The American Novel Since 1945

ENGL 291 - Lecture 20 - Philip Roth, The Human Stain (cont.)

Chapter 1. Observing Local Bookshops: Patterns of Display and Absence
Professor Amy Hungerford: Today I’m going to talk about censorship in the United States
since 1945, in the period that we’re studying, and I’m going to connect that with The
Human Stain and some of my general thoughts about Roth’s work at the very end of
lecture. So, I’ll give you a little bit of history and then a little bit of meditation on Roth. I
asked you, for today, to go around to the various bookstores in New Haven, choose one
and go, and observe what you saw there. And in particular I asked you to think about what
you are not seeing there. So, does anyone want to tell me what they saw on their little
observation trip? What did you observe? Yes.
Student: I went to Labyrinth, and they had a ton of history, historiography, cultural
studies, all in the front, that seemed very deliberately diverse.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Diverse in what way?
Student: Diverse, culturally, as far as the history books that I looked at. They ranged
anything from Germany during the Weimar Republic, to the history of tragedy, to death
in the Atlantic slave trade, to all sorts of other things, though mainly European. What was
not there, which I found interesting, which I looked for specifically, because I thought it
might not be there, was Mein Kampf.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Did you look back in the stacks too? Uh huh.
Student: Yeah, I looked in the stacks. I didn’t see it there, or in the library at all, so I guess
they don’t support Hitler, which I approve of.
Professor Amy Hungerford: You approve of Mein Kampf not being in Labyrinth
bookstore.
Student: I approve of not supporting Hitler, I guess, Mein Kampf…
Professor Amy Hungerford: Very good. Okay. What else? What else did people notice?
What did you notice about the bookstore? Yes.
Student: There is a table that has works by Yale graduates.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Which bookstore did you go to?
Student: Barnes and Noble. Yeah, so just clearly trying to sell to the market they know.
Professor Amy Hungerford: By Yale graduates. But here’s a question: not by Yale
professors?
Student: I’m not sure.
Professor Amy Hungerford: It’s a significant difference. What else did you notice? Yes.
Local market. What else did you notice? Someone–Yes, Eli.
Student: I guess that I really haven’t thought about this this much, but how much of a
decision it is to decide what kind of shelf the book goes in, like history versus philosophy,
and I guess it’s probably the publishers who do that, or, I don’t know, but–
Professor Amy Hungerford: Well, this is a really important question: where to shelve the
book. Now, it’s not just about categories, although it is partly about categories, what
subject matter does a book belong to; it’s also about what kind of shelf, physically. So
those tables that we’re thinking about in Labyrinth, with that array of literature, who chose
that? Does anyone know who chose that literature to put on that table? I can tell you in a
minute. One question is: who chose that? Now, those tables are in Barnes and Noble, too.
So, you walk into the bookstore on the ground level, and there are all those tables, and
the stacks go up really high. There are all these elaborate ways of getting books’ covers
to face you. Okay. Then there are all the stacks and shelves up on the upper level, and
those books are interspersed with smaller displays.
So, if you go up there, you’ll begin to see some very interesting things. There’s a little
table, for example, up on the right. Maybe you noticed this, right as you come up the stairs
in Barnes and Noble, and it’s promoted as “urban literature.” Well, in my experience,
having seen it over the years, it’s really just code for black writers, somehow, so it’s all
these books about the black history of New Haven, or whatever. So, you have these little
tables around.
Now, the big tables in front of Barnes and Noble, who chooses what goes on there? That
space is bought and paid for by publishers, bought and paid for. It’s part of the contract
with the publisher to stock that book that it be displayed in certain ways. You know those
nice discounts that you get, 20% off the New York Times bestseller books when they’re
in hardback? Those are possible at Barnes and Noble because of the huge buying power
of that bookstore. So, they buy in huge volume. Now, a store like Labyrinth or its
predecessor, Book Haven, wasn’t able to have that kind of volume in sales, and so they
couldn’t negotiate with a publisher that sort of discount. So, that means that a smaller
bookstore, because of its smaller buying power, can’t provide a competitive price in a
market where Barnes and Noble is right next door.
