of his or her social world can escape the traditional critique of representation because the mapping is intimately related to practice – to the individual’s successful negotiation of urban space’ (xiv).

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a frustrated attempt at decoding when he spies on Christian homes. Later still, his family’s environs throw up physical barriers where none have previously existed: in the penultimate chapter, ‘Bad Days’, the family is virtually ghettoized as riots break out a few blocks from their house, and the New York City police, controlled by a friendly mayor, patrol the ends of their streets to ensure the Jewish residents’ safety. The final chapter also recounts how the carefree journey made by Sandy into Kentucky for his summer program on the Mawhinneys’ farm is turned back on itself to become a gruelling ordeal, a hellish terrain strewn with obstacles, when Herman Roth and his sons retrace it the following year to collect Seldon and bring him back to New Jersey after his mother’s death in the riots that break out after Lindbergh’s disappearance. Hindered by misreading their road map and repeated automobile breakdowns, the Roths pursue their expeditionary rescue route through the American nightmare that Herman Roth first envisaged back when they were in Washington: a threatening industrial landscape filled with malevolent goys and typified by the misnamed Belle, ‘another of those tiny, hellish industrial hamlets, where the fumes from the Du Pont ammonia plant almost knocked them flat’ (Plot, 356). The landscape thus takes on a dystopic aspect in a way that partly reflects the Roths’ view of it, yet which at the same time seems to escape their control. Their ghastly journey through America seems to be an echo of Lindbergh’s earlier air expeditions that have formed that landscape in his image. It is as though Lindbergh has cast a network of associations across the geography of the nation transforming the Roths into alien intruders in a land of ‘upright American Christians’ (357).

The brother as conspirator and the conspiratorial text The paranoid quality of the Roths’ daily life bizarrely mirrors the wider American society in which they are being marginalized, since the mainstream population has become subject to paranoid fears of a Jewish conspiracy, which eventually surfaces in calls for ‘extreme measures to protect America from a Jewish coup d’etat’ (Plot, 310). The feverish conspiratorial atmosphere now abroad in America is symptomatic of a state of national dysfunction: a breakdown of fraternal democracy in which American brothers treacherously turn against one another and become conspirators. The Plot against America shows how the brother-conspirator figure, personified in Sandy, Philip and Alvin, introduces otherness into the ‘double singularity’ of the ideal fraternal image (Derrida 2005, 276). The symbolism of the national fraternal image now oscillates between sameness and otherness, as does the Jewish brother-conspirator duality itself. The narrative’s double-sided conspiratorial scenario – which alternates the idea of a Jewish conspiracy against Americans with the notion of a government conspiracy to abolish democratic freedoms and destroy the Jews – evidences a similar oscillation between states of perception. The double-sided conspirator-figure is now a composite of the ‘representative’ American man (personified in Lindbergh) and the (male) American Jew. In this context, and as Roth has repeatedly argued in his other works,

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the Jewish-American is at once alien, or ‘other’, and intrinsically American; he thus fixes the ‘other’ at the core of the American self. These oscillations within the self create a characteristic flickering effect similar to that which we have just described as influencing modes of perception of the everyday, a quality that recalls the flickering turns from visibility to invisibility, which we have investigated in regard to Coleman Silk. As before, it is a quality which serves to construct the self as multiple, not singular. It must be noted that the self is not thus conceived of as being dual, because its continual oscillations between states are themselves a part of the self ’s construction – it is in this turbulence that the self exists. The Plot against America thus pushes to a pathological extremity Roth’s conception of the American male self as being founded upon otherness, contradiction and self-betrayal. Displaying the treacherousness we have become used to in Roth’s models of the self, Philip profoundly betrays his friend Seldon Wishnow, the ‘skinny, pallid, gentle-faced’ boy downstairs, when Philip tries to forestall the Roth family’s removal under Homestead 42 by persuading his Aunt Evelyn, Rabbi Bengelsdorf ’s fiancée, to intercede on their behalf with Bengelsdorf, an act that backfires and, inadvertently on Philip’s part, involves Seldon’s family in the enforced move (Plot, 141). This betrayal epitomizes the poisoning of the fraternal bond in The Plot against America, while enmeshing Philip ever deeper in the role of conspirator. Seldon’s growing dependency on Philip after his father’s death has led Philip to fearfully visualize Seldon as his ‘other self ’, expressing his foreboding that their now-fragmented families, and thus their biographies, will merge (222). His fears are subsequently played out in his attempt to escape his family’s predicament, and Seldon, in the wake of the Homestead 42 removal, by stealing Seldon’s clothes and his identity and running away to a nearby Christian orphanage. Seldon, he fantasizes, will assume his place within the household, wearing Philip’s clothes as he wears Seldon’s. Philip’s fantasy, besides being a sign of his growing estrangement from home, is an offshoot of the urge to self-sameness personified in Lindbergh: but while Sandy aspires to be ‘a boy on the grand scale’ in emulating Lindbergh, Philip is now aiming to be ‘a boy on the smallest scale possible’, a goal that presages a severely stunted manhood (232–3). But the fantasy possesses another, more important significance, in regard to Philip’s betrayal of Seldon, since we can observe that, by taking on the other boy’s identity, Philip transforms himself from traitor to victim. In Jameson’s words, he now becomes a ‘double agent’ in a conspiratorial landscape who turns ‘at the flip of a switch’ from perpetrator to victim by fantasizing Seldon as his other self (1992, 16). The nation’s conspiracy mania climaxes when, in the penultimate chapter, ‘Bad Days’, Lindbergh suddenly disappears in his plane; martial law is subsequently declared amid wild rumours of plot and counterplot, and fear of treachery grips the heart of the nation. Prominent Jews are arrested under accusation of implication in the president’s disappearance, as are key political figures, notably the former president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tyranny looms, until order is restored by Mrs Lindbergh’s personal intervention pleading for the resumption of democratic processes through the stillexistent free medium of the radio, and her call is backed by influential politicians

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working through the remaining undamaged democratic structures of government to call for an election, which reinstalls Roosevelt as president. For that short period nevertheless, a frenetic, all-consuming atmosphere of conspiracy engulfs the categories of friend and enemy, brother and stranger, so striking hard at the core of American identity. Crucially, however, The Plot against America diverges from what Jameson calls the conspiratorial text – a text whose narrative world is permeated by conspiracy theory – in that its penultimate chapter, ‘Bad Days’, uncovers a real conspiracy on the part of the acting Wheeler administration, the defeat of which can pave the way for the return of Roosevelt and democratic rule. The discovery of the conspiracy distinguishes The Plot against America from the conspiratorial text in that it posits a world beyond the conspiracy world. In making the distinction between itself and the conspiratorial text, the novel also comments upon the conspiratorial narrative, which is the apologia for the Lindbergh administration written by Rabbi Bengelsdorf, an ‘insider’s diary’ later published in book form as My Life under Lindbergh (Plot, 326). Bengelsdorf ’s book ‘explaining’ Charles Lindbergh’s pro-German stance, the only supposedly complete account of the forces behind the actions of the Lindbergh administration, is termed ‘the most unbelievable story – though not necessarily the least convincing’ and ignites a long-running public controversy (321). The story, denied by the Lindbergh family itself, relates the German kidnapping of Lindbergh’s son, and his safekeeping by the Germans in return for the Lindberghs’ cooperation with Nazi wartime objectives and a grand masterplan for world domination. It presents a prime example of the conspiratorial narrative: all events are linked, all factors accounted for and stemming from one source, with no role given to accident or error. It provides for a consolingly neat explanation that also works conveniently to exculpate the president from the worst, most treacherous motives that can be put to his charge. By this account the fascist threat to America, instead of being endemic to the national body, would have originated outside it, threatening it externally. Moreover, it would have meant that the re-election of Roosevelt, by severing completely the links with the Nazis and bringing about the declaration of war on Nazi Germany, had restored the integrity of the American national body and removed from it the stain of fascism. On the contrary, however, the wider narrative context makes clear that the Bengelsdorf papers are an invalid attempt to account for the events of the Lindbergh period, since The Plot against America actually resists any such reassuring restoration of the national equilibrium, indicating rather that the workings of its fraternal democracy are fragile and always prone to destabilization. That the Bengelsdorf account is ‘not the least convincing’ owes, we might observe, more to the remaining American propensity to believe conspiratorial narratives than to the probity of the account. The Plot against America appears to be conveying that much of the damage to America’s democratic body is due precisely to that recurrent national tendency towards paranoia, which has given rise to Lindbergh’s administration and has then been intensified by that administration. Rather than endorsing conspiracy theory, in that case, the novel mounts a vigorous argument against the belief in conspiracy

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theory: against the paranoid tendency in American culture towards conspiratorial thinking as exhibited at various periods of post-war history. The recognition that The Plot against America maps the terrain of this pathology may well be what has created the perception among many critics that there is a strong resonance between the novel and the post-9/11 culture in which it was published. Consequently, far from the novel’s presentation of history being characteristic of the conspiratorial text and thus reflecting what Jameson calls the ‘incapacity of the postmodern subject to process history itself ’, Roth is critiquing the conspiratorial mind-set upon which he discourses and thus expresses a confidence that it is possible after all to engage with and give a moral assessment of historical events (1992, 16).

Writing history in The Plot against America How, then, does the novel’s alternative vision of the 1940s demonstrate Roth’s approach to writing of actual historical events? How does it enable the reader to process a ‘history’ that never happened in its mixing of fiction with facts on the historical record? And how does it read the state of the nation in its post-9/11 phase? The Roosevelt administration is in place at both the beginning and end of the novel, with the narrative looping back from Lindbergh’s fictional rule to the reality of America’s entry into World War II. However, the loop is not closed, because that entry into war happens nearly a year later, in October 1942 instead of December 1941. The narrative is not then brought back exactly in line with the historical facts (although Roth takes pains to outline these facts in an appendix to the novel). The fictive diversion appears to continue, because Lindbergh seems to have cast a fearsome shadow over the novel’s post-war future: the narrative projects a history beyond 1942 in a form of epilogue in the penultimate chapter describing the 50-year controversy concerning Lindbergh’s motives for cooperating with Nazi Germany. This projects the ‘future’ to the turn of the twenty-first century and the actual period of the novel’s publication. In this way Roth seems to create an imaginative bridge between Lindbergh’s America and actual post-9/11 America, appearing to reframe key moments of America’s past so as to highlight their importance to the present. The narrative tacitly relies on the reader’s knowledge of real historical events after World War II, so that the novel appears to pull within its compass and replay disturbances from an American history that we actually recognize, disturbances from a more recent past than the novel explicitly addresses. Thus echoes of the Vietnam era’s paranoid zeitgeist, Ronald Reagan’s political moves against a foreign ‘axis of evil’ and the demands for a crushing invasive military response to acts of terrorism and heightened internal security following the 9/11 disasters, all resonate within the novel. One might then perceive that the perpetual fear emanating from the Lindbergh regime is paralleled by the perpetual fear generated by the Bush War on Terror after 9/11. The irony common to the fictitious Lindbergh administration and the real Bush administration (at least prior to 2003 at the time when Roth was presumably writing the novel) is that both are seen to have put America on a war

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footing and to have consequently greatly extended the powers of the executive branch in detriment of civil rights, without it being at war with any other nation.13 Such a history seems aimed at exposing Americans’ defective understanding of their past (a theme common to all Roth’s major works studied in this book) and their tendency towards paranoid interpretations. Commenting on the unhealthy circularity of this thinking, Roth re-runs the traumas of the last 50 years through a fictional lens that reiterates and heightens the era’s paranoid aspects. Lindberghian history operates within a doomed circle of error and malfeasance, its repetitive motion evidencing the paranoid circularity of self-justifying and often politically motivated fear and suspicion. Here, ‘history’ represents the reversal of direction and expectation that Jameson has commented on (in regard to Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland), where ‘the moments of fear are derived from what we already know . . . rather than the other way round’ (1992, 19). The representation of history as possessing a circular, repetitive motion also exposes the nostalgic or melancholic element in this fear-dominated post-war cultural landscape. It shows how the atmosphere of perpetual fear has been exacerbated by a post-war conservative and neoconservative politics particularly dominant in the 1950s, the 1980s and the second Bush era during which the novel was written: a politics which, in looking back to a mythical past for certainties about national identity, has fostered an atmosphere of conspiracy. Mary Caputi has explored how American conservatism’s view of history is connected with nostalgia and melancholia. She explains how, for 1980s neoconservatives, the 1950s recapitulates ‘a true, foundational identity’, which, they believe, can be projected forward into the 1980s to re-found the national identity after what they see as the disruptions of the 1960s (2005, 6). Caputi points to the need of post-war conservatism to escape history and temporality, to evade the present by recovering the past. Conservatives return to the past to renew the present. In recovering and reinterpreting the past, though, they also aim to renew the past itself. The ultimate impossibility of this project generates melancholia (2005, 27). The historian Daniel Marcus shows how Reaganism drew upon nostalgia to ‘generate usable narratives of post-World War II national life’ and to ‘provide historically rooted justifications for [its] own present-day politics’ (2004, 1–2). Caputi identifies conservatives’ melancholia as stemming from a ‘longing for lost origins’ and the search for deeper meanings in life, to which Reagan tried to find the answer for Americans in returning to the 1950s (2005, 22). Reaganism’s rhetoric ‘puts into play the impossible nature of desire acting as both cause and effect of the melancholia it seeks to overcome’ (2005, 113). The retrieval of the mythic past was just as evident in George W. Bush’s speeches to the nation such as his Address to Congress and the American people on 20 September 2001 in which he drew from the nation’s

13

Reference the USA Patriot Act of October 2001 extending surveillance provisions over both US citizens and foreigners and introducing roving wiretaps to monitor mobile phone conversations; giving powers to detain or deport noncitizens with little or no judicial oversight; reducing the information available under the Freedom of Information Act; and placing greater power in the hands of the president and the attorney general.

