Conversion to the Zeitgeist

“Why read old books?” That was the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s essay at his Works and Days blog yesterday. Turns out Hanson doesn’t mean just any old books. He means the classics—Homer, Sophocles, Hesiod. You know the ones. But there’s another kind of old book—the book that is not a classic, has not withstood the “test of time,” and is (in fact) so very much a product of its times that to read it is to be transported to an earlier day. Something like an episode of Mad Men without the recherche and ironical self-awareness.

Fifty years ago this April one of the most useful American Jewish novels ever written—a lavish 341-page archive of information about American Jewish attitudes in the early ’sixties—was published by a Reform rabbi who had just quit the pulpit for the life of a bestselling author. “I have a sneaking suspicion that people appreciate what they have to pay for,” Herbert Tarr told the New York Times. “Sermons are free, and half of what you say from the pulpit is discounted as pious sentiments that just go with the robe.” The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen (New York: Bernard Geis, 1963), the first of his five novels, alternated the sermons with humor and social criticism (as it used to be called), and all for the price of $4.95. The novel went through five printings, selling more than 30,000 copies in hardback—not bad for a first novel in 1963.

But it’s not at all clear that Tarr had any clue what he was writing. The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen is not only one of the first American novels about a rabbi, but it is also the first about an American military chaplain of any denomination. True enough, Joseph Heller had included a chaplain in the joke with which he began Catch-22, published only eighteen months earlier:

       It was love at first sight.
       The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.Not because either man is gay or anything like that; no, no, no: because the chaplain is “sweet.” Yossarian wants him to have three votes. Yossarian wants “more votes for decent folk.” That, he says, is what the U.S. Army Air Corps should be fighting for.

So Tarr’s Chaplain David Cohen is the second air force chaplain in American fiction, but he is the first who is something more than “sweet” and “decent.” He is also the first to get a book of his own. The novel opens in July 1955, during the Geneva Summit, at a moment when the Cold War was suspended between Korea and Vietnam and it looked as if there might be, as David reflects, a “lessening of friction between East and West.” He has chosen this moment to enlist in the Armed Services. Like his author, he has only recently concluded his rabbinical studies and received semikhah.

Now twenty-four, David is standing in line, buck naked except for a 3 x 5 card with which he can occasionally conceal the sign of the covenant, waiting for his physical examination in the old Army Building at the Battery in New York. In front of him, a doctor is examining a young Puerto Rican recruit. The young man has small English, and when he fails repeatedly to understand his instructions, the doctor yells at him: “Don’t they teach you anything in that stupid country you come from?” Without thinking, David calls out: “You’re certainly no advertisement for America, Doctor.” “Who said that?” the doctor demands. Tentatively, David identifies himself as the one who spoke:       “And what was it that you said? Do you perhaps remember?”
       David faltered. “Not exactly.”
       A smile of triumph darkened [the doctor’s] face. “I was sure you wouldn’t.” He turned back to the terrorized Puerto Rican and dismissed him contemptuously. “All right, you can go now, you ignoramus. Do you understand that much English?”
       Impulsively, David blurted out: “Horshoim kayom nigrosh ki hashkeit lo yuchol, vayigr’shu meimov refesh vovit.”
       [The doctor] turned on David. “What was that again?”
       David swallowed. “Hebrew.”
       “Hebrew!” [the doctor] snorted. “Doesn’t anyone here speak English?David has been quoting the prophet Isaiah to the effect that the doctor is like a troubled sea that casts up muck and garbage. For his troubles, he gets himself declared 1-A.

And so Tarr’s narrative plan is established. As Brendan Behan said in his New York Times review, Rabbi Cohen has the “idiotic notion that he should speak out against injustice wherever he sees it.” Assigned to a base in Mississippi, for example (it is obviously modeled upon Columbus Air Force Base, although its name is changed to Fairfield in the novel), he brings a Negro to a Passover seder at the synagogue in town, despite orders from his commanding officer not to interfere in “off-base discrimination.” Later he delivers an unauthorized political talk in enthusiastic support of Israel (“David was one Jew to whom Exodus automatically meant the second book of the Bible and not the novel”). Even later he publicly dresses down an officer’s wife, who is humiliating her partner at bridge. He calls her a “bitch” only to discover afterwards that she is the wife of the commanding officer.

Tarr means for Rabbi Cohen to come across as an angry and unfortunate prophet, but that’s not how he comes across at all. From a distance of fifty years, he seems little more than a mouthpiece for liberal pieties. Even his opposition to racial discrimination is more of a formality, an abstract maxim rather than a warm-blooded response to a human dilemma, since the black Jewish airman he drags to the seder is leaving Mississippi in less than a week, is not especially religious, and mainly wants to go in order to show off his singing voice in chanting kiddush.

David’s talk on Israel angers the president of the local congregation, whose son is becoming bar mitsvah at the service. Also the owner of the major department store in town, the man is appalled that the rabbi intends to say “how terrible it was for the U.N. and the United States to censure Israel for retaliating against Syria’s machine-gunning of Israeli fishermen.” The president tries to bully David into switching topics, reminding him that “you will be speaking to people who can’t be expected to view the Middle East through Jew-colored glasses.” David stands firm. “If he were to start running his ministry on the platform of No Offense to Anyone Ever,” he reflects, “he might as well have studied for four years to be a writer of deodorant ads.”

Comes the day, however, and what David says is anodyne. He blames the United Nations for the “current state of cold war between Israel and the Arab nations”—they failed “to insure Israel’s survival” and “neglected to develop practical plans for aiding the Arab refugees on a permanent basis.” Given these failures, Israel cannot be expected “to submit to annihilation.” Still, the rabbi allows, war is not the answer:[O]nly a moral delinquent would deny that warfare, even when self-defensive and justified, is at best only tenth-rate justice. First-rate justice requires discussions of problems, negotiation of common concerns, a willingness to sit down at conference tables to iron out differences with words instead of trying to stamp them out in blood.Even before the Six-Day War, “advanced” liberal thinking defended Israel merely as a prelude to a call for negotiations.

The best parts of The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen are the least timely. A bachelor in self-acknowledged search for a Jewish wife, David tries out two different candidates over the course of the novel, and both are surprising choices (if not particularly successful characters). The first, Dena Gordon, is a morbidly obese young woman who lives with her parents. She is good company, though, with a sharp tongue and a cutting wit, which she is quick to turn on herself. Dena accuses him of wanting only to counsel her (“A person who wants to enjoy a good old-fashioned neurosis doesn’t stand a chance any more,” she complains), and not even David is sure whether she is right. To prove her wrong, he consents to sleep with her, and only the deus ex machina of a coffee table, which trips him up with a smash and wakes the whole household, saves him from admitting Dena is right after all.

The other candidate to become Mrs. Cohen is a Holocaust survivor with the symbolic name of Ilona Lazarus. At a time when the only Holocaust novels written for American audiences were Meyer Levin’s Eva (1959) and Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961), Tarr compresses the horrors into three pages. He even anticipates Sophie’s Choice:Of all the Nazi methods of torture, Ilona dwelt on only one, the one which had been employed upon her mother. Mrs. Lazarus had been forced to tell the authorities which of her twin daughters she wanted buried alive. She has refused the make the choice, until she had been informed that in that case both her daughters would be buried alive, and she had randomly chosen to save Ilona. Mrs. Lazarus had then been forced to watch her other daughter, Eva, being buried alive in a huge pit with some forty other children.Ilona refuses David’s marriage proposal for reasons that will become commonplace for Holocaust survivors (“You, David, look at the world and see order and purpose and the handiwork of God,” she explains. “I look at the world and see chaos and madness. . .”). She returns six chapters later to outfit Tarr’s book with an unconvincing happy ending, but by then Rabbi Cohen has undergone a conversion under her influence. He does not convert to Christianity nor to unbelief. After two years in the U.S. Air Force, he has been converted to the warm undemanding dereligionized religion of universalism:[W]hatever change he had undergone was in the direction of his becoming more Jewish, truly religious. For the Sh’ma directed Jews to be universal in their concern. This declaration of the oneness of God forced Jews to affirm the oneness of man.Or, as he tells his aunt, “The more people a person can bring into his ‘we,’ the more human he himself becomes.” And so the concern to be human slowly squeezes out the need to be Jewish; the desire to be inclusive overrides the exclusive demands of the Jewish God, and “his ‘we’ ” impose their ethics on a man instead. These are the ideas that would lead many thousands of Jews to abandon Judaism over the next fifty years, while continuing to speak in its name. Along with Chaplain Cohen, they would believe themselves to be doing something brave and noble, while they were merely converting to the Zeitgeist.

Anonymity, terrible anonymity

When I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I was the fine arts editor of City on a Hill Press, the student newspaper. As if eager to confirm what I wrote just yesterday (“The secret to understanding literature—any literature—is wide reading and long experience, which leaves the beginner practically worthless as a critic”), I was also the paper’s book critic. As a senior sophomore, I reviewed Another Shore, the only novel by the late George Hitchcock, the editor of the one-man magazine kayak who did so much to make Santa Cruz something like Black Mountain West. At Santa Cruz there was a passionate attachment to art which was strictly non-discursive. I’m not sure I was the best person, given my literary loyalties, to be the fine arts editor of the student newspaper there. At all events, my old friend Rand Careaga—we were at Santa Cruz together, he also studied under Hitchcock—sends along a clipping of the review I wrote at 22 20 of the novel I described in my obituary of Hitchcock as “utter nonsense,” but a “merry read.” Here it is. For the historical record or something.