Now, there were ways that independent bookstores try to compensate for that, especially
in this market, by giving discounts to faculty members stocking their books at the
bookstore. This is somewhat controversial, although it’s Barnes and Noble that has tried
to make it controversial by bringing it up with the university and saying, “Now, isn’t this
a kind of bribery?” But that’s the way that a store like Labyrinth, or like Book Haven
before it, was able to try to be price competitive among people it knew wanted to buy
from them, those professors who stock their book at an independent bookstore.
So, back to this question of who decides what’s on the table: at Labyrinth I went in, and
I said, “Who decides what’s on this table?” And they said, “Oh, she’s over there,” and I
went and talked to her and I said, “How do you decide what’s on the table?” She said,
“Well, you know, I had a good general education as a young person, and I kind of know
who’s who in the intellectual circles in Europe and in the United States. And so I browse
the lists, and I talk to sales reps when they come in, and I read, and I look at what certain
courses are stocking, and I see what people are reading on campus, and then I decide.”
That’s really different from that space being bought and paid for by a publisher as part of
a marketing agreement. Those tables are very powerful, for browsers, in shaping what
browsers might possibly buy, or think about, when they come in to a bookstore.
So, that space is particularly key to a bookstore’s presence, culturally, in the community.
And Sarah’s point, about the Yale graduates on the bookshelf: that is a nod to Barnes and
Noble’s immediate context. So, there is that local marketing piece.
But, think about this. There are just a few fiction buyers who work with publishers to
decide what novels will end up in Barnes and Noble. So, writers, when they’re thinking
about, “can I sell my book?” instead of thinking, “I wonder if I can impress the owner of
the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park in Chicago,”–a very famous, huge, wonderful
bookstore, not a chain–instead of saying, “I want to sell my book in Chicago. It’s set
there, and maybe it’ll be appealing. I wonder if I can impress the owner of that bookstore,”
and having a strategy that addresses those kinds of individual circumstances in different
spaces– Powell’s in Seattle, Labyrinth in New York–they have to say, “I wonder if I can
impress the buy from Barnes and Noble.” So, instead of many people making that
decision about whether a novel is worthy of being promoted, it’s one person. That person
becomes extremely powerful in shaping what literary texts reach us, what comes to our
attention through the bookstore.
Now, have you ever wondered, as you’re driving down the street, why there might be a
Dunkin’ Donuts here, and a Dunkin’ Donuts just two blocks away? Have you ever noticed
that? There are various stores that you’ll see this: gas stations sometimes, fast food
restaurants, sometimes Wal-Mart. Bookstores are another that you will sometimes see
this. Why is that? Well, what they’re doing is competing in an overwhelming way with
another store in that market. Usually this happens when they’re trying to drive another
store out of business. So, they’re a big enough chain, they can absorb losses from an
unproductive second store to saturate a market, and then they can absorb the closing of
that second store once the competitor has been driven out of business. So that’s why that
market saturation happens. It’s not because they think it’s going to be profitable, that
there’s another hundred-percent increase when they add that second store one block over.
It’s all about market saturation. It’s getting it as close to a hundred percent as possible.
So, those kinds of tactics are possible for chain stores, and they are not possible for
independent bookstores. And this is how many independent bookstores have been taken
off the map in our cities and in the suburbs.
So, this is one way that censorship comes to us: not in that old-fashioned way of
censorship laws, but in a new way, market censorship. This has always been part of how
things work in a capitalist economy. It’s true that in the past literary enterprises–be they
selling books or writing books or publishing books–had to make a profit in order to stay
afloat. But the way that profit was made has changed from the early twentieth century
until this point, and I’m going to say more about that. So, just by going in to the bookstore,
I want you to think about–the next time you go in, think about how things are being
presented to you. Now, how many of you get most of the books you buy–not for
classes…well, let’s just ask this, blanket, and then I’ll break it down–how many of you
get most of the books you buy from a bookstore? Still quite a few of you. How many of
you get them mostly over the internet? Okay, not a majority. Taking out classes, books
you buy for pleasure, your own decision to buy them, how many of you are still buying
those in bookstores? Okay, actually a lot of you. So, that really, even, tips the scale in
favor of bookstores, so that’s interesting to me. I wasn’t sure what you would say. That
suggests that bookstores are still powerful purveyors of culture; they still shape what you
think about and what you read. It’s browsing, or maybe that you’ve read about something,
and you go looking for it, that brings you in to the bookstore.