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loss a renewed, re-unifying rhetoric of mission and the reassertion that America, more than anywhere else, is the home of liberty.14 By embodying this impossible desire in the reactionary, fascist-leaning Lindbergh, a populist president who, like Reagan, functions as ‘the site of identification for voters’, Roth demonstrates that the attempt to move forward politically by looking backward is not only doomed to failure but it is also dangerously destructive (Marcus 2004, 84). His dissection of melancholic nostalgia as a political stratagem highlights its essentially undemocratic nature as well as its ultimate failure to define American nationhood. Roth imagines a fictional past so as to identify the sources of this nostalgic malady, embedded deep within the nation’s history and originating with the misconceived notion of democracy, which he appears to believe actually constitutes America’s ‘true foundational identity’. He critiques conservative political nostalgia for trying to promulgate a sense of national history as a past era of greatness, progress and a homogenous national identity located in the 1940s and 1950s. By creating an impossible history – a history that never happened – he can draw attention to cultural strands that since World War II have worked to negate America’s mythology of mission and progress, trial and regeneration, producing not renewal but rather a malignant cycle of contamination of the present by the betrayals of the past. Consequently, The Plot against America counters post-war conservatism’s narrative of national glory, decline and renewal by producing a counternarrative locating fascism at the heart of national life in the 1940s. Rather than casting backwards in search of reassuring national paradigms, Roth encourages us to project the narrative forward to see the 1950s in the context of perpetual fear with the Cold War curtailment of individual freedoms and the advent of McCarthyism, a vision we have already seen in I Married a Communist. Roth thus reorients the view of the post-war decades to combat the conservative narrative of renewal, undermining its nostalgic bid to reclaim either the wartime years or the immediate post-war period as times of national purpose, unity and overall progress and achievement. The novel marks the places at which nostalgia shades into conspiratorial thinking and paranoia with the conservative staking out of American post-war history.15 In a move that reverses Reaganism’s and

14

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The address declares that America has been attacked by ‘the enemies of freedom’. It asserts that ‘this country will define our times, not be defined by them. As long as the United States is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world. . . . We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war’ (qtd. Silberstein 2002, 27–8). A leading example of recent conservative moves to control the historical perspective is the report in November 2001 by the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni calling for a renewed emphasis on teaching the history of Western civilization and disparaging other more broadly based educational initiatives such as teaching the history of Islam. Don Cheney’s wife, Lynne V. Cheney, in the report’s introduction stresses ‘the study of our past’ framed as an appreciation of ‘how fortunate we are to live in freedom’ (qtd. Silberstein 2002, 133). Cheney’s call for national unity and renewal, by returning to a past which is the source of present freedoms but not present problems or conflicts, depends on nostalgically recirculating the cultural myths that Roth dissects, in the context of a document designed to exercise a ‘chilling effect’ on academic dissent from the Bush administration’s War on Terror by listing examples of what ACTA terms a ‘blame America first’ attitude (Silberstein 2002, 127).

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Bushism’s myth-laden, unhistorical appropriation of the past, Roth intimates that recurring errors in foreign policy since the War have menaced internal security in the subsequent decades. His fictionalization of history ultimately works to assert a sense of America’s real post-war history stripped of nostalgia and of paranoia; the novel articulates the need not to escape from history, but to study the past in order to avoid repeating its mistakes. If The Plot against America repudiates conspiracy theory along with conservative nostalgia, one must enquire why perpetual fear pervades the novel’s close. The answer must be that this fear marks the Roths’ incompletely restored losses as to citizenship and their anxiety lest their democratic rights should again be placed in jeopardy. Roth has chronicled lasting damage to the nation’s democratic functioning in terms of harm done to the Constitution by the political administration. ‘Everyone knows’ now seems to become a lament for lost constitutional certainties and democratic insufficiency. Mrs Lindbergh’s intervention, like a fairy godmother, to halt the Wheeler regime and restore democracy – seemingly the weakest section of the narrative – perhaps indicates, as Dan Shiffman says, ‘strained efforts to maintain clear lines of justice in an environment threatened by dangerous . . . ideologies’ (2009, 69). This implausibility towards the end of the novel does appear to speak obliquely of enduring constitutional vulnerability. The concluding narrative of damage and disorder finds expression in the male Jewish body with Philip’s characterization of Seldon as ‘the stump’, whose burden he must bear, an image speaking eloquently of what is still felt to be lacking in regard to democratic brotherhood and to male identity in general (Plot, 362). It is notable, too, that despite the narrator obviously being a man recalling the events of many years earlier, the Philip of the novel remains a ‘frightened boy’ on the last page as on the first (1). He finally becomes Seldon’s ‘prosthesis’: a term which strains to articulate wholeness but which resonates with loss and insufficiency, reducing Philip while failing to satisfactorily restore Seldon’s physique (362). The attempt at restoration of the national body also finds expression in the figure of the ‘good neighbour’ evoked in Roosevelt’s first inaugural address of 1933; the neighbour who might embody difference but also the concept of reciprocal obligation and of mutual support.16 Neighbourliness survives in The Plot against America, in the Roths’ support of the Mrs Wishnow and Seldon as fellow-Jews, and in the Italian Catholic Cucuzza family’s fellow-concern for the Roths when these new neighbours extend a protective hand to Philip’s family during the worst excesses of the ‘bad days’. The good neighbour, too, seems to enact a prosthetic role in what Roosevelt has called a ‘stricken nation’ in the 1933 Inaugural address.17 16

17

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural address, 4 March 1933, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057, retrieved 27 December 2008. Gurumurthy Neelakantan persuasively argues in ‘Philip Roth’s Nostalgia for the Yiddishkayt and the New Deal Idealisms in The Plot against America’, Philip Roth Studies 4.2 (Fall 2008): 125–36 that Plot evinces an overlap of traditional Jewish communitarianism or yiddishkayt with New Dealism, marrying Jewish and American values; he quotes Irving Howe’s definition of yiddishkayt as ‘plebeian fraternity’. While agreeing that Roth evokes more inclusive alternatives to Lindberghian fraternity that weld Jewishness to Americanness, I must disagree with Neelakantan’s view that Plot is therefore ‘benignly optimistic’ (134).

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At this point one cannot discount the possibility that the novel cannot finally resist a certain melancholic nostalgia for the Roosevelt years, a consideration strengthened by the reflection that the novel fails to articulate and scrutinize Roosevelt’s own powerful mystique to anything like the same degree as it does Lindbergh’s. And Roth revives the echo of Roosevelt’s famous declaration in that first inaugural address, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself ’, a textual countercall to ‘perpetual fear’ that Roth actually quotes in the historical appendix to the main narrative (Plot, 365). At the same time the figuration of stump and prosthesis that closes the novel seems to fully acknowledge the impossibility of return. It is in recognizing the ambiguity of this image, moreover, that we can appreciate its meaning to the novel; it conjures the suffering and depleted body, but it also embraces human imperfection and thereby implicitly rejects the repressively homogenizing, totalitarian strain embodied in Lindbergh. The body thus becomes ‘a metaphor for the vulnerability of justice itself ’, evoking the need for constant vigilance, care and protection of the American Constitution (Gurnham c2009, 9).

Conclusion: Bodily loss in The Plot against America By producing a history that never happened, Roth has diagnosed a fearful and paranoid American national tendency that he believes has been in evidence ever since World War II. He identifies this condition as originating in an inadequate, failing fraternal model of democracy bolstered by mythological narratives of the unified male body. He shows that a nation modelled on a homogenous ideal of fraternity is doomed to a history dominated by the twin evils of melancholia and paranoia that cause repeated outbreaks of xenophobia as the nation turns upon itself trying to expel its own substance. Articulating the Roths’ experience as at once essentially American and ‘other’, Roth establishes that America cannot exist in a recognizable form – that is as a democracy – without ‘others’ such as its Jews. The Plot against America explores how identity formation becomes distorted by melancholia and paranoia and identifies the role of these elements in the post-war politics of nostalgia and fear. Roth contends that democracy has to be actively guarded; that Americans must be watchful lest they unwittingly let loose the repressive forces, which he shows to be ever-active within the nation, and so lose their historic liberties. Far from resisting the notion of legibility as he appears to do in The Human Stain, he reinforces the worth of the nation’s constitutional texts, vulnerable though they are, as a means of resisting the threats to democracy inherent in a xenophobic and narcissistic populism such as Lindbergh’s. He shows how the paranoia issuing from Lindbergh’s regime ‘tilts the world’ – the world of meaning – so that it can no longer be interpreted as before. For the Roths, this means that their culture becomes illegible, so that the very concept of ‘home’ becomes estranged from their understanding. The Roths’ condition of ‘unhomeliness’ or unsettlement, I have argued, constitutes a state of trial: a lived ordeal, which is at the same time a rhetorical space dynamically bounded by changing political and legal discourses regarding citizenship that are threatening to brand them as irrevocably ‘other’; it is a space characterized by a malign

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encroachment of the political sphere upon the legal sphere. This charged space, exemplified by the letter concerning Homestead 42, possesses a physical counterpart in the alienated landscape the Roths have to navigate when they travel to Kentucky and back to rescue Seldon Wishnow: a seemingly paranoid landscape dominated by Lindbergh that resists their attempts to engage in ‘cognitive mapping’, illustrating how they have been distanced from their country. The Roths’ unsettlement is further marked by the writer Roth’s engineering a flickering effect within the narrative: an effect characterizing the oscillation in the Roths’ daily perception between a sense of normality and a world of conspiracy and fear. The personae of the Roth boys also undergo these flickering turns as they metamorphosize from brothers to conspirators, suffering losses to the psyche and to the body in another of Roth’s visions of the turbulent self. However, The Plot against America resists conspiracy theory and is not a conspiratorial text as in Jameson’s formulation. It is better understood as a call to break the doom-laden circle of events by recognizing national obsessions and the history whence they have emerged. Roth proposes that the national ideal of fraternity that can be expressed in a Lindbergh should be replaced by legislated rights and duties of citizenship supported by the concept of good neighbourliness, a notion that approximates the ‘friendship’ suggested by Derrida in finding a place for and supporting the ‘other’. In studying the shortcomings of democratic fraternity, the novel also counters the post-war conservatives’ heavy investment in nostalgic reinventions of brotherhood personified in Reagan and Bush, the ‘regular guys’. Finally, The Plot against America proposes that America’s post-war vicious cycle of fear, conspiracy and betrayal must be broken, but that first its history must be understood and acknowledged. The sombre note on which the novel closes nevertheless suggests pessimism about whether the national body’s losses can ever be restored. The fragile and imperfect constitutional body, matched as it is with the suffering human body – two bodies on trial – both call for a restitution that does not seem to be forthcoming.

7

Nemeses: Reworking the Trial for Post-War America

Since 2004, Roth has published five short novels: Everyman (2006); Exit Ghost (2007); Indignation (2008); The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010). Exit Ghost brings the elderly, memory-challenged Nathan Zuckerman back on stage to take his final bow, and consequently rounds off the sequence of Zuckerman titles in the categorized listing of Roth’s works that precedes the title page of Nemesis. Notably, the other four titles are grouped, for the first time, under the heading Nemeses. The meaning of Nemesis appears as: ‘retributive justice’, from the Greek ‘give what is due’; the larger definition being, ‘the inescapable agent of someone or something’s downfall, especially when this is deserved’ (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2005). Permeating all these novels, therefore, is judgement, one that apparently is no longer suspended but irrevocably, although as Roth stresses, often unfairly, pronounced as the retribution of illness and death is wreaked on his trial-wracked male bodies. This chapter, before making concluding comments on Roth’s long involvement with the intricate, fascinating concept of the trial, will indicate the final shaping given to it by his exploration of ‘nemesis’ in his career-closing works. We now know that Roth’s latest five works are final because he announced his retirement from writing fiction in 2012.1 So, with Exit Ghost and Nemeses forming the conclusion to his career as a novelist, it seems that Roth has made his own judgement as to the centrality of the trial to his fiction. In recording the terminal personal predicaments of his elderly or severely ailing subjects, Roth moves away somewhat from exploring how subjectivity is enmeshed with national identity. Indignation is set against a 1950s Korean War background that, after all, looms vaguely on the national horizon rather than being fully worked out, and his other post-2004 works have much less to say about the state of America than those we have already studied. An exception is Nemesis, the very last, and perhaps most affecting, of these late works. Nemesis does seem to query the signification of

1

Roth almost inaudibly announced his retirement from writing fiction in October 2012, in an interview with Nelly Kaprielian in the French cultural magazine, Les inRocks. Asked, ‘Do you still have the desire to write?’ he replies, ‘No. Anyway, I have no intention of writing in the next 10 years. To tell the truth, I’m finished. Nemesis is going to be my last book’. So low-key was this statement that it was nearly a month before it was picked up by the mainstream media, such as The New Yorker on 9 November and The Paris Review, which published an English translation of the original article on 13 November.

