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Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Criticism Found Dead, Authorities Suspect Roth
From this article in the Guardian. [via Slant Truth]
Now you’re talking! I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there’s no bridge between the two.
I never knew Roth spoke with a British spelling.
Comments
After graduating from high school at the age of 16, Roth went on to attend Bucknell University, earning a degree in English. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, receiving a M.A. in English literature and then working briefly as an instructor in the university’s writing program....
The interview continues with Roth saying:
Everyman is the name of a line of English plays from the 15th century, allegorical plays, moral theatre. They were performed in cemeteries, and the theme is always salvation. The classic is called Everyman, it’s from 1485, by an anonymous author. It was right in between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Shakespeare. The moral was always ‘Work hard and get into heaven’, ‘Be a good Christian or go to hell’. Everyman is the main character and he gets a visit from Death. He thinks it’s some sort of messenger, but Death says, ‘I am Death’ and Everyman’s answer is the first great line in English drama: ‘Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.’ When I thought of you least. My new book is about death and about dying. Well, what do you think?"
That you’re asking to be shot or imprisoned?
Never mind the British spelling; what’s with the “I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk...”? Is that an (American) typo? Or is Roth really saying that it would take a moritorium on criticism to make him wonderful? In which case, who are we to stand in the way of his personal development?
...oops, British misspelling, moritorium, moratorium ... that’s better
Well, I have a large degree of sympathy for Roth. It’s unlikely that we’ll get rid of criticism, but the process of reviewing/talking about books does seem to take on a life of its own--and frequently a distractingly unfair one.
It’s maddening, as a writer, to know that the reviewer has obviously not read your book, or not read it with any kind of care, and has just fit the snippets they’ve dog-eared while scanning into their mental review template. As a reviewer, it’s a damned struggle to actually review & try to say something interesting in 500-700 words, while also wondering whether your editor will chop the thing to hell if you try to be the least bit provocative or challenging.
And beyond this: there’re just not enough column inches to do books justice, and those books that do get the notice drown out those that don’t w/o any apparent relation to quality or importance. Whenever I go to the office & see thousands upon thousands of books awaiting my selection for a small handful of reviews in a given month, I just think: “well, there are a lot of good books in here that I’m just never going to read, or learn the merits of, until they’re way past their release date (and thus: review window for a major paper).”
In the meantime, there’s our development as writers/readers--who doesn’t long for their days in high school/undergrad when books were discovered rather than foist upon us by duty? Who hasn’t looked at their library and said, “Man, why haven’t I read that for ten years?” All while the stacks of Bookforum and The New Yorker and The New Republic grow, each with their own calls to buy yet more books. Blogs? Does a day go by where I’m not jealous at the luck of someone else’s new discovery? Rarely, but why care about that? It’s natural… but getting a bit less connnected, less consumed in reviewery and pitches as a reader strikes me as a much more sane life in literature.
Hm, I wonder if Roth is hiring thugs and goons? I may be interested.
On the “Jewish writer” thing, Roth was bitterly attacked by some official Jews for his first book (I think) “Goodbye Columbus”, which includes a hilariously impious storu “The Conversion of the Jews”.
Roth’s generation of writers was often ethnically interpreted, a slant which eventually led to multiculturalism, and he always hated that.
I think some of the awkwardness is that the interview’s translated from Danish into British English. If he retains any of the felicities of Yiddish-inflection which crop up in his novels, I foresee layers upon layers of subtle miscommunication.
I agree with Roth. Books, criticism, two different things. But I don’t think it really matters. Very few people read literary criticism. It doesn’t have much actual effect in the world.
Actually, Zizka, it was the title story --Goodbye Columbus-- as well as “Defender of the Faith” and “Epstein” that got him in trouble for airing the race’s dirty laundry and not representing, as it were. My father, a Jew born in 1928, long hated Roth for giving fuel to the racists, until at a relative’s Bar Mitzvah last summer in North Jersey he was forced to admit that there are People Like That.
I wonder --here comes the pedagogical tone again, ‘cause it’s all I’ve got-- whether you or Scott, who seems to know something about the guy, can elaborate on “ethnically interpreted . . . which eventually led to multiculturalism . . . “ Do you mean he was one of like two token chroniclers of Jewish-American life who showed up in Our Heritage of Minority Literature classes? Baldwin, Morrison, Kingston, Okada, Erdrich, Alexie, Elkin, O’Connor, Malamud, Roth?
