The Plot Against America: Real Threats in a Fictive World There still seems to be a great confusion among the readers of Philip Roth with regards to the critical approach of his works. Criticism on the author Philip Roth can be found in greater detail in Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Much commentary has been directed towards Roth’s ethnic proclivity and, to a serious extent, has seemingly resulted in diminishing the potency of his texts and their effects on the reader. Whilst the focus is primarily centred on Philip Roth (as the ‘American’ and/or the ‘Jewish’) and his own integration within the American society, the intrinsic values of his writing have consequently become rather sequestered and seemingly secondary. Nevertheless, as The Plot Against America (2004) will hopefully reveal, Roth’s writing often extends far beyond the margins of the fictional and the unbelievable, and draws a remarkably paralleled and accurate account of the world. Partly, this is due to the fact that, the issues he so insistently delves into – of conflicting ethnic identities, of contradicting ideologies, and the dangers and threats these result in – are often far bigger than any one person, or his attitude, or his hometown, or his own country. Consequently, and as this essay will primarily concentrate on, Roth’s thematics thus become strikingly multi-dimensional, which is due precisely to his choice of such an overwhelming, ever-engulfing subject-matters, greatly pondering over real issues and real-world anxieties. As is the case with The Plot Against America, Roth’s fabricated reality, or uchronia, is not for the purpose of mere literary entertainment, but, quite on the contrary, it seems to be a necessary prerequisite for the conveyance of the painful truth which we, in real life, very often consciously ignore. Truly, the novel does go back in time, changing the winner of the 1940s’ presidential elections, and thus deviates from ‘history’ to ‘alternative history’, from the real to the fictional. As Roth suggests in his own essay however, what this newly formed uchronistic setting never does is modify, or alter, the real characters themselves, and the reason why this book becomes so painfully realistic springs from precisely this fact. As he himself states in his own essay “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America’” that, “I for one had to believe that, in the circumstances I imagine, each might well have done or said something very like what I have him or her doing or saying; otherwise I couldn’t have written the book.” [found in Philip Roth, “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America’”, New York Times Book Review, (Sep 19, 2004), p. 10]. I present 27 pages of the documentary evidence that underpins a historical unreality of 362 pages in the hope of establishing the book as something other than fabulous. ibid., p.12. As Ginevra Geraci clearly puts it, “Roth has invented his plot, but he neither invented anti-Semitism in “the land of the free,” nor Henry Ford’s peculiarities.” Ginevra Geraci, 2011. “The Sense of an Ending: Alternative History in Philip Roth's The Plot against America.” Philip Roth Studies, (2011 Fall), pp. 187-204, p.195. And, truly, as I will attempt to show in the following pages of this paper, the nearly complete ‘Nazification’ of America in the novel, the issue of racism within it, and the ‘perpetual fear’ these culminate in, are not only the main anxieties facing Roth’s fictional world, but are also some of the biggest problems American society has faced, and, as many would suggest, still faces to this day. Philip Roth, “Chapter 9: Perpetual Fear”, The Plot Against America, (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p.328; throughout the novel, ‘perpetual fear’ is seen repeatedly. “By setting it [The Plot Against America] in a wholly imaginary history,’ Laura Miller writes, ‘Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years’. Laura Miller, ‘”The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth’, URL: http://www.salon.com/2004/09/29/roth_7/ (visited on 01.11.16). The questions of identity, particularly those concerning ethnicity, occupy a huge chunk of the American Literature, and The Plot Against America certainly undertakes to discuss more broadly some of these. The instances of racial discrimination are shaped within the fictional world of the novel, but are also given realistic substance on the backdrop of those real events and happenings which had taken place without the novel. Philip Roth’s Jewish heritage is often explicitly referred to and openly discussed, however, it should be noted that it is charged with, and purposefully designated to, reveal the features and experiences of a bigger whole, namely, the Jewish community in America before, during, and after the Holocaust. The first instance the reader encounters the issue of racism is in the hotel lobby in Washington when the whole family is virtually thrown out of the hotel as a result of another family holding their room, despite Roths’ reservation made and confirmed months ago. I whispered to my brother, “What happened?” “Anti-Semitism,” he whispered back. op.cit., The Plot Against America, p.69. This marks the beginning of a series of anti-Semitic events affecting the family. Perhaps the most important one is in the face of the new program, ‘Homestead 42’, enacted by the Lindbergh government, designed to take ethnic children away from their families in order to ‘Americanise’ them by placing them in the homes of Americans for a certain period of time. In reality, such program did exist in the late 1800s, which was then targeting Native Americans for the same purposes. More information on the Homestead Act can