Chapter 2. The History of Legal Censorship in the United States
Censorship does have a legal history in this part of the century. And so now I want to just
give you a little rundown of that. So, this [a slide reading “Censorship and Censure”] is
actually a title of a chapter of a book that I will be writing on the post-45 novel, and I’m
going to have this as the last chapter of that book. The reason for that is that censorship
and what I’m calling censure–that’s the public outcry against literature, even not on legal
grounds–is a way for the culture to speak back to the literary. So, I spend a lot of time in
this class, and in my teaching in general, and in my writing, talking about what books say
to us. But what do we say back to those books as a society? Well, censorship and its
companion, censure, do a lot of that talking back. So, there are two sides of access to
literature. I’ve just been talking a little bit about market constraints on what can be
published and read, and now I’m going to talk a little bit about legal constraints. I’m going
to get back to the market constraints in a little while.
Since the early twentieth century, a lot of the legal constraints on publishing and
distributing literature have eased. In the 1870s, the Comstock laws in the United States
aimed to regulate the use of the mails for the dissemination of obscene materials. These
laws were used in 1914 to indict Margaret Sanger for sending information about
contraception across state lines, and she had to flee, and she left the country to protect
herself. So, just the description of how contraception worked was a violation of the
Comstock laws; so of course we’re happily out of that moment. In 1933, for literature
there was a major decision by Judge Woolsey declaring that James Joyce’s Ulysses was
not obscene. Often censorship in literature would have to do with the import of literature
into the United States. So, this is sort of on the same logic as the Comstock laws. The
Comstock laws regulate the traveling of obscene literature across state lines. Customs
regulations regulated obscenity coming in to the United States.
Why is obscenity important? Well, obscenity is largely recognized by legal scholars as
not being protected by the Fourteenth Amendment; it is not protected speech. So, that’s
why it was important for someone who wanted to keep Ulysses out of American hands to
call it obscene. Now, it’s very interesting to read what Woolsey says about Ulysses. It
just shows you how the learned reading of literature comes to have a legal impact in the
world. So, this is Woolsey on Joyce:
Joyce has attempted, it seems to me, with astonishing success, to show how the screen of
consciousness, with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions, carries, as it were, on a
plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual
things about him, but also on a penumbral zone residual of past impressions, some recent
and some drawn up by association, from the domain of the subconscious.
He’s talking about the stream-of-consciousness method of narration in Ulysses. He shows
how each of these impressions affects the life and the behavior of the character which he
is describing, and I’m going to skip down. He goes on to detail more about Joyce’s
technique: “It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its
necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think
about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks, and that his purpose has been so
often misunderstood and misrepresented.” So, here, Woolsey takes a very serious view
of Joyce’s artistic project, and he takes as the mark of its success what he calls the loyalty
of Joyce to that project, of showing exactly what characters think in their subconscious
associations, as those rise into consciousness and into language. That principle is
furthered in the United States in 1957 with a case called Roth.
It’s Roth v. United States, and in this case Woolsey’s approach to the literary is enshrined
in American law, affirmed as a precedent. So, according to the Roth case, something can
be judged obscene only if it meets three conditions, and those are these: The books’
descriptions of nudity or sex must go beyond the limits of taste established by community
standards. So that phrase, “community standards,” will become very important in later
law, and I’ll mention how in a minute. “It must not appeal to the interests of the average
adult.” So, you have to be really aberrant in order to meet this standard; it can’t appeal to
the interests of the average adult. That’s what makes it obscene, so–I don’t know–
necrophilia, maybe that counts. And lastly–this is the kicker–it must have no redeeming
social or literary value whatsoever. That means if you can prove just that one, you’re safe.
So, no matter what it is, even if it is necrophilia, if you can prove that it has literary value
it cannot be obscene.
