Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) 9781472542748, 9781441185112, 9781623563233

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For Philip Roth, who gave us these words.

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PREFACE

During the last week of January, 2011, as I worked to complete this manuscript, President Barack Obama gave two different speeches promoting his ideas about how to “win the future.” I was intrigued by these speeches; after all, I had Roth on my mind and know full well the skepticism with which he treats our presidential figures — Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Clinton, Bush — who all populate his fiction in order to reveal our nation at work. From the very beginning, I was struck by the language in President Obama’s first speech, the 2011 State of the Union address. I was curious about the awkward sense of history he promoted. How, I wondered, could a nation “win” something as vague as “the future” — especially given all of the “unknown unknowns” that lie before us? However, I am experienced enough to realize that the rhetoric of winning has historically been effective for American audiences. For many Americans, that is what the United States is founded on: a series of important “wins” that would help shape the narrative of the future. President Obama reinforced this idea in his speech when he said: “From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That’s how we win the future.” Again, it remains vague as to how having a dream can “win” in a competition that is so abstract, but President Obama nonetheless powerfully referred to the history of America’s founding to solidify, even in 2011 and beyond, our identity as a nation. In drawing on the encompassing language of the American Dream, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” President Obama declared: And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth. . . . We may have differences in policy, but we all believe in the rights enshrined in our Constitution. vii

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P R E FA C E

We may have different opinions, but we believe in the same promise that says this is a place where you can make it if you try. For someone as entrenched as I am in a project on Philip Roth’s traumatic ideals of democracy, I was perhaps irrationally moved by such language: as a third generation US citizen of Polish descent, the promise of the protection of the Constitution remains as appealing to me as it does to my family who moved to the United States at the beginning of the last century in order to experience the proverbial “better way of life.” And while the president’s rhetoric here is absolutely commonplace, it’s worth underscoring for that reason: America’s founding documents, in this case the Constitution, are elevated to quasi-mythical status. I’ll be arguing throughout this book that Philip Roth revisits this trope in order to unpack the darker secrets of American identity. The day after his State of the Union address, President Obama visited my hometown of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. I was born in that town in a small flat that occupied the first floor of a three-story house. I am told that Polish immigrants lived upstairs and helped my young, working parents whenever they could. The day the President arrived in Manitowoc was perhaps more momentous for the family than the day I was born in that small flat. President Obama began his speech in Manitowoc by explaining that he was not there because he lost a bet; if one did not know that he was a football fan rooting for the Chicago Bears the previous weekend, only to see them get beat by the Green Bay Packers, then one might think he was referring to how depressed the area is and the few reasons anyone would have to visit. For many years, my uncle, who grew up there, proclaimed that Manitowoc was a good place to be from. The city certainly has had better days: in 2003, the manufacturing company Mirro — a company where my grandfather worked, as well as my mother and my aunt — left the city to continue their work overseas. For a US town as small as Manitowoc, the President’s arrival was treated like a holiday. My mother, no supporter of Obama, wrote in an email to her sisters: “Today, history is being made.” And she meant it; we all kind of believed in that history, to an extent. President Obama was visiting the Polish immigrant community in Manitowoc, WI to say that they had found a way to rebuild after Mirro, to “win the future” with a new company called Orion that focuses on producing energy-efficient materials. It was not until that moment, after many years of reading Roth and reflecting on his unique project of representing America stripped of the ideals and rhetorical fluff, that it became clear to me why a Midwestern girl such as myself felt so connected with the novels of Philip Roth, viii

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a writer who grew up in New Jersey two decades before I was born. Reading the email exchanges among my mother and aunts the day of Obama’s visit to Manitowoc felt like reading a Roth novel, except I guess without the frank talk about sex: an odd combination of bittersweet humor and immigrant persistence emerged in those messages as it emerges in the later works of Roth himself. His characters are immigrant families who continue to live, or who once lived in, flats in a depressed town; they love America because it promised a better way of life — a better education, and a chance to “win” the future. Unfortunately, in Roth’s works, as in contemporary American life — in large cities and small towns — the language about the protection of the US Constitution and the value of diversity does not hold up. Hours after watching the video of Obama speaking from the factory floor where my mother once worked, I chided myself for being so moved by it all. I had become a Roth character myself who would be required to question the merits of her very ideals and see past the seductive language attached to the story of the American dream and the birth of a winning nation. My relationship with Roth’s fiction and Obama’s speeches is further complicated by the fact that I have even raised my son from the perspective of a third-generation Polish daughter who feels rather ambivalent about the promise of the US It is therefore no accident that the seed for this book grew out of the turbulent US history surrounding me as I prepared to bring a child — and eventually to raise a child — into this historical moment. Pregnant during the 2002 midterm elections, I remember crying the night “democracy” had apparently failed me; in 2003, my son was born, amidst the Bush years; in 2004, the Abu Ghraib photos emerged; in 2008, my son pulled the lever to help his father vote for the first African American president in US history. The year 2011 marks the sixth year in a row that my son and I perpetually reenact the American revolution with toy soldiers, although the story is different every time: sometimes George Washington paddles up the Delaware, sometimes the artillery is stolen from Lexington, sometimes Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown. Yet, again, it wasn’t until recently that I finally realized that the story of the American revolution I was enacting with my son on the playroom floor actually had an important bearing on what was happening in contemporary life and politics, in the US, and crucially, beyond — an important historical dynamic conveyed in Roth’s fiction in ways I have seen no American writer address before. For Roth, as I hope to show in this book, American democracy was traumatic in its emergence, and, as a result, has had a traumatic effect on the nation and the world — a trauma whose effects resonate today. ix

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With this book, then, I hope to achieve two primary ends: to point up the relevance of Roth’s fiction not only to his generation of Jewish writers and intellects, but also to young readers everywhere who have an interest in history and democracy; and to appeal especially to a new set of readers prepared to dismiss Roth on reputation alone as a misogynist or perhaps too self-referential or pornographic to be appealing. In fact, I have found that Roth appeals powerfully to young mothers, particularly, on the grounds of one of the most important strains I’ve found in his later works: an appreciation for parenthood and for the delicate figure of the child — one who is confronted with violence on almost every corner of the world stage while simultaneously brought to believe in the tenets of freedom and democracy. Roth writes, early in I Married a Communist, with reference to a memory of his young narrator, Nathan Zuckerman: “You flood into history and history floods into you. You flood into America and America floods into you” (39). The second person “you” here is interesting, as it pulls in the reader as a part of this history while simultaneously referring to the figure of the child who is born into history only to become a part of its turbulence and unpredictability. In Roth and Trauma, I seek to interpret the moments in Roth’s fiction where the birth of the American project reveals turbulence and unpredictability right down to our present moment, rather than the stability and freedom we have been promising our children for the last 235 years. In place of a fall from innocence, Roth’s late fiction shows us that we should not have been surprised at the vexatious state of our union in the new millennium. As such, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) moves beyond a critical reception of Philip Roth’s recent fiction that has focused closely on his interest in post-WWII America. I argue, by contrast, that these novels grapple more comprehensively with US history in their fascination with America’s “traumatic beginnings” and the legacy of the American Revolution. Drawing on close readings and trauma theory, Roth and Trauma reveals the problem of history in Roth’s later works to be the unexpected and repeated appearance of historical trauma that links the still-unfinished American Dream with the nightmarish quality of our recent history. Given this book’s project, then, I need to underscore here two selfconscious choices I made during the writing process. The first is related to the informal style and candid tone of the book: while I believe this work will be engaging for advanced scholars of Roth, I also have written it with my students in mind — students who may be confronting a critical text for the first time. As a result, the style is at times colloquial, the conversational style I would use in the classroom or at a dinner party, x

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talking to colleagues and family alike who may not see as their life’s work to find meaning in Roth, but who would find his revisionary project of American history interesting nonetheless. The second self-conscious decision was to use my training as a critic of poetry to read Roth’s intricate and lovely sentences as closely as possible. In fact, I would go as far as to say I read his sentences the way a critic would read lines of poetry; his sentences are that good, and they bear up under close scrutiny better than any other prose writer working today. One of the few places I have found any amount of grace in the last several years is in Roth’s fiction; the second is on the playroom floor, listening to my son compose his own stories as he prepares his toy soldiers for battles — battles waged both in defense of the nation’s ideals, and to deliver on the guarantee of basic rights I hope he lives to see.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In many ways, my professional and intellectual life began at Emory University, where I had the pleasure and honor of working closely with some of the finest minds in academia. First and foremost, I thank Walter Kalaidjian and Cathy Caruth, my graduate advisors and mentors in every imaginable way, for teaching me how to read; I also thank Michael Elliott, Mark Sanders, Martine Watson Brownley, Angelika Bammer, Deborah Lipstadt, Christopher Lane, Susan Frost, Gary Wihl, Robert A. Paul, and Elissa Marder for fostering my scholarship in American studies and psychoanalytic theory at no small cost to themselves. Looking even further back, I thank R. Clifton Spargo, Christine Krueger, and Krista Ratcliffe at Marquette University, who saw potential in me as a young scholar and helped me to see it, too. And, looking still even further back, I thank Robert Treu, my first academic mentor at University of WisconsinLacrosse, who also gave me my first and latest Roth-related gifts in the form of novels in hardback — The Ghost Writer was the first; and most fittingly, Exit Ghost, the second. In Roth studies, I would be remiss if I did not first thank Derek Royal, the founding President of the Philip Roth Society, who welcomed me into the fold and helped provide direction to this work as early as 2002. I also thank fellow Roth Society members, for their suggestions, energy, and conversation: David Brauner, Richard Sheehan, Jessica Rabin, James Bloom, Debra Shostak, Peter Rudnytsky, Ira Nadel, Sandor Goodhart, Elaine Safer, Ross Posnock, Mark Shechner, Victoria Aarons, Miriam Jaffe-Foger, Matthew Shipe, and Maggie McKinley. Then there are the people whose paths crossed mine in significant ways, without them even realizing it. The conversations I had with these scholars, however brief, left a lasting impression that can be felt throughout the pages of this book: Michael Rothberg, Peter Hayes, Sara Horowitz, Claire Kahane, Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra, Rebecca Chopp, and Marjorie Perloff. Thank you. xii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my colleagues in the Central Connecticut State University Departments of English and History for reading and listening to various versions of this work and for suggesting invaluable revisions: Gilbert Gigliotti, Stephen Cohen, Mary Anne Nunn, Candace Barrington, Eric Leonidas, David Cappella, Robert Wolff, Matthew Specter, and Carl Lovitt. Thank you to my colleagues across the CCSU campus who acknowledge in vibrant conversation the fullness of our lives as parents and scholars: Katherine Sugg, A. Fiona Pearson, Heidi Hartwig, Carrie Andreoletti, Jen Hedlund, Angelina Kendra, and Karen Ritzenhoff. Thank you to former and present students at CCSU, who continue to challenge me with their research in the fields of trauma, contemporary American literature, and American studies: Stephanie Cherolis, Brittany Hirth, Stephanie Kapinos, Taylor Loomis, Michelle Hannon, Alex Jarvis, Elizabeth Zambrano, Sharon Kenniston, Candace Corbeil, and Stacey Finke. Thank you to Deborah Herman, Susan Slaga, and Kimberly Farrington, stellar staff at the CCSU Elihu Burritt Library, who taught me everything I know about doing an advanced search on Roth, and for getting access to books from around the country that I didn’t even know existed. Thank you to the CCSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the Carol A. Ammon School of Arts & Sciences, the CCSU Department of English, and the Emory University Department of English for funding my research at all different levels since 2002. Thank you to the Connecticut Review, Studies in Jewish American Literature, and Philip Roth Studies for granting me permission to reprint revised versions of the work that originally appeared in their pages. Thank you to my son’s inspiring and talented teachers in the New Britain Public School District — Lisa Urso, Doris Johnson, and Kathleen Bannon, from kindergarten to grade 2, respectively — for engaging throughout this process Eliot’s imagination about the origins of the US, and, more difficult still, for keeping the conversation going. Thank you to the excellent people at Continuum who have made this book a possibility: my incredibly thorough and thoughtful acquisitions editor, Haaris Naqvi; Ally Jane Grossan, whose aesthetic sensibilities I have trusted from the beginning; the design department, who worked tirelessly on the cover; the anonymous readers who provided invaluable suggestions for the direction of this book; and the editors and fact-checkers who have helped to make all the important improvements along the way. Thank you to Grandma Pozorski, to my mother, Phyllis Vorpahl, to my sister, Rachel A. Cloud, and to my in-laws, Paula and Terry Jones, for never saying good-bye without first asking about the book. xiii

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My profoundest thanks and appreciation go to my family: Jason Jones, my partner in all things, who gave up six months of his own intellectual life to help me with what emerged in mine; Eliot Krzysztof Jones, my son, who sometimes abandoned playtime so he could read aloud for me selected Roth sentences, an activity which provided him an education that extends far beyond writing; and Athena the boxer, named not after the university where E. I. Lonoff spent his career, but after the goddess of wisdom and war strategy. She, somehow, managed to hear each one of my inner ramblings during walks in all temperatures, through all parts of the neighborhood and beyond.

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CHAPTER 1

ROTH AND TRAUMA: THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY IN THE LATER WORKS

His recent novels are more like embers from a once raging fire — but they glow with [the] same vivid sense of threat and the sense of history as a series of traps a man must negotiate or, having fallen into, escape. Tom Shone, 2010

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Nothing points up the critical irrelevance of academic/theoretical pronouncements about the “death of the author” more than an aging famous writer. Such pronouncements almost take on the air of gallows humor, as critics vie ferociously to be the first to suss out signs of diminishing authorial talent or energy. And of course the most salient points of comparisons such critics cite are an author’s earlier works, as if the same literary conditions prevail over 20 or 30 years. This, or something like it, is a price of literary celebrity, and Philip Roth has been paying it for many years. Perhaps given his current cultural capital as humorist and celebrity, Roth’s consistent representation of twentieth-century American history as retroactively exposing a trauma at the heart of the American project has, to date, been met with critical silence. For Roth, such an exposé offers a critique of the culture warriors who insist that there was ever a “pure” or virtuous America, either before the 1960s, or before the war, or during the Revolution. By drawing on trauma theory, I emphasize how Roth illustrates the disruptive effect of trauma — how traumatic events don’t just change subsequent ones, but mysteriously recast everything that has come before. In so doing, I seek to reposition the common understanding of Roth as interested solely in the twentieth century and reveal, instead, 1

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how Roth’s traumas disclose a fundamental truth about America and its origins. In the epigraph above, from the headnote to Tom Shone’s recent interview with Roth, we can, to be sure, glimpse the obligatory tropes of the aging author — “embers from a once raging fire” stands out most noticeably — but something more interesting emerges as well: a focus on Roth’s investment in history, an investment that is perhaps more legible now than in the novelist’s youth. Shone’s reading is consistent with the general reception of Roth’s later work, which has focused on Roth’s engagement with twentieth-century history. However, what is most interesting is Roth’s response to Shone’s question about whether life is a series of traps: “I’ve stepped into a few traps, yes . . . I’ve also been dragged into a few traps. And I seem to have made it out. I don’t know that we know the traps in the immediate moment. You don’t just get caught by the big, gaping trap; you get blindsided by something you weren’t prepared for” (Shone, “Freed from the Fury”). At this moment, public history — of the Holocaust, of Vietnam, of the US involvement in World War II, of 9/11, to name only a few examples of public history in Roth’s works — becomes conflated with the personal history of Roth himself, under the sign of surprise. While this book will take up Roth’s representations of ostensibly public history in his later works — namely, Sabbath’s Theater (1995); the American Trilogy, composed of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000); The Dying Animal (2001); The Plot Against America (2004); Exit Ghost (2007); and the tetralogy ending with Nemesis (2010), also including Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbling (2009) — it’s worth dwelling for a moment on Roth’s definition of history as something that is “blind-siding” and as something for which one cannot prepare. It is indeed a sense of history as a traumatic force for which we cannot prepare that guides this book. I am influenced, in particular, by such trauma theorists as Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman, and Cathy Caruth, who have been credited with a surge in trauma studies as a result of their ground-breaking texts, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), edited by Felman and Laub; and Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), edited by Caruth, as well as her own Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996). While a field called “trauma studies” might seem far-removed from literary criticism, what appeared so refreshing at the time these books emerged is their cross-disciplinary nature: Laub is a psychiatrist who became interested in the ways his patients verbally stumbled while trying to describe the most horrific aspects of their experiences, such as 2

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incarceration during the Holocaust. Felman and Caruth, by contrast, are literary critics — a colleague and student, respectively, of Paul de Man, famous or notorious for his deconstructionist approach to reading — an approach that considers how accidental repetitions, textual failures, or other moments when the text seems to work against its ability to communicate, actually becomes a more interesting way to understand a literary work.1 Trauma studies is a relatively new field, but its theoretical roots date at least to Sigmund Freud’s 1895 letters, where he grapples with a fundamental problem: not all horrific events cause psychic distress; in fact, much distress seems, at least, to arise from quite minor sources. The external cause and the internal suffering don’t line up neatly. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he goes on to develop the idea that trauma is not simply a horrific event, but it is also an event that misaligns our perception of time. Solidified by his work with WWI veterans, Freud’s theory evolved to account for the effects of an encounter with death. Since such an encounter necessarily occurs too soon for consciousness to process it during the moment in which it occurs, subsequent time for the survivor turns on the repetition of the key aspects of the event — with no beginning and no end — in search of that missed encounter.2 And while the horror of the moment is often fully intelligible to the survivor, elements of that encounter continue as otherwise meaningless goads — and impediments — to memory. Trauma theory, in this light, articulates what’s at stake when a witness or victim must confront her traumatic past endlessly, living daily with a sense of skewed temporality. After a traumatic event, there appears to be neither a pure, uncontaminated “before” nor an “after” that progresses straightforwardly. Generally, I see Roth’s later fiction as enacting this repetition: although the events of the second half of the twentieth century lie at the heart of these later novels, they seem to be looking back to another missed encounter — an encounter with the nation’s founding — as if in spite of themselves. References to the origins of the nation are everywhere in this later work, as this book shows; it is as if Roth’s later novels are “stuck” in the originary moment, which, for Freud, is as traumatic as death itself. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth writes about the impact of trauma not only on the narrative of an individual’s life, but on our common history as well. In her emphasis on time gone awry — on the effects of a witness’s failure to claim a traumatic experience as it is happening — Caruth not only reveals a significant debt to Freud, but also addresses the more recent scholarship of trauma and its theoretical counterparts as modeled by the work of Felman and Laub. In theorizing this “unclaimed experience,” Caruth addresses the endless repetition of the traumatic 3

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event in the mind and life of the witness, as well as the uncanny sense that this moment necessarily affects all other moments in time. The 1996 book opens with the revelation that: Freud wonders at the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them. In some case, as Freud points out, these repetitions are particularly striking because they seem not to be initiated by the individual’s own acts but rather appear as the possession of some people by a sort of fate, a series of painful events to which they are subjected, and which seem to be entirely outside of their wish or control. (1–2) As Caruth points up here, what defines a traumatic event involves not simply crucial and horrifying details of the event itself, but also the temporal effects of that event and the haunting imposition of these events in the lives of the survivors. Key words in this passage such as “uncanny,” “possession,” “subjected,” and “fate” emphasize the apparent agency of an event as it becomes inextricable, and yet oddly separate, from consciousness. For Caruth, it is as if the future — what always comes after — is as much at stake as the present time. The trauma, in other words, lives in the present, and in the future, as much as the past that carries with it the original event. In the case of Roth, the figures of Johnny Appleseed, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln are as alive in the present moment of the text as the “contemporary” events that his narratives depict. One reason to account for this is the cultural explanation that we have never fully grappled with the significance of the early events starring these key individuals — events that Roth’s narratives turn to, not only as a way of making sense of the past, but in order to make sense of the present moment as well. Looking back, it appears as if Freud’s own articulation of the displacement of time and narrative was itself not easy to integrate into cultural consciousness. In other words, delineating a theory of trauma based on temporality rather than a correspondence cause and effect and was somehow more disturbing than the content of that theory, which involved a confrontation with sexual development, sexual assault, hysteria, and — later, in his 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle — the effects of trench warfare during World War I.3 Freud’s earliest theory, called Nachträglichkeit in Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950 [1895]) and developed through his correspondence with friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess between 1887 and 1902, works to distinguish between trauma and any other kind of event in a person’s life, explaining that a 4

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“traumatic event” is not simply one that is difficult to endure or even unimaginable. For Caruth, we can turn back again to Freud’s own writing at the time to see Freud, too, was unprepared for what he encountered in his thoughts: [F]or example in his early “Katharina” case study from Studies on Hysteria Freud suggests that he discovered this patient, in whose symptoms he came to discover and develop some of his central traumatic concepts, in a trip in which he was attempting to forget the neuroses — as if the theory emerged as itself the interruption of a forgetting. (“Interview,” 79). Indeed, the tradition in trauma — in the psychoanalytic works, the criticism, but, most especially, the literary tradition, bears out the interweaving of the theory’s form with what it purports to explain.4 In a 2006 interview with Caruth, I ask why Freud’s theory of trauma’s temporality seems as traumatic as the events his patients endure (Caruth, “Interview,” 77). I ask, in other words, why there appears to be a 50-year gap between the 1920 formal articulation of trauma, on the one hand, and its return after the Vietnam War, on the other hand, when trauma newly emerges as a problem for psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sociology (Caruth, Explorations in Memory, 3). After all, this event — namely, the emergence of trauma as a theory — appears to follow the same structure as the traumatic events it describes: it was an event that came too soon, and was largely missed, only to return to us repeatedly via literary representations, political studies, and historical events though the decades that we align with worldwide atrocity. Caruth suggests that “Since the notion of trauma, as a delayed experience, is itself a rethinking of the relation between history and temporality, it is quite possible that we could not understand the concept’s own vicissitudes without at the very least taking into account the framework provided by trauma theory itself” (“Interview,” 78). She goes on to clarify that Freud always gave his own theoretical texts on trauma a self-reflexive frame that carefully linked trauma as an object of study to the nature of the study itself. . . . In every case, Freud seems to suggest that trauma and its theorization cannot be separated and that this is not a hindrance to, but at the very heart of, its insight. (79) This self-referential mode of writing — of inextricably linking the form and content of his writing — perhaps is the reason why Freud has done so well in literary circles. A recipient of the 1930 Goethe Prize, a prestigious 5

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German literary award, Freud set in motion not simply a traumatic theory of trauma, but several generations of writers within this traumatic history as well — all writers who unwittingly happen upon repeated representations of traumatic events even as we try to heal from them, or even forget. Literary events among authors in this tradition betray a sense that they, too, are trying to come to terms not only with Freud’s ideas, but also the implications of these ideas: implications for understanding the alienating effects of trauma itself. It is as though in writing about trauma, the formal attributes of Freud’s writing deliver a traumatic effect as well — the vaguely self-confessional case studies about others, the blending of the diction of human anatomy with psychology, the multiple layers of meaning working simultaneously in his essays — all function to reinforce the disorienting effects of trauma as such. One of the important dimensions of trauma theory, particularly as it has become a mode of inquiry for literary scholars, is an interest in how a failure to communicate helps, paradoxically, to underscore something striking about the nature of traumatic experience: an experience that blindsides a witness so absolutely that words fail them when returning to describe it later. In other words, when trauma theorists refer to trauma, they are not simply suggesting that a historical event was terrible or atrocious or unimaginable. More precisely, trauma theory considers the relationship between time and the event: an indescribable event, for them, is indescribable because consciousness — and therefore, verbal ability — has not caught up with the moment of impact or the accident. It is “indescribable,” not because nothing can be said about the event, and not simply because the witness chooses to repress the moment, but rather because nothing that’s said seems to work quite right. There’s a necessary failure when speaking or writing about such events. It appears as though there are no words, even amid torrents of speech. Trauma theorists insist that, despite or because of this failure of language, the traumatic event compels us, almost demonically, to talk about it. That this speech is marked by failure distinguishes the repetitive speech of traumatic witness from other repetitive forms, such as propaganda. In her oft-quoted introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), Caruth explains this quality in a reflection on the relationship between language and post-traumatic stress disorder: While the precise definition of post-traumatic stress disorder is contested, most descriptions generally agree that there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may 6

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have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of ) stimuli recalling the event. This simple definition belies a very peculiar fact: the pathology cannot be defined either by the event itself — which may or may not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equally — nor can it be defined in terms of a distortion of the event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal significances attached to it. The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. (4) Caruth’s italics are very important here: by emphasizing the structure of an experience, she is literally referring to time, and to history. Rather than using structure as a screen to avoid looking at history, Caruth’s formulation here helps articulate how a sense of disjointed time — of time out of whack — and history are inextricably linked: in describing a subjective experience in history, Caruth’s formulation also reveals how the linear chronology of the experience of history is somewhat of a fantasy, given all we know about the traumatic events of our time. What is so helpful to me about her work is the way she understands the repetition of actions, words, symbols, or phrases as linked inextricably with the effect of a history that was not assimilated or experienced fully at the time — a relationship that also emerges unexpectedly in the later works of Roth. What I hope to show in the chapters that follow is that this view of history as something that can’t be prepared for or assimilated is rather like Roth’s view of history as blindsiding. Such a relationship has not yet been fully explored, if indeed recognized at all, by literary scholars of Roth. They primarily tend to read Roth in one of two ways, regardless of the novel or the time period in which it was written, regardless of the precise subject matter of the novel itself: either he is (primarily) a Jewish American writer interested in questions of his Jewish identity in the United States in the twentieth century, or he is (primarily) a representative of those who came of age in the United States after World War II. Obviously, there are exceptions: Ross Posnock, David Brauner, and Debra Shostak, particularly, argue for readings of Roth that consider his works in conversation with his literary forebears as well as his peers overseas, choosing to advance close readings of Roth’s prose rather than to sleuth for contextual clues in his private life. There has also been a significant amount of work done regarding Roth’s representation of the Holocaust (by Michael Rothberg and Stephen Milowitz, for example), which would indicate at least a nod in the direction toward Roth’s engagement with traumatic history.5 7

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I am especially indebted to David Brauner, Ross Posnock, Debra Shostak, Elaine Safer, Catherine Morley, and Derek Royal for their creative and liberating approaches to Roth’s later works. David Brauner’s 2007 monograph, Philip Roth, rightly observes a greater need for responding to Roth as a stylist (6–7) — something that I have tried to accomplish here. He organizes his book on “the idea of paradox, both as a rhetorical device of which Roth is particularly fond, and also as an organising intellectual and ideological principle that inflects all his work” (8). Brauner’s focus on paradox here has been important for opening up a discussion of Roth’s inconsistencies, his confusions, his repetitions and apparent failures. In opening up a way of reading Roth against the grain, Brauner’s work has set the stage for my own work on Roth’s apparent digressions on the American Revolution. Picking up on this idea of Roth’s intellectual and ideological principle as paradoxical, Posnock’s Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (2008) has two closely linked aims; in this work, Posnock reveals the paradoxical relationship in Roth’s novels between the immaturity often espoused by his alter-egos and the rich lineage of intellectual history he continues to draw on in his later works. Like Posnock, Debra Shostak’s Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives (2004) sees Roth’s later work as perpetually in conversation. Informed by the dialogical method of M. M. Bakhtin, Shostak suggests that “Roth’s books ‘converse’ with one another in a mutually illuminating fashion”; “it is possible to trace changes and continuities in his thinking, particularly in relation to concepts and constructs of selfhood” (vii). For her, “The books talk to one another as countertexts in an ongoing and mutually illuminating conversation, zigzagging from one way of representing problems of selfhood to another, often by conceiving of such representations in terms of oppositions and displacements — of attitude, or belief, or character type, or genre, or tone” (3). Influenced by postmodern theory much like Shostak, Elaine Safer’s Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (2006) is also written in a postmodern style, with loose connections and fragments. A study of the simultaneously tragic and comic elements underscoring postmodernism, the book is most like my own in terms of its political edge. Published in 2006, it is considered the first assessment of Philip Roth’s later novels. My book seeks not only to update that through 2010, but also to focus my reading on how Roth’s interest in the past helps us to understand significant problems in the present. While Safer reads Roth as tragic — especially with regard to his treatment of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the post–World War II era in America, I read Roth as traumatic, particularly as his characters and metaphors hearken back 8

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beyond the Holocaust, to the American Revolution. According to Safer, “Roth increasingly illuminates and mocks the public events of the age and the private obsessions of its denizens — especially his Americans — through absurdist humor and comedy. With acrid humor he laughs at the hypocrisies and foibles of our time” (15–16). Safer’s work exemplifies the type of criticism that reads in particular the three texts of the American Trilogy — American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain — as taking up American history after World War II. For her: “The trilogy highlights three historical events that fundamentally damaged American society after World War II: the Vietnam War and the rebellion of the ’60s and ’70s, McCarthyism in the ’50s, and the political correctness frenzy of the ’80s and ’90s” (3). My project looks at the historical event linking all three of these texts, as well as Roth’s other later works: the American Revolution itself. In this way, I show that Roth sees American society not as damaged after World War II, but rather as more self-conscious about wounds that had always been present. His real question here, then, isn’t what has damaged American society after World War II, but rather, given everything we know about American history, “why do we believe so passionately that our society has only been damaged since then?” What has been incredibly useful about these four previous Roth studies is that all of them are interested in negotiating different tensions in Roth’s work. The focus on these tensions comes generally in the form of an analysis of Roth’s simultaneous conservatism and postmodernism. So perhaps one way my work is different is that I insist these tensions are brought to bear in order to fail — which is Roth’s most powerful way to illustrate the failure of the American project overall. To guide my reading in terms of Roth’s investment in the US fantasies of origin, I turned to the recent work of Morley and Royal in particular. Morley’s work draws on the theoretical dimensions of Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye, through their mutual interest in the anxiety of origins. According to Morley (2009), “Throughout the trilogy, Roth, by political invocation or literary paternalism, confronts this issue of national foundations and the implicit (and explicit) dualism at the heart of American identity” (111). She goes on to explain how: “Layered upon the palimpsests of the past, Roth’s ironic epic of return and wrath engages with, consumes, and demythologizes the foundational myths of the American people” (114). Using as a starting point Morley’s reading of the final scene of The Human Stain — taking place as it does within the ominous setting of a dark and frozen pond — I explore in this book Roth’s repeated representation of American political leaders as figuratively emerging from that dark and murky pond and discuss the traumatic nature 9

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of such an emergence. Derek Royal’s edited collection, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (2005) is similarly groundbreaking in that it challenges our understanding of Roth’s “Americanness,” especially as it relates to Roth’s representations of lived experience as a writer and as a son in and of the US. All of these books have two important strengths in common: a broad knowledge of Roth and Roth studies; and a strong sense of the context in which Roth has been writing since the 1950s. My work draws on this knowledge and recasts it using a more theoretical approach. Of the above writers, only Milowitz’s book considers traumatic history: his focus is on the effects of the Holocaust on Roth as a contemporary writer. Derek Royal’s edited collection features some essays that consider Roth in terms of traumatic history. (Royal’s essay in that collection is an example, although it is not framed in these terms, as well as my essay on The Ghost Writer). But my book takes a more sustained approach in order to track this investment in Roth’s writing over the course of 15 years. Safer’s work is considered the first exploration of Roth’s “Later Work,” as it reads Roth’s work from The Ghost Writer (1979) through The Plot Against America (2004). My book extends that by several years, although one difficulty with writing about Roth is that he publishes new works so frequently. Brauner’s and Shostak’s books are essential for situating Roth in terms of his writing contemporaries, just as Safer’s work situates Roth in terms of his sense of contemporary culture. Brauner and Shostak are also strong readers of Roth’s difficult prose. My work distinguishes itself from theirs in the turn away from self-reflective questions of the author and toward a more considered study of the role of traumatic history in Roth’s work. Like Brauner and Shostak, Posnock’s work also considers Roth within the context of a community of writers. As a part of the community of scholars motivated by Roth’s work, I reconsider Roth’s work not in terms of the influence of his peers, since that has been done so well already, but in terms of the influence of traumatic history as well. Although these authors and others consider briefly the role of psychoanalysis in Roth’s fiction, it is generally understood in terms of Roth’s biography — his experience with psychoanalysis as an individual, for example. With a focus on trauma, I seek not to apply psychoanalysis or trauma theory to Roth as an author, but rather to show the effects of trauma on a culture as revealed to us in Roth’s fiction. In so doing, my project looks even farther back than the traumatic composition of the twentieth century to argue that Roth’s later works actually point up a fascination with America’s “traumatic beginnings” and the legacy of the American Revolution. In this way, I see myself in 10

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conversation with two different groups of literary scholars: First, those defenders of the early American literary canon (inside the academy and out), who, on Roth’s account, oversimplify the relationship between ideals and revolutionary action. And, second, literary critics of the work of Philip Roth who read his novels as invested particularly in Jewish identity and/or the formation of what has been often regarded as “the Greatest Generation.” In Roth and Trauma, I seek to complicate the readings of these two groups by revealing how, in his provocative later fiction, Roth represents the foundation of America as primordially “traumatic” — a beginning that has had reoccurring consequences to this day. In re-evaluating Roth in these terms, I believe there is a way that we can read the catastrophic event in American Pastoral not as the Vietnam War; that we can read the catastrophic event in I Married a Communist not as the Red Scare; that we read the catastrophic event in The Plot Against America not as Nazi expansion into the US; and that we read the catastrophic event in Exit Ghost not as 9/11. Rather, I propose that, in each of these cases, the catastrophic event that drives the plot and the whole of American history is the founding of the nation itself — a founding, a war, we have never quite possessed — a gesture toward democracy that we have never fully grasped. In my reading, Roth’s later works undermine a contemporary sense of America as (once) an Eden, as ideologically pure as a result of our birth as a democracy, even if it has now been somewhat degraded. He seems to be working against a vision of America and its founding revolution that has been inherited by many Americans and perpetuated by cultural artifacts that range from the high art of the Hudson River School’s nineteenthcentury landscape painting and the low art of children’s programming exemplified by School House Rock, to the even lower discourse of Glenn Beck and the contemporary Tea Party movements. Of this latter group, Jill Lepore’s new book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History, aptly notes that they are “fashioning a nostalgic and inflexible version of that history. The Tea Party simplifies the Founding Fathers — it turns them into an orderly (and angelic) choir when, in fact, they were a confusing and contradictory group.”6 In so doing, the Tea Party has simply consolidated and made prominent a key aspect of the American culture wars of the past several decades, and it is precisely this simplification that Roth attacks. In 2002, Roth was asked one of the pressing questions of the day — that is, how US innocence about foreign policy necessarily changed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.7 “What innocence?” Roth asked in response, framing it, as he does, in the roots of American history. Although Roth writes often — in his own way — of his admiration for American idealism 11

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and the Great American Novel, such admiration does not come without serious reflection, as the interview in 2002 makes clear. In providing his own version of US history, Roth continues, “From 1668 to 1865 this country had slavery; and from 1865 to 1955 was a society existing under a brutal segregation. I don’t really know what these people [who call America innocent] are talking about” (quoted in Leith, “Philip Roth attacks ‘orgy of narcissism’,” 21). It is this question, “What innocence?” that I use as my point of departure in many ways because it calls into question a sense of innocence that — for many in the media and in our political discourse — has been repeatedly lost, whether during World War II or Vietnam or the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. However, as Roth’s insights signal, America has never been innocent.8 In fact, we’ve been marked by fratricide from the traumatic beginning of American democracy. In other words, I argue here that, in Roth’s view, what’s gone awry in American culture is the fantasy that its ideals and principles, so ritualistically invoked in the culture wars and after, represent the exclusive meaning of America, thus occluding its complement: that America is founded on fractious trauma. In reading Roth’s take on American history as a history that serves both as our pride and our curse, we can see the American Revolution as a revolution in its truest sense — that is, as unexpected, as blindsiding, as ultimately traumatic, and therefore perpetually repeating itself in the global arena. It is hard to determine whether Roth’s repetition of the figure of the revolution along with allusions to such historically important figures in American history as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln have heretofore gone unnoticed because they are so subtle in the context of these great American novels that announce as their theme contemporary history, or because these repeated references to the founding fathers and the founding documents seem like an imaginative failure which proponents of Roth might choose simply to downplay. However, turning our attention toward Roth’s treatment of the revolution rather than away from it might more effectively help us understand what Roth is saying about our present time in addition to the past. In short, I argue here that Roth’s novels clarify in important ways what I have referred to as “the problem of history” — one with unintended consequences that are felt as repeated intrusions on our everyday lives. In other words, this book reconsiders Roth’s oeuvre from the perspective of trauma theory by focusing on his representations of national and global trauma since 1995 and the way those representations paradoxically look past the events they purport to describe; as such, the book begins a literary-critical project that seeks to recast Roth in terms of his emphasis on the traumatic founding of the US and the ways this foundation has 12

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affected the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I begin with Sabbath’s Theater because it marks a turning point in Roth’s career: whereas Roth’s previous works depict the role of the writer and the postmodern difficulties in the formation of self, Sabbath’s Theater takes a broader look at distorted American ideals. The final novel this book takes up is Nemesis, which was published in 2010. With the exception of chapter 9, which considers Roth’s latest tetralogy (Everyman [2006], Indignation [2008], The Humbling [2009], and Nemesis [2010]), each novel is treated in its own chapter in the order in which it was published. The reason for offering readings of these last four novels as a tetralogy in a postscript is to link the personal trauma of that “nemesis” which cannot be overcome to the more national questions posed by the previous works. TRAUMA AND HISTORY

Although not theoretically grounded in trauma, the work of Hannah Arendt and Rebecca Chopp perhaps can begin to shed some light on the ways in which Roth represents the founding ideals of America as inherently fractured — thus clarifying a certain urgency to return to trauma studies. Although Chopp wrote her 2002 article, “Beyond the Founding Fratricidal Conflict” for the American Academy of Religion as a way of thinking about methods for disciplinary reinvigoration, it also resonates, for me, with the way Roth’s later fiction understands American democracy — as having been founded on a fratricidal conflict. Chopp takes as her inspiration the story of Romulus and Remus and their role in the founding of Rome: “In this city fratricidal conflict is the founding discourse, and this crime of origin continues to haunt the deep trenches and narrow gates of its purity” (467). She goes on to say, as though speaking of America’s beginnings, but still referring here to the city of Rome: “A city established through fratricide is haunted by this founding . . . So long as we are defined by this conflict, which produces and reproduces bureaucratic structures and frameworks of discursive identity, it will define and haunt us” (467–8). Just as Chopp envisions the “problem of beginnings” through the fratricidal birth of Rome and the story of Romulus and Remus, Arendt (a philosopher Chopp must have been reading at the time) takes up what she also refers to as “the problem of beginning” in her 1963 work On Revolution. Granted, the global changes in or around 1963 likely gave rise to such a book, but what is significant to me is Arendt’s reading of the birth of a nation and political ideologies, not in terms of strategies and hoped-for events, but rather as violent surprises that only seem to take on 13

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coherent meaning after the fact. For Arendt, The relevance of the problem of beginning to the phenomenon of revolution is obvious. That such a beginning must be intimately connected with violence seems to be vouched for by the legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical and classical antiquity report it: Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus; violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating. . . . The tale spoke clearly: whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization man may have achieved has its origin in crime. (10–11) According to Arendt, then, in the beginning was not the Word, but, rather, as with Chopp, the slaughtered brother. This is particularly true of the American Revolution, where brother turned on brother — not only across national borders, but within them as well. What would it mean, Arendt ultimately asks, to recognize that nations are founded on the violence and crime of revolution? How does a country, grounded on the foundation of violence, gain stability after the trauma of revolution? In Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006) Gordon S. Wood suggests that the founding fathers took on a kind of “aura of divinity” following the revolution — granting them a kind of demigod status and, simultaneously, providing the new nation with a sense of coherent identity following such a fractious war (4–5). He is quick to point out, however, that the idolatry gave way to muckraking, which ultimately turned into a “full-scale campaign” against them. Certainly, in this sense, historians seem to have understood all along what the rest of us are still trying to grasp: that “Great as they were, the revolutionary leaders were certainly not demigods or superhuman individuals; they were very much the product of specific circumstances and a specific moment in time. Nor were they immune to the allures of interest that attracted most ordinary human beings” (11). Wood’s thinking seems to be in line with Richard Hofstadter, who, as early as 1948 confessed that, as a historian, he had no desire to add to a literature of hero-worship and national selfcongratulation which is already large. It seems to me to be less important to estimate how great our public men have been than to analyze their historical roles. A democratic society, in any case, can more safely be overcritical than overindulgent in its attitude toward public leadership. (xi)

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In fact, Wood appears to take this move a step farther in his 2009 study, Empire of Liberty, to argue that “little worked out quite as the Founders expected . . . By 1815 the classical Enlightenment in America was over or popularized, and many of the ideals of the Revolution, including the hope of America’s becoming the repository of Western art and culture, had been modified or perverted” (4). Preferring to follow in the path of academic historians rather than popular culture, Roth sketched quickly in his 2002 interview how we generally prefer to downplay the violence of our founding fathers, opting instead for reverence. This is a problem within literary studies, in particular, as earlier anxieties over the status of American literature in the academy — anxieties that have only been resolved over the last half-century — have led to an emphasis on the most-polished prose and well-crafted ideals from this period. Roth’s later works, it seems to me, challenge the notion that America was borne out of pristine ideals and the best intentions for its many diverse citizens. These notions are manifest not only in popular culture, but also in the various collections representing “ethnic” or “minority” voices of those who immigrated to the United States and in the anthologized “founding” texts that have become the canonical method for teaching backgrounds to US literature.9 So, when we teach de Crèvecoeur in an early American literature survey, for example, it is the bit about the American as a “new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence” (“Letters from an American Farmer,” 660). Similarly, Thomas Paine famously contributed to American fantasies of self-generation, writing that “the sun never shined on a cause of greater worth” and positing that a government of our own is our natural right; and when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced that it is infinitely wiser and safer to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. (707) With such inspired rhetoric, it is no surprise Roth would return to Paine in I Married a Communist, if only to point out that the founding of America on a revolution was ultimately an accident, and as such, it was a messy affair in which no one wanted to be involved. Perhaps the greatest creator of the democratic sense of America is Thomas Jefferson, a man who also has a cameo in American Pastoral 15

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as someone who knew Bill Orcutt’s grandfather’s uncle, and I believe it is significant that Orcutt is portrayed as a an insincere wife-stealer in this novel. Jefferson’s own well-known words from the Declaration of Independence are worth returning to, in this context: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain and inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (728) Of course, the phrase “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is one of the most famous in the Declaration. And while scholars recognize the Lockean history of Jefferson’s phrase (“life, liberty, and estate or property”), that tie between property and happiness usually isn’t exalted quite so loftily in our public discourse. Roth, however, begins with just this connection in the Appleseed narrative that serves as the foundation for Levov’s American Dream in American Pastoral. Of the Founding Fathers, it seems as though Benjamin Franklin has been most easily understood as the skeptical one, as Gore Vidal reports Franklin’s laments at the age of 81: I agree to this Constitution with all its faults — if they are such because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what might be a blessing to the people if well-administered; and I believe, further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. (Quoted in Vidal, Inventing a Nation, 30–31) Obviously, Franklin was not alone in his ambivalence about the new founding documents, something David McCullough’s 1776 most effectively brought to light as late as 2003, ten years after Roth began his project in the later novels.10 It is there, too, in Peter Stone’s and Sherman Edwards’s comical musical of the same name from 1964. In that production, the character playing John Adams makes a moving speech 16

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about what the colonists have had to endure under King George and his Parliament, ending with, “[A]nd still this Congress won’t grant any of my proposals on Independence even so much as the courtesy of open debate! Good God, what in the hell are they waiting for?” (1776, 1). Adams goes on to say: “Vote Yes! Vote Yes! Vote for independency!” with the entire Congress panicking, not yet ready for what a declaration would mean. “Sit down, John! Someone ought to open up a window!” they say repeatedly. “Sit down, John!” (1–4). Such a blatant refusal to stand up to the British Parliament through Stone’s and Edwards’s representation of those momentous days in 1776 returns us, perhaps surprisingly, to the work of Hannah Arendt, who theorizes: The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the new drama was going to be. However, once the revolutions had begun to run their course, and long before those who were involved in them could know whether their enterprise would end in victory or disaster, the novelty of the story and the innermost meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spectators alike. (On Revolution, 21) Arendt’s point is well taken. Although a part of the American mythic imagination proposes that the country’s founders had an ideal in mind and set out to fight for it with neither fear nor worry about its consequences, Arendt speculates that meaning emerges in the making of the act. So, in Arendt’s model, you start clueless, but then “the innermost meaning of its plot [becomes] manifest” in an event that was actually an accident. Her sentence, “Before they were engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the new trauma was going to be,” perhaps sheds light on the burden of Merry’s bombing that governs the entire text of American Pastoral. To rethink revolution in terms of trauma would mean to understand why and how characters in history and literature were forever going back to that originary moment in an attempt to find some meaning. While Roth is not alone in representing the treatment of democracy and human rights as far from their mythic American ideals, the work of Arendt, other historians of revolution such as François Furet and Denis 17

