Philip Milton Roth wrote an impressively
long list of savagely funny novels and stories during his lifetime including the
stunning American Trilogy written in
his sixties. He was awarded a number of prestigious literary awards including
National Book Award and The Presidential medal for the Humanities during his
lifetime. When he died on 22 May, we lost a voice that relentlessly pilloried
our absurdities and exposed our fragility. What does Philip Roth mean in a
world where Philip Roth does not physically exist anymore?
Guilt
as Comedy
Roth followed in the tradition of
engaging with guilt-ridden characters after the tradition of Shakespeare’s Othello, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Rodion
Raskolnikov, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary
and Kafka’s Josef K. But he treated guilt
as a comical idea by means of characters who were cut off from their moorings
and lived beyond their moral means. His outlandish protagonists were not paradigms
of conflicting selves but individuals whose spiritual and sensual ambitions
were so inextricably interlinked that they had to find a personalized way of
salvation. Their problem was not that they were fragmented and deluded, but
that they were whole and undeluded. This often brought them into tension with
moral authority and social restraints from the outside. A Rothsian character
had moral sovereignty, personal commandments, ethical convictions, personal
inhibitions and fear. Her comic recklessness to rebel against taboos brought her
pain, rage and a sense of loss and nostalgia as much as honoring social
expectations did. Alex in Portnoy’s
Complaint and Lucy in When She was Good,
rebelling against their parents find their rage inadequate to salvage their
pain.
Guilt as comedy was the central
preoccupation of Roth as he attempted to portray the vicissitudes of being
American and being Jewish. On writing American novels, he described that to understand,
describe and make credible the American reality of the twentieth century was a formidable
challenge to any writer. He remarked that the American reality ‘stupefies,
sickens, infuriates and then embarrasses’ the quintessential American writer because
actuality outdoes imagination and life emerges as a substitute for fiction. We experience
the outlandishness of this reality in his political satires especially The Great American Novel and Our Gang. The creation of counter history
and counter mythology of a nation begins with inane acts of separating the power-holder
from power. Roth savagely attacked this discrepancy between official piety and unpleasant truths.
When he started out describing
Jewish characters in stories such as Epstein,
he was initially described as a self-hating Jew. Quite characteristically, he reacted
with ‘to ask a satirist to be in good taste is like asking a love poet to be
less personal’. Roth explained that he was trying to not depict a stereotype of
the Jew but point out when a Jew acted like the stereotype. He was responding to
the Jewish predicament of the need to act out Jewishness in highly differentiated
ways which was traumatic and inescapable after having gone through specific
kinds of historical persecution and humiliation. His unique position as a
Jewish man gave him the freedom to refuse ennobling even the persecuted, with
the explanation that the lack of will and grace is found in all of us.
The
Final Literary Act
It was this continuing distrust
of ‘positions of authority’ including his own that motivated him to write the
way he did. He described his writing as a literary act not a political one and
his retribution was parodic justice. On this issue, he followed the dictum of the
Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky, whose last statement in his trial by an authoritarian
regime was that ‘the most rudimentary thing about literature…is that words are
not deeds’.
Roth never wrote for an audience.
His deep mistrust of external authority of any kind and validated positions
meant that he would not have cared about his legacy as a writer. But he would
have cared about being read. It would
have mattered to him if his books began conversations between partially realized
narratives that we all are, drawing energy from one another. In that sense he
has left us a world to continue those conversations. Roth once spoke about the
legacy of the writers he admired thus, ‘the trick apparently is to turn
yourself from a proper noun to an adjective and the best way to accomplish this
is to die’. Now that he is gone, his final literary act has been to gift us
this adjective- enter the Rothsian!
