ashthomas//blog: Jonathan Lethem's thoughts on Philip Roth

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Thursday, October 20, 2005

Jonathan Lethem's thoughts on Philip Roth

The Morning News has up an interview with Jonathan Lethem by Robert Birnbaum. Lethem is a writer that I have not read a lot of, but what I have (short stories and essays), I have enjoyed. Beyond that, from interviews with Lethem, I have found him to be extremely likable as a person as well as a writer. He seems to be quite a cool and interesting guy. All this was reinforced by the Birnbaum conversation.

What I happily stumbled on halfway through was Lethem's thoughts about Philip Roth. Roth is a writer that I have greatly admired forever. His Nathan Zuckerman novels have been a pleasure for and an inspiration to me since I found them in my first year of university.

A few weeks ago, my wife succumbed to my insistent suggestion that she read Roth, and she has since fallen in love with work as well. She began to ask me about how much of Roth's life was direct source material for his novels, and so we began tracking down articles about Roth's life and read his autobiography, The Facts.

Lethem discusses the connection between real life and fiction in the interview. Lethem uses Brooklyn in much the same way that Roth uses Newark, and Lethem cites Roth as a crucial influence in his development as a writer:

You can derive tremendous energy for yourself as a writer and for readers in their experience of a book, not only by gathering material from your real life, [but also] from raising the question of whether or not something is autobiographical. In Roth this tension often stands in place of traditional plot mechanics for generating readerly fervor. You’re always having to think, "This might be real. But it might not be. He could be fooling me." In Fortress, I switched not only to honest autobiographical methods but as well to manipulative autobiographical chimeras, where I seem to be saying, "This is me." And then I pull away. I become deceitful, and the reader responds to that as well, with irritation perhaps, but curiosity. They're being teased with the possibility of confession.


Part of the fascination of looking for connections between an author's work and their life is the very human desire for gossip. Reading Portnoy's Complaint, one wonders where the line between Roth and Portnoy is, about how much of Portnoy's life is Roth's.

Such literary trickery became more and more common in Roth's fiction as he wrote more novels. The Zuckerman books are about an author who has written a controversial best-seller very similar to Portnoy's Complaint. Zuckerman became Roth's alter-ego. But this wasn't the end of it -- in The Facts, Roth's memoir, Zuckerman contributes an afterword in the form of a letter to his creator. The line between fiction and reality is blurred and transgressed. In other books, a character named Philip Roth appears, and the lines are further fuzzied.

This literary experimentation (either modernist or post-modernist, according to whom you speak to), combined with his emotional depth and evocation of place has made Roth one of, if not the, most important American authors of the second half of the twentieth century. He is, in my opinion, the number one American candidate for the Nobel (although his chances have now diminished with the recent naming of another English-speaking writer for the prize; like it or not, the Nobel committee seems to be very politically aware of making sure they recognise writing from all over the world in all languages).

Lethem, later in the interview, discusses how critics have seemed to forgotten Roth's back-catalogue when reviewing Roth's latest book, The Plot Against America. Lethem sees the way that critics have fawned over the alternate history aspect of the book as something more sinister than mere feigned or actual ignorance of the experimental and non-realistic aspects of Roth's earlier work. What it is symptomatic of is, in Lethem's opinion, the reactionary attitude of the establishment to unconsciously regard realism (as in the nineteenth century style of Dickens or Trollope or Eliot or Hardy) as the dominant style and the only genre to be considered "literature" [paragraph breaks inserted by me to ease reading]:

You saw this happening when Roth's new book was reviewed. Roth's use of the "alternate history" was treated, in certain quarters, as though, first of all, Roth himself had never written a book that challenged mimetic propriety—suddenly The Breast didn't exist, suddenly The Great American Novel didn't exist. Suddenly Counterlife didn't exist. To write about this thing with a 10-foot pole, and say, "What's this strange method? What have we got here? One of the great pillars of strictly realist fiction has inserted something very odd into his book. We'll puzzle over this as though it's unprecedented."

It was as though there had been no Thomas Pynchon. As though Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, Robert Coover had been thrown into the memory hole. Was there never a book called The Public Burning? Do we really have to retrace our steps so utterly in order to reinscribe our class anxieties? Not to mention, of course, the absolute ignorance of international writing implicit in the stance: where's Cortazar, Abe, Murakami, Calvino, and so very many others?

Well, the status quo might argue, patronizingly, those cute magical-realist methods—how I despise that term—are fine for translated books, but we here writing in English hew to another standard of "seriousness." Not to mention, of course, the quarantine that's been implicitly and silently installed around genre writing that uses the same method as Roth's with utmost familiarity. Well, the status quo might argue, sounding now like an uncle in a P.G. Wodehouse novel: Ah, yes, well, we all know that stuff is, how do you say it, old boy? Rather grubby. No, I say, no. This isn't good enough, not for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, in 2004.