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Richet (historians of the French Revolution in particular), and trauma theorists offer crucial insight into what is at the heart of Roth’s worry about American mythmaking. For Furet and Richet, for example, who appear to return to Arendt on the question of fratricidal origins, “the [new French] regime found its burden a heavy one. By constantly denying its origins it was undermining its own authority” (French Revolution, 364). Furet and Richet clarify the stakes of Roth’s argument, and indeed of all such arguments about the American revolution after the 1960s: Are the ideals of the revolution authorities to be upheld and venerated where any change to their meaning is to be understood as an attack (this is, as Lepore shows, roughly the view of the Tea Party movement), or are the ideals disruptive, aspirational challenges to any authority? When I say that the ideals upon which the US was founded were traumatic, then, I do not simply mean that they were horrifying in the colloquial sense of the world. Quite the contrary. Who wouldn’t celebrate justice for all, liberty, democracy, and human rights? Rather, they were “traumatic” in the sense that they are marked by skewed temporality, in the sense described above. Such a reading of time goes a long way in explaining why catastrophic events in history are so likely to repeat themselves. In the context of American Pastoral, for example, we might say that Merry’s bombing appears, on the surface, as stemming from an unacknowledged injustice originating in Vietnam. But, Roth encourages us to wonder, where did Vietnam come from? Where did all of the wars preceding Vietnam come from? As American Pastoral seems to suggest, the founding trauma, the surprise of Revolution and the patricide at its core, is precisely the unacknowledged trauma of the Revolution itself — of all that has become of these United States of America — something Roth seems to worry about a great deal in Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and the American Trilogy, more recently. Is it possible that precisely because we have never fully come to terms with the original American war for democracy, and the meaning that it carries, we are psychically positioned to repeat these traumatic events, with Vietnam, and most recently, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or, perhaps the recent traumatic events make clear that we have never done so? After all, part of the difficulty in reconciling the original attempt to lay claim to an ideal — “a gesture toward democracy” — is that the one thing that unifies the wars is not establishing a democratic ideal, but rather the American public’s refusal to believe that we could act badly. Is it possible, in other words, that Merry’s act of bombing the post office is a protest not only of the spread of democracy, of its accidental birth, a birth unacknowledged as messy as the “messy” founding father, Thomas Paine himself? It is also, for me, a protest against the blatant 18

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disconnect between the founding ideals, on the one hand, and the way they get played out in the global arena as violent acts of subjugation, on the other hand. As Freud hinted over 100 years ago, the problem of time is also a problem of history, a history Roth revisits in his later work. This interest in global conflict is part and parcel of trauma theory. Freud’s most explicit theorizations arose in response to shellshock, and according to Caruth, literary scholars must not abandon history at this moment in time. She argues that the lessons of PTSD and its centrality in our culture at this moment should return us, at least in part, to the political lessons of those who helped make it so central a diagnosis, to the veterans whose message is not only about war but about blindness, not only about atrocity but about the nature of decision-making in a crisis. Our subsequent involvement in international conflicts have not reflected a direct confrontation with these issues and these lessons, and it is my hope that the focus on trauma in our culture will lead us back to a sustained vigilance on our own blindness and to the meaning and impact — in the past and for the future — of what was both a moral and political trauma in our history. (“Confronting Political Trauma,” 182) For Caruth, a failure to recognize the moral blindness at the heart of Vietnam, something Merry underscores in her own moment of moral blindness, will only lead to further international conflicts on the shoulders of US infantry. In other words, “moral blindness,” when it comes to war, has ill effects. And while Merry might be worried about the blindness in America regarding Vietnam, Roth appears to be more worried about our collective blindness regarding such unintended — or even, in some cases, intended — consequences of the American Revolution as slavery, segregation, colonization, and other forms of violence that were born — or, fully conceived — with the founding of the country on traumatic ideals. However, given this ethical formulation of history that is driven more by questions of reference than by objective facts, one can see why perhaps trauma theory has been widely disputed since 2000, particularly by Dominick LaCapra, Ruth Leys, and Michael Roth. The biggest charges against trauma theory emerged during the trial in which Deborah Lipstadt was called upon in a London court to defend her analysis of David Irving as a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. If scholars and psychiatrists alike depend upon studying that which is unspeakable — or studying that which cannot be mastered or articulated — as an approach 19

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to the history of the Holocaust, the thinking goes, then doesn’t this leave the floodgates open to such bold claims as the Holocaust quite possibly didn’t happen because history can’t tell “the truth” about it? In an uncomfortable moment in his own writing about how to grapple with Holocaust testimonies, LaCapra attacks Caruth’s writing thus: One remarkable use of the term precisely, along with paradoxically, in her writing comes precisely when the thought is least precise and most perplexing, perhaps at times disoriented — but in thought-provoking ways that give a ‘feel’ for traumatic experience. In this sense, precisely may be invoked more or less unconsciously as a compellingly repeated marker or trace of post-traumatic effects that may not be sufficiently worked through. (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 106) He continues to psychoanalyze Caruth and Felman via their writing tics, both in the body of his book as well as in the footnotes, much like Michael Roth’s performance in his famous essay entitled, “Why Trauma Now,” where he asks: “Was theory’s continued insistence on unmasking truth claims, realism, and intentionality merely a screen to conceal its own inability to see the world?” (quoted in E. Ann Kaplan, “Why Trauma Now?,” 35). In Michael Roth’s assessment, such a theoretical approach to understanding representations of history is a defense mechanism that scholars in the de Manian school of deconstruction use to counter their otherwise “a-historical” sense of meaning in the world. Such an apparently ad hominem approach (deconstruction has had its fair share of bullying in the past) to attacking interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of history, psychiatry, and literature — fields Caruth, Felman, and Laub originally began to unite via the concepts of ethics and witnessing — have led other scholars, particularly after 9/11, to try defend what is worthwhile in understanding the relationship between trauma and history. Ruth’s Leys’s reassessment of trauma as a field of study has perhaps been the most damning, as she argues in chapters that range in coverage from Freud to Caruth, that various explanations of trauma have been vexed and contradictory from the very beginning and are therefore ultimately discreditable. Leys takes on Caruth in the final chapter of her book from 2002, walking through a line-by-line reading of Caruth’s rereading of Freud, particularly his text entitled Moses and Monotheism, which argues for a cultural inheritance of trauma. In so doing, Leys points out over-readings and under-readings on Caruth’s part. Where she is at her most generalizing, Leys says of Caruth’s scholarship: “[A]s a reading of Freud, there is much that is tendentious about these remarks. But they are typical of Caruth’s practices, which involve not so much detailed readings 20

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of the texts under consideration as thematizations of them in terms of certain privileged figures or tropes” (Trauma: A Geneaology, 279). Both Leys and LaCapra, like Michael Roth, link their criticisms of Caruth with their assessment of her as a critic schooled in deconstruction. Says LaCapra in an extended footnote: “Indeed, her version of trauma theory, as well as Shoshana Felman’s, may itself be interpreted as an intricate displacement and disguise of the de Manian variant of deconstruction” (Writing History, Writing Trauma, 107). For Leys, “The ‘flashback,’ defined as ‘an interruption . . . that . . . cannot be thought simply as a representation,’ is regarded by her as the equivalent of the ‘interruption of a representational mode’ that she associates with de Man’s deconstruction of language” (Trauma: A Geneaology, 267). While LaCapra and Leys are not willing to go as far as to state it outright, this critique of Felman, but particularly Caruth, is, in effect, about the fact that many view trauma as a way of understanding the birth of theory and deconstruction in the humanities. What started as a figure or metaphor for a new way of understanding literature, for example, only secondarily became a more clinical way for understanding actual history in the actual world — something I am not sure that even Caruth was prepared for. In her book Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, for example, E. Ann Kaplan self-consciously refers to Michael Roth’s title, “Why Trauma Now?” to recuperate it for future scholarship in these fields. In asking anew the question, “Why trauma now?” — giving it, this time, a more redeemable spin — she argues: “Ruth Leys usefully points to confusions within trauma discussions . . . But her challenge to some humanists’ claims — such as those by Cathy Caruth — seems in turn tendentious . . . partly because Leys does not offer anything in place of the theories she attacks” (37). However, I think there is more to this worry about deconstruction and its relationship with trauma and history than people are willing to recognize. The problem, in the critiques established above, is not with trauma theory per se, but with its very genesis in deconstruction. Caruth, in fact, had an answer to these concerns in 1995, when she edited, along with Deborah Esch, Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, where she asks, in a defense of deconstruction: What would it mean . . . to conceive of an experience that is constituted by the very way it escapes or resists comprehension? How might one have access to a history that is constituted by its continually delayed entrance into experience? In what ways could we define a politics or ethics that derives from a position in which full understanding is not possible? (1) 21

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Over the course of the collection, the answers to those questions are variously presented as a rejection of mastery — and, in so doing, as a rejection of that Fascist project with which latter-day critics of de Man tried to brush all of deconstruction. Rather than leave a text or historical document or political speech with a sense of mastery and moving on, the project of deconstruction — and of the trauma theory that was born out of it — emphasizes instead the importance of reopening questions, as, in Caruth’s words: “the thinking of politics, that is, like the thinking of reference, seems to require a way of recognizing and taking into account the force of what is not known, of allowing for, and negotiating, the powerful effects of the ill-understood and the not yet known in human experience” (Critical Encounters, 6). To add to Kaplan’s question, following Michael Roth, and with an eye toward the later fiction of Philip Roth, I might ask: “Why think trauma and Roth together now . . . particularly via the problematic figure of revolution?” The undertaking seems risky, especially given the critical “truisms” that Roth is interested in identity and post-war history in America. And it seems also seems risky given the controversies surrounding trauma studies as a field of inquiry. But, it seems to me now more important than ever, because Roth’s later work helps us to see not only what is at stake in the birth of a nation via revolution, but also the resonating effects afterward — effects that have also touched the lives of innocent victims beyond our borders. As William Faulkner suggested in his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (80). When I first read The Plot Against America in 2004, for example, I woke up from nightmares — the traumatic effects of reading — not because of the anticipated “plot against America” supposedly led by terrorists following the 9/11 attacks, but because of Roth’s representation of what happens, in a democracy, when people do not read carefully enough or think critically enough, which ultimately led, in his fictional alternative history, to the election of Fascist Charles Lindbergh as president of the United States in the 1940s. At the same time that The Plot Against America came out, American citizens, journalists, and politicians justified a war in Iraq despite there being no evidence of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and also worked further to marginalize so-called “outsiders” from American society. Just four years before the publication of that dystopian novel, in 2000, George W. Bush took office even though he had not won the majority of votes in the popular vote, and even the claim that he won Florida to gain those votes for an Electoral College majority was shaky, at best. And three years before that, in 1997, one of Roth’s idealistic characters at the center of American Pastoral, Lou Levov, uncannily tells his 22

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granddaughter that there’s no need to bomb a post office in protest of Vietnam — that she can communicate to the White House via her vote. Because her vote counts. This structural problem of time, as it relates to the problem of survival and witness, the problem of facing a horrible moment over and over, of facing the moments of our loved ones, our ancestors, and our neighbors, is a concern of contemporary philosophers, poets, analysts, critics, and fiction writers. Our current moment, especially as captured by Roth, indeed appears as the time of trauma — as trauma’s time — not only with a new interest in trauma and trauma studies, but also with the emergence of history itself. With their grandparents passing on, the third generation after the Holocaust, along with their parents, have come forward to articulate the haunting of a genocidal past. Increasingly, the witnesses to 9/11 have come forward to tell their stories, along with the story of New York City. Every day, media accounts detail the current and belated suffering of the soldiers and the people in Iraq, the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the cleanup efforts following Hurricane Katrina. And the list goes on with each passing day — lists filled with fragmented details involving cultural disasters, natural disasters, historical disasters, and such personal disasters as rape, incest, murder, theft. But the “time” in the time of trauma, or the “history” in the problem of history, as I have tried to articulate here, is not simply one moment during which trauma appears prevalent. The “time of trauma” or “trauma’s time” also refers to a radical change in the way we understand the relationship between time and trauma, or, more precisely, between time and consciousness, of its effects not only on the present, but the past, and — most strikingly — the future. In keeping with the dual understanding of trauma, this study takes up trauma in Roth in terms of both content and form: these later works, like the histories they detail, are presented non-linearly; they echo and repeat significant moments via flashbacks, and they question the ability of language to convey such horrific events. As such, trauma theory seems increasingly pertinent. Trauma theory and the work of trauma theorists have provided a way of addressing the unspeakable moments in our history and culture that necessarily refuses to reduce traumatic events to banal, redemptive, superficial, or flat statements about the world. Ultimately, this book seeks to lay bare the ethical dimensions to trauma studies and, more particularly still, to Philip Roth’s later work. Such a dimension begs for a response that can only attempt to recognize suffering in the twentieth century and beyond. According to Caruth, what is at stake here is a recognition of “the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, 23

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therefore, to an encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wounds” (Unclaimed Experience, 8). The important work of Caruth in this field, like the work of her predecessors Felman and Laub, suggests that an adequate witness to a traumatic event does not turn away. Needless to say, we are still working to perfect our American democracy, still emerging out of a traumatic revolution. We have not yet caught up with the revolution that came too soon in order for us to witness fully the radical changes that history had in store for us. This is the chilling subtext of Roth’s later works. This is the problem of history.

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CHAPTER 2

“I PLEDGE A LEGION TO THE FLAG”: DRENKA BALICH’S MALAPROPISMS AND THE TRAUMATIC SUBLIME OF THE FLAG

[E]ven if I try, I can’t steer clear of our common history creeping thematically into my work. This is the result of growing older, I suppose. You don’t have a historical perspective for a long time. A historical perspective requires time. Then, alas, time passes, you’ve got one, and you’re stuck with it. Philip Roth, 2000 On the surface, Sabbath’s Theater focuses on Mickey Sabbath, commonly referred to as the “pornographic puppeteer,” who for decades continues to mourn his brother’s death in combat during World War II. However, Sabbath’s pornographic intentions and relentless mourning (the primary thematic component of the book) reinforce in surprising ways the stylistic malapropisms of his Croatian mistress, Drenka Balich, whose story represents the millions in America who trace their lineage to the three major immigration waves in this country’s early history. Rather than see her malapropisms as lighthearted only, we might instead say, following Sigmund Freud (who argues convincingly that comedy overcomes stasis by moving a culture forward) and Sarah Blacher Cohen, that Drenka’s linguistic mistakes provide the comic relief necessary to provide life to a novel that is otherwise drenched in thoughts of suicide and the traumatic losses of World War II. When the book appeared in the summer of 1995, critics seemed much more interested in the content of the novel than in its formal innovation.1 For example, the prominent literary critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, evaluated the idiosyncrasies of this complicated novel in a review entitled, “Mickey Sabbath, You’re No Portnoy,” writing: “Whereas Portnoy’s attacks of conscience coupled with his rage to revolt gave that novel an exuberant comic energy, Sabbath’s plodding pursuit of 25

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defiance lends Sabbath’s Theater a static and claustrophobic air, resulting in a novel that is sour instead of manic, nasty instead of funny, lugubrious instead of liberating.” However, given the energy of Drenka Balich and her discourse, I think it is reductive to read Sabbath’s Theater as a failed Portnoy’s Complaint. A closer reading of Drenka and her malapropisms clarifies not only the hope and humor Roth uses to balance this incredibly provocative novel, but also a vision for the future he provides in the wake of World War II. In order to show how this balance works, I want to look, not at Mickey or Morty Sabbath, but at Mickey’s lover, Drenka, because her diction allows us to read the novel’s messiness in form (Drenka’s malapropisms, Sabbath’s extended monologues) as inextricable from the “messiness” of the almost pornographic content of the novel itself. According to Ross Posnock, “Sabbath’s Theater is the fullest expression of Roth’s stake in letting go not least because he takes it back . . . to primitive origins in genital and anal stimulation, in child’s play and the production of feces, sites where art is unimpeded release” (Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 162). It is Drenka, in many ways, who allows for this release — she is the sexual foil to Sabbath’s experimentation — although Sabbath is the straight man to her comedy. Sabbath’s mistress has a role in this novel that exceeds a narrow conception of comic relief, a role that helps give the novel its political charge. Drenka functions in another way too, by offering opportunities for Sabbath’s extended reflections on the flag — both as a prop and as the symbol of national ideals. This is especially true at the end of the novel, when the previously suicidal Mickey, shrouded in the American flag, urinates on Drenka’s grave, later to proclaim that he would choose to live on account of the fact that “everything he hated was here.” During this moment, Mickey is proud to be wearing the flag, as an American; he is proud to be celebrating his love for Drenka out in the open; he is proud to be wearing the flag on her grave, as she, alone, is the single most patriotic figure in the novel. In fact, the prominence of the flag in this scene especially, but also in the last 50 pages of the book, harkens back to the art of Jasper Johns, and comparable artistic ways he found to render the US flag. When reading the momentous scene of Mickey Sabbath looking through the long-lost trunk, pulling out Morty’s flag, I am reminded repeatedly of the way Johns depicted his Flag (1954–5) — a bold, but somewhat off-kilter representation of the Stars and Stripes. We can trace the intellectual roots of Johns and Roth back to the 1950s, a decade where — despite the homogeneity glimpsed through popular culture — artists and intellectuals asked significant and conflicting questions about America’s post-war 26

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identity. Not unrelated, these questions also involved the status of the arts, and the distinction between high culture and low culture — what counts as representing the cultural authority and what does not. In the New York Times recently, for example, Rachel Donadio published an essay on the significance of the year 1958 — reminding us that “the year saw the advent of” both Philip Roth’s collection, GoodBye Columbus, as well as Jasper Johns’s Three Flags. Roth’s style in describing this old flag is surprisingly understated. In fact, in foregoing his talent for pictorial representation, Roth tells us only that the flag is heavy and that it is folded. In one very brief paragraph we learn, as Sabbath rifles all the way to the bottom of the box: “At the bottom, the American flag. How heavy a flag is! All folded up in the official way” (407). Granted, on the one hand, this brief description resembles in no way the Pop Art rendering of Jasper Johns’s US flag in his Flag of 1954–5, an image, he says, that was handed to him in a dream (Orton 104). However, a closer look at the artistic impulses of Johns, on the one hand, and Roth, on the other, reveals that their attitudes toward art, the US flag, and their relationship to the US are similarly ambivalent. Roth’s connection with the flag, then, is not so direct as an ekphrasis, one could not so easily render the passages as iconotextual. But I would argue that Roth shows his allegiance to Johns by raising the flag to the status of artistic image — one that can be manipulated and challenged — in a way that supersedes its political or patriotic meaning. According to Fred Orton, the dedication on November 11, 1954, of the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery likely played a role in Johns’s inspiration to depict the US flag when he did (103). For Orton, It is not necessary to chronicle all the events and activities that, in 1954, were associated with the Stars and Stripes, but the dedication . . . of the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery is worthy of mention . . . the importance of Flag Day in 1954, the need to recuperate the Stars and Stripes as a symbol for national identity, and the dedication of the Marine Memorial can be taken as symptomatic of the social and political residue of the day that may have been appropriated to and transformed in and by Johns’s dream. (Figuring Jasper Johns, 104) Sabbath’s Theater also takes the WWII era as the backdrop for Mickey Sabbath’s most compelling emotional moments — those moments leading up to, and then following, the death of his brother after being shot down 27

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above the Philippines. Like Johns, who created his Flag out of newspaper clippings from the New York Times, The Nation, and the Daily News, in Sabbath’s Theater Roth considers particular aspects of social and individual life that are perhaps trivial and superficial. However that, too, is part of their humor. For Orton, “it is a humor not occasioned at the expense of the flag, whose meaning is not obviously devalued by their discovery” (128). In other words, the humor, the profane, even — in the case of Mickey — the shame, cloaked by the very flag he wears at the end of the novel serve as their own kind of ambivalent nod to the flag: in these works, the flag is a symbol of the ideals of freedom and equality that America holds dear, on the one hand, and the failure of America to live up to those ideals, on the other hand. Both Johns, then, and Roth after him, share a fairly patriotic relationship to the flag, despite the in-jokes, social commentary, and utter debasement of such a powerful image and representation of our national identity. And it is not just Morty’s flag that carries with it such an ambivalent status — whether enshrined in a cardboard box or worn for the less-patriotic act of urinating on a grave. Fish’s flag, for example, “looks as washed out as the beach chair in the yard. If this cleaning lady were interested in cleaning, she would have torn it up for rags years ago” (Sabbath’s Theater, 398). And, even before Mickey gets to the flag in the box, he finds Morty’s yarmulke, constructed out of “[i]sosceles triangles of red, white, and blue satin . . . [with the words] ‘God Bless America’ beneath that. A patriot’s yarmulke” (404). In considering the relationship between art and politics, Laurie Adams asks of Jasper Johns’s work: “When does the flag cease to be a patriotic sign or symbol and become an artistic image?” The work of Roth, in his allegiance to the artistic practice of Jasper Johns, too, invites that question. But it’s a question that was, perhaps, answered by Ellison in 1952 before we even knew it as a question: The flag becomes an artistic image when it causes one to discover that “we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence” (Invisible Man, 574). Reading Sabbath’s Theater in this way could perhaps offer a more suitable context for understanding what comes next in terms of Roth’s oeuvre. As Derek Parker Royal and David Brauner, among others, have pointed out, Roth reported in an interview that, while writing Sabbath’s Theater, he felt “free” to take on new subject matter, that he was “in charge” now (quoted in Royal, “Pastoral Dreams and National Identity,” 185). A part of that freedom, it appears, was to take on the American literary and political tradition with more vigor. Royal concludes his 2005 essay on American Pastoral with the observation that, “Merry’s bomb 28

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awakens Swede to the turmoil of the 1960s, but in a more general sense, it illustrates the fictitiousness of any mythologized national Eden” (202). As Royal hints, and I have tried to make more explicit here, this concern starts with Sabbath’s Theater, as indicated through the many — often vexed — representations of the US flag. In 1954, Jasper Johns makes a similar move in an attempt to defamiliarize familiar objects — those objects of daily life too often taken for granted. Orton suggests of Johns’s rendition of the flag: The Stars and Stripes does its work. The point of view is that of any citizen of the United States, but this Stars and Stripes to which he or she is subject contains something inappropriate; within the framework of a positive conception of ideology the viewer finds something not quite negative but odd and unexpected, trivial, humorous. Flag affects a subject who should identify with what the Stars and Stripes represents — and in Johns’ case this is not merely, or simply, patriotism — but finds itself reading a kind of subversion of that identity. (130) In one reading of the work of Johns, and of Roth, then, we might say that the flag does not become art until it becomes that which we identify with a subversion of ideals. Through the striking symbol of the flag, then, a literary flag, which is rendered nearly ekphrastically in Sabbath’s Theater, I would like to consider the novel’s focus on the United States, its ideals, and its identity in the twentieth century. For me, there are at least two — sometimes opposing — voices or forces in this novel: the voice of Mickey Sabbath, which, granted, is often hard to get out of one’s head, a voice who remembers fondly his brother and his brother’s sacrifices for the country; and the voice of Roth who often speaks through Mickey’s last lover Drenka Balich (herself an immigrant, looking at the country with new eyes) about what America has come to mean since its founding days. But even more poignantly voiced are the attitudes of Drenka, who drives Mickey to such grief. She is a woman who makes patchwork quilts, “the American way,” she says. Given Drenka’s attitude toward America, and toward Mickey — she calls him her “American boyfriend” (culminating with “you are America, yes you are my wicked boy”) not less than five times in four pages (416–20) — it appears as only fitting that, given her difficulty in learning English, she would mishear in the ultimate of malapropisms in the novel, the Pledge of Allegiance as proclaiming “I pledge a legion to the flag.” In a way, all Americans have pledged, for their country, a legion of men — a body of infantry — to do their bidding and fight on behalf of 29

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freedom. It is also, in many ways, Drenka’s project, too — to pledge herself to a vision of America as demonic impropriety, which resonates with the demon Legion in the New Testament (Mark 9–10). In the latter category — the “legion” of Legion — there is Mickey himself. However, in the former sense, there is Morty: a part of the legion. As Mickey reflects: “he didn’t die because he was a Jew,” he finally understands, “Died because he was an American. They killed him because he was born in America” (405). For me, this is a tricky passage because the subject and verb here in the second sentence — “they killed” — refer to the Japanese who shot down Morty’s plane. It is as if this statement seeks to place blame, and an explanation, in the hands of the enemy. However, the first fragment, which is also significant as a fragment, refers to the fact of Morty’s service on behalf of the American flag and the patriotism that sent him to war in the first place. In this way, the flag at the bottom of Morty’s box — a box containing important aspects of the protagonist’s identity, is much like the contents of the briefcase revealed at the end of Invisible Man, another novel overwhelmed with the visual imagery associated with the Stars and Stripes, as the nude, blond dancer at the Battle Royal with the flag tattoo is only one example (19). Like Ellison before him, Roth self-consciously depicts this iconic and patriotic image in ways that might also defile it — through sand, through urine. Drenka’s son declares, after catching Sabbath in his last great act of the novel: “You desecrate my mother’s grave. You desecrate the American flag” (446). Roth, like Jasper Johns, who appeared to “ridicule” the flag with his indecent and superficial construction out of newspaper clippings of everyday life, appears as proud of his flag, but not always the people it represents. And this is perhaps one of the moments of the novel that calls for the separation between Sabbath and his flag. With its focus on the flag, Sabbath’s Theater marks a clear turning point in Roth’s career from the experimental, self-referential novels of the middle period, exemplified by Operation Shylock (1993) and Deception (1990) to novels that offer reflections on the project of US democracy that are inspired more by realism than any other mode of fiction. Of course, Roth continues to write, so, for the foreseeable future, there will always be another Roth novel; in fact, there may be several more Roth novels quite likely to change our vision of the entire scope of his oeuvre. But — for now — I believe that one late turning point in Roth’s writing can be located in his return to the United States after living for seven months of each year in London from 1974 to 1989 and simultaneously working on the Other Europe Series for Penguin. Roth reflects, upon completing that series: 30

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When I came home from England for good in ’89, it was really my rediscovering America as a writer. I came back, in fact, because I felt out of touch. Not that I didn’t know what was going on here from reading the paper, but what was missing was the daily immediacy of what people were saying and thinking — missing was everything that was going on by the way . . . When I look back now, I see that Sabbath’s Theater is real turning back to American stuff. Mickey Sabbath’s is such an American voice. And after him, if not out of him, came the American trilogy. (Roth, “Zuckerman’s Alter Brain”) When critics interpret Roth’s claims about “rediscovering America” and “turning back to American stuff,” they have generally understood them as implying a desire to offer a new reflection on post-war America — gained as it was, according to Roth, from a new perspective on America and American-ness, particularly as it was informed by lived experience overseas. However, I believe that in order to provide that reflection, Roth is in fact looking much farther back — literally, turning back in history in addition to turning back to American life — to the puritanical and revolutionary origins of the United States. While it is clear that the most striking US historical event at the heart of Sabbath’s Theater is the death of Mickey’s brother Morty during World War II — an event that reverberates throughout the 400-plus page novel itself — the novel also begins questioning, as does The Human Stain after it, where the values of America originated: with the “repressive puritanism” of the nation’s first founders (20). By balancing the figures of Morty, the war hero and saint of the novel, a classic American soldier and pinnacle of American diligence, and Drenka, the adulteress immigrant who shares Sabbath’s disdain for America’s puritanical principles, and the unwitting hedonistic hero of the book, Sabbath’s Theater returns, in both form and function, to the “American stuff” that had purportedly been on Roth’s mind since his return to the US in 1989. In Sabbath’s Theater — and in the American Trilogy and The Plot Against America that come later — Roth makes a similar move, but takes the idea one step farther, a step made explicit toward the end of Royal’s 2005 essay on American Pastoral. As we saw in the introduction, Roth responded with skeptical disbelief — “what innocence?” — to the idea of an Edenic America. It’s worth taking a closer look at his quick summary of US history: “From 1668 to 1865 this country had slavery; and from 1865 to 1955 was a society existing under brutal segregation. I don’t really know what these people (who refer to American innocence) are talking about” (quoted in Leith, “Philip Roth attacks ‘orgy of narcissism,’” 21). Roth’s dates are interesting here, as they aren’t the straightforward “textbook” 31

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dates we might assign to the historical moments to which he refers. For a son of Jersey, 1668 is interesting because the colony passed its fugitive slave law then, and a tax law passed that year that operationally defines even free black women as taxable labor. Although 1954’s Brown v. the Board of Education is usually cited as the beginning of the civil rights movement, Roth offers 1955 here, the date of the Montgomery bus boycott, and the beginning of the crucial actions of the organized movement. Given Roth’s new-found interest in US history, however, it might be worth mentioning that, when Roth introduced his novel to his readership via the New Yorker in 1995, he did it in two installations — both of which feature the Drenka moments. The first segment, published on June 26, entitled, “The Ultimatum,” is the first chapter of the novel, verbatim, ending with the death of Drenka six months after she proclaims — by contrast with Sabbath at the novel’s end — “I can die! If they can’t stop it darling, I will be dead in a year” (32, emphasis mine). On July 10, 1995, the New Yorker published the second Drenka installment. Entitled “Drenka’s Men,” the segment highlights Drenka’s life and death, much as it is described in the second chapter of Sabbath’s Theater, but streamlined to focus only on Drenka, leaving out many of the other memories Sabbath endures during this chapter. Again, the New Yorker segment ends powerfully with Sabbath chanting beneath the full moon: “I am Drenka! I am Drenka!” (78). This moment reads, for me, much like the famous quip of Gustave Flaubert: “Madame Bovary c’est moi” — a quip that has led critics for over a hundred years to wonder whether Flaubert defined himself as his novel, Madame Bovary, or as his most enigmatic character, Emma herself.2 Although the novel is, in many ways, structured around memories of the last days Drenka has to live, Drenka appears as a life-giving force from the beginning thanks to her baptismal qualities: she is known “for the attention she showered on all [the] guests” at the inn her husband runs; she and Mickey find solace “where their bathing brook bubbled forth” — and Mickey answers that viscous quality, almost in a call and response-like relationship, by urinating and ejaculating upon her grave in the weeks and months after her death. On the novel’s first pages, we learn that Drenka is dying of cancer, although Sabbath does not know it at the time, and she has given him the “maddeningly improbable, wholly unforeseen, ultimatum”: “Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over” (3). In the novel’s present moment, this ultimatum seems to be the death of Mickey himself: It is unforeseen because, until this point, the two are identical in their sexual adventurousness and their shared rejection of propriety. In fact, we learn early on that Drenka has emigrated from Yugoslavia under the rule of 32

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Comrade Tito and the Communists. As Drenka recalls: “There was a big threat always hanging in the air about being proper, and proper is to support the regime” (6). Drenka embodies impropriety in America — for her “America seemed so . . . enormously different” (7). America offers, as in any immigrant story, a place for Drenka to reinvent herself and to reject the Communist regime — not only in terms of her carnality, but also in nearly every aspect of her life, right down to the grammatical construction of the words she speaks. By creating Drenka Balich as not only a woman who thought like a man — but who thought like Mickey Sabbath particularly — Roth has created a different origin story for the US, one founded on the coupling of an aging immigrant prone to malapropisms and a pornographic puppeteer drowning in his own grief. Together, they outraged the Arcadia that is Madamaska (a combination of “madam” and “mask”) Falls (the “madam’s mask falls”), NY. As Sabbath tells us early on, “She was, as she put it, his sidekicker” (9). So, it really is a kick in the side when Drenka seems to turn on Mickey and demand monogamy in what is, ironically, a 13-year affair they’ve carried on without their spouses knowing, or so we think. Sabbath erupts: [I]t shocks me, I might add, to think that the forthrightness that has sustained me and excited us both, that provides such a healthy contrast to the routine deceitfulness that is the hallmark of a hundred million marriages, including yours and mine, is now less to your taste than the solace of conventional lines and repressive puritanism. As a self-imposed challenge, repressive puritanism is fine with me, but it is Titoism, Drenka, inhuman Titoism, when it seeks to impose its norms on others by self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex. (20) Given Roth’s interest in historical trauma in these later works, it is worth noting straightaway that Roth uses the diction of trauma (unforeseen; shock) to depict Mickey Sabbath’s desolation as well. Of course, on the one hand, the reader realizes from the beginning that Sabbath is an unreliable narrator par excellence — it seems rather manipulative for him to tell his lover that returning to marital convention (albeit, within the confines of a 13-year extramarital affair) late in one’s life is “inhuman” and “Titoism”; however, the worry about “repressive puritanism” is not a joke, especially as it resonates in contemporary American life in terms of the imposition of norms on others and the tendency to demonize alternative sex practices. One can almost hear the serpent in the garden hissing through the repeated “s” sounds at the end of Mickey’s tirade about the effects of “self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex.” 33

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Whereas the novel opens with a declaration that Mickey Sabbath is the torchbearer for sexual freedom and liberty, it ends on a similar note — lest any reader forget what the novel’s “true” focus might be. In the end, as he continues to reflect, over 400 pages later, on the life and death of Drenka, Mickey seeks to pay tribute to her grave by urinating on it. However, the “stream was painfully slow to start,” which initiates an existential crisis characterized by a stream of questions in place of the urine: Could what was impeding the urine flow be that wall of conscience that deprives a person of what is most himself? What had happened to his entire conception of life? It had cost him dearly to clear a space where he could exist in the world as antagonistically as he liked. Where was the contempt with which he had overridden their hatred; where were the laws, the code of conduct, by which he had labored to be free from their stupidly harmonious expectations? Yes, the strictures that had inspired the buffoonery were taking their vengeance at last. All the taboos that seek to abate our monstrosity had shut his water down. (444) The “hard c” lyricism of this passage only seeks to underscore the frustration that Mickey feels at this point: with such words as “could,” “conscience,” “conception,” “clear,” “contempt,” “code,” “conduct,” “expectations,” “strictures,” the tension between one’s “true” self and the puritanical codes of society become painfully clear. Tellingly, Mickey’s love for Drenka becomes clear very early on, even for as raunchy and improper as their shared sex scenes seem to the outside world, particularly to Drenka’s son Matthew, who has read about his mother’s exploits in her journal (“Drink it, Drenka! Drink it!” she writes [446]). I am interested here in his question: “Where were the laws, the code of conduct?” — as it becomes clear that they are not missing, but rather, all too present. His apparent self-consciousness — an incredibly rare moment for Sabbath — is what “shuts the water down” (444). The mockery comes here when he least expects it: in his greatest act of mourning, he is paralyzed by the very “strictures” that inspired him to be who he was: everything the “laws,” the “code,” and the “strictures” said he should not be. Rather provocatively still, there are two codes at work, and often in tension, in this passage as Mickey laments the absence of his own codes that he had previously used as a weapon against society’s. At this moment, and during others like it, one can almost hear Sabbath looking back 300 years, to emerge as a modern-day Anne Bradstreet, who staged a duel between the body and the soul in “The Flesh and the Spirit” (1678), with the spirit being perhaps the more bullying of the two: “Be still though unregenerate part, / Disturb no more my settled heart, / For I 34

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have vowed (and so will do) / Thee as a foe still to pursue. / And combat with thee will and must, / Until I see thee laid in th’ dust” (260). Even Bradstreet’s persona seems ambivalent here — tacking on the awkward ninth syllable in the last line, when the other lines so clearly have eight. However little her iambs break down, Sabbath’s messy, diabolical, pleasure-seeking “American” voice seems to want to break down the puritanical form and content in the lives of American people. And even though Drenka is “lost” by the end of the first chapter, as Sherman points out, her witty, grammatically incorrect, conventionbreaking malapropisms continue to the end of the novel in Sabbath’s memory. Acknowledging the centrality of Drenka to the text, as previous critics have failed to do, Sherman writes, “And it is with Drenka that Sabbath’s woeful sorrows have their genesis, because she, though arguably the most important and richly realized character in the novel aside from Sabbath, is dead of cancer by the end of the first chapter” (170).3 But she is always there, propelling poor Sabbath forward, if even to the “old cemetery” where Drenka is buried. The cemetery is “old,” although, apparently, significantly, not as old as cemeteries “in the nearby hills, their eroded tombstones, fallen aslant, dating back to the earliest years of colonial America” (50–1). The cemetery where Drenka is buried dates back only to 1745: “The first burial here — of a certain John Driscoll — had been in 1745; the last burial had been of Drenka, on the last day of November 1993” (51).4 This seems significant to me — even in death Drenka is “beyond” the ethos of colonial America but still manages to embody, as does the other dead hero of the novel, Sabbath’s brother Morty, the ideals of the United States as symbolized by the flag that accompanies them both in the novel’s most compelling moments. While we learn of Drenka’s ultimatum on the first page of the novel, we learn of Morty’s death nearly as early, on page 14, with a simple line, a small, sad line interrupting Mickey’s fond memories of childhood: “Then Morty went off to war and it all changed” (14). Whereas the language affixed to Drenka is comical and playful in tone, the language affixed to Morty is direct, practical: “He enlisted in the Army Corps at eighteen, a kid just out of Asbury High, rather than wait to be drafted. He went in at eighteen and was dead at twenty. Shot down over the Philippines December 12, 1944” (15). The effect of Morty’s death on their mother is one of the most compelling aspects of the novel; rarely, when Morty’s death comes back to haunt Mickey, is it unaccompanied by their mother’s grieving. Sabbath says to his friend Norman in a surprisingly straightforward manner, for example, “‘We were one of those families with a gold star in the window. It meant that not only was my brother dead, my mother was dead’” (144).5 35

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Perhaps one of the most touching moments of the novel is at the end, when Sabbath finds a box marked “Morty’s things” (395) — a moment that joins together the two deaths — Morty’s on the one hand, and Drenka’s on the other — under the weight, the heft, the symbol of the flag that is the most prominent belonging in the box. By contrast with Kakutani’s disappointed review of the novel, for example, William Pritchard not three weeks later declared Sabbath’s Theater “Mr. Roth’s longest and . . . richest, most rewarding novel.” Pritchard reaches this conclusion based, in part, on the novel’s 60-page section, what Pritchard calls “the heart of the novel,” when Sabbath returns to the Jersey shore and discovers there, in the house of Fish, a distant cousin, a box marked “Morty’s things,” filled with souvenirs Sabbath’s mother kept to remind her of her other son. For Pritchard, this moment is “one of the greatest sequences in American fiction” — a declaration he elaborates on when he ends his review by emphasizing the ways in which Roth appears to be saying something “terrifying and exhilarating about American life in 1995.” Pritchard’s review emphasizes here, when put alongside Kakutani’s early review, a noteworthy tension in reading Sabbath’s Theater that continues today: It is the tension between reading Sabbath’s Theater, on the one hand, for its characterization of Mickey Sabbath, a retired and self-loathing puppeteer who has a penchant for recalling the sexual exploits of his not-so distant youth; and reading Sabbath’s Theater, on the other hand, for what Mickey Sabbath’s exploits and insights can tell us about Philip Roth as a fine and uniquely American novelist — one who tells the story, not simply, of Mickey Sabbath, but of America (as embodied by Morty and Drenka) itself, and how it has come to be understood in the twentieth century and beyond. For example, consider Sabbath’s final, ridiculously over-the-top act: shrouding himself in Morty’s American flag and matching yarmulke and subsequently urinating on Drenka’s grave. This golden shower emerges, if not as a celebration of life, at least as a celebration of his love for Drenka. When Drenka’s son, a local police officer, discovers Morty’s finally successful golden shower, he shouts: “You desecrate my mother’s grave. You desecrate the American flag. You desecrate your own people. With your stupid fucking prick out, wearing the skullcap of your own religion” (446). There’s a jarring moment here, too, when, a beat later, Sabbath says, “This is a religious act” and Matthew says: “Wrapped in the flag!” Sabbath’s retort is “proudly, proudly” a repetition that, nonetheless, renders the source of the pride ambiguous: is it the act of “pissing” (finally)? Of “pissing” on Drenka’s grave? Of simply wearing the flag? 36

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Of making a secular act religious or a religious act secular, via the US flag? Obviously, all of these sources of pride go together, which is what makes the scene so brilliant: Considering that powerful moment that ends the novel, what is so fascinating to me about Sabbath’s Theater generally is its ability to connect through the symbol of the US flag two apparently unrelated events from the life of Mickey Sabbath — events that seem marked, throughout the text, by perpetual mourning. The first event is the death of his mistress, Drenka, in the present; the second event is the war-related death of his brother, Morty, during World War II. It is not until the end of the novel, however, that these two deaths come together through Roth’s representation of Morty’s flag. On the one hand, Drenka, a voice I trust very much in this novel — a symbol of the death of the old-world presence in present-day America — proclaims that Mickey is America. But — he is only part of it. He is the human, or even, daemonic side of America, with all of its imperfections and failures at attaining an ideal. But the flag — the flag is his cloak, his covering, as indicated by the spotlight provided by Drenka’s son as he watches Sabbath at his mother’s grave: “The light passed down the length of his body and then upward from his feet to his eyes. He was painted like this, coat upon coat, six or seven times, until at last the beam illuminated the prick alone, seemingly keeping an eye out from between the edges of the flag, a spout without menace or significance of any kind, intermittently dripping as though in need of repair” (445). In this passage, rather than having Johns’s brush or glue or collage paint the image — the coats of paint that would create the flag and the men behind it — Matthew’s flashlight coats Sabbath with light, illuminating the separation between flag — symbol of American ideals — and man who has ultimately failed at living up to them. The light illuminates, yes, Sabbath’s “prick.” And, while I am aware that sometimes “a cigar is just a cigar” and sometimes a urinating penis is just a penis — here I think the offensive language and the continuation of Roth’s pornographic content reveals an important sticking point (no pun intended here): the point at which the ideals of the US have failed to become reality, much like Sabbath’s own aging penis, that is also “without menace or significance.” What would it mean for Roth, through Mickey, to have assigned Drenka as his mouthpiece, the answer to Mickey’s hopeless mourning in the role of comic foil? In fact, in the darkest moment following Drenka’s death, Mickey Sabbath cheers himself by recalling her malapropisms. One of the richest, although critically overlooked passages in the novel occurs in this moment:

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She was weakest at retaining idiomatic English but managed, right up to her death, to display a knack for turning the clichéd phrase, proverb, or platitude into an objet trouvé so entirely her own that Sabbath wouldn’t have dreamed of intervening — indeed, some (such as “it takes two to tangle”) he wound up adopting. Remembering the confidence with which she believed herself to be smoothly idiomatic, lovingly recalling from over all the years as many as he could of Drenka’s malapropisms stripped him now of every defense, and once again he descended to the very pit of his sorrow: bear and grin it . . . his days are counted . . . a roof under my head . . . when the shithouse hit the fan . . . you can’t compare apples to apples . . . the boy who cried “Woof!” . . . easy as a log . . . alive and cooking . . . you’re pulling my leg out . . . I’ve got to get quacking . . . talk for yourself, Johnny . . . a closed and shut case . . . don’t keep me in suspension . . . beating a dead whore . . . a little salt goes a long way . . . he thinks I’m a bottomless piss . . . let him eat his own medicine . . . the early bird is never late . . . his bark is worse than your cry . . . it took me for a loop . . . it’s like bringing coals to the fireplace . . . I feel as through I’ve been run over by a ringer . . . I have a bone to grind with you . . . crime doesn’t pay off . . . you can’t teach an old dog to sit . . . When she wanted Matija’s dog to stop and wait at her side, instead of saying “Heel!” Drenka called out, “Foot!” And once when Drenka came up to Brick Furnace Road to spend an afternoon in the Sabbaths’ bedroom — Roseanna was visiting her sister in Cambridge — though it was raining only lightly when she arrived, by the time they had eaten the sandwiches Sabbath had prepared and smoked a joint and gotten into bed, the day had all but turned into a moonless night. An eerie black hour of silence passed and then the storm broke over their mountain — on the radio Sabbath later learned that a tornado had torn apart a trailer park only fifteen miles west of Madamaska Falls. When the turbulence overhead was most noisily dramatic hammering down like artillery that had found its target in Sabbath’s property, Drenka, clinging to him beneath the sheet, said to Sabbath in a woozy voice, “I hope there is a thunder catcher on this house.” “I am the thunder catcher on this house,” he assured her. (71–2) These aren’t just any linguistic errors: They are errors in standard American idioms used to describe everyday occurrences. With Drenka, as ever, there is a slightly sexualized twist with the references to “piss” and “foot” and “thunder catcher,” for example, she too seems to provide an answer to Anne Bradstreet: Choose the Flesh! Despite the way these malapropisms are showcased in such an extended way, perhaps my favorite two malapropisms of Drenka are 38

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“nuts and bulbs” instead of “nuts and bolts” and “pledge a legion to the flag” instead of “pledge allegiance to the flag” — precisely because they are so central to the workings of the novel itself. As Mickey reflects in the above passage, they seem so entirely Drenka’s own, and — although he doesn’t say it, it remains true, they seem so uncannily correct, that he couldn’t dream of intervening. And while she realizes the error in “nuts and bulbs” — a phrase brilliantly rendered in the repetition of the short /u/ and plosive /b/ sounds — she also voices Mickey’s intense sense of loss over his brother in depicting the remnants of his life after he sacrifices his life for his country. The “nuts and bulbs” drama is a special case because it has its own origins in the beginning of the novel, when Mickey remembers offering advice to Drenka about how to help her husband rewrite a speech he is scheduled to give at the Rotary Club. Again, on the one hand, introducing errors into Matija Balich’s public speech seems unconscionable for the puritanical reader; on the other hand, however, such advice introduces a gag that lasts until the end of the novel. After reading the speech, Mickey tells Drenka: “Two problems, however. It’s too short. He’s not thorough enough. It’s got to be three times as long. And this expression, this idiom here, is wrong. It isn’t ‘nuts and bolts.’ You don’t say in English, ‘If you watch the nuts and bolts . . .’ ‘No?’ ‘Who told him it was ‘nuts and bolts,’ Drenka?” “Stupid Drenka did,” she replied. “Nuts and bulbs,” said Sabbath. “Nuts and bulbs,” she repeated and wrote on the back of the last page. (39) Mickey actually does attend the speech to witness the fact that it does, indeed, take over an hour, and to hear his own malaprop spoken: “If you watch the nuts and bulbs, the business works for you” (43). Again, given what we understand of Drenka, a kind of natural goddess, this seems to make perfect sense: Watch the natural world around you, and take signs from it. However, this is in no way what Mr. Balich intended to say: What he intended was to look like a successful American businessman who had control over American idioms using the language of mechanics and inner workings that would seem, with this audience, to garner more respect. The second malapropism is actually Drenka’s. She owns it. Further described as “the small things I could understand, because of [Mickey],” Drenka recites the line, “I pledge a legion to the flag” — at once conveying an immigrant’s misunderstanding of the crucial pledge to America, but also saying something true and honest about the thousands of men pledged to fight on behalf of the country. But even more poignant are the 39

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attitudes Drenka herself betrays: She is a woman who makes patchwork quilts, “the American way,” she says. However, Drenka’s mistakes, as Mickey Sabbath reflects after her death, are not straightforward malapropisms; rather, they evolve into what linguists refer to as “eggcorns”: an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker’s dialect. While a malapropism results in a phrase that is nonsensical or improbable, the meaning of the eggcorn is different from the original, but still plausible in the same context. In one of the touching final scenes between Drenka and Mickey, the epiphanic moment culminating with “it isn’t nuts and bulbs, Mickey,” Drenka’s eggcorns suggest that she, too, has developed over the course of the novel while retaining her own sense of ethnic identity. And it is this ability to recuperate a sense of her identity as a Croatian that renders Drenka as a hero in her own right — a model for Sabbath to water and nourish in the end. In Jewish Wry, Cohen has argued that humor “has helped the Jewish people to survive, to confront the indifferent, often hostile universe, to endure the painful ambiguities of life and to retain a sense of internal power despite their external impotence” (13). Perhaps Roth offers Drenka here as an answer to Sabbath’s lost sense of identity at every level, according to Omer-Sherman and others. In Drenka Balich, Roth has given us a figure of that survival through the comic eggcorns of a US immigrant. Although the novel ends in the compelling scene with Mickey urinating, draped in a US flag, upon her grave — it is through her memory and malapropisms that he is able to be free, fertilizing the perennial bulbs in his midst. In fact, in one of her very last speech acts, Drenka confesses to Mickey: “‘And it isn’t ‘nuts and bulbs,’ Mickey” (418). She gets it, as does Mickey in the end. For what began as a novel that devolves into Mickey’s various plots to commit suicide, ends as an acceptance of life. But as with all three endings of the American Trilogy to come after Sabbath, the acceptance of life can only come with an acceptance of the fact that — as for Jasper Johns — national identity or patriotism is itself a kind of eggcorn, and that’s where the dual mourning comes in: there’s mourning both for the proper American ideals as well as for the bastard Croat ones. In depicting the flag as sullied in its own way, Roth, perhaps adapting Johns, suggests that national identity or patriotism is itself a kind of eggcorn. As such, Sabbath’s Theater, far from being a failed Portnoy, or even failed pornography, proposes a kind of eggcorn theory of national identity, one that is itself inextricable from formal messiness, and depends, as well, upon an immigrant’s mistake.

