Philip Roth And The Role Of The American Novelist

'[The American novelist's job is to] imagine the corruption and vulgarity and treachery of American public life. that is, the country's private life.'

The concept of "the American novelist" would likely be dismissed as utterly specious by Philip Roth himself. Having - since the publication of "Writing American Fiction" - rejected the "salvationist literary ethos" of the fifties, it is hard to imagine Roth accepting a generalized and ostensibly moral function for this hypostatised entity. Roth has shown, through both his fictional work and personal statements, a keen awareness of the heterogeneity of American experience: of the co-existence of multiple American realities, and accordingly of the boundless diversity of writing in America, and of writers each possessing a unique sense of their literary function. Roth has identified his motivations as an author in terms of the singular reading experience that he strives to offer, and - from around the time of Portnoy's Complaint (1969) on - has scrupulously distanced himself from the self-justifying literary principles with which he began his career as a writer. "Writing American Fiction" was composed in 1960 - when Roth was still committed to the didacticism of the New Critics. This commitment is evident in the unequivocally moral terms with which Roth evaluates contemporary American fiction.2 In this early piece, Roth does not make any claim pertaining to the "job" of "the American novelist;" rather he indicates his attachment to a theory of literature defined principally by its moral agenda - an attachment that was soon to be dramatically and permanently severed.

This notion of "the American novelist's job" misrepresents Roth's thinking: it imposes a falsely narrow version of what Roth may actually perceive as the author's role in society, and constricts the parameters within which Roth's work can be assessed. However, it is more relevant to early Roth, 50s and early 60s, did think more this way.

Similarly, the nature of the relationship between "American public life" and "the country's private life" in this title is achieved through the omission of a key phrase. In Roth's original statement, he only implies a connection between the public and the private worlds; intimating a dynamic relation between the two, without ever explicitly conflating the two. In terms of Roth's early fiction, this conflation seems inappropriate, for whilst he shows a definite interest in the relationship between public life and private life, it is not until the nineties that it becomes possible to speak of the relationship between the public and the private - or of history and the individual - as sufficiently dynamic in Roth to legitimate a conflation of the two. Moreover, up to this point, the relationship between these spheres of experience is not central in Roth's work.

The title needlessly (and, indeed, mistakenly) restricts the parameters in which one can approach this complex aspect of Roth's work. The relationship between public and private worlds in Roth exists beyond the narrow trinity of immoral differentiae comprising of "corruption and vulgarity and treachery;" Roth's universe is much more variegated than these terms would allow. While these terms are relevant to this discussion, they do not circumscribe it. The admirable, the ironic, the comic and the tragic, for example, are also imagined by Roth in his representation of public and private worlds.

In his earliest fiction, Roth explores the ways in which public life impacts upon the individual in terms of the claims that it makes upon identity. As Ian Hacking has observed, individuals are - to varying degrees - 'brought into being by the creation of labels for them'.3 For Roth, being both a Jew and an American seems to entail a degree of conflict, as these labels inevitably impose different - often incompatible - ethical claims. In the collection of stories entitled Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Roth examines the difficulties involved in either resisting, repressing, or reconciling the separate but overlapping systems of socialization which exert pressures upon the selfhood of his Jewish-American characters. One of the principal shaping forces acting upon the Jews of Goodbye, Columbus is the need for public acceptance within the context of an ethnic group fleeing persecution as a result of differences to dominant ethnic groups.

In "Eli, the Fanatic," the Jews of Woodenton are characterized by their fear of being 'considered outsiders and interlopers among the rightful inheritors of American culture'. Eli and his community have internally repressed their historical attachments to Judaism, and have smoothed over the outward signs of their Jewish heritage, in order to live out a fantasy as privileged American suburbanites. The collective desire for integration into the public world entails an act of partial self-annihilation in the private. The benefits of this act is, however, materially significant. Hence, we observe Eli projecting the material comforts of the Woodenton community as a justification for their treatment of Leo Tzuref and his community of vulnerable refugees:

What Peace. What incredible peace. .Here, after all, were peace and safety - what civilization had been working toward for centuries. For all his jerkiness, that was what Ted Heller was asking for, peace and safety. It was what his parents had asked for in the Bronx, and his grandparents in Poland, and theirs in Russia or Austria. And now they had it - the world was at last a place for families, even Jewish families. (208)

