The Philip Roth We Don't Know

Jacques Berlinerblau

Description

Let it be said, Philip Roth was never uncontroversial. From his first book, Roth scandalized literary society as he questioned Jewish identity and sexual politics in postwar America. Scrutiny and fierce rebukes of the renowned author, for everything from chauvinism to anti-Semitism, followed him his entire career. But the public discussions of race and gender and the role of personal history in fiction have deepened in the new millennium. In his latest book, Jacques Berlinerblau offers a critical new perspective on Roth’s work by exploring it in the era of autofiction, highly charged racial reckonings, and the #MeToo movement.

The Philip Roth We Don’t Know poses provocative new questions about the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, and the Zuckerman trilogy first by revisiting the long-running argument about Roth’s misogyny within the context of #MeToo, considering the most current perceptions of artists accused of sexual impropriety and the works they create, and so resituating the Roth debates. Berlinerblau also examines Roth’s work in the context of race, revealing how it often trafficked in stereotypes, and explores Roth’s six-decade preoccupation with unstable selves, questioning how this fictional emphasis on fractured personalities may speak to the author’s own mental state. Throughout, Berlinerblau confronts the critics of Roth —as well as his defenders, many of whom were uncritical friends of the famous author—arguing that the man taught us all to doubt "pastorals," whether in life or in our intellectual discourse.

Introduction: Art Is Slimy/Reverse Biography
1. Roth and Race
2. Old Men, Young Women
3. Misogyny and Autobiography
4. Before We Conclude That Roth’s Fiction Is Misogynistic
5. You Must Change Your Life!
6. Go Flux Your Self ! Philip Roth as Self-Help Guru
7. Fiction Is Truth! (Right?)
Conclusion: Philip Roth’s Legacy
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• American

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 14 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780813946627
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Philip Roth We Don’t Know
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2021
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Berlinerblau, Jacques, author.
Title: The Philip Roth we don’t know : sex, race, and autobiography / Jacques Berlinerblau.
Other titles: Philip Roth we do not know.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020058638 (print) | LCCN 2020058639 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946610 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813946627 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Roth, Philip—Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PS3568.O855 Z575 2021 (print) | LCC PS3568.O855 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058638
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058639
Cover art: “Philip Roth, 1984.” David Levine. (© Matthew and Eve Levine)
To Rubin Berlinerblau (1929–2019)
So you’re going to redeem Lonoff’s reputation as a writer by ruining it as a man. Replace the genius of the genius with the secret of the genius. Rehabilitation by disgrace?
—Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
“Lucidity,” he said, “is more important than happiness, because there isn’t any perpetual happiness, but there can be perpetual lucidity.”
—Philip Roth, “His Mistress’s Voice”
Contents
Introduction: Art Is Slimy/Reverse Biography
Part I. Race, Gender, Sex, and Autobiography in Roth’s Writing
1. Roth and Race
2. Old Men, Young Women
3. Misogyny and Autobiography
4. Before We Conclude That Roth’s Fiction Is Misogynistic
Part II. Roth Unsexed
5. You Must Change Your Life!
6. Go Flux Your Self! Philip Roth as Self-Help Guru
7. Fiction Is Truth! (Right?)
Conclusion: Philip Roth’s Legacy
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index
• INTRODUCTION •
Art Is Slimy/Reverse Biography