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CHAPTER 3

AMERICAN PASTORAL AND THE TRAUMATIC IDEALS OF DEMOCRACY

What innocence? Philip Roth, 2002 From its very title, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) presents itself as yet another novel that is nostalgic for some unnamable moment “before the Vietnam war,” a time before the Vietnam era brought home to America the reality of violence experienced in other parts of the world. Generally, when critics read the novel within this framework — a framework dependent upon Nathan Zuckerman’s own vision of life in the US during the Vietnam Era — they focus their readings upon such aspects as ethnicity and identity, on the one hand; or, on the other hand, they concentrate on the generation that produced America’s most vocal war protesters, contrasting the Edenic 1940s of childhood with the chaotic effects of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. While Zuckerman’s self-presentation is certainly appealing, I propose that an unexpected trauma lurks behind it: The moment that disrupts our sense of “American” identity is not the Vietnam War only, but, more deeply, the original articulation of the very ideals upon which America was first founded during the colonial and revolutionary periods as well as the articulation of those ideals “now” — in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — considering the stated causes and experienced effects of the Vietnam War. As we’ve seen in Chapters 1 and 2, Roth has little patience for the idea of American innocence (Royal, “Pastoral Dreams,” 202).1 He extends that skepticism about American innocence in American Pastoral, the first novel in his now famous “American Trilogy.” American Pastoral tells the story of Seymour Levov, a blue-eyed athlete who allowed his Jewish neighborhood to enter into “a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as 41

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they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war” (3–4). By “war,” Nathan Zuckerman, the novel’s narrator, self-evidently refers to World War II — a war that, in appalling retrospect, is not irrelevant to the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. For Zuckerman, Levov was such a talented and amiable athlete that he had the power to erase the history of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century. However, the “war” in question here also looks ahead to the Vietnam War, since the novel tracks the process through which Levov’s daughter becomes the ultimate example of how war protest can go awry; and it also — more provocatively still — looks back to the founding war of United States history: the American Revolution. In other words, what Zuckerman appears really to want to say is that Swede allowed his community in Newark to forget, as he forgot, that, according to the way the founding documents of America have been interpreted — and, indeed, as they were originally intended — some citizens were not treated as equally as others. It was not World War II that the Swede helped them forget, and it is not Vietnam that Merry brought home, but the War of Independence — the war that was the starting point for the violence in the name of upholding an impossible ideal. The Vietnam War, in this way, although central to the plot of American Pastoral, was not the crisis that disrupts the American Eden. It is not, contrary to appearances, the fall that Levov should be worried about. But, rather, it reveals in new ways how America was always “fallen” — how it began on a false premise — and provocatively suggests that all of the violence and wars since have been a way of returning to that founding moment: a return to understanding what democracy truly means, and to uncover the perpetual violence that lies beneath its surface. While critical readings focused on the theme of ethnic identity in American Pastoral are effective for underscoring Levov’s whole-hearted assimilation in America, they fail to consider Roth’s larger critique of the American Dream itself — a myth that leads to the desire to assimilate in the first place.2 Critics who are invested in reading the novel in terms of the radicals of the 1960s make a similar move regarding the narrative fantasy upon which our understanding of that decade has been founded.3 In keeping with these critics interested in aspects of US history behind the novel — the shattering war and the turbulence of the 1960s among them — I argue that the moment which disrupts our sense of national identity in American Pastoral is not the Vietnam War, but rather the emergence of the very ideals that lead to that fateful and originary war: the American Revolution. That is to say, American identity has been disrupted, 42

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and disruptive, from the beginning. Such a reading would help situate the novel in terms of the American Trilogy, particularly the conversation Roth forges with Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine in the next novel in this trilogy, I Married a Communist (1998). In that text, Mr. Ringold says the “genius of Paine” was to “articulate the cause in English. The revolution was totally improvised, totally disorganized. . . . these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose” (26–7). In this sense, Ringold interprets Paine’s role in the American Revolution as not simply inspiring a great movement, but as finding the words in hindsight to describe what was happening in the political sphere of a fledgling nation. Ringold understands that the American Revolution was not a strategically planned enterprise, plotted to assert the colonies’ dominance and self-righteousness at the head of the democratic movement. According to Ringold, the Thomas Paine of Citizen Tom Paine was not the beloved leader of a war in the name of democratic ideals, but rather “single-minded and unsociable, an epic, folkloric belligerent — unkempt, dirty, wearing a beggar’s clothes, bearing a musket in the unruly streets of wartime Philadelphia, a bitter, caustic man, often drunk, frequenting brothels, hunted by assassins, and friendless. He did it all alone” (25). As the “face” behind the rhetoric of the nation’s beloved revolutionary period, Paine, in Ringold’s reading, comes off not as the popular national hero one would expect, but rather as an unsympathetic outlaw. Such a portrayal dramatically undermines the celebratory sentiments Americans share about our nation’s origins and the founders themselves. Like Ringold’s reading of the revolutionary Paine, Zuckerman’s interpretation of Levov’s values extends this Rothian line of questioning. In American Pastoral, Zuckerman surmises that, for the Swede, not only did the Vietnam War bring home twentieth-century trauma when Merry blows up the post office, but also that Merry’s Rimrock bombing questions the founding of the US upon the original documents of the eighteenth century. In so doing, this novel appears to suggest that the American Revolution itself was traumatic in its purest sense: the ideals of equality and democracy, while apparently desired, came too soon to be adequately and responsibly implemented by a governing body. As Zuckerman would have it, the earliest citizens of the democratic state were not yet ready to live in such an Eden as they themselves proposed — as Ringold says of Paine, he had to do it all alone — and Merry Levov’s bombing, symbolically returning Vietnam to US soil, suggests that we all have been trying to catch up with the ideals of democracy ever since. At first glance, the ultimate crime in American Pastoral seems nowhere near the originary crime of the American Revolution. Merry’s bombing, 43

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after all, allows the text to uphold the ungrateful Merry and her radical politics as guilty of disrupting any comfortable sense that America is the Eden that had been guaranteed to her father. Early on, we learn that Merideth Levov, Seymour’s daughter, was the Rimrock Bomber: “The high school kid who blew up the post office and killed the doctor. The kid who stopped the war in Vietnam by blowing up somebody out mailing a letter at five a.m. A doctor on his way to the hospital” (68). She is, according to her uncle Jerry, a “[c]harming child [who b]rought the war home to Lyndon Johnson by blowing up the post office in the general store” (68). And if it isn’t clear here that Merry brought the Vietnam War home — to US soil — then we are reminded again, much later: Merry, after all, the murderous child who bombed the post office and killed four people, is again described as bringing a war back home in the apparent act that ended the Dream. For her father, “it was not the specific war that she’d had in mind, but it was a war, nonetheless, that she brought home to America — home into her very own house” (418). But here we ought to question or complicate precisely what war that was. It was not simply Vietnam. Nor was it simply a metaphorical war of wills that Merry waged against her successful father. In other words, American Pastoral is not simply an allegory about intergenerational disagreement about what America ought to have stood for in the 1960s. It is, rather, a look much farther back, at our inherited idea of what America is and should be — and the ideals upon which it was founded. After all, no one single event — certainly none of the 1960s — interrupted the seamless unfolding of the American idyll. America was always interrupted in this task, never fully able to reconcile its origins in the demand of “liberty for all” with the violence against those who helped build the nation. For example, as Levov’s celebration of such figures as Johnny Appleseed reveals, Roth seems to suggest quite provocatively that America never actually went awry at any given, locatable point. It never actually diverged from its original and ideal path at an easily identifiable moment of rupture. Rather, American Pastoral appears to ask, What if the birth of American democracy was traumatic from the onset? What if the radical notion upon which it came into being — the value of individual rights and freedom for all of mankind — was so difficult to comprehend that no one could have possibly prepared in the eighteenth century for the revolutions to come, what they stand for, and the blatant inconsistencies that were in the founding rhetoric all along? Seymour Levov’s extended reflections about Johnny Appleseed do more than simply illustrate how thoroughly the Swede has assimilated mainstream American ideals. They also say something about his naïveté about America and what it represents. He recalls: 44

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You know whom he really felt like? Not during the hour or two a week he happened to be on the receiving end of a Bucky Robinson pass, but whom he felt like all the rest of the time? He couldn’t tell anybody of course: he was twenty-six and a new father and people would have laughed at the childishness of it. He laughed at it himself. It was one of those kid things you keep in your mind no matter how old you get, but whom he felt like out in Old Rimrock was Johnny Appleseed. (315) What becomes remarkable here in Roth’s style is that what at first appears as free indirect discourse from the perspective of the Swede — a man who appears to need somehow to assert his own voice into the text — is actually the voice of Zuckerman, an older narrator now who betrays as much about his own value for what Johnny Appleseed signifies as he does about Levov himself. And, if this extended reflection on Appleseed is not enough, the Swede persists, through Zuckerman’s fantasy: “Johnny Appleseed, that’s the man for me . . . Johnny Appleseed was just a happy American . . . Johnny Appleseed, out there everywhere planting apple trees. That bag of seeds. I loved that bag” (316). As if he just can’t let it go, Zuckerman takes the Johnny Appleseed myth further, imagining of Levov that every time he walked into Old Rimrock village he could not restrain himself — first thing on the weekend he pulled on his boots and walked the five hilly miles into the village and the five hilly miles back, early in the morning walked all that way just to get the Saturday paper, and he could not help himself — he thought “Johnny Appleseed!” The pleasure of it. The pure, buoyant pleasure of striding. (316)4 Johnny Appleseed is not simply a figment of America’s mythic imagination, but the way we have come to understand John Chapman, born on September 26, 1774, near Leominster, Massachusetts who, by the time he was twenty-five, had become a nursery man and had planted apple trees in the western portions of New York and Pennsylvania. According to national myth, which Michael Pollan would later complicate, his approach was simple: he went into the wilderness to find an ideal place for planting. There, he would clear the land by hand. He then could plant his apple seeds in neat rows and build a fence around them for protection. A closer look at the literary aspects of this lengthy Appleseed passage highlights yet another relationship between Chapman and Levov, a relationship that extends beyond national mythmaking. The “kid things” mentioned above call attention to just how young Chapman was while taking on his work; by the same token, Levov is only 25 when he adopts 45

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this identity. As a phrase, “kid things” emphasizes that Levov is both a child and man who has just had his own child. The constant reference here to the seeds of Appleseed appears to be as much about planting literal apple seeds as it is about a father giving life — life, to his daughter, of course, but also it conveys the sense of spreading an ideological legacy about the American Dream. What is so appealing about American opportunity, for Levov, is this ability to “pull on his boots” — to pull himself up by his bootstraps, an idea of rugged individualism promoted repeatedly by Horatio Alger’s “Ragged Dick” stories. By the end of the passage, the buoyancy of Levov’s walk — surely, facilitated by his Ragged Dick–fashioned boots — is mirrored in the buoyancy of the prose. In the sentence, “The pleasure of it. The pure, buoyant pleasure of striding,” for example, the plosive “p” and “b” sounds in “pleasure,” “pure,” “buoyant,” and the second “pleasure” all pop, as if exploding from the balls of Levov’s feet. Further, it is difficult not to hear the plosives — plosives used in honor of Johnny Appleseed — as somehow related to Merry’s frustration with her father, as evidenced by her stutter. As she reflects, much earlier in the novel, “Not what she said but how she said it was all that bothered them. And all she really had to do to be free of it was to not give a shit about how it made them so miserable when she had to pronounce the letter b” (101). Just as she stumbles over pronouncing the letter b, so too does she stumble over the capitalistic enterprise of her father, on the heels of Johnny Appleseed — especially given all of the references to planting seeds surrounding the myth alone. It is in this seed imagery that Roth particularly capitalizes on the early American ideals of “Manifest Destiny.” The seed of Johnny Appleseed, and Levov by proxy, becomes problematic not simply as a source for reproduction as seen in the conception of Merry, for example, who feels trapped by her familial legacy, but also as a source for spreading — via perennials, no less — the symbol of American values. In other words, with all of the rhetoric about seed-planting surrounding the myth of Johnny Appleseed, it is difficult not to hear references to the US project of westward expansion here, or to America’s insistence upon spreading everything (read “democracy”) it believes would be good for others, even to the point of being an imposition. What makes the figure of Johnny Appleseed so interesting here is the fact that Roth’s sentences betray something to all of us that was perhaps there all along: Johnny Appleseed wasn’t simply sharing his seeds with the people. He was sharing his values, and that which he loved: America and what it stood for, the “potential” it offers — potential not in the form of seeds, but in the form of ideals, despite the fact that these ideals would 46

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be impossible to uphold, no matter how much and how often you pursue them. But what is interesting about this mythical story of origins is that Appleseed was actually a speculator, selling trees for settlers to make liquor. Only in subsequent generations would his story be transformed for children’s consumption, a synecdochal example in this novel of how the mythical stories of origin take on meaning retroactively. These ideals, as Merry’s frustration reveals, are spread not simply from town to town, as in the case of Johnny Appleseed, nor from country to country, as in the case of the US government, as exemplified by its involvement in Vietnam, but also from father to daughter. As Merry helps Levov to learn — or so Zuckerman is led to believe — “The daughter has made her father see” (418). What is less clear, however, is Zuckerman’s understanding of Levov’s own role in history; after all, it is his seed that has grown into the young and violent war objector, Merry. While Levov may certainly see American history in a different light after hearing Merry’s story by novel’s end, Zuckerman still struggles to understand the role that Levov himself has played. When juxtaposed with Levov’s earlier reflections on his success in the country, it becomes easier to see Roth’s own ambivalence about the possibilities of America and the rights it espouses. It’s not surprising, for example, that the Swede would celebrate such rights, considering his Ragged Dick success with the glove business. And it is not surprising that he would celebrate his own adventurous spirit, recalling that what was Mars to his father was America to him — he was settling Revolutionary New Jersey as if for the first time. Out in Old Rimrock, all of America lay at their door. That was an idea he loved. Jewish resentment, Irish resentment — the hell with it. A husband and wife each just twenty-five years of age, a baby of less than a year — it had been courageous of them to head out to Old Rimrock. (310) Here, Zuckerman imagines Levov relishing his sense of conquering Old Rimrock, and through it, the world. Like the colonists in the New World, like Johnny Appleseed, like the US soldiers in Vietnam, Levov celebrates his successes not as a Jew, but as an American. In fact, for him, the very racial divides upon which America was actually founded do not matter. He was a revolutionary who opened his arms to all America had to offer, if a bit naively — equating Old Rimrock with such other important revolutionary sites as Concord, Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Yorktown. Michael Pollan reconsiders the myth of Johnny Appleseed in terms of what Appleseed seemed to be selling — all America had to offer — out there on the American frontier. For Pollan, it was not something as simple 47

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as apples, nor was it as lofty as American ideals. Rather, Appleseed offered the sweetness of apples in its fermented form: He was “bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier” (9). Pollan suggests: To people in Brilliant, Chapman explained that he preferred to get out ahead of the settlers moving west, and this would become the pattern of his life: planting a nursery on a tract of wilderness he judged ripe for settlement and then waiting. By the time the settlers arrived, he’d have apple trees ready to sell them. . . . By the 1830s John Chapman was operating a chain of nurseries that reached all the way from Western Pennsylvania through central Ohio and into Indiana. (8) This Johnny Appleseed narrative, however, goes even further than the gift of alcohol. What Appleseed really stands for, in this sense, is his capitalistic enterprise that relies so heavily on supply and demand. Pollan explains: “Chapman saw himself as a bumblebee on the frontier, bringer of both seeds and the word of God — of both sweetness and light” (27). Surely, Appleseed brings ideas of sweetness, but not simply in the literal sense of nectar. He was also the bringer of sweetness in the lofty, metaphorical sense of belief in self-reliance and the good of competition. He had something the people wanted and were willing to pay for — fermenting apples provided the sweetness in one sense, capital provided sweetness in yet another. However, perhaps what is most interesting here is the way Levov compares himself to Johnny Appleseed — a kind of outsider, in his own way — given the ties of his neighbor, Bill Orcutt (an architect with “plans,” no less) with the Jefferson family line. At one point in the novel, for example, the names of Bill Orcutt and Johnny Appleseed appear side by side, although separated by the crucial and divisive period: “Who cares about Bill Orcutt? Woodrow Wilson knew Orcutt’s grandfather? Thomas Jefferson knew his grandfather’s uncle? Good for Bill Orcutt. Johnny Appleseed, that’s the man for me” (316). Such a division makes perfect sense, given Orcutt’s own vexed position in the narrative, ultimately caught in an adulterous embrace with Dawn Levov, the Swede’s wife. However, he is mentioned much earlier, too, as an architect (189), and then again in the third section, significantly titled, “Paradise Lost,” when Levov mocks the idea of the “Orcutt Family Cemetery Tour” (312). In saying that the Orcutt “[f]amily goes back to the Revolution,” Levov is not exactly celebrating his stature (304). Instead, he may be referring to this kind of lineage that takes what it wants in the name of freedom and democracy. For example, during the final dinner party scene, as Dawn leans over the sink and Orcutt bends over her from 48

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behind, Zuckerman realizes, finally, that “What the Swede believed he’d seen . . . was Orcutt putting himself exactly where he intended to be” (336). On the one hand, what is at stake is a difference in perspective here: while Levov believes in the eternally present “Revolutionary New Jersey,” Orcutt believes in a genealogy-obsessed, exclusive model of the past. For Levov, for example, America holds mythic meaning for him in the present; for Orcutt, knowledge of America is gained only because his ancestors were there at the start. On the other hand, this passage invokes the problem of history in another sense: Given Merry’s complaints about the US enterprise abroad, Orcutt’s “territorializing” of Dawn does not sound too far off from America’s past and present tendency to take over territories in the name of its values. Both make a move for what they want — ultimately succeeding, as Zuckerman imagines Levov realizing: “Got it made, got it all now, the greedy, thieving son of a bitch” (381). And it is here, in the end, when Bill Orcutt is fully transformed as an allegory for America: “The cuckolded husband understands. Of course. Understands everything now. Who will get her back to the dream of where she has always wanted to go? Mr. America” (384–5). What is interesting here, though, is who will ultimately be understood as the “Mr. America” of this text. After all, it could as easily be Levov himself, given Zuckerman’s presentation of him from the very beginning. And yet, or perhaps as a result, Levov — the self-described, modernday Johnny Appleseed — does not hear, or cannot confront, Merry’s critique of America, of everything America stands for, indeed has stood for, from the beginning. Like many, Merry understands the Vietnam War as one way to spread democratic ideals to unite Vietnam under the banner of democracy. She saw the enterprise of sending troops in to prevent the south Vietnamese government from collapsing ultimately, for what it was: an unjust act of Johnny Appleseed out to spread the seeds of democracy that necessarily looked better on paper than in practice. Given its extended focus in the novel, (three pages, at least) the figure of Johnny Appleseed is not simply remembered as a man who planted apples, then, but rather as a metaphor for the American desire to spread values of capitalism and democracy — giving it to others and asking them to plant it, while taking over their land with his ideals. And so, even in hindsight, Levov seems more similar to Orcutt than different (except for the important fact that he does not attempt to win over another man’s wife). In this view, Appleseed is simply spreading his seeds in innocence, even in ignorance — two things he can afford. But, even for this reason, for this attribute of America and American democracy, Merry loathed her country. As Zuckerman surmises, bearing the weight of Levov’s perspective: 49

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being an American was loathing America, but loving America was something he could not let go of any more than he could have let go of loving his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency. How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? . . . There wasn’t much difference, and she knew it, between hating America and hating them. (213, emphasis in the original) At first glance, Zuckerman is sympathetic to Levov’s thinking here. However, a closer look suggests that Zuckerman may, at some level, recognize that Levov could actually be the one with the blind spot. Whereas Levov cannot separate himself from his country — and therefore sees in the “conception” everything of value it has offered him (high school popularity, his dream wife, a nice house, a thriving business) — Merry sees the “rotten system” for what is it: the project of spreading US values around the world, whether the world wanted them or not. The word “conception” here seems important, italicized, as it is in the text. On the one hand, it could mean, in this context, “idea” or “sense,” but it also appears to mean more than that. The idea of “conception” harkens back to Johnny’s seeds, the apple seeds, yes, but the seeds of democracy, the ideas of a new government planted — the birth of a new nation. The “rotten system” of democracy also seems tainted by Levov’s investment in Johnny Appleseed, perhaps the bad seed, one who, from the beginning, has turned everything rotten — from the apple to the system itself. And, what is more disturbing still, from the perspective of her father, is that Merry made a conscious decision to reject her own origins — from the seeds of Johnny Appleseed (the literal apple seeds as well as the seeds of the ideal America), to the seed of her father — eventually becoming the girl willing to blow it all away. In this way, as the product of the seed of her father, it might be possible to see elements of Merry’s own self-loathing — as an American, as daughter of Dawn Dwyer, and as the princess of a glove company — that, for all of its familial tradition, is too closely wrapped up in capitalist profit for Merry to be able to endorse. Through the eyes of Merry, whose sensibility is juxtaposed radically with Levov’s throughout the novel, the unexpected trauma of the novel which disrupts our sense of “American” identity is not the Vietnam War, but rather the recognition, perhaps for Zuckerman, although never for Levov, that the very ideals upon which America was first founded have yet to see fruition. The conception of the country, at first glance, seems truly idyllic, especially through the eyes of Levov, whose perspective provides 50

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the point of view of the pastoral.5 Especially when we understand Levov’s relation to his place in New Jersey, his nearly skipping through Old Rimrock, we can see all that he has lost with Merry’s bomb. Likewise, one can almost hear Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century pastoral “The Garden” — “What wondrous life is this I lead! / Ripe apples drop about my head; / The luscious clusters of the vine / Upon my mouth do crush their wine” (33–6) — behind Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s “Letters from an American Farmer,” a work that celebrates his new land as “this great American asylum” where the poor of Europe may become men under “new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system” promising liberty and justice for all (659). (And, here, too, return the apples. Pollan points out in his work on the apple that, although the Creation story emphasizes the “fruit” of the tree in the Garden of Eden, that fruit has been replaced with the apple almost unequivocally.) Merry’s bomb, in fact, does not seem to reject the “life” and “liberty” parts of the Declaration. Rather, her act of bombing the post office rejects the pursuit of happiness specifically through property acquisition that remains the foundation of American idealism. And yet, or perhaps because of such a violent rejection of American ideals, all of this questioning is layered with questions of Zuckerman himself. The only sense we have that Levov might have second thoughts about the victims of Vietnam that Merry stands to defend come from a Zuckermanian fantasy about the difficult position of Levov, trapped as he is between his love for America and his love for a daughter trying to destroy it. Zuckerman speculates that, after the bombing, [h]e heard them laughing, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the angry ragtag army of the violent Uncorrupted who called him a criminal and hated his guts because he was one of those who own and have. The Swede finally found out! They were delirious with joy . . . shepherding him at long last to their truth, to the truth as they knew it to be for every Vietnamese man, woman, child, and tot, for every colonized black in America, for everyone everywhere who had been fucked over by the capitalists and their insatiable greed. The something that’s demented, honky, is American history! It’s the American empire! It’s Chase Manhattan and General Motors and Standard Oil and Newark Maid Leatherware! Welcome aboard, capitalist dog! Welcome to the fucked-over-by-America human race!” (257) Zuckerman imagining Levov imagining the response of radical political extremists becomes particularly significant when considering the work of the original revolutionaries themselves. At this moment in the text, 51

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it appears (at least through Zuckerman’s understanding), that there is a very fine line between revolutionaries fighting for freedom and the critics who reject what became of freedom — the social, and particularly economic revolutions that were born in the intervening two hundred years. American history seems to have been skewed just a bit here — just enough to provide a fresh perspective of the revolutionary war itself: a war fomented by the rich who also happened to be patrician slave owners. The implied juxtaposition here between business moguls and the founding patrician slave owners reveal America for what it really is — and what it always has been. But with a final Zuckermanian turn, humor saves the day, as Newark Maid Leatherware appears in this list of American moguls that also includes Chase Manhattan, General Motors, and Standard Oil. While Zuckerman’s narrative is, in this rare moment, mocking the Swede — in part for being so self-aggrandizing (including Newark Maid Leatherware in a list of iconic businesses) and his dismissal of radical politicians, it also simultaneously mocks the radicals who saw violence as a means to exposing US citizens to the truth. But there is something to this, something Merry understands about the failure of democracy that her idealistic grandfather and father do not. Merry says Lyndon Johnson’s a war criminal and that he’s “not going to s-s-s-stop the w-w-war, Grandpa, because you tell him to” (288). And yet, her grandfather — on her father’s behalf — persists: “Honey, we live in a democracy. Thank God for that. You don’t have to go around getting angry with your family. You can write letters. You can vote” (288–9). After the 2000 election in democratic America, these words seem to carry uncanny weight. What would it mean for Roth to have predicted where idealism gets us, living now, as we do, in a country we claim as democratic, but where the vote and voice of the people so obviously did not count in the twenty-first century? Whereas there is always the possibility that there is some truth to this statement, or, at least it was in 1997, when the novel was published, now we can only read this as sad irony, as a commentary on the older generation’s inability or refusal to see what their country has clearly failed to grow into: a full-fledged democracy where people can write letters and vote, and, further, to be heard. They refuse, in other words, to see it for what it is, for what it always was: a country that has perpetually waged wars, not to defend its ideals, but rather to achieve other strategic, tactical, and financial ends. Such tangled explanations for war reflect Arendt’s statement about the traumatic nature of revolution: “Before they were engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the new trauma was going to be” (21). Such a formulation perhaps sheds light on the burden of Merry’s bombing 52

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that governs American Pastoral. To rethink revolution in terms of trauma would mean to understand why and how characters in history and literature were forever going back to that originary moment — trying to find larger meaning in a moment that was a complete and total surprise. Similarly, as Caruth argues in her introduction to Unclaimed Experience, what defines a traumatic event involves not simply crucial and horrifying details of the event itself, but also the temporal effects of that event — precisely the haunting imposition of these events in the lives of the survivors. Such an understanding of time goes a long way in explaining why catastrophic events in history are so likely to repeat themselves. In the context of American Pastoral, we might say that Merry’s bombing appears, on the surface, as stemming from an unacknowledged injustice originating in Vietnam. But where did Vietnam come from? Where did all of the wars preceding Vietnam come from? As American Pastoral seems to suggest, the founding trauma, the surprise of revolution and the patricide at its core, is the unacknowledged trauma of the Revolution — of all that has become of these United States of America — something Roth seems to worry about a great deal in Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and the American Trilogy, more recently. Is there a way, then, that we can read the catastrophic event in American Pastoral not as the Vietnam War, but as the founding of the nation itself — a founding, a war, we have never quite possessed — a gesture toward democracy that we have never fully grasped? Is it possible that precisely because we have never fully come to terms with the original American war for democracy, and the meaning that it carries, we are doomed to repeat these traumatic events, with Vietnam, and most recently, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it possible that Merry’s act of bombing the post office is a protest, too, of the spread of democracy, of its accidental birth, a birth unacknowledged as messy as the “messy” founding father, Thomas Paine himself? As Freud hinted over 100 years ago, the problem of time is also a problem of history, a history Roth revisits in this important work. While Merry might be worried about the blindness in America regarding Vietnam, Roth appears to be more worried about our collective blindness regarding such unintended consequences of the American Revolution as slavery, segregation, colonization, and other forms of violence that were born — or, fully conceived — with the founding of the country on traumatic ideals. “What innocence?” he asks, of American history. Addressing Vietnam in this way, as a moral and political trauma in history, American Pastoral posits the troubling possibility that Vietnam was not a singular event in this country. Rather, it points up our own blindness about the very ideals that led us to Vietnam, ideals that quite 53

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possibly emerged as an accident in the eighteenth century, ideals that emerged too quickly to enact responsibly at any moment in our collective consciousness. Such blindness becomes manifest during the dinner party that composes nearly the entirety of the final chapter of the novel. Like a traditional pastoral, American Pastoral attempts to restore a mood of peaceful harmony via a ceremonial scene — a shared meal. However, this being “the” American Pastoral, the Swede only recalls pastoral settings of a simpler time as he shares a chaotic dinner, in real time, with his friends and family. In many ways, the most striking moment in this chapter is the simultaneously dramatic and humorous moment a drunk Jessie Orcutt stabs the father of the family, the traditional patriarch Lou Levov, in the eye with a fork, pulling the Swede out of his revelry with the single, simple acknowledgment that “There was blood on Lou Levov’s face” (421). Perhaps more noteworthy still is the romantic revelry that this violent moment punctuates. Between the recognition that his father screams “No!” (418) and the precise cause of this scream, “There was blood on [his] face” (421) lies the nearly three-page reverie of the Swede walking with his daughter through the countryside: [H]e all at once envisioned it — already back in the countryside, here in the lovely Morris County countryside that had been tamed over the centuries by ten American generations, back walking the hilly roads that were edged now, in September, with the red and burnt orange of devil’s paintbrush, with a matted profusion of asters and goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, an entangled bumper crop of white and blue and pink and wine-colored flowers artistically topping their workaday stems, all the flowers she had learned to identify and classify as a 4-H Club project and then on their walks together had taught him, a city boy, to recognize — “See, Dad, how there’s a n-notch at the tip of the petal?” — chicory, cinquefoil, pasture thistle, wild pinks, joe-pye weed, the last vestiges of yellow-flowered wild mustard sturdily spilling over from the fields, clover, yarrow, wild sunflowers, stringy alfalfa escaped from an adjacent farm and sporting its simple lavender blossom, the bladder campion with its clusters of white-petaled flowers and the distended little sac back of the petals that she loved to pop loudly in the palm of her hand, the erect mullein whose tonguelike velvety leaves she plucked and wore inside her sneakers — so as to be like the first settlers, who, according to her history teacher, used mullein leaves for insoles — the milkweed whose exquisitely made pods she would carefully tear open as a kid so she could blow into the air the silky seed-bearing down, thus feeling herself at one with nature, 54

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imagining that she was the everlasting wind. Indian Brook flowing rapidly on her left, crossed by little bridges, dammed up for swimming holes along the way and opening into the strong trout stream where she’d fished with her father — Indian Brook crossing under the road, flowing eastward from the mountain where it arises. On her left the pussy willows, the swamp maples, the marsh plants; on her right the walnut trees nearing fruition, only weeks from dropping the nuts whose husks when she pulled them apart would darkly stain her fingers and pleasantly stink them up with an acid pungency. On her right the black cherry, the field plants, the mowed fields. Up on the hills the dogwood trees; beyond them the woodlands — the maples, the oaks, and the locusts, abundant and tall and straight. She used to collect their beanpods in the fall. She used to collect everything, catalog everything, explain to him everything, examine with the pocket magnifying glass he’d given her every chameleonlike crab spider that she brought home to hold briefly captive in the moistened mason jar, feeding it on dead houseflies until she released it back onto the goldenrod or the Queen Anne’s lace (“watch what happens now, Dad”) where it resumed adjusting its color to ambush its prey. Walking northwest into a horizon still thinly alive with light, walking up through the twilight call of the thrushes: up past the white pasture fences she hated, up past the hay fields, the corn fields, the turnip fields she hated, up past the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes (“The pioneers used them, Mom, to scrub their pots and pans”), the meadows, the acres and acres of woods she hated, up from the village, tracing her father’s high-spirited, happy Johnny Appleseed walk until, just as the first stars appeared, she reached the century-old maple trees that she hated and the substantial old stone house, imprinted with her being, that she hated, the house in which there lived the substantial family, also imprinted with her being, that she also hated. (419–20) In the beginning of this vision, Merry appears as an Eve figure in the Garden of Eden, walking as she does among the flowers and communing with the apparently untainted natural world. The alliterative lists of the flowers and trees she walks among with her father only add to the beauty of the scene in the countryside. She literally is his guide here — “See, Dad,” she says — which becomes even more compelling when the Swede tells us a page before that “The daughter has made her father to see” (418). This vision, however, is more metaphorical: Through her terrorist acts, Merry has made her father to see, precisely, not only that she has, in fact, killed four people, but that his own promised land in Old 55

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Rimrock is not the idyll he once thought it was. He reflects, again, just a page earlier: “She has given him sight, the sight to see clear through to that which will never be regularized, to see what you can’t see and don’t see and won’t see until three is added to one to get four” (418). The repetition of the words “sight” and “see” here, added to what the Swede “all at once envisioned” on the next page only serves to reinforce that, ultimately, this novel emphasizes the necessity to see beyond the pastoral. It is telling, for example, that during this vision, Lou Levov is screaming and bleeding because Jessie Orcutt has nearly poked him in the right eye with a fork. She has nearly rendered him blind. “One drink less,” Marcia says in the third to last paragraph, “and you’d be blind, Lou” (423). Lou is, for all intents and purposes here, a blind Oedipus figure — “We live in a democracy, Merry; you can vote,” he tells her. And the Swede seems blind here, too. We might ask: how dare he indulge in such a fantastical reverie in the middle of a terrible dinner party, after all that his daughter has done? But is also helps to reflect on the fact that the reason he believes his father to be screaming, for one short second, is that his murderous daughter has just walked through the door. This is what sets in motion the slippage in associations with walking: Merry walking the five miles from the village to get to her parents’ house; Merry walking the length of an underpass through the squalid streets; Merry walking in the countryside; and, finally, at the very end of this passage, Merry “tracing her father’s high-spirited, happy Johnny Appleseed walk.” Such a line of associations inevitably tarnishes even this fondest of early memories. The length of the first quoted sentence, for example, occupies 22 lines of printed text as shown here, and 25 in the book itself. As if to reflect the breathless interminable experience he has had with Merry, the Swede punctuates it only with the rests provided by em dashes and commas. There isn’t much slowing down, traipsing as they are through the countryside surrounded by flowers, but also hurtling as they are into a history of violence the Swede had no idea how to stop. On the surface, the descriptions of the flowers are lovely: fall has cast the traditional New England hues of red and orange across the field. It is September after all. But the fall of September also invokes the Swede’s own fall, his perceived moral failing here as well as the fall as experienced by the original Adam and Eve — the fall that comes from knowledge, from being tempted to see what one is not supposed to see. A closer look at the descriptions of the colors though — “red and burnt orange of devil’s paintbrush”; “wine-colored flowers”; “darkly stain her fingers and pleasantly stink them up” — all cannot hide the fact that Merry, like Lady Macbeth, has virtual blood on her hands. The blood of “three . . . added to one to get 56

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four” individuals who died at the post office that day. In fact, this is not the only language of violence undercutting the idyllic pasture. Such verbs as “pop”; “plucked”; “tear”; “hold briefly captive”; and “ambush its prey” reveal not only violence in the natural world, but also Merry’s violent tendencies within that world. What is interesting here, given Merry’s persistent stutter, is that there is only one word stuttered here — “notch” — the word itself, like the stutter, an interruption in something that is otherwise perfect. Such plosive interruptions also occur at the level of sound here: While there are many soothing sounds marked by the soft “s” and “w,” there are an equal number of “b,” “p,” and hard “c” sounds disrupting the bucolic associations one would have with this natural setting. Take, for example, the first couple of lines. There are such soft sounds in the words “once”; “—side”; “Morris”; “—side”; “centuries”; “September”; “with”; “with”; “asters”; “lace”; and so on. However, the hard “c” of such words as “back” and “countryside” and “county” as well as all the plosives in “bumper crop,” “topping,” and “pasture” announce that this is a harder linguistic journey than otherwise expected. I am particularly struck by the list of flowers the Swede recalls Merry showing him that bear the notch: “chicory,” “cinquefoil,” “pasture thistle,” “wild pinks” and “joe-pye weed” all possess the lovely markings of alliterative ambivalence: the peaceful sounds of the soft “s” and “w” undercut by the more jarring, violent sounds of the hard “c” and the “p.” The linguistic control here mirrors Merry’s own control and domination over the natural world — she “used to collect everything, catalogue everything, explain to him everything, examine with the pocket magnifying glass everything” — which reads like a self-referential commentary on the nature of Nathan’s own collection and cataloguing of information: clues to Merry’s unexpected crimes, the despair and disappointment of the Swede in the face of these crimes; it also refers to Roth’s own style of cataloguing, particularly here, with all of the apparently gratuitous descriptions of the bucolic countryside in the midst of a shocking family feud. What starts then as a utopian vision of a child and her father during a simpler time gradually disintegrates, like the utopian vision of the US itself, into a blur of self-loathing. The end of this passage is haunted by Merry’s hatred, the word “hate” offered six times in the last sentence, perhaps a projection of Zuckerman’s own self-loathing, but, more compellingly still, a suggestion that our modern-day Eve both loathes herself as well as the garden that created her. And somehow, perhaps most startlingly, we can associate Merry’s knowledge of the place as the explanation for the loathing — she perhaps knows it too well, has examined it too closely. Such intense hatred is difficult to read at this moment in the text: ten 57

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paragraphs from the end, the reader is compelled to ask, “Surely, this is not what we are left with.” The answer is, of course, “No”: the Swede snaps out of the fantasy in order to be present for the explanation of the fork in the eye of his father. And it seems that, ultimately, Nathan Zuckerman gets the last word. On the one hand, he tells us, “They’ll never recover. Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life!” (423). But then come the surprising, nearly reparative last words, a two-sentence paragraph composed of questions: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs” (423). It is difficult to determine, given all that has come before these lines, how they could be read as a sincere assessment of the Levov’s life. In fact, it is possible that Merry, for all of her crimes, gets the last word, as this banality of goodness has always underwritten her complaint — particularly when this false sense of goodness fails to notice the violence that it simultaneously perpetuates and underwrites. The “What on earth” sounds like the beginning of a frustrated mother’s lament. And even if it is sincere, their life is not described in purely positive terms: surely no American family would aspire to lead the least “reprehensible” life. But, then again, maybe that’s all we can do, given our national origins and the traumatic events that have occurred in its wake. What’s important is that we have, like the Swede himself, been made to see. What’s important is that we see the “dark stain” on the natural world that has always been tainted by humanity.