Within this attempt to justify the 'jerkiness' of his community's actions, Eli misrepresents the aspirations of his Jewish communities' forbears. In fleeing countries where they experienced persecution, Jewish immigrants sought places in which they could live, as Eli says, in 'peace and safety'. The undoubted hope of such immigrating peoples was to find a place that was "civilized" in its cultural acceptance of Jews; they hoped for a place in which they could peacefully assimilate themselves as Jews. Hence, such a place would, for them, represent 'what civilization had been working toward for centuries'; a place 'for families, even Jewish families.' What Eli does not acknowledge whilst driving through his cosy suburban neighbourhood is that in attempting to achieve the goals of previous generations to escape Jewish exclusion and persecution, they - in an instance of monstrous irony - have become the persecutors. In their desire to affect and assume the lifestyle of affluent gentiles, the Jews of Woodenton actively perpetuate the historical exclusion which their historical community has attempted to escape and which constitutes the basis of their own social and psychological paranoia. Although a recognition of this is not made explicit by Eli, the trauma of guilty recognition is apparent in the compulsion he feels to assume - at least superficially - the identity of the 'other'. The threatening and offensive 'other' is, as Eli comes to recognise, a ghostly reminder of his own heritage. And so, in a crazed, trance-like state, Eli parades through the town in the 'greenie's' orthodox garb, as a ghost-like image of a former self. recognises himself in the mysterious 'greenie' with his orthodox garb. In donning the clothes of the 'greenie', Eli attempts to both recognise and regain that aspect of his identity which he has so violently and erroneously denied. Eli's confusion over his identity leading up to this event is apparent in the ambivalent tone with which he attempts to define his place within the secular Jewish community and, concomitantly, with which he attempts to define his relationship to Leo Tzuref and the yeshiva community. On one of his visits to the 'sagging old mansion' (187) which stands eerily apart from the blinking lights of Woodenton like a Radley house, Eli indicates the ambiguity of his position as a representative of the 'progressive suburban community' who, above all, value 'American life in the 20th century' (195-196). The vagueness of Eli's language belies a sense that he cannot clearly perceive the demarcations that he believes to exist between himself and other Jews, whether new Woodenton Jews or "old world" refugees. Eli declares that 'I am them, they are me,' to which Tzuref exclaims 'Ach! You are us, we are you!' (198). Moments later, Eli then distinguishes himself from the 'them' he previously conflated with 'me':

'It's not me Mr Tzuref, it's them.' 'They are you.' 'No,' Eli intoned, 'I am me. They are them. You are you.' (199)

This protracted barrage of pronouns (indicates the confusion experienced by Eli when the claims of public life - as representative of his community - come into conflict with the claims of his private life, in which he becomes increasingly self-critical) only serves to confuse Eli further, for when Tzuref insightfully replies that 'You talk about leaves and branches. I'm dealing with under the dirt,' (199) Eli protests that he is being driven crazy, and - at that moment - fails to appreciate the insight into essential consanguinity that is communicated by Tzuref's figurative analogy. At this point in the narrative, Eli's sense of identity - and its relationship to both his immediate and his historical communities - is so fractured and perplexed that he interprets a straightforward metaphor as an impenetrable cabbalistic riddle.

The gulf that Eli perceives between himself and the refugees is subtly manifest in the disjunction between the Talmudic logic used by Tzuref, and the stubbornly secular logic of Eli. Eli refuses to acknowledge the validity of what he sarcastically terms 'Talmudic wisdom,' (199) and is initially infuriated by it in his conversations with Tzuref. It becomes apparent, however, that some part of Eli's consciousness both understands and appreciates this archaic, specifically Judaic-proverbial reasoning. When harassed by his friend Ted Heller to explain 'what happened', 'Eli heard himself say, 'What happened, happened' (206). Eli thus echoes Tzuref's earlier statement that 'What is, is' (197). Roth's descri ption of Eli hearing himself speak implies the separation of selves experienced by Eli in that moment. The partial secular American identity in which Eli cloaks himself is momentarily stifled here as the sublimated other - which recalls its origins in "old world" Judaism - slips through the crumbling façade to make itself 'heard.'