Another Shore, by George Hitchcock, Kayak, $2.00

The novels of poets are a curious lot. Ideally the poet brings to the form that, in America, has been suckled on the peculiar notion of escape into realism a linguistic sense of illusion. Having worked a lifetime with the limitations of language, the poet seems to be in a position to overcome or surpass realism. The fact of his art allows him to differentiate between the limits of reality and the limits of illusion. His linguistic sensibility is the perfect literary foil.

The distinction between illusion and reality is central to poet George Hitchcock’s novel, Another Shore. But as in Ellison’s Invisible Man, here the sense of illusion becomes a question of identity.

The nameless narrator of the book is sent to “potentially hostile territory” as a spy whose mission is to identify the enemy. His superior, Colonel Negundo, says, “What has become decisive in all branches of warfare is the question of identity. . . . The central problem, the existential problem if you like, without which nothing else makes sense, is the question of identity.” Thus the narrator of Another Shore becomes another Invisible Man who, in tabbing the illusion about him, comes to grips with his own non-identity: “. . . that what began as an artifice has become my master: anonymity, terrible anonymity.” It is a paradox that he must become anonymous (and yet seek the identity of “the enemy”). In having no identity himself, nothing else about him does make sense. It is as the Invisible Man put it, “HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION. . . . And now I answered, ‘Painful and empty’ . . .”

Appropriately, the title of Another Shore comes from the lament of the Mock Turtle in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:

“What matters is how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.
“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”Like Alice, the nameless narrator has come to a one-dimensional land of surface actions and interactions. It is not even the form of the land that is dreamlike, but that, in coming from that “other side,” the narrator brings with him an inherent dualism. It is the dualism between illusion and reality. This “another shore” cannot appear but as illusory.

Given this context, Hitchcock allows his wit and imagination to develop freely. The narrator’s experiences range fully between the hilarious and the horrific.

There are, of course, no characters in the novel. Soon after parachuting into “hostile territory,” the nameless narrator is wed to a local girl named Flavia. But he leaves Flavia quickly; and she appears and reappears throughout the rest of the book in different roles and modes, climaxing in a scene of sacrificial terror.

It is not that Hitchcock is unable to create characters. It is that the realm of illusion is uninhabited. The nameless narrator come to term himself “a witness to God’s changing identity.” He is a voyeur of the changing nature of illusion about him, of his own ever-changing anonymity.

As a novelist, George Hitchcock becomes not a metaphysician, but a metarealist. All of the illusions of Another Shore are eninently real, to the reader as well as to the nameless narrator of the book. There is something above realm, fictional or otherwise. Like Alice in Wonderland, its genesis is perhaps dreamlike; but its playing out is immediately and charmingly lifelike.

This is a tribute to Hitchcock’s language. The prose of Another Shore never slops into didacticism, or slips into surreal vacuity. While the nature of the novel demands an absence of character, the fiction of George Hitchcock never requires characterization to give it vitality. Mr. Hitchcock has written a fine novel in which the portrayal of and obsession with illusion is achieved in a remarkable tension. It is more than just fun to read.

What became of literary history?

So ends another semester, and the losing effort to teach books outside a literary vacuum. “I don't need a library to do what I do,” Stanley Fish told Jerome McGann, showing him around the Johns Hopkins campus. All of my students are Stanley Fish. There are no libraries behind their study of literature. Seven decades after John Crowe Ransom named the movement, the New Critics have achieved what they were after. “[T]hough one may consider a poem as an instance of historical and ethical documentation,” Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had said in Understanding Poetry, “the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object of study.” The syllabus of nearly every English course is little more than a series of discrete texts which can’t be read historically because no one has any literary history. English departments might as well be renamed departments of close reading, because that is all they do—all that is possible for them to do.

Few understand that the doctrine of close reading emerges out of a logical paradox. Prior to a close reading of a literary text, the New Critics asked, how can you possibly know anything of its subject-matter? Only a close reading of it will establish what background knowledge, if any, is relevant. And if you supply the background in advance for students who are coming to the text for the first time, you rob their reading experience of its innocence and predetermine its outcome. For seven decades now, the object of study in literature classrooms has contracted to the text-in-itself. Even deconstructive critics (and those they have influenced) are primarily concerned with a text’s internal self-contradictions.

It’s not merely that undergraduates arrive at American universities notoriously ignorant of their cultural heritage—in my freshman honors seminar this term, only three students had ever heard of William Faulkner and none had read him—but also that no other conception of literature, if it is to be studied as literature, has any standing. William James believed that “You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically.” By teaching it without its history, have the English departments nullified the humanistic value of literature?

There is an amusing passage in Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), the last book I taught this semester. Delphine Roux, the young French professor who does everything in her power to destroy the novel’s protagonist, is trying to write a personals ad for the New York Review of Books. Most of the academics she knows—the “diapers,” as she secretly calls the male feminists, and the “hats,” the pretentious creative writers—repel her. Even the young theorists like herself, dripping with French sophistication and dressed from head to toe in black, are oddly unacceptable—“for despite her publications and a growing scholarly reputation, it was always difficult for her to deal with literature through literary theory. There could be such a gigantic gap between what she liked and what she was supposed to admire—between how she was supposed to speak about what she was supposed to admire and how she spoke to herself about the writers she treasured”—and she cannot tolerate the academic men for whom theory seems to roll off the tongue like a well-practiced speech.

Then there are “the older types, who are uncool and tweedy, ‘The Humanists’ ”:

Well, obliging as she must be at conferences and in publications to write and speak as the profession requires, the humanist is the very part of her own self that she sometimes feeels herself betraying, and so she is attracted to them: because they are what they are and always have been and because she knows they think of her as a traitor. . . . These older men, the Humanists, the old-fashioned traditionalist humanists who have read everything, the born-again teachers (as she thinks of them), make her sometimes feel shallow. . . . At faculty meetings they’re not afraid to say what they say, and you would think they should be; in class they’re not afraid to say what they feel, and, again, you would think they should be; and, as a result, in front of them she crumbles. Since she doesn’t herself have that much conviction about all the so-called discourse she picked up in Paris and New Haven, inwardly she crumbles. Only she needs that language to succeed.Whether literature needs the language is a question she doesn’t ask herself. I don’t have a quick-and-easy reform to propose. The earliest students of English, when the first departments were founded in the nineteenth century, complained that they were tired of lectures about literature: they wanted to read the literature itself. I suspect that my undergraduate students would be happy to sit through a series of lectures about literature—just as long as they didn’t have to read any of it!

There is another paradox involved in the study of literature, which the New Critics did not fully appreciate. The secret to understanding literature—any literature—is wide reading and long experience, which leaves the beginner practically worthless as a critic. Yet the only method for understanding literature is to read it as a critc—closely, that is, without any preconceptions. Perhaps the only exit from this paradox is to read literary history, which almost no one does anymore. Which is a tragedy and a surprise, since we live in a happy era for literary history—if Philip F. Gura’s provocative and manageable new history of the early American novel, Truth’s Ragged Edge (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is any indication. Yesterday on Twitter, the critic Michael Schaub (a former student of mine) asked where to start in reading literary history. Here’s a short syllabus:

• E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. The title is deceptive: this is the study of how literature began, and where most of the literary concepts still in use derive from. A monument of German scholarship.

• Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Every student of literature reads his Mimesis, which is oddly less historical, and Scenes from the Drama of European Literature lightens the load by taking the form of essays. This is the heavy-duty stuff. If you can make it through this, you can make it through anything.

• J. V. Cunningham, Collected Essays. Criminally out of print, but in classic essays like “Ripeness Is All,” “Logic and Lyric,” and “Plots and Errors,” Cunningham demonstrates that literature is incapable of being understood without the historical sense.

• C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Lewis despised writing this volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, but the result is a model of how a comprehensive history of a literary period should be written.

• Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970. The mirror image of Lewis’s book: a model of compression in the writing of history. Dickstein is one of those old-fashioned tradtionalist humanists who has read everything, by the way.

• W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History. The “standard” work is Rene Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism in six volumes, although (as someone who was originally trained in the field) the title I most admire is Bernard Weinberg’s two-volume History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. If pressed, I would reply that my own Elephants Teach is a contribution to the history of criticism.

• Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols.). Originally published in 1876, it still holds up remarkably well. The very sparseness of schoarly apparatus, the appeal to a common reader, makes it a good example of the kind.

• Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (3 vols.). I’ve been called a red-baiter for even mentioning the title, but Kolakowski’s is an exhaustive study of every branch and twig of Marxism, displaying great disinterested scholarship and insistently clear prose. (Maybe those are what the reds object to?) Really intellectual history instead of literary history, but this is how the encyclopaedic study of a subliterature is done.