be read in Trina Shanks, "The Homestead Act: A major asset-building policy in American history." in Michael Sherraden, Inclusion in the American Dream: Assets, Poverty, and Public Policy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Within the novel, ‘Homestead 42’ manages to penetrate Roth’s family and almost ‘Americanises’ Philip’s bigger brother, Sandy. Soon enough, many other Jewish families suffer the same fate, forced to scatter all over the country. In addition to those, there is the constant comparison between white Americans and American Jews, a paradigm of which becomes the lengthy, almost extolling description of Mr. Mawhinney compared to Herman’s one-word portrait, ‘he was only a Jew’; Op.cit., The Plot Against America, pp.111-112. there is also ‘The case with the West Virginia mountain girl’ and the hanging of the Jew who had supposedly killed her, becoming, quote, a ‘public warning to other “Jewish libertines” to stay the hell out of the South and away from their women.” Ibid., p.361. The author himself writes in his essay on the novel that, “There was exclusion in America, to be sure. Jews were deliberately and systematically excluded from partaking of certain affiliations and entering important portals at every level of American society, and exclusion is a primary form of humiliation, and humiliation is crippling – it does terrible injury to people, it twists them, it deforms them, as every American minority can attest […]” Op.cit., see footnote 2, p.10. The rise of certain Anti-Semitic groups after WWI, such as Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the dissemination of anti-Semitic papers, such as Henry Ford’s (a recurring character in the novel as well), and the increased radio propagation of anti-Semitic sentiments during the 1930s, are all indicators of the heavy pressure weighing upon most of the American Jewish families. Up until the end of WWII, cases involving discrimination towards Jews in America multiplied in tenfold; many of them were abused at the workplace, denied access to different areas, refused memberships and/or participation in various organizations and teaching institutions; some were even denied access to restaurants and hotels. See Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Thus, we are made to believe, and justifiably so, that for every fictionally constructed anxiety raised in the novel, there seems to exist its referential real-life counterpart. Admittedly, Lindbergh never became president, and there was never a state of emergency or a martial law declared in America, however, there surely was racial discrimination, which Roth’s novel carefully explores, ponders over, and constantly refers to. “We knew things were bad,” Herman Roth comments, “but not like this. You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.” Op.cit., see footnote 5, p.76 [italics added]. In the context of history, as I mentioned earlier, Charles Lindbergh never won the 1940’s elections. He never even ran for President. Why did, then, Roth choose to alter history so dramatically in the Plot, at that particular time? Young Philip seems to find a very adult explanation: And, as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, 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 a disaster into an epic. Ibid., pp.113-114. History, or, in fact, historiography, becomes central to Roth’s fiction. It is surely easier to comprehend the atrocious nature of fascism from the vantage point of our time; the many millions of deaths it accounted for, and the nearly complete annihilation of a race because of it. However, during the 1930s and 1940s, there was another threat. Although hostile to each other, Communism and Fascism developed simultaneously in the attempt to engulf the globe. The world was a battle on two fronts and, particularly around the year 1940, taking the ‘right’ side was a choice dependant on numerous factors. And what Roth very successfully does in his novel is presenting static history (our fact-based knowledge gained in the aftermath of particular events) as a derivative of, first and foremost, the vacillating historiography (the epistemology of those particular events). Thus, what the reader perceives as a mere phantasm of Roth’s imagination now, could be seen, as young Philip does in the novel, a logical potentiality back then. As Geraci writes, “American historiography and American fiction [...] they’re are both artificial; both are forms of literature, and I would suggest further that American history grows primarily out of the same attitudes of mind, and attitudes toward chronology, which gave birth to our great tall stories.” Op.cit., Ginevra Geraci, p.187. This is more clearly understood from the author’s own words: The “what if” in America was somebody else’s reality […] Why it didn’t happen is another book […] I can only repeat that in the 30’s there were many of the seeds for its happening here […] Op.cit., Roth, “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America’”, p.11. This notion of the ‘unforeseen’, due to the Janus-faced nature of history, is repeatedly cross-examined in the novel and becomes the connexion between the fictional within and the factual without. On the one hand, there is young Philip’s stamp collection, which becomes an eerie symbol of the, particularly Jewish, fear of ‘Nazified’ America. And his dream clearly aims at concentrating the reader’s attention on that fear. Washington wasn’t on the stamps anymore: instead of a different portrait of Washington on each of the twelve stamps, the portraits were now the same and no longer of Washington but of Hitler”; “[across] the face of each, across the cliffs, the woods, the rivers […] across everything in America