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‘nemesis’ on the broader historical scale, perhaps asking not, ‘[w]here are the scales of justice?’ as does the grieving father of a victim of the 1944 polio epidemic that forms the background to the novel, but, as we have seen Roth ask in his greatest works, how does it become possible, in struggling against large forces beyond individual control, to understand or speak about justice (48)? Exit Ghost alternatively is concerned with questions of judgement and retribution in regard to a writer’s work; retribution here is the fixing of a literary reputation in a mould unwelcome to its possessor. Nevertheless, one could argue that Roth’s persistently turning in Exit Ghost to questions of literary inheritance and legacy, apparently also assessing his own contribution to his national literature, can be seen as once more opening up the viewpoint on the ways in which America’s national story has been told, which has been the focus in those five of his key works that we have already examined. On the absorbing topic of literary legacy, Exit Ghost has much to say, as is reflected in the pages of this concluding chapter, which deals with it more extensively than the Nemeses novels. All the protagonists of these final novels grow to feel that, ‘bodily decay [is] his entire story’ as their constitutions face some of their severest trials (Everyman, 71). Everyman begins with the burial scene of the unnamed central character whose infirmities, physical and emotional, are then unfolded and laid out to view; it voices the conviction that ‘old age is a massacre’ (156). Marcus Messner of Indignation is revealed to be dying then, finally, to have died as a result of being called up to fight in the Korean War even though all his energies, and his over-anxious father’s, have been dedicated to avoiding this fate. The Humbling finishes with the suicide of Simon Axler, a previously successful actor struck by stage fright. Meanwhile, Exit Ghost features an ailing, impotent Zuckerman as ineffectual sexually, due to the ravages of prostate cancer, as he is in opposing the ambitions of Kliman, the thrusting young would-be biographer of Zuckerman’s old mentor Lonoff. Lastly, the striving and conscientious young physical education teacher, Bucky Cantor, becomes stricken with the polio virus that brings death and disfigurement to many thousands of young people in Nemesis. Like the elderly members of the art class run by the assailable subject of Everyman, these men are ‘all embarrassed by what they’d become’ (Everyman, 91). The protagonists of Exit Ghost and the Nemeses novels, like their predecessors, appear to feel that they face imminent judgement even while their bodies’ constitutional failure, as in The Plot against America, continues to be ‘a metaphor for the vulnerability of justice itself ’ (Gurnham 2009, 9). College freshman Marcus Messner of Indignation faces a long interrogation by the dean at his rural, conservative, Gentile-dominated Winesburg College over what he indignantly sees as the private matter of his living arrangements but also suspects to be an attack by a representative of the college and wider culture on him as a professed atheist of Jewish origin and a left-leaning outsider (Indignation, 93). Marcus’s sense of being on trial is provoked by the moralizing Dean Caudwell’s observation that ‘our lives inevitably are [filled] with trial and tribulation’ that, he implies, Marcus as an atheist is unfitted to deal with: a refrain belonging to the same puritan-inspired narrative of testing and perfectibility that has been Roth’s target so often before and that Marcus now vigorously kicks against, setting himself on track for expulsion from the college and his fatal draft into the army fighting the

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Korean War (93). The unnamed focal character of Everyman, too, feels that he has to ‘defend’ his life story, this time against accusations of failure as a husband and father though, prompting visions of the ‘innocent’ subject whose selfhood Roth has previously dissected, he is ‘convinced of his right . . . to be pardoned ultimately’ for his sins (32, 95). The graveside scene that begins Everyman recreates an archetypal moment of judgement: that occasion when the just-dead must submit to the appraisal of the still-living, some of whom, like the dead man’s two estranged sons, are in no mood to pardon the deceased. Simon Axler of The Humbling faces self-destroying failure at his craft that, after many decades of success, makes acting into ‘a night-afternight exercise in trying to get away with something’, an exercise cruelly judged by an audience that stays away from his performances (Humbling, 3). In Nemesis judgement, first and foremost, signifies the protagonist’s self-judgement. Bucky Cantor believes himself to be a polio carrier accountable for infecting with polio the youngsters at Indian Hill summer camp to work at which he has left diseasestricken Newark and accepts his own disablement from polio as a judgement upon him for deserting his city playground supervisor’s job for the mountain retreat. In regard to Nemesis, Roth says that ‘nemesis’ can ‘be defined as doom, or misfortune, a force that [the protagonist] can’t overcome and that chooses him as its victim’ (Paris Review, 13 November 2012). This interpretation seems to move away from the concept of a deserved retribution and to emphasize instead the randomness of life events; yet Roth modifies his definition when he tells the interviewer that, ‘the nemesis seems to be polio, but in the case of Bucky Cantor, it is actually his troubled conscience. One thing that’s always interested me as a writer . . . is people who have an extreme – and finally misplaced – sense of their own responsibility. Bucky is a man who defines himself solely by his virtue, and that’s a very dangerous thing’ (Paris Review, 13 November 2012). Roth’s narrator Arnie Meskinoff, one of the pupils Bucky supervised during the polio months and a fellow polio-sufferer, concludes that Bucky is the type of person who ‘will never guiltlessly acknowledge that he has any limits’; who holds himself responsible and punishes himself needlessly when, in fact, he has been ‘taken to pieces by his times’ (274). Bucky’s self-punishing verdict is therefore shown to be due to a fatally misguided view of his place in the world, an outcome of his need to believe in controlling powers: if not his own unfettered agency then a God of rage and retribution whom he can blame for random events. When Roth comments that ‘nemesis’ is ‘a word one hears a lot in the United States’, he appears to suggest a national struggle against fate that has emerged from America’s own history and mythology, recalling the deluded protagonists of, say, American Pastoral or The Human Stain: men whose obsessive belief in the American myth of regenerative, perfectible self-creation, ‘the intoxication of renewal’, leads to disaster (Paris Review, 13 November 2012; Nemesis, 144). When Bucky views the polio virus as a test that he has failed and courts retribution, his fate is in some sense deserved. Yet there are still many indications in Exit Ghost and Nemeses that Roth continues to resist the idea that valid final judgements are possible. As Victoria Aarons puts it, ‘all Roth’s characters live fictions that need defending’, where the self is performative and indeterminable, though the emphasis is now more firmly than ever on the failure

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of those fictions (Aarons 2013, 61). Simon Axler is portrayed as a failed actor in whose performances ‘[s]omething fundamental has vanished’: a description that apparently also embraces Axler’s disintegrating personal life (Humbling, 10, 37). An actor to the last, after a short-lived, spirit-crushing affair with Pegeen, the daughter of old friends, he even chooses to depart his life in the character of Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev of Chekhov’s The Seagull by shooting himself, an act he fantasizes will be his crowning achievement. Roth raises the question here of whether Axler’s suicide is indeed a triumphant concluding performance, a persuasive final judgement by the actor on himself; but this outcome seems highly unlikely given that the raison d’etre of Roth’s work has always been the excavation of deep and insoluble contradictions within the self. It is hard to think that the novel’s final sentence, ‘[h]e had brought it off ’, indicates that Axler has redeemed his life story rather than simply achieved the state of death (140).2 Axler’s final action seems closer to the complete abdication of the self, a lack of meaning regarding the self; in death, after all, Axler enters wordlessness. Roth thus reminds us that the self, if it is to continue to exist at all, must exist in memory, becoming only words on the page. In the Philip Roth Society roundtable discussion on Everyman, Mark Shechner makes the point that in Judaism, ‘one of the ways in which you do achieve a form of immortality within the Jewish tradition is to be remembered. The great Jewish sacrament, after all, is memory, Yizkor’ (Rodgers and Royal 2007, 23). But, at the same time, memory is never to be trusted. When the unnamed Everyman visits the cemetery where his parents are buried, he takes consolation in his proximity to their ‘bones in a box’, revealing that, ‘[o]nce he was with those bones he could not leave them, couldn’t not talk to them, couldn’t but listen to them when they spoke’ (Everyman, 170). But this vision is chilled by Roth’s awareness that these skeletal ghosts have only fragments to give their son. And Zuckerman, we once more realize, can only deal in fragments. We have always been made aware that Zuckerman’s memory as it stretches back over the years has been chronically unreliable, but add in the effects of ageing and ill-health, and memory begins to escape him altogether. In Exit Ghost Zuckerman’s memory lets him down on a day-to-day basis: unexpectedly encountering Amy Bellette, his former mentor Lonoff ’s old lover and his own inspiration as a youthful writer, he subsequently misses a dinner date with her because he forgets in which restaurant he has arranged their meeting. Even worse, he is beginning to lose his grasp of language, forgetting people’s names and asking a salesclerk for a box instead of a bag for his shopping. He fears that his capacity for writing will soon be obliterated. To worsen his confusion, Amy Bellette’s memory is failing to the extent that she cannot give him an accurate account of what she has said to Lonoff ’s putative biographer Kliman or whether she has given Kliman the part-manuscript of Lonoff ’s 2

Ira Nadel, drawing on the work on the late style of Theodore Adorno and Edward Said, argues that observing the ‘unresolved tensions’ of unmet artistic goals is characteristic of an artist’s late style: he contends that ‘[c]ontradiction suddenly becomes the norm’, producing an impression that work is incomplete (2013, 77). I am arguing, however, as throughout this book, that contradiction has been a constant in Roth’s work throughout: as we have seen, he has always refused resolution and suspended final judgement, in Portnoy’s Complaint just as much as in his last works.

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last unpublished novel that Kliman later shows to Zuckerman; she has a recurring brain tumour and her memory is being affected, either by the tumour or its treatment, so that language escapes her control in a way that is reminiscent of The Human Stain and Coleman’s momentarily unguarded language slips, or the Swede’s speaking what he feels to be a foreign language in American Pastoral. The mystery about Amy eventually becomes about whether ‘Amy’ is speaking, or her tumour: ‘my tumor found Kliman winning’, she confides to Zuckerman (Exit, 177). Amy’s self in this way seems to split due to her disease, leading to the self-multiplication that we have become accustomed to in Roth’s male subjects, a splitting that echoes her dual character as Amy/Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer. The reader is seemingly offered a resolution of this duality when Amy relates her ‘real’ history, clearly distinguished from Anne’s, to Zuckerman (Exit, 188–93); but then Roth snatches away the proffered certainty, substituting another memory crisis that dissolves the character’s identity. Zuckerman, too, is dissolving: he reveals in a two-page parenthesis that while working on the manuscript of Exit Ghost his difficulties have increased to the point where he has to ‘labor every day against the threat of incoherence’ and, though considering the book as it stands to be unsatisfactory, he feels he no longer possesses the mental strength to push through to a satisfactory conclusion nor the critical faculties to be able to assess what a satisfactory conclusion might be (Exit, 160). These are signs that he is losing the ability to deal in transformation, that regenerative testing of linguistic boundaries that has always marked the art of writing. Exit Ghost in fact abruptly ends with an unfinished playlet between the characters He and She, where the words stop altogether after a concluding, seemingly hastily written, parenthesis indicating that Zuckerman has left the building: ‘He disintegrates . . . Gone for good’ (292). And the end of Zuckerman’s writing is also the end of his ability to construct himself: perhaps not merely the forerunner to the death of his physical body, but death itself: ‘[w]ithout my work, what would be left of me?’ he asks (106). In intersecting with questions of memory, the self on trial once more becomes entangled with ghost writing. In Exit Ghost Zuckerman builds up a ghostly world of profound importance both to him personally and to the history of American literature, a world that he is anticipating joining before very long, perhaps of fragments but still sustaining him. Zuckerman indeed calls himself a ‘revenant’: a ghost of his former self who on impulse starts to chase his fellow-shade Lonoff, wanting to defend his old mentor against having his life ghostwritten by Kliman (Exit, 31). But the fictional writers Lonoff, Kliman and Zuckerman himself are far from being the only ones to haunt these pages: Exit Ghost is stuffed with references to other, real writers. For instance Zuckerman, mulling over his fears about his memory affecting his work, seeks guidance by considering the contrasting approaches to this problem of two great American predecessors: Hemingway, who put aside unsatisfactory work; and Faulkner, who pressed on with it and had it published. Joseph Conrad’s presence is strongly manifested through his short novel, The Shadow-Line (1917): a coming-of-age story about a young sea-captain commanding his first vessel, becalmed for weeks at sea, in the fog, with a crew who are all sick and hardly able to carry out basic duties, told in retrospect by his older self. The parallels with Exit Ghost are clear; and Roth

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creates a literary echo of The Shadow-Line, where Conrad’s imaginary line signifies not only the threshold of maturity but also the ever-present shadow of death, by referring to Roth’s friend George Plimpton’s Shadow Box: a collection of Plimpton’s fellow writers’ fantasies about how they’d like to die. The title Shadow Box in its turn conjures up Coleman Silk of The Human Stain, that wily young boxer who as an old man becomes desperate to break out of the ‘box’ of his self as he has constructed it over the years (Stain, 32). Kliman, meanwhile, is described by Zuckerman as someone who, habitually but obliviously, ‘irredeemably crosse[s] the line’: a boundary-breaker whose youthful, thoughtless daring is compared and contrasted with the self-conscious hesitations of Zuckerman’s ‘rash moments’; another inflection borrowed from ShadowLine (Exit, 138, 165). The density and subtlety of both inward reference, to Roth’s own works, and outward reference, to the works of his literary ancestors – the quality of his ghost writing – rivals The Human Stain as we considered it in Chapter 5. Once more, this spectral multivocality allows for the creation of the rhetorical spaces we have been absorbed in exploring: spaces that continue to resist final judgements by provoking an ongoing debate about the role of the artist and how an artist creates his identity. Nor is Exit Ghost the only one of Roth’s post-2006 novels to call on the voices of other writers. Both Everyman and Indignation, for example, begin with an epigraph. Everyman opens with a four-line disquisition on age, ‘[w]here palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs’, from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, while Indignation, besides referencing at length the philosophical works of Bertrand Russell in the anguished scene with Dean Caudwell, foreshadows the doom of the combative Marcus Messner by featuring ‘I sing of Olaf glad and big’ by e e cummings: ‘Olaf (upon what were once knees)/ does almost ceaselessly repeat/ “there is some shit I will not eat”’. The Humbling, in keeping with its actor protagonist, calls up several plays by Shakespeare, including The Tempest, and Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night; it also includes a long list, recalled by the despairing Simon Axler, of characters in dramatic works who commit suicide, including, of course, Konstantin in The Seagull, whose final action Axler emulates. Above all, Zuckerman’s re-encountering Amy and, through her, Lonoff, allows Roth to re-present his enduring concerns about writing, this tricky, treacherous, lessthan-truthful creative process, in relation to the long sweep of his own writing. All the novels of Nemeses, it appears, self-consciously evoke the identity-related, trial-oriented themes and tropes we have been studying in his major works, such as impersonation, the pursuing double and physical and psychological insufficiency. The sense that Roth is reviewing and assessing his own work is strengthened by his revelation that he ‘decided to reread all my books, starting at the end, Nemesis. I read until I got tired of them, just before Portnoy’s Complaint, which is a flawed book. I wanted to see whether I’d been wasting my time by writing. And I decided that I’d actually done all right . . . I did the best I could with what I had’ (Paris Review, 13 November 2012). Exit Ghost’s and Nemeses’ exceptionally high level of intratextuality raises the possibility that Roth is bringing his past work before the reader once more so as to reinforce the worth of his literary legacy. Exit Ghost in particular reprises many earlier Roth works, most overtly The Ghost Writer but also Zuckerman Unbound, Deception, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock,