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CHAPTER 4

“THE STARS ARE INDISPENSABLE”: TRAUMA, BETRAYAL, AND CELEBRITY IN I MARRIED A COMMUNIST

No light in the east yet, but the stars show a certain fatigue. Robert Penn Warren, 1968 This is America. The moment you start this public machine, no other end is possible except a catastrophe for everybody. Philip Roth, 1998 Most critics read the triumvirate of Roth’s Newark novels, otherwise known as the “American Trilogy” (composed of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain), collectively, conflating the three novels under the banner of their overt thematic interest in the United States after World War II.1 From such a perspective, I Married a Communist often gets shortchanged, like a middle child no one knows how to engage. It is the “noisiest” of the three, as Mark Shechner recently pointed out — populated as it is with people yelling political slogans at each other from their own respective soapboxes (180). Readings that unify these novels often do so to bolster Roth’s social claims. Bonnie Lyons, Michael Kimmage, and Philip Abbott exemplify these “collective” readings, understanding the three together as if they were one large work: Lyons argues in “Philip Roth’s American Tragedies” that the trilogy establishes Roth as “our most important author of significant American tragedies” (125); Kimmage explains how the three have been “captivated by history” (“In History’s Grip,” 15–31); and Abbott suggests that the three present more positive, or, at least more sympathetic, aspects of democratic populism (“‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,’” 431–52). Even Shostak, who otherwise does the most work to read I Married a Communist as a novel in its own right, follows this line when she argues 59

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that: “from one perspective, I Married a Communist can be seen as an extended critique of the late twentieth-century slogan, ‘The personal is political’” (Philip Roth, 252). “Like American Pastoral,” she says, “I Married a Communist probes into the problems of narrating history by way of its own form” (250); this analysis is perhaps a bit more generous than Shechner’s similar point that “The waves of indignation that sweep through the novel eventually become the novel” itself (180). Considering the mythology of America that became Roth’s focus in the mid-1990s, Derek Royal and David Brauner also interpret the trilogy as a collective, focusing in particular on how Roth weaves the individual subject into American history. For Royal, “all three novels show how individual identity embodies national identity and how the forces of history — American history, specifically — threaten to overtake personal freedom and individual agency” (“Pastoral Dreams,” 187).2 While I am closer to these latter readings in their focus on American history and the mythology that sprang out of its own founding, I seek here to closely read I Married A Communist as an entity unto itself — one that focuses in odd and unexpected ways on the trauma of betrayal in particular; as such, I propose that the novel reveals how market-construed stardom, as opposed to the historically earned fame of Lincoln or Paine, makes betrayal inevitable.3 But the novel is also about purity, and how an obsession with purity — ideological, moral, professional, even ethnic — can lead to betrayal with traumatic effects. One of the most striking lines in the entire novel is the curt observation that: “Purity is a lie” — an important thematic aspect of The Human Stain that I will address in the next chapter. Like The Human Stain, I Married a Communist addresses racial injustices in America — and the related founding breach, the ultimate betrayal — of African Americans in this country. But it is also, fundamentally, about Communism and its relationship with the U.S’s own founding ideals. Just as an important branch of the civil rights movement had deep connections with the Communist Party in the US, the novel too makes these issues inextricable. In this sense, references here to the Civil War and Abe Lincoln show the politics of nineteenth century America as a precursor to the Red Scare. Nathan, in particular, sees himself as a race-conscious child upon looking back to the moment when he met Ira, saying to his father early on that “the democrats will never do anything to end segregation” (30) — a sentiment we can’t help but return to when young Nathan, at a party at Ira’s, notices a black woman in the maid’s uniform serving the bourgeois Communists (125). Zuckerman’s description of his own idealistic play, however, a play he writes as a young boy, solidifies this connection between civil rights and the Communist cause: 60

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Many people here in Anywhere give lip service to the fight against discrimination. They talk about the need to wreck the fences that keep minorities in social concentration camps. But too many carry on their fight in abstract terms. They think and speak of justice and decency and right, about Americanism, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. All this is fine, but it shows they are really unaware of the what and why of racial, religious, and national discrimination. (129) For Nathan, a young writer influenced by the genre of social protest, one cannot be a Communist and talk about the Constitution and the Declaration without also grappling with other kinds of discrimination in the US – not just class warfare but also racial injustices as well. Considering this idea of the betrayal of the founding ideals, on the one hand, alongside the betrayal linked inextricably with celebrity, on the other hand, this chapter reads I Married a Communist as a story about Ira (Adam) and Eve: a twisted Garden of Eden story set in the very America that was once understood as Eden itself. In so doing, this chapter considers the problematic relationship between representation and celebrity by closely reading the double meanings of signature phrases that characterize Roth’s later work. I argue here, for example, that in ending with the single-paragraph sentence, “The stars are indispensable,” Roth’s I Married a Communist simultaneously refers to the stars in the night sky, the stars that epitomize the democratic work of the nation on the US flag, and the celebrities that come and go through the novel. In other words, I read the novel as populated by stars, in the sense that a “star” or “celebrity” “‘shines’ in society, or is distinguished in some branch of art, industry, science” (OED). This linguistic doubling betrays the aftershocks of the traumatic history of betrayal, especially as it becomes inextricably bound up with the life of the celebrity. Here, I propose that, in representing the heart of the McCarthy era, but also looking back to the ambivalent celebrity status of Thomas Paine during the Revolutionary era and the moments of betrayal in American history that followed, I Married a Communist, like The Plot Against America, depicts the uncomfortable, and often ambivalent, relationship between trauma, celebrity, and patriotic revolution. As this novel points out, part of what’s so corrupt about celebrity culture is that it insists that its understanding of fame is the truth, thus debasing people who are legitimately famous. In this way, I am interested in how part of the trauma encoded in the novel is the way celebrity culture retroactively turns (figures who had been understood as) heroes into celebrities, thereby also changing our understanding of previous generations. 61

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On some level, the book reads exactly as Shechner describes it: The main character, Ira, whose story is narrated to Nathan Zuckerman by his brother Murray long after Ira’s death, is full of the ire he is named after. An idealistic revolutionary at heart who bears an uncanny resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, Ira makes a living through staging Lincoln reenactments and later goes on to become a radio celebrity. Ultimately, Ira marries the woman who will be his demise, if he doesn’t destroy himself first: Eve Frame, the celebrity actress who provides for Ira the bourgeois lifestyle that contradicts everything Ira stands for — the plight of the working class and socialist ideals. When Eve finds out that Ira sleeps both with his masseuse and Eve’s daughter’s friend, she gets even by drawing on friendships with some other celebrities: Katrina van Tassel Grant (an allusion to Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) and Bryden Grant. Katrina, in particular, is described as having a special kind of power — what Nathan Zuckerman refers to as “the power of celebrity” (144). The Grants are well connected and zealous, eager to see into print the story of Eve’s marriage to Ira, complicated by his political affiliations, the publication of which all but guarantees Ira’s subsequent downfall. Giving the novel its title, Eve’s memoir, I Married a Communist finds a committed audience during the height of the Red Scare in the US. The novel’s emphatic insistence on the paranoid environment in the US during the rise of McCarthy is consistent with readings offered by Royal and Safer, among others: Safer describes the novel as highlighting “McCarthyism in the ’50s” (Mocking the Age, 3); Royal (2005) describes it as set during “the Red-baiting heydays of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee” (187). However, I find it both odd and intriguing that much of the noise in this novel’s background comes from descriptions of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Paine; it comes from ranting about the founding ideals of the United States; and, ultimately, it comes from the philosophical insights about betrayal delivered by Ira’s brother, Murray, whose extended monologue — the monologue that composes the book — reads like an elegy in many ways. When considering this juxtaposition of 1950s culture, on the one hand, with the narrative focus on celebrity, betrayal, and the failure of the founding ideals, on the other hand, Roth’s vision of the US democracy as inherently and irredeemably flawed appears more dramatically here than in any of his previous works. The unlikely connection between stars — or celebrity — and loss is no more clear than in the final passages of the novel: passages that hold within them all of the concerns of the novel as a whole. In this passage, the trope of the stars serves to reinforce the idea that the book is ultimately about celebrity. But it is also, significantly, about loss. The novel closes 62

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with Zuckerman alone. Surprisingly, finally, there are no voices surrounding him. There remains only the fleeting memory of Murray’s departure as it is linked with Zuckerman’s childhood past. Zuckerman recalls: On the night Murray left I recalled how, as a small child, I’d been told — as a small child unable to sleep because his grandfather had died and he insisted on understanding where the dead man had gone — that Grandpa had been turned into a star. My mother took me out of bed and down into the driveway beside the house and together we looked straight up at the night sky while she explained that one of those stars was my grandfather. Another was my grandmother, and so on. What happens when people die, my mother explained, is that they go up to the sky and live on forever as gleaming stars. I searched the sky and said, “Is he that one?” and she said yes, and we went back inside and I fell asleep. That explanation made sense then and, of all things, it made sense again on that night when, wide awake from the stimulus of all that narrative engorgement, I lay out of doors till dawn, thinking that Ira was dead, that Eve was dead, that with the exception perhaps of Sylphid off in her villa on the French Riviera, a rich old woman of seventy-two, all the people with a role in Murray’s account of the Iron Man’s unmaking were now no longer impaled on their moment but dead and free of the traps set for them by their era. Neither the ideas of their era or the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. There are no longer mistakes for Eve or Ira to make. There is no betrayal. There is no idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience nor its absence. There are no mothers and daughters, no fathers and stepfathers. There are no actors. There is no class struggle. There is no discrimination or lynching or Jim Crow, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice. There are no utopias. There are no shovels. Contrary to the folklore, except for the constellation Lyra — which happened to perch high in the eastern sky a little west of the Milky Way and southeast of the two Dippers — there are no harps. There is just the furnace of Ira and the furnace of Eve burning at twenty million degrees. There is the furnace of novelist Katrina Van Tassel Grant, the furnace of Congressman Bryden Grant, the furnace of taxidermist Horace Bixton, and of miner Tommy Minarek, and of flutist Pamela Solomon, and of Estonian masseuse Helgi Pärn, and of lab technician Doris Ringold, and of Doris’s uncle-loving daughter, Lorraine. There is the furnace of Karl Marx and of Joseph Stalin and of Leon Trotsky and of Paul Robeson and of Johnny O’Day. There is the furnace of 63

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Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain on a night as splendidly clear as that night Murray left me for good — for the very best of loyal brothers, the ace of English teachers, died in Phoenix two months later — is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand. The stars are indispensable. (322–3) While Posnock creatively reads these stars in terms of Spinoza’s cosmopolitanism (Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 260–6), I read the stars as celebrities themselves. Although, even this reading is complicated, as something is not quite right here, indicated by the oxymoron “silent rostrum.” While a rostrum is traditionally understood as a (famous) speaker’s podium, it is striking here that there is no longer anybody speaking. The rostrum, Zuckerman tells us, is silent. The many stars in the night sky Nathan describes seem to indicate a void in both presence and in sound. A surface reading would suggest that the stars in the night sky are “indispensible” because they give light and comfort in darkness. Compellingly, the stars are also associated or contrasted with the furnaces of all the famous people, leading one to understand that, while furnaces lead to conflict, the stars themselves offer “the colossal spectacle of no antagonism” — the key word here being “spectacle” as it is implicitly linked with conflict. But this passage also catalogues the celebrity-stars who are indispensable for helping understand important lessons about betrayal, idealism, and falsehoods. Betrayal is a key word here, as it is a key word throughout the rest of the novel. The passage begins by repeating the phrase “small child” along with establishing an internal rhyme from the repeated words “sky” and “die.” What is in the sky is death — neither conscience nor its absence. For Zuckerman, as he came to understand as a child, stars are a reminder of that death but also offer comfort in the paradoxical presence of nothingness, of absence. The sublimity of that insight is underscored by the poetry on the page — internal rhyme, anaphora (from the repeated “there is no” and “there are no”); the image of the “furnace” (perhaps more usually associated with the horror of the twentieth century); and the repetition of the hard /c/ sound in the end — beginning with the name “McCarthy,” whose sinister ideology is behind almost every page in the novel, but also the words “inconceivable,” “spectacle,” and “colossal.” For me, the “stars” of the passage are the actors who travel in Ira and Eve’s circle, but are also Bixon, Minarek, Helgi Pärn, average people 64

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equated with actual celebrities — Ira, Eve, Katrina and Bryden, Robeson, Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, with the last three functioning as “stars” of the working-class revolutionary movement, and Robeson personifying a bridge between celebrities and the revolutionary movement. Yet, even though there is a kind of comfort in Zuckerman’s words, the passage’s rhetoric undermines it. Certainly, as this final passage makes clear, there is no shortage of “stars” appearing in the novel as a whole. The entire novel, from beginning to end, revolves around name-dropping of authors, actors, politicians — all working for a better future in America and representing, in part, the cost of being a celebrity voice for the US democracy. In addition to its interest in celebrity, however, the novel is also simultaneously about revolution — but not simply the kind of revolution that we have seen in Roth’s previous books, such as the American Pastoral (1998), or the kind we will see in later books such as The Dying Animal (2001). More significant, the defining revolution here is the proletarian revolution that came together under the slogan, “Workers of the world, unite!” There are several mentions of the workers’ revolution here, an aspect of US society considered most carefully by Murray himself. At one point, Murray tells Zuckerman: “What does it mean, ‘a revolution’? It means a revolution. He took the rhetoric seriously. You can’t call yourself a revolutionary and not be serious in your commitment. It was not something fake. It was something genuine. He took the Soviet Union seriously. At AFTRA, Ira meant business” (272). Here, Murray appears in stark contrast with Johnny O’Day, Ira’s friend and mentor who introduced him to the socialist cause in the first place: whereas O’Day will ultimately proclaim that Ira betrayed the revolutionary ideals to live in Manhattan with Eve Frame — his commitment both to people and to things makes him a failed revolutionary by definition (289) — Murray understands his own brother to be as committed as they come. It is in this way, through Murray, that the reader understands Ira as a descendant of Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man (1952). In featuring as its central hero an indignant and righteous spokesperson, the novel hearkens back to that earlier novel that also satirizes the Communist Party on the brink of the McCarthy era.4 Like Invisible Man, Ira is a protagonist full of ire; he is an imperfect man whose ideals are near perfect when they are the founding ideals of the US. In many cases, it is his anger, which at one point is described as “indignant righteousness” (190), which leads to his downfall, particularly with the murder of an anti-Semite early in his life that the reader does not learn about until very late in the novel. Murray provides some perspective on this anger when he explains to Zuckerman: “That’s one of the biggest things that America 65

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gave to the Jews — gave them their anger. Especially our generation, Ira’s and mine. Especially after the war. The America we came home to offered us a place to really get pissed off ” (163).5 When considered in this light, the novel, ultimately, is not about Communists, epitomized by Ira, being good or bad — it is not really invested in a debate between communism and capitalism, for example — as much as it is about betrayal during this part of American history: the way the McCarthy trials betrayed civil liberties in the name of an anxiety over betrayed purity, as well as a generalized awareness that the ongoing affront to the civil rights of black Americans, enforced by lynch law, constitutes a betrayal at the heart of American history as such. For however much Ira talks in this novel, Murray seems to have the final word in the end, functioning as the voice of reason that has finally come to understand the hysteria of the McCarthy era. He reflects: Perhaps it’s because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper’s half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere. McCarthy was never in the Communist business; if nobody else knew that, he did. The show-trial aspect of McCarthy’s patriotic crusade was merely its theatrical form. Having cameras view it just gave it the false authenticity of real life. 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 and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That’s how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment. (284) Murray, it seems to me, is the voice of Roth here — or at least the voice behind the revisionist project that Roth began with these later novels. For me, this is the key to the novel: By indicating the vexed circumstances surrounding “how the country began,” Murray says more about the Puritan impulse toward ideological or religious “purity” than he does about Communism, although — for him — the two are connected in important ways. It is as if he is saying that our failure to confront the traumatic past 66

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initiated by the Puritans haunts us in the present time of the novel through McCarthy’s appeal to democratic purity. For Murray, McCarthy’s entire platform worked because of the combination of gossip and theatrics; what makes “the stars” “indispensable” in this reading is precisely the fact that they offer the theatrics necessary to make people pay attention. The origins of the country are at issue here, not simply the US in the 1950s. As Murray’s reflection makes clear, there are many examples of how moral disgrace became public entertainment in our history: slaves at auction, the burning of witches, innocent men on trial, and so on down the line. In other words, we might say that Roth sets these traumatic moments of history against the backdrop of the contemporary social movements in order to say something about America’s origins: about how far we have strayed from the founding ideals or whether the nation’s founding, in actual fact, lined up with the ideals originally espoused at all. We are reminded of these founding ideals at key moments throughout the text, and it is often when Zuckerman is looking back to his childhood — as it becomes clear from the beginning of the novel that Ira significantly influenced him, not only on account of his fame, but also on account of his politics as well. Such disconnect between the “principle” and the “men who do the violence” is reinforced in the perpetual references to Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln in the novel — with Thomas Paine represented as another kind of “outlaw” and Abraham Lincoln coming alive through Iron Rinn, an angry man with blood on his hands who ultimately dies disgraced. THE FOUNDING IDEALS OF PAINE AND LINCOLN

As Ira Ringold says, “Well these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose” (27). So even before Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln appear in the novel, it becomes clear early on that this is not simply another novel about the Red Scare. Rather, I Married a Communist represents the founding ideals and the McCarthy witch hunts as inextricable by pointing out, as early as page six, that the McCarthy hearings were a breach of the rights of US citizens. This point manifests when Zuckerman first talks with Murray about his fate during the 1950s. Murray reflects: “But as I understood the Bill of Rights, my political beliefs were none of their business, and that’s what I told them” (6). This sentiment is underscored when Nathan remembers asking Ira as a child about the future of his radio show when the lists came out: “You worried?,” he asks. And Ira responds: “you can fight them, you know. 67

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You can fight the bastards. Last I heard there was a Constitution in this country, a Bill of Rights somewhere” (215). However, as compelling as the appeal to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is here, what is perhaps more challenging — indeed, unexpected — are the consistent intertextual references to Howard Fast’s book, Citizen Tom Paine. As Nathan himself comes to realize, Paine is an unlikely hero of the founding of the US But here, in many ways, he is the star of Nathan’s childhood, and holds a very important place in his memory, as this was the book Nathan is reading when he meets Ira on October 12, 1948 (22). In classic Romantic form, the adult Zuckerman looks back on his childhood to filter the childish memory with a more distanced, grown up point of view, providing a more nuanced reading of Fast’s novel in the context of his extended conversation with Murray: Citizen Tom Paine was not so much a novel plotted in the familiar manner as a sustained linking of highly charged rhetorical flourishes tracing the contradictions of an unsavory man with a smoldering intellect and the purest social ideals, a writer and a revolutionary. “He was the most hated — and perhaps by a few the most loved — man in all the world.” “A mind that burned itself as few minds in all human history.” “To feel on his own soul the whip laid on the back of millions.” “His thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson’s could ever be.” That was Paine as Fast portrayed him, savagely single-minded and unsociable, an epic, folkloric belligerent — unkempt, dirty, wearing a beggar’s clothes, bearing a musket in the unruly streets of wartime Philadelphia, a bitter, caustic man, often drunk, frequenting brothels, hunted by assassins, and friendless. He did in all alone: “My only friend is the revolution.” By the time I had finished the book, there seemed to me no way other than Paine’s for a man to live and die if he was intent on demanding, in behalf of human freedom — demanding both from remote rulers and from the coarse mob — the transformation of society. (25) What makes this passage so striking is its self-referentiality. The description of Fast’s novel might as well be a description of I Married a Communist, particularly with the opening line describing the novel as “plotted in the familiar manner as a sustained linking of highly charged rhetorical flourishes tracing the contradictions of an unsavory man with a smoldering intellect and the purest social ideals, a writer and a revolutionary” (25). This is precisely how Shechner originally reviewed Roth’s book; indeed, Ira is not anything if not “an unsavory man with a smoldering intellect and purest social ideals.” But this passage also sheds 68

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new light on the figure of Paine himself. Rather than simply being a man who wrote important pamphlets so confident in the cause of the American Revolution, he was an unlikely celebrity in his own right. Perhaps Ira is correct when he understands the real genius of the founding fathers as the ability to “articulate the cause in English” (27, emphasis in original). Rather than understand the American Revolution — and here it must be tied somehow to the Marxist Revolution — as completely and perfectly plotted and expected, Ira sounds more like Hannah Arendt here when he reads, through Fast, Paine’s talents simply for giving language to a total and complete surprise. Ira goes on to say: “The revolution was totally improvised, totally disorganized. Isn’t that the sense you get from this book, Nathan? Well these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose” (26–7). However, Nathan takes this new reading of Paine one step further as a boy, and begins to define himself as a Paine figure as well, particularly in relation to his father. Nathan reflects: The Ringolds compelled me to respond at a level of rigor that felt appropriate to who I now was. Be a good boy wasn’t the issue with them. The sole issue was my convictions. But then, their responsibility wasn’t a father’s which his to steer his son away from the pitfalls. The father has to worry about the pitfalls in a way the teacher doesn’t. He has to worry about his son’s conduct, he has to worry about socializing his little Tom Paine. But once little Tom Paine has been let into the company of men and the father is still educating him as a boy, the father is finished. Sure, he’s worrying about the pitfalls — if he wasn’t, it would be wrong. But he’s finished anyway. Little Tom Paine has no choice but to write him off, to betray the father and go boldly forth to step straight into life’s very first pit. And then, all on his own — providing real unity to his existence — to step from pit to pit for the rest of his days, until the grave, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, is at least the last pit into which one can fall. (32) Again, the word “betrayal” appears here, but, in this case, it is a very personal betrayal — the betrayal of a son in the face of his father. There is suddenly a new tension in Nathan’s life — one between growing into his own man and making mistakes (one might wonder if getting involved with Ira is one of them) and respecting his father’s authority. This is, of course, a new spin on an old theme: intergenerational conflict now is seen as a political tableau, with Tom Paine as both the hero and the villain. Although Ira Rinn himself could be considered a Paine figure — a figure Nathan clearly models himself on — it was Lincoln whom he literally 69

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embodied, as one of Nathan’s earliest memories of seeing the star is when he plays the role of Abraham Lincoln in the high-school auditorium. It is here, in the shadow of Lincoln, where the idea of celebrity and the founding ideals merge. As Nathan remembers, Ira as Lincoln powerfully delivered the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, concluding with what Mr. Ringold, the orator’s brother, later told us was 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, that he then made us diagram and analyze and discuss for an entire class period): “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” For the rest of the program, Abraham Lincoln removed his stovepipe hat and debated the pro-slavery senator Stephen A. Douglas, whose lines (the most insidiously anti-Negro of which a group of students — we members of an extracurricular discussion group called the Contemporary Club — loudly booed) were read by Murray Ringold, who had arranged for Iron Rinn to visit the school. (18) The line beginning “with malice toward none, with charity for all” especially as it is closely read here, with the help of Murray, the English teacher, appears as pitch-perfect as it ever did. But something also seems rather jarring here: It is being performed by a brash Communist revolutionary — one whose ideals are in the right place, perhaps, but who also, lest we not forget, killed a man. And we might say that Ira’s murderous intentions were well founded: he killed a racist and an anti-Semite after being insulted in an alley. But it certainly raises questions about the ideals — “with malice toward none and charity toward all.” Although Ira was a charismatic actor — a star in his own right — he certainly had a difficult time putting these sentiments into practice. Not 30 pages later, Ira returns in the form of Abraham Lincoln, again to solidify the connection between the Civil War over which Lincoln presided and the Communist revolution in Newark, led by Ira. Nathan recalls: It was for his union’s Washington-Lincoln birthday fund-raiser his first February out in Chicago that somebody got the idea to turn Ira, a 70

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wiry man, knobbily-jointed, with dark, coarse, Indian-like hair and a floppy, big-footed gait, into Abe Lincoln: put whiskers on him, decked him out in a stovepipe hat, high button shoes, and an old-fashioned, ill-fitting black suit, and sent him up to the lectern to read from the Lincoln-Douglas debates one of Lincoln’s most telling condemnations of slavery. He got such a big hand for giving the word “slavery” a strong working-class, political slant — and enjoyed himself so much doing it — that he continued right on with the only thing he remembered by heart from his nine and a half years of schooling, the Gettysburg Address. He brought the house down with the finale, that sentence as gloriously resolute as any sounded in heaven or uttered on earth since the world began. Raising and wiggling one of those huge hairy-knuckled, superflexible hands of his, plunging the longest of his inordinately long fingers right into the eyeball of his union audience each of the three times, he dramatically dropped his voice and rasped, “the people.” (43–4) Again, while we might not consider the Gettysburg Address a founding document since it was delivered in the nineteenth century, it is nonetheless remembered as giving voice to a particular ideal underwriting American society, since it was delivered in the nineteenth century. What interests me here is how the word “slavery” could be given a “strong working-class political slant.” On the one hand, it seems a bit simplistic to equate the status of the slave, for example, with the status of the working classes — as though their plights were the same; on the other hand, there exists a whole range of working-class commentary published in the US and England in the nineteenth century that insists on this analogy. As such, this passage raises many questions about the status of Ira in the novel, the status of Lincoln in American lore, and the place of the working-class as protected under “the people” in the founding documents of the US These questions are only reinforced with the introduction in the novel of Arthur Sokolow, a big name among names who also reappears at a dinner party the Rinns host in their home and to which Nathan is invited not simply to gaze among the stars, but also to see Ira in action. Before the party, we get a glimpse into Ira’s history with Sokolow: By the time Sokolow, now a civilian writing The Free and the Brave, happened to turn up in Chicago, 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 high-pitched country twang and his awkward giant’s gestures and his droll, plainspoken 71

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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!”), and so did Sokolow, who brought Ira to the attention of another Jewish ex-GI, a New York soap opera producer with left-leaning sympathies. (45) It is entirely anachronistic for “Lincoln” to respond to controversies of the twentieth century, although no one in the audience seems slightly ruffled by the proposition. Of course, the people at a Chicago rally are there to see Ira more than they are there to hear “Lincoln,” but even so it seems an awkward pairing of social issues and injustices. Nathan is not only taken with Ira as Lincoln, however, he is taken by Sokolow, who has a plan for Ira to take his show — again, the language of celebrity — to a bigger stage. Nathan recalls: I got my strongest picture ever of what I wanted my life to be like when, by deliberately roaming within earshot of him, I listened to Sokolow describing to a couple of women a play he was planning to write for Ira, a one-man show based not on the speeches but on the entire life of Abraham Lincoln, from his birth to his death. “The First Inaugural, the Gettysberg Address, the Second Inaugural — that’s not the story. That’s the rhetoric. I want Ira up there telling the story. Telling how goddamn difficult it was: no schooling, the stupid father, the terrific stepmother, the law partners, running against Douglas, losing, that hysterical shopper his wife, the brutal loss of the son — the death of Willie — the condemnation from every side, the daily political assault from the moment the man took office. The savagery of the war, the incompetence of the generals, the Emancipation Proclamation, the victory, the union preserved and the Negro freed — then the assassination that changed this country forever. Wonderful stuff there for an actor. Three hours. No intermission. Leave them speechless in their seats. Leave them grieving for what America might be like today, for the Negro and the white man, if he’d served his second term and overseen Reconstruction. I’ve thought a lot about that man. Killed by an actor. Who else?” He laughed. “Who else would be so vain and so stupid as to kill Abraham Lincoln?” (142) For Sokolow, what sells here — again, what is magic is the theatrical nature of the story — is the “rhetoric” and the tragedy. We might see the 72

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ultimate betrayal in this passage as having something to do with Lincoln’s assassination by another actor, but it is also a betrayal of the memory of Lincoln; while the ideals are likely in the right place here, the man, Sokolow, wants only to make a profit and a name for himself. Ultimately, Nathan comes to understand Ira as someone “whose life was so intimately circumscribed by so much American history” (189). In this reading, Ira embodies American history, but not simply the present moment. He embodies the past as well — by literally taking on the body and manners of Abe Lincoln. While much of the country and an assassin betrayed Lincoln himself, one begins to wonder at what other level betrayal is working if he becomes only a puppet in the hands and voice of Ira Ringold. As Philip’s father laments in The Plot Against America: Lincoln was “the greatest American president, and look what they did to him.” BETRAYAL

Murray Ringold’s observation that there is “nothing so ruthlessly creative in even the most refined of the refined as the workings of betrayal” suggests that, while the novel is clearly invested in the problem of communal betrayal on the national stage, a smaller, quieter aspect of the novel is the problem, the inevitability, of betrayal in our most personal relationships as well (184). The novel is bookended by Nathan’s father’s desire to protect his son from Ira’s politics in the beginning, and Murray’s confession that he failed to protect his own wife by staying in Newark in the end. In both cases, the language of betrayal reveals personal failings at the private level. The first instance of the mention of betrayal occurs when Nathan’s father asks Ira if he is a Communist. Sounding like a lawyer during the House Un-American Activities trial parroted by Murray in the first pages of the novel: “Have you now or have you ever been . . .” (6), Nathan’s father asks: “I want to know whether you are a Communist, and I want my son to know whether you are a Communist. I’m not asking if you ever have been a Communist. I don’t care about the past. I care about right now” (102). When Ira lies by answering “No sir,” Nathan, now looking back, understands that “Ira was not telling the truth” (105). Here Nathan seems to understand the ultimate effect on his father, when he says: “I’ll insert this here and not return to the subject of the wound inflicted on my father’s face. I count on the reader to remember it when that seems appropriate” (105). It is difficult to tell when this appropriate moment later in the novel would be; I can only imagine it is related to the key word introduced here as a very specific kind of wound: a betrayal that eventually would play itself out in the national arena foreshadowed when 73

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Nathan refers to a wound three times, with the third recalling his “face bearing the wound of betrayal” (106). If David Kepesh is Roth’s most famous “Professor of Desire,” then Murray Ringold is Roth’s best “professor of betrayal” — not in the sense that he has betrayed, but in the sense that he has theorized it so beautifully in this novel, while he simultaneously tells the story of the downfall of his brother. While the tendency may be to read this as a novel about betrayal simply on personal terms — the Philip Roth versus Claire Bloom readings seem to take this turn — I believe the personal betrayals here function more effectively as metaphors for a national betrayal of founding ideals. In one of his first extended reflections on the nature of betrayal, Murray asks Zuckerman, now grown, to: “Think of the tragedies. What brings on the melancholy, the raving, the bloodshed? Othello — betrayed. Hamlet — betrayed. Lear — betrayed. You might even claim that Macbeth is betrayed — by himself — though that’s not the same thing. Professionals who’ve spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature’s scrutiny of things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It’s a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of the Bible. What’s that book about? The master story situation of the Bible is betrayal. Adam — betrayed. Esau — betrayed. The Shechemites — betrayed. Judah — betrayed. Joseph — betrayed. Moses — betrayed. Samson — betrayed. Samuel — betrayed. David — betrayed. Uriah — betrayed. Job — betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don’t forget the betrayal of God. God betrayed. Betrayed by our ancestors at every turn.” (185) This is not just personal betrayal of which Murray speaks, but the betrayal of history, on a world scale. In this short passage, a form of the verb “betray” is uttered over 20 times. The structure of these sentences is fascinating as well: In almost each instance, the word “betrayed” follows an em dash, with the em dash performing an interruption of sense that is arguably like the interruption staged by betrayal itself. It is as if we could put any word from global history in front of it, and, it, too, would become clearly betrayed. Almost 100 pages later — 100 pages further into the telling of his brother’s downfall — Murray returns to this idea of betrayal, and he links it to the story of a man betrayed in prison. Murray goes on: 74

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“All those antagonisms,” Murray said, “and then the torrent of betrayal. Every soul is its own betrayal factory. For whatever reason: survival, excitement, advancement, idealism. For the sake of the damage that can be done, and the pain that can be inflicted. For the cruelty in it. For the pleasure in it. The pleasure of manifesting one’s latent power. The pleasure of dominating others, of destroying people who are your enemies. You’re surprising them. Isn’t that the pleasure of betrayal? The pleasure of tricking somebody. It’s a way to pay people back for a feeling of inferiority they arouse in you, of being put down by them, a feeling of frustration in your relationship with them. Their very existence may be humiliating to you, either because you aren’t what they are or because they aren’t what you are. And so you give them comeuppance. “Of course there are those who betray because they have no choice. I read a book by a Russian scientist who, in the Stalin years, betrayed his best friend to the secret police. He was under heavy interrogation, terrible physical torture for six months — at which point he said, ‘Look, I cannot resist any longer, so please tell me what you want. Whatever you give me I will sign.’ “He signed whatever they wanted him to sign. He was himself sentenced to life in prison. Without parole. After fourteen years, in the sixties, when things changed, he was released and he wrote this book. He says that he betrayed his best friend for two reasons: because he was not able to resist the torture and because he knows that it didn’t matter, that the result of the trial was already established. What he said or didn’t say would make no difference. If he didn’t say it, another tortured person would. He knew his friend, whom he loved to the end, would despise him, but under brutal torture a normal human being cannot resist. Heroism is a human exception. A person who lives a normal life, which is made up of twenty thousand little compromised every day, is untrained to suddenly not compromise at all, let alone to withstand torture. “For some people it takes six months of torture to make them weak. And some start off with an advantage: they are already weak. They are people who know only how to give in. With a person like that, you just say, ‘Do it’ and they do it. It happens so rapidly they do not even know it is betrayal. Because they do what they are asked to do, it seems okay. And by the time it sinks in it’s too late: they have betrayed.” (262–3) Although Murray’s storytelling and prose is much more learned than Goldstine, he seems to return to this same theme: At the end of the day, people are “semi-shits.” We betray. And we betray for reasons that aren’t entirely political. They are personal, too, but these personal betrayals have 75

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political, communal, and historical resonances. What is interesting here is that the betrayer is sentenced to prison along with the betrayed. In the friend’s understanding, the cycle of betrayal was already put in motion: the actor here is betrayal, rather than a human subject who actually betrays. This anecdote that Murray tells is not terribly interesting on its own, but ultimately he gets around to connecting it up to the particular history in America after World War II. Murray continues: “To me it seems likely that the more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetuated in America in the decade after the war — say, between ’46 and ’56 — than any other period in our history. This nasty thing that Eve Frame did was typical of lots of nasty things people did in those years, either because they had to or because they felt they had to. Eve’s behavior fell well within the routing informer practices of the era. When before had betrayal ever been so destigmatized and rewarded in this country? It was everywhere during those years, the accessible transgression, the permissible transgression that any American could commit. Not only does the pleasure of betrayal replace the prohibition, but you transgress without giving up your moral authority. You retain your purity at the same time as you are patriotically betraying — at the same time as you are realizing a satisfaction that verges on the sexual with its ambiguous components of pleasure and weakness, of aggression and shame: the satisfaction of undermining. Undermining sweethearts. Undermining rivals. Undermining friends. Betrayal is in the same zone of perverse and illicit and fragmented pleasure. An interesting, manipulative, underground type of pleasure in which there is much that a human being finds appealing. “There are even those who have the brilliance of mind to practice the game of betrayal for itself alone. Without any self-interest. Purely to entertain themselves. It’s what Coleridge was probably getting at by describing Iago’s betrayal of Othello as ‘a motiveless malignity.’ Generally, however, I would say there is a motive that provokes the vicious energy and brings out the malignity. “The only hitch is that in the halcyon days of the Cold War, turning somebody in to the authorities as a Soviet spy could lead right to the chair. Eve, after all, wasn’t turning Ira in to the FBI as a bad husband who fucked his masseuse. Betrayal is an inescapable component of living — who doesn’t betray? — but to confuse the most heinous public act of betrayal, treason, with every other form of capital offense, so reckless exaggeration and thoughtless imprecision and false accusation, even just the seemingly genteel game of naming names — well, 76

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the results could be dire in those dark days when our Soviet allies had betrayed us by staying in Eastern Europe and exploding an atomic bomb and our Chinese allies had betrayed us by making a Communist revolution and throwing out Chiang Kai-shek. Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung: there was the oral excuse for it all.” (264–5) And here it is: personal betrayal as a metaphor for political betrayal. What Eve did in publishing her memoir is not unique in its way — spouses betray loved ones all the time, Murray seems to be saying — but such a life story underscores what was also happening in the global arena during those “dark days”: American citizens are betrayed at every turn on the witness stand; Soviet allies stayed in Europe and exploded an atom bomb; Chinese allies made a Communist revolution; Stalin and Tse-tung provided the rhetoric. Telling here also is the fact that the word “purity” occurs twice in this passage: although the actions and betrayals are never pure. Turning in a friend or a loved one might seem like “patriotic purity,” but it is much like the political betrayals Murray offers up here as examples: Someone always gets hurt; “no other end is possible except for catastrophe for everybody” (306). What are we left with then, if both world history and literary history alike depict none other than a history of betrayal? Some insight, I believe, can be gleaned from the end, when Zuckerman helps Murray down the steps of the deck after their last conversation. It is when Zuckerman recalls Murray teaching Macbeth and reads the scene at the end of Act 4 when Ross explains to Macduff that Macbeth has slain Macduff’s family: As Ross he read, “Your castle is surpris’d; your wife and babes / Savagely slaughtered . . .” Then after a long silence in which Macduff both comprehends and fails to comprehend, he read as Macduff — quietly, hollowly, almost in his reply like a child himself — “My children too?” “Wife, children, servants,” says Mr. Ringold/Ross, “all / That could be found.” Mr. Ringold/Macduff is again speechless. So is the class: as a class, the class is by now missing from the room. Everything has vanished except whatever words of disbelief are coming next. Mr. Ringold/Macduff: “My wife kill’d too?” Mr. Ringold/ Ross: “I have said.” The large clock is ticking toward two-thirty up on the classroom wall. Outside, a 14 bus is grinding up the Chancellor Avenue hill. It is only minutes before the end of eighth period and the long school day. But all that matters — matters more than what happens after school or even in the future — is when Mr. Ringold/ Macduff will grasp the incomprehensible. “He has no children,” Mr. Ringold says. Whom is he speaking of ? Who has no children? Some 77

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years later I was taught the standard interpretation, that it is Macbeth to whom Macduff is referring, that Macbeth is the “he” who has no children. But as read by Mr. Ringold, the “he” to whom Macduff is referring is, horribly, Macduff himself. “All my pretty ones? / Did you say all? . . . All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?” And now Malcolm speaks, Mr. Ringold/Malcolm, harshly, as though to shake Macduff: “Dispute it like a man.” “I shall do so,” says Mr. Ringold/Macduff. Then the simple line that would assert itself, in Murray Ringold’s voice, a hundred times, a thousand times, during the remainder of my life: “But I must also feel it as a man.” (315) On the one hand, this seems like a gratuitous passage — a reference to a Shakespeare play that is likely to reduce the most hardened reader to tears at the end of a long and, frankly, grueling novel to read. However, it seems connected in an important way to the knowledge that Eve had aborted Ira’s only child. Murray tells us that the “abortion crushed him” (297), and that Ira is grieving the loss of the child on the fateful day when he met Nathan as a young boy. Suddenly, the novel seems incredibly heavy under the weight of all of the deaths — a perfect tragedy, as Lyons points up. A few pages later, we learn that Eve died in a Manhattan hotel room in 1962 and two years later, Ira died (313). Not only that, but Murray tells Nathan that Murray’s wife Doris was murdered in Newark as a result of what he considers another personal betrayal (317). It is somewhat ironic that the only sense of futurity in the novel comes not in the form of an aged narrator, Zuckerman himself, but in the form of a small child who also, upon looking back, has a starring role in the novel. As Murray shares with Nathan about his brother after finding out about Eve’s abortion: “He meets this boy who was all that he had never been and who had all that he had never had” (297). As such, the image of the scared boy, the hope of the future loved so well by Ira, comes back in the end only to be conflated with the image of the writer. As a writer, Nathan wonders of Murray’s story: Why hadn’t he told me about Doris earlier? Was the reticence a kind of heroism or a kind of suffering? This too happened to him. What else is there? We could have sat on my deck for six hundred nights before I heard the entire story of how Murray Ringold who’d chosen to be nothing more extraordinary than a high school teacher had failed to elude the turmoil of his time and place and ended up no less a historical casualty than his brother. This was the existence that America had worked out for him and that he’d worked out for himself 78

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by thinking, by taking his revenge on his father by cri-ti-cal thinking, by being reasonable in the face of no reason. This was what thinking in America had got him. This was what adhering to his convictions had got him, resisting the tyranny of compromise. If there was any chance for the improvement of life where is it going to begin if not in the school? Hopelessly entangled in the best of intentions, tangibly, over a lifetime committed to a constructive course that is now an illusion, formulations and solutions that will no longer wash. You control betrayal on one side and you wind up betraying somewhere else. Because it not a static system. Because it’s alive. Because everything that lives is in movement. Because purity is petrifaction. Because purity is a lie. Because unless you are an ascetic paragon like Johnny O’Day and Jesus Christ, you are urged on by five hundred things. Because without the iron pole of righteousness with which the Grants clubbed their way to success without the big lie of righteousness to tell you why you do what you do, you have to ask yourself all along the way, Why do I do what I do? And you have to endure yourself without knowing. (318) And now it is Zuckerman himself who has taken on Murray’s philosophy of betrayal after Murray himself dies. The future seems gone with “all my pretty ones” dead. Zuckerman again understands betrayal not as a verb — not as what one person does to another — but as a living actor in its own right: “It’s alive,” Zuckerman says. And it is this connection between betrayal and purity — purity cannot possibly coexist with the changing nature of betrayal — that connects I Married a Communist with The Human Stain. In this novel, however, the understanding of betrayal as tainting the founding ideals and the magic of celebrity seems traumatic in its own right: a trauma, as the novel makes clear, perpetuated through the centuries. Rather than ending with closure, then, we are left with loss and a radical unknowing we are forced to endure. It is no wonder, then, that the text often describes Eve’s full-throated scream in moments of complete frustration. By definition, the scream is inarticulate — like the silence accompanying McDuff’s loss of his entire family — but still powerfully captures the unspeakable traumas, personal and political, of history. For Zuckerman: “when Eve Frame screamed it was a scream with neither a bottom to it nor a top, a scream that signaled a life-threatening state of emergency that ended effectively all political discourse” (150). Although Eve is perhaps one of the least sympathetic characters in the book, her inarticulate scream in the madness of night suggests something about our contemporary moment and us: we are reduced, unknowing, to victims of betrayal unable to articulate the traumas of our lives. 79

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CHAPTER 5

FOUNDING TRAUMAS: VIETNAM, INFANTICIDE, AND THE ILIAD IN THE HUMAN STAIN

A city established through fratricide is haunted by this founding. Rebecca Chopp, 2002 When scholars and citizens discuss fratricide in relation to US history, they typically refer to the Civil War, which pitted North against South — brother against brother — in a four-year battle that tested not only the endurance of the nation’s leader, but the entire nation as a whole. Although the Civil War is considered the quintessential fratricidal conflict, it certainly is not the only one the United States has seen. For it appears that, as long as puritanical ideals are upheld as the goal — ideals that refer to religious beliefs or founding principles or philosophical doctrine — then there will be fratricidal conflict in the name of them. In terms of US history, fratricide may also refer to the revolutionary war period when Loyalists collided with Patriots; to the Salem witch hunts of the Puritans and the Witch hunts of the McCarthy era; and it refers to the conflict in Vietnam, particularly with the return of the soldiers who had fought there, often rejected by their own society for fighting an unpopular war. The implications of fratricide are nowhere made more clear in Roth’s later works than they are in The Human Stain, a novel that reveals how “the stain” of humanity is always there: For as long as people reproduce, we will also betray, steal, lie, and murder as well. Set against the backdrop of Monicagate during the Clinton presidency, the novel underscores this perspective in the foundational speech of the novel — the one that gives the novel its title in reference to “the human stain.” This reference emerges when Zuckerman imagines Faunia Farley, the much younger mistress of Coleman Silk, the novel’s central protagonist, talking to a crow who seems to listen to humans, which, as a result, has been tainted by humans, and therefore is no longer included in the flock. In Zuckerman’s telling, Faunia says: 80

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[W]e leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, terror, excrement, semen — there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it’s inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia’s take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection. She’s like the Greeks, like Coleman’s Greeks. Like their gods. They’re petty. They quarrel. They fight. They hate. They murder. They fuck. . . . All the craziness desire brings. The dissoluteness. The depravity. The crudest pleasures. And the fury from the all-seeing wife. Not the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame than an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine stain. A great reality-reflecting religion for Faunia Farley if, through Coleman, she’d known anything about it. As the hubristic fantasy has it, made in the image of God, all right, but not ours — theirs. God debauched. God corrupted. A god of life if ever there was one. God in the image of man. (242–3) Faunia’s reflection on the fate of the crow becomes, remarkably here, a religion of the stain, of impurity; by reversing the common religious notion that human beings come into the world pure, Zuckerman imagines that Faunia locates a commonality between the Greeks of The Iliad and the American people of the 1990s: the only “way to be here” is to leave our human stink, our stain, on others. And while this was made literally manifest by the famous semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, it is also a figurative stain representing humanity’s inherent desires to “fight”; to “hate”; to “murder”; to “fuck.” What is so brilliant about this insight is that Faunia’s reflection here also incorporates ideas of America’s founding on Puritan principles — those that call for punishment for infidelity, in all senses of the word — principles that also led to fighting, 81