that was the greenest and the bluest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika. Op.cit., The Plot Against America5, p.43. On the other end of the spectrum, however, there is rabbi Bengelsdorf’s vision of Lindbergh’s government: [T]here is ignorance as well among Jews, unfortunately, many of whom persist in thinking of President Lindbergh as an American Hitler […] Where is the fascist statism? Where is the fascist thuggery? […] What Hitler perpetrated on Germany’s Jews with the passage in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws is the absolute antithesis of what President Lindbergh has undertaken to do for America’s Jews […] Ibid., p.111. And, I would suggest, as a result of this highly epistemological character of the fictional in Roth’s The Plot Against America, the reader is enabled to admit the fragility of history itself, and thus more readily apprehend the ‘Nazification’ of America as a real-world potentiality, which, in turn, justifies the American-Jewish anxiety, making it so alarmingly realistic. History is never a one-sided phenomenon and its facts we often take for granted are not always the only truth there is. Where, then, does one find the pathos in The Plot Against America? Is it in the face of the racially discriminated Jewish people, such as the Roths and the Wishnows; or is it reflected in the portrayal of a Fascist America, led by one of Hitler’s pawns; or is it history itself and its insistence on factuality, accounting for the ‘Big’ events and leaving out the ‘small’ ones in the hands of fiction? Neither. The pathos, I believe, comes from seeing how the lives of young Philip Roth, his brother, his cousin, and Seldon Wishnow are getting irrevocably impaired as each of these occurrences take turns in depraving their reality, their awareness of the world around them. The really tragic figures are the ones belonging to posterity. And, in fact, the most important ‘message’ the novel seems to send us is thus deliberately ‘told’ by the nine-year old boy Philip. The narrator of the story, along with his siblings and his ‘best’ friend, are the ones who we fear for the most, who we suffer with the most, who we sympathize with the most. Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Ibid., p.1. As when young Philip runs away towards the orphanage, the reader witnesses how all those events in the novel begin shaping not only the boy’s consciousness, but also his sub-consciousness: I surely didn’t feel as though I were rushing headlong into insanity [...] I wasn’t being swallowed up by anything other than the determination to resist a disaster our family and our friends could no longer elude and might not survive […] I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan. Ibid., p. 232-233. In much the same way, the reader sees his brother Sandy being tossed from side to side, becoming almost an inanimate asset in the hands of politics, an eager spokesman primarily against himself. “Ghetto Jews […] frightened, paranoid ghetto Jews,” is how he sees ‘them’, those who are in fact his own kind. The virtue of loyalty in the face of Alvin is yet even more macabre: “The Jews? I wrecked my life for the Jews! I lost my fuckin’ leg for the Jews! […] What did I give a shit either way about Lindbergh? But you send me to go fuckin’ fight him, and the stupid fuckin’ kid I am, I go. And look, look, Uncle Fucking Disaster – I have no fucking leg!” Ibid., p.297. As far as Seldon is concerned, the small boy who loses both his parents, Herman’s words say it all, “motherless and fatherless you are vulnerable to manipulation, to influences — you are rootless and you are vulnerable to everything.” Ibid., p.358. Despite the fictional plot and the imaginary setting, The Plot Against America is, truly, a historical novel, drawing a historiographical account of true eventualities. History, so considered, is a fictive substitute for authority and tradition, a maker of concords between past, present, and future, a provider of significance to mere chronicity. Everything is relevant if its relevance can be invented [ . . . ] The novel imitates historiography in this: anything can take its important place in the concord [ . . . ] The merely successive character of events has been exorcised; the synthesizing consciousness has done its work. As Geraci concludes, the novel’s “veracity is achieved through fictional instruments, […] characterizing fiction as quasi-historical and history as quasi-fictive.” Op.cit., Geraci, p.200. In his novel, the anxieties underlining the ethnic Jewish segregation, the antagonistic beliefs of the different characters, the tragic circumstances of the boys, are so remarkably animated on the backdrop of the fictional that, as soon as the reader turns away from the book and enters reality, he imminently faces those same threats and dangers, those same tragedies facing the world and its future.  Bibliography: Dinnerstein, Leonard, Antisemitism in America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Geraci, Ginevra, “The Sense of an Ending: Alternative History in Philip Roth's The Plot against America.” Philip Roth Studies, (2011 Fall), pp. 187-204. Miller, Laura, “’The Plot Against America’ by Philip Roth”, (2004), URL: http://www.salon.com/2004/09/29/roth_7/ (visited on 01.11.16). Sherraden, Michael, Inclusion in the American Dream: Assets, Poverty, and Public Policy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America, (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), Roth, Philip, “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America’”, New York Times Book Review, (Sep 19, 2004), pp.10-7.10. Parrish, Timothy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 1 Gatev 1 Simeon Gatev: 140018599