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American Pastoral, The Human Stain and others. Exit Ghost returns the ailing Zuckerman, who for decades has lived a secluded life in rural Connecticut, to his former ground of New York where, in Zuckerman Unbound, about 30 years before, he had experienced the unwelcome effects of literary fame and success. Going to the city for treatment that might produce ‘the body refashioned’ by eliminating or reducing his chronic incontinence due to his former surgery for prostate cancer, he comes across Amy Bellette at the hospital, with a giveaway scar on her skull (Exit, 31). Soon after spotting Amy, Zuckerman is phoned by Kliman, whose brash self-confidence and sticking power recall both Alvin Pepler in Zuckerman Unbound and Moishe Pipik in Operation Shylock – and, perhaps, the younger Zuckerman who made public his inside story of that weekend with Lonoff in The Ghost Writer. Kliman wants Zuckerman to talk about Lonoff and to persuade Amy to do so, specifically regarding a certain personal sexual secret which he is convinced was held by Lonoff and that affected the whole course of his writing career. Amy later confirms to Zuckerman that this secret is Lonoff ’s incest with his sister when Lonoff was a youth. Kliman asserts about Lonoff that he wants ‘to do him justice’; but Zuckerman is violently resistant to the idea of a biography that will sensationally expose Lonoff, visiting upon him ‘[r]ehabilitation by disgrace’, and tells Kliman angrily that he will do his best to sabotage his book (46, 101). Zuckerman’s response to Amy’s confiding the story told to her by Lonoff of incestuous involvement with his sister Frieda is very much a writer’s response, and also very Rothian. Zuckerman is convinced, and tries his best to convince Amy, that what Lonoff told her about his relationship with Frieda was purely a figment of his literary imagination; that the experience which had utterly perplexed him and prevented him from writing his last work was not the personal turmoil of a forbidden relationship, but a writing block: the difficulty of communicating persuasively the fictional narrative that he had intended to be the definitive novel of his writing life. Lonoff ’s incest did not happen, Zuckerman asserts, only a story about incest that was itself stillborn. At this point we are very much in the ambiguous territory claimed by The Counterlife and, perhaps even more so, Deception with its teasing tale of a writer who might be having an affair or, perhaps, only writing about having an affair: territory where the boundaries of fiction and biography have dissolved. As, too, have the boundaries between fiction and autobiography: Zuckerman, battling his fading memory, is writing Exit Ghost, but is the book intended to be an autobiographical account of his trip to New York, a record of his meetings with Amy, his quarrel with Kliman and his rash plan to house swap with the young couple, Jamie and Billy Logan; or is it a fiction, as is suggested by the interspersed sections of dialogue between an unnamed He and She? The categorical slipperiness of Roth’s writing, so evident here at the end of his career and distinguishing it through the decades, tallies with his reluctance to impose final moral judgements on the characters whose predicaments he exposes to view; but it also seems consistent with his marked resistance to exposing himself to the judgement of others, either personally or as a writer.3 3

In the interview with Kaprielian, Roth reveals that after his death his executors will destroy his personal archive: ‘I don’t want my personal papers dragged all over the place’.

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This resistance might also lie behind Roth’s continually provoking speculation as to whether and how he and Nathan Zuckerman are one and the same. As Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr points out in the Philip Roth Society roundtable discussion on Exit Ghost, both Zuckerman and Roth are writing this book, so ‘how do we separate out the Roth from the Zuckerman?’ (Royal 2009, 12). The scope for confusion between (what appears to be) Zuckerman’s autobiographical material and what might be Roth’s is evident in the roundtable discussion as, several times, participants slip into speaking of one as though he is the other. Is Roth at this late stage, as Debra Shostak suggests might be the case, ‘giving us an opening to read [Exit Ghost] more autobiographically’ or is he teasingly hiding behind his fiction as he has so often done before, most notably in Operation Shylock? (Royal 2009, 13). A case in point is the eight-page appreciation of the recently dead George Plimpton that occurs near the end of Exit Ghost, where Zuckerman is voicing warm recollections about a man who in actuality was a valued friend of Roth’s. In his interview with Robert Siegel for NPR on 17 July 2011, Roth, true to form, refuses to admit to the autobiographical nature of what he has written, implicitly ascribing the words to Zuckerman by asserting that he, Roth, was pleased when the Plimpton pages ‘turned up’. Michael Rothberg observes that Plimpton was ‘a writer who wrote autobiographically, who created himself ’: who built a journalistic persona of ‘a bumbler of an athlete’ as Roth puts it, a no-hoper trying to play with major sports stars, even though he was a gifted athlete himself; a man with perfect self-possession from the most privileged of backgrounds (Royal 2009, 31; Exit, 249). And certainly the admiration evident here, from Zuckerman as from Roth, does largely appear to spring from seeing in Plimpton a fellow-adept at dissimulation, one who, with perhaps greater success than either Zuckerman or Roth, has created a serviceable and long-lasting doppelganger to hide behind. It is also possible that in this section of Exit Ghost, as Bernard F. Rodgers suggests, Roth is consciously presenting a model of how to write about another writer; of how to judge the impact of a writer’s persona upon his audience without crassly eliding his work with his personal life as critics have done so often to Roth himself (Royal 2009, 33). In this regard, where Exit Ghost appears to me to be coming most directly from Roth is during and after the scenes between Zuckerman and the judgemental Kliman. An exhausted Zuckerman, trying to recover from an encounter with Kliman, anxiously tries to assess Kliman’s potential threat, not to Lonoff, but to himself. ‘I couldn’t stop that kid’, he concludes, ‘[n]or could I stop him, when he was finished with Lonoff, from turning his blazing attention on me. Once I was dead, who could protect the story of my life from Richard Kliman? Wasn’t Lonoff his literary steppingstone to me? And what would my “incest” be? . . . An astonishing thing it is, too, that one’s prowess and achievement, such as they have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical inquisition’ (Exit, 275). Zuckerman’s forebodings concerning literary biography may well be thought to emanate directly from Roth in light of the fact that, since at least 2004, when he appointed Ross Miller to do the honours, Roth has been contemplating having his own biography written, especially considering that in 2009 that project was abandoned and Roth has since engaged another biographer, Blake

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Bailey, to do the work.4 Starting in 2012, as Roth has told the interviewer, Charles McGrath, the biography is intended to take 8 to 10 years to produce, with extensive co-operation from Roth himself, information that is bound to provoke speculation as to how much of a free hand Bailey will have in writing it (New York Times, 5 September 2012). We can only guess at what caused the change of biographer; but clearly the trials of biography must have been on Roth’s mind during the writing of Exit Ghost, since it voices a vigorous protest by Zuckerman, that ultimately comes, one feels, from Roth, against critics’ hasty or superficial determinations of the writer’s oeuvre. For a writer like Zuckerman – and almost certainly for Roth also – the trial now becomes very much about the ordeal of one’s life work being assessed and judged by others. Tellingly, the Zuckerman of Exit Ghost unquestionably wants to remain ‘[t]he man in control of the words’: so much so that he feverishly imagines Kliman to be ‘no less my nemesis than Lonoff ’s’ and desperately desires to be free of him (Exit, 274–5). Velichka Ivanova rightly comments here that the relationship between a biographer and the biographee ‘involves a dialogue between two life stories’ and accordingly the question of who controls, or should control, the story of a life is among the novel’s focal themes (Ivanova 2009, 206). Intriguingly in this regard, Zuckerman has an impression of Kliman as ‘a heavy wooden door’: an impression he struggles to interpret correctly (Exit, 269). He muses: ‘A door to what? A door between what? Clarity and confusion? That could be. I never know whether he is telling the truth or I have forgotten something or he is making things up . . . a door between Amy and Jamie, a door to George Plimpton’s death, a door swinging open and shut just inches from my face. Is there more to him than that? All I know is the door’ (Exit, 269). Kliman’s acting as ‘a door between Amy and Jamie’ (he is an old friend and ex-lover of Jamie, who puts him in touch with Zuckerman) makes him a link between past and present, a memory portal, though he is at the same time an obstruction, perceived by Zuckerman as blocking the way to Jamie, the woman he now desires. However, Kliman is also a doorway to the narrative: a check on Zuckerman’s control of the story. We seem to be in familiar territory: Operation Shylock and the parallel I have drawn with Derrida’s ‘Before the Law’: the man (or artist) at the doorway to the law, where the trials of ‘Philip Roth’ are caused by Pipik’s and then Smilesburger’s attempts to impose a voice on the writer, but where, simultaneously, the presence of a Pipik and a Smilesburger is essential to the exercise of that voice. Kliman has now become Zuckerman’s gatekeeper to the literary law; however, as we have already discovered, the major threat to Zuckerman’s voice comes now not from state-sanctioned machinations, or from a half-crazed second Philip Roth, as in Operation Shylock, but from his failing memory. Kliman therefore, the unfaltering one of the Lonoff-related trio that is completed by the memory-challenged Amy, does indeed provide a door between clarity and confusion, furnishing a coherent account of events that frames Zuckerman’s

4

A critical study, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books by Claudia Roth Pierpont, a friend of Roth’s, was published in 2013. Approved by Philip Roth, whom Pierpont interviewed at length for the project, it contains biographical material while focusing on his writing career; it is not an authorized biography.

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remembrances of the recent past even as Zuckerman suspects this young man whom Amy and he regard as an ‘impostor’ of distorting that account to further his own interests (195). Roth is giving one more twist to the impostor/double device that he has used so successfully several times before to perplex questions of both personal identity and literary authority while again, with the reference to Operation Shylock, suggesting the possibility that he is aiming to pre-empt judgement by effectively revisiting and assessing his own career. Roth’s engagement with his past work in Exit Ghost and Nemeses, however, also raises the question of whether or not these last novels are merely re-treads of earlier successes, lacking in power and originality. The critic Michiko Kakutani is scathingly dismissive of The Humbling, which was perhaps the least well received of the Nemeses novels, labelling it ‘a slight, disposable work’, where Roth seems to be ‘going through the motions of ticking off plot points on a spindly, ill-conceived outline’ (New York Times, 22 October 2009). Miriam Jaffe-Foger and Aimee Pozorski’s defence of The Humbling, in the context of Roth’s recently writing stronger female characters, cites Simon Axler ceding sexual and psychological dominance in their relationship to his young lover, Pegeen; Jaffe-Foger and Pozorski view this episode as an example of Roth turning on its head the literary and dramatic archetypes of female transformation in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady to render Simon Axler’s own transformation from dominator to dominated (2012, 89). However, despite The Humbling’s exhibiting another approach to male sexuality (and I think this is ultimately about male sexuality; an approach perhaps signalled by the character of the sexually bold Drenka in Sabbath’s Theater who is made to disappear suddenly instead of developing), the characters are too superficially and clumsily handled and the plot too flimsy to make it more than the most forgettable of Roth’s stories. Indignation, moreover, reprises the American Trilogy in perhaps too many respects. To begin with, it displays structural similarities: the crucial revelation that Marcus is at the point of death – in fact, believes himself to be dead – comes, with the intention of surprising and shocking the reader, roughly a quarter of the way into the novel, as does the uncovering of the secret about Coleman Silk’s blackness in The Human Stain. Then, Indignation revisits the Cold War era and ideology of I Married a Communist but with a sidelight this time on the Korean War. Additionally, it evokes American Pastoral in marshalling an order/disorder motif so as to interrogate pastoral innocence, the location this time being Winesburg College. Marcus, like the Swede, seeks always to live within the norms but is brought to recognize his otherness through contact both with the world of Winesburg and a female fellow-student with a difficult past: Olivia Hutton, a disorderly female somewhat like Merry Levov whose turbulence appears in her physique, this time as a scar from self-harming. Roth slightly rings the changes here by introducing a half-demented father who is also ‘out of control’ due to extreme anxiety about his son’s welfare: another twist on his tormented father – son relationships (Indignation, 168). ‘History will catch you in the end’, College President Albin Lentz admonishes the male students after an outbreak of disorder known as the Great White Panty Raid, echoing the foreboding tone of the American Trilogy; but here the interweavings of personal predicament and the Cold War context are far more