There are many more, and every scholar has his personal favorites—ten more titles will occur to me the moment I hit the Publish button—and then there are the titles that don’t fit anywhere, like Clive James’s quirky and judgmental Cultural Amnesia, which is a history of twentieth-century literature in several langauges without offering itself in those terms. It is, at all events, a truth rarely acknowledged that there have been great books written in literary history, although they have attracted few readers—even among serious students of literature, who might begin to fill their own “gigantic gaps” by studying them.
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Update: John Wilson recommends Czeslaw Milosz’s History of Polish Literature. Darin Strauss recommends V. S. Pritchett’s Myth Makers or The Tale Bearers. Evan Hughes, the author of Literary Brooklyn, recommends Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds, a classic of American criticism.

The hope of digital humanities

Next week I return to Texas A&M University, where I started my academic career and spent twenty indifferent years of it, to deliver a lecture on the digital humanities. The subject is an appropriate one for me, I guess, since I was a pioneer of the digital humanities a good decade before they were even called that. Along with the late Denis Dutton, I founded the listserve discussion group PHIL-LIT in the summer of 1994, just a few weeks after L-Soft launched its first version of listserv software. I moderated PHIL-LIT for nine years until, sick unto death of the partisan politics that had crowded out any discussion of philosophy and literature, I pulled the plug on it.

All talk about the digital humanities is pretty evenly divided between those who are skeptical that computers will ever do anything more than lighten the drudgery of humanistic scholarship by speeding up its more mechanical tasks and those, like Alan Liu of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who are excited by the prospect of a “uniquely contemporary kind of discourse”:

Seen one way, such projects make the transmission of academic knowledge more efficient and flexible. . . . But, viewed differently, they also prepare the academy to refract such technologic through its own values, which are not always on the same page with the business master plan.[1]Just as long as the computer-ready humanities are not on the same page as business!

Number me among the skeptics. My suspicion is that what Liu calls the “structured encoding of knowledge” is really only another way—a newer way, I grant you, and for now a stranger way—of preparing copy for the printer. The printer has been replaced by a machine; our copy must now be machine readable. But the copy itself remains unchanged fundamentally (I apologize for the swear word). The encoding is a superaddition to it.

One reason for my skepticism is that the digital humanities have been around for nearly half a century now, and the hoped-for breakthrough has yet to occur. Jerome McGann, a well-known scholar of romanticism, expresses the hope succinctly when he predicts that computers will be able to “expose textual features that lie outside the usual purview of human readers.”[2] But even the most successful work in the digital humanities (like the four-author paper “The Expression of Emotion in 20th Century Books,” with its impressive equations and graphs) has produced what scientists call results of low statistical power—small sample sizes, small effects being studied.

In 1965, IBM awarded a grant to Yale University to investigate the promise of computers in humanistic research. At the inevitable conference that ensued, the late Jacques Barzun was optimistic about the promise of computers for indexing, collating, verifying, drawing up concordances, and similar attention-to-detail work, but he warned that humanists who hope to rely upon the computer for more far-reaching results will only “reduce wholes to discrete parts that are disconnected from the value or nature of the whole.”[3]

Barzun’s warning is even more timely now that digitalization has opened up archives and library collections that were once closed to everyone outside a small elite. By means of topic modeling, a humanistic scholar can now search more text in an afternoon than he previously could in a lifetime. But the problem—the problem as defined by Barzun—remains. The excited advocates of the digital humanities, which they familiarly call DH (they don’t mean Lawrence), are worried about a different problem altogether, which they are confident the new computer-backed methods and conventions will solve:What galvanizes many of us working in cultural heritage is how DH tools and practices will enable us to move beyond the traditional methodologies of description of, and access to, archival or cultural collections. These traditional practices, holdovers from a world of physical materials and all the attendant requirements of arrangement, bulk, and storage, have also been fundamentally subjective. Catalogs, finding aids, L[ibrary of] C[ongress] S[ubject] H[eadings]—all are products of interpretive biases.So too, for that matter, are topic models. There is no escaping the undertow of subjectivity, which is simply another way of saying that data are not self-interpreting: a mind must interpose between machine and meaning. And this is the scandal of the digital humanities. They have been unsuccessful at their fondest hope—eliminating the mind from humanistic scholarship.

Barzun’s warning is a reminder that mind, the moisture in the robot, is forever indispensable to human knowledge, including the humanities. The connection of discrete parts to the value and nature of the whole is an operation that can only be performed by a human being who is capable of judgment in addition to designing search protocols.

Let me brag for a moment. Perhaps my only substantive contribution to humanistic learning is the discovery that Ralph Waldo Emerson coined the term creative writing, which he first used in “The American Scholar” (a discovery that has been incorporated, without attribution, into the third edition of the OED, by the way, thus giving the lie to Cassio’s claim that his reputation is a man’s immortal part). Without question, the selection of archival materials that I plowed through to study the history of the idea of creative writing was a product of my interpretive bias. But the mistake is to assume that my bias illegitimately skewed the search results somehow. You are not permitted to ignore the fact that I was right about the origin of the term. My bias (namely, that creative writing reeks of American romanticism) led me to the right materials.

The confidence that they “will enable us to move beyond the traditional methodologies” might be called the Great White Hope of the digital humanities. It is overweight, overhyped, an expression of superstition and prejudice.

The real promise of the digital humanities is at once less exciting and more liberating. What the digital humanities promise is the death of the credential. Anyone at all can now undertake an inquiry into the human heritage, and anyone at all can now publish her findings. No one need any longer submit her research for prior approval to a figure in a position of institutional power. She is free to follow her inclinations and talents—free to follow them as far as they will carry her. This is what political conservatives, who complain incessantly about the “liberal bias” in academe, fail to understand. No one is in control of humanistic scholarship any longer, no party, no league of prestigious institutions, no system of acceptance and rejection. When credentials have lost their cultural influence, the only influence in the humanities will be the influence of brilliant undeterred minds. And that is the final hope of the digital humanities.
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[1] Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004).

[2] Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 190.

[3] Jacob Leed, Review of Computers for the Humanities? A Record of the Confederence Sponsored by Yale University on a Grant from IBM, January 22–23, 1965, Computers and the Humanities 1 (September 1966): 13.

Masters of Atlantis

Masters of Atlantis was the fourth novel by Charles Portis, who is customarily identified as the author of True Grit. Familiar to American readers from the two movie versions of it (1969, 2010), True Grit is perfect of its kind, and its kind is not very hard to name. It is a first-person “adventure” novel, like Huckleberry Finn or Lolita, in which stop-and-go travel through an American landscape along with the narrator’s voice and moral intelligence—what is commonly and mistakenly called an unreliable narrator—are at least as significant as the “adventures.” Portis’s other four novels (Masters of Atlantis was followed six years later by Gringos, his last novel so far) are more resistant to classification.

None more so than Masters of Atlantis (1985). I was drawn to it for the same reason I suspect Portis might have been drawn to the subject—he has been called a “cult novelist” so often, with such mind-numbing banality, that an inside look at a real cult was badly needed to break the habit (not that it has). The 24-chapter novel recounts the history of the Gnomon Society, a cross between a secret order and a New Age religion based on “the secret wisdom of Atlantis,” from its first appearance in France in 1917 until its investigation by the Texas state senate and final consolidation some five decades later in the south Texas town of La Coma, “a town notable for its blowing paper.” The best reaction I’ve had so far was from my physical therapist, who asked excitedly what I was reading. I showed her the cover of the Overlook Press reprint edition, and her smile froze on her face as she assumed I was reading a credulous zealot’s account, an esoteric book full of esoteric knowledge, like Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis, which would have numbered me among the “Odd Birds,” a list of whom Lamar Jimmerson, the Master of the Society, culls for men who might be interested in Gnomonism, men

who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms that were filled with rocks or old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers, who might be more receptive to the Atlantean lore than the general run of men.Much of what Portis is trying to do in his fiction is contained in this short passage. The difference between “independent thinkers” and full-out crackpots is thin, not always easy to see, possibly as much an accident of history as anything else.

Portis has succeeded Wright Morris as the American novelist who is known for being unknown. There are some suggestive parallels between him and Roger Miller, the singer-songwriter whose name keeps coming up in Portis’s wonderful Saturday Evening Post report on “The New Sound from Nashville,” reprinted in Jay Jennings’s indispensable new “Portis miscellany” Escape Velocity. “He’s a genius,” the songwriter Jan Crutchfield said of Miller. “[H]e was knocking around here for years and couldn’t get anywhere. They didn’t even know what he was trying to do.” Portis advances Miller’s career asa good measure of what the Grand Ole Opry is all about. In the bad old rock-’n’-roll days, the Opry stood firm when other hillbilly shows around the South were giving way. The Opry came through it and the others only managed to lose both audiences. But this same conservatism led it to overlook Miller.Almost exactly the same can be said about the literary establishment and Portis’s literary career. Perhaps the most famous critical remark about him is what gave Ed Park the title for his 2003 article in the Believer: “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to,” the humorist Roy Blount Jr. once said, “but he’d rather be funny.” Except that Portis has nothing in common with McCarthy, not even geography. It would be more accurate to say that Portis could have been the second coming of Flannery O’Connor (“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one”), except that he is not Catholic, his corner of Arkansas appears to be the one part of the South that is not particularly Christ-haunted, his conception of man is not theological, and his freaks are not freaks but ordinary men and women.