Let me say it simply: there is nothing that was proposed in Roth’s book that could be genuinely unfamiliar to a serious reader of literary fiction of the last 25 years, 30 years, 50 years. To treat it as unfamiliar is a bogus naiveté—one that disguises an attack on modernism itself, in the guise of suspiciousness about what are being called post-modern techniques. It actually reflects a discomfort with the entire century.

...

If I’m right—let’s just for the sake of argument, let’s say there is a kind of reactionary shudder making its way through the literary community, from newspaper reviewing to magazine reviewing to perhaps even some of the blogosphere—there’s what feminism would call a backlash phenomenon going on. What would the motive be, for such a thing?

Well, if you permit analogies to things like identity politics, you’d say some bulwark or status quo is feeling itself threatened. Which in turn means that the very success of writers like Pynchon and Delillo and Angela Carter, and the pervasiveness of their influence is what’s threatening this status quo. For, much like feminism, if the argument had no influence, if these methods all represented failed experiments, if they led nowhere, led only to unreadable novels, then there would be no reason to draw up the gates.

In fact, that’s what’s being proposed by the false naiveté: that these activities were circumscribed, that they consisted only of a brief period of avant-garde provocation, one with no influence, that had no resonance or relevance. If those writers didn’t have hundreds upon hundreds of delighted successors who have made free and ready use of their methods, the status quo wouldn’t be unsettled. Unsettled by what they attack under the name post-modernism and what—if you accept my argument—is in fact modernism itself!

It is the success, not the failure, of the revolution, which has caused the nostalgic hand-wringing for the ‘good old days’—as always, the non-existent good old days—when literature was the safe preserve of the ‘realists.’ What are we hankering for? Examine the logic and see where this impulse ends up. Let’s see, if we chide the writer who makes reference to low-brow material, who appropriates cultural material—because appropriations are a bit like sampling in rap, really borderline plagiarism, everyone knows this—we’ll have to roll back to T.S. Eliot. Oops, we have to throw Eliot on the scrap heap, too—apparently he risked some high-low mixing, and some appropriations. Forget Joyce, of course. We’d better go even further back.

Once you begin looking at the underlying premise—a blanket attack on the methods that modernism uncovered—the kind of bogus nostalgia for a pure, as opposed to an impure, literature, what you really discover is a discomfort with literature itself. A discomfort with writing. A discomfort with the kinds of exuberance, with relevance. What’s really being called for is a deeply irrelevant—literature as a high-brow quilting bee for people who are terrified, in fact, by its potential vitality, influence, and viability.

American writing, its roots in Poe, Twain, Melville, and extended through Faulkner and, for gawd’s sake, everyone else—is encompassing, courageous, omnivorous. It gobbles contradiction, keeps its eyes open, engages with the culture at every possible level. But boundaries being crossed make the inhabitants of the increasingly isolated castle of the status quo all the more anxious. If we’re free to use these methods, allowed to talk about everything we know, if we are allowed to describe the world of advertising, the world of capitalism, the world of pop culture, the actual world where the elements described as of high- and low-brow are in a constant inextricable mingling—if we let down our guard, where will our status emblems be? What credentials will we burnish? How will we know we are different from the rabble outside the gates?

Again, it’s sheerly class anxiety that is expressed in these attacks. And, as well, a fundamental discomfort with the creative act, with the innately polymorphous, the innately acquisitive, curious, exuberant and engaged tendencies in the creative act itself.

...

A reactionary shudder is moving through the collective mind.



The state of criticism's attitude towards experimental or non-realist or genre fiction may not be as bad as Lethem paints, however. The authoritative voice of James Wood has recently, in a review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, noted that such divisions are becoming irrelevant:

Works of fantasy or science fiction that also succeed in literary terms are hard to find, and are rightly to be treasured — Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark" comes to mind, and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and some of Karel Capek's stories. And just as one is triumphantly sizing up this thin elite, one thinks correctively of that great fantasist Kafka, or even of Beckett, two writers whose impress can be felt, perhaps surprisingly, on Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel. And how about Borges, who so admired Wells? Or Gogol's "The Nose"? Or The Double? Or Lord of the Flies? A genre that must make room for Kafka and Beckett and Dostoevsky is perhaps no longer a genre but merely a definition of writing successfully; in particular, a way of combining the fantastic and the realistic so that we can no longer separate them, and of making allegory earn its keep by becoming indistinguishable from narration itself.


I understand how Lethem, who began his career as a science-fiction author and who still includes many fantastical elements in his work, would get a thorn in his paw over the problems in present-day reviewing. But Lethem should be heartened by the fact that many people agree with him within the literary world.

2 Comments:

Blogger Henry Baum said...

He can also be heartened because he's rich and successful. (I'm not bitter.) Did he say all of that off the cuff, out loud? If so, I feel stupid...nice blog.

1:44 AM  
Blogger ash thomas said...

It wasn't as slick as perhaps I've made it seem: I edited out some of the interviewer's comments and Lethem's asides in an effort to make his point more direct.

But, yes, it was off the cuff, and part of a much longer conversation, all of which is worth checking out.

1:24 PM  

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