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sketchy and insubstantial, the novel’s set-pieces less convincing, than in any of their counterparts in the Trilogy (222). Neither does Exit Ghost escape these charges. Several scholars comment on Exit Ghost’s lack of originality in the roundtable discussion, Debra Shostak, for example, saying that despite ‘some wonderful passages . . . there are other times when I’m thinking, we’ve heard it all before’ (Royal 2009, 24). Kakutani’s review of Exit Ghost calls it, in comparison with the American Trilogy, ‘definitely a modest undertaking’ (New York Times, 2 October 2007). Even Roth himself appears, indirectly, to pass judgement on the novel’s originality in the radio interview with Siegel, when he says that he was pleased with the George Plimpton section because it was ‘something new’, perhaps implying that the rest of the book consists of older, less noteworthy, material. In light of this observation, one does wonder whether Zuckerman’s firstsight appraisal of the frail Amy as ‘a pathetic re-constitution of Amy Bellette’ applies as much to his feeling about what he has written about her in Exit Ghost as to his impression of Amy in person (Exit, 18). Given the qualms expressed by Zuckerman about the overall quality of his work that we have seen above, is this a novel that might even be seen, for example, in places such as the He and She dialogues, as intentionally bad: written by Roth to show Zuckerman’s deterioration (Royal 2009, 18–19)? The dialogues are undoubtedly sections it would be easy to skip: often repetitive and banal. There is additionally a language slip that bears out Zuckerman’s misgivings about his diminishing writing capacity, when ‘She’ says to ‘He’ that he has ‘held his existence so very close to his vest’ instead of ‘close to his chest’ (291). Roth here is surely once more with full intent pushing language near to disintegration, testing the reach of a writer’s all-too-human powers as he approaches death. But does this display of Zuckerman’s vulnerability as a writer open the possibility, that the haunting of Roth’s last novels by their predecessors is also an admission by Roth that his best work is behind him? We must not forget, though, that there have always been ebbs and flows during the course of Roth’s lifetime work: in between Portnoy’s Complaint and the first Zuckerman Trilogy were published the comparative squibs of Our Gang (1971), a none-too-subtle satire of the Nixon administration, and The Breast (1973), a play on the Kafka short story The Metamorphosis (1915), while The Plot against America was preceded by the relatively minor short work, The Dying Animal (2001). And Roth’s career in fiction has ended with a return to his old form in Nemesis: a book that yet again revisits the Newark of his childhood but still vividly makes it anew, while it refreshes his enduring theme of the trial where bodily ordeals, this time furnished by the polio virus, are again indicative of the strain upon a national mythology of wholeness and invulnerability. This time, one feels that the dialogue that is clearly taking place between Nemesis and the novels of the American Trilogy, strengthening the narrative’s reach towards the historical circumstances that lie beyond the personal tragedy, only enriches the experience of reading it. Meanwhile, this last of the Nemeses novels caps Roth’s exploration of the varied connotations of nemesis, moving away again from considering the writer’s world and the literary nemesis of critical judgement in favour of examining what nemesis means when a self, moulded by a trial-oriented national

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culture to perpetually seek purity and self-renewal, constantly facing and testing normative boundaries, is faced with ‘the tyranny of contingency’ (Nemesis, 243). With a warmly favourable reaction to Nemesis from many critics and scholars it seems as if Roth has gone out on a high note.5

Conclusion Roth’s late major novels, centred on the trial-racked body of the Jewish-American man, strip the nation of its innocence and reinstate accountability at the heart of individual and national self-making. They all seek accountability for the 1940s’ post-war dream of national unity and revival – the embracement of the myth of new beginnings – that marked the ideological response to fears of national disintegration and loss of identity following the realignment of the international powers after World War II. Considered collectively, they comprehensively portray that dream’s unravelling during the decades between the onset of the Cold War and the unruly present, where the 1948 settlement regarding Israel and Palestine is still playing itself out globally and testing America constitutionally. They sceptically re-interrogate the ‘possibilities of democracy’, which Matthiessen’s American Renaissance detects as being the concern of the five great nineteenth-century writers whose works Matthiessen places at the core of the American literary canon (1946, ix). These important works progressively expose the sense of contradiction and conflict at the heart of American self-making. They achieve this by conceiving of a changeable body in an innately threat-filled and treacherous relationship with an American national body. Roth’s paradigm for this relationship is the body in a state of trial, where the body of the defendant is the turbulent, often suffering, male Jewish body, whose boundaries are constantly under construction and therefore also constantly under threat. Undergoing those trials by which the American male self comes into being, it not only experiences testing situations but also constitutes a bodily space where ‘order itself ’ is on trial (Sherwin 2000, 69). All these novels present counternarratives to the narrative about a unified self at one with the nation, figuratively representing the multiplicity and fragmentation of both these entities, as we have seen, in terms of performance, half-visibility, half-legibility, doubling and impurity or contamination. They therefore perplex the words of Greil Marcus that Roth is ‘the Tocqueville of the American heart’ who portrays ‘a few Newark Jews convincingly standing in for the whole of the great expanse of place and people’ (2006, 100). In these novels, the Jewish body as the American masculine paradigm registers America’s constitutional vulnerability in several interconnected dimensions: historical, political, social and mythical. It is marked by spots and stains where its constitutional integrity is infringed upon. As has several times become apparent, women often operate 5

For example, Leah Hagen Cohen in the New York Times Sunday Book Review writes, ‘in the final shining pages, the narrator does restore Bucky to happiness, not by changing the man, but by doing what a storyteller can: conjure a moment from the past and fix it for all time’ (8 October 2010).

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here as agents of disorder, functioning, as do Merry and Rita in American Pastoral, Eve Frame in I Married a Communist and Monica Lewinsky in The Human Stain, to undo and betray the American man. By creating spaces of trial for the American man in which conflicting national discourses and narratives cross and clash, Roth’s novels embody R. W. B. Lewis’s contention that a culture equals its debates; that it is the ‘dominant clashes over ideas’ that ‘carry discourse forward’ (1955, 2). In this way also, Roth indicates the potential for transformation in states of trial. His creation of the subject as being ‘before a judgment which is always in preparation and always being deferred’ allows us to view the trial in its sense of an ongoing experiment and therefore to see the nation and ‘the American’ as being still in flux (Derrida 1992, 205–6). Does Roth anywhere admit scope for America’s story, in which the varying meanings of the trial have held such significance for its citizens, to give rise to yet another burst of national regeneration? Given that, for the last 10 years or so, Roth has consistently created figurations of a decline that is inevitable due to increasing age and impending death, immediately following another 10-year period in which, as we have seen, he has applied (possibly transformative) figurations of bodily breakdown to the state of the nation as a whole – an unravelling of the national narrative – we cannot avoid speculating that he sees his nation experiencing a dissolution in the post-war period that will not be reversed in future years: a terminal phase of the national constitution. And when it comes to fiction itself, Roth appears to detect a similar process of entropy in American readership. In an interview with Charles McGrath soon after announcing his retirement, he says, ‘I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has’ (New York Times, 17 November 2012). However, Roth seems to be far from writing off the book of voices that is American culture, when he continues, ‘[b]ut even as readership declines, great novels continue to be written [mentioning Ed Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Franzen, and Louise Erdrich.] This is something. . . . The numbers don’t mean anything. The books mean something’ (New York Times, 17 November 2012). The word is, then, still potent for Roth, particularly one word: justice. This becomes clear in Roth’s published eulogy for his old high school teacher, Bob Lowenstein, the man whose character became the basis for one of Roth’s wisest and most humane creations: Murray Ringold, of I Married a Communist. Roth says, of Murray, or Bob, that his ‘rage is . . . reserved for unwarrantable injustice’ (New York Times Sunday Review, 20 April 2013). Crucially, Roth has registered the writer’s struggle as to how to speak about justice and injustice: to demarcate a space in which to reflect upon ‘the law’ in American culture and society. He comments upon the political and public domains while at the same time negotiating the laws pertaining to literary expression and dealing with his place within America’s literary canon. Roth’s singular voice speaks clearly in the vivid, sharply observant, sceptical and often ironic, sometimes excessive or even outrageous language of his novels. It consistently speaks about the role of the American-inflected English language in bringing his nation and its laws into being, as it has brought its own literature into being. The role of language itself in building self as well as nation is both foregrounded and resisted in these texts. His protagonists’ struggles when their language escapes them or they speak inappropriately like Pipik or ‘wrongly’, as does

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Coleman Silk by saying the word ‘spooks’, indicate crises of experiencing themselves as ‘other’, that is, feeling themselves to be in a state of unsettlement or unhomeliness in their country amounting to existing in a state of deception, or betrayal. To apply Roth’s own words about Bob Lowenstein to Roth himself, he has ‘personified the drama of transformation through talk’ (New York Times Sunday Review, 20 April 2013). Roth consistently links speaking wrongly to the writer’s ‘creative subterfuge’ (Shylock, 346). Writing, like living, according to Roth, is about getting people wrong. It is in the potential for getting people wrong – in the expression of changeability or difference – that he shows writing to become transformative; but in fulfilling that potential, writing also becomes a treacherous act, an act that challenges its own authenticity. In these novels, perhaps most of all in Operation Shylock, Roth expounds on the creativity and, simultaneously, the treachery, of that subterfuge. In the act of discovering those places where speech might be ‘before-the-law’ – in asking whether speech can ever claim truth status – the writer too is placed on trial over how, when and whether to speak about issues of loyalty affecting the individual conscience and the nation. As an American and as a Jewish ‘grain of mustard’ within his culture, Roth explores these literary spaces of trial with tremendous brio but immense underlying seriousness, demonstrating how the writer can assume an oppositional role within the culture without sermonizing or being openly partisan politically. These texts, moreover, seem to proclaim their own treachery when they apparently declare that certain acts of America’s post-war history demand judgement, while also endlessly deferring judgement. Yet it is in their demands on the reader’s own judgement that their integrity depends. Despite the unreliability of the word in Roth’s works he always, perhaps paradoxically, asserts the seriousness of the word, the writer’s duty to ‘write well’ (Communist, 218). It is undoubtedly Roth speaking when he puts these words into the mouth of the young Nathan Zuckerman’s tutor and fiercest critic, Leo Glucksman, as also when Glucksman asserts that writers must show they are ‘on the side of the word!’(Communist, 219). To be on the side of the word and to write well – an activity that necessitates finding one’s own voice and taking responsibility for that voice – is, by Roth’s implication, a way to build an American identity and, perhaps, is also a way in which to begin to speak justly about America and Americans, or at least to begin to define the terms ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ in that regard. To do this is to take account of the past, in the sense of the nation’s history distanced from its mythology, and to restate the need to think seriously about the language of America’s written Constitution. It is also to acknowledge, as Roth surely does, the literary culture from which one’s own voice emerges, while transmuting ‘the book of voices’ into one’s unique voice, in the act of ghost writing (Communist, 222). This act allows room for the reader’s response and for the possibility of alternative narratives speaking within the text. It acknowledges the act of storytelling as a meaningful act but asserts the need to keep contesting the old stories in the face of attempts to resuscitate them. Roth’s states of trial place his Americans ‘before-the-law’: always potentially in the wrong but also always in a state of change, as too is the writer. In these rhetorical spaces, the debate goes on.

Bibliography of Works Cited Primary sources Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, [1952] 1965. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. London: Vintage, 1998. —. Anatomy Lesson in Zuckerman Bound. London: Vintage, [1983] 1998. —. The Breast. London: Corgi, 1973. —. Counterlife. London: Jonathan Cape, [1986] 1987. —. Deception: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. —. Everyman. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. —. Exit Ghost. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. —. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York: Vintage, 1988. —. Ghost Writer in Zuckerman Bound. London: Vintage, [1979] 1998. —. Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories. London: Transworld Publishers, 1964. —. Human Stain. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. —. Humbling. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. —. I Married a Communist. London: Vintage, [1998] 1999. —. Indignation. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008. —. My Life as a Man. New York: Vintage, [1974] 1993. —. Nemesis. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. —. Operation Shylock: A Confession. London: Vintage, 1994. —. Plot Against America: A Novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. —. Portnoy’s Complaint. Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, [1969] 1986. —. Sabbath’s Theater. London: Vintage, 1996. —. Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. —. When She Was Good. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967. —. Zuckerman Unbound in Zuckerman Bound. London: Vintage, [1981] 1998.

Secondary sources Aarons, Victoria. ‘Expelled Once Again: The Failure of the Fantasized Self in Philip Roth’s Nemesis’. Philip Roth Studies 9.1 (Spring 2013): 51–63. —. What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Algren, Nelson. Never Come Morning. New York: Seven Stories Press, [1942] 1996. Allen, Mary. The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976, pp. 70–96. Alphandary, Idit. ‘Wrestling With the Angel and the Law or the Critique of Identity: The Demjanjuk Trial, Operation Shylock: A Confession, and “Angel Levine”’. Philip Roth Studies 4.1 (Spring 2008): 57–74.