With all that, Masters of Atlantis reads like Wise Blood in ecstatic and sinful union with The Blithedale Romance. Gnomonism has its popularizer and traveling salesman in the figure of Austin Popper, who has “the vulgar inclination to make everything clear” and reduces the demands of becoming an Adept in the Society:The two nights of initiation were reduced to a token twenty minutes, with no insistence on figs, and the Pledge was no longer eight densely printed pages of Hermetical mystery lore and bloody vows of faith to the Ten Pillars of Atlantis—all to be recited without stumbling once—but rather one short paragraph that was little more than a bland affirmation of humility before the unseen powers of the universe.But the mystery lore and the Ten Pillars also have their credulous zealots who, just like Hollingsworth and Coverdale on their utopian farm, believe with utter sincerity that it is “wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one’s daydream to its natural consummation, although, if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.”

It is a tribute to Portis’s genius to have understood that, while only the popularly successful versions of esoteric spirituality—Edgar Cayce, James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy, the Church of Scientology, the Kabbalah Center—ever win much attention in America, there are failures in esoteric spirituality too. And failure gives the lie to the American skepticism that all of these storefront churches and secret orders dedicated to the rediscovery of ancient wisdom are rackets—that they are, in Mr. Jimmerson’s own words, “running a stupendous bluff.” Americans have just as strong a talent for credulity as skepticism.

During the ’thirties, the Gnomon Society enjoys a brief period of success. The Depression leaves some men “so desperate as to seek answers in books.” The Codex Pappus, the Society’s sacred text, which Mr. Jimmerson received from the hands of Pletho Pappus himself in Europe after World War I, goes into a second printing of 5,000 copies. Mr. Jimmerson writes 101 Gnomon Facts, Why I Am a Gnomon, and Tracking the Telluric Currents. The Gnomon Temple is opened in Burnette, Indiana, “the most fashionable suburb of Gary.” But then comes the inevitable schism with the English branch of Gnomonism, and the Society enters into a long period of decline. Mr. Jimmerson is undisturbed. He prefers to think of it as “the right pitch, this drowsy afternoon air of not much going on, a state very close to that of sleep.” At the age of forty-six, he looks forward to his senescence.

Reviewing the novel for the Chicago Tribune, L. J. Davis was irked by Portis’s vagueness about the conceptual content of Gnomonism. “When Kurt Vonnegut set out to invent a religion, bokononism, in his novel Cat’s Cradle, we soon learned exactly what it was, how it worked and what its doctrines were,” Davis said; “Portis vouchsafes us no such insight.” But that was the point. At the height of its popularity, Portis writes (in a passage Davis must have overlooked), Gnomonism was attacked by bishops, “academic rationalists,” Masons, “political engineers,” and newspaper writers:None of these gentlemen could say just what Gnomonism was—the Archbishop of Chicago had it confused with Gnosticism—but they all agreed it was something to stay clear of. Why the secrecy? Who are these people? Whatever it is they are concealing must be evil. What are their long-range plans? Do they claim magical powers? What are they up to with their triangles? [Italics in original]“That fog,” as Portis says elsewhere in the book, “was there for a purpose.” New Age spirituality, of which Gnomonism is an example avant la lettre, places less emphasis on exactly what it is, on doctrines and how the new thinking works, than on its source. As a scholar of New Age religion explains, “[T]he idea is that an inner core of true spirituality lies hidden behind the outer surface of all religious traditions, and the knowledge of it has been kept alive by secret traditions throughout the ages.”[1] Even toward the end of the novel, as the Gnomon Society has dwindled to a single chapter in Texas, as the Gnomon Temple is stranded between “two parts of a divided highway” with a “maintenance yard for the city’s dump trucks and garbage trucks” in its backyard, new seekers after wisdom find their way to Gnomonism. A court stenographer from Chicago, a man in his fifties named Maurice Babcock, stumbles upon a copy of 101 Gnomon Facts, takes it home and reads it throughwith wonder, lost in triangles for the weekend. This is the stuff for me. He knew it at once. This is what I’ve been looking for. My search for certitudes is over. He hastened to Burnette and called on Mr. Jimmerson, hopeful of getting an autograph, a word or two from the Master’s lips, more and thicker books, with footnotes longer than the text proper, perhaps even a signed photograph.These secret orders and born-in-the-U.S.A. religions are real institutions of American life, perhaps even important institutions of American life, almost entirely dismissed by the literary intelligentsia. For Portis, the Gnomon Society (like any New Age religion) is only partly cause for satire, although it is most definitely cause for satire. But it is also a distinct and autonomous culture, with its central figures and hangers-on and sworn enemies, its manners and special language and idiosyncrasies of mind, which shape the lives of some people as much as love and work and politics. Without exactly taking it seriously, Portis finds it remarkable—remarkable perhaps that anyone at all finds it believable—but not grotesque or freakish so much as distinctively American, a home-made institution of independence and self-reliance.

Compare his treatment of the Gnomon Society to another literary account of uneducated white truth-seekers (because it is they who populate New Age cults). In Scott Spencer’s Men in Black (1995), a serious writer, a writer of autobiographical fiction (the only kind of writing that passes as serious in some quarters), gives up on literary failure and strikes it rich with Visitors from Above, a book about UFO’s. Sam Holland wrote the book to strike it rich, and he is contemptuous of the men and women who have made him successful:My readers had casts on their feet, Ace bandages on their ankles, patches on their eyes; they received radio signals through the fillings in their teeth; they needed to lose weight, gargle; they had lost their meager inheritances in pyramid schemes; they wouldn't mind selling you mail-order shoes or Amway kitchen cleansers; they rattled around the country on secondary roads where the gas and food were cheaper; they tested their cellars for radon; they called the Culligan Man; they watched the Christian Broadcasting System; they looked for stores that still sold eight-track tapes; they lived near electric-power-line towers the size of the Washington Monument; they had guns.Portis does not share this sense of superiority. His inside account of the Gnomon Society is hysterical, but not because it is an invitation to condescension. Portis’s many admirers like to describe his comic delivery as “deadpan,” but even this expression implies an attitude that is being suppressed, although winked at. And that’s not quite right, doesn’t quite capture Portis’s tone or stance. A clue appears when the Gnomon Society hires a journalist named Huggins to serve as editorial advisor. Huggins doesn’t last very long. He refuses to become a Gnomon, perhaps out of “a newspaperman’s terror of being duped.”

Portis himself was a newspaperman of the old style. Although he worked at the New York Herald Tribune during its glory days—he had the desk behind Tom Wolfe with a full view of the birth of the New Journalism, or at least its backside—Portis recalled that he did “more or less straight newspaper reporting,” the “old, dreary journalism.”

Along with a terror of being duped, the old dreary journalist had a terror of being wrong. In an interview, he told about being on the same story, once, with Jimmy Breslin:I had to cover a story opposite him one time in Haneyville, Alabama, one of those Ku Klux trials down there, and Claude Sitton, my national editor, was on me because Breslin, you know, was a colorful writer, and Sitton wanted more of that in my copy. I treasure the day when I was able to call Sitton and say, “Did you see that long quote in Breslin’s column today? Leroy Motten saying so and so?” I said, “It’s all made up.” Son of a bitch didn’t say it. Even had it wrong. [Ed.: See correction in comments section below.]Portis’s secret in Masters of Atlantis is to tell the story of an obscure luckless religious cult, a den of nutcases, as if it were straight reporting, factually correct, without exaggeration for comic effect. The result is so funny you can’t read it safely in a public place. Masters of Atlantis is a great joy to read—it is the very novel for which the phrase “curl up with” seems to have been invented—but it leaves a curious aftertaste. You begin to worry if the intellectual independence of which you are so proud, the principled shunning of America’s consumer culture, the patient acquisition of rare and unpopular knowledge over the course of a lifetime, doesn’t make you just as nutty as the Gnomons. Who knows but that the literary life is nothing more than another esoteric New Age religious cult?
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[1] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “New Age Religion and Secularization,” Numen 47, Fasc. 3, Religions in the Disenchanted World (2000): 292.

A man’s a man for a’ that

First it was the novel of religious belief. Last December Paul Elie took to the pages of the New York Times Book Review to lament that it has “gone where belief itself has gone”—to the margins of American life. (Well, that’s where nearly all American novels have gone in the last twenty-five years, but you know what he means.) Now it is “masculine writing” that has turned up missing and presumed dead. At least according to the novelist Frank Bill, who worries in the Daily Beast that

a large number of men have lost their ruggedness. Maybe they never had it. I believe to be a man is to be tough mentally and physically. To have a small set of skills to survive from day to day when needed. Like lifting weights or boxing in a dust and spider-web-infested concrete shed with a tin roof. Where it’s sweltering in the summer and freezer-burn-cold in the winter, to keep the body and mind tough. Hunting and fishing to hone the skills my father and grandfather passed onto me.Is it any surprise, then, that these things have disappeared from American writing? Now, the disappearances may be overdue: feminist critics have argued for two generations that masculinity is the default setting in American fiction. Hence the shaking of the canon, the predictable outrage when any book list does not contain enough women writers, the Orange Prize, the Vida count. A man need not be “rugged” to produce “masculine writing”; he need only not be a woman.