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hating, murder precisely because they refused to tolerate anything less than purity. This focus on purity is carried throughout the novel, down to the end when Zuckerman confronts Faunia’s husband, and alleged killer, on an apparently untainted pond — one frozen over with ice where Arcadian mountains stand majestically in the background. In many ways, this ominous setting may be read as a nod toward horror stories: at the pond, Nathan Zuckerman discovers Les Farley, a man he suspects of murdering both Faunia and Coleman, who had been found dead after a car accident a few days before. That’s the source of the scene’s horror — Zuckerman thinks he is talking to the murderer of Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley, the two unlikely lovebirds at the heart of the novel, and fears that Farley may kill him, too, with an auger he has just picked up and thrust into Zuckerman’s face. The scene’s inherent drama covers over a more subtle interest in Farley. Here’s how Zuckerman reports the encounter: “Almost midway out on the ice there was a solitary figure in brown coveralls and a black cap seated on a low yellow bucket, bending over an ice hole with an abbreviated fishing rod in his gloved hands. I didn’t step onto the ice until I saw that he’d looked up and spotted me. I didn’t want to come up on him unawares, or in any way look as though I intended to, not if the fisherman really was Les Farley. If this was Les Farley, he wasn’t someone you wanted to take by surprise” (345–6). Of course, the solitary figure is indeed eventually revealed to be Les Farley, who thus, as Ross Posnock has observed, appears to be the prototypical “frontier individualist (Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 234) and “American isolato” (235). However, it’s a mistake to focus on the surface and miss the water beneath, which is dark and tumultuous. After all, Les is not solitary due to some individual whim, but because of his suffering from PTSD, from his two rotations in Vietnam. Zuckerman’s focus on the word “ice” — repeated an additional five times on the following page — suggests that the icy exterior (and the contrast with what lies beneath) is something that captivates or worries Zuckerman. Moreover, he sees this frigidity not as central to the mysterious Les only, but more generally to the frozen nature of the American idyll itself.1 Since Zuckerman ultimately tells Farley, “I write about people like you” (356), this chapter ends, as the novel does, with the two figures alone on the ice. It offers an extended close reading of the novel’s engagement with Les Farley, the Vietnam veteran and ex-husband of Coleman Silk’s much younger lover, Faunia. In so doing, it offers a reading of the novel’s investment in fratricide — made manifest not only in Lester’s apparent murder of Coleman and Faunia, but also in references to his two tours in 82

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Vietnam and vexed homecoming as well as parallel scenes depicted in the founding text of fratricide: The Iliad by Homer. This emphasis on Farley seems to be a new turn in Roth studies. When reading The Human Stain, critics focus predominantly on the narrative of racial passing — of Coleman Silk, a light-skinned African American and his self-transformation into a Jew. For the most part, this is an understandable critical move, as the story is framed, once again, by the novelist Zuckerman, who has been asked to write of the personal and professional downfall of Silk, a neighbor in the Berkshires who was discredited as Dean of Athena College for using the word “spooks” in the classroom. As we find out later, this is one of many ironies in the novel: Not only did Silk use the word “in its customary and primary meaning: ‘spook’ as a specter or a ghost,” since the occasion of the utterance is a lament that he has never seen the students attend his classes (6), but also Coleman himself is revealed as an African American who had “passed” as Jewish for his entire adult life. With the key word “spooks,” — a word that literally organizes the novel — I would suggest that the haunting of history is what is at stake here, in addition to the central point of the novel, which no one could dispute: the consequences of “passing” in twentieth-century America.2 In particular, many critics see this as a veiled retelling of the life of Antole Broyard, as there are several biographical similarities between the fictional dean and the literary critic.3 Overwhelmingly, however, readers of the novel take Roth’s interest in race, racial identity, and passing as their critical focal point.4 A subset of these critics has made the connection between Zuckerman’s recreation of the Coleman story with Coleman’s recreation of himself, bringing together narrative theory with race theory (Royal, Brauner).5 A second group is interested in Zuckerman’s representation of America during the 1990s, as exemplified by the Clinton scandal with Monica Lewinsky (Maslan, Safer, Parrish, and others) — a reading that has been authorized by Roth himself in an interview with Charles McGrath in the New York Times. However, if Les Farley, as a figure for the devastating effect of the Vietnam War on the American psyche, has been met with critical silence over the last decade, I can understand why. It may be explained, in part, by what Lorrie Moore communicates in her scathing critique of Roth’s representation of the veteran upon reviewing the book in the New York Times: “The novel’s weakest parts involve hatefully rendered interior monologues of two characters, the first being Lester Farley, Faunia’s psychotic ex-husband and Vietnam vet” (8). Given such strong language, this is all she is willing to say on the matter of Lester. Most of the review is dedicated to teasing out the implications of Silk’s decision as a young man to pass as a Jew. 83

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In the ten years since the novel’s publication, and Moore’s subsequent indictment of Roth’s representation of Lester, no critic has taken a sustained interest in this figure.6 If mentioned at all in the criticism, he is always dismissed as a figure lurking on the edge of the text, which is perhaps Roth’s point. Posnock, for example, describes Roth’s vet as “Faunia’s ex-husband, a psychopathic Vietnam veteran who has been stalking the couple, forces them off the road into a fatal car crash” (Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 203).7 And later, Posnock surmises that the fire that kills Faunia’s two children was “likely set by her ex-husband” (the vet) (218). Similarly, Safer, who, like Posnock and Morley, is compelled by the novel’s ending with just two men alone on the ice, reads for the tone of the scene rather than its politics when she concludes: “The whole ‘confrontation scene’ with Lester has startling contrasts that are at the grotesque and uncanny edge of the humor continuum” (Mocking the Age, 129). Despite Lester Farley’s murderous possibilities, Posnock agrees that the novel’s closing scene featuring the solitary man on the icy white lake is the most compelling, most meaningful moment in the novel, by arguing: Inevitably, death also lives at the heart of this pastoral of entrancing simplicity and purity. The location that Zuckerman intrudes upon is Farley’s special “secret spot” — “away from man, close to God.” Farley is a frontier individualist (he despises those who “live in cities . . . the craziness . . . the congestion”), one of those “wild men” whom Thoreau sees fishing in “The Pond in Winter” chapter of Walden, men “who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen.” (Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 188) Yet, pivoting from Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma, which links the crabbed speech of PSTD sufferers with certain kinds of narrative strategies, I wonder whether there might nevertheless be something crucial in Les Farley that compels attending to the role of Vietnam in the novel’s politics, despite or because of Roth’s apparent representational failure. On this account, the overlooked story of the so-called “crazy vet” and his children’s death by burning gains new force. What does this story, told repeatedly, if in muddled form, by Les, suggest about American ideals and America’s founding trauma? Especially when we consider that Les’s story is framed through references to wars historical and literary: Vietnam, of course, but also that most canonical tale of war and nation-founding, The Iliad.8 In other words, rather than read the solitary figure on the pond in keeping with the American Romantic tradition so influenced by Thoreau, 84

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I read the solitary figure as more contemporary: as a man who not only has secrets about domestic murder, or possible murder, but of what he has seen and done in Vietnam. Whereas this novel is often associated with the part of American history that involves the Clinton sex scandal — Roth comments vigorously here that a large segment of the American public is ridiculous for being outraged that the Clinton presidency has undermined our sense of American purity by stating explicitly that purity is a fantasy — I read the figure of the veteran as having something very specific to say about the part of American history that is also addressed by American Pastoral: the Vietnam crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. What such a reading necessarily implies, however, is a kind of mourning for what’s lost beyond the pain of contemporary politics: idealized figures from the past, such as the frontier individualist, are, under the sign of trauma, retroactively revealed as already crazy, if not murderous. This figure of the veteran is featured prominently in ten pages in the first one-third of the novel, and later, when he visits the Moving Wall, not simply to provide a cartoonish and clichéd vision of the American vet, nor to set in motion a kind of murder mystery Zuckerman must solve, but also, more seriously, to give voice to the American experience in Vietnam. For this reason, I am always a bit perplexed that American Pastoral is referred to as Roth’s “Vietnam novel,” as The Human Stain’s “deranged” vet who has returned from war seems much more closely connected with the Vietnam experience than the rebellious teenaged daughter who bombs a post office to protest Vietnam in American Pastoral. To critics’ credit, such a reading is apparently authorized by a statement Roth made during an interview with Charles McGrath in 2000 on the occasion of publishing The Human Stain as the third novel to complete the “thematic trilogy.”9 Roth says: I think of it as a thematic trilogy, dealing with the historical moments in postwar American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation. . . . The first was the McCarthy Era. You read the newspapers even as a student and you were frightened, you were mesmerized, you were outraged. Even more potent was the impact of the Vietnam War. That was the most shattering national event of my adulthood. A brutal war went on an on — went on longer even than that other great milestone, World War II — and brought with it social turbulence unlike anything since the Depression. The third moment was 1998, the year of the presidential impeachment. In 1998 you had the illusion that you were suddenly able to know this huge, unknowable country, to catch a glimpse of its moral core. (“Zuckerman’s Alter Brain”)

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Because The Human Stain, the third novel of the trilogy, takes place in the 1990s, it seems clear that this is the novel of the thematic trilogy that focuses solely on the year of the presidential impeachment. However, through the voice of the vet, it is also clear that the potent impact of Vietnam still lingers, even after Roth published American Pastoral. Granted, it takes a while for the novel’s interest in Vietnam to emerge. In fact, the war with which the novel virtually opens is the Trojan War, as there is an explicit reference to the ancient Greeks in the first line of the novel: “It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk — who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College” (1), and The Iliad, specifically, is invoked three pages later, with Silk’s proclamation that “All of European literature springs from a fight” (4). What interests me here are the overt references to The Iliad and the ancient Greeks, Coleman Silk’s research specialty, on the one hand, and the subtler, if not discredited, and therefore, overlooked narrative of the Vietnam veteran, on the other hand. I can’t help but believe they are connected in some way to the idea of fratricide, which also conjures an unspoken third concern of the novel: the founding of the US by Puritans on false notions of purity. Fratricide connects all three: Greeks killed the Trojans; the Vietnam War split the American body politic; Puritans killed infidels, which is the role Faunia Farley embodies when she begins to date Coleman Silk. In reading The Human Stain in this way, as commenting on the traumatic effects of building a country on fratricide, and as understanding the Vietnam War as a part of a larger narrative spanning the history of the United States, we can see the novel as a part of a larger tradition of literature that points up the traumatic effects of survivor guilt after war. Leslie Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Robert Olen Butler’s “Salem” (1995), and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), among many others, understand war as being waged not between enemies, but among brothers — as, these texts reveal, killing another human being, whether that human is on “our side” or not, has the same effect of killing one’s brother. To say that the American founders are like “Coleman’s” Greeks, as Faunia reflects, is, of course, to say that they resemble those who waged a ten-year fratricidal war culminating with Achilles’s brutal killing — aided by Athena — of Hector. Further, the significance of the fact that Coleman teaches at Athena College has not been overlooked, which is also underscored by Moore’s influential review of the novel when it appeared in 2000. Entitling her review “The Wrath of Athena,” Moore unpacks the moment Silk tells his mother he will turn his back on his family by saying: “It is a valedictory between mother and son on par with Hector and his weeping mother (just before Hector is slaughtered by Achilles). Not for 86

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nothing is Coleman Silk a classical scholar. His favorite book, in fact, is the ‘Iliad’” (7). As I suggested above, this teaching and research interest becomes clear on page 4, which features a memory of Coleman teaching at Athena: “You know how European literature begins?” he’d ask, after having taken the roll at the first class meeting. “With a quarrel. All of European literature springs from a fight.” And then he picked up his copy of The Iliad and read to the class the opening lines: ‘Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles . . . Begin where they first quarreled, Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.’ And what are they quarreling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarreling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen from her father. A girl abducted in a war. Mia kouri.” (4) This opening statement is not too far off from Faunia’s analysis of the human stain that comes much later in the book, and although Coleman seeks, in some ways, to bring this “down to earth” for his students by referring to the origin of the war as a “barroom brawl,” to begin with such a lofty invocation of the muse — “Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath” — it is anything but a story about a quarrel. This is a quarrel with divine intervention, which suggests, as does Faunia, that even our gods are stained with the desire to quarrel and wage war. Not only, in other words, is violence the foundation of European literature, it is also the foundation of humanity, and extends back as far as our fantasies about the gods themselves. It is worth noting, however, that taking place, as it does, under the watchful eye of Athena, the novel might be interested, like in Homer’s The Iliad, in laying bare the high cost of war. Even Athena herself, although well known as the “goddess of war and battle strategy,” speaks adamantly against conflict when we first meet her in the epic: It was to check this killing rage I came from Heaven, if you will listen. Hera sent me, being fond of both of you, concerned for both. Enough: break off this combat, stay your hand Upon the sword hilt. Let him have a lashing With words instead: tell him how things will be. (Book 1, 242–7) Here, Athena does not celebrate war, but warns against Achilles’s rivalry with Agamemnon and advises Achilles to respect the chain of command by returning to the main battle. However, as Zuckerman later reflects 87

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on the power of The Iliad and its description of war, his understanding is marked by savagery and murder. Comparing Coleman’s decision to break from his family, his mother most compellingly, to turn his back on his African American family and go forward into the world as a Jewish man, Zuckerman suggests: “It’s like the savagery in The Iliad, Coleman’s favorite book about the ravening spirit of man. Each murder there has its own quality, each a more brutal slaughter than the last” (335). However, I do not think we can take Zuckerman at his word here. Or, even if we do, if we read this novel as an “anti-passing” narrative, then we must also read it as an anti-war novel. On the one hand, framed as it is via a description of The Iliad as a “barroom brawl” over two girls — first Briseis, then Helen — the novel itself positions Coleman and Lester as two figures fighting over the hand of Faunia, and, in so doing, foreshadows the murder of Coleman as early as page 4. As Coleman says to Faunia much later in the novel, “There’s no one like you. Helen of Troy,” to which Faunia responds: “Helen of Nowhere. Helen of Nothing” (232). What makes Faunia so different from Helen as represented in The Iliad, indeed — what makes The Human Stain stand out for me — is the fact of the accidental deaths of two children who do not have voices of their own in the text. Faunia makes this clear when she says: “I had two kids. They’re dead. If I don’t have the energy this morning to feel bad about Monica and Bill, chalk it up to my two kids, all right? If that’s my shortcoming, so be it. I don’t have any more left in me for all the great troubles of the world” (235). Given the traditional “Rothian” sentence with convoluted, though poetic, syntax, Faunia’s back-to-back “I had two kids. They’re dead” strikes like a blow here. It is difficult to ignore the children literally buried beneath the text. We aren’t given too many details of the children’s deaths — again, the primary, or surface at least, concern of the novel is on Coleman’s life trajectory — but, when we are given hints, as here, with Faunia, and more troubling still, with Farley, it seems like something we cannot turn our own critical eyes from. As we will see, tied so closely with Les’s narrative about his involvement in Vietnam, the text would seem to suggest that, through these wars, these fratricides, connected here through The Iliad, Faunia’s reflection on the Puritans, and down through Les’s stories about the US involvement in Vietnam, we have the blood of the children on our hands. Cathy Caruth, in particular, has written extensively on the traumatic consequences of war, and most recently, she’s taken up the Vietnam War and the US occupation in Iraq. For Caruth, we need to attend more carefully to the insights with which our veterans return home. She argues: 88

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Our subsequent involvements in international conflicts have not reflected a direct confrontation with these issues and these lessons, and it is my hope that the focus on trauma in our culture will lead us back to a sustained vigilance on our own blindness and to the meaning and impact — in the past and for the future — of what was both a moral and political trauma in our history. (“Confronting Political Trauma,” 182) Caruth’s argument generates from the work Robert Jay Lifton has done with veterans, particularly noting that “returning veterans from Vietnam were often, much like survivors of other catastrophes, compelled by a mission to reveal a truth, a ‘truth mission’ that, in Lifton’s words, suggests a kind of ‘prophetic element’ to much of these soldiers’ words” (179). In an essay entitled, “Confronting Political Trauma,” Caruth turns to the work of psychoanalyst Jacob Lindy, for example, as a perfect example of this prophetic element, particularly regarding his work with a veteran named “Abraham.” Abraham was haunted by a recurring dream of a child he had killed under forced circumstances in Vietnam. The boy, in the dream, taps him on the shoulder when he wants to go to sleep. A close reading of this nightmare leads Caruth to argue: “What these flashbacks ask us to see . . . is not only the impact of war but of betrayal, and this command to see thus has political consequences that are yet to be understood” (180). Caruth goes on: “This veteran’s dream, I would suggest, tells us something about a task that we, as Americans, still have before us: to remain awake in the face of a memory around which we’d rather fall asleep” (181). Somewhat uncannily — as I do not believe Roth has read the work of Lindy — like the “Abraham” of the essay, Lester’s disturbing flashbacks of killing children in Vietnam somehow get tangled up with the memory of his own children burning to death. Following Caruth, I propose that we become more vigilant to what Lester’s flashbacks tell us; rather than functioning as a foil or cliché here, I believe Roth’s veteran tells us, even in his failure, of the deaths of children during war that we have not yet fully addressed. I propose, in other words, that fratricide and infanticide are inextricably related via Lester: a fratricidal soldier who also witnessed the death of his children. This conflation of murdering babies in Vietnam and the burning deaths of his children strikingly become muddled in his own mind. As such, The Human Stain cannot be read strictly as a novel about passing, with all of the references to murder that populate the text. My ideas about literary fratricide are grounded, in part, in the work of Leon R. Kass, who, in “Farmers, Founders, and Fratricide: The Story of Cain and Abel,” argues: 89

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Everyone knows that Cain committed fratricide. But few people remember that he is also the first farmer, the initiator of sacrifices, and the founder of the first city, as well as the progenitor of a line of men that invented the arts — including music and metallurgy. Why does the first family issue in fratricide? And what has fratricide to do with the city or with all these other — and usually celebrated — features of civilized life? Is there, perhaps, something questionable, even destructive, at the heart of civilization? Here, Kass’s reading of the story of Cain and Abel seems remarkably like Faunia’s reading of civilization as well: it seems we have been born out of fratricide and continue to repeat the founding fratricidal act — an act that is extended in US history, from slavery through the traumatic past of the Vietnam War, and into the twenty-first century plagued, still, by the conflict in Afghanistan. Largely underwritten by the word “spooks” throughout, the text suggests that we continue to be haunted by history;10 Zuckerman realizes this when he tries to come to terms with Coleman’s identity. In this moment, he understands Coleman’s future as something universally applicable to all of us: Coleman “brilliantly succeeds at altering his personal lot, only to be ensnared by the history he hadn’t quite counted on: the history that isn’t yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time and grasped better in the future than it will ever be by us” (335). In his own way, Zuckerman has not only articulated the problem of history, he has also theorized trauma — a trauma not only that Zuckerman hadn’t expected; and not only that Coleman hadn’t expected, but that Lester hadn’t expected as well — a trauma that is as historical as it is personal, and which has its origins in fratricidal conflict. Particularly compelling in this novel is the fact that children become figures for the personal and historical trauma that Lester grapples with throughout the text. What is striking about drawing on the deaths of children to figure trauma is that children represent not only innocence, but also futurity. This fact become further complicated still when the articulation of their deaths is far from articulate — in fact, it becomes as confusing and incomprehensible as the fact of the deaths itself. It is perhaps no accident that, in this trilogy, Zuckerman reinforces the fact of his own incontinence and impotence throughout the text: when he says “I was also left impotent by the [prostate] surgery,” we can understand this as a reference to his impotence as a writer and narrator of this particular story as well (36). The impotence of Zuckerman, once again the storyteller, is not simply an interesting plot point, it reinforces this idea of a dead future; the impotence refers to procreation in the sense 90

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of creating a new generation, but also in adequately telling this story of stories. Whereas Faunia tells Coleman fairly straightforwardly that she had two children and that they died — in fact, this apparently objective truth-telling is much like the newspaper article covering the deaths of her children that she has nearly memorized — Farley’s same manner of narrating the event is garbled and nearly incomprehensible on a first reading. According to Silk’s memory, Faunia’s account of the loss of her children reads as follows: “‘She had two children. A space heater tipped over, caught fire, and both children were asphyxiated. Aside from the ashes of the two children that she keeps in a canister under her bed, she owns nothing of value except an ’83 Chevy’” (28). Faunia’s ex-husband, Farley, however, does not see things so clearly. In fact, he brings in the language of infanticide when he accuses her of killing the children: “Twice he popped up out of nowhere — once in the parking lot of a supermarket, once when she was at a gas station — and screamed out the pickup window, ‘Murdering whore! Murdering bitch! You murdered my kids, you murdering bitch!’” (53). Clearly, Faunia did not actually kill her children; what might be said of her is that they died as a result of her negligence: the narrative hints that she was with another man in a truck when the fire started. This theory is given voice by Farley himself when during an extended monologue that takes up ten pages of text, Farley tells his story in his own voice in an early chapter ironically entitled, “Everyone Knows.”11 This is an incredibly surprising moment in the text, as — to this point — it appears as though Zuckerman has complete control of the narrative, especially as it has to do with Coleman’s past and present. On page 63, for example, he says he is going to explain a significant confrontation between Coleman and Farley. Zuckerman writes: “The head-on confrontation with Farley came some four hours later [after a conversation Coleman has with his son]. As I reconstruct it . . .” (63). On page 64, after a break in the page, Zuckerman starts in again: The encounter with Farley. The encounter that night with Farley, the confrontation with a dairy farmer who had not meant to fail but did, a road crew employee who gave his all to the town no matter how lowly and degrading the task assigned to him, a loyal American who’d served his country with not one tour but two, who’d gone back a second time to finish the goddamn job. (64) For the time being, this seems to be all Zuckerman, but then something fascinating happens in the middle of that sentence; suddenly, the narration 91

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of the encounter with Farley has been usurped by Farley himself: Farley understands his identity as a loyal American who’d served his country with not one tour but two, who’d gone back a second time to finish the goddamn job. Re-upped and went back because when he comes home the first time everybody says he isn’t the same person and that they don’t recognize him, and he sees that it’s true: they’re all afraid of him. . . . So he goes back for a second tour, and this time he is geared up. Pissed off. Pumped up. A very aggressive warrior. The first time he wasn’t all that gung ho. (64) Somewhere after the words “gone back a second time,” Les Farley takes over the narrative; the style is free indirect discourse now from the perspective of Les himself. Surely, the sophisticated writer Nathan Zuckerman, the writer trying to do justice to Coleman Silk’s life story, would not say “to finish the goddamn job.” He also would not write in fragments such as “pissed off” nor “pumped up”; and he certainly wouldn’t reduce himself to the phrase “gung ho.” The most convincing sign that Les Farley has taken over here, however, is the fact that starting with the page break on 64, the paragraph doesn’t end until Les is able to let go of this traumatic story six pages later. Nathan Zuckerman would not betray the rules of paragraphing in this way. Starting from the moment Les’s voice is heard on page 64, the monologue reads very much like stream of consciousness: everything gets twisted up into the surreal experience of Vietnam, including the accidental deaths of his children. Les continues: The first time he’d cut off ears because he was there and it was being done, but that was it. He wasn’t one of those who once they were in all that lawlessness couldn’t wait to get going, the ones who weren’t too well put together or were pretty aggressive to start off with and only needed the slightest opportunity to go ape-shit. One guy in his unit, guy they called Big Man, he wasn’t there one or two days when he’d slashed some pregnant woman’s belly open. Farley was himself only beginning to get good at it at the end of his first tour. But the second time, in this unit where there are a lot of other guys who’d also come back and who hadn’t come back just to kill time or to make a couple extra bucks, this second time, in with these guys who are always looking to be put out in front, ape-shit guys who recognize the horror but know it is the very best moment of their lives, he is 92

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ape-shit too. In a firefight, running from danger, blasting with guns, you can’t not be frightened, but you can go berserk and get the rush, and so the second time he goes berserk. The second time he fucking wreaks havoc. (65) Most noteworthy, perhaps, about this passage is the fact that Les does not simply begin by stating that he was in Vietnam; here we have a confession, although we have to work for it, that what he says he gets “good at” “at the end of his first tour” is slashing “some pregnant woman’s belly open.” Les Farley has murdered women and children under the command, he says later, of the US government. The phrase “ape-shit” is used here repeatedly, and it’s difficult to tell whether this is simply a sign of Les’s underdeveloped vocabulary, or if there is something particularly useful (to Les) about the phrase in trying to depict the horror he encountered. The utterance “you can’t not be frightened,” again, on the surface, seems like an uneducated use of the double negative. But it also reinforces the frightening aspect of the Vietnam theatre. In the end, when Les repeats the word “berserk,” he inadvertently connects this novel with American Pastoral, the “true” Vietnam novel of Roth’s oeuvre as a result of the oft-quoted line from that novel referring to “the indigenous American berserk” (86). The role of the government in Les’s life, as it was affected by his Vietnam experience, comes later, when Les recalls of his marriage to Faunia: A couple times in the middle of the night he wakes up choking her, but it isn’t his fault — it’s the government’s fault. The government did that to him. He thought she was the fucking enemy. What did she think he was going to do? She knew he was going to come out of it. He never hurt her and he never hurt the kids. That was all lies. She never cared about anything but herself. He should have known never to let her go off with the kids. She waited until he was in rehab — that was why she wanted to get him into rehab. She said she wanted him to be better so that they could be together again, and instead she used the whole thing against him to get the kids away from him. The bitch. The cunt. She tricked him. He should have known never to let her go off with those kids. It was partly his own fault because he was so drunk and they could get him to rehab by force, but it would have been better if he’d taken them all out when he said he would. Should have killed her, should have killed the kids, and would have if it hadn’t been for rehab. And she knew it, knew he’d have killed them like that if she’d ever tried to take them away. He was the father — if anybody was going 93

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to raise his kids it was him. If he couldn’t take care of them, the kids would be better off dead. She’d had no right to steal his kids. Steals them, then she kills them. The payback for what he did in Vietnam. (66–7) This is one of the first moments when the story of Les’s children gets tangled up in the story of Vietnam. Judging from all appearances, the children died in a very unfortunate accident involving a space heater. However, both Les and Les’s memory of Faunia seem murderous, especially toward the children. On the one hand, the logic is totally twisted here: Les argues he never would hurt the kids at the same time as he says he is willing to murder them all if they were ever taken from him. This appears, on the other hand, as a rough allusion to the Medea story, which Coleman also references when thinking about the rage Coleman sometimes feels toward his son. One can’t help but notice all the references to “kill” here — more so than in the Vietnam portions of the memory, although he makes clear from the beginning that he also killed women and babies in Vietnam. Perhaps that is why he says, at the end of this passage, that it is “payback for what he did in Vietnam.” The passage continues with this focus on historical comeuppance (and here I quote two pages at length to illustrate the full effect of Les’s monologue): They all said that at rehab — payback this and payback that, but because everyone said it, didn’t make it so. It was payback, all payback, the death of the kids was payback and the carpenter she was fucking was payback. He didn’t know why he hadn’t killed him. At first he just smelled the smoke. He was in the bushes down the road watching the two of them in the carpenter’s pickup. They were parked in her driveway. She comes downstairs — the apartment she’s renting is over a garage back of some bungalow — and she gets in the pickup and there’s no light and there’s no moon but he knows what’s going on. Then he smelled the smoke. The only way he’d survived in Vietnam was that any change, a noise, the smell of an animal, any movement at all in the jungle, and he could detect it before anyone else — alert in the jungle like he was born there. Couldn’t see the smoke, couldn’t see the flames, couldn’t see anything it was so dark, but all of a sudden he could smell the smoke and these things are flying over his head and he began running. They see him coming and they think he is going to steal the kids. They don’t know the building is on fire. They think he’s gone nuts. But he can smell the smoke and he knows it’s coming from the second story and he knows the kids are in there. He knows 94

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his wife, stupid bitch cunt, isn’t going to do anything because she’s in the truck blowing the carpenter. He runs right by them. He doesn’t know where he is now, forgets where he is, all he knows is that he’s got to get in there and up the stairs, and so he bashes in the side door and he’s running to where the fire is, and that’s when he sees the kids on the stairs, huddled there at the top of the stairs, and they’re gasping, and that’s when he picks them up. They’re crumpled together on the stairs and he picks them up and tears out the door. They’re alive, he’s sure. He doesn’t think there’s a chance that they’re not alive. He just thinks they’re scared. Then he looks up and who does he see outside the door, standing there looking, but the carpenter. That’s when he lost it. Didn’t know what he was doing. That’s when he went straight for his throat. Started choking him, and that bitch, instead of going to the kids, worries about him choking the fucking boyfriend. Fucking bitch worries more about him killing her boyfriend instead of about her own goddamn kids. And they would have made it. That’s why they died. Because she didn’t give two shits about the kids. She never did. They weren’t dead when he picked them up. They were warm. He knows that dead is. Two tours in Vietnam you’re not going to tell him what dead is. He can smell death when he needs to. He can taste death. He knows what death is. They — were — not — dead. It was the boyfriend who was going to be fucking dead, until the police, in cahoots with the government came with heir guns, and that’s when they put him away. The bitch kills the kids, it’s her neglect, and they put him away. Jesus Christ, let me be right for a minute! The bitch wasn’t paying attention! She never does. Like when he had the hunch they were headed for an ambush. Couldn’t say why but he knew they were being set up, and nobody believed him, and he was right. Some new dumb officer comes into the company, won’t listen to him, and that’s how people get killed. That’s how people get burned to hell! That’s how assholes cause the death of your two best buddies! They don’t listen to him! They don’t give him credit! He came back alive, didn’t he? He came back with all his limbs, he came back with his dick — you know what that took? But she won’t listen! Never! She turned her back on him and she turned her back on his kids. He’s just a crazy Vietnam vet. But he knows things, goddamnit. And she knows nothing. But do they put away the stupid bitch? They put him away. They shoot him up with stuff. Again they put him in restraints, and they won’t let him out of the Northampton VA. And all he did was what they had trained him to do: you see the enemy, you kill the enemy. They train you for a year, then they try to kill you for a year, and when you’re just doing what they trained you to do, that is when they fucking put the leather restraints on you and 95

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shoot you full of shit. He did what they were training him to do, and while he was doing that, his fucking wife is turning her back on his kids. He should have killed them all when he could. (67–9) If it’s not clear from the first reference to “payback” in the previous passage I cited, then — repeated as it is seven times here — we start to see Les’s guilt emerge a bit more clearly. After this, the narrative begins running as if on adrenaline as Les thinks back to the moment of his children’s deaths, but it is a moment that also blurs memories of Vietnam. The sentences: “At first he just smelled the smoke. He was in the bushes” could just as easily take place in Vietnam as it does in New England. He smells the smoke, which inevitably brings back memories of burning in Vietnam; just as he was in Vietnam, he is “alert in the jungle” as the fire begins. The language moves from an emphasis on smoke to an emphasize on knowledge — “he knows the kids are in there”; “He knows his wife . . . isn’t going to do anything”; “He doesn’t know where he is now”; “all he knows is that he’s got to get in there” (67). Again, it’s striking to consider the chapter’s title, “Everyone Knows,” as the only thing Les really knows here is that his children are caught in a fire. To save them, he must “[bash] the side of the door” — as would a door-gunner in Vietnam who would also appear to be stealing the children. Just as the narrative runs along here, so too does Les. He is trying to save his children. And this is where the text becomes the most confusing. Between the contradictory “That’s why they died” and the italicized “They — were — not — dead” we know as little about this traumatic happening as does Les. The reader is left to wonder: How, exactly, did these children die? Why did they die? From what I can tell, Les goes in to retrieve the children from the fire but then puts them down to start choking Faunia’s lover. What makes it confusing is yet another double negative: “He doesn’t think there’s a chance that they’re not alive.” But, again, the narrative gets muddled: “And they would have made it. That’s why they died. Because she didn’t give two shits about the kids. She never did. They weren’t dead when he picked them up. They were warm” (68). While the chronology gets a bit muddled here, it does seem curious that Faunia gets blamed for their deaths; it seems as though Les could just as easily carried them to safety if they were alive. We are left to wonder: Is Posnock right? Did Les light that fire out of jealousy? Did he leave the children to die on purpose because he “can’t have them”? Les says, “The bitch kills the kids, it’s her neglect, and they put him away. Jesus Christ, let me be right for a minute!” This “let me be right” can be read two or more ways here. Les could either be making a plea to be correct in saying that he is not responsible for the deaths of his children, or he could beg to “be right” in the sense of a 96

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centered, grounded, whole: he is making here an effort to comes to terms with his traumatic history, and it seems to be slipping out of his fingers. Further, any ethical capital he has is shattered when he conveys the regret that he did not kill them all when he had the chance. On that same page, he describes himself in the reductive way most critics do — as “just a crazy Vietnam vet” (68) — before going on to lament the circumstances of his life: “The kids would be alive today. His fucking kids would be alive today! He’d be like all the rest of those guys out there, with their families and their nice cars. Instead of locked up in a fucking VA facility. That was the thanks he got: Thorazine. His thanks was the Thorazine shuffle” (70). The language of “payback” returns a page later; Lester says “There was no end to it” (71) and then we finally get a reference to the encounter Zuckerman had originally set out to narrate seven pages earlier. As it happens, all of the material we have read so far is about a moment in a much more distant past: a past when Faunia was with a man — not Coleman — on the night the children died, until this moment: “It felt like flying, it felt like Nam, it felt like the moment in which you go wild. Crazier, suddenly, because she is sucking off that Jew then because she killed the kids, Farley is flying upward, screaming, and the Jew professor is screaming back” (71). At first, even these two “confrontations” become muddled: the first confrontation between Lester and Faunia’s unnamed past lover; and the second confrontation between Lester and Coleman Silk — the confrontation Nathan doesn’t get around to until several pages later. These moments are also alike in that images of Vietnam abound and get entangled with the present moment. As Farley recalls: After he made it home that night (never know how he did that either) and right through to the early hours of the morning — when it took five men from the fire department, five buddies of his, to hold him down and get him into restraints and drive him over to Northampton — Lester saw it all, everything, all at once, right there in his own house enduring the heat, enduring the rain, the mud, the giant ants, killer bees on his own linoleum floor just beside the kitchen table, being sick with diarrhea, headaches, sick from no food and no water, short of ammo, certain this is his last night, waiting for it to happen, Foster stepping on the booby trap, Quillen drowning, himself almost drowning, freaking out, throwing grenades in every direction and shouting, “I don’t want to die,” the warplanes all mixed up and shooting at them, Drago losing a leg, an arm, his nose, Conrity’s burned body sticking to his hands, unable to get a chopper to land, the chopper saying they cannot land 97

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because we are under attack and him fucking angry knowing that he is going to die that he is trying to shoot it down, shoot down our own chopper — the most inhuman night he ever witnessed and it is right there now in his own scumbag house, and the longest night too. (72) This sentence begins “After he made it home that night” and ends 26 lines later with “‘I don’t want to die.’” The sentence runs on interminably as does Lester’s experience in Vietnam. In this moment, he sees “everything, all at once” — the present and the past: the linoleum of his actual kitchen and the mud and the ants of the jungle. At first it seems he is “sick with diarrhea, headaches” because of his memories of his children and the confrontation with Coleman, but then it becomes obvious that he is thinking back, back to the experience in Vietnam when he is also “sick from no food and no water, short of ammo.” And then we are almost entirely back in Vietnam with him — during “his longest night on earth” — a moment he relives at the end of the novel as well, when fratricide becomes a fact of war, not simply from killing the enemy, but from killing a brother in the act to “shoot down our own chopper — the most inhuman night he ever witnessed” (72). Perhaps the deaths of Lester’s children do not seem real — at least the children themselves do not seem real in the text — until they are given faces a few passages later. We learn that: He told them all what happened, told them every day what had failed to happen when he saw the suffocated faces of his two little kids and knew for sure that they were dead. “Numb,” he said. “Fuckin’ numb. No emotions. Numb to the death of my own kids. My son’s eyes are rolled in back of his head and he has no pulse. He has no heartbeat. My son isn’t fucking breathing. My son. Little Les. The only son I will ever have. But I did not feel anything. I was acting as if he was a stranger. Same with Rawley. She was a stranger. My little girl. That fucking Vietnam, you caused this! . . . Then something is happening, something fucking huge, I don’t feel a fucking thing. Numbed out. My kids are dead, but my body is numb and my mind is blank. Vietnam. That’s why! I never did cry for my kids. He was five and she was eight. I said to myself, ‘Why can’t I feel?’ I said, ‘Why didn’t I save them? Why couldn’t I save them?’ Payback. Payback! I kept thinking about Vietnam. About all the times I think I died. That’s how I began to know that I can’t die. Because I died already. Because I died already in Vietnam. Because I am a man who fucking died.” (73)

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The zombie aspect of Les’s experience is frightening.12 We get a sense here that he both is and is not willing to take responsibility for his children’s deaths. Since the fact that children’s deaths before their parents seems to disrupt a sense of continuity, of futurity, it seems understandable that Les would describe himself as being dead before them; but he is also describing PTSD, and the effects that the war had on him and his inability to act with feeling toward his burning children. Again the language of “payback” returns, and although it is difficult to hear Roth saying here that people who murdered in Vietnam must accept the loss of their children as a kind of balancing justice — it does seem as though we have some cultural payback to recognize. What does it mean to say that we pay for our cultural habits of fratricide not simply with our own lives, but with the lives of our children, our future? While this extended monologue of Les’s is most compelling, it is also worth noting his preparation to visit the Vietnam Wall, not the one in DC, he is quick to point out, but the “Moving Wall” (213) by visiting a Chinese restaurant also ironically referred to as “The Harmony Place” (217–24). Here, again, his crimes against women and children return to haunt him, as “Thirty feet away, and Les can pick up the scent of whatever’s the brand of cheap toilet water that they’ve sprayed behind their gook ears — it’s as pungent to him as the smell of raw earth . . . he smells the women and begins to lose it” (220). Later, although Les is simply referring to eating a dinner served by Asian citizens of the US, he says, sounding like Maurice Blanchot: “Besieged on all sides by the disaster to come — how long can the agony be transformed into eating?” (220). Although the language that comes out of the veteran’s mouth is filthy and racist, there is something almost tender about their spiritual leader, Louie Borrero, and his attempt to stage a communion at The Harmony Place. Still later, when Lester is ready to go to the Wall, he is forced to confront the death of a fellow soldier in a moment that emphasizes his guilt for surviving: He has to go look at Kenny’s name. And this he can’t do. It was enough once to look up Kenny’s name in the book they’ve got at the VA. After, he was sick for a week. That was all he could think about. That’s all he can think about anyway. Kenny there beside him without his head. Day and night he thinks, Why Kenny, why Chip, why Buddy, why them and not me? Sometimes he thinks that they’re the lucky ones. It’s over for them. (225) In many ways, this passage, like the problematic and overlooked passages of Les Farley, points out the problem not simply of traumatic history, but, 99

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more specifically, of traumatic survival, especially in the face of the deaths of women and children.13 The Human Stain, like many other novels in twentieth-century American war literature — such as A Farewell to Arms and The Things They Carried to name two famous examples — feature inexplicable scenes of the death of a child, apparently unrelated to the wars at hand, revealing how such scenes inscribe the traces of war, slavery, and genocide that compose the legacy of the founding of the US The figure of infanticide’s perpetual return in this unlikely story, I propose, signals that the founding of the US and subsequent foreign policy are still very much with us. Given its close thematic proximity with war and genocide, the unexpected death or murder of a child in this novel requires critical and collective attention that has been met only with silence. The double instance of silence — both the silence in the criticism, as well as the depicted silence surrounding the dying children — perhaps reveals something about modern culture that has become too easy to overlook: an unconscious awareness of, indeed worry about, infanticide underwriting US slavery, silence around the Holocaust, and US involvement in Vietnam and Iraq. The death of a child seems so horrific, perhaps, because of all that children have come to represent in the past century: innocence, helplessness, hope for the future, and utter vulnerability. That someone could imagine systematically killing the most innocent and helpless members of society, as in Vietnam, seems incomprehensible. Further, to kill a child also forecloses changes in the future and all of the hope these changes carry with them. But it also forecloses a narrative of the future. As an unspeakable crime against victims who cannot speak, indeed, a crime so traumatic even the witness cannot tell the story: infanticide challenges our ability to tell the story of an act that must be preserved for future generations. This problem becomes clear at the end of the novel, during that frigid and most private moment between Farley and Zuckerman, when Farley has trapped Zuckerman with his story — like the wedding guest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s traumatic and traumatizing “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” (351). Lester Farley once again wants to talk about going into North Vietnam to pick up two pilots and his role was as a door gunner. This time, however, Zuckerman has complete control of the narrative — just in time for the novel’s ending. Zuckerman reflects: He’s telling me a war story, I thought. He knows he’s doing it. There’s a point here he’s going to make. Something he wants me to carry away with me, to the shore, to my car, to the house whose location he 100

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knows and wishes me to understand that he knows. To carry away as “the author”? Or as somebody else — somebody who knows a secret of his that is even bigger than the secret of his pond. He wants me to know that not many people have seen what he’s seen, been where he’s been, done what he’s done and, if required to, can do again. He’s murdered in Vietnam and he’s brought the murderer back with him to the Berkshires, back with him from the country of war, the country of horror, to this completely uncomprehending place. The auger out on the ice. (352) Zuckerman, in other words, for all of his fear of Lester in this moment, realizes that it is his job to listen to Les’s story one more time, to become something like an “ethical listener” to borrow from Dori Laub, to share the burden of all he’s witnessed. The phrases here “the country of war, the country of horror” could be Vietnam, but it could also be a state of mind, a perpetual place that, as Faunia Farley has noted, underwrites all of history. Further, the unlikely shift to the “auger” on the ice in the following paragraph is the fourth mention in this closing scene so far, a scene that will go on to repeat the word a total of 21 times by the novel’s end. While Nathan is indeed worried about Les possibly using that auger as a weapon, I believe it has a more weighty significance as well. After going on to describe the experience of PTSD in his own words (354–5) — at one point, Les says, “The subconscious mind. You can’t control it. It’s like the government. It is the government. It’s the government all over again. It gets you to do what you don’t want to do” (355) — Les finally begins to talk to Zuckerman about what he is thinking about all alone on the ice. He says: “If I had a son, you see, which is what I was thinkin’, I’d be teachin’ him how to jig it. I’d be teachin’ him how to bait the lure. There’s different kinds of baits, you see . . . And we’d go down to the store, me and Les Junior, and we’d buy ’em at the ice fishing store. And they come in a little cup, you know. If I had Little Les right now, a son of my own, you know, if I wasn’t doomed instead for life with this freakin’ PTSD, I’d be out here with him teachin’ him all this stuff. I’d teach him how to use the auger.” (359) It seems significant here, for example, that one of the things Les would have taught his son, had he survived the accident, is not only how to fish and choose bait, but how to use the auger. With the 21 repeated references to the auger in the 16 pages that close the novel, this seems more than “An 101

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instrument for boring in the soil or strata of the earth” (OED). Among other reasons, this auger appears so threatening because it is a symbolic penis being shoved in the face of the impotent Zuckerman. Holding this symbolic phallus up to Zuckerman’s face, it seems as though Les has the last word on the importance of passing on the cultural memory of war and its costs: we need to bore through the history we’ve received, for example, to get closer to the core and the truth, that under the smooth surface of the ice we are likely to see dark and tumultuous waters. Zuckerman closes the novel by explaining: Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger — even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man, on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America. (361) Although it is Coleman’s story he has set out to tell, it appears as though Les’s story is equally on Zuckerman’s mind — and that Les, not Coleman, presents us with the “whole picture” of America. Of course, the image he gleans is only partly accurate: Les himself is, indeed, alone fishing on a lake on a mountain. But there is more beneath the surface, as with the ice — and the auger — itself. The story that Les embodies is the story of America, as Morley points out, that is no longer the idyll of Arcadia; rather, it is the story of fratricide and trauma; and it is the story of betrayal at the heart of the Vietnam War.