And so this particular standard comes in to play when Allen Ginsberg’s Howl goes on
trial in–I think it’s 1959–it goes on trial. Similarly, a customs case and a case about selling
the book: it was bought at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and the poor sales clerk
was indicted for selling it, and also the bookstore was indicted for importing it. It had
been published in Europe. All they had to do in that trial, and it’s very funny to read the
transcript, is to prove that Ginsberg in Howl was doing anything remotely resembling
literary work. And it’s very funny to see people trying to argue that he was not. So, it’s
not enough to say that he uses the word “cock,” for example, in that poem; that’s not
enough. And the prosecutor tries to make the case on the basis of individual words, and
then you see them having these hilarious conversations about how individual words work
in metaphors and how they mean different things. This standard really saves literature
from any kind of continuing legal censorship.
But, there are other ways of producing censorship; that “community standards” comes to
be a problem in, for example, textbook design. So, there are these huge markets in public
schools in Florida and Texas and California, and so textbook publishers have to appeal to
the community standards of those huge, powerful markets, and that has an impact on
what’s available to school systems all over the country. So, there is a way that those
community standards, while in the Roth case they’re redeeming–they help to make the
case against censorship, against a too-wide definition of obscenity–it does have an impact
in other ways in the opposite direction. Since the 1990s, in the wake of these changes,
libraries have become the primary place where legal cases are based. So, in 1982 the
school board of Long Island, in Island Trees, Long Island, tries to remove, or actually
does remove Black Boy, Slaughterhouse 5, and various other sort of books of the 1960s,
mainly about politics, mostly has them removed from the school library. And a suit is
brought against that school system for doing that.
The decision in that case affirms that even though public school systems are within their
rights in the context of the classroom to restrict what is on the syllabi of their teachers,
that the school library represents what they call a “special environment.” The special
environment is a place of voluntary study; it is a place where the Fourteenth Amendment
cannot be suspended. And as they say, sort of poetically, students do not leave their rights
at the school door. And so school libraries can’t be regulated in that way. But these things
come up over and over, and what’s interesting about that particular case is that the
objection was that these books were anti-American. How far have we come since Black
Boy had to be truncated? Not that far, in certain sectors of the country, in certain ways of
thinking. Black Boy was cut in half because it didn’t seem like a good reflection on
America. It’s still a problem for some books in being accepted and read.
Chapter 3. New Forms of Censorship: The Influence of the Market
So, I began to talk about market constraints, and I want to just say a little bit more about
that and how it affects the writing of literature and the publishing, even before you arrive
at the bookstore. Traditional publishing has undergone a huge consolidation since the
1980s. So, there are large multinational corporations that have bought up publishers. The
one signal example of this is when Bertelsmann, a German company, bought up Pantheon
Books. This is written about in a book. Now I’m forgetting the name of it. It’ll come to
me. One of the Pantheon editors led a revolt when this happened. It became clear that
Bertelsmann was going to impose a new standard of profitability on the lists in Pantheon’s
portfolio. So it used to be in old-time publishing, sort of mid century publishing and up
to the 1980s, that the list, a literature list (and that’s the list of books that any publisher
publishes), the list should be profitable. That does not mean that every single item on that
list will be profitable. So editors in the old-time mode could work with writers who they
found to be difficult and interesting, path breaking, unusual, not catering to what was
popular. They could work with writers and cultivate them and they knew that they were
taking on a book–say it’s a collection of short stories; these are notoriously hard to sell–
they were taking on a book that was not going to make a profit. But then they would also
take on The Joy of Cooking–or The Joy of Sex, since it’s censorship day–and they knew
that the profit from a popular book could help to carry and balance those less profitable
books, or not-at-all-profitable books, that they had on the list. So, there was a management
of lists that could be tilted to allow different kinds of books into the public domain.
When publishers were taken over by multinational corporations that were very distant
from the interaction between an editor and a writer, they looked at the numbers and they
started to demand that every book have its profit-and-loss analysis and that a very strict
regulation be followed in ensuring that all titles were going to make a profit. That’s a very
different standard, and it had a huge impact on what kind of latitude editors had in
working with writers who they thought might be a little unusual or not so marketable. At
the same time, agents began to have a role in the publishing business. In the 1950s, when
editors were encouraging literary writers directly, they had a much more collaborative
relationship with writers. But as profit became more important writers needed to turn to
someone else who wasn’t going to pressure them to follow the market, and agents came
to have a role. Now, it’s interesting. There is yet a third role that has just begun to emerge
in this structure, and that is of the coach, the writing coach: so you can now pay big bucks,
if you’re a writer, to have someone who will call you up every week and say, “Hey, how’s
the book going? Let’s talk about your ideas. Are you writing today?” It used to be that
agents took that kind of active role. Well, agents are very busy now, with their clients
selling movie rights and such things. Movie rights are where a lot of the profit in a book
sale come from. So, agents began to be what the old-time editor was, and I think we have
yet to see whether coaches become what agents used to be in turn. But, as profitability
becomes more and more of an issue in selling a book to a publisher, there is an ever
ongoing search for that person who will be the ally of the literary in this process.