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Angyal, Andras. Foundations for a Science of Personality. New York; London: The Commonwealth Fund; Oxford University Press, 1941. Appelfeld, Aharon. Tzili: The Story of a Life. Trans. Dalya Bilu. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1983. Arac, Jonathan. ‘F.O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance’ in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83. Ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease, New Series, no. 9. Baltimore; London: John Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp. 90–112. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. London: Michael Joseph, 1963. Bell, Jonathan. Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years. Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Bercovitch, Sacvan. American Jeremiad. Madison, WI; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. —. Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York; London: Routledge, 1993. Berger, Jr, Harry. Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies and Cultural Representations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Berlant, Lauren. Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Berryman, Charles. ‘Philip Roth and Nathan Zuckerman: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prometheus’. Contemporary Literature 31.2 (1990): 177–90. Bloom, Claire. Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir. London: Virago Press, 1997. Brauner, David. ‘American Anti-Pastoral: Incontinence and Impurity in American Pastoral and The Human Stain’. Studies in American Jewish Literature 23 (2004): 67–76. —. Philip Roth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Budick, Emily Miller. ‘The Haunted House of Fiction: Ghost Writing the Holocaust’. Common Knowledge 5 (Fall 1996): 120–35. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York; London: Routledge, 1997. Caputi, Mary. A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Chomsky, Noam. Language and Politics. Ed. C. P. Otero. Montreal; New York: Black Rose Books, 1988. —. Language and Responsibility. Trans. John Viertel. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979. Cohen, Josh. ‘Roth’s doubles’, in Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Ed. Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Conrad, Joseph. Shadow-line: A Confession. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Deans, Phil and Hugo Dobson. ‘Introduction: East Asian Postage Stamps as Socio-Political Artifacts’. EAST ASIA 22 (Summer 2005): 3–7. Deem, Melissa. ‘The Scandalous Fall of Feminism and the “First Black President”’, in A Companion to Cultural Studies. Ed. Toby Miller. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York; London: Routledge, 1992. —. Politics of Friendship. Radical Thinkers 5. London; New York: Verso, [1997] 2005.

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Index 9-11 see post 9-11 era Aarons, Victoria 61–3, 157–8 Adamism 6, 53, 58–9, 61, 71, 73, 87, 138 ageing 3, 116, 121, 158 Algren, Nelson 83 Allen, Mary 11n. 13 Alphandary, Idit 3, 33n. 7 Amboy Dukes (Shulman) 83n. 7 American Adam (Lewis) 6, 53n. 3, 58, 61, 71 ‘American berserk’ 13, 54, 64, 67, 71–5 American Constitution 25, 53, 85n. 9, 129–53 American Dream, An (Mailer) 64n. 14 American history see American Way; Cold War era; McCarthyism; post 9-11 era; regeneration, of post-war America; Roth, Philip and turning back of historical perspective; Roth, Philip on post-war American history; Vietnam era American identity see American national body; body, female; body, Jewish male; body, male; identity, American male; identity, American national; identity, Jewish; self-making American Jeremiad (Bercovitch) 52n. 2 American national body 2, 6–8, 73, 166 and Levov, Merry 64 and Levov, Seymour ‘the Swede’ 54, 64–5 and Lewinsky, Monica 122 in The Plot against America 133–4, 139, 148, 152, 167 and Ringold, Ira 87, 91 and Roosevelt, F. D. 123, 148 and Silk, Coleman 116–25 American national identity see identity, American national American Pastoral and American berserk 54, 72, 74 and American national body 64

and American Way 51, 53, 56, 84 and betrayal 11, 66, 72–3 and body, trials of 15, 63–5, 69–70, 73, 74 and disease 65, 66 and disorder 11, 51, 65, 66, 69, 73, 74, 164 and entitlement 53, 58 and father/daughter relationship 60 and father/son relationship 61 and guilt 68, 73, 75 and identity, American male 15, 54, 56, 59, 60–3, 65, 66, 74–5 and identity, Jewish 61–3 and inheritance 57 and innocence 58, 61, 68, 73, 75 and liminality 7, 57–8 and madness 71–2 and normative boundaries, testing 64, 65, 70–2 and otherness 11, 67, 72, 164 and pastoral myth 51, 53, 54, 58–9, 60–3 and retribution 61–3 and Roosevelt, F. D. 56 and speech, testing boundaries of 11, 54, 71–2 and stuttering 64, 114 and ‘trial’ (impeachment) of Nixon 9, 15, 54, 64n. 14, 66, 73–4, 122 and trial spaces 11, 51, 54, 55, 60, 61, 67, 69 and Vietnam era 53, 56, 59, 66, 72, 74 and violence 51, 59, 60, 66, 69, 74, 118 and women 13, 51, 54, 66, 67–72, 74–5, 120 American Renaissance (Matthiessen) 16–17, 17n. 15, 166 American Way 8, 13, 51–3, 55–8, 62, 63, 74, 84, 86, 96, 130

178

Index

Anatomy Lesson 3, 19–21, 61 Angyal, Andras 83n. 7 anti-Semitism 56n. 6 and Focus (Miller) 89–90 and Lindbergh, Charles 129–30, 132, 139, 140 and Ringold, Ira 96 and Roth, Philip 48 and Zuckerman, Nathan 20 Appel, Milton (character) 20 Appelfeld, Aharon 28n. 2, 29, 34, 38, 38n. 10 Appleseed, Johnny 58 Arac, Jonathan 16 autobiography 9–10, 13, 30–1, 34, 39, 79, 81, 93, 95, 97, 100, 161–2 Axler, Simon (character) 156, 157, 158, 160, 164 Baldwin, James 105, 106, 107n. 4 ‘Before the Law’ (Derrida) 29, 34–6, 37–9, 41, 42, 44, 46, 163, 167 Bell, Jonathan 85 Bellette, Amy (character) and betrayal 23 and body, trials of 161, 165 as Frank, Anne 22–3 and ghost writing 22 and Lonoff, E. I. 22, 24, 161 and memory 158, 163 and self-multiplication 159 and speech, testing boundaries of 159 Bellow, Saul 16, 17 Bercovitch, Sacvan 4, 16n. 14, 52n. 2 Berger, Harry, Jr 88 Berlant, Lauren 133 Berryman, Charles 61n. 13 berserk see ‘American berserk’ betrayal 11, 20, 23, 48, 66, 72–3, 77–9, 84, 86, 91–2, 94–5, 97, 115, 155, 167 Bildungsroman 13, 22–5, 73, 77–82, 86, 87, 89–95, 99–100 biography 24, 28, 161–3 Blackboard Jungle (Hunter) 83n. 7 blackness, racial 104–6, 108, 110, 112–14, 123, 164 Bloom, Claire 10n. 11, 31 bodily impurity see body, contamination of

bodily ordeals see body, trials of body and blackness, racial 104–6, 108, 110, 112–14, 123, 164 contamination of 6–7, 12, 64n. 14, 66, 104, 116–17, 119–20, 166 disease of 7, 64–5, 116, 122, 157, 159 female 2, 4, 11, 64–5, 67–70, 122–3, 161, 164 Jewish male 7, 90, 108, 122–3, 139, 152, 166 male 5–6, 9, 11, 20, 51–3, 64, 69–70, 83, 105, 116–19, 121, 125, 130, 153–6, 159, 161 of president 6, 119–21, 134, 153 regeneration of 4–6 trials of 1, 2, 7, 10–11, 19, 21, 54, 63–5, 115, 118, 153, 155, 165–6 and whiteness, racial 104–6, 108–10, 114–19, 120, 125, 127, 136 wholesome 2, 5–6, 17, 58, 87, 116, 124–5 body national see American national body Brauner, David 3, 20 The Breast 7 Brooks, Peter 30, 31, 34, 38, 42 Budick, Emily Miller 13–14, 24 Bush, G. W. 129, 144n. 10, 149–52, 154 Butler, Judith 44–5, 48, 49, 71, 97, 126 Call It Sleep (Roth) 82n. 3 Cantor, Bucky (character) 156, 157, 166n. 5 Caputi, Mary 150 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) 83, 84 censorship 27, 30, 40, 44, 46–7, 49 Chomsky, Noam 27, 28n. 1, 47 citizenship 3, 5, 13, 15 in American Pastoral 62, 65, 76 and Demjanjuk, John (Ivan) 33 in The Human Stain 104–6, 109, 114, 116–18, 120, 122 in The Plot against America 130, 133, 137, 140–2, 152–4 and Ringold, Ira 96 Citizen Tom Paine (Fast) 81 Clinton, Bill (character) and American national body 6, 11, 117, 119–20, 121, 125

Index and blackness, racial 119 and body, contamination of 104, 117, 119–20 and Conservatism 119, 123 and feminization 120–1, 123, 125 and impeachment hearings 9, 104, 125–6 and Lewinsky, Monica 119–21, 123, 125 and normative boundaries, testing of 121 and ‘spirit of sanctimony’ 110, 123, 125–6 Cohen, Josh 30n. 3 Cohen, Rita 67–9 Cold War era 8, 9, 17, 52, 55, 56, 77–9, 83–5, 87, 88, 91, 92, 99, 100, 151, 164 Compulsion (Levin) 83n. 7 confession 10, 13, 20, 28–34, 36–40, 42–4, 46–7 Conrad, Joseph 159–60 conspiracy 130–2, 134, 136, 137, 140, 144–8, 150, 152, 154 conspiratorial text 132, 145, 148–9, 154 Constitution, US 6, 9, 13, 25–6, 53, 65n. 15, 85n. 9, 100, 122, 130–1, 142–4, 152–3, 154, 156, 166, 168 contamination, of body see blackness, racial; body, contamination of; body, disease of; body, female; body, Jewish male Counterlife 9, 160, 161 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon) 136n. 5 Deans, Phil 135n. 4, 138 death 3, 67, 70, 108, 112–13, 120, 125, 155–6, 158–60, 161n. 3, 163–5, 167 Deception 9, 10, 160, 161 Deem, Melissa 119, 121 defendant, subject as 1–2, 7, 11, 14, 19, 59, 67, 76, 98, 114, 166 Demjanjuk, John (Ivan) 3, 8, 29, 32, 33, 37, 42 democracy, American 6, 17, 51, 52n. 2, 55, 74, 85, 118, 129, 131, 133–4, 136, 137n. 8, 143, 146, 148, 151–3, 166

179

Derrida, Jacques 12 ‘Before the Law’ 27, 29, 34–9, 41–2, 44, 46, 163, 167 Politics of Friendship 136, 137, 137n. 8, 154 Diasporism 28n. 1, 29, 34, 39, 41–2, 45–8 Dinnerstein, Leonard 56n. 6, 107 disease see body, disease of disorder 2, 11–14, 20, 51, 54, 64–7, 71, 73, 75, 90–1, 130, 152, 164, 167 Dobozy, Tamas 33n. 7 Dobson, Hugo 135n. 4, 138 doubling 43–4, 99, 114, 131, 136, 146, 147, 160, 164, 166 Eagle, Christopher 64 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 5, 16, 53n. 3, 59n. 12, 81, 87 Everyman 155–60 Everyman (character) 156, 157, 158 Exit Ghost and ageing 156 and autobiography 162 and biography 162–3 and body, trials of 156, 158–9 and genre boundaries, testing of 161 and ghost writing 159–60 and intratextuality 160 and judgement 156, 157 and memory 158–9 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven 48 The Facts 9 fascism 129, 130, 137 Fast, Howard 81, 87 father-daughter relationship 60 father-son relationship 61, 139, 144 Felman, Shoshana 70 female body see body, female feminization (of male characters) 11, 120, 121, 123 Ferguson, Robert on defendants 7, 67, 114 on trials and liminality 12, 67 on trials and narrative 11–12, 54, 113, 125 on trials and social norms 12, 96–7 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin) 107

180

Index

Focus (Miller) 89–90, 98, 99 Foley, Michael 142–3 Fowler, Alastair 39 Frame, Eve (character) and betrayal 11, 94–5, 167 and ghostwriting 39, 79, 93–5 and identity, Jewish 79, 96 and self, performative 94–6 Frank, Anne (character) in Exit Ghost 159 in Ghost Writer 22–5 in I Married a Communist 98–9 fraternal image 131, 132, 134, 136–7, 143, 146, 154 fraternity 129, 131–4, 136–40, 143, 146, 147, 152, 154 Freedom Road (Fast) 81 Freeman, Daniel 130 Freeman, Jason 130 Freud, Sigmund 137 Fromm, Erich 83n. 7 Fuchs, Lawrence H. 5n. 5 genre boundaries, testing of 10, 12, 13, 162–3 in The Ghost Writer 22 in I Married a Communist 78–80, 95, 100 in Operation Shylock 29–32, 38–40, 44, 46, 49 see also autobiography; biography Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson) 131, 132, 135, 145, 147–50 Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost 160–1 and Frank, Anne 22–5 and ghost writing 14, 22–5, 98–9, 101 and impersonation 22–5 and James, Henry 15 and judgement 19 and self-multiplication 159 and Zuckerman, Nathan 19, 22–5, 160–1 ghost writing 3, 13–14, 21–5, 77, 79, 93, 95, 98–9, 100–1, 103, 112, 159–60, 168 ghostwriting 13–14, 21, 23–4, 77, 79, 93, 95, 98, 100

Gilman, Sander 7n. 9, 106, 107, 122 Gilmore, Michael T. 15, 104, 105, 120, 133, 142, 143 Girgus, Sam B. 16, 55n. 4, 85 Gold, Michael 82n. 5 Goodbye Columbus 2, 40 Gordon, Andrew 61n. 13 guilt 2, 6–7, 14, 19, 20, 157 in American Pastoral 59, 61, 67–8, 70, 72, 73, 75–6 in The Human Stain 113–14, 119n. 9 in I Married a Communist 91, 96–8 in Operation Shylock 31, 33n. 8, 42, 46, 48 in The Plot against America 134, 139, 140 Gurnham, David 153, 156 Hariman, Robert 95 Hassan, Ihab W. 84n. 8 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1, 4, 15, 16, 112 Heinze, Andrew R. 57n. 10, 83, 84 Herberg, Will 52n. 2 Hinckley, Barbara 134 Hofstadter, Richard 130 Holocaust 8, 14, 22, 24–5, 32–4, 38, 70n. 17 ‘Homestead 42’ 140–4 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 8, 9, 56, 78, 84, 93, 95–7 Human Stain and American national body 6, 11, 116–21, 125 and being a ‘spook’ 113–15 and betrayal 115 and blackness, racial 14, 15, 103–4, 106–8, 112–13, 119, 127 and body, contamination of 11, 104, 116–17, 118–21, 12 and Clinton, Bill 117, 119–21 and Conservatism 119, 123 and Faunia Farley 103, 110–12, 116 and feminization 11, 120–1, 123, 125 and ghost writing 103, 112 and identity, American male 14, 15, 108, 109–10, 118–21, 125 and identity, Jewish 15, 104, 106–8, 115–16, 121–3, 125, 127