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CHAPTER 6

TERROR, TRAUMA, AND “THE MOCKERY OF ARMAGEDDON”: THE DYING ANIMAL IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Judging by its title alone, The Dying Animal would seem to mark a turn inward from Roth’s post-WWII trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain). As Greil Marcus claims in The Threepenny Review, Roth’s trilogy, in the tradition of John Dos Passos, has “in a sense emerged from the wreckage of the Gingrich revolution: a rediscovery of what it means to be American, an exploration of what it means both to invent a country and, as a moral citizen who in some essential way embodies the country, to invent oneself.” By contrast, The Dying Animal features the return of Kepesh, a character who rejected “moral citizenship” in the 1960s in novels such as The Breast (1972) and The Professor of Desire (1977). The Dying Animal ends surprisingly, as Kepesh turns from his self-involved dramatic monologue to reflect beyond himself and his national borders as the new millennium approaches. In New York City, on New Year’s Eve of the year 1999, Kepesh faces yet another existential crisis — this one being arguably more serious than in Roth’s earlier novella, The Breast. On this night, Kepesh learns from his sophisticated ex-student and beautiful ex-lover, Consuela, that she has breast cancer. But this information is delivered against the backdrop of televised New Year’s Eve festivities, providing an uncanny juxtaposition of mourning and mania. With this setting, however, The Dying Animal seems to emphasize a kind of counterintuitive longing for Armageddon, or for revolution, in its lamentation of the Big Event’s refusal to arrive. This chapter considers how such a climactic episode functions as an exemplum for the problem of subjectivity in, or under, history by illustrating our desire for something — such as the millennial turn, or the founding of a nation — to be significant in some way, only to turn out woefully inadequate in the end. What happens, I consider here, when the Big Historical Moment never arrives in quite the way one expects? And how, 103

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in The Dying Animal, is the missed encounter paradoxically the traumatic event at the heart of the novel? Trauma theory provides not only the language for considering such a failure, but also a way of understanding implications of this failure for witnesses to historical events. It considers how the traumatized witness tries to return incessantly to the moment of a missed encounter, only to find it continuously impossible to grasp in retrospect.1 One way to read the complexity of Kepesh’s discourse on time here is via trauma theory — as exemplified by Sigmund Freud (1985, 1961) and Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996) — which also focuses on skewed temporality: traumatic experience compels survivors to return perpetually to a missed event in order to recover an experience which came too soon and without preparation. Sigmund Freud first began studying what he then called “traumatic neurosis” in 1920, with the return of war veterans who were behaving as if they had received blows to the head. According to Freud, “in the case of war neuroses, the fact that the same symptoms sometimes came about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force seemed at once enlightening and bewildering” (10–11, my emphasis). As a result, Freud set out to understand the psychic — as opposed to biological or physiological — causes and effects of trauma. Ultimately, he concluded that not remembering — not even being aware of the event consciously the first time — helps save the survivor from a much greater harm. Had they actually been psychically present for the event, Freud reasons, then they may have suffered a severe psychic breakdown. What is left, however, is a constant desire to “master” (as in child’s play) that which was missed in the first place (10–17). Nearly 75 years later, Caruth resurrected Freud’s discussion of trauma in order to theorize effects of the Vietnam War and to give closer readings to Freudian texts, arguing ultimately that while not remembering a traumatic event may help individual survivors, it also has negative cultural implications as well. According to Caruth, PTSD is a “response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behaviors stemming from the event, along with a numbing that may have begun during or after the experience” (“Explorations in Memory,” 4). In other words, traumatic experience cannot be wholly integrated into consciousness because it was not experienced fully in the first place, leaving the survivor longing to return to the scene that was never experienced, despite her physical presence. This returning, after all, would allow the survivor to be present at the moment of the incident to master that which was initially unprepared for, changing our notion of experiential time from linear to circular. The section opens with: “We watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial 104

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New Year’s Eve celebration” (144). This seems an odd way to conclude an elegiac novel about the death of the body and of desire, until one remembers that it was published in 2001, just after the widespread panic that is now referred to as the Y2K paranoia. The “mass hysteria” reached its peak, perhaps, with news reports of people stocking up on toilet paper and water in stories about what appeared to be the impending apocalypse, veiled behind worries about a glitch in computer programming. That people paradoxically “anticipated” “the unexpected” by watching television coverage of millennial celebrations around the world — coverage paid for by advertisements which disrupted the entire disaster narrative — also underscored the alienating, modern moment that was New Year’s Eve of 1999. People seemed more surprised and disappointed that the end of the world did not come than they would have been had everything actually gone haywire. Opening as it does with an epigraph from Edna O’Brien — “The body contains the life story just as much as the brain” — Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001) seems to be more interested in the physical matters of the body than in the philosophical problems of time.2 In fact, many critics have seen the connection between death and desire in the novel, suggesting that, through his depiction of the infamous “Professor of Desire” David Kepesh, Roth interrogates in this novel the connection between sex and death, having Kepesh voice his now infamous mantra accordingly: “Sex isn’t just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death” (69). From one perspective, this statement captures the thematic investment of the novel: surrounded by loved ones dying — his oldest friend, poet George O’Hearn, on the one hand, and his young lover, Consuela Castillo, on the other hand — Kepesh struggles to come to terms with the fact that, for all of his knowledge of “High Culture” (the life story as told by the brain), his body, too, will some day fail him. In fact, there is not much to the plot of this slim volume: the novel basically tells the story of the first day of meeting Consuela and ends with the open-ended question about whether Kepesh will go to her, now no longer his lover, after finding out, in two weeks’ time, they will remove her breast to keep her cancer from spreading. The fact that much of the middle of the novel narrates Kepesh’s own sexual adventures — not only with Consuela, but with other lovers, past and present — seems to underscore this belief that sex can stave off not only death, but aging as well. As sexy as this novel is, however, I am more interested in Kepesh’s digressions — digressions that, by comparison, may seem pedantic and dry compared with the references to his sexual escapades and conquests — that lead, in the free-flowing way only a monologue would 105

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allow, to reflections on the past, and — particularly — to reflections on the nature of revolution.3 Kepesh here offers a myriad of insights into the American Revolution, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the Cuban Revolution under Castro before going on to reflect on the “mockery” posed by the failure of Armageddon to arrive at the end of the twentieth century. Viewed from the perspective of these digressions, then, this novel is about more than simply death and desire. It is also about the nature of revolution. Considering all of its apparent digressions on the traumatic nature of revolution — or the mockery that it poses — the question of the novel then becomes: How do the representations of these historical moments — as traumatic in their own right — help us understand the purpose of the love story Roth sets up between the aging Kepesh and the dying Consuela? What the two apparently contradictory modes (political theory, on the one hand, and the realities of the desirous and aging body, on the other) have in common, I propose here, is in fact the problem of history: the problem of unpredictability and instability. As Kepesh reflects, hearing Consuela tell her family’s story: “And I was thinking, She is dying before my eyes, she too is now dying. Instability had merely to enter her cozy Cuban family with the predictable death of a beloved old grandfather to set rapidly in motion a cascade of misfortune culminating in cancer” (128–9). Such a reflection is so striking because it makes explicit the way that which is “predictable” — and therefore not unstable — tips so dramatically into instability, much in the same way that death and desire thwart narratability itself. In fact, this tendency to link the language of aging with the language of trauma is typical of the way Kepesh speaks of his sexual relationship with Consuela and subsequent mourning over her body; and he uses the discourse of trauma echoed in the revolution narrative in order also to discuss the impact of her illness. His sense of vulnerability in the wake of her news is marked by such words as “instability” (128); “chaos,” “destabilization” and “imbalance” (20); “uncertainty” (27); “uncertainty”; “disaster” (142); “terror” (153, 156); and “traumatic moment” (154). It is not until the end of the novel that the overlapping relationships among sex, death, and the history of revolution become clear, and it happens during a moment when Kepesh and Consuela are watching the millennial New Year’s celebrations. In this 12-page concluding section, the language of trauma emerges in the context of the millennial moment in order to underscore the problem of the unexpected. What is so threatening about the unexpected is not only that one cannot psychically prepare for such an event, but also that the fallout is so much worse as a result. Roth ingeniously brings together the dueling narratives of revolution, on the one hand, and the cancer of Consuela, who is of Cuban descent, on 106

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the other hand, by representing Consuela’s reaction to Castro’s millennial celebration, broadcast via television along with all the others. Consuela responds, thus: “‘My God,’ Consuela said, and she began to cry. ‘This,’ she said, and so angrily, ‘this is what he gives the world. This is what he shows them on New Year’s Eve.’ ‘It is a bit of a grotesque farce. Maybe,’ I said, ‘it’s Castro’s idea of a joke’” (146–7). Consuela’s and Kepesh’s shared horror, which leads to another three-page digression (146–8) would appear as a narrative failure unless one considers the consistent worries about time throughout the novel, as well as Consuela’s opening conversation with Kepesh detailing her family’s origins in Cuba. Strangely, then, Castro’s showboating for the world on New Year’s Eve gives way to the dominant worry of the book: the unexpected nature of time and our inability to grapple with it. Kepesh wonders: Why should Castro the revolutionary care, why should anyone care, about something that gives us a sense that we’re understanding something that we’re not understanding? The passage of time. We’re in the swim, sinking in time, until finally we drown and go. This nonevent made into a great event while Consuela is here suffering the biggest event in her life. The Big Ending, though no one knows what, if anything, is ending and certainly no one knows what is beginning. It’s a wild celebration of no one knows what. (147–8) On the one hand, the convoluted syntax of this passage seems to reveal that Kepesh has been drinking, although the text does not justify his syntactical breakdown as such.4 Kepesh indeed seems to be drowning, given the one central sentence with water imagery here — “We’re in the swim, sinking in time, until we finally drown” — but rather than understand himself as drowning in grief over Consuela, he understands himself, and everyone else at that moment, as drowning in time. The idea is conceptually difficult: when one thinks of drowning, it usually entails a substance — water, sand — or, even metaphorically, mountains of paperwork, sadness. But time is such a vague and elusive concept, and that is precisely the point of the text, it seems to me. The drowning, the sense of flailing and failing, comes in relation to time’s unpredictability. This is true of the coming of a new year, but it is also true of life, of aging, of sickness, of disease. Here we have a conflation of “The Big Ending” as the looked-for millennial disaster as well as Consuela’s possible death. As Kepesh points out, in both instances: “no one knows what . . . is ending and certainly no one knows what is beginning.” The celebration here masks the fact that no one knows anything about anything; it also reveals something important about narration, too: that, for as desired as it is, it is impossible to narrate beyond the Big Ending. 107

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Further, this passage captures a broader political point about what it means to be Castro-the-revolutionary who envisions the revolution as bringing about “the end of history.” And, if that’s the case, then what could Castro be commemorating other than a purely formal occasion, one literally ginned up by the false consciousness of the church (2000 Anno Domini) or the late-capitalist practice of blowing everything out in a big party for tomorrow since we’re all in debt anyway. The Cuban connection is interesting here because it raises questions about what becomes the metaphor for what in this novel. Is revolution a metaphor for time . . . or is it the other way around: time is a metaphor for the unexpectedness of revolution and also illness and death? This becomes especially complicated given the connection between the invasion of cancer in Consuela’s body and the role the US played in Cuban politics in the twentieth century. It is as though the Cuban Revolution is both desired and feared — feared in the sense that invasion is the way to understand Consuela’s cancer; desired in the sense that it could finally provide, in the very least and at the very most, narrative closure on the twentieth century. In many ways, in offering up Consuela as a sympathetic love interest of David Kepesh, the novel raises questions about US involvement in Cuban relations but also, more importantly, the effect of revolution on the people. This is not a throw-away idea in the novel, after all — in the opening pages, for example, we hear in a number of different ways that Consuela is closely linked with Cuban culture and the way she had transformed herself into an American woman.5 In fact, Consuela is much like Drenka Balich in Sabbath’s Theater: a foreign-born woman who is able to teach the otherwise unchanging, unchangeable protagonist a lesson through her illness and suffering. However, Consuela is also singular in her mysteriousness — which could be deemed, by a less sympathetic reader, as both misogynist and racist in its representation of dark-featured women from abroad. For Kepesh, Consuela is “at once specific and mysterious, and strangely full of little surprises. But, in the beginning especially, she was difficult for me to decipher, and mistakenly — or perhaps not — I chalked that up to her Cubanness” (26). In this way, too, Consuela is associated with the problem of time: like “The Big Event” of the millennium New Year as well as Consuela’s unexpected illness, Consuela herself appears as a “Big Event” in Kepesh’s life — difficult to decipher, unexpected, surprising. It would be one thing if Consuela starred in the novel as the only surprise in Kepesh’s life — for, if that were the case, then we could more easily read this as a straightforward lament about death and the potential recuperative power of desire. However, we must also grapple with the 20-page digression (47–65) that manages to triangulate the 108

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sexual revolution, the Latin American revolutions, and the American Revolution all under the banner of unwanted Puritanism, with freedoms guaranteed by a nation’s founding documents. This digression features extended descriptions of Janie Wyatt, a young student whom Kepesh had met 30 years before the novel takes place. As a kind of counter-voice to the despair over impending death that underwrites the novel, Janie Wyatt’s mantra is: “we’re all equal, we’re all free, we can land anything we want” (50). Janie’s declaration “we can land anything we want” seems almost consistent with Roth’s view of American neo-imperialism, a worry he addresses more fully in American Pastoral; however, Janie is a more sympathetic figure — at least in Kepesh’s estimation, because she also embodies the youthful power of the sexual revolution. When she says “land,” here, we think of sexual, rather than territorial, conquests. Although their narratives seem to contradict one another — Janie is full of life, Consuela is carrying death — Janie is connected to Consuela in the sense that Janie is, “in her own small-time way a Consuela Castillo’s Simón Bolívar. Yes, a great revolutionary leader like the South American Bolívar whose armies destroyed the power of colonialist Spain — an insurrectionist unafraid of battling superior forces, the libertador pitted against the college’s reigning morality who eventually swept its authority away” (52). Quite unexpectedly here, if not outright awkwardly, Kepesh sees a direct connection between the sexual revolution in the US in the 1960s with South American revolutions, as both have in common a desire and value for freedom over authoritarian and moralistic regimes. Although it is worth thinking about the role of Bolívar’s conservatism in the fantasies of such revolutionaries, too — particularly the way his insurrection tips into something far more stratified and limited than it might have first appeared. The memory of Janie here gives way to an all-out theory of revolution, using the sexual revolution as the perfect case. Kepesh reflects: It was an improvised revolution at first, the sixties revolution; the campus vanguard was tiny, half of one percent, maybe a percent and a half, but that didn’t matter because the vibrating faction of society soon followed. Culture is always being led by its narrowest point, among the young women on this campus by Janie’s Gutter Girls, the female trailblazers of a completely spontaneous sexual change. (51) The words “improvised,” “vanguard,” “vibrating,” “narrowest point,” and “spontaneous” not only describe revolutions, but also sexual relations. It is as if, at this moment, for Kepesh, sex and death are simply metaphors for the political unexpectedness of revolutions — and their unintended 109

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consequences. Kepesh, in fact, goes on to say: “Then came the longdelayed explosion, the disreputable assault on post-war normalcy and the cultural consensus. All that was unmanageable came breaking out, and the irreversible transformation of the young had begun” (51–2). Again, the “explosion,” the “breaking out,” the “irreversible transformation” — coupled with the image of the “narrowest point” of the young women, vaguely “disreputable,” leading to a “long-delayed explosion” where the unmanageable comes breaking out — without question link sex not simply with a shield against death, but, particularly, as a way of transforming the future: as revolutionary in its own way. Such sexual freedoms, as shared by Janie Wyatt and Consuela Castillo, become patriotic, in Kepesh’s mind: they are as guaranteed as civil rights and the right to bear arms.6 Kepesh says: Today, the carefree sexual conduct of the well-bred girls in my class is, as far as they know, warranted by the Declaration of Independence, an entitlement that requires of them little if any courage to utilize and that is in harmony with the pursuit of happiness as conceived of at Philadelphia in 1776. (52–3)7 Of course, this is one of many examples of how Kepesh is not to be trusted, or, at the very least, understood as an out-of-touch product of the ’60s. After all, what could be less guaranteed, in many ways, than civil rights, the right to bear arms, and the right to abortion: the very topics of the culture wars for the last 30 years? On the other hand, we might read Kepesh as being thoroughly ironic here — referring to the girls as “well-bred,” as far as they know, and therefore “entitled” to “the pursuit of happiness as conceived of at Philadelphia.” But then, in case we could not be more confused about Kepesh’s tone and perspective, comes his digression within a digression — one that encompasses four full pages. Kepesh sets it off, rhetorically, with the one-word warning: “Sidelight.” He goes on to ask his unnamed interlocutor — but, incidentally, the reader as well: “The English trading outpost at Merry Mount that so incensed the Plymouth Puritans — know about that?” (57–8). This begins the meta-digression that picks up a thread about the Puritans Roth has pursued, in many ways, since the beginning of his career — but most recently, and more directly, with Sabbath’s Theater. In the uncanny way Kepesh plays with time in the narrative, he links Merry Mount with Janie Wyatt’s self-named “Gutter Girls” of the ’60s: “The Puritans were terrified that their daughters would be carried off and corrupted by this merry miscegenator at Merry Mount. A white man, a white Indian, luring the virgins away? This was even more sinister than 110

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red Indians stealing them. Morton was going to turn their daughter into Gutter Girls” (59). The fear of Merry Mount, in fact, even makes its way into the canonical Of Plymouth Plantation, in which, according to Kepesh, Governor William Bradford “writes amply about the evils of Merry Mount, the ‘riotous prodigality,’ the ‘profuse excess’” (60). In one way, this can be read as a self-conscious nod to the “profuse excess” of The Dying Animal or nearly all of Roth’s books, in fact; however, in another way, it also underscores Roth’s concern about the ways our founding principles have been, paradoxically, “tainted” by Puritanical fear. In a self-serving move to vindicate Janie Wyatt and her legacy, Consuela Castillo as Kepesh’s latest “conquest,” he says — as if in response to his interlocutor: No, the sixties weren’t aberrant. The Wyatt girl wasn’t aberrant. She was a natural Mortonian in the conflict that’s been ongoing from the beginning. Out in the American wilderness, order will reign. The Puritans were the agents of rule and godly virtue and right reason, and on the other side was misrule. But why is it rule and misrule? Why isn’t Morton the great theologian of no-rules? Why isn’t Morton seen for what he is, the founding father of personal freedom? In the Puritan theocracy you were at liberty to do good; in Morton’s Merry Mount you were at liberty — that was it. (61) Again, although Kepesh is largely discreditable on a number of scales — sexual politics and professional decency among them — his circuitous thinking appears to make some sense here: Given the founding principles of the US — personal freedom, liberty, justice — then why would Merry Mount and the sexual revolution, which Kepesh believes is a direct extension of that strain in American culture all along, be such a threat? What were the Puritans worried about? In Kepesh’s reasoning: The answer is “order” — finding a way to stave off the unexpected, the traumatic nature of history, misrule, and possibly chaos. But isn’t that what the founding of the US was: unexpected, traumatic, and chaotic . . . by definition? By linking Puritanical “rule,” “godly virtue,” and “right reason” with such a restrictive agenda, one would think Kepesh is describing Fascists rather than Democrats. Kepesh is then apparently asked about his own moment “of Merry Mount” — “Me and the sixties?” he asks (62). He then goes on to explain that that is the period during which he left his wife. What follows is a four-page rationale for how he has come to live the way he has. But, again, it is difficult to judge Kepesh too harshly. For if there is any reason to believe this book is interested in anything less than “the problem of history,” Kepesh’s statement clarifies that here: 111

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But I was determined, once I saw the disorder for what it was, to seize from the moment a rationale for myself, to undo my former allegiances and my current allegiances and not to do it on the side, not to be, as many my age were, either inferior to it or superior to it or simply titillated by it, but to follow the logic of this revolution to its conclusion, and without having to become its casualty. This required some doing. Just because there’s no memorial bearing the names of those who out on the rampage came to grief doesn’t mean there weren’t casualties. There wasn’t necessarily carnage, but there was plenty of breakage. This was not a pretty revolution taking place on the dignified theoretical plane. This was a puerile, preposterous, uncontrolled, drastic mess, the whole society in a huge brawl. Though there was comedy too. It was a revolution that at the same time was like the day after the revolution — a big idyll. People took off their underwear and walked around laughing. Often it was no more than farce, childish farce, but astonishingly far-reaching childish farce; often it was no more than a teenage power surge, the adolescence of the biggest most powerful American generation ever coming into their hormones all at once. Yet the impact was revolutionary. Things forever changed. One’s skepticism, one’s cynicism, the cultural-political good sense that normally kept one outside of mass movements, was a useful shield. I wasn’t as high as everyone else, and I didn’t want to be. For me the job was to detach the revolution from its immediate paraphernalia, from its pathological trappings and its rhetorical inanities and the pharmacological dynamite that made people jump out of windows, to sidestep the worst and to seize and use the idea, to say to oneself, What a chance this is, what an opportunity to live out my own revolution. Why rein myself in because of the accident of the fact that I was born in this year and not in that year? People fifteen, twenty years younger than I, the privileged beneficiaries of the revolution, could afford to go through it unconsciously. There was this exuberant party, this squalid paradise of disarray, and, without thinking or having to think, they claimed it, and usually with all its trivia and trash. But I had to think. There I was, still in the prime of life and the country entering into this extraordinary time. Am I or am I not a candidate for this wild, sloppy, raucous repudiation, this wholesale wrecking of the inhibitive past? Can I master the discipline of freedom as opposed to the recklessness of freedom? How does one turn freedom into a system? To find out cost plenty. I have a son of forty-two who hates me. We needn’t go into that. The point is that the mob didn’t come and open my cell door. The erratic mob was there, but as it happened, I had to 112

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open the door myself. Because I was too compliant and fundamentally thwarted, even if, while I was married, I was sneaking out of the house fucking whomever I could. That kind of sixties deliverance was what I’d had in mind from the beginning, but in the beginning, my beginning, there was nothing resembling a communal endorsement of anything like it, no social torrent to sweep you up and carry you along. There were only obstacles, one of which was one’s civil nature, one of which was one’s provincial beginnings, one of which was one’s education in genteel notions of seriousness that one could not buck alone. The trajectory of my upbringing and my education was to delude me into entering a domestic vocation for which I had no tolerance. The family man, conscientious, married and with the kid — and then the revolution begins. The whole thing explodes and there are these girls all around me, and what was I to do, continue on married and having my adulteries and thinking, This is it, this is the bound way you live? (62–5) This passage sets up multiple tensions which actually underscore Kepesh’s ambivalence about the whole enterprise: boundaries vs freedom; beginnings vs endings; seriousness vs farce; social vs individual; violence vs Eden; power vs helplessness. On the surface, he appears to value the “messiness” of the whole enterprise; but he also reveals a kind of nostalgia for order — for a system within freedom, or freedom within a system that would counteract the unexpected effects of history, dying, and death. It is as though Kepesh is back on Merry Mount legitimating the ’60s in the face of the Puritans. The word revolution, or a form of the word, is used here nine times. Other key words are “disorder”; “allegiances” (twice); “casualty”/“casualties”; “carnage”; “breakage”; “mess”; “idyll”; “farce” (three times); “power surge”; “accident”; “exuberant”; “paradise”; “trash”; “raucous repudiation” — alliteration with the “r” sound; “wholesale wrecking” — alliteration with the “w” sound; “master”; “discipline of freedom” vs “recklessness of freedom”; “freedom into a system”; “mob” (twice — as in, “erratic mob”); “beginning” (three times); “communal”; “social”; “torrent”; “beginnings” (four times); “explodes”; and “bound.” Given this extended digression on the social explosion of the 1960s, then, it comes as no surprise that the novel ends with a sense of fear and foreboding as Kepesh and Consuela reunite to watch the millennial celebration on television. However, there is something special about this moment — it is both intensely private and intimate (Kepesh feels as though he must say goodbye to Consuela, although she has only asked him to say goodbye to the breasts she will lose to a mastectomy) and public, as people around the world appear to be joined via the television to watch either millennial celebrations, the end of the world, or, if possible, 113

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both. Further, a part of the problem here is that Kepesh is reading the loss of Consuela’s breasts as his own Big Ending; he is, in fact, misreading her illness as his death. In this way, it become increasingly clear, during these final moments, that the unexpectedness of the revolution is as traumatic as the unexpectedness of “nothing” — both personal and historical — that descends upon them that evening. Finally, Kepesh recalls that they “watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden” (144). At this very moment — and with an uncanny anticipation of the terrorist events of 9/11 — Roth links personal tragedy and public hysteria in the single image of the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration: one moment in time joining America with the world in both its paranoia and preparation for anticipated world devastation. While Kepesh reports the “mass hysteria” as insignificant, however, the overwhelming public reaction to impending doom is of utmost importance, as hysteria marks nothing if not something important — if, perhaps, unreal. Kepesh continues to report the effects of useless panic and celebratory fireworks that might eventually replace other burning associations with Europe in the twentieth century: Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire, a facsimile flame-throwing weapon such as Wernher von Braun might have designed for Hitler’s annihilating arsenal — the historical missile of missiles, the rocket of rockets, the bomb of bombs, with ancient Paris the launching pad and the whole of humanity the target. All evening long, on networks everywhere, the mockery of the Armageddon that we’d been awaiting in our backyard shelters since August 6, 1945. How could it not happen? Even on that very night, especially on that night, people anticipating the worst as though the evening were one long air-raid drill. The wait for the chain of horrendous Hiroshimas to link in synchronized destruction the abiding civilizations of the world. It’s now or never. And it never came. (144–5) Of course, the first uncanny thought in response to this passage is that it does come — in the form of 9/11 — even though the novel appeared well before that event. Further, Kepesh, for all of his self-absorption, manages to diagnose the world’s strange ambivalence regarding the new millennium, as his observation betrays a bizarre desire for “The Big Ending” manifest in all of the excited preparation for the end of the world, or glitches in computer programs that might just seem like the end of the world. Such 114

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a diagnosis is matched equally by Roth’s poetics in this passage. The first sentence, for example, combines the long, lingering sounds of the “l” and the “s” with the short stops of the “t” and the “d”; the former indicates hope for the continuation of life (the world must go on) while the latter indicates a peculiar anticipation of the end of the world (it must not go on after all): “Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz.” The “Blitz” of this passage is one of many European events that left Americans shocked and devastated from overseas, even though it was not “their” particular disaster. This Blitz with a capital “B” signifies, of course, the terrifying presence of Nazi bombers flying over London on September 7, 1940 — a presence that signaled Hitler’s intensified strategy to attempt to force England to come to his terms as he continued to invade the city with bombs and fires for 57 straight days. Since these two wars were literally traumatic, as was, apparently, the history of the evolving US from the beginning, then this Armageddon might have been a second chance at reparation, a way of “curing” the nation’s, even the world’s, post-traumatic stress disorder. One can see, then, why the language of the event to come becomes interesting for discussions of the new millennium, and why survivors of World War II and/or the Vietnam War might “await” or “anticipate” another worldwide disaster. Actually to prepare for and to experience this disaster might offer some relief — some sense of redemption — following the unanticipated, fully missed disasters of the middle of the century. However, Armageddon only mocked the world. Rather than being something — if even a disaster — that could be remembered, this night so eagerly anticipated became a night “not to remember but to forget” (145); it became a “nonevent made into a great event” (148), but no more capable of a cultural recovery from the previous wars than those wars themselves. In Kepesh’s fragmentary, final analysis, “The Big Ending, though no one knows what, if anything, is ending and certainly no one knows what is beginning. It’s a wild celebration of no one knows what” (148). Paradoxically, the absence of the disaster at the turn of the new millennium left us as devastated as before. Having prepared this time for the unimaginable, nothing happened — the most fitting example of the “unimagined” of all. Granted, initially Kepesh’s association between the turn of the century New Year’s Eve celebrations and the travesties of Europe during World War II — the London Blitz, the Eiffel Tower burning, the bombing of Hiroshima — seems rather over the top, even disrespectful, gratuitous, like the bitter ranting of an over-sexed old man. His representation of the disasters of the past and the disaster to come invokes Karl Marx here: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts 115

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and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (594). In this case, the first tragic instance of light whirling over London is the Blitz; the second instance is the farce of the overhyped New Year. As such, Kepesh’s commentary on television’s portrayal of “light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz” makes even the Blitz seem like a spectacular! spectacular! scene from Paris’s bohemian night life. However, Kepesh’s key words, “awaiting” and “anticipating” remarkably emphasize something that we perhaps knew all along: that someday, Americans would be prepared for a worldwide tragedy of their own. Rather than being surprised as with the Blitz and the atom bomb, “we” seemed to run for cover after bombing Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, launching the Cold War, and with it, mutual assured destruction. After living in fear with the Cold War — a war that ended only in mockery, so to speak — Y2K seemed to serve as the replacement for a disaster that had not come, offering the US an opportunity to predict the disaster in advance and to know what was happening when it happened. The Y2K problem and the rhetoric of Armageddon appeared to revive that chance. Yet, it never came, as if history were mocking any human desire to confront disaster head on: “How could it not happen?” Kepesh asks, not entirely kidding. And, the worst part, he seems to be saying, is that television was prepared to show us to each other as we died at the end of the world: “all evening long, on networks everywhere,” viewers could seek entertainment in casualties, just as during the first Gulf War. In other words, Kepesh, as cynical as he is, seems to get it right when he suggests that Armageddon was supposed to be both a US tragedy and a US victory. However, it never came, leaving US citizens — even the world — feeling defeated once again. Finally, we were prepared in a way that we could not be for Vietnam, for the Blitz, for Hiroshima, for the Eiffel Tower ablaze; and it turned out that there was nothing to prepare for all along and that we would have to continue surviving with our haunted pasts. Aware of the general ambivalence surrounding millennial preparations, Kepesh continues: “Maybe that’s what everyone was celebrating — that it hadn’t come, never came, that the disaster of the end will now never arrive. All the disorder is controlled disorder punctuated with intervals to sell automobiles” (145). With one key word, “maybe,” Kepesh seems once again to skew the general perspective of this uncanny evening. The celebrations everyone watched all night long, and that every network represented, were not your typical “ring-in the New Year” carryings-on. Rather, with the stroke of midnight, relief settled in like never before: the “disaster to come” in fact, will not ever come, an oxymoronic “controlled 116

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disorder” as narrated by network news and two-minute advertisements. All of this should be the “good news,” and yet Kepesh seems betrayed. By repeating here it “never came,” he points up ambivalent feelings regarding Armageddon’s mockery: after all of the hype, how dare it let us down like that? Kepesh does not simply say it “did not come,” but rather, “it never came” — indicating relief, yes, but also a bizarre sense of Sisyphean longing, as if the tension building since 1945 might somehow be released had the end come after a two-year period of preparation. Of course, with US television’s fascination with horror and suffering, Armageddon would not be, could never be, as innocent as a spiritual event or as dark as someone’s worst nightmare. Conversely, it was marketed as a kitschy Broadway musical: our potential misery, Kepesh emphasizes, was made ordinary by our era sedated by the grandiose stimulation of the grandest illusion. Watching this hyped-up production of staged pandemonium, I have a sense of the monied world eagerly entering the prosperous dark ages. A night of human happiness to usher in barbarism.com. To welcome appropriately the shit and the kitsch of the new millennium. (145) Kepesh again plays with oxymoron in order to emphasize our desire to obliterate knowledge of historical trauma — for how else could the “dark ages” be considered “prosperous”? Further, such phrases as “grandiose stimulation,” “grandest illusion,” and “staged pandemonium” sound like advertising copy for a glitzy play, and that is exactly how US media understood the new millennium. Even if it had meant the end of the world or devastating technological glitches, Armageddon would provide entertainment for the entire family. And yet, as Kepesh underscores, it “never came.” This rhetoric of impending disasters does not originate in these passages, however. In fact, just a few pages before these reflections on the millennium hype, Kepesh slips into the future tense in a way that neither precedes nor follows this awkward and hallucinatory reflection: “Part Two. She asks me three months from now, she calls me and says, ‘Let’s get together,’ and then she takes her clothes off again. Is that the disaster to come?” (142). Whereas The Dying Animal in its near-entirety is written in the past tense, these three sentences look toward the future. More important, they look forward to a disaster, much like the millennium coverage Kepesh goes on to discuss. Fittingly, the disaster of Consuela’s potential seduction and the disaster of the millennium are left as open questions: We know, now, that Armageddon never came, but what is the fate of Consuela? We never really learn if Kepesh sees her in the end, and — if he does — what the outcome of that meeting is. Kepesh is much less eager to close the circle 117

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of her narrative, the very character driving the desirous plot of The Dying Animal. We know only that Kepesh goes to her against the advice of his interlocutor (156). At the end of the novel then, this seemingly superficial rendezvous is the disaster to come, as Armageddon has come and gone only with the smugness of history’s mockery. How does this new understanding of temporality as circular, of “traumatic” events as “missed” help us understand the role of the US both in terms of its own revolutionary history as well as within a transnational context? The intense media speculation and the preparatory actions, particularly of the US at the turn of the millennium, revealed a collective fantasy that Armageddon could allow the world finally to prepare for the devastating experience never fully processed during World War II. Paradoxically, the disaster at the new millennium seemed cleansing in the collective fantasy, even reparative. However (to use the words of Philip Roth), “Armageddon mocked the world,” providing it with no second chance to realign the unimaginable events of the twentieth century. As Roth demonstrates in The Dying Animal, the worldwide mayhem broadcast at the turn of the millennium might be our best lesson for thinking beyond our national borders, indicating that the trauma of the last century was neither personal nor isolated, but rather collective and transnational. Then there is the point to be made about the fundamental stupidity of it all: assuming that Armageddon would come on New Year’s, instead of on just a regular Tuesday, as Auden would have it. Just like the potential of David Kepesh to console Consuela, what was supposed to be reparative offers only stasis and sterility. In the face of a static new millennium, people seemed almost disappointed that Armageddon was so bold as to mock them and not to happen. More important than a simple embarrassment or “making fun,” however, this mockery provides us with no closure — no real second chance to regain a world once lost. We might even call The Dying Animal — with even its title gesturing toward a nonconsolatory description of humanity — a modern elegy for US culture, for the world. Such elegies, according to Jahan Ramazani, erupt “with all the violence and irresolution, all the guilt and ambivalence of modern mourning” (Poetry of Mourning, ix). In other words, modern elegies refuse the solace and comfort that prior elegies embraced; they “tend not to achieve, but to resist consolation, not to override but to sustain anger, not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss” (xi). And in this reopening, forgetting is foreclosed. Perhaps that is the mockery’s greatest lesson of all. Had any of the events of the last century been “mastered” along the lines of our cultural fantasy of recovery, then they may have been forgotten, an all too dangerous proposition if we are ever to learn something about disasters of the past and disasters yet to come. 118

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CHAPTER 7

TRAUMATIC REALISM, “AFTERWARDSNESS”, AND THE FIGURE OF THE CHILD IN THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

In Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), Michael Rothberg worries that the three modes of representation available to twentieth-century writers — realism, modernism, and postmodernism — fail effectively to convey the horrors of the traumatic experiences of our century, using representations of the Holocaust to illuminate the problem. Rather than having to choose between the documentary style of realism or the alienating style of postmodernism to reflect traumatic experience — and risking failure at both — Rothberg proposes that a reading of realism under the sign of trauma may be the most productive way out of the current dilemma (1–15). This chapter reads The Plot Against America (2004) under the sign of trauma, paradoxically by considering Roth’s representation of three apparently quotidian objects in the life of a child — stamps, bookends, and maps — all symbols one might find in the realistic mode of fiction to depict a boyhood in perfect order. However, I ultimately turn to the final image of brokenness: a stump or prosthesis, which is the most powerful sign of the trauma underpinning these young boys’ lives, suggesting Roth’s mode to be realism under the sign of trauma, and, simultaneously, trauma under the sign of realism. In many ways, then, Roth’s 2004 “counter-history” heeds Rothberg’s call: stylistically associated with neither the social realism that characterizes, for many critics, Roth’s American Trilogy of the late 1990s, nor the experimentation of what is now referred to as “middle Roth” that preceded it, The Plot Against America tells a horrifying tale of the US under the fascist leadership of Charles Lindbergh through the eyes of a small child who just happens to be named Philip Roth. While Paul Berman praised the novel for balancing political anger with the representation 119

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of childhood fears (“The Plot Against America”), Michiko Kakutani in “A Pro-Nazi President” criticized it as a novel that can be read, in the current Bush era, as either a warning about the dangers of isolationism or a warning about the dangers of the Patriot Act and the threat to civil liberties. Yet it is also a novel that can be read as a not-altogether-successful attempt to mesh two incompatible genres: the political-historical thriller and the coming-of-age tale. Rather than judge this novel a failure for mixing styles, I would argue, however, that Roth’s use of these incompatible genres follows Rothberg’s demand that we interpret realism under the sign of trauma. Further, Roth is at his most forceful when employing the figure of the vulnerable child. The historical thriller aspect of the novel, I propose, not only requires readers to look back to the effects of anti-Semitism globally; it also requires readers to consider the present moment of the novel’s publication, particularly in 2004. In fact, many of the novel’s most provocative questions come from the voice of Walter Winchell, a syndicated columnist for the New York Daily Mirror who, in both reality and in the novel, was considered to be a provocative gossip. Winchell the fictional reporter has many qualities of the historical figure: he denounced the rise of Fascism and received national recognition for his coverage of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child. It is Winchell, for example, who asks: “And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?” (230). On the one hand, knowing what we know about the historical Winchell, we might say this is fear-mongering and overhyped rhetoric at its best; however, on the other hand, as with the “fool” in Shakespeare’s drama, we are forced to ask: What if this voice carries with it some reason? How far would we as a nation have to fall for Winchell to be speaking the truth? In so doing, the problem of history works on many levels in this novel. It looks back to the nation’s founding in order to consider the violence done to the US Constitution as it is rendered ineffective in protecting citizen’s rights. It also looks back to the 1940s and the rise of Fascism in its dramatic presentation of “everyday” life. Finally, and most compellingly, I believe the novel calls attention to — and defamiliarizes — the present time that exists outside of the novel: 2004, in the heart of the Bush years, when the American people remained asleep while the Constitution was torn to shreds.1 120

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Theorists perplexed by these ideas of skewed time — a kind of traumatic time that conflates the present moment with an unassimilated past — Jean Laplanche and J. -B. Pontalis rely on Nachträglichkeit to articulate this effect. For them, Nachträglichkeit (or “afterwardsness” or “deferred action”) is a term Freud “frequently used in connection with his view of psychical temporality and causality,” indicating how traumatic experience is often told or lived repeatedly, cyclically, as if to arrive at a new understanding of an event that was not fully experienced in the first place (111). I contend here that Roth’s novel does just that: it, in its own provocative way, reimagines the Holocaust to tell the story of a America that has lost its way in the 2000s, derailed as it was by a disregard for its founding ideals. And, more compellingly still, it depicts the weight that impact has on future generations by revealing the horror through the perspective of the child. It is this very commitment to the figure of the child in this case which allows for a reading of “realism under the sign of trauma,” to return to the language of Rothberg, quoted earlier in this chapter. When John Freeman of the St. Petersburg Times said in an interview with Roth in 2004 (“Interview with Philip Roth”), “You have written about not wanting this book to be interpreted as a roman-à-clef about current times,” Roth responds by explaining: I began it back in January of 2001 and Bush had just become president. We didn’t even know what he was; 9/11 wouldn’t take place for six more months. So I was very much trying to deal with these figures who were out of my childhood, some of whom were quite frightening to me as a child, like (right-wing radio personality) Father Coughlin. He either broadcast from his little church outside Detroit, or else, occasionally, he’d have a big rally in what was then the Detroit Tigers baseball stadium — and that used to scare me particularly because I knew how many people could be there. Ultimately, Roth says, he wants people to read The Plot Against America as “a fantasy of what did not happen. The triumph of America is that this did not happen. It happened in Europe; it did not happen here. They got Fascism; we got Roosevelt.” While, ultimately, this is a very uplifting way of reading the novel, and, a rather optimistic view of the assured “triumph of America” that guarantees the happy ending, I am still, at the end of the day, left with the same fear — conveyed through Roth’s child narrator, none other than Roth’s imagination of himself as a child — that pervades the novel. This “perpetual fear,” which is the title of one of the novel’s chapters, lingers 121

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especially as a result of what Roth conveyed in the interview about his vulnerability as a child to right-wing radio personalities (something we have no shortage of today), as well as the reality in America — that democracy does not always work in favor of the people, something uncannily brought to light in the novel about politics in 2000, despite Roth’s disavowal of any intention to refer to contemporary politics at all. By relying on the figure of the child, particularly, the novel communicates the effects of indignities committed against the US Constitution. The indignities featured in the novel include the Just Folks project and their Office of American Absorption, which had as its official business to “implement programs ‘encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society,’” though, as young narrator Philip observes, “by the spring of 1941 the only minority the OAA appeared to take a serious interest in encouraging was ours” (85). By the middle of the novel, the OAA has deeply affected the Roth household, leading the Mr. Roth of the novel to say: “How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having an hallucination” (196). One paragraph later, Mr. Roth says Lindbergh has “kidnapped” Philip’s brother Sandy, having converted him to the work of the OAA. This paragraph repeats a form of the word kidnap three times in the last sentence, recalling inexplicably the description of the circumstances of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh’s son just five pages into the novel (6). The indignities, of course, worsen throughout the course of the novel: the Roths are ejected from their hotel in DC when making a family trip, ironically, to the nation’s capital to visit the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, among other historical sites dedicated to celebrating America’s founding ideals; radio personality Walter Winchell is fired for speaking out against the Lindbergh administration and is subsequently assassinated while running for president; and riots pervade the end of the novel, during which the narrator and his family live in “perpetual fear.” What makes the novel so startling is that Roth has organized the moments signifying the gradual disintegration of the inalienable rights of the Jewish citizens into chapters labeled and identified much like traditional Holocaust history books — with dates and key historical references to anti-Semitism structuring the book itself. But to go the further step and filter this history through the eyes of a child — or even through the eyes of the child, Philip, reporting on the fear and disintegration of another child such as Seldon, the boyhood friend who, along with his widowed mother, takes the Roths’ place in Kentucky as a part of the relocation project, ultimately causing his mother’s murder 122

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during riots while commuting to work — The Plot Against America earns the generic categorization of “dystopia.” In Traumatic Realism, Rothberg sets as his task “to argue for the absolutely central and unavoidable need for reflections on the means and modes of representation in all scholarly and lay approaches to the Holocaust” (2). On the one hand, it may seem inappropriate to compare Roth’s “fantasy of what did not happen” in America to the actual Holocaust in Europe; obviously, the fiction and the fact — aside from the detail that one is made up and another is not — vary in terms of scope and scale. However, on the other hand, by conflating the contemporary abuse of power in the Bush administration with the abuse of power of the Lindbergh administration in his fictional account about the rise of Fascism in the US, Roth returns to us the perpetual fear of the 1930s and 1940s, indicating, via his genre-bending experiment, how traumatic experience is often told or lived repeatedly, cyclically, in an attempt to grasp something as unimaginable as the disintegration of a democratic nation. In turning toward key passages in the novel representing the figure of the child, this chapter proposes that such affective imagery allows for the terror to set in: if the democratic process allows for a Fascist to become elected, then the insight becomes manifest, if belatedly, through the estranging dimension of the child’s voice. The Holocaust most certainly could happen here. It is not by accident, I argue, that all of these references to young Philip’s worry are marked with such words as fear, nightmare, chaos, terror, disaster, and — perhaps the most terrifying dimension of history this novel takes up — the unforeseen. The novel provides what it promises in the first sentence: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews” (1). Perhaps what is the most troubling to witness, as a reader, is the frustration of one of the most dignified characters in the novel, Mr. Roth, Philip’s father, who laments — when his Italian neighbor upstairs offers him a pistol to protect his family — the failure of the democratic process thus: “I was born in the city of Newark in the year nineteen hundred and one,” my father told him. “All my life I have paid my rent on time, I have paid my taxes on time, and I have paid my bills on time. I’ve never cheated an employer for as much as a dime. I have never tried to cheat the United States government. I believe in this country. I love this country . . . You know what I love, Cucuzza? Election Day,” my father told him. “I love to vote. Since I was old enough, I have not 123

