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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In "The Plot Against America," the great novelist imagines a 1940s America devoured by anti-Semitism -- ignoring the brutal anti-black bigotry that actually existed.
Oct 11, 2004 | "Both men continued to swear their innocence, but McDaniels ultimately broke down, his screams sending children scurrying to their mothers' sides. Once he'd confessed to the crime he was shot to death. Townes had his eyes gouged out with an ice pick and then was slowly roasted with the torch until he, too, agreed to confess. When he finally uttered the words the mob wanted to hear, he was doused with gasoline and set afire. Souvenir hunters would fight over severed testicles and strips of barbecued flesh."
-- David Levering Lewis, in a 2002 review, quoting Philip Dray from "The Lynching of Black America," where the typical denouement of a double lynching in the Mississippi Delta in 1937 is described.
Great artists can commit great sins of monstrous allegiance, of bigotry, of individual cruelty, but they can commit no greater sin than taking on the mantle of Alzheimer's when addressing major periods in American history. I say that because so much of what has become important in American life since the election of John Kennedy is about deepening the quality of national memory. We search through our files, our documents, our newspapers, our diaries and so on, to somehow know who and what we have been and when we were that repugnant or inspirational or duplicitous or confused. Or whatever. I say that because the subject of this essay is Philip Roth, who has committed a highly celebrated sin against history that would mean nothing if he were not one of our greatest writers, a pure flare of talent out of New Jersey.
Roth has been at war with stereotypes and the limits of assumed good behavior throughout his career. One could accuse him of thrilling at the idea of shocking the bourgeoisie or being responsible for forcing his public to know what happens when the girls slide out of their panties and the men climb out of their pants. He is our most prominent son of James Joyce, but he has also become one of our most adventurous writers in his last few fiction works. Roth is usually obsessed with the limits and the tears hidden by the compartmentalized aspirations of middle-class Jewish life, the rubber demands of the academy, and the disappointments of wealth and fame as experienced by a writer named Nathan Zuckerman, who critics are always sure is actually Roth himself.
Roth is a high-IQ jokester who delivers his punch lines with glass capsules of cyanide. He focuses on tales from below the belt and has always been most interesting, it seems to me, when he has moved into domains other than those in which he grew up or made a living before going on to receive his well-deserved celebration. He has been under attack from the dunderheads of the academy and those who do not have enough literary sense to understand that his politics did not come off the assembly line. Yet he has maintained his integrity by going his own way and taking the lumps that come of maintaining a singular vision. Roth is too intentionally crude for those on the right and too unforgiving of the laughing-gas ideology that those on the left assume should be taken seriously.
So what is Philip Roth's great sin and what does it have to do with the material quoted at the beginning of this piece? Simply this: His new novel moves along as though that bestial level of social bigotry was not a highly visible fact of American life at the time that "The Plot Against America" is imagined to have taken place, between 1940 and 1942. "Boo!" some will automatically say because the book has been so vastly praised, but they would not leap so quickly into that camp if they realized just how much the novel is now part of the ongoing complaint that Ralph Ellison raised to the level of masterpiece in "Invisible Man." Roth expects us to believe that the very deep hostility that white Southerners had toward black Americans, a hostility that had been supported by white Northerners either after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 or soon thereafter, would suddenly dissolve and transform itself into anti-Semitism because Lucky Lindy defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940.