Josh, I’m not going to speak for John, but I think that Roth was initially considered “the next great Jewish author,” esp. since there were so many stories in the Times and Tribune about his relationship with Bellow. Then there’s the fact that the world he’s always depicted has, since the get-go, been populated by Brooklyn Jews and their ideological kin. I should say that I’m a casual, not academic, reader of Roth (which, it seems, would suit him fine); so I don’t know if or how he’s been appropriated by those who favor identity politics. I know he thinks he’s been shoved into a literary-ethnic enclave from the interviews he gave after publishing The Human Stain; but I doubt he’s been embraced by Jewish identity politicians. He’s too abrasive and fails to write in that quasi-mystical, almost celebratory tone of writers who are championed by the academic left. He’s too critical of the traditions to be easily incorporated into a liberatory politics; if anything, his (rather typical, in my experience my Brooklyn Jews) self-loathing undermines the claims of identitarian logic.
But I could be wrong, since I only read the novels. Also, his opposition to the politics of the New Left--apparent in all his ‘70s novels and which reemerges in his recent work (The Human Stain, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, &c.)--makes me doubt that he values their ideological progeny in the academy. The link between Brown/Marcuse/Hayden/Hoffman and contemporary identity politics--in which what’s important is the “self-realization” of the individual as opposed to health of the body politic--informs much of Roth’s recent work. For example, The Plot Against America showcases the conflict between the older Roth brother, an artist who wants to “express himself” and ends up doing so in the service of a fascist politics, and the younger Philip whose resistance enables him to save his older brother from himself. The idea/ideal of self-realization which informs both the New Left and contemporary academics is something Roth considers anathema. I think.
As I said, I haven’t studied this period or Roth in anything but an enthusiastic but casual manner, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Where’s Sean when we need him? This is more up his alley than mine.
As I remember, it was considered to be news when a bunch of Jewish novelists showed up (I think Mailer was the first). Who were the big pre WWII Jewish novelists? So there was this controversy about whether a Jew could be an American novelist. I think that the hyphenated “Jewish-American” epithet may have been a concession to those like Eliot and Hemingway who had a thing about Jews who were “just so awful”, rather than a recognition of our rich multicultural heritage.
I did hear a HS English teacher refer to Karl Sandburg as Swedish-American, though. And Delmore Schwartz as German-American (really).
Well, interesting though this is, it’s sliding away from Roth the Criticism Hater to Roth: Jewish Writer (unless somebody wants to argue that the latter is somehow necessarily implicated in the former; a thing I find hard to imagine). The reason why this interview sticks out is precisely its ironic twang, no? Which other living American writer is getting the thorough Academy total-body-rub (and metaphorical facial) like Roth presently is? Are Updike, Morrison, Saul Bellow (OK: Canadian, but he lived in the US most of his life) (OK, he’s dead, so not a ‘living’ writer in the strict sense of that word; are you going to carry on picking nits like this all day?) or DeLillo sitting at home fretting that the Library of America aren’t issuing a handsome multi-volume edition of *their* complete fiction? So many Academics love Roth, write about Roth, undertake research on Roth, that of course it has to be Roth who snarls at the whole barbarous world of academia. Would he make these comments if he weren’t so cosseted by literature scholars? If he were (whisper it) ignored by academia?
I think that Roth depends more on a reading audience than on critical acclaim. I especially like his stuff about having sex with students. (Each of us has his own critical screen, right?)
I once described Mordecai Richler, who also writes some nice things about having sex with students, as the Canadian-content Phillip Roth—even though, by birth, Saul Bellow should be the Canadian-content Phillip Roth. (Take that, Roth—Richler—Bellow! You are all ethnic writers who write about sex all the time!)
Updike is the ethnic Wasp in the group, just as Styron is the ethnic cracker. Both have a terrible tendency to overwrite—I find Updike unreadable now. Ethnicism was a forerunner of multiculturalism, but not the same thing at all.
UPDATE: As far as I know, Bellow only writes about his succession of horrible wives, and not about having sex with students. Perhaps I left a false impression above.
Yet another advantage of reading mostly SF—no major science fiction writer that I know of is known for either writing about sex with students or about their horrible wives. It’s the pernicious influence of “write what you know” on even the best writers—why do they think that their lives and their personal fantasies are so interesting?
Well, academic porn may be a specialized taste, but don’t knock it. I mean, I don’t like oysters, but it’s OK with me if you do. You aren’t judgemental, rigid, intolerant and hate-filled, are you?
Scott, that’s a great point about the contrast Roth sets up in Plot between draughtsman and writer and the way it relates to his antipathy to expressivist politics. But, whatever Sandy says about the desire to express himself, if I remember right, what the novel stresses is his extraordinary interest in/ability at mimesis--with the implication that artistic imitation is continuous with the social imitation of bad assimilation. Sandy has a remarkable ability to draw other people’s faces and a remarkable urgency to become part of mass America. The implicitly second order reflection of Philip’s literary composition, by contrast, looks like the good model of both creativity and social integration.
