Adieu, Philip Roth

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!

A ghost-love story

George Saunders (2017). Lincoln in the Bardo, Bloomsbury

‘These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy broth, but we then named them and loved them, and, in this way brought them forth. And now must lose them.’

        roger bevins in Lincoln in the Bardo

This is the Man Booker winning experimental debut novel from George Saunders. The story opens in the United States of mid nineteenth century, with President Lincoln’s son Willie fighting for his life, while the country is gripped in civil war. Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery in a marble crypt. His mother descends into grief and madness. The President is bent on returning to his son as he visits the crypt and talks to him lovingly. This agonizing love, guilt and longing reaches his son across the veil of death.

The Bardo- which in Tibetan language means ‘that place between life and death’- is populated with a bevy of rich characters, all in a state of oblivion. People of all sorts have carved out a space for themselves in this netherworld, the high and the low, god fearing and nihilists, with their friendships and subterfuge. Into this world, little Willie descends, expecting his father to come and visit him again. The entry of the little boy creates a new sensation among the inhabitants of the lively Bardo and they unite to help Willie ‘pass over’. For this plot to succeed, they must have an unlikely ally- the President himself. How Willie is transported on through the unlikely alliance of his father and the Bardo, forms the rest of the story.

The central theme that runs through the story is that of love and loss, the deep human ache to retrace lost tracks and reclaim our pasts. Saunders shows us a way of moving on after a devastating loss, not by forgetting, but by letting go, accepting, freeing ourselves from the burden of care for the loved one. He attacks the very idea of loving by living, by showing, by acting- our love for those who are dead should be a different kind of love. It cannot find meaning in the repetitive acts of expression through words and deeds, for this creates a tomb of the past, a never-ending mourning. A graceful way of loving the dead is to not act or talk but to think, to ache and hold. It is not a love that hinges on sharing, sympathy and reciprocity. It is a silent one-sided love, not prone to the tempest of action, time or space. That is how love for someone who is absent looks like.

The deep contrast to Lincoln’s throbbing aching love is the cohort in the Bardo, ebullient, devoid of all memory and sense of being. They are literally a ghost of their previous Saunders uses the oldest trick in the book to make the imaginary world real- by turning metaphors into their heads. They are accustomed to a charade, a clinging on to the most mundane that defined them when they were alive. Willie’s arrival infuses a human-like feeling in them for the first time- passion, purpose and fellow feeling.  Eventually helping Willie to freedom helps the Bardo to free itself.

This unusually poignant novel works because of its audacity- the narrative style, the imagination at one level, and the philosophy that is conveyed through polyphony that testifies to love, loss and what it takes to heal and be free.

The American Imperative

Colson Whitehead (2016), The Underground Railroad, London: Fleet, pp. 306

‘In America, the quirk was that people were things.’

                                                  

If you are a thing, your value depended on your possibilities. After being appraised and reappraised in the scales of other men’s visions, you knew your value and your place in the order of things. To escape the confines of this hierarchy was to escape the principles of your existence. The Underground Railroad, winner of Pulitzer Prize Fiction 2017, is a daring novel that maps the journey of escape of a slave girl as she traverses the physical terrain and foundational myths of America.

Three generations of slave women- Ajarry, Mabel and Cora- are at the heart of the story. While grandmother Ajarry was sold from Africa and died in plantation after being sold and resold many times over, her only surviving daughter Mabel attempts to escape the plantation and is not seen thereafter. Cora, Mabel’s daughter, is living as a stray, outcast among other slaves. She is part of the Hob that has seven outcast women who have insulated themselves from the insinuations of the world around them because of their reluctance to mix with others. As she is fighting for her ‘three square yards of dirt’ within the plantation where she grows her own garden, she meets Caesar, a former freeman from Virginia, who offers her passage to freedom through the ‘underground railroad’. Cora is compelled to take this offer and she sets off on a dangerous journey to go to the free states up north.

Upending metaphors

In this vicarious pathway to freedom and dignity, Cora encounters different states, each a possibility of an alternative America. In each of these steps, she encounters a terror more unprecedented than the previous. Cora understands that you do not need chains to imprison a person- the purpose of chains was accomplished in so many different ways. The seemingly harmless hospital in South Carolina is a hub of eugenics that subjugates black people through controlled sterilisation and her refuge (a nook in the attic of a white man’s house) in North Carolina is no more than a secret prison. Cora understands that ‘the world could make living prison of your safe haven.’ As she passes through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana, a miraculous combination of faith and friendship, takes her to her freedom.

What makes the novel stunning is the way metaphors and myths are turned on their heads, to live out their literal existence. Colson Whitehead sketches the details of the underground railroad by making the metaphor live its meaning, bolts and all. The railroad literally spreads like invisible vein of slave transport, an empire with its own logic, under the foundation of America. From this underbelly, it chisels away at the foundational myths of the American Declaration of Independence- the promise of equality, freedom and dignity to all its citizens. Cora hears of the Declaration recited by a slave and thinks of it as a ghost from the darkness. Later her language tutor Georgina tells her, ‘The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.’ When Cora ventures out, truth comes to her as a sudden engine from darkness dislocating all her beliefs, breaking her. When she works as an actor in a history museum in South Carolina, playing out a slave for the white audience, she thinks of truth as ‘a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach’. Simple theatre becomes a refuge of faith that comforts her. It is this same mistrust in truth as revealed by history that makes her reject the Bible and poetry.  Cora understands truth, freedom and equality when the lived experience of her life confronts the inherited faith of her society.

Questioning history

The American landscape is portrayed with as much brilliance as the mindscape of its people that run a ruthless machinery of order and hierarchy. The slave master and the slave catcher, the slave mother and the station agent, the grave robber and the abolitionist, are all the products of the same system. The philosophy of the slave catcher Ridgeway sums up the unstoppable racial logic, that the story portrays and disembodies, trenchantly. He believes that the true American Spirit was one ‘that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate, if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription- the American Imperative’. Ridgeway worked for this ‘American Imperative’ to ensure that property remained property. It was a notion of order, hierarchy of social arrangement and chain of value.

In the end, this is a story of one woman’s indomitable will to escape her destiny and find her way to freedom. Quite directly, it is her adventure through space and time in America where at each step a unique terror awaits. But this is also a meditation on history, our understanding of our pasts. In this light, the politics that works when black history is placed in the pages of white narratives attacks the foundational myths of the America. This story also brings out how technology moulds history, the tale of inventions and human endeavour to find a way out of difficulties, the kind of technology that is fantastic and adds meaning to life. Whitehead is claiming back something substantive here, but it is not something we are expecting. The novel is in the same vein of other defining works that took the idea of identity and turned it on its head- Julian Barnes’ England, England on the English question, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout on slavery and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question on being Jewish. An important perspective for our times!