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missed an election. In 1924 I voted against Mr. Coolidge and for Mr. Davis, and Mr. Coolidge won. And we all know what Mr. Coolidge did for the poor people of this country. In 1928 I voted against Mr. Hoover and for Mr. Smith, and Mr. Hoover won. And we know what he did for the poor people of this country. In 1932 I voted against Mr. Hoover for the second time and for Mr. Roosevelt for the first time, and, thank God, Mr. Roosevelt won, and he put America back on its feet. He took this country out of the Depression and he gave the people what he promised — a new deal. In 1936 I voted against Mr. Langdon and for Mr. Roosevelt, and again Mr. Roosevelt won — two states, Maine and Vermont, that is all Mr. Landon is able to carry. Can’t even carry Kansas. Mr. Roosevelt sweeps the country by the biggest presidential vote there has ever been, and once again he keeps every promise to the working people that he made in that campaign. And so what do the voters up and do in nineteen hundred and forty? They elect a fascist instead. Not just an idiot like Coolidge, not just a fool like Hoover, but an out-and-out fascist rabble-rouser, Mr. Wheeler as his sidekick, and they put Mr. Ford into the cabinet, not only an antiSemite right up there with Hitler but a slave driver who has turned the workingman into a human machine. And so tonight you come to me, sir, in my own home, and you offer me a pistol. In America in the year nineteen hundred and forty-two, a brand-new neighbor, a man I do not even know yet, has come here and offer me a pistol in order for me to protect my family from Mr. Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic mob. Well, don’t you think I’m not grateful, Cucuzza. I will never forget your concern. But I am a citizen of the United States of America, and so is my wife, and so are my children and so,” he said, his voice catching, “and so was Mr. Walter Winchell.” (285–6) Admittedly, this is a long passage, but that is precisely the point. I am consistently struck here by the catalogue of elections Mr. Roth cites — name after name of leaders he voted for. Certainly, the words “country” and “vote” dominate this moment — the repetition functioning to reinforce the unforeseen effects of democracy at work. And although Mr. Roth is beside himself, he still appears to idealize the country enough to feel safe within it as a US citizen, safe enough, for example, to reject the pistol. His rhetoric is also strikingly heightened — “and so tonight you come here, sir, in my own home” — and, as a result, sounds at once indignant and scared. It is as though he believes the form of his own articulation, the heightened language, the affective dimension can change the course of history, which is precisely what happens when rhetoricians take the stump in the political arena. 124

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Mr. Roth’s speech, as heard by the young Philip, also underscores the sense of this family that their “homeland was America” (4). In coming to understand, for example, why his family does not contribute to the poor old man who seeks contributions to a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, Philip reflects: [W]e’d already had a homeland for three generations. I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school. I sang of its marvels with my classmates at assembly programs. I eagerly observed its national holidays, and without giving a second thought to my affinity for the Fourth of July fireworks or the Thanksgiving turkey or the Decoration Day double-header. Our homeland was America. (4–5) The striking, pivotal word in this passage, of course, is “homeland” — which sounds incredibly un-American in many ways. “Homeland” is a word, for example, that Eastern European immigrants often give to their birthplace in Europe after establishing a new life in the States. Of course, it also echoes the language of early Zionism that perceives establishing a Jewish national homeland as an alternative to both assimilation and anti-Semitism. This striking early paragraph ends with another sense of terror: “Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed” (5). What changed, primarily, from the adults’ perspective, is a way of life. But this imposition of Lindbergh cuts deeper in the child’s mind: young Philip says he loses his sense of “personal security,” but his emphasis on the word “American” in so many passages also reveals his insecurity about what that means, particularly if the ideals enumerated in the founding documents are not upheld. Philip recalls: Lindbergh was the first living American whom I learned to hate — just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love — and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in 1940 assaulted, as nothing had ever before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world. (6) In such a short passage, the repetition of the adjective “American” — used here not less than seven times — appears as both defensive (as in “I am an American!”) and insecure (“Am I an American?”). The word “assaulted” here is also telling, as it is a word used to indicate physical violence, foreshadowing the violent events at the end of the novel. 125

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If the main plot of the novel is the disintegration of the US — also a recurring theme in American Pastoral — this time, under the leadership of Lindbergh, then we can say a subplot is young Philip’s witnessing of his father’s disintegration as well. About a third of the way through the novel, Philip laments: A new life began for me. I’d watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was now away all day working for Hahne’s, the brother on call was now off after school working for Lindbergh, and the father who’d defiantly serenaded all those callow cafeteria anti-Semites in Washington was crying aloud with his mouth wide open — crying like both a baby abandoned and a man being tortured — because he was powerless to stop the unforeseen. And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning disaster into an epic. (113–14) All of the novel’s key words come together in this passage: “unforeseen,” for example, occurs four times in the last three sentences — “unforeseen,” in this case, being an exemplary cause of the traumatic structure. There’s something else about “unforeseen,” too: the word almost implies that the events should have been foreseen — that it would be possible to have done so. But that’s still a failure to grasp the structure of trauma, which insists that some effects are simply not foreseeable in a straightforward way. It is also about a new, more mature understanding of the forces of history: in this case, not harmless, as the schoolchildren came to learn, but unexpected, and ultimately understood as every word associated with dread the child can think of: terror, disaster, torture, crying, abandonment, and powerlessness. But what is perhaps most disturbing is the image of the solid father figure crying with his mouth wide open — crying because words fail him, with crying understood ultimately as paradoxically the most effective way to communicate the incommunicable. While the breakdown of the father is undeniable here, many readers, such as Debra Shostak, read the novel as oscillating, on the one hand, between the broken stump of Alvin, who goes to war to fight Hitler and comes back literally a broken man; and on the other hand young Philip’s investment in his stamp collection, representing everything that is good about the United States. With the dead stump, on the one hand, and the 126

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idyllic stamps, on the other hand, the novel seems trapped between hope and horror. This perhaps becomes most clear in Philip’s own description of the nightmares that begin occurring early on in the novel. In the “Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War” section, for example, Philip recalls: When I opened my 1932 Washington Bicentennials — twelve stamps ranging in denomination from the half-cent dark brown to the ten-cent yellow — I was stunned. Washington wasn’t on the stamps anymore. Unchanged at the top of each stamp — lettered in what I’d learned to recognize as white-faced roman and spaced out on either one or two lines — was the legend “United States Postage.” The colors of the stamps were unchanged as well — the two-cent red, the five-cent blue, the eight-cent olive green, and so on — all the stamps were the same regulation size, and the frames for the portraits remained individually designed as they were in the original set, but 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. And on the ribbon beneath each portrait, there was no longer the name “Washington” either. Whether the ribbon was curved downward as on the one-half-cent stamp and the six, or curved upward as on the four, the five, the seven, and the ten, or straight with raised ends as on the one, the one and a half, the two, the three, the eight, and the nine, the name lettered across the ribbon was “Hitler.” It was when I looked next at the album’s facing page to see what, if anything, had happened to my 1934 National Parks set of ten that I fell out of bed and woke up on the floor, this time screaming. Yosemite in California, Grand Canyon in Arizona, Mesa Verde in Colorado, Crater Lake in Oregon, Acadia in Maine, Mount Rainier in Washington, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Zion in Utah, Glacier in Montana, the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee — and across the face of each, the cliffs, the woods, the rivers, the peaks, the geyser, the gorges, the granite coastline, across the deep blue water and the high waterfalls, across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika. (43) For me, this is among the most vivid, most emotional, most striking description in the entire novel — for these aren’t just any stamps. Young Philip’s devotion to the Washington Bicentennials must be related to the centrality of the figure of Washington himself — the founding father who led the colonial troops to victory during a revolution that would allow for an actual democracy where people choose their leaders. The name 127

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Washington is repeated here no less than five times. And although Roth himself said in interviews that he just was fascinated with stamps as a young boy, there is something powerful here about the connection with the post office, another powerful symbol for US growth and expansion, which a young girl bombs in order to protest the Vietnam War in Roth’s own American Pastoral (1997). Further, while the 1934 National Parks set was of course an actual set, it also has uncanny literary power as all the places depicted on the stamps are American idylls in many ways — actual photos of the Eden America was romanticized to be. According to Kurt Repanshek in National Parks Traveler, which documents the history of the National Parks stamp set, in 1925 Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, suggested that national parks be featured on US postage, but nothing came of his request. In 1933 a little more pressure was exerted, this time from the editor of the Greely (Colorado) Tribune Republican, who noted that, “While the (Eastern) seaboard flocks to Europe on vacations, Uncle Sam misses a great opportunity by not issuing series of pictorials on the National Parks. It would be Federal advertising paid for many times over by philatelists.” The colors of both of these stamps are the very patriotic red, white, and blue . . . but also green, referring to the Edenic landscape of the American terrain. Further, there is a repetition in the novel’s passage, almost a musicality, of sounds here with the hissing of the soft /s/ working against the cutting, harsh sound of the hard /c/ — leading us to the final image of the black swastika against white — which is the final image of that chapter. To understand the swastika as replacing the national parks is not the only horrifying aspect of this moment, however; it is also the chilling knowledge that we may not be too far off after all. While references to national stamps and monuments take the center stage in the beginning of the novel, Seldon, the displaced boy now in Kentucky, occupies the attention in the last 80 pages of the work. As Roth says in an essay entitled, “The Story Behind The Plot Against America”: [T]he deepest reward in the writing and what lends the story its pathos wasn’t the resurrection of my family circa 1941 but the invention of the family downstairs, of the tragic Wishnows, on whom the full brunt of the anti-Semitism falls — the invention particularly of the Wishnows’ little boy, Seldon, that nice, lonely little kid in your class whom you run away from when you’re yourself a kid because he demands to be 128

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befriended by you in ways that another child cannot stand. He’s the responsibility that you can’t get rid of. While Philip’s mother tries to talk to Seldon in a long-distance collect call following Winchell’s assassination, Philip describes Seldon as a “shell of a boy” (276), later saying: “I’m thinking that, alone now out in Kentucky, he sounds as though he were the one who was kicked in the head. He sounds stunned. Stunted. He sounds stopped. And yet he was the smartest kid in our class” (279). Again, in this touching scene depicting two boys’ fear connected via a telephone line, Roth’s language balances dystopian elements with the longed-for idealism that the boys cannot help but associate with the American enterprise. When Phil is instructed to get his map of America, he recalls: I rushed into the sun parlor, where, shelved between the brass George Washington bookends bought at Mount Vernon by my father, was the whole of our library: the six-volume encyclopedia, a leather-bound copy of the United States Constitution awarded by Metropolitan Life, and the unabridged Webster’s dictionary that Aunt Evelyn had given Sandy for his tenth birthday. . . . In only seconds the two of us were back at the telephone table in the foyer, above which hung yet another of my father’s awards for selling insurance, a framed copper engraving replicating the Declaration of Independence. (275) Ultimately, this US map provides a literal way for the Roth family to find Seldon, but it is also a metaphor for the US political terrain. What is telling about this passage is that the child finds the map among other valuable symbols of the US: the brass bookends of Washington; the US Constitution; the dictionary; the Declaration of Independence. However, the adult reader knows better: Everything in this list — and eventually the map too — has been tainted by a betrayal of the founding ideals. The trip to Washington DC was marred by anti-Semitic bigotry; Metropolitan Life becomes an instrumental company in the OAA project; Aunt Evelyn betrays the family to become a part of the Lindbergh administration, and even the sunroom becomes darkened by the recovery process of both Alvin and, later, Seldon. In other words, in my reading, the end of the novel is interested in nothing if not the vulnerability of the child in a place where the Constitution is not upheld — where the George Washington bookends, the Declaration of Independence, the life insurance company, the knowledge-bearing encyclopedias, the sunroom are not what they once 129

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were. It becomes increasingly difficult to see the final message here, as just as the novel oscillates between stamps and stump, it also ends in a vexingly ambivalent manner. On the one hand, dignity is once again restored to Mr. Roth, who drives to Kentucky and back again in the midst of race riots in order to bring Seldon back to Newark. Philip reflects: My father was a rescuer and orphans were his specialty. A displacement even greater than having to move to Union or to leave for Kentucky was to lose one’s parents and be orphaned. Witness, he would tell you, what happened to Alvin. Witness what had happened to his sister in law after Grandma had died. No one should be motherless or fatherless. Motherless and fatherless you are vulnerable to manipulation, to influences — you are rootless and vulnerable to everything. (358) In this light not only is Mr. Roth reinstated as rescuer — no longer crying like a baby — but there is a sincere move here to point out an ethics of witnessing: Mr. Roth had witnessed these losses and stepped in to help the most vulnerable members of society. I like this image very much: not only did the US “get Roosevelt” in the end as president, but also all of the orphans are named and accounted for. However, there is also the perplexing last paragraph, one that seems to undo the hope found in the passage on witnessing. In the end, the novel is simply, in hindsight, described as an account of how Seldon came to live with us. After their safe return to Newark from Kentucky, Sandy moved into the sun parlor and Seldon took over where Alvin and Aunt Evelyn had left off — as the person in the twin bed next to mine shattered by the malicious indignities of Lindbergh’s America. There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis. (362) The novel ends, in other words, with a boy who is a stump, ruined by Lindbergh’s America via a process that would allow a Fascist to become a president of the United States. What would it mean then, to extend Rothberg’s thinking, to call for a mode of representation that offers trauma under the sign of realism — as Roth appears to offer here? The mode, as reviewers and readers have noted, is incredibly defamiliarizing — an uncanny representation of the present moment that has the potential to shock one out of blind submission. 130

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After all, it may be easier to turn a blind eye to willful misreadings of the Constitution when practiced at a level that feels virtual and distanced; it is far less easy to turn a blind eye to a boy depicted as a stump. In fact, the stump, as Alvin predicted of his own injured leg, will take “forever” to heal (137), raising the lingering question: If children who suffer the indignities of a shredded Constitution are effectively reduced to a stump, then what would happen, ultimately, to this great American land?

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CHAPTER 8

EXIT GHOST: MOURNING ZUCKERMAN IN THE AGE OF TERROR

And was there ever an election like Gore versus Bush, resolved in the treacherous ways that it was, so perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen’s naiveté? Philip Roth, 2007 Nathan Zuckerman, the familiar narrator of Roth’s 2007 Exit Ghost, tells us, by the novel’s end, that it is the last book he will write. In many ways, it is an exemplary exit for the title character of the 1979 novel The Ghost Writer; by this time, Zuckerman has become an author in his own right, after appearing nearly 30 years before to fantasize that Amy Bellette, the student and eventual mistress of his mentor, E. I. Lonoff, was none other than the living Anne Frank.1 Exit Ghost comes full circle from that early novel: although E. I. Lonoff has been gone a long time, Amy Bellette reappears, as provocative a writer as ever. However, like an aging and aged Zuckerman, Bellette also seems to be losing her memory.2 Both writers acknowledge that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, they’ve seen better days. While the novel is set in New York City during the 2004 presidential election, the events of 9/11 remain fresh in the characters’ minds. The entire novel feels foreboding, not only because of the foreshadowed amnesia of the two leading characters, but also by the sense of atmospheric terror following the 9/11 attacks, and most striking still, a sense of despair following the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004. In fact, it is difficult to determine whether the 2004 election that organizes the text is a figure for terror or the terror itself. What is perhaps more clear is that, although mentions of the 9/11 attacks remain in the background for the most part, the language associated with terror that appeared following those terrorist attacks pervades the discussions of 132

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the election, rendering the democratic election itself as a repeated act of terror upon the United States. The epigraph to this chapter sets the tone for the novel as a whole. When Zuckerman recalls the disputed presidential win of George W. Bush in 2000, he acknowledges the fact that voting citizens can be naïve no longer: the word “treacherous,” in particular, conjures a sense of betrayal, and implicitly asks what it would mean for the US government to behave traitorously “on behalf of” its own people. Additionally, the word “shameful” delivers several connotations — not only with regard to the notoriously shameful Roth, but also for a government embarrassed by its citizens’ innocence. At every turn, then, the terror and betrayal at the heart of the novel set against a backdrop of an attacked, still-wounded New York City arises paradoxically from the democratic system of the United States that not only votes for, but also trusts in, its elected officials. Zuckerman freely admits that he has been hiding from city life for several years. One of the most political chapters of his later works, “Under the Spell” (68–147) appears in Exit Ghost at first glance to narrate the ways in which Zuckerman falls under the spell of another intriguing young writer: Jamie Logan, who, with her husband, agrees to swap homes with Zuckerman so she can escape the perpetual fear of living in the city, and so he can be closer to Amy Bellette during her final days (36). However, the “spell” here also appears as a kind of political spell — a sense of being dumbfounded or entranced in the aftermath of Election Day in 2004. Zuckerman confesses: I dispelled a good half, if not more, of a lifetime’s allegiances and pursuits. After 9/11 I pulled the plug on the contradictions. Otherwise, I told myself, you’ll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman, the village grouch, manifesting the syndrome in all its seething ridiculousness: ranting and raving while you read the paper, and at night, on the phone with friends, roaring indignantly about the pernicious profitability for which a wounded nation’s authentic patriotism was about to be exploited by an imbecilic king, and in a republic, a king in a free country with all the slogans of freedom with which American children are raised. The despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush was not for one that had developed a strong interest in surviving as reasonably serene — and so I began to annihilate the abiding wish to find out. (69–70) Beginning with the line, “after 9/11,” one thinks Zuckerman is about to discuss the mentality of terror that encompasses a victimized 133

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New York — a major US city victimized by terrorists from elsewhere. However, as Zuckerman proceeds, it becomes clear that the villain here is the “imbecilic king”; it is he who exploits US patriotism with a kind of empty rhetoric provocative enough to lead a nation to war. Such key words as “syndrome,” “wounded,” “remission,” “surviving,” and “annihilate” all have associations with illness and/or trauma. However, if the language of trauma is evoked here, it is not simply to recall 9/11. Instead, it is used to recall a nation’s — and national leadership’s — actions in response to 9/11: a response that is considered equally as traumatic and unjust as the attacks themselves. For that reason — for the need to “annihilate the abiding wish to find out” — it seems fitting that Nathan Zuckerman will appear in fiction no more. The ultimate recorder of history, Zuckerman’s famous turn in the American Trilogy is nothing if not an attempt to find out about the trajectory of US history and the manner in which its founding ideals have been acted upon. Zuckerman’s attempt to dispel “a good half, if not more, of a lifetime’s allegiances and pursuits” comes not with the scathing humor or comedy of errors that we have come to associate with him, however. This Zuckerman is also more clearly a ventriloquizing Roth, one who no longer needs the alter ego of Zuckerman to interrogate American history through the safe distance of this fictional consciousness. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, “this is how this new novel differs from The Ghost Writer. Zuckerman is in mourning in Exit Ghost, he is a mourning man” (“Mourning Zuckerman,” 24). And if Zuckerman is a mourning man, many of Roth’s readers are in mourning, also, for the loss of this character. This double-sided idea of “mourning Zuckerman,” both in the sense that Zuckerman is a man in mourning in this final novel, as well as in the sense that readers have already come to mourn him in his absence, comes from Sigmund Freud’s famous 1917 treatise on “Mourning and Melancholia,” which considers differences in the way people respond to the loss of a loved one. “Mourning and Melancholia” wonders why some people seem to express typical sadness when they lose something important to them, a condition Freud terms “mourning,” and why others berate themselves and fall into a deep and dysfunctional depression, a condition Freud terms “melancholia.” Beyond the technical relevance of his definitions of mourning and melancholia here, however, it’s also interesting how Freud’s paper uncannily anticipates his own life 20 years later — a life that changed completely when, in March of 1938, Freud’s native country of Austria was occupied by German troops who put the Freud family under house arrest. As Mark Edmundson points out in his recent book, The Death of Sigmund Freud (2008), even though Freud was able to flee 134

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Vienna forever in June of that year, he left his home a dying man: a man who must confront his own mortality, and who is left, in his final days, only to mourn his beloved city, Vienna. Freud died in mourning himself, in England in September of 1939. For this reason, we might say that the concept of mourning, like the Angel of History, is always looking back — to that which is lost in the past — but also it looks forward to anticipate, at times, uncannily, a loss that is yet to come. According to Freud, “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (“Mourning and Melancholia,” 243). In that sense, we as readers of Roth’s best work, beginning with 1979’s The Ghost Writer, and we as readers who have lived with Zuckerman for 25 years, feel intensely the loss of the character who, following the 2007 novel Exit Ghost, allegedly will never return again. But, like Freud, who, in his own age, had foreseen the rise of Fascist Europe and mourned its effects, Zuckerman, too, is a man in mourning — a man who has lost not only loved ones, but also such “abstract ideals” as the freedom and democracy he once believed to be the founding ideals of the United States. While this traumatic loss of ideals is clear within the first pages of the famous Zuckerman-narrated American Trilogy composed of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), it is emphasized again in Exit Ghost, a novel not simply about the exploits of New Jersey’s precocious son, but also about what it means to be a man aging, a writer facing memory loss, a US citizen who has seen the effects of political corruption in his own country in the twenty-first century. In a 2006 interview with Mark Lawson, Philip Roth gives voice to the same sense of America’s lost ideals that Zuckerman bemoans in Exit Ghost; and he underscores this loss more clearly in the interview than the idiosyncrasies of his craft or the trajectory of his oeuvre. Lawson opens the interview with Roth by paying homage to the historical relevance of Roth’s fiction, suggesting that his recent novels about the United States “say more about America than a presidential address.” Such a move appears to authorize Roth to speak his mind about the era of George W. Bush, an era Roth recapitulates thus: “he was elected once on the basis of fraudulent tabulations of votes in Florida. It was a kind of electoral coup d’état; the second time he was elected on the back of fear.” Roth goes on to explain how this moment in 2000, and beyond, seemed far different than what he witnessed during the McCarthy era or the Vietnam War. He continues: “This is something unlike any of those. I’ve never heard people so despairing, as they weren’t during the Vietnam War. They were angry; 135

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opposition was enormous. Opposition finally ended the war. But there’s no pressure from the Democratic Party. It’s a sad moment really” (Roth, “Mark Lawson Talks to Philip Roth”). When Roth describes the present moment as sad, he too appears as a man in mourning; based on appearances, Roth seems to be there to talk to a British reporter not only about the political climate in his country, but also about its effects on the rest of the world. Lawson, however, redirects his line of questioning to Roth’s take on the impact of 9/11 on American history and politics in particular. And it is in this response that Roth is at his most literary, his most Zuckermanian, his most mournful in describing the traumatic legacy of 9/11: Devastating, yes: This criminal administration has hijacked the event to bankrupt the country financially, to go to war needlessly. What could be more criminal than that? To destroy every social program they possibly could that gave aid and comfort to people in need, to make lying . . . 90% of politics, to alienate America from the most of the world, to utterly destroy whatever moral prestige America still had, it is hardly a pure country, but there were things it stood for that were pretty good and that’s utterly destroyed. (“Mark Lawson Talks to Philip Roth”) While it is difficult to determine whether Roth prepared this response ahead of time, his haunting use of the rhetoric of hijacking has the effect of positioning the Bush administration as the country’s real terrorists: it is they who criminally sent the US into a needless war; it is they who alienated America from the rest of the world; it is they who destroyed America, not al-Qaeda. His anaphoric use of the infinitive — “to bankrupt”; “to go to war”; “to destroy”; “to make lying 90% of politics”; “to alienate”; “to utterly destroy” — places him in both the literary and political traditions of such American patriots as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, or the expatriate poet from China, Ha Jin, who uses anaphora in “They Come” in order to emphasize the haunting effects of a terrorist state. In his response to Lawson, Roth emphasizes destruction here not less than three times: “To destroy every social program”; “to utterly destroy whatever moral prestige America still had”; “and that’s utterly destroyed.” In this sense, Roth himself appears to mourn the destruction of American ideals — ideals that promised to protect its citizens from terrorists at home and abroad. This sense of loss is conveyed readily through Zuckerman in Exit Ghost — a book that purports to center on a plot devised by another writer, Richard Kliman, to undo the good name of E. I. Lonoff by writing an expose about Lonoff’s purported incestuous affair — but it also reinforces 136

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a more general, and political, sense of loss that appears in the beginning of the trilogy in American Pastoral (1997). For, in that work, as I argued in Chapter 3, Roth’s fiction turns away from the exuberance for America present in the previous novel, Sabbath’s Theater (1995); in the trilogy and after, the difference between the exuberance of Sabbath and the mourning of Zuckerman is the voice, the awareness, and the consciousness of the latter narrator — a consciousness, perhaps of the fact that the last shameful naivety has been beaten out of him, or that, relatedly, the kind of sexual shamelessness of Zuckerman we meet in the earlier works turns out, in fact, to be politically impotent. It seems only fitting, then, that we say goodbye to Zuckerman as a mourner in, and of, America in Exit Ghost, which appears as a post-9/11 novel in the truest sense. It is as though the post-9/11 state is no longer worthy of a creation like Zuckerman.3 The world is too much with him, we might say. In the true fashion of tragedy, it had become time for him to exit the stage. And even though the events or effects of 9/11 are never described at length in Exit Ghost, it is referred to right there on the first page in the first paragraph — it is thus the sign under which the novel is written, the novel in which we are forced to confront the final departure of Zuckerman. The post 9/11 world in which an “imbecilic king” capitalizes on a nation’s fear and patriotism appears as no longer adequate to sustain the figure who burst forth so optimistically on the literary scene in 1979 with The Ghost Writer, when he thought he could change his relationship with his family, indeed, the course of history, with the “simple” marriage to Anne Frank, survivor. Exit Ghost borrows its title from the repeated stage direction in Act I, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: a stage direction that is preceded by Horatio’s plea: “Stay! Speak, speak! I charge thee, speak!”4 Readers may likely feel the same way about Zuckerman, who appears, in Roth’s play-within-a-play, by novel’s end to be “Gone for good” (292). And we may also think of Roth himself as Horatio here, still wanting Zuckerman to speak. Though now, after nearly three decades featuring Zuckerman’s fraught sense of the writer’s position in the world, Exit Ghost seems to be his final farewell, and it is a farewell presented in the absence of both the Twin Towers, as well as a certain confidence in the ideals of a nation. In her work on trauma after 9/11, particularly in terms of the shattered ideals of a nation, E. Ann Kaplan argues that: “I did agree that the attacks broke through an illusory haze in which many Americans may have been living” (“Why Trauma Now?,” 15). She goes on to say, “Our nation really was and in 2004 still is ‘challenged’ by the attacks. They are a challenge to us in the sense that the United States has had to respond, to deal with 137

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the situation” (18). Exit Ghost takes this assessment one step further by not only criticizing the national and political response to the situation but also calling into question Zuckerman’s own response. It is as though his oncoming amnesia underscores his denial, until he starts paying attention to the 2004 election night results, which would produce, in effect, a kind of cultural amnesia as well. The novel seems to be asking: How many people figuratively exiled themselves after 9/11 in response not to another terrorist threat, but rather to the threats posed to the US founding ideals in the wake of the attacks? In fact, we learn as early as the second sentence of this final novel that Nathan Zuckerman had exiled himself to the Berkshires after 9/11. He reports: “Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what’s more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of loss — merely, at the outset, a kind of drought within me — I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment” (1).5 In this typical Zuckerman reflection, the personal is in the foreground, the political in the background: while the cancerous prostate is foremost in his mind, and remains there, at some level, throughout the entire novel, the national disaster “three years back” is buried at the end of a long sentence, but packs a punch nonetheless. Zuckerman’s confession to feeling “no sense of loss” already disorients the reader, especially given the internal “drought” referenced just before — a drought we might superficially associate with the sexual exploits of a younger Zuckerman, but which becomes clarified as the novel progresses to reveal an actual loss of meaningful relationships — with his country, but also with his past. After all, this novel, in part, forces Zuckerman to confront the dual losses of Amy Bellette and E. I. Lonoff, the mysterious refugee and the literary mentor, respectively, whose sexual history first captivated Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer. As in such other contemporary works as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Elina Hirvonen’s When I Forgot (2005), Don Delillo’s Falling Man (2007), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), and Anna Winger’s This Must Be the Place (2008), 9/11 and the impact of this American tragedy do not drive the plot of this novel, though it is certainly in the background with mentions of Ground Zero (15); election night of 2004, when the novel is set (52, 69, 97); and the exodus of New Yorkers following the collapse of the towers (157). However, this novel seems to be the one most willing to question directly which agency poses the biggest threat to the US as a nation. Of course, Zuckerman is no saint, and certainly cannot 138

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be considered the ideal citizen defending its ideals given the multiple references to his coping strategy of living in the past, holed up, as he is, in his cabin near Athena (52).6 In fact, Zuckerman’s disavowal of the present situation seems to be an important theme of the first section of the book: first we learn that he stops at the museum to immerse himself in the past instead of at Ground Zero — which functions peculiarly as a metaphor for the present time. Next, we learn that he even regrets buying the “Special Election Issue” of the New York Review of Books, saying: “I was sorry I bought it, and even when curiosity got the best of me, instead of starting with the table of contents and the opening pages of the election symposium, I began my reimmersion by tiptoeing in at the back, reading the classified advertisements” (28). It is only when Jamie and her husband invite him to participate, on some level, in the US political scene by spending election night with them does he fully understand the deterioration of the nation and the dismay of its people. Jamie and Billy Logan seem rather surprised at Zuckerman’s withdrawal from the world — a withdrawal for which Murray Ringold had already chastised him in I Married a Communist — using as he does self-preservation as the most convincing rationale, even though they, too, seem driven to the same strategy by the novel’s end. Zuckerman offers in defense of his decision to leave New York: Until well into my sixties, I’d not looked away, drifted off, turned my back, I’d tried my best to show no fear, but whatever work might remain could be completed without knowing or hearing more about Al Qaeda, terrorism, the war in Iraq, or the possible reelection of Bush. It was not advisable to collide with all this indignant, highly emotional crisis-brooding — I’d been more than susceptible to my own brand during the Vietnam years — and if I moved back to the city it wouldn’t be long before I was blanketed by it and by the not necessarily enlightening loquaciousness that accompanied such brooding and that, at the end of a nightlong spell submerged in its emptiness could leave you seething like a lunatic, shattered and stupid, and that surely had contributed to Jamie Logan’s decision to take flight. (43) I am consistently surprised by the sense of vulnerability Zuckerman describes here, as he has a tendency in many of the earlier works to depict himself as “hard-boiled” in the Hemingway sense. Here, the self-preservation for which Zuckerman argues is more about protecting himself from psychic wounding than from an actual terrorist attack. The passive structure, “It was not advisable” makes one wonder who his 139

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advisor is; more than likely, it is Zuckerman’s own inclination that keeps him out of the present moment, wary as he is given his susceptibility to “highly emotional crisis-brooding” during Vietnam. The poetic nature of the end of this passage reinforces the kind of violence — psychic, physical — he is trying to escape. With the repetition of the “p” and “b” plosives, one has a sense that Zuckerman feels as though he is already taking in the news as a series of blows to the chest: “blanketed,” “by” and “by” again; “brooding”; “spell”; “submerged”; “emptiness”; and “stupid” are key words here. “Blanketed” is striking because it is normally a word associated with comfort. “Shattered” is another odd choice in diction — at the very least, an incredibly dramatic way to discuss the effects of “loquaciousness” on the people. Clearly, Zuckerman wants no part of it. It is with a bit of irony, then, that the novel continues. In fact, there is a kind of Godfather-like aspect to the middle section of the novel. One can hear Al Pacino’s emotive “Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in” line from The Godfather III (1990) behind those moments when Zuckerman speaks with Jamie and Billy about politics. Certainly, Zuckerman is not prepared for the constant worrying, and later, fulminating, about the state of the national political scene in 2004: the year he stepped into like a “Rip Van Winkle” character who was happily living in the past of his personal library before deciding to visit New York. Only Billy’s most uncanny sense of history seems adequate to get Zuckerman, literally, up to date: speaking in 2004, in a novel published in 2007, Billy predicts the collapse of a nation from inside the bubble, a collapse that was exceedingly clear by 2008. At a point when it is still pretty obvious to him that Kerry will win the 2004 election, Billy says: “These guys would have devastated the country . . . had they won a second term. We’d had bad presidents and we’ve survived, but this one’s the bottom. Serious cognitive deficiencies. Dogmatic. A tremendously limited ignoramus about to wreck a very great thing . . . It’s amazing they pulled it off for even one term. It’s terrifying to think what they would have done with a second term. These are terrible, evil guys. But their arrogance and their lies finally caught up with them.” (72) On the one hand, we may need to confront the “arrogance” of someone like Billy himself. On the other hand, his anger seems to capture the frustrations of many New Yorkers surrounding that particular election. As though the hijackers of the twenty-first century were not the members of the Al-Qaeda cell that hijacked the planes, but rather the political party of George W. Bush, Billy talks about that administration as terrorizing 140

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the country with such words as “devastated”; “wreck”; “terrifying”; “terrible,” and “evil.” The weapon of terror, however, is ignorance: “serious cognitive deficiencies” — which surprisingly comes out in fragment form from an unusually articulate character. Jamie, in her characteristic tendency to repeat what her husband says several pages later, echoes this sentiment, this fear, when she says: “‘I don’t know what I’d do if Bush gets back in. It’ll be the end of the road for a whole way of political life. All their intolerance focuses on a liberal society. It’ll mean that the values of liberalism will continue to be reversed. It’ll be terrible. I don’t think I could live with it’” (81–2). This begins the most devastating 20 pages of the book — pages where intellectual, liberal elites, Zuckerman now among them — confront the reality of the political climate, post-9/11, in which they live. In an attempt to comfort Jamie, Zuckerman says, coming off as a bit infantilizing: “‘It’s a flexible instrument that we’ve inherited,’ I told her. ‘It’s amazing how much punishment we can take’” (82). This is an idea to which Zuckerman returns a few pages later — clearly, the founding documents are on his mind — although the statement about the “flexibility” of the “instrument” sounds more like he is describing a body part than the Constitution of the United States. And then something interesting happens: Jamie borrows the language and values of al-Qaeda to talk about ways to defend the country against the new terrorist, George W. Bush. Jamie continues: “‘There’s nothing to stop them now, except Al Qaeda’” (85). On the one hand, Jamie seems to be saying that, in defending the country against al-Qaeda, it would have to put its best values forward; however, she also could be suggesting that the only way to fight the terror of the Bush administration is with the terror of al-Qaeda. Zuckerman picks up on this extremist view when he admits: I thought to repeat, It’s amazing how much punishment we can take. I thought to say, If in America you think like you do, nine times out of ten you fail. I thought to say, It’s bad, but not like waking up the morning after Pearl Harbor was bombed. It’s bad, but not like waking up the morning after Kennedy was shot. It’s bad, but not like waking up the morning after Martin Luther King was shot. It’s bad, but not like waking up the morning after the Kent State students were shot. I thought to say, We have all been through it. But I said nothing. She didn’t want words anyway. She wanted murder. She wanted to wake up the morning after George Bush had been shot. (86) The repetition of the phrase, “It’s bad, but” is incredibly moving here: each “but” followed by another example of the violence done to the icons 141

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of US democratic principles makes manifest such philosophically elusive values as “freedom” and “equal rights.” Zuckerman also reveals his own experience, rendering Jamie and Billy perhaps the most naïve of all for believing that the events of the twenty-first century were the worst in the nation’s history. It’s unclear whether Zuckerman empathizes with Jamie here — “She wanted murder” is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but again the rhetoric of murder, which has only become more ominous in the wake of 9/11, seems to present George W. Bush as the true terrorist of the state. Following the conversation with Jamie and Billy, Zuckerman has a similar conversation with Kliman. It is the first full morning after the 2004 election, and — again — the atmosphere in New York is described as it was described the week of 2001 following the attacks. Zuckerman observes: “It was dreadful in New York the next day, a lot of enraged people walking around looking glum and disbelieving. It was quiet, the traffic so thin you could barely hear it in Central Park, where I had gone to meet Kliman on a bench not far from the Metropolitan” (93). It must be significant that the Metropolitan comes back into view here — an exemplar of the importance of valuing the past, especially in the midst of such a dreadful present. Kliman reinforces this view when he says: “It’s a dark day, Mr. Zuckerman. I’ve been eating crow all morning. I couldn’t believe it would happen. People voted for moral values? What values are those? Lying to get us into war? The idiocy! . . . I haven’t slept. Nobody I know has slept. A friend of mine who works at the Forty-second Street library phoned to tell me that there are people crying on the library steps” (94). Most of this language is also post-9/11 language: “dark day”: “disbelief; “war”; “insomnia”; “crying”; and so forth. The one thing that is different is what is in the middle: the observation that people have voted the reality into being. The United States, in other words, isn’t the terrorist group we have come to associate with al-Qaeda; it is a democratic nation where people’s voices are apparently heard. And yet other people are so terrorized that they are crying in the street. What is perhaps the final blow here is the realization that non-New Yorkers took 9/11 as their rallying cry to re-elect an imbecilic king, which, in turn, re-terrorized New York. Even as he says “I did not intrude on the public drama; the public drama did not intrude on me,” Zuckerman is very much a part of this day of reckoning (95). He later reflects, drawing once more from the vocabulary of trauma:

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Kerry’s loss to Bush was taking a prominent place in the cluster of extreme historical shocks that would mentally shape their American kinship, as Vietnam had publicly defined their parents’ generation and as the Depression and the Second World War had organized the expectations of my parents and their friends. There has been the barely concealed chicanery that had given Bush the presidency in 2000; there had been the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the indelible memory of the doll-like people leaping from the high windows of the burning towers; and now there was this, a second triumph by the ‘ignoramus’ they loathed as much for his undeveloped mental faculties as for his devious nuclear fairy tales. (97) To put a lost election in the list of such historical traumas as Vietnam, World War II, and the suicides of people falling from the Twin Towers is pretty bold of Zuckerman. But, then again, when read closely enough, the use of the word “chicanery” — a seventeenth-century French word for legalized deceit or abuse of legal forms — suggests a collapse of innocence just as compelling as it was during the Vietnam era and the Depression. Further, that an “ignoramus” has taken the reins illegally of what was once the most powerful country on the globe reads like something out of Plot Against America, a point that has been suggested powerfully since the publication of that Roth novel as well. But the diction here, i.e. “ignoramus,” also reads like an indictment of liberal elitism — at once chastising those who voted for Bush but also those who understand his failure as a leader through his limited vocabulary rather than his lies about Saddam Hussein. So, when Zuckerman proclaims himself as “gone for good” toward the end of the novel, we simultaneously believe him in the sense that the world is too much with him; however, we also might understand this as a bit of Zuckerman’s own clever “chicanery.” (I cannot help but worry, for example, that after all this time I spent “mourning Zuckerman,” he may appear in yet another novel in the twenty-first century.)7 At least for now, however, it does seem as though he is gone for good, and he has taken our sense of the right-thinking ways of the American democracy with him. The difference is that, while our relationship with American ideals may change with new leadership, Zuckerman’s absence will remain. It seems a promise when he says, during a two-page parenthetical section exactly halfway through the book, “Nothing is certain any longer except that this will likely be my last attempt to persist in groping for words to combine into the sentences and paragraphs of a book. Because permanent groping is what it is now, a groping that goes well beyond the anxious groping for fluency that writing is to begin with” (159). The hard sound of the 143

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“g” here, as exemplified in the word “groping” that appears four times, carries with it the impact of a drowning infant, especially considering that our once-virile Zuckerman may, just a decade or two before, have been groping at women rather than at shards of unsatisfying memories. At a more base level, he may perhaps be groping for one last erection, given his repeated description of the Constitution as a “flexible instrument” following his prostate surgery. In any case, Zuckerman is aware of loss at every level: both the political, the national, following the election, but also as the most personal: “This time it was my mind,” he says, “and this time my foreboding was being given more than a moment’s notice, though, for all I knew, not much more” (162). For as serious as this moment is, the double sense of the word “groping” here refers to his relationship with Jamie Logan — the woman he seeks to recreate before he ends his career; the woman who gives voice to the many disillusioned about American politics in the wake of 9/11. Ultimately turning on the American people and founding ethos, Jamie asks Zuckerman with vitriol, referring to Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: “‘And how to you like your America now,’ she asked me, ‘on the first day of the second coming?’” (107). She appears to compare George W. here to the “rough beast” which “crouches toward Bethlehem to be born”: reversing the Christian rhetoric that was such a large part of his platform in order to render him a kind of criminal Antichrist. In a brassy, self-referential move, Zuckerman recreates Jamie’s fears about the Bush administration in his last finished creative work: a dialogue, or “play within a play,” entitled He and She which is at once reminiscent of the self-referential dialogue between lovers in Roth’s 1990 novel Deception and an allusion to the Chekhov story “He and She” (146). In Zuckerman’s version, “She” ultimately reinforces the vision of Bush as the terrorist after 9/11, not al-Qaeda, nor any part of the rest of the world. “She” says: “It’s not Al Qaeda that scares me — it’s my own government” (126). “She” also, unlike Zuckerman the character or Zuckerman the writer of this dialogue, signifies the present — the opposite of Zuckerman’s protective need to live in the past. Although, living in the present, for her, carries with it its own kind of extremism. As she says: “The pain of being present in the present moment. Yes, that could be said to describe very neatly the extreme thing I’m doing. But for you it wasn’t merely that present moment. It was being present at all. It was being present in the presence of anything” (137, emphasis in original). Again, we have a reference to time here — not the pain of the past, but of the present: a time, at least for Zuckerman and Jamie, that is too much. The effect of living in the present day of New York in 2004 — the “upheaval” in the city in the sense of both national politics 144

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and Zuckerman’s personal confrontation — sends him back to his retreat in the Berkshires near Athena College, where we met him in 1979. The tone at the end of the novel is more mournful than at the beginning; the sentences and thoughts are also more convoluted, revealing the disintegration of Zuckerman’s memory and linguistic capabilities before the readers’ eyes. Zuckerman says: The upheaval in New York had taken little more than a week. There is no more worldly in-the-world place than New York . . . and I’d thought to come back in from where I’d been, to resume residence there reembodied, to take on all things I’d decided to relinquish — love, desire, quarrels, professional conflict, the whole messy legacy of the past — and instead, as in a speeded-up old movie, I passed through for the briefest moment, only to pull out to come back here. All that happened is that things almost happened, yet I returned as through from some massive happening. I attempted nothing really, for a few days just stood there, replete with frustration, buffeted by the merciless encounter between the no-longers and the not-yets. That was humbling enough. (279) In a kind of Arnoldian fashion, Zuckerman sees himself as “wandering between two worlds” — the world of the past and the world of the future. Stuck in the present time in New York City — precisely where he does not want to be — Zuckerman understands his experience as an “upheaval,” which is most clear a few lines down when he tries to talk about time gone awry: “all that happened is that things almost happened” — a kind of nonsensical, empty statement, leading him to experience that week, nonetheless, as some “massive happening.” One is left to wonder if this is Zuckerman at his most philosophical, proving a brilliant statement about the experience of time out of joint in the twenty-first century, or whether he has totally lost it here — piecing together a series of words that populate the text, in no particular order, leading to no particular meaning. The language of failure permeates this passage, setting up Roth’s Nemesis tetralogy to come: Zuckerman for a long time now, he tells us, has been sexually impotent. The same seems to be true of his sense of himself as a man in the world as well. The passage also ends with the word “humbling” — the title of one of the four novels that compose the tetralogy — humbling being precisely the term to describe what it means to be ineffectual in the world. Therefore, it seems like that is where the novel should end — with the final resolve of Zuckerman back home near the Athena campus where we first met him in 1979. However, the novel closes with the final scene 145

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in the play he is writing, “He and She,” where “She” (Jamie) says she will visit “He” (Zuckerman) in his New York hotel. In other words, the fiction within the fiction gets the last word. When he hangs up the phone after they plan to meet, however, he packs his bags and flees. The note in Zuckerman’s final scene tells us “He” disintegrates — the character along with the author. “Gone for good” are the last, self-referential words of the text. He is gone, Zuckerman is gone, and — along with it — political sanity in the US as marked by the 2004 election of Bush over Kerry. If the al-Qaeda terrorist cell does not destroy America, believe the “no-longers” and the “not-yets,” then the new president will: much like The Dying Animal in 2001, it uncannily foreshadows the future of a nation in terror.