And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.
—Philip Roth, The Counterlife
In October 2017, the #MeToo movement burst onto social media, igniting a multinational, multi-industry reckoning about sexual misconduct. Seven months later, on May 22, 2018, Philip Milton Roth passed away at the age of eighty-five. There is, obviously, no causal relation between these two events; the former did not precipitate the latter. Then again, the types of concerns that #MeToo raises about male misbehavior and privilege might precipitate the demise of Roth’s literary legacy. By which I mean to say that among younger readers—readers attuned to our age’s sensitivities about gender, race, and class—this author is a really, really hard sell.
Roth’s fictional protagonists can outrage and “turn off” the current generation in myriad ways. When Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater plots to seduce a woman forty years his junior, he reflects thusly: “He could not let her get away. . . . The core of seduction is persistence. Persistence, the Jesuit ideal. Eighty percent of women will yield under tremendous pressure if the pressure is persistent. ” 1 Tonally, Sabbath reminds us of David Kepesh in The Dying Animal. He is a professor who serially preys upon his students . Reflecting on one of his lovers with whom he has had sexual relations for decades, Kepesh remarks, “Carolyn the undergraduate flower you pollinated, Carolyn at forty-five you farmed.” 2
When they’re not sounding like epaulet-bearing brand ambassadors from “rape culture,” Roth’s men find other ways to alienate vast swaths of today’s readership. They indulge in racist banter. 3 They mock multiculturalism. With especial verve, they lampoon feminists and feminism. 4 After decades of teaching Roth to college students, I find more than a few losing patience with him. Some appreciate his awesome talent, obviously. But with each passing year, more and more appear impervious to his charms.
It certainly doesn’t help that many of Philip Roth’s fictional bad boys greatly resemble Philip Roth; some of his characters actually bear his name. This tendency to write fictionalized autobiography—a tendency that he denied until his death—imbues debates about his work with a certain ferocity. Roth criticism often gets personal. His detractors, be they women’s studies majors or even professional literary scholars, frequently associate the misogyny of the author’s characters with the author himself. 5
If a readership skeptical of white male privilege needed any other reason to dismiss, or “cancel,” Roth, let’s never forget his lofty cultural stature. 6 This cisgendered, heterosexual genius was garlanded with every imaginable major literary prize save the Nobel. 7 Many of his twenty-eight novels were greeted by fanfare, hype, and scrutiny likely unknown to any previous American author. 8 His name was a virtual watermark on the pages of the New York Times, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, and other high-toned places. He started his career in the mid-1950s as a Jewish “outsider.” Yet, like so many of his industrious coreligionists, he eventually scaled the fence, and soon the peak, of his gentile profession. In the mostly white, mostly male, preserve of American letters, few writers attained Philip Roth’s wealth and prestige.
One might imagine that this establishment novelist, deemed “too-testosterone-y” by graduate students, and assailed by critics for the “superabundance of cock” in his prose, might fare badly among those with a #MeToo sensibility. 9 And, in truth, he often does! We shall encounter pre- and post-#MeToo feminist critics who lament the manner in which Roth writes about women, love, masculinity, and eroticism.
Yet it is simplistic to suggest that anyone who is sympathetic to #MeToo’s intervention might be allergic to Roth’s prose. This movement is not an orthodoxy. Those who concur with some, or all, of its goals have discovered characters and/or ideas that intrigue them in his fiction. What I’m about to show is that there are unexpected, and unnoticed, conceptual synergies in how both approach aesthetics. The relation between Roth and #MeToo, I will argue, is more complicated than either his admirers or critics recognize. Once we understand that relation, new possibilities for studying his work will emerge. And maybe, just maybe, a younger generation of readers might be persuaded to engage with his art.
The #MeToo Reckoning
In 2006, the activist Tarana Burke coined the phrase “Me Too.” 10 Ms. Burke did so in order to draw attention to sexual violence experienced by young women of color. A decade later, on October 15, 2017, her slogan reemerged. 11 The “Me” and the “Too” were conjoined, hashtagged, and primed for the staggering amplification of solidarity and outrage that social media enables.
The scholar Carly Gieseler notes that within just ten days, the handle had “spread to eighty-five countries, with 1.7 million tweets.” 12 On Facebook, 12 million people had posted about these two words within twenty-four hours. 13 Women of color, however, were no longer the focus of this viralizing phenomenon. Rather, the first revelations and reactions centered on the mostly white actresses whose suffering at the hands of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had just fully come to light. (Alyssa Milano, who reintroduced the term “#MeToo,” apologized for the inadvertent appropriation. Ms. Burke appeared to accept.) 14
According to one writer, #MeToo is “an attempt to get people to understand the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society.” 15 The movement, in the words of the New York Times, is “a national reckoning over harassment and gender discrimination, toppling powerful figures in nearly every industry.” 16 Media icons such as Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose grabbed a lot of the headlines. But of all the industries in which powerful figures were exposed (and sometimes toppled), it was the misbehavior of the creative class that consistently produced the most riveting story lines. 17
Philip Roth’s name was everywhere in this new conversational intersection between #MeToo and the arts. 18 “What are we to make,” asked Erin Vanderhoof in a reflection on Roth’s “dirtbag” aesthetic, “of literature’s towering male figures in the #MeToo era?” 19 Katy Waldman saw the occasion of his death as an “inflection point”—a prompt to ponder the “gendered blindness” of a more patriarchal literary era. 20 Upon his passing, the New Yorker gathered some of his closest friends for a dialogue entitled “Philip Roth in the #MeToo Era.” 21 Elsewhere, Meghan Daum cheekily praised Roth for writing fiction that provided women with a bestiary of toxic men. 22 The title of her piece says it all: “In the Age of #MeToo, Philip Roth Offers an Unlikely Blueprint for Feminists.” When asked about Roth’s alleged misogyny, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie commented, “I rea