Index and legibility/illegibility 104, 109–10, 127 and Lewinsky, Monica 121–3 and liminality 114–15 and normative boundaries, testing of 121 and political correctness 9, 103, 108 and racial harassment 103, 125 and sexual misconduct 103, 116, 119–21 and speech boundaries, testing of 14, 108, 110–13, 114, 126–7 and ‘spirit of sanctimony’ 110, 123, 125–6 and (Coleman Silk’s) tattoo 108–10 and trial spaces 9, 103, 113, 118, 125–7 and visibility/invisibility 103–4, 106–8, 109–10, 113–15, 123, 127 and whiteness, racial 118–19, 127 and Zuckerman, Nathan as narrator 111, 113, 125 Humbling and critical reception 164 and death 156, 158 and ghost writing 160 and judgement 157 and self, performative 158 and sexual roles 164 Hunter, Evan 83n. 7 identity, American male 2–3, 5–6, 8–10, 20 in American Pastoral 15, 54, 56, 58–9, 60–3, 65, 66, 74–6 in The Human Stain 14, 15, 108, 109–10, 116–21, 125 in I Married a Communist 77, 80, 84–9, 87, 90–2, 95, 99, 100 in Operation Shylock 21, 22, 41, 44, 45 in The Plot against America 132–8, 139, 141, 146–7, 152 identity, American national 1, 5, 8–10, 27, 34, 42, 52, 54, 57, 65, 77, 81, 83, 91, 99, 104, 106, 116–17, 131, 140, 150–1, 155 see also American national body

181

identity, Jewish 8, 15, 16, 49, 61–3, 77, 79, 84, 90, 96, 99, 104, 106–8, 115–16, 121–3, 125, 127, 133, 144 identity as performance see self, performative illegibility see legibility I Married a Communist and American national body 87, 91 and betrayal 11, 77–9, 84, 86, 91, 92, 94–5, 97 and Bildungsroman 77–8, 80, 81, 87, 89, 92, 94–5, 99, 100 and Communism 77–8, 91, 95–7 and ghostwriting 39, 79, 93–5 and identity, American male 77, 80, 86, 87, 90–2, 95, 99, 100 and identity, Jewish 77, 79, 84, 90, 96, 99 and impersonation 91–2 and injustice 100, 167 and liminality 91 and Lincoln, Abraham 85–9, 91, 95 and McCarthyism 77, 94–7 and narrator, unreliable 86, 95, 97–8, 100 and self, performative 79, 86, 87–92, 94–6, 99 and speech boundaries, testing of 86–9, 114, 126 and trial spaces 78–9, 94–7, 98, 100 impersonation 13 in The Ghost Writer 21–5 in I Married a Communist 91–2 in Operation Shylock 10, 15, 38, 40, 42 in The Plot against America 147 and ‘Roth, Philip’ 10, 38, 42, 147 and Zuckerman, Nathan 21–4, 163–4 impurity see body, contamination of Indignation 155–6 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz) 82n. 3 inheritance 4, 27, 57, 59–62, 65, 81, 89, 99, 101, 103, 113, 118, 142, 156 innocence 2, 3, 5–7, 166 in American Pastoral 51, 53, 58–61, 67, 68, 70, 73–6 in Everyman 157 in The Human Stain 113

182

Index

in I Married a Communist 84, 97–8 in Indignation 164 in The Plot against America 135n. 4 invisibility 103–8, 110, 114–15, 117, 126–7, 147 Invisible Man (Ellison) 103 and betrayal 155 and blackness, racial 104–5, 114 and ghost writing 112–13 and influence on Roth, Philip 104 and invisibility 104–5, 114 and legibility 125 Iser, Wolfgang 15 Island Within, The (Lewisohn) 82n. 3 Ivanova, Velichka 64, 163 Jacobson, Matthew Frye 89, 106, 107, 110, 117 Jaffe-Foger, Miriam 164 James, Henry 15, 20 “The Middle Years” 16, 23, 24 Jameson, Fredric 131, 135, 147, 150 and conspiratorial text 132, 145, 148, 149, 154 Japtok, Martin 81 Jewish identity see identity, Jewish Jews without Money (Gold) 82n. 5 Joyce, James 23–5 judgement 2, 12, 14–15, 17, 155–8, 160–2, 164–5, 168 in American Pastoral 59, 63, 72, 76 in The Ghost Writer 19, 20 in The Human Stain 108, 114, 116, 125, 127 in I Married a Communist 97, 98 in Operation Shylock 38, 43, 45–6, 48, 50 in The Plot against America 143n. 9 Kaprielian, Nelly 155n. 1, 161n. 3 Kellmann, Steven G. 129n. 1 Kliman, Richard (character) 156, 158–63 Knight, Peter 136n. 6 Konvitz, Milton 55n. 4 Kutler, S. 64n. 14 language see ghost writing; ghostwriting; speech, testing boundaries of Lasch, Christopher 137n. 7

Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 16–17 Leaving a Doll’s House (Bloom) 10n. 11 legibility 15, 104–5, 109–11, 113–14, 117, 124–7, 131, 133, 142–3, 153, 166 Levin, Meyer 83n. 7 Levov, Dawn (character) and betrayal 66 and body, trials of 73 and Levov, Merry 70 real-life model for 57n. 10 and Vietnam era 66 Levov, Lou (character) and American Way 51, 53, 56 and body, trials of 15, 74 and identity, American male 56 and innocence 75 and normative boundaries, testing of 71 and Roosevelt 56 Levov, Merry (character) and ‘American berserk’ 54, 72, 74 and betrayal 11, 66, 72, 73 and body, trials of 64, 65, 69–70 and disease 65–6 and disorder 11, 51, 65–6, 69, 73, 74, 164 and father/daughter relationship 60 and identity, American male 60, 61–2, 65, 66, 74–5 and innocence 75 and madness 71–2 and normative boundaries, testing 64, 65, 70–2 and pastoral myth 61–2 and retribution 61–2 and self-making 74–5 and speech boundaries, testing of 11, 54, 70–2 and stuttering 64, 114 and trial spaces 11, 54, 60, 69 and Vietnam era 56, 74 and violence 51, 59, 60, 66, 69, 74, 118 Levov, Seymour ‘the Swede’ (character) and betrayal 72–3 and body, trials of 63, 64 and Cohen, Rita 67–9 and entitlement 53, 58 and father/son relationship 61 and guilt 68, 73, 75

Index and identity, American male 15, 54, 56, 59, 61–3, 76 and identity, Jewish 61–3 and innocence 58, 61, 68, 73 and inheritance 57 and Levov, Merry 60, 65–6, 69–71 and liminality 7, 57–8 and Nixon, Richard, impeachment hearings of 73–4 and otherness 11, 67, 72, 164 and pastoral myth 51, 53, 54, 58–9, 60, 63 physical appearance 57 and retribution 61–3 and speech boundaries, testing of 71–2 and trial spaces 11, 51, 54, 55, 60, 61, 67 and Vietnam era 53, 59, 66, 72 and women, disorderly 13, 51, 54, 66, 67–72, 74–5 Lewinsky, Monica (character) and American national body 119, 121–3, 125 and betrayal 167 and body, contamination of 104, 117, 119–20 and Clinton, Bill 119–21, 123, 125 and feminization of male characters 11, 120, 121, 123 and identity, Jewish 11, 122 and self-making 122–3 and ‘spirit of sanctimony’ 110, 125–6 Lewis, R. W. B. 167 on Adamism 6, 53n. 3, 58, 61, 71 Lewisohn, Ludwig 82n. 3 liminality 2, 4, 7 in American Pastoral 7, 54, 58, 63, 67, 72, 76 in The Human Stain 104, 106, 114–15, 117 in I Married a Communist 91 in Operation Shylock 10, 39, 43 Lindbergh, Charles (character) and 1940s 9, 149 and American national body 139 and anti-Semitism 130, 132, 133, 138, 139, 140 and conspiracy 140, 144, 146

183

and Constitution, US 143–4 disappearance of 130, 146, 147 and fascism 129, 130, 137 and flight 132, 134, 135, 146 and fraternal image 131, 132, 134, 136–7, 143, 146, 154 and ‘Homestead 42’ 140–4 and identity, American national 140 and paranoia 135–6, 138, 145, 148, 153, 154 and populism 137, 153 and ‘undivided manhood’ 134, 136, 138, 139 Lonoff, E. I. (character) and Amy Bellette 22, 24 and biography 156, 158–9, 161 and father-son relationship 139, 144 and ghostwriting 159 and identity, American male 23 and judgement 19–20, 161 as mentor of Zuckerman, Nathan 19 Looby, Christopher 85 loshon hora (evil speech) 45–9 Luckhurst, Roger 30n. 4 McCarthyism 8, 9, 25, 26, 77, 79, 85, 91, 94–7, 101, 129, 151 McDonald, Brian 51–2 McLaughlin, Kate 33n. 7 madness 71 Mailer, Norman 16, 64n. 14 male body see body, male male identity, American see identity, American male male identity, Jewish see identity, Jewish manhood, national see American national body manhood, ‘undivided’ 6, 21, 120, 134, 137, 138 Marcus, Daniel 150, 151 Marcus, Griel 2n. 3, 166 masculinity see American national body; body, Jewish male; body, male; feminization; identity, American male; identity, Jewish Matthiessen, F. O. 16–17, 58n. 11, 166 melancholia 9, 131, 139, 140, 150–2, 153 Melville, Herman 16, 17

184

Index

memory 31, 52, 60, 158–9, 163 Messner, Marcus (character) 156, 164 Middle Years, The (James) 16, 23, 24 Miller, Arthur 89–90, 98, 99 Miller, Perry 52n. 2 Moby-Dick (Melville) 17 Moretti, Franco 78, 80, 86, 92, 100 Morley, Catherine 14, 129n. 1 My Life as a Man 19 Nadel, Ira 158n. 2 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer) 81 narrator, unreliable 12, 22, 31, 52, 72, 77, 86, 97, 99–100, 127 national body, American see American national body national identity see identity, American national national manhood see American national body National Manhood (Nelson) 6, 65n. 15, 105, 120, 136, 137 national mythology 1–2, 4, 7, 51, 53–4, 80, 88, 127, 151, 157, 165, 168 Neelakantan, Gurumurthy 129n. 1, 152n. 17 Nelson, Dana D. body, female 65n. 15 body, male 105 national manhood 6, 120, 136, 137 Nemesis and body, trials of 156, 165 and death 156 and identity, American national 155–7, 165–6 and justice 156 and meaning of ‘nemesis’ 155, 157 and self-judgement 157 Never Come Morning (Algren) 83 Nixon, Richard and American Way 84 and impeachment hearings 9, 15, 54, 64n. 14, 66, 73, 74, 122 in Our Gang 165 normative boundaries, testing of 1–2, 8, 10, 12, 19, 64–5, 70–2, 83, 121, 164, 166 nostalgia 60, 123, 129n. 1, 150–3

O’Donnell, Patrick 24, 25 O’Neill, William L. 111n. 15 Operation Shylock and ‘agents of the law’ 22, 30, 31, 39, 40–1, 44, 45–7, 163 and authorship 34–9 and autobiography 30 and betrayal 48 and body, trials of 15 and censorship 34, 37, 40, 44–7 and confession 31, 37, 39, 40, 42–3 and deception 39 and Demjanjuk trial 3, 8, 29, 32–3, 37, 42 and Diasporism 29, 34, 39, 41, 46 and doubling 29, 33, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46 and factivity 28–9, 28n. 2 and generic boundaries 31–2, 35–9, 42, 44, 47 and identity, American male 21, 22, 41, 44, 45 and identity, Jewish 49 and impersonation 10, 15, 38, 40, 42 and judgement 45 and liminality 43 and loshon hora (evil speech) 44–9 and normative boundaries, testing 21, 42, 47 and ‘Operation Shylock’ 29 and Pipik, Moishe 15, 21, 22, 29, 38–9, 40–4, 46 and self-reflexiveness 10, 28 and Smilesburger 28n. 2, 29–30, 34, 37, 39–41, 44–9 and speech boundaries, testing of 21, 22, 29, 39, 40–7, 49 and US-Israel relations 29–33, 44, 48 ‘other’, the 11–12, 34, 164, 168 in American Pastoral 56, 64–5, 67, 71–2, 75 in The Human Stain 106–8, 115 in I Married a Communist 83n. 6, 84, 88–9, 96, 99–100 in The Plot against America 130, 132, 136–7, 140, 146–7, 153–4