But masculinity means something more. For Bill it means “to be tough, to be rugged, to be able to take care of your damn self.” Among the writers who “shed light” on this side of masculinity, for him, are Charles Bukowski, Thom Jones, Jim Harrison, Larry Brown, Hubert Selby, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, Cormac McCarthy, Roger Smith, and James Carlos Blake. O, how I love a list without explanations, as if I were going to take it to the bookstore with me! The only writer Bill says anything more about is Crews, who is “like rare bourbon, hard to come by, but worth every drop—we’d have to keep him behind the counter.” Has literary criticism ever been so definitive, so unashamedly literary?

The truth is that Frank Bill is on to something, but not in the terms he proposes. There are fewer men in American fiction, there is less masculinity, but not because there are fewer hunters and less weight-lifting. Richard Katz, the rocker in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, is a man in Frank Bill’s sense, a good man, a mentsh—not, however, because he uses power tools to build decks. He is a man because, even while “glimps[ing] his pride in its pathetic woundedness,” he renounces his adulterous lover (a woman he has loved hopelessly for twenty years) and convinces her to return to her husband.

Nestor Camacho, the 25-year-old Miami cop in Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, is a man in Frank Bill’s sense—a man who is “tough mentally and physically.” Not, however, because he climbs the 70-foot mast of a schooner to save a Cuban refugee and not because, without any help, he takes down a suspect who is a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier. (Those actions make him a hero in the eyes of his fellow cops, although a taboo prevents them from saying so.) He is a man because official reprimands and suspension from the police force—public accusations of racism, ostracism by his own family—don’t stop him from investigating an injustice all on his own. “He was just being a cop,” his superior officer explains.

Charles Homar, the 31-year-old magazine writer in William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters, is a man in Frank Bill’s sense, or at least he develops into one over the course of his novel—not because he shoots up the boat on which his fiancée leaves him, serves a stretch in prison, stalks Bigfoot, becomes what his old allies on the Left would call a gun nut (“You can find comfort in Misters Smith and Wesson”), and stays on the trail of his fiancée till he gets her back. He is a man because his brushes with danger lead to marriage and fatherhood.

Bill’s conception of it might called reactive masculinity, a backlash against the gender-neutralization of American culture described by Harvey C. Mansfield nearly seven years ago in his book Manliness. Bill is hardly alone: last week John Hawkins listed the “7 Movies That Show You The Masculine Ideal,” and predictably enough, all seven were action movies in which masculinity is a romanticized ideal, released from the realities (including the physical limitations) that drag upon ordinary men. Whenever reactive masculinity is confused with true manhood, I feel as if I were back in high school, being ridiculed once again by the heavy-set one-year lettermen who played offensive line on the winless football team because I was a three-year letterman in varsity track and cross country, too small to play the more “rugged” sport, not a “real athlete.”

Bill almost has it right, although his insertion of the word damn betrays his anxiety: to be a real man is “to be able to take care of your damn self,” but only because you have a horror of anyone else’s being obliged to take care of you. Taking care of others is a man’s job. A man knows in his bones that he is expendable, especially in his bones, and if he is to be indispensable, he must make himself so—by indispensable service to others. If I had to define masculinity while standing on one foot, I don’t think I could do any worse.

I find myself thinking of Swede Levov in Roth’s American Pastoral with his “golden gift of responsibility,” his “fatal attraction to duty.” He doesn’t change his own oil; he doesn’t lift weights or hunt deer; he isn’t even much of a do-it-yourselfer. But Swede is a man for all that—a real man, perhaps the manliest man in recent American fiction. Not his athleticism, not his rugged frame and youthful good looks, not even his hands-on knowledge of how to make something lasting and useful (gloves, in his case), but the responsibility that “follows him through life”—that’s what makes him, for Philip Roth and the reader of American Pastoral, a shining symbol of manhood. If there are fewer men in American fiction, if there is less masculinity, perhaps the reason is that more male characters are absorbed with their “damn selves” and fewer are willing, like the Swede, to accede to responsibility, no matter (really) what it is.

The irreconcilable conflicts within

Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). 193 pages.

In late May or early June of 1952, Robert Lowell wrote to Flannery O’Connor after reading her story “Enoch and the Gorilla” in New World Writing (it was later revised for a chapter of Wise Blood):

[Y]ou’re as good as ever, only really and enviably professional. Ford used to say that you could tell if a writer was any good from the first sentence. . . . Your first two sentences show you know your craft, and the end of the first and the word “downpour” in the second do even more. When I was through reading I could have hugged the gorilla. The whole incident is rather epically dismal. . . . I’m delighted to see that your novel is about to be published; I think it will be something absolute of its kind and want to hail it and promise that we will keep a copy under our pillows so that we can always say “Isn’t it wonderful that life is so awful, and that man’s misery is without grandeur.”[1]They had met three years earlier when both were at Yaddo. Lowell intervened in O’Connor’s literary life, introducing his eight-years-younger friend to Robert Giroux, who was to remain her editor to the end. O’Connor intervened in Lowell’s religious life, serving as a witness to his “reconversion” to Roman Catholicism. In March 1949, on “the day of Flannery O’Connor, whose patron saint is St. Therese of Lisieux,” Lowell baptized himself in a cold bath in his New York apartment, praying “in gasps.” Years later O’Connor tried to “stash & obliterate” the “revolting story” that Lowell believed her to be a saint (he was “about three steps from the asylum” and was “canonizing everybody that had anything to do with his situation then”).[2] Who knows but that her later anger was rooted in her deep humility? Many of Flannery O’Connor’s readers have come to a conclusion not much different from Lowell’s.

Out of these materials, Carlene Bauer has constructed a first novel that is remarkable for its ambition (in such a short novel) and for the sureness of its historical grasp (in a novelist so young). Born nine years after the death of O’Connor and four years before the death of Lowell, Bauer comes out of a strikingly different milieu, as she made clear in Not That Kind of Girl, the coming-of-age memoir that was her first book. The daughter of a born-again evangelical Christian mother and a lapsed Catholic father, she was harried by rock music as much as questions of faith, and she had nothing like Lowell’s family tradition nor O’Connor’s Christ-haunted South (and the theological conception of man that came with it) to give her a place to start. She grew up in cul-de-sac suburban New Jersey.

In Frances and Bernard, Bauer imagines literary life and religious life under different circumstances. Frances Reardon is a Philadelphia-born fiction writer who has “just escaped from the workshop at Iowa.” (Her first novel, about a nun who receives stigmata, sounds suspiciously like Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy.) Bernard Eliot is a Harvard-educated poet with Puritan ancestors and sounds of John Donne “prowling around in the boiler room” of his poems. In the summer of 1957 they meet while in residence at “the colony” (it’s never called anything more than that). Both are Catholics. Frances is a cradle Catholic, and “a little Mother Superiorish,” according to Bernard. He is a convert. As a senior at Harvard, he met a theologian who urged him to read Jacques Maritain. (Reading Maritain became a convention of American literary intellectuals’ postwar Catholic conversion narratives, although by now Maritain is more a name to be mentioned than a text to be quoted.) After reading Maritain, Bernard decided to become a Catholic. He glimpsed in Catholicism “a way to make a sustained and coherent statement about what I believed.” Although Frances worries that it “could be a sign of delusions of grandeur, when a Puritan turns to Rome,” within a month of leaving the colony they commence an eleven-year correspondence.

Frances and Bernard is a return to the English-language novel’s oldest kind. It is an episolary novel. And it puts out for the taking all the pleasures of the best epistolary novels—the shifts in point of view, the divergent accounts of the same event, the necessary inferences, the coy white spaces between the letters, the mysterious silences. Bauer has fun with the genre without making genre-fun the point of her novel. “To accept the fact that [other people] are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God,” Bernard significantly quotes Simone Weil at one point. “I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.” The back-and-forth of letters between them demonstrates the truth of both these propositions—perhaps no other form of fiction is so effective at preserving the intransmutable otherness of fictional characters. As Patrick Kurp said in his recent review of Anthony Hecht’s letters, “Perhaps the most important ingredient [in a good letter] is revelation of character, the writer’s willingness to reveal, inadvertently or otherwise, some truth about himself.” And if the writer is not aware of the full truth about himself, so much the better!

Because they are rambles, because they have no other form than the movement of the writer’s mind, letters also permit the unsystematic discussion of pressing ideas. Bauer takes full advantage of letters’ capacity to include thought, which would otherwise have to be disguised as monologue. Bernard begins their correspondence by asking Frances, “Who is the Holy Spirit to you?” The resulting dialectic is promising. “I believe he is grace and wisdom,” Frances replies. To which Bernard says:I don’t know what the Holy Spirit is or does. I think this is because I came to Catholicism late and have felt hesitant to penetrate this mystery. Protestants shove the Holy Spirit to the side—too mystical, too much distraction from the Father and Son. They regard the Holy Spirit with the same suspicion, I think, as they do the saints—it’s a form of idolatry to shift the focus to a third party, whether it be the Holy Spirit or Saint Francis. To appeal to the third party is pagan. Is he grace and wisdom? How do you know?Over the course of the novel, they say other equally interesting things to each other. They quote Augustine and Kierkegaard and William James; they discuss prayer and the liturgy and the “craving for God’s mercy.” But the Holy Spirit is never spoken of again. They quietly drop the subject. Within a few pages, Frances is assuring him that she has “always voted for Democrats,” while Bernard is bragging about the demonstrations he has led, including one “to protest [Harvard]’s hiring of a right-wing ideologue whose work was a tract against welfare.” Thank goodness they’ve established their political fides, even if they must sound like they are writing in 1968 and not 1958.