I’ve talked about the consolidation in book selling, the rise of the chains, and I’ve also
talked about those financial relationships between book sellers and publishers, were space
is bought. They also have incentives that publishers give, sometimes give money for
readings to be held at a bookstore. So, sometimes those things are bought also, those kinds
of events, promotional events. There is, of course, this whole context of the rise of the
internet, and all kinds of competition from the film industry, other media. Market
constraints are sometimes paradoxically produced by that overload that we get from the
internet. So what that means is the culture is finding new arbiters. So, you have this huge
volume of information and cultural offerings being given to you. In that welter of
information we all look to some arbiter to tell us, “How do I sort this out?” Nobody has
the time to read all the blogs and decide which one they’re going to read regularly. So
you might get a link from someone else’s page, someone you are friends with, someone
you admire, a writer you’ve seen elsewhere. You might read certain print publications
and from there follow them in to the internet, into cyberspace. Most books now come
with a web address somewhere on them. A lot of films do; most films do. This is still in
a period of development. How profit gets connected up with those arbiters isn’t yet very
clear, so companies are experimenting with paying for placements, like when you do the
Google search and there are certain Google-sponsored links at the top. That’s like having
the space in the front of your store bought and paid for. So you think that you’re getting–
or, I think we all know that those are sponsored links, now, but at the beginning people
didn’t really quite know that, so it looked like you were getting– the product of a
disinterested electronic search, but in fact you were getting a promotion. So the internet
experiments with all kinds of both new and tried and true ways of using money to create
prominence among the welter of information.
Chapter 4. The Other Side of the Coin: Intellectual Property and Infinite Access in
the Digital Age
Then there is another rising problem in question, and that is of intellectual property and
access as books are digitized. So, I don’t know if you have heard of the Google Book
Project, and also all the digital libraries initiatives. There are various ones, but the Google
Book Project is digitizing with a special technology. People think it’s probably a robotic
technology–it’s kept secret–for scanning books that are in the public domain, and they’ve
made agreements with lots of university libraries including Stanford, Cornell, Michigan,
to digitize all the books that are beyond the copyright that are in their collections to make
a huge digital library. And the dream is that this will be a sort of bonanza of access. It’ll
be searchable. It’ll be–well, maybe–free. It’ll be accessible all over the world. So, there
is a dream here that’s very noble. Publishers and writers’ groups, unions, are very worried
about copyright infringement, because Google has stepped over the line and is interested
in pushing the envelope into scanning copyrighted material. So, what has started to
happen is that individual publishers have made deals with Google to let Google digitize
their list for a fee. But, see, now that money starts to come into this arrangement, it starts
to look less like free access and more like an access that is, once again, shaped by these
financial considerations. It’s not at all clear how the nobility of the project and the
financial context are going to work themselves out, and it’s not at all clear yet what the
general approach of educational institutions will be towards this. Yale has not signed onto
this, for example, so some universities have; some haven’t. These are huge, looming
questions that will impact what we get to see as literature, how much access we have
among the vast choices that the internet makes available to us.
I want to just mention one more thing, and that’s about internationalization. One thing
that you didn’t probably see at the bookstore is fiction in translation, contemporary fiction
in translation, notoriously impossible to sell. There is a press called the New Press that
was founded after some of the Pantheon editors left and they founded this nonprofit press.
That is the only kind of fiction that the New Press publishes, contemporary fiction in
translation, because they knew that only a nonprofit press could publish this. It will never
sell. One of the objections to the Google Book Project is that the vast majority of its texts
are in English, and it seems to present an English-centric vision of the world’s knowledge,
‘cause it does have pretensions to be the repository of the world’s knowledge.