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CHAPTER 9

“THE GRAVEST MEANING”: TRAUMA AND THE TETRALOGY OF THE GRAVE

And for that he had paid a high price in assigning the gravest meaning to his story. Philip Roth, 2010 Death by cardiac arrest. Death by war. Death by suicide. Death by polio. These are the outcomes for the protagonists in Roth’s four most recent novels: Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), and Nemesis (2010), respectively. The well-known and playful list of “Books by Philip Roth” in the front of the latter novel — the list is a shifting, self-referential genre in its own right — categorizes these four titles as: “Nemeses: Short Novels.” The nemesis underwriting all of these novels, Roth says in an interview with Jeffrey Trachenberg in the Wall Street Journal, is “that which you can’t conquer” — and as the outcome of these books makes clear, “that which you can’t conquer” is death itself (Roth, “Roth on Roth”). Following the long and dense novels of the American Trilogy, particularly, these slim novels seem to embody an interest in a different kind of storytelling, in a novel that seems like a different genre altogether. Regarding this new turn, he told Trachenberg that he had recently been thinking of the shorter work of Saul Bellow. For Roth, “You have to be able to compress and condense,” he says. “That’s the skill, to condense and pack a punch at the same time” (“Roth on Roth”). Such compression seems to characterize the later work of Philip Roth. In fact, much has been done on this idea of “Late Roth,” inspired by Edward Said’s essay on what he describes as “Late Style.” As early as 2008, in the context of a roundtable discussion of Roth’s Exit Ghost, Michael Rothberg asserted that we ought to consider Roth as a “kind of public intellectual” in conversation with Said’s ideas about “late style” — particularly that moment when Said asks: “what of artistic lateness, not as 147

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harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contraction. What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity and ‘ripeness is all?’” (quoted in Royal, “Zuckerman Unsound,” 20). For Rothberg, “this notion of talking about late style as a way of talking about this problem of aging is really key” (20).1 Matthew Shipe extends this idea in a later essay that begins with an epigraph from Theodor Adorno: “In the history of art late works are the catastrophes” (quoted in Shipe, “Exit Ghost and the Politics of ‘Late Style,’” 189). In his thinking about Exit Ghost, Shipe focuses on the “potential political implications that are contained within Zuckerman’s departure” and he concludes by pointing out that, “for as death-obsessed as much of his late fiction has been, it seems oddly appropriate that Roth would spare Zuckerman the grim reality of death” (201). The protagonists of the tetralogy, frankly, should be so lucky. Everyman, the first book in the series, begins with a scene at the grave: “Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his advertising colleagues from New York, who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him” (1). While we have come to expect a powerful “gravesite” scene in every one of Roth’s major, later works — I am thinking here of Mickey mourning at Drenka’s grave in Sabbath’s Theater; Coleman Silk’s funeral scene in The Human Stain; the funerals of the boys who have died from polio in Nemesis (just to name a few) — it is rather startling to meet a Rothian protagonist, for the first time, when he is dead. It brings to mind, in fact, the opening scene from Elie Wiesel’s The Forgotten (1990), which also begins in medias res with Malkiel at the gravesite of his grandfather, also named Malkiel. As in Roth’s fiction, the narrative structure (beginning in the middle) reinforces the disorientation Malkiel feels in the graveyard, a disorientation that is not fully resolved until we learn of Grandfather Malkiel’s role in the ghetto, further contributing to the uncanniness of Malkiel seeing his own name on a grave (12, 111–14). It is as though the trauma before the grave is the trauma of facing — literally, in the case of Malkiel — one’s own death. As with The Forgotten, it is not a stretch to say that these later novellas of Roth are not only obsessed with death, but also with questions about legacy and intergenerational haunting inherited by all of us. All of these grave scenes, although compellingly written and important to the chronology of the respective novels at hand, also function significantly as figures for a kind of unresolved, and perhaps unrecognized, mourning: a kernel that remains of the deceased and all they represent, revealing how our ancestors may be gone, but not forgotten, and certainly not insignificant forces in our own lives. 148

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So, in the first novel of the tetralogy, Everyman, an allusion to an anonymous fifteenth century allegorical play, when the sons of “Everyman” appear in the catalogue of mourners at his grave, we initially understand them and their relationship with their father as contentious possibly because of a clash of personalities and disagreements over politics, the nature of fiction, personal decisions (as we have come to expect of fathers and their children in Roth’s oeuvre). The novel proceeds: Then came the sons . . . as closely linked with each other as they’d been irreconcilably alienated from the dead father. But once [the younger brother, Lonny had] taken a clod of dirt in his hand, his entire body began to tremble and quake, and it looked as though he were on the edge of violently regurgitating. He was overcome with feeling from his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release. When he opened his mouth, nothing emerged except a series of grotesque gasps, making it appear likely that whatever had him in its grip would never be finished with him. (13) Again, here is the echo of Faulkner’s famous statement: “the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.” As Roth tells us, the connection of the brothers is the inverse of the connection with their father, from whom they are “irreconcilably alienated” — the sound of the phrase itself a mouthful of linguistic stumbling blocks like the “antagonism” that denied the release of a cry. The unspeakable described in terms of “a series of grotesque gasps” is not simply the death of the father, but a struggle against all he represented and continues to represent. The dominance of the father, we learn, “will never be finished with” Lonny; it will never let him go. The same “hold” can be discussed with regard to intergenerational conflict overall. For scholars of the contemporary American literary period, in particular, such a phrase is usually used as shorthand for the Oedipal dynamic of “children who do not get along with their parents” in canonical texts. Indeed, it is an important characteristic of much of the literature from this period. But here we might ask, following Freud: To what end? Why are these contentious father–son (particularly) dynamics played out so thoroughly in so many important contemporary works, Roth’s novels exemplarily so? The answer, I propose, goes all the way back to the nation’s founding. As one student provocatively noted, “all of the founding documents function as a big middle finger pointed at our forebears overseas” (Jarvis).2 It is not a stretch to say that such a democratic rejection of “our royal fathers” in England underwrites the whole of the American literary canon in the reenactment of sons rejecting their fathers’ ideals in search for a more viable futurity.3 149

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Even in these “compressed” and “condensed” late novellas, the historical memory of the nation’s founding is not far from view. In Indignation, for example, Marcus Messner, who chafes against the overbearing protection of his father — a father who is overcome by fear (referred to four times on page 2/3 and three more times on page 3) that his son will die — reads aloud to his mother from “the first volume of [Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s] The Growth of the American Republic” when his mother asks him to read her something from any one of his college textbooks (167). Marcus’s mother tells him that she wants to hear what he is learning, so Marcus proceeds: “Thomas Jefferson,” I began, “ruminating years later on the events of a crowded lifetime, thought that his election to the Presidency marked as real a revolution as that of 1776. He had saved the country from monarchy and militarism, and brought it back to republican simplicity. But there never had been any danger of monarchy; it was John Adams who saved the country from militarism, and a little simplicity cannot be deemed revolutionary.” (167) Even the national hero, Thomas Jefferson, seems to have an inflated sense of his place in history, especially as it relates to his legacy among the generations. To be dismissed as “simple” rather than “revolutionary” seems to counter everything we assume to be true about Jefferson, and surely what he thought about himself. In fact, Marcus tells us that he continued to read aloud this version of American history, at first to placate his mother, but then continuing even after she has fallen asleep (168). He admits: “Now she was fully asleep, but I did not stop. Madison. Monroe. J. Q. Adams. I’d read right on through to Harry Truman if that was what it took to ease the woes of my having left her behind alone with a husband now out of control” (168). In this oddly self-referential moment, in other words, Marcus reads dozens of passages representing the history of US presidents throughout the generations — representations of generations and political voices that necessarily clashed throughout the years — in order to distract his mother from the intergenerational conflict in her very own family. This may be a small plot point, but it is telling within the context of the novel overall: Marcus dies, after all, after failing to heed his father’s advice and going off to fight the Korean War, a war that, in many cases, divided generations, was tied to the rhetoric of the founding ideals, and venerated with lofty rhetoric, as personified in the speech made by the president of a Midwestern university that had succeeded, at every turn, in alienating Marcus (217–24). 150

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The conflict at the heart of Roth’s latest work, Nemesis, is less overtly about intergenerational strain. In fact, it appears to look not back to the American Revolution in any way but forward to an empty future. As such, in these closing pages I am interested less in the way the tetralogy considers the traumatic ideals of democracy and more in its investment in a new problem — perhaps one related to aging, on the surface, but also one that is related to the problem of futurity. Nemesis begins in Newark, New Jersey, with Bucky Cantor trying to minimize the fear in his role as playground director during the height of the polio epidemic in 1944; the novel’s setting moves in the middle to Indian Hill, a summer camp where Bucky escapes with his privileged fiancé, Marcia, as a camp counselor to escape the epidemic.4 And it comes full circle back to Newark in 1971, where the narrator, Arnold Mesnikoff — one of the boys from Bucky’s playground — runs into Bucky on the street after he has been crippled by polio, having carried the polio to Indian Hill himself. This novel, like Indignation before it, feels like a shift because the graves that the reader confronts are the graves of young people; with many of Roth’s later works taking on the perspective of older men, primarily, we — to this point — have come to expect a reflection on the aging process. When Arnie reports to the reader, “We had reached the hardest part of the story,” the part that makes it hardest is not the crippling effects of polio but rather Bucky’s rejection of the family life he could have shared with Marcia out of a combination of martyrdom, self-punishment, and stubbornness. In the end of this novel, there is no future — not for Bucky, not for the multitudes of children who died of polio. In a typical scene after a child dies from the disease (in this case, Alan Michaels) an adult inevitably observes: “‘A boy — tragedy strikes a boy. The cruelty of it! . . . The meaninglessness of it! A terrible disease drops from the sky and somebody is dead overnight. A child, no less!’” (48). It is worth noting here that, in 1941, the cause and spread of polio was still unknown, resulting in further terror from parents and the health community. We might also consider the ways in which the novel draws attention to the anti-Semitic theories that circulated in Newark at the time, wondering, as they did, why the disease seemed to “drop from the sky” in the Jewish community in particular (192–3). J. M. Coetzee, in that vein, reads this latest novel as an allegory for the tendency to persecute groups of people needlessly for those realities we do not understand.5 For Bucky Cantor, this confusion translates into Bucky’s bitter relationship with God, an issue that pervades the text and serves as the heart of Bucky’s break with Marcia. During the haunting graveyard scene of Alan Michaels’s burial, for example, Bucky’s voice takes over Artie’s as the narrator to describe how “[t]hey all joined the rabbi in reciting the 151

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mourner’s prayer, praising God’s almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly, the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death” (74). The narrative, in fact, proceeds for another two pages in this way, culminating with: Yes, better by far to praise the irreplaceable generator that has sustained our existence from its beginning — better by far to honor in prayer one’s tangible daily encounter with that ubiquitous eye of gold isolated in the blue body of the sky and its immanent power to incinerate the earth — than to swallow the official lie that God is good and truckle before a cold-blooded murderer of children. (76) The understanding of the eye of God as the burning hot sun that contributed to the fear and misery of the children of Weequahic is reinforced by the book’s original jacket: colored bright yellow with three faded yellow discs that deliver connotations of the unrelenting sun. But perhaps the most striking idea of God as villain is in the assessment of him as a cold-blooded murderer, rendered here as a kind of infanticidal maniac — a thought that is only lessened when Bucky talks with Marcia in the beginning, as then “he was almost able to forget his outrage with God for the murderous persecution of Weequahic’s innocent children” (135). This is a lingering frustration that stays with Bucky, and even encounters with Marcia cannot stifle it ultimately. After reuniting at the summer camp, for example, Bucky wants to bring it up with her — and ultimately does — but wonders first whether it was “a subject matter entirely too grave for the moment, and irrelevant really” (169). This commingling of the two meanings of the word “grave” — death, on the one hand, and gravity on the other, happens again in the novel, when Arnie tells us, regarding Bucky’s narration of the end of their affair, that: “And for that he had paid a high price in assigning the gravest meaning to his story” (273). Although much has been said about the beauty of the novel’s final pages — pages that recast Bucky as Herculean god because of the grace with which he threw the javelin (275–80), I cannot help but linger on the idea that this final novel of the tetralogy — a tetralogy noted for its obsession with death and stylistic compression — ends without a sense of futurity: it’s not that God is dead simply, in this vision, but that all the children are dead and God has killed them. Having said that, then, what we might say of the late style is not only that Roth’s works have turned repeatedly toward death, but that his actual style has changed too: in aiming for compression in these novellas, the sentences themselves betray a kind of minimalism. In all senses — in both form and content — there 152

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is a dramatic wearing away of the body, of the corpus, of the work. And in this we might see an allegory — as Coetzee has — of what is left of the meaning of life in twenty-first century America. A direct obsession with the nation’s founding has seemed to drop out of this final text, and it has been replaced with the death of the individual, or many individuals, at the hands not of failed ideals, but of a murderous God. Surely, all we know is Bucky Cantor’s reading of history and of God; this is not Roth’s voice after all. But the very fact of its obsession with the grave says something important about where we are as a nation following our centuries-long experiment with democracy with an eye toward human rights. Allegorically speaking, who or what has ultimately died here? What is being, or necessarily must be, buried: a fantasy of omnipotence, possibly, of a government that recognizes equality, of the trust in human empowerment over all? Finally, we might reconsider our own place in this grave history, in the generational line, in the twenty-first century, as we turn to face our nemeses.

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Notes to Chapter 1: Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works 1 See de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement”; “The Epistemology of Metaphor”; and The Resistance to Theory. 2 See sections 2 and 4 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in particular. 3 Indeed, somehow Freud’s realization that hysteria must involve elements of unacknowledged fantasy has proved more controversial than his original suspicion of widespread sexual abuse in fin de siècle Vienna. 4 For a more extended analysis of this dynamic see Jason B. Jones, “The Time of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis and the Past,” Postmodern Culture 14.3 (May 2004). 5 According to Steven Milowitz, Roth “employs a style that inverts the conditions of the Holocaust world. The world of anxiety, of choicelessness and fear, of ideology and judgment, of unambiguous language and definitive truth is rewritten to become a world where choice is reborn, where ideology is indefensible, where language thrives in rich play of meaning, and where truth remains elusive” (Philip Roth Reconsidered, 53). Roth’s ambiguous and playful style, in other words, is a continuous counter to the rigidity and fixed universe of fascism that authored the Holocaust. Michael Rothberg, in “Roth and the Holocaust” has responded to Milowitz compellingly by arguing “it is less the Holocaust and its impact on American life that obsesses Roth than the unbridgeable distance between the Holocaust and American life — and the inauthenticity of most attempts to lessen that distance” (53). 6 As a kind of elegant coda to this book, Lepore’s “The Commandments: The Constitution and its worshippers” appears in the January 17, 2011, issue of the New Yorker, where she points out that the Constitution has been read by surprisingly few Americans — it is rarely formally taught, after all — and 154

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7 8 9

10

of those Americans who have read the Constitution, surprisingly few are equipped to understand it. “If you haven’t read the Constitution lately, do,” she persuades: “Chances are, you’ll find that it doesn’t exactly explain itself ” (72). Cited in Royal’s 2005 essay on American Pastoral, “Pastoral Dreams and National Identity in American Pastoral and I Married a Communist.” See Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of the stakes of this argument. While I hesitate to limit my discussion of Roth in terms of the Jewish American experience, it is difficult not to consider how his fiction seeks to undo the myth of the American experience as promoted by such series as “The Jewish People in America,” sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society. Further, texts with a similar recuperative project such as Gerald Sorin’s The Prophetic Minority (1985) from the “The Modern Jewish Experience Series” and Henry Feingold’s A Midrash on American Jewish History (1982), in which Feingold admits outright: “it should not surprise the reader that the author is comparatively optimistic concerning the contemporary Jewish condition” (x), seem to be in Roth’s line of sight throughout the later works. See also Lepore (2010) and Wood, Revolutionary Characters (2006), for historical analyses of this significant date.

Notes to Chapter 2: “I pledge a legion to the flag”: Drenka Balich’s Malapropisms and the Traumatic Sublime of the Flag 1 Ranen Omer-Sherman reads Sabbath as “a surrogate for the post-assimilationist Jew who experiences his loss of the past as an annihilating force beyond his control”; and, ultimately, he claims: “The true significance of Sabbath’s encounters with death, impotence, and loss relate to Roth’s mythic representation of the annihilation of the Jewish subject” (“A Little Stranger in the House,” 178–9). Whereas Kakutani reads this Roth text as “static,” “claustrophobic,” “sour,” “nasty” (and, as a result, decidedly not funny!), and “lugubrious,” Omer-Sherman reads the text as deeply mournful, interpreting Sabbath as a kind of Sisyphus doomed to live, given the greatest, and final, lines of the novel: “He could not fucking die . . . Everything he hated was here” (451). However, as I contend here, there is real humor in this novel and a tremendous amount of life. As a result I see it as perpetually forward-thinking, perhaps as a way to counter what the novel also criticizes as a static element in American culture, one that has persisted since the Puritans. 2 Posnock reads this moment differently, but compellingly: For him, “Drenka possesses a male carnality and love of pursuit; Sabbath at one point rhapsodizes, ‘I am Drenka! I am Drenka,’ ‘licking from his fingers’ the ‘sperm’ of one of her old lovers who has masturbated on the grave (she dies early in the novel) after placing a bouquet and drenching it” (169). 155

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3 Most critics read this novel, as they do The Dying Animal, as balancing in some way love and death — Thanatos and Eros. See Mellard, Zucker, and Kelleter for fine examples of this line of reasoning. While I am more interested in looking at the humor here, in the tradition of Safer, Halio, and Neelakantan, I consider the novel’s humor singularly through the figure of Drenka as a life-giving force in the face of historical trauma precisely because of her rejection of the Puritan ideals. Finally, in his fine new book, Philip Roth, David Brauner reads Sabbath’s Theater for its insights — through Mickey Sabbath — on mortality and masculinity, providing an incredibly persuasive interpretation of the pornographic transcription recounting a telephone conversation between Sabbath and Kathy Goolsbee, a moment that showcases Roth’s wit and precociousness as a writer. 4 John Driscoll: MA politician who defeated three people named John Kennedy; November 30, 1993, the day President Clinton signed the Brady Gun Control Bill. 5 See also pages 324–8; 365–70; 398–451.

Notes to Chapter 3: American Pastoral and the Traumatic Ideals of Democracy 1 Keeping in mind the role of national identity in American history, Royal’s article brings together the two dominant critical perspectives on the novel — ethnic identity, on the one hand, and American history and founding documents, on the other hand — and ultimately claims that all three novels in the American Trilogy “show how individual identity embodies national identity and how the forces of history — American history, specifically — threaten to overtake personal freedom and individual agency” (187). In thinking about the novel from the perspective of national history more generally, his argument goes beyond the ethnicity vs 1960s dichotomy, and opens up the text to a reading that returns to Roth’s interest in the eighteenth century. 2 For critical readings of this novel as representing contemporary American ethnicity, see Debra Shostak, Gary Johnson, Hana Wirth-Nesher, and Timothy Parrish. Shostak, for example, explains that: “American Pastoral is designed to demonstrate what the wages of such self-invention might be for the Jew in America” (100). For her, “Although it remains unspoken by Nathan, the implication that hovers behind this urge to forget is that the Swede gives the American Jews license to repress their knowledge of what was happening to the European Jews” (101). Johnson claims that “[t]he Swede emerges as a figure who represents the potential of American victory and Jewish survival. . . . Perhaps more interesting, however, is the Swede’s role in an even more particularly Jewish narrative. In this scenario, the protagonist represents the potential for overcoming a kind of Jewish angst” (238–9). Nesher, relatedly, claims that “[t]he Jewishness 156

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in Roth’s more recent writing goes beyond chronicling the last stages of assimilation . . . by taking the form of a vaguely felt duty to identify with the most recent Jewish past, namely the Holocaust. Roth’s work is marked by the discomfort of the American Jew who has never suffered as a result of his Jewishness, but is heir to a tradition that, from his point of view, is characterized by suffering” (23). Most compelling, perhaps, of the category of “ethnic perspectives” on the novel, is Parrish’s claim that, in American Pastoral, “Roth allows Zuckerman to raise [the] question [‘where was the Jew in him?’] precisely so he can explore the deleterious consequences of forsaking one’s Jewish origins. . . . With American Pastoral Roth in a sense completes his assimilation story by rendering judgment upon its naïve hopefulness” (133). Parrish’s reading emphasizes the role that narrative invention plays in the novel — not simply an attribute of the Zuckerman storytelling we have come to appreciate, but also an attribute of Levov himself, a character who has inserted himself, unquestioningly, into the invented narrative of the American Pastoral. 3 See, in particular, the work of Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Bonnie Lyons, and Marshall Bruce Gentry. For Stanley, “Roth portrays the members of the ‘greatest generation’ who were baffled by the demythologizing decade of the sixties with sympathy, but he also critiques the myths by which they lived and exposes their refusal to acknowledge how that very mythology might propagate the social and economic injustices that sixties radicals battled” (3). Further, Lyons argues that, “Although Zuckerman is ostensibly writing American Pastoral in 1995, the America he dramatizes is mostly the America from World War II through Vietnam and Watergate. . . . The very title of the book . . . underscores the centrality of America in the novel and suggests that a whole period of American history can be seen as a collective pastoral, a beautiful and fragile bubble bound to burst” (126). Gentry connects the novel’s foundation in the radical movement of the 1960s with its feminist undertones, suggesting ultimately that, “Roth has written a feminist novel about how Swede and the culture, the politics, and the economic system he represents, have at least indirectly produced the nightmares they suffer. The novel blames the tumult of the 1960s on the culture of twentieth-century America as the male protagonist embodies them, and the various female reactions to Swede, taken as a whole, refute his reputation as the world’s nicest guy” (163). For additional critical essays invested in this ethnicity vs 1960s debate, see also the collection edited by Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson, as well as articles by Andrew Gordon, and Carol Iannone. 4 See Derek Parker Royal’s reading of this Johnny Appleseed moment (190–2). 5 For a traditional definition of the literary genre of pastoral, see Abrams: “a deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the rural life” (141).

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Notes to Chapter 4: “The stars are indispensable”: Trauma, Betrayal, and Celebrity in I Married a Communist 1 See, for example, Safer, Mocking the Age, 79–132. 2 Similarly, for Brauner, all three protagonists of these novels “are victims of what might be seen as different manifestations of American Puritanism, or, to put it another way, different versions of the pastoral dream of a Utopian world that has always been at the heart of America’s mythology of itself” (Philip Roth,150). 3 In another critical vein, but one that is more closely aligned with the theme of betrayal, Safer (Mocking the Age, 101–3) and Shechner (Up Society’s Ass, Copper, 174–5) both read the novel as speaking to Roth’s relationship with, and ultimate separation from, the actress Claire Bloom; for them, it is a deeply personal, score-settling novel, and, in this sense, Shechner particularly understands the novel not as being simply about America or Communism or Newark, but as ultimately about a cycle of betrayal, with one spouse betraying another out of revenge for another betrayal. 4 Timothy Parrish reads Invisible Man as an important intertext in Roth’s The Human Stain (“Becoming Black,” 421–59), but I also see it here, in I Married a Communist; although it speaks not so insistently to the problem of racial injustice in America as does The Human Stain, it, like Invisible Man, questions the value and intentions and the place of history within the Communist agenda. The Invisible Man connections with this novel are many: the discussions of boxing recall the opening battle royale scene of the 1952 novel; it also features an ongoing critique of Communism, the special appearance of Paul Robeson as the celebrity voice of the Communist movement, and, most compellingly, the moment of two men eating cheesecake in a diner discussing the potential of Communism. In this instance, the latter of the two novels offers a sly wink to the former by having a young Nathan asking the more experienced Ira: “what are Negroes like when you work with them?” (93), before he goes on to read more about the party in such pamphlets as James S. Allen’s “Who Owns America?” like the earnest and ambitious Invisible Man (236). But, ultimately, the two novels are linked most closely in their recognition of the gap between the ideals the country was founded upon and the men who serve as spokespeople for those ideals. Just as Ellison’s Invisible Man concludes: “we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence” (574), I Married a Communist shares the same sentiment: the founding ideals are worth celebrating; the problem becomes what happens when men, such as McCarthy, but also Ira in his way, do the violence. 5 Such language connects I Married a Communist with Sabbath’s Theater in telling ways: Not only does the latter novel end with Mickey Sabbath “pissing” on the grave of his deceased lover, it also establishes him as one of literature’s great misanthropists. The novel ends with a striking final

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observation: Mickey Sabbath cannot commit suicide because “Everything he hated was here” (451). Similarly, we learn what drives Ira to pursue life through his brother, Murray: “change was what Ira lived for. Why he lived. Why he lived strenuously. It is the essence of the man that he treats everything as a challenge to his will. He must always make the effort. He must change everything. For him that was the purpose of being in the world. Everything he wanted to change was here” (84). The structure of these two sentences is identical: “Everything he hated was here” from 1995 vs “Everything he wanted to change was here” from 1998. It’s as if Mickey Sabbath returns to us — still draped in American ideals — in the form of a less sad, more angry version of himself.

Notes to Chapter 5: Founding Traumas: Vietnam, Infanticide, and The Iliad in The Human Stain 1 See Morley’s The Quest for Epic. Morley offers the most compelling close reading of this scene, connecting the image of the cracked ice with a “cracked” and fractured America and the broken foundation upon which America was built (185–6). 2 I in no way intend to downplay the complex relationship between racial identification and US society here, nor do I intend to provide an alternative reading to ones proposed about the nature of race, language, and nationbuilding. For more nuanced explanations of racial dynamics in the US in the twentieth century, see Cassuto, Gilroy, Lott, Mills, North, and Roediger. 3 See Safer, Mocking the Age; Royal, “Plotting the Frames of Subjectivity”; Brett Ashley Kaplan, “Reading Race”; and Gates, “The Passing of Anatole Broyard.” 4 See Chang, “Passing as Trans-Racial Bonding”; Faisst, “Fictions of Race”; Franco, “Being Black” and “Roth and Race”; Glaser, “The Jew in the Canon”; Kaplan, “Reading Race”; Kirby, “Shades of Passing”; Parrish, “Becoming Black” and “Ralph Ellison”; Rankine, “Passing as Tragedy”; Tenenbaum, “Race, Class, and Shame”; and Wilson, “The Genre of a Passing Novel.” 5 According to Royal, for example: “Through the narrative voice of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth establishes a metaphorical link between the constructed nature of identity and the constructed nature of the text as it relates to subjective representation” (“Plotting the Frames of Subjectivity,” 138). Morley also sees a connection between identity and narrative, especially related to the idea of American mythmaking; she interprets Roth “as a writer who, throughout his American Pastoral epic series, is profoundly interested in the multiplicity of the American national identity and the selfhood of the writer” (87). See also Brauner, “American Anti-Pastoral”; Kral, “F(r)ictions of Identity”; and Stow, “Written and Unwritten America.” 159

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6 Posnock and Parrish in particular have argued how The Human Stain is indebted to Ellison’s Invisible Man. From here, it seems like a clear connection would exist between Ellison’s “crazy vet” and Roth’s own vet. Yet, even Roth/Ellison criticism hasn’t been willing to take this step. Ross Posnock argues: “Like The Human Stain, the novel that pays its homage, Invisible Man is a cumulative work of the synethic imagination, a palimpsest of literary and cultural approbation and allusion ranging across time and space” (Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, 194). Posnock goes as far as to conjure the vet by citing the famous quip from the Ellison novel: “‘Play the game, but don’t believe in it,’ counsels another sage, the brilliant, deranged Vet” in Invisible Man (194). However, he is not willing to connect his “crazy” advice, which also happens to be the truth of the novel, to Roth’s vet, Les Farley. 7 This is a matter of debate. See pp. 256–9 of the novel, where it is never clear what are Les’s intentions and what actually happened during the crash. Safer takes up this ambiguity in Mocking the Age (129–31). 8 There also appears to be a secret connection to The Iliad here; like most other Greek literature, one major theme focuses on the rules of hospitality. Paris breaks those rules by stealing Helen from Menelaus’s home while he was a guest there. Similarly, what angers Farley about Faunia’s affair, in addition to the fact that she is sleeping with “a Jew” is that she was cheating on him during the very moment when she was supposed to be tending to the children. 9 In this interview with McGrath, Roth talks about the impetus for the novel as coming from a conversation with the mother of a former girlfriend who was a young woman from a black middle-class family: Roth says, “And I never forgot her mother saying that there were relatives of hers who’d been lost to all their people.” Thus, Coleman (Coal-man, as Parrish cleverly points out) is born and takes over a narrative about passing and self-creation in America where anything remains a possibility. 10 For more on this aspect, it is interesting to consider Derrida’s haunt-ology, which emerges around and after the publication of Spectres of Marx. 11 The statement actually comes from an anonymous note alerting Coleman to the fact that the college faculty and staff know about his affair with Faunia; but it is also ironic, as one of the main subtexts of the book is that we cannot really know someone — Les included. 12 Slavoj Žižek, in Organs without Bodies, discusses zombies in similar terms; for Žižek, the difference between zombies and humans has to do with satisfaction/enjoyment, which humans have and zombies don’t. There is a possible connection here to be made with the ways in which trauma theory frames PTSD: according to Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example, the traumatized witness cannot get that satisfaction from his obsessive repetitions that he would under normal circumstances. 13 See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience and Pozorski, “Traumatic Survival and the Death of a Child in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust.”

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Notes to Chapter 6: Terror, Trauma, and “the mockery of Armageddon”: The Dying Animal in the New Millennium 1 Jean Laplanche and J. -B. Pontalis, for example, note that deferred action, or “afterwardsness” is a term Freud “frequently used in connection with his view of psychical temporality and causality; experiences, impressions and memory-traces may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development” (“Deferred Action; Deferred,” 111). The word “revised” in their definition is crucial here, as it indicates how, with regard to traumatic experience, an event is told or lived repeatedly, cyclically, as if to arrive upon a revision — a more suitable narrative — of something that was never fully perceived. 2 For the most part, readings of The Dying Animal are variations on the themes of death, desire, and pornography — often using as a cue the novel’s statement: “sex is also the revenge on death” (169). See Lee (“Affairs of the Breast”), Zucker (“Philip Roth: Desire and Death”), Banita (“Philip Roth’s Fictions of Intimacy and the Aging of America”), Cherolis (“Philip Roth’s Pornographic Elegy”), Mathews (“The Pornography of Destruction”), Shechner (Up Society’s Ass, Copper, 197–206), and Safer (Mocking the Age, 133–46) for typical readings in this vein. 3 In Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature, Jason B. Jones writes that “meaning fails in historical narratives, not because of ideology, but because of factors that elude discursive elaboration . . . Specifically, when we recognize that narratives — whether normal or ‘counter’ — cannot make society coherent, then we grasp that the demand for coherence is fraudulent” (17). 4 See Jones, pp. 40–4. Here Jones argues that the “genially drunken Varden” (of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, “resembles nobody so much as Dickens himself, or at least Dickens’s narrating persona” (40). 5 See, in particular: “She truly was of a bygone era, a throwback to a more mannerly time, and I guessed that her way of thinking about herself, like her way of comporting herself, had a lot to do with her being the daughter of wealthy Cuban émigrés, rich people who’d fled the revolution” (11). This way of describing Consuela continues for two more pages, and then picks up her voice much later, when she says: “I always answered my parents in English. Oh, God. How I wish I had answered him more in Spanish . . . I wanted to be an American. I did not want all their sadness” (153). 6 Just as Kepesh connects sexual freedom with guaranteed rights, he also finds a way, using the founding documents, to justify an abortion for his son, Kenny’s lover: “Declaration of Independence. The Bill of Rights. The Gettysburg Address. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth Amendment. All three of the Civil War Amendments. I went over everything for him. I found the Tocqueville for him. I figured, he’s twenty-one, at long last we can talk. I out-Poloniused Polonius. What I was telling him,

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after all, wasn’t so far out, certainly not for 1979. Nor would it have been back when I needed it drummed in my head. Conceived in liberty — that’s just good American common sense” (82). 7 Kepesh later connects the sexual revolution to Thoreau, which has the unintended effect not of crediting the orgy, but of discrediting Thoreau: “There were two strains to the turbulence: there was the libertarianism extending orgiastic permission to the individual and opposed to the traditional interests of the community, but with it, often wedded to it, there was the communal righteousness about civil rights and against the war, the disobedience whose moral prestige devolves through Thoreau. And the two strains interconnecting made the orgy difficult to discredit” (55).

Notes to Chapter 7: Traumatic Realism, “Afterwardsness”, and the Figure of the Child in The Plot Against America 1 Brett Ashley Kaplan is perhaps closest to my reading in this regard. In “Just Folks Homesteading: Roth’s Doubled Plots Against America,” Kaplan argues that the novel “puts into play a traumatic vision of a violently anti-Semitic United States that Philip Roth depicts with a level of detail so as to make it utterly ‘believable.’ In fact he suggests that the Holocaust can and could have happened here, and Roth’s life-long love of America is severely tested but ultimately salvaged through the curious plots twists he creates . . . Indeed, he is sometimes corny in his approach to the American dream but that sensibility only serves to highlight the juxtapositions between the (always false, never attainable) ideal and the (always corrupted, doubled, shadowed) reality” (144). Despite Roth’s warning against reading the novel as a political allegory of the present time, Kellman also interprets the events of Plot Against America as commenting on the politically repressive George W. Bush presidency and the US national response following the 9–11 terrorist attacks (“It Is Happening Here,” 113–23). By contrast, Christopher Douglas has recently argued that The Plot Against America is “a kind of fictional thought experiment based on things that have already happened in the United States . . . What puts the factual in this counterfactual history is not so much the historical backdrop of the Holocaust in Europe, but Roth’s attention to the specific histories of American minorities in the 1940s and 1950s. Using the language of ‘segregation,’ ‘relocation,’ and ‘concentration camps,’ Roth’s alternative history alludes to the specific histories of African Americans, Native Americans, and Japanese Americans during and following the war” (2). In this way, Douglas shares my sense that Roth’s later works look back much farther to the originary moment when the “(always false, never attainable) ideal and the (always corrupted, doubled, shadowed) reality” (to borrow again from Kaplan) coincide.

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Notes to Chapter 8: Exit Ghost: Mourning Zuckerman in the Age of Terror 1 See R. Clifton Spargo, “To Invent as Presumptuously as Real Life”; Taylor Loomis, “Nathan Zuckerman,” and my essay “How to Tell a True Ghost Story.” 2 In a move to emphasize the literary amnesia that characterizes the twentyfirst century, both Zuckerman and Bellette are losing their memories, perhaps in a way to gesture toward national amnesia. Amy Bellette is dying of brain cancer; as Kliman worries: “If the cancer gets worse before I get to speak with her again, everything she knows will be lost” (50). Further, Zuckerman advises Kliman to follow “‘The senile solution: forget it’” (95). We find out later that he’s been forgetting things and keeps a notebook to list chores, meetings, phone calls, letters (105), as he confesses: “I had begun to live in a world full of holes” (106). 3 For a fantastic reading of the figure of Kliman, and what kinds of threats he poses to Zuckerman, see Christiansen, “Zuckerman versus Kliman” (219–26). 4 There has been some controversy over this claim. Many readers view the novel’s title as an allusion to Macbeth (Royal, “Zuckerman Unsound,” 16). In a 2009 roundtable discussion of the novel, Michael Rothberg understands Hamlet to be the most likely connection, as that play is, in Rothberg’s reading “about time out of joint” (Royal, “Zuckerman Unsound,” 17). 5 Such thinking is reinforced several pages later, when Zuckerman also admits he has no desire to visit the site of the attacks, to be a kind of belated witness. He says, “I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occurred; but because I’ve withdrawn as witness and participant both, I never made it to the subway” (15). 6 Although, to be fair to Zuckerman, he makes it clear that he had a real reason to leave the city: anti-Semitic death threats in response to his work. He says: “In my case, the specific danger threatening me back when I decided to leave the city for good — the danger of fatal attack — didn’t emanate from the menace of Islamic terrorism but from death threats that I’d begun to received and that the FBI determined to be issuing from a single source” (53). During these moments of explanation, Zuckerman also uses the language of terror — particularly the word “target” (Zuckerman is a target like the World Trade Center Towers were a target), which is repeated several times in this section (53–6). 7 See the Ilan Stavans parody, “The Plagiarist” for a book review predicting this eventuality.

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Notes to Chapter 9: “the gravest meaning”: Trauma and the Tetralogy of the Grave 1 There have been a variety of books written since on this idea of late style in an author’s career: Shipe discusses John Updike’s essay, for example; Nicholas Delbanco’s Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011) seems to be the latest in this genre. 2 Alex Jarvis, in conversation. Contemporary American Literature seminar, Spring 2010. 3 See Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. 4 We learn early on that Bucky intended to join the military after the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. As a result of poor eyesight, Bucky is not allowed to enlist, however. Instead, Bucky’s local fight against polio becomes his own personal war — a fact reinforced throughout the novel in the description of his confrontation with polio with war rhetoric. In the end, Marcia laments that he didn’t go to war because she believes Bucky “might have been a soldier and gotten over all this” (261). It is polio, in this case, that warps the progression of history — in Marcia’s reading — even beyond the devastation of war that remains in the background of this novel. In considering the number of polio deaths reported regularly, Bucky understands: “this was a real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste, and damnation, war with the ravages of war — war upon the children of Newark” (132). 5 In Coetzee’s view, Nemesis depicts “plenty of deplorable behavior on the part of a plague- and panic-stricken populace, not excluding ethnic scapegoating. The Newark of Nemesis turns out to be no less fertile breeding ground for ant-Semitism than the cities of Roth’s dystopian fantasy The Plot Against America (2004), set in the same time period. But in his narrative of the plague year of 1944 Roth’s concern is less with how communities behave in times of crisis than with questions of fate and freedom.”

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WORKS CITED

Abbott, Philip. “‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’: Democratic Theory, Populism, and Philip Roth’s ‘American Trilogy.’” Canadian Review of American Studies 37.3 (2007): 431–52. Abrams, M. H. “Pastoral.” A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1988. 141–2. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963. Banita, Georgianna. “Philip Roth’s Fictions of Intimacy and the Aging of America.” In: Narratives of Life: Mediating Age. Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2009. 91–112. Berman, Paul. “The Plot Against America: What if It Happened Here?” New York Times. October 3, 2004. Web. September 15, 2010. . Bradstreet, Anne. “The Flesh and the Spirit” (1678). In: The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. 260–2. 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. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. —“An Interview with Trauma Pioneer Cathy Caruth.” Conducted by Aimee Pozorski. Connecticut Review 28.1 (2006): 77–84. —“Confronting Political Trauma.” Connecticut Review 28.1 (2006): 179–82. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Caruth, Cathy and Deborah Esch, eds. Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Cassuto, Leonard. The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 165

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—“The End of Identity: Philip Roth’s Jewish American Pastoral.” In: Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels. Eds. Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 133–49. Pollan, Michael. “Desire: Sweetness/Plant: The Apple.” In: The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2001. 1–58. Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pozorski, Aimee. “How to Tell a True Ghost Story: The Ghost Writer and the Case of Anne Frank.” In: Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. 89–102. —“Traumatic Survival and the Loss of a Child: Reznikoff’s Holocaust Revisited.” Paideuma 36 (2007–2009): 75–104. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Rankine, Patrice D. “Passing as Tragedy: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the Oedipus Myth, and the Self-Made Man.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.1 (2005): 101–12. Repanshek, Kurt. “Tracing the Postage Stamp-Sized History of the National Parks System.” National Parks Traveler. March 29, 2009. Web. February 1, 2011. . Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Revized ed. London: Verso, 1999. Roth, Philip. Deception. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. —“Drenka’s Men.” New Yorker. July 10, 1995. 56–66. —“The Ultimatum.” New Yorker. June 26, 1995. 114–27. —Sabbath’s Theater. New York: Vintage, 1996. —American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. —I Married a Communist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. —The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. —“Zuckerman’s Alter Brain.” Interview. Conducted by Charles McGrath. New York Times Book Review May 7, 2000: sec. 7: 8. Web. May 7, 2011. . —The Dying Animal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. —The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. —“The Story Behind The Plot Against America.” New York Times. September 19, 2004. Web. November 6, 2010. . —Everyman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. —“Mark Lawson Talks to Philip Roth.” Front Row. BBC. London. June 3, 2006. Television. 171

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173

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INDEX

Abbott, Philip 59 Abrams, M. H. 157 Arendt, Hannah 13–14, 17–18, 52, 69 Banita, Georgianna 161n. 2 Berman, Paul 119 Bradstreet, Anne 34–5, 38 Brauner, David 7–8, 10, 28, 60, 83, 156n. 3, 158n. 2, 159 n. 5

Faisst, Julia 159n. 4 Faulkner, William 22, 149 Feingold, Henry L. 155n. 9 Felman, Shoshana 2–3, 20–1, 24 Franco, Dean 159n. 4 Freeman, John 121 Freud, Sigmund 3–6, 19–20, 25, 53, 104, 121, 134–5, 149, 154n. 3, 160n. 12, 161n. 1 Furet, Francois 17–18

Caruth, Cathy 2–7, 19–24, 53, 84, 88–9, 104, 160n. 13 Cassuto, Leonard 159n. 2 Chang, Shu-li 159n. 4 Cherolis, Stephanie 161n. 2 Chopp, Rebecca 13–14, 80 Christiansen, Stian Stang 163n. 3 Coetzee, J.M. 151, 153, 164n. 5 Cohen, Sarah Blacher, 25, 40

Gates, Henry Louis 159n. 3 Gentry, Marshall Bruce 157n. 3 Gilroy, Paul 159n. 2 Glaser, Jennifer 159n. 4 Gordon, Andrew 157n. 3

de Crèvecouer, J. Hector 15, 51 Delbanco, Nicholas 164n. 1 de Man, Paul 3, 20–2, 154n. 1 Derrida, Jacques 160n. 10 Douglas, Christopher 162n. 1

Jarvis, Alex 149, 164n. 2 Jefferson, Thomas 4, 12, 15–16, 43, 48, 68, 150 Johnson, Gary 156n. 2 Jones, Jason 154n. 4, 161n. 3, 161n. 4

Edmundson, Mark 134 Edwards, Sherman 16–17 Ellison, Ralph 28, 30, 65, 158n. 4, 160n. 6

Kakutani, Michiko 25, 36, 120, 155n. 1 Kaplan, Brett Ashley 159n. 3, 162n. 1 Kaplan, E. Ann 20–2, 137 Kass, Leon R. 89–90

Homer 83, 87 Iannone, Carol 157n. 3

174

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INDEX

Kelleter, Frank 156n. 3 Kellman, Steven G. 162n. 1 Kimmage, Michael 59 Kirby, Lisa 159n. 4 Kral, Francoise 159n. 5 LaCapra 19–21 Laplanche, Jean 121, 161n. 1 Laub, Dori 2–3, 20, 24, 101 Lee, Judith Yaross 161n. 2 Leith, Sam 12, 31 Lepore, Jill 11, 18, 154n. 6, 155n. 10 Leys, Ruth 19–21 Lipstadt, Deborah 19 Loomis, Taylor 163n. 1 Lott, Eric 159n. 2 Lyons, Bonnie 59, 78, 157n. 3 Marvell, Andrew 51 Maslan, Mark 83 Mathews, Peter 161n. 2 Mellard, James M. 156n. 3 Milbauer, Asher 157n. 3 Mills, Charles 159n. 2 Milowitz, Stephen 7, 10, 154n. 5 Moore, Lorrie 83–4, 86 Morley, Catherine 8–9, 84, 102, 159n. 1, 159n. 5 Neelakantan, Gurumurthy 156n. 3 North, Michael 159n. 2 Obama, Barack vii–ix Omer-Sherman, Ranen 40, 155n. 1 Orton, Fred 27–9 Paine, Thomas 4, 12, 15, 18, 43, 53, 60–2, 67–9 Parrish, Timothy L. 83, 156n. 2, 157n. 2, 158n. 4, 159n. 4, 160n. 6, 160n. 9 Pollan, Michael 45, 47–8, 51 Pontalis, J.-B. 121, 161n. 1

Posnock, Ross 7, 8, 10, 26, 64, 82, 84, 96, 155n. 2, 160n. 6 Ramazani, Jahan 118 Rankine, Patrice D. 159n. 4 Repanshek, Kurt 128 Richet, Denise 17–18 Roediger, David R. 159n. 2 Rothberg, Michael 7, 119–21, 123, 130, 147–8, 154n. 5, 163n. 4 Royal, Derek Parker 8–10, 28–31, 41, 60, 62, 83, 148, 155n. 7, 156n. 1, 157n. 4, 159n. 3, 159n. 5, 163n. 4 Safer, Elaine B. 8–10, 62, 83–4, 156n. 3, 158n. 1, 158n. 3, 159n. 3, 160n. 7, 161n. 2 Shaw, Peter 164n. 3 Shechner, Mark 59–60, 62, 68, 158n. 3, 161n. 2 Shipe, Matthew 148, 164n. 1 Shone, Tom 1–2 Shostak, Debra 7–8, 10, 59, 126, 156n. 2 Sorin, Gerald 155n. 9 Spargo, R. Clifton 163n. 1 Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto 157n. 3 Stavans, Ilan 163n. 7 Stone, Peter 16–17 Stow, Simon 159n. 5 Tenenbaum, David 159n. 4 Vidal, Gore 16 Warren, Robert Penn 59 Watson, Donald G. 157n. 3 Wilson, Matthew 159n. 4 Wirth-Nesher, Hana 156n. 2 Wood, Gordon 14, 155n. 10 ŽiŽek, Slavoj 160n. 12 Zucker, David J. 161n. 2 175

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