The sad fact is that, with all its squibs and chatter about Catholicism and the thirst for God, Frances and Bernard advances religion as merely a complex series of steps in the dance of courtship. Bauer’s novel is not a religious novel at all; it is a love story—a marriage plot, as we’ve been taught to say—dressed up to look like something else.

Bernard first raises the question of love eight months into their correspondence—in his eleventh letter—at which point they begin to discuss their friends’ marriages. Frances takes a job in New York and a room at the Barbizon. Two months later Bernard comes to town for a visit. Thus ends the first chapter of their courtship.

“I did not come to New York intending to kiss you,” Bernard writes to close the second chapter and open the third. (I am supplying the old-fashioned numbers Bauer withholds.) What he describes as a kiss, however, Frances describes as a “manic episode,” an outbreak of the mental illness that has been “lying in wait for him.” He surprises her by showing up unannounced at church. “It’s your birthday,” he begins to rave, “your feast day, and this is why I have come. Today is the day of Frances Reardon . . . patron saint of frigid knees. Of unmet wishes, of idées fixes, of withering eyes, of docile guise.” He gets up and starts walking up and down the central aisle, shouting, “This place is a place where the people come to drink. . . . They drink to forget, to die to what is real, they slump over in prayer, drinking and drinking in remembrance of me.” He begins throwing missals. An ambulance arrives, and it takes four attendants to wrestle him down and bear him away. Bernard is committed to a mental hospital outside Boston. The whole experience has turned her “into a crazy person too,” as Frances writes to her friend Claire (an old married friend who is to her as Sally Fitzgerald was to Flannery O’Connor)—she has entered “into the realm of what if and who’s there?”

Bernard loses his faith, and Frances tries to comfort him as best she can. After six months, he moves to New York and the fourth chapter of their romance begins. “See,” he says, “We can keep up a conversation without God at the center. . . .” Living in the same city, though, they do not write to each other—their conversations are kept up with others, to whom they confide the romantic details. Bernard kisses her again; her friend Claire reassures Frances that Bernard is in love with her; his friend Ted writes to reassure her that she is not just another of the “many infatuations” Bernard has had “when he is not in his right mind.” Frances takes him home to meet the family, who demonstratively approve. “I bet you keep each other good company,” her father says.

Then a fight—and Frances and Bernard become unreliable narrators, offering irreconcilable versions of what happened in letters to friends. By this point in the novel, fifty pages from the end, you are more likely to credit Frances. She has become a fascinating woman by this point, worrying that she has “vinegar where [her] blood should be.” “No man should give himself the way [Bernard] does to me,” she complains to Claire, “and receive mere acquiescence in return.” The conflicts within her are irreconcilable too. She is not sure that she can be a mother and also the writer she has set herself to be. (Bernard agrees: “[A]ll the women writers I know are libertines,” he says.) She dismisses herself as “lukewarm,” but the truth is otherwise. “[T]he more consciously spiritual a person appears to be,” she writes to Bernard in an early letter, “the less truly spiritual that person is.” The truth is that Frances is afraid, really, of only one thing—that she will be accused of exhibitionism, the pride of self-display, in either religion or romance. But the truth is also that, for all her complaints about the Church, she is a Christian—she is sane—and Bernard is neither.

Thus the inevitable breakup. Bauer’s resolution is disappointing—Frances marries a French professor, Bernard marries the girl who interviewed him for the Paris Review—but the disappointment of the ending is as nothing compared to what Bauer leaves unfinished and unexplored. In what might have been the novel’s climax, Frances bares her soul on a dark night in a letter to a nun she has befriended. She ends up not sending the letter (a nice touch), but only perhaps because her quarrel with God, as she herself says, is adolescent:Some of us have a talent for suffering—but I guess I don’t. What is the point of God if he cannot soothe us? What is the point of believing in something all-powerful if he cannot give you the strength to go on at this very moment? What is the point of other people if you cannot keep your hands on them?It is difficult to imagine that Flannery O’Connor would have much patience for all this. In The Habit of Being, which Bauer lists among her favorite books, O’Connor says that “modern liberal Protestantism” encourages us “to turn religion into poetry and therapy,” and if we aren’t getting what we want (“security and emotional release and sense of purpose” and what all) then we might as well reject it:Of course, I am a Catholic and I believe the opposite of all this. I believe what the Church teaches—that God has given us reason to use and that it can lead us toward a knowledge of him, through analogy; that he has revealed himself in history and continues to do so through the Church, and that he is present (not just symbolically) in the Eucharist on our altars. To believe all this I don’t take any leap into the absurd. I find it reasonable to believe, even though these beliefs are beyond reason.[3]But then the religiosity of Bauer’s Frances, with her mistrust of “severity” and priests (“I have never gone to a priest about anything in my life”) and parishioners (“Parishioners are not Christians,” she writes. “They are parishioners”), may owe more to modern liberal Protestantism than to Rome.

At a time when the novel of belief is said to have disappeared, it is gratifying to see a young writer of Carlene Bauer’s seriousness and talent equip her characters with religious experience and a religious vocabulary, even if she falls victim in the end to what Denis de Rougemont calls the universal propaganda on behalf of romantic passion. It’s also gratifying to see such a gifted first novelist return to the riches of the novel’s tradition, although you turn the last page and turn from Bernard’s plea to be kept in Frances’s prayers to Bauer’s own acknowledgments of her own friends and mentors—in the same typeface but a different tone of voice, as if these acknowledgments were not another document to be included in this epistolary novel. For next time, a word of advice. Send a letter.
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[1] Robert Lowell, No. 211 (To Flannery O’Connor), The Letters, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), pp. 187–88.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, To “A” [Betty Hester], May 14, 1960, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), p. 395.

[3] O’Connor, To Alfred Corn, June 16, 1962, The Habit of Being, p. 479.

A farewell to Roth (for now)

It may be time for me to shut the hell up about Philip Roth. On Sunday afternoon, at the local Jewish Community Center’s “Day of Jewish Learning,” I offered a session called “Roth Roth Roth Roth Roth Roth Roth”—a private joke, a twist on Daniel Hoffman’s 1973 book Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Hoffman took his title from a line in Poe’s story “Berenice,” in which the narrator longs to “dream away whole days” by (among other methods) repeating, “monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatsoever to the mind. . . .” Mimicking the narrator, Hoffman found himself repeating Poe’s name to himself until it became “not a name at all but now a note, a tone struck upon some inward anvil of my being, one syllable in a chord I strained to hear, an ineffable harmony plucked from some sphere beyond the meshes of our common feelings” (Hoffman was also a poet).

That’s a pretty good description, at all events, of the sense Roth’s name has come to have for me. I talk about Roth so often—I have become identified with Roth so closely, by those who know me and those who don’t—that my unwearied Roth-flogging has become a cliché, if not a joke. On Saturday night my wife and I went out with friends to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth installment in the Die Hard series. (Give me John McClane, shaved head, two-day stubble, old tee-shirt, over James Bond’s oversexed elegance any day.) My friend Benjy asked whether I would be teaching at the Day of Jewish Learning the next day. When I admitted I was, he said, “On Roth, right?”

When it came time for the class, exactly five students showed up. Including one man, a little younger than I, who demanded, as he was sitting down, “Just who is Roth?” Damned good question. In The Ghost Writer, an older Nathan Zuckerman explains why, at twenty-three, he had made a literary pilgrimmage to E. I. Lonoff, what Lonoff meant to him:

[His] fiction seemed to me a response to the same burden of exclusion and confinement that still weighed upon the lives of those who had raised me, and that had informed our relentless househould obsession with the status of the Jews. The pride inspired in my parents by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what well up in me when I first came upon Lonoff’s thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls, and realized that out of everything humbling from which my own striving, troubled father had labored to elevate us all, a literature of such dour wit and poignancy could be shamelessly conceived.Roth, in short, is someone the Jews might be proud of—a kosher end for this most treyfe of Jewish writers, about whom Marie Syrkin complained, in a 1973 letter to Commentary, that his portraits of the Jews are “straight out of the Goebbels-Streicher script.”

A large part of Roth’s genius is to have taken his critics seriously, even the most pious and disdainful among them. “Opposition determines your direction,” Maria tells Zuckerman in The Counterlife. “You would probably never have written those books about Jews if Jews hadn’t insisted on telling you not to.” Roth’s novels are (to use another phrase from The Counterlife) “conversational duels” between the spokesmen for different Jewish ways of life. Roth did not set out to take revenge on his critics; he admitted them into his fiction, where he could debate them (but only if he allowed them their say). And as the great Ruth Wisse says of much Jewish fiction, the drama is in the debate.

Of all Jewish writers, then, Roth is the one whom Jews, especially secularized American Jews, have a moral obligation to read. At least that’s what I claimed at the “Day of Jewish Learning.” (Fat lot of good it did Roth. Even if I convinced my listeners, I won him only an additional five readers.) If you aren’t going to go to shul and pray three times a day, if you aren’t going to emigrate to Israel and raise children to speak in Hebrew, then you can be a Jew, you can establish and explore your Jewish identity, by reading the fiction of Philip Roth.