I think that’s a powerful, but pretty manipulative distinction and like everything Roth says--in particular in the linked article-- should be taken with several shakers of salt. Who couldn’t sympathize? A lot of criticism, book chat, etc. is bogus and soul killing. (Also, by the way, there’s a lot of imitation in democratic societies and it can be really reductive and demagogic.) First thing we do, let’s hang all the critics. But it’s helpful to view all this with some sociological imagination. Suspicion of criticism and wariness of social categorization are utterly unremarkable attitudes among contemporary artists. They’re practically part of the job description. It would be weird if Roth didn’t say something about hating critics and not wanting to be characterized as a Jewish writer.
On the other hand, there’s the unusual truculence of his tone. (The poor interviewer!) Here don’t you have to take into account not just the professional status of the modern artist, but the contexts of mass-mediated literary reputation? How many zillions of these interviews has Roth done, how wearying must they be, and how skillful is he at manipulating them? (He doesn’t turn them down; he just acts like a prick.) What we read is less the literary opinons of Philip Roth, then Roth’s presentation of “Philip Roth” tm.
Roth must know this. He’s too terrifyingly intelligent, and all this is too close to the metafictional narcissism of his fiction, for it to be otherwise. I have to think that when he follows an attack on literary criticism with some boilerplate literary criticism, he’s fully aware of the contradiction and expects us to be too.
In my view, the stuff about New Left politics and about ethnic identity is similarly undependable. It would sound too dismissive to call it the narcissism of small differences, but that’s not too far off, I think.
John, ‘Update’, yes: I can’t think of a single Roth character who has sex with his students. The dentist in The Counterlife has sex with his dental nurse; and the main figure in The Human Stain is an academic who has sex with a much younger (much much younger) woman (though not a student). But that’s as near as it gets, I think. Not that I’m judgemental, rigid, intolerant or hate-filled on the subject of writing about having sex with students. I reserve my judgement, rigidity, intolerance and hatred to that arena where it belongs: football.
Nor, actually, does Roth write about ‘a succession of horrible wives’, not really. He did caricature Claire Bloom in I Married A Communist (on the rebound from his divorce from her, and wounded by that memoir she published which portrayed him as a git); and the wife in Portnoy’s Complaint is a rather manipulative and dodgy person. But otherwise there are a whole bunch of really nice wives in his fiction.
On the other hand: ‘writing about sex all the time’ ... yes, that sounds like Roth.
My Life as a Man.
John Emerson: “Well, academic porn may be a specialized taste, but don’t knock it. I mean, I don’t like oysters, but it’s OK with me if you do. You aren’t judgemental, rigid, intolerant and hate-filled, are you?”
Oh no, whatever you like. But I should point out that my distaste is not for the academic porn as such. It’s for the overflow of writerly ego that leads writers into thinking that their lives are really the most interesting lives, and the failure of imagination that leads them to think that they can only write well about people like themselves.
Yeah, I agree. After I systematically went through the up-and-coming novelists around 1963-4, I decided not to become a novelist. My sex life wasn’t at all interesting then, and after reading the novels I didn’t want it to be interesting that way, either. I found Updike’s “Rabbit, Run” especially discouraging, since I had actually sort of liked his earlier stuff, and he was my ethnic representative in that particular pack.
My Life as a Man. Nope, haven’t read that one. Is that a book about an academic with a foul wife having sex with all his students, then? Rather contradicts what I was saying, if so.
My sex life wasn’t at all interesting then... The ‘then’ is very well judged, I feel.
I have this feeling that we’re now working with a slightly dubious model of reader identification with class/gender/race/experience as the ground of literary satisfaction. It can’t be as limiting as that, surely.
You see, I’m not a critic. I can say anything I want to.
My Life as a Man. Nope, haven’t read that one. Is that a book about an academic with a foul wife having sex with all his students, then?
that is an amazingly accurate summary of the book—are you sure you haven’t read it? well, i think he only has sex with one of his students, but the wife sure is foul...but then he isn’t exactly a prize....
also Sabbath’s Theatre and The Dying Animal feature academics having affairs with students.
actually in Dying Animal they’re former students. I’m pretty sure this is not a mark in the protagonist’s favor.
The Roth-figure in “My Life as a Man” is a desperate mess, and the student he has a relationship with cuts it off, saying “I can’t save you. I’m only 20 year old.” When he made a pass at her she was unsurprised, because (as she explained) all of her teachers made passes at her.
Roberts 2:51—I didn’t want my sex life to become interesting, and it didn’t.
’Roberts 2:51’ makes me sound like a book in the Bible.
The Book of Roberts, chapter 1. For he was unafraid to make sweeping statements about Philip Roth despite the fact that he had not read several of the novels written by the Roth.