Between Rising and Passing: Justice Suspended in the Fiction of Philip RothJackie Weisman
The American literary corpus is a rich body of commentary that features the process of becoming American as one of its most prevalent themes. According to the unofficial national mantra that Americans are all equal in their right to compete for success, Americanization entails not just gaining citizenship, but winning the spoils reserved for those who strive hardest and best in the meritocracy of capitalism. With this premise as a basis, "becoming American" novels diverge into subgenres with their own distinct sets of rules and attitudes toward the struggle for American identity. The genres of racial passing, economic ascent, and the hybrid Jewish mobility narratives of Philip Roth recognize the relationship between these schemas as essential to becoming American. Roth's conception of the American Dream cannot be accommodated within the boundaries set by his predecessors in rising and passing; however, his abiding notions of justice, as well as the rewards or penalties that befall his characters in the course of their endeavors, suggest a new subgenre to account for his second- and third-generation American Jews.
Although most of Roth's works fall within the same genre and involve characters trying to reconcile their Jewish and American identities, the stances they take evolve over the nearly fifty-year span of Roth's career. Three texts represent Roth's developing attitude toward Americanization: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), The Counterlife (1986), and American Pastoral (1997). These texts are important, in part, for when they were written, but in larger part for the years during which their narratives take place. Set in the year of its publication—squarely between World War II and the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement—Goodbye, Columbus recounts a young couple's summer romance. Though it deals principally with the related themes of class status and assimilation, its conspicuous racial undertones highlight the tenuous and irregular relationship that Jews had to whiteness at the time. American Pastoral devotes the bulk of its text to events occurring a decade after those in Goodbye, Columbus, though its narrator is a sixty-two-year-old living in 1995. The narrative details the unraveling of the Levovs, whose faultless facade conceals a family deep in crisis; it will serve as a hinge between the other two texts, as it explores Jewish identity questions in the years toward the end of the Vietnam War, at the peak of nationwide racial unrest, and at a crucial turning point in Jewish American self-identification. The last key text, The Counterlife, is set another ten years later in 1978, in geographic locations as varied as the United States, London, and Israel. Although American Jews in the late 1970s were more ensconced as Americans, Roth unearths their lingering anxieties to produce what Letty Cottin Pogrebin describes as the "quintessential novel of Jewish-American identity conflict." [1]
In America, Finding a Name
The difficulty in positioning Roth's body of work within a more inclusive literary category reflects taxonomical uncertainties surrounding Jews in American society. Though American Jews have experienced far less persecution than Jews nearly anywhere else in the world, they were not always welcomed in the United States, due in part to the "racial conundrum" they represented to pre-World War II Americans, who remained invested in the strict dichotomy between black and white. [2] Several associated factors kept Jews in a category that resisted this binary construction.
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Jackie Weisman is a first-year student at New York University School of Law.