None of the five “learners” laughed. Who deserves the credit for that? Maybe they were unsure whether to make me seriously. I meant every word, though. Postwar Jewish fiction, especially Roth’s fiction (but not only his), could be a source of pride to the Jews almost as gratifying as their chest-swelling Zionism. And why? Because it is very nearly as great a triumph as the establishment of the state of Israel. Heretical, I know—but only, perhaps, because the critics have been too nervous and indecisive to say so. (Hello, outrage!) And even if not quite as remarkable an achievement as the creation of a Jewish state, postwar Jewish fiction was nevetheless an indispensable means and an important symbol of the Jews’ advancement into the social and cultural mainstream. Consider the record. Saul Bellow, Vasili Grossman, Bernard Malamud, Amos Oz, Yehuda Amichai, Chaim Grade, Albert Cohen, Henryk Grynberg, Cynthia Ozick, Shulamith Hareven, Mordecai Richler, Aharon Appelfeld, A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Francine Prose, Leon de Winter, Howard Jacobson, Steve Stern, Michael Chabon—and those are just the biggest names! No matter how you slice it, postwar Jewish fiction is a monument to Jewish imagination and persistence. And Roth might just be the best writer of it.

He was certainly the one who made an issue of it. The Jews’ obsession with Jewish status, and the effect of that obsession on the Jewish writer who tried to write about it, was his overriding subject. After four decades of writing my own things about Roth, however—I wrote my first essay on him, “Philip Roth and the Toilet Bowl of American Fiction,” for my high-school literary magazine, although the faculty adviser spiked it—I am finding my own arguments less and less compelling. Perhaps because the Jews’ obsession with Jewish status belonged to a specific historical moment, which has now passed. The debates over Jewish identity in Roth’s fiction have begun to read like historical transcripts, and reading them has begun to seem like reading about the debates that determined and swirled around the Oxford Movement—fascinating but also foreign, fusty, and even a little amusing. It’s sometimes hard to believe that anyone got so worked up about such issues as the status of the Irish church and William Palmer’s “Branch Theory.” Or about the deracination of Jews in the suburbs. Or about fears of American antisemitism.

“What, another book on Poe!” Hoffman begins his own book. “Who needs it?” I suspect that’s what editors have said to themselves when I have pitched to them my plan for a comprehensive study of Roth, an intellectual biography from “The first time I saw Brenda” to “he seemed to us invincible.” No one seems to want any such book. Farewell, then, O friend of my youth and middle age! Farewell—until I can find a more compelling argument for your indispensability, a wider context for your peculiar genius.

A critic’s jealousy

In a Salon essay that is attracting a fair amount of attention, the critic Alexander Nazaryan has confessed that at least some of his book reviews will have to be tossed out now; they carry the “stench of bitterness.” He “trashed” the first novels by young men his own age (“young men whose profiles were similar to [his],” whatever that means away from Facebook), because he was “set aflame by jealousy.” They had done, you see, what he had not. They had finished a novel! They had gotten it published! His essay at Salon is Nazaryan’s apology to them.

Let me hurry to confess that I am jealous of Nazaryan, because he has a staff position at the New York Daily News, editing the paper’s Page Views book blog, and I do not. (By the way, does it qualify as Schadenfreude to observe that Commentary has not published a word of literary criticism since firing me in November?) I am not jealous of Nazaryan’s confession, though. Don’t misunderstand me. I am as beset by small-mindedness as any other critic. But I have never written a review out of jealousy, and cannot really understand what it would mean to do so. I have abused my share of bad books—Richard Ohmann’s Politics of Letters, Rafael Yglesias’s A Happy Marriage, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Nicole Krauss’s Great House, Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet—but never out of the fear that their authors’ success magnified my own failure. For one thing, I did not consider the authors to be successes (even if I acknowledge that I am a failure). For another, I do not think literary success is a zero-sum game. Nor (although Nazaryan holds that only “hopeless naïfs” fail to do so) do I equate literary success with “fame, greatness and immortality, preferably in that order.”

My own small-mindedness, when I am overcome by it, reveals itself as self-righteousness, as if the Holy One, Blessed Be He, had called to me from a burning bush to act as the defender of literary tradition. I am not bitter that some writers have succeeded where I have failed; I am angry that they have settled for such a measly simulacrum of success. Consider Nazaryan’s own literary ambitions:

Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.William Styron and Donna Tartt? Really? That’s your idea of literary greatness, is it? Now imagine a young actor’s announcing his “immodest” ambition to do community theater.

Like Nazaryan, I too wanted to be a novelist once upon a time. (Till I admitted to myself that I lacked the talent.) My thwarted ambition to write fiction did not leave me jealous of published novelists, though. It gave me a specialized knowledge, an insider’s vantage—the same way an amateur tennis player can see things at the U.S. Open that escape those who have never tried to master the difficult game. But an amateur who is jealous of Roger Federer isn’t particularly interested in tennis; he is engaging in a narcissistic fantasy.

Nazaryan is quick to say that his confession of jealousy has not tainted all of his reviews, and I hope he is right. (I am personally grateful to him for his report on my firing.) I worry, though, that he may be wrong. He is like a crime lab that admits it fudged the results to get a conviction, but just in this one case—all its other results are accurate! A critic asks his readers to trust that his judgments are motivated by a disinterested passion for good books. And once that trust is lost. . . .

“The rest is marketing”

After listening to an eight-minute interview on NPR with a novelist who has a new book out (“She gamely answered the interviewer’s questions”), Patrick Kurp found that he was left with a “mild aftertaste of disgust,” even though his personal impression of the novelist was favorable. He could imagine himself enjoying a conversation with her. Why the disgust, then? As is his literary policy, Kurp turned to another writer to tease out an answer, to elaborate the thought. In this case the writer was L. E. Sissman, who said in his “Innocent Bystander” column in the Atlantic (a precursor of the book blog) that the “serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim.” And among these is a “vow of silence, except through his work.”

“The rest is marketing,” Kurp concluded. Here he was alluding to the famous scene in the Bavli (Shabbat 31a) in which a derisive skeptic approaches Rabbi Hillel and asks him to explain the entire Torah while standing on one foot. “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor,” he replied; “that is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary.” Likewise, Sissman was summing up the literary life while standing on one foot. Apart from the years of practice, the hard work, the sacrifice, the solitude, and the subordination of “the self as personality” to the “self as writer,” there is much else that may seem as if it were literature, but it isn’t; it is extraliterary; it is supplemental; it is mere commentary on the literary life.

From an early age I wanted nothing else than to be a writer. I didn’t know how to go about it, aside from reading my eyes out and writing so much I raised a thick horny callus on my middle finger, but from the beginning I knew exactly how not to go about it. I can remember the ads for Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School, which promised to teach me “to write successfully at home.” They made me vaguely suspicious, although I couldn’t say why. Believing that he was encouraging my ambitions, my grandfather, alav hashalom, bought me a subscription to the Writer magazine. I hated it, couldn’t finish the first issue, begged Grandpa not to renew the subscription. Advice for getting published, eight ways to make your manuscript stand out, how to find an agent, establishing an author platform, nine tips for marketing your first book—these hold out as much appeal for me as the book How to Seduce a Woman and Get Her Sexually Addicted to You in 5 Steps. The strategizing may even work, but what does the lucky winner end up with? A man who hopes to marry a woman is not thinking about seducing her.

In The Elephants Teach, I pointed out that the first practical how-to guides to writing were primarily by women. (A couple of them, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer and Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, both dating from the ’thirties, are still in print.) The relentlessly practical tone of these books identify them for what they are—self-help books. Not all of them are like Esther L. Schwartz’s So You Want to Write! (1936), which treats literature as a commodity that might contribute hard cash to the household income. But they are unanimous in rejecting what Schwartz calls “quality” and “artiness”; they laugh off the view that writing is, as Brande taunts it, a “holy mystery”; they urge young would-be writers to avoid what Margaret Widdemer in Do You Want to Write? (1937) calls “the highbrows.” Their attitude is easy to understand. Since women’s writing was not taken very seriously by male critics in the ’thirties, those critics’ claims for highbrow literature—the demands for quality and artiness, the hush surrounding literature’s holy mystery—must have seemed like rules for excluding women. Practical advice was women writers’ revenge on the men’s club.

Times have changed. In the 21st century, Sissman’s “serious writer” is as likely to be a woman as a man. Take one of my favorites. Marly Youmans is, as John Wilson of Books and Culture describes her, an “invisible novelist.” Although four of her novels were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, she had to settle for Mercer University Press—not even a major university press—to publish her remarkable Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, a deeply Christian novel in an age that has been said to have abandoned the novel of belief. Her most recent book is a blank-verse epic. A writer who has more resolutely stood her ground against the tide of literary fashion would be difficult to name. And yet Youmans insists that it is “impossible” to “say ‘no’ to marketing.” To do so, she says, is to yearn for a “fairy tale world where no such work is needed.” As Ellen Olenska says to Newland Archer, “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?”