In the reception of literature there are other forces, and here’s when we start to move in
to the realm of The Human Stain. In the 1990s, there was a very lively and often
acrimonious debate in academia and among intellectual commentators about whether
literature was the purveyor of ideology, political ideology. So, the question is, does
literature have a message that it’s trying to tell us? And one way to think about this is to
think about English 125, major British poets, the picture of what the old-fashioned canon
might look like. It’s all white guys. I think there might be one woman that you can put on
the syllabus in the Spring, a modern poet. You can probably teach Bishop. I think people
do teach Bishop in the second term of English 125. Did those poets represent the
communication of an ideology? Because a lot of contemporary fiction became the object
of contention: along with these very traditional syllabi, are you going to include Toni
Morrison on your syllabus? Well, this is no longer controversial. She’s such an
overwhelmingly powerful author, at this time, by the sheer quality of her work, but early
in her career it would have been a question.
One of the striking things, of course, about American fiction in the second half of the
twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, is the demographic really does change.
Writers of color are much more prominent; there are many more points of view present
in that canon. So, is literature sociological? Does it speak to society, or is it an aesthetic
object, something that we should understand as part of the history of an art form? Do you
have to choose between these two? And I cite here what became an incredibly important
book. It’s really a wonderful book by actually a Yale graduate, John Guillory. The title is
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, published right at the height
of the culture wars, of the canon wars. In it, he argues that in the mid twentieth century,
literature was a kind of social elite good, and that the aesthetic, if it had an ideology, it
was an ideology of bourgeois privilege. So, it wasn’t that the content of particular poems
would be communicating something about an elite bourgeois ideology, but rather that the
very act of being in the institution where you would study such a thing (at Yale, in English
125) that was the repository of the elite power of these texts. So it had much more to do
with institutions than it did about the content of any particular literary work. And it makes
some very persuasive readings of canonical poems that demonstrate the undecidability of
their ideology, or the way that they resist how they’ve been cast, how those poems have
been cast by critics.
There are also ways that novels were received and complained about that become part of
this picture. So, we’ve talked about Black Boy. I mentioned how controversial Woman
Warrior was because of its impurity as a Chinese text. Toni Morrison became a real
advocate of writing by women of color, in particular, and also as a literary critic she
mounted an argument about how whiteness functions as a central part of the traditional
canon of literature. And she wrote Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination in 1992, a very influential text. Internationally, we had the phenomenon of
Salman Rushdie’s persecution, the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini
after the publication of The Satanic Verses, for its depiction of Islam. That kind of
persecution becomes a feature of this more internationalized debate about what is okay to
say, especially about religions, and then of course we have the Danish cartoon episode,
with the cartoons of Muhammad that are now seemingly…it’s resurgent. There is another
question about a film about Muhammad’s life, I believe it is. Then there is Roth’s work,
and here’s where I just want to meditate for a minute on Roth.
Philip Roth’s work has been defined by these kinds of objections, that censure that I was
talking about. He was very widely acclaimed in 1960 when Goodbye, Columbus won the
National Book Award. Goodbye, Columbus is a set of stories mostly about young Jewish
protagonists living in a Jewish context in Jewish communities in Newark or in New York.
It included a story called “The Conversion of the Jews” in which a young boy (actually,
well, a little older than young boy, maybe he’s a teenager), Ozzie Freedman, becomes
extremely agitated because all his questions to his family and to his rabbi about
Christianity are dismissed; he finally comes to be punished for asking these kinds of
questions. So, Ozzie stages his revolt by climbing to the top of the synagogue roof and
threatening to jump off if his family, all the assembled students from his Hebrew school,
and the rabbi, won’t kneel down and pray to Jesus, which of course they do because he’s
about to jump off. This story was quite controversial, as you might imagine, so there was
a taste of Roth’s vexed relationship to Jewish community in that story. So, it was all about
how a hidebound Jewish community was preventing and circumscribing the curiosity of
a young American boy, and it really highlighted Ozzie’s Americanness. And Roth has
always emphasized that about himself: He’s an American writer.