Index paranoia 9, 130–1, 134–8, 141, 144–6, 148–54 Parrish, Timothy 104, 110 pastoral myth 2, 6, 130, 164 in American Pastoral 13, 51, 53, 57–63, 73, 74 paternal authority 139, 141, 144 Pepler, Alvin (character) 21–2, 161 performance of identity see self, performative Pierpont, Claudia Roth 163n. 4 Pinsker, Sanford 107 Pipik, Moishe (character) as an ‘agent of the law’ 22, 30, 31, 39, 40–1, 163 and betrayal 48 and body, trials of 15 and confession 39, 40 and Diasporism 34, 39, 46 and doubling 29, 33, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46 and genre boundaries, testing of 44 and identity, American male 22, 41, 44 and impersonation 15, 38, 40, 42 and normative boundaries, testing 21, 42, 47 and Pepler, Alvin 21–2, 161 and speech boundaries, testing of 21, 29, 40–2, 44–7 Plot against America and 1940s 9, 149 and American national body 139, 152 and anti-Semitism 130, 132, 133, 138, 139, 140 and betrayal 147 and citizenship 133, 141, 146 and conspiracy 130–2, 134, 136, 137, 140, 144–8, 150, 152, 154 and fascism 129, 130, 137 and father-son relationship 139, 144 and flights (of Charles Lindbergh) 132, 134, 135, 146 and fraternal image 131, 132, 134, 136–7, 143, 146, 154 and fraternity 129, 131–4, 138–40, 146, 147, 152 and ‘Homestead 42’ 140–4 and identity, American male 133, 139, 141, 146, 152

185

and identity, American national 140 and identity, Jewish 133, 144 and impersonation 147 and melancholia 139, 140, 152 and paranoia 135–6, 138, 141, 145, 148, 153, 154 and paternal authority 139, 141, 144 and populism 137, 153 and speech boundaries, testing of 140–4 and ‘undivided manhood’ 134, 136, 138, 139 and US Constitution 143–4 Politics of Friendship (Derrida) 136, 137, 154 populism 86–8, 91, 96–7, 100, 123, 129n. 1, 132, 134, 137, 143, 151, 153 Portnoy’s Complaint 19 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 23–5 Posnock, Ross 3 post 9-11 era 3, 9, 129, 131, 144n. 10, 149 post-war American history 1–2, 8–10, 12, 26–9, 33, 51–2, 58, 62, 73, 75, 78, 81, 83, 104, 119, 129, 131, 149–54, 166–8 post-war regeneration, of America 8–9, 12, 17, 51–2, 151, 167 Pozorski, Aimee 164 presidential body see body, of president Puritanism, influence of 4–5 Pynchon, Thomas 136n. 5, 150 racial blackness see blackness, racial racial whiteness see whiteness, racial Radstone, Susannah 31, 32 Reagan, Ronald 149–51, 154 regeneration, of body 4–6 regeneration, of post-war America 8–9, 12, 17, 51–2, 151, 167 retribution 46, 61–3, 155–6 rhetorical spaces see trials as rhetorical spaces Riesman, David 83 Ringold, Ira (character) and American national manhood 87, 91 and betrayal 77–9, 84, 86, 91, 92, 94–5, 97

186

Index

and Bildungsroman 78, 80, 81, 87, 89, 92, 94–5, 100 as a Communist 77–8, 91, 95–7 downfall of 93–4 and identity, American male 77, 80, 86, 87, 90–2, 95, 99, 100 and identity, Jewish 77, 84, 90, 96, 99 and impersonation 91–2 and liminality 91 and Lincoln, Abraham 85–9, 91, 95 and McCarthyism 77, 94–7 as mentor of Zuckerman, Nathan 77–8, 81, 92, 98 and self, performative 79, 86, 87–92, 94, 99 and speech boundaries, testing of 86, 87–9, 114, 126 and trial spaces 78–9, 94–7, 98, 100 Ringold, Murray (character) on Frame, Eve 95–6 and HUAC 95–6 and injustice 167 and Lincoln, Abraham 85, 91 and McCarthyism 95–7 as narrator 86, 95, 97–8, 100 on Ringold, Ira 91, 94 on self, performative 90 and Zuckerman, Nathan 85, 97 Rites of Assent (Bercovitch) 4 Rodgers, Bernard F., Jr 158, 162 Roediger, David R. 7, 105–6, 107, 116n. 7, 118 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 8, 56, 57, 107, 130, 132, 135, 139, 147–9 and American national body 123, 134, 138, 152 and citizenship 137, 152 and nostalgia 153 Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 27, 33 Roth, Alvin (character) 131, 139–40, 146 Roth, Bess (character) 141–3, 145 Roth, Henry 82n. 3 Roth, Herman (character) and anti-Semitism 133 and citizenship 133, 141, 146 and identity, American male 133, 146 and identity, Jewish 133, 144

and paranoia 145 and paternal authority 139, 141, 144 Roth, Philip as an American writer 2, 15–18, 27, 50 and attitude to women as characters 11, 72–5 and autobiography 9–10, 13, 34, 162 and avoiding judgement (of his work) 168 and biography 162–3 and generic boundaries, testing of 10, 12–13, 22, 29–32, 38–40, 44, 49, 78–80, 100, 162–3 and ghost writing 3, 13–14, 21–5, 77, 79, 93, 95, 98–9, 100–1, 103, 112, 159–60, 168 on justice 167–8 and national mythology 1–2, 4, 7, 51, 53–4, 80, 88, 127, 151, 157, 165, 168 and post-war American history 1–2, 8–10, 12, 26–9, 33, 51–2, 58, 62, 73, 75, 78, 81, 83, 104, 119, 129, 131, 149–54, 166–8 and self-judgement 164–5 and turning back of historical perspective 8, 53, 77, 103, 119, 129, 149–53 ‘Roth, Philip’ (character) and American national body 152 and authorship 34–9 and autobiography 30 and betrayal 147 and censorship 34, 46–7 and confession 31, 37, 39, 42–3 as a conspirator 131, 140, 146, 147 and Demjanjuk trial 32–3 and Diasporism 29, 34, 41 and doubling 29, 44 and factivity 28–9 and fraternity 131–4, 138–9, 146, 147, 152 and generic boundaries, testing of 31–2, 35–9, 42, 44, 47 and identity, American male 21, 44, 45, 139, 152 and identity, Jewish 49 and impersonation 10, 38, 42, 147

Index and judgement 45 and liminality 43 and Lindbergh, Charles 132–3, 135 and loshon hora (evil speech) 45–7 and melancholia 139, 152 and paranoia 145 as a philatelist 132–3, 135–6 and Pipik, Moishe 15, 21, 22, 29, 38–9, 40–4, 46 and self-reflexiveness 10, 28 and speech boundaries, testing of 21, 22, 29, 39, 40–7, 49 and US-Israel relations 29–33, 44, 48 Roth, Sandy (character) and father/son relationship 139, 144 and fraternity 129, 131–2, 134, 138, 140, 146 and identity, American male 133, 138–9, 141 and Lindbergh, Charles 132–4, 136, 139, 144, 147 and paranoia 141 Royal, Derek Parker 2, 3, 30n. 3, 51, 52, 158, 162, 165 Rubio, Philip 107 Sabbath’s Theater 31n. 5, 52, 164 Safer, Elaine 2n. 3 Salinger, J. D. 83, 84 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) 1, 4, 15, 16, 112 Schwartz, Delmore 16, 82n. 3 Schweber, Matthew S. 129n. 1 self, contradictions within 23, 31, 75, 84–93, 99–100, 108–10, 116, 127 self, performative 79, 84–96, 98–9, 157–8 self, unity of 3, 7, 23, 58, 69, 78, 83, 86 self-division 14, 21, 23, 31, 41–2, 63, 84–93, 113, 131, 159 self-judgement 157 self-making 1–3, 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 40, 162, 166–7 in American Pastoral 8–9, 62, 71, 73–5 in The Ghost Writer 22–5 in The Human Stain 104–8, 113–14, 118, 122–3

187

in I Married a Communist 77, 80–2, 84–94, 99 in The Plot against America 138–40, 146–7 self-multiplication 159 self on trial 22, 31, 63, 67, 69–70, 77, 95–7, 103, 118–19, 159, 165–6 self-reflexiveness 10, 28 sexual misconduct 103, 116, 119–21 Shadow-Line, The (Conrad) 159–60 Shaffner, Randolph P. 79 Shatz, Adam 27, 28n. 1 Shaw, Irwin 81 Shechner, Mark 16, 158 Sherman, Bernard 82n. 3 Sherwin, Richard K. 12, 54, 72, 76, 166 Shiffman, Dan 3 Shop Talk 38n. 10 Shostak, Debra 2, 3, 16, 94n. 12, 101, 162, 165 Shulman, Irving 83n. 7 Siegel, Robert 162, 165 Siegel, Ronald K. 130, 135, 144 Silberstein, Sandra 151n. 14, 151n. 15 Silk, Coleman (character) and American national body 116–18 and being a ‘spook’ 113–15 and betrayal 115 and blackness, racial 14, 15, 103–4, 106–8, 112–13, 127 and body, contamination of 11, 104, 116, 118–21, 125 and Clinton, Bill 119–21 and Farley, Faunia 103, 110–12, 116 and feminization 11, 120–1, 123 and identity, American male 14, 15, 108, 109–10, 118–21, 125 and identity, Jewish 15, 104, 106–8, 115–16, 121–3, 125, 127 and legibility/illegibility 104, 109–10, 127 and Lewinsky, Monica 121–3 and liminality 114–15 and political correctness 9, 103, 108 and racial harassment 103, 125 and sexual misconduct 103, 116, 119–21

188

Index

and speech boundaries, testing of 14, 108, 110–13, 114, 126–7 and ‘spirit of sanctimony’ 125–6 and tattoo 108–10 and trial spaces 9, 103, 113, 118, 125, 127 and visibility/invisibility 103–4, 106–8, 109–10, 113–15, 123, 127 and whiteness, racial 118–19, 127 Sklare, Marshall 55n. 5 Smilesburger (character) as an ‘agent of the law’ 30, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45–7, 163 and betrayal 48 and censorship 34, 37, 40, 44–7 and Diasporism 34 and factivity 28n. 2 and generic boundaries, testing of 44, 47 and identity, Jewish 49 and loshon hora (evil speech) 44–9 and ‘Operation Shylock’ 29 Smith, Henry Nash 6n. 7 societal norms, testing boundaries of 1–2, 8, 10, 12, 19, 64–5, 70–2, 83, 121, 164, 166 Sontag, Susan 64n. 14 speech, testing boundaries of in American Pastoral 11, 54, 71–2 in The Human Stain 14, 108, 110–13, 114, 126–9 in I Married a Communist 86–9, 114, 126 in Operation Shylock 14, 21–2, 29, 39, 40–7, 49 in The Plot against America 140–4 and Zuckerman 21–4, 159 ‘spirit of sanctimony’ 110, 119–21, 123 ‘spook’ 113–15 Steiner, George 27, 32 Stout, Janis P. 11n. 13 stuttering 62, 64, 69–71, 100, 114 Svonkin, Stuart 56n. 7 Sword, Helen 14 Thoreau, Henry David treachery see betrayal

5, 16, 78, 81, 100

Trial in American Life, The (Ferguson) 7, 11–12, 54, 67, 96–7, 113–14, 125 trials as rhetorical spaces 1, 10–15, 27, 41, 51, 54, 67–72, 78, 95, 153, 160, 168 trials of the body see body, trials of trial spaces and Clinton impeachment hearings 9, 104, 125–6 and Levov, Merry 11, 54, 60–9 and Levov, Seymour ‘the Swede’ 11, 51, 54–5, 60–1, 67 and Nixon impeachment hearings 9, 15, 54, 64n. 14, 66, 73, 74, 122 and Ringold, Ira 78–9, 94–7, 98, 100 and Silk, Coleman 9, 103, 113, 118 Turner, Victor 7, 12 Tzili: The Story of a Life (Appelfeld) 38 US Constitution 6, 9, 13, 25–6, 53, 65n. 15, 85n. 9, 100, 122, 130–1, 142–4, 152–3, 154, 156, 166, 168 Vietnam era 11, 51, 52, 55, 56, 72, 75, 129, 149 visibility see invisibility Walden (Thoreau) 5, 16, 78, 81, 100 Wall, Wendy 8n. 10, 52n. 2 Weiner, Andrew D. 125 Wenger, Beth S. 57n. 9 When She Was Good 11 whiteness racial 104–6, 109–10, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 125, 127, 136 Whitman, Walt 5, 16–17 Wilson, Matthew 61n. 13 Wishnow, Seldon (character) 131, 139, 146, 147, 152, 154 Witham, W. Tasker 82n. 2, 82n. 4, 83n. 7 women, disorderly 11, 13, 51, 54, 66–75, 120 women as characters, attitude of Philip Roth to 11, 72–5 Working Towards Whiteness (Roediger) 7, 105–7, 116n. 7, 118 writing and betrayal 12–13, 23, 28, 43, 48, 72–3, 77–8, 80, 84, 93–5, 98–100, 112, 125, 160, 168

Index Young Lions (Shaw) 81 Zuckerman, Nathan (character) as ‘alter brain’ of Roth 3 and American national manhood 21, 87 and authorship 9 and autobiography 9, 161, 162 and betrayal 20 and the Bildungsroman 77, 86, 89 and body, of president 124 and body, trials of 20, 64, 156, 161 and death 159 as a defendant 19–20 and Frank, Anne 22–4, 98 and genre boundaries, testing of 161, 163 and ghost writing 21–4, 79, 98, 101, 159

189

and identity, American male 20, 21, 25 and identity, Jewish 19 and impersonation 21–4, 163–4 and judgement 20, 162–3 and Lonoff, E. I. 19 and memory 155, 158–9, 163 as narrator 9, 72, 77, 86, 97–8, 100, 111, 113, 125, 163 origin as a character 19 and post-war history 53 and Roth, Philip 162 and speech boundaries, testing of 21–4 and writing 75, 86, 112, 159, 161, 163, 165 Zuckerman Unbound 3, 19–21, 61, 160, 161