I think Youmans may have misunderstood Kurp. I don’t think the literary life—the life of serious writing—is a “fairy tale” any more than I think (or than she thinks, I’d wager) that some writing, the writing also known as literature, has been called “serious” only for the sake of keeping women out. There is literature and there is marketing. A writer may or may not have to market her own book, but if she does so, she is no longer writing; she is marketing. For a serious writer, there is something vaguely distasteful about the need to market one’s books. Perhaps the source lies in class feeling, an ill-defined condescension to the life of commerce. Or perhaps the source lies in an impatience to get back to writing, the querulous feeling that one is wasting unrecoverable time in the pursuit of something other than literature. Whatever its source, the distaste is real and not to be denied. And when those of us who are serious about writing hear someone publicly talking about her books—hawking her wares instead of letting her prose do all the talking—we realize that we are not hearing about literature at all, but about the acceptable substitutes which are offered to a world not much interested in literature. We experience the same involuntary unease. It is impossible to live wholly for literature, but it is disgusting that we cannot.

Portnoy’s complaining voice

The most striking thing about Portnoy’s Complaint is its voice. Time has not softened its jolt:

What is he doing to himself, this fool! this idiot! this furtive boy! This sex maniac! He simply cannot—will not—control the fires in his putz, the fevers in his brain, the desire continually burning within for the new, the wild, the unthought-of and, if you can imagine such a thing, the undreamt-of. Where cunt is concerned he lives in a condition that has neither diminished nor in any significant way been refined from what it was when he was fifteen years old and could not get up from his seat in the classroom without hiding a hard-on beneath his three-ring notebook. Every girl he sees turns out (hold your hats) to be carrying around between her legs—a real cunt. Amazing! Astonishing! Still can’t get over the fantastic idea that when you are looking at a girl, you are looking at somebody who is guaranteed to have on her—a cunt! They all have cunts! Right under their dresses! Cunts—for fucking![1]Portnoy was not the first in American fiction to use such language. Three-and-a-half decades earlier, Henry Miller had permitted Carl, a friend of the narrator, to go on like this:You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn’t have to have any brains. They’re better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she’s brilliant, even if she’s the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn’t put meat on their arms or juice between the legs.[2]The difference in tone is immediately apparent—Portnoy is feverish with astonishment, while Carl’s is the tired voice of habitual promiscuity—but not even Miller tried to write an entire book in such language. Portnoy’s voice, by contrast, is largely what Roth’s novel is for. It was an overt break, an intentional break, with what had come before—not only with Miller’s relative lack of daring, but also with what Roth would later call his own “literary conscience.” The young American Jewish writer Ilan Mochari, whose first novel Zinsky the Obscure owes an unrepayable debt to Roth’s fourth book, locates the break within Roth’s own career. He asks:Did the traditional, Jamesian traits of Letting Go and its follow-up, When She Was Good (1967), make it easier for critics to acclaim the raucous boundary-smashing of Portnoy? Which is to say: Did critics further appreciate Portnoy’s lack of old-school structure as a conscientious artistic choice because Roth had already proven he could write the formal stuff?Or did Roth, in writing his first three books, find that the refined voice of American literary realism, owing as much to Howells and even Sinclair Lewis as to James, was fundamentally incompatible with very coarseness of life, which the realists sought to admit into literature? The answers to these questions are likely to remain mysteries, even to Roth’s authorized biographer. What can be said with a little greater certainty is that no one like Alexander Portnoy had ever been heard before in American prose fiction. Portnoy’s Complaint represented a break, with literary tradition and conscience, in how it sounded.

The critics have never succeeded in describing the sound. Ross Posnock showers it with adjectives: “exorbitant, raw, regressive,” “Huck Finnish” (twice), “shrill,” “flamboyant,” “manically shameless,” “Dionysian (and literary),” “outrageous,” but “curiously inhibited” when compared to the later Sabbath’s Theater—oh, and don’t forget “immature.”[3] Bernard Avishai had the advantage of consulting Roth’s notes. “The background I was overthrowing was literary,” Roth scribbled: Portnoy does not give voice to “the dignified unacceptable thoughts” but to the “stinky unacceptable thoughts,” because he has a “grotesque conception of life.” Avishai, however, is unwilling to take Roth at his word:[Readers] could not assume Portnoy’s story was simply grotesque. They could not assume Portnoy’s voice was, first and foremost, self-satirizing. Portnoy remained adorable somehow, the consummate stand-up comic, his parents and lovers the justified targets of his petulance, the character through which Roth liberated his voice and spirit. It has been hard to see Roth’s protagonist as a mere literary device.[4]Love that mere. For a political economist and business professor, there is always something more important than literature. Perhaps not for a writer, though—especially for one like Roth, who devoted an entire life, solitary and childless, to the struggle with writing. What outsiders to literature do not seem to comprehend is that writing is a struggle, not just with sentences and paragraphs, but with other writers, other styles and voices and strategies for getting things said. Literature is a ceaseless conversation and sometimes even a debate with one’s predecessors and contemporaries and even with one’s younger writing self. To see Portnoy as a literary device is to see him as he draws himself up to full height.

Roth was pretty clear what he was up to. Portnoy’s Complaint, he said, is a novel in the form of a confession, not a confession in the form of a novel. It is not the thinly fictionalized revelation of personal and embarrassing facts about the author. “Novel writing is for the novelist a game of let’s pretend,” he said in his open letter to Wikipedia. The novel pretends to be one thing (in this case, a long-winded “talking cure” addressed to a psychoanalyst, Doctor Spielvogel, who is referred to now and again), but in reality it is an elaborate mechanism and disguise for making meanings that can be made in no other way. Let Portnoy explain:All I do is complain, the repugnance seems bottomless, and I’m beginning to wonder if maybe enough isn’t enough. I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public. . . . Is this truth I’m delivering up, or is it just plain kvetching? Or is kvetching for people like me a form of truth? (p. 94)Portnoy never clarifies what sort of people are people like him. Jews who were born in 1933, raised in Newark, attended a good college (Antioch, say, or Bucknell), hold the correct liberal opinions? The phrase seems a throwaway until you begin to suspect that, on the lower frequencies, he speaks for you. Portnoy’s kvetch is a form of truth for people like him—that is, like all of us moderns and postmoderns—who are suspended between two worlds, one that claims us, the other that beguiles us, neither of which we can acknowledge without resort to irony or derision.

Here is a good example of the bilateral condition I am trying to describe. “The Jews I despise,” Portnoy says,for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority—but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. (p. 168)To hell with the Jews and their airs of superiority! I’m better than that. I’m certainly better than the goyim! Portnoy’s voice is only intermittently “self-satirizing” (as Avishai calls it) or self-abusive (to mint an appropriate pun). Yes, Portnoy degrades himself. “Whom am I harming with my lusts?” he demands (p. 103). The answer is not “No one.” As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, he degrades Mary Jane Reed, his lover, whom he calls the Monkey (the very nickname is degrading). Portnoy’s is the psychological strategy of sado-masochism, which the Anglo-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson suggests as the basis of most humor, especially Jewish humor (“I’m living in the middle of a Jewish joke!” Portnoy complains [p. 36]). “How to separate,” Jacobson asks, “damaging another from damaging oneself? Wherein lies the satisfaction for the fool—being seen to win a domestic argument or being seen to submit to pain?” Self-satire becomes satire of others. Or in Jacobson’s words: “The pratfall as a means to make a prat of someone else.”[5]

Anything to avoid the obvious. Namely: Portnoy is a literary device, a comic device, even to himself. All the self-satire and self-laceration and self-abuse are antics to pretend that there really is a self behind them, that these are not only satire and laceration and abuse. Portnoy is a refugee from any world to which he might belong and find acceptance, equally contemptuous of Jews and goyim. He dreams of “sitting at home listening to Jack Benny with my kids! Raising intelligent, loving, sturdy children! Protecting some good woman!” (p. 248). But he also hates the bourgeois conventions (his emphasis)—the “respectable conventions,” “those fucking conventions”—which are required to make his dream a reality (p. 124). Portnoy does not contradict himself, because he has no self to contradict.

As is his custom, he himself supplies the terms of the analysis. He tells Doctor Spielvogel that, in search of “the sentence, the phrase, the word that will liberate [him],” he has been reading Freud’s 1912 essay “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” which includesthat phrase, “currents of feeling.” For “a fully normal attitude in love” (deserving of semantic scrutiny, that “fully normal,” but to go on—) for a fully normal attitude in love, says he, it is necessary that two currents of feeling be united: the tender, affectionate feelings, and the sensuous feeling. And in many instances this just doesn’t happen, sad to say. “Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love.” (pp. 185–86)Portnoy’s Complaint is the effusive testimony of a thirty-year failure to unite any two currents of feeling in one healthy and normally functioning self. Suspended between two worlds—Jewish and non-Jewish (or “human,” as the unhappy Jew always likes to say), bourgeois and Bohemian, domestic and sexual, brilliant and bad—he dangles over a void. Portnoy’s voice is the voluble concealment of that fact, talking non-stop against the day on which he must finally admit his inner emptiness, his lack of belief in anything. Because when he finally admits it, all he will be able to do is scream inarticulately:

       Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!! (p. 274)

Only then he may perhaps to begin the reintegration of self.
____________________

[1] Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 101–02. Subsequent references will be inserted between parentheses.

[2] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 114. Originally published in Paris in 1934.

[3] Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 166–168 and passim.

[4] Bernard Avishai, Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 8, 10–11, 13. Italics in the original.

[5] Howard Jacobson, Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (New York: Viking, 1997), pp. 143, 146.