Like Saul Bellow before him–Saul Bellow had been his mentor and teacher for a brief
time at the University of Chicago–Bellow insisted on bringing into American literature
the voice and sensibility of an immigrant Jewish family. Bellow was from a Russian
Jewish family that immigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century. Bellow was told
he would neve–because of his heritage, when he was at the University of Chicago–he was
told he would never have the ear for language that would allow him to write beautifully,
because of his linguistic background and because he was Jewish. Well, Bellow pioneered
the way of bringing in a particularly Jewish and European notion of literature and a
sensibility about the body that could enter American literature and change it from its
either WASPish or southern genteel quality. And, certainly, this was a very powerful
current, and Roth is the continuation of that current in American letters.
Roth comes out in 1969 with Portnoy’s Complaint. Portnoy is quite a novel. It’s really all
about masturbation. It’s about Alex Portnoy jacking off in the bathroom to every possible
provocative thought he can have, and it’s told as if to Alex’s psychiatrist in a sort of
ranting, over-the-top style, very explicit. This got Roth into big trouble, partly because
Alex lives in a very tight-knit Jewish family, and this enters into the whole story of his
obsession with sex. Irving Howe, a very prominent Jewish literary critic, public
intellectual, wrote a famous essay in 1972 called “Philip Roth Reconsidered.” And he
basically said that the adulation given to Roth was entirely inappropriate–he now saw on
reflection, now that he had read Portnoy’s Complaint–because Roth had an unfocused
hostility towards the Jewish community. This enraged Roth. That rage fueled huge
portions of his career. When, in The Human Stain, Roth has Coleman Silk say, “All of
Western literature began with a quarrel, the wrath of Achilles,” in a certain way he is
describing his own origin as a writer.
Now, if you’ll go with me: Do you have just five minutes? I want to get to one last point.
Roth, in case you haven’t noticed, is a very misogynist writer. Did you notice? Hard to
miss that. Why do I like Roth? In this context where writers are taken to task for their
offensiveness on cultural grounds, on gender grounds, on the grounds of identification,
how can you like someone who has this major flaw, who seems to see all women as sexual
objects, who is unembarrassed about saying his writing is about a man’s life, the life of
men; it’s not about the life of women? So, why do I like Roth? This has actually baffled
me for years. Why doesn’t it bother me? There are parts in The Human Stain that really
are quite amazingly objectionable. My favorite is the gift of the molestation. Do you
remember this when they are talking about Faunia, and how great she is in bed, and what
she is like at breakfast afterwards, and they speculate, Coleman and Nathan, that maybe
that was the gift of her having been molested? Well, molestation is never a gift. If there
is anything that comes from living through a hard life, it is not the gift of the molestation,
but the gift of the person who survived it. This is insane.
Why do I still like Roth? Well, partly it’s that, like no one else, he can take me into a
voice, seamlessly draw me in. Some of his ranting voices are more or less convincing.
Some are more or less caricatured; of course the women’s are more caricatured than the
men’s. Nevertheless, he can take me in there, and the way his sentences work are really
sometimes just astonishingly beautiful. There is a part of The Human Stain that I
particularly like, and you’ll get to it as you finish the novel for Monday, and that’s when
he’s describing Coleman and Faunia at Tanglewood. So, just think about that when you
read that, pause for a minute over that.
I think what it is ultimately is that I’m very moved by two things in Roth’s writing; that
is the meditation on mortality and what goes along with that, I think: the focus on and the
dignity of the body. There is a very Whitmanian sense to his understanding of sex and the
body in all its complexity. I appreciate that. I am moved by that sense of the inaccessibility
of the other person–this is from my lecture on Monday–the way you always get the other
fellow’s life somehow wrong. That speaks to me about the difference between my
consciousness and anyone I encounter in the world. That to me is profound and moving.
It reminds me that, for all Roth’s linguistic energy and skill as a writer, there is still that
great divide that language is trying to cross. And that’s what I appreciate about literature
in general, that it’s that great attempt to cross that divide. I can overlook the misogyny
for those things. Am I like Roth? Probably not, but that’s why I like him. I read to see
what I’m not, not to see what I am, and so Roth’s very difference from me, his misogyny,
is part of what allows me to feel that I am entering, however partially, however always in
a compromised way, into the consciousness of another person through that beautiful,
amazing medium of language. So, that’s why I like Roth, and I would encourage you to
think about your own responses to the books that we’ve read together, think about what
it means about you as a reader that you respond in certain ways. So we’ll pick this up on
Monday; thank you for waiting.