A Professor of Roth in India

Abstract

A Professor of Roth in India Gurumurthy Neelakantan (bio) My introduction to the fiction of philip roth began with the purchase of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) from a second-hand bookstore on the Kanpur campus of Indian Institute of Technology in the mid-eighties.1 I was then a graduate student pursuing research on the fiction of Saul Bellow. While Bellow's interviews and the secondary literature on his fiction gave a sketchy idea of the novelistic concerns of Roth, it was not until I read Roth's Goodbye, Columbus that I began to realize the author's compelling voice. Having finished my PhD in the late eighties and settling in a good academic career, my next few years saw me engage with the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Cynthia Ozick, Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley. Sometimes it surprises me that I did not revert to Roth in that period, considering how entranced I was by Goodbye, Columbus. The impetus to pursue Roth's fiction did not return to me until the summer of 1992. During a visit to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras library, I was browsing through the pages of the latest issue of Modern Fiction Studies and chanced upon an essay on Roth's The Counterlife (1986) by Debra Shostak. A felicitously written and thoroughgoing postmodern analysis, Shostak's essay as much rekindled my interest in Roth as a desire to become a good scholar like herself. Rediscovering Roth through Shostak, I immediately bought The Counterlife, Deception (1990), The Ghost Writer (1979), and My Life as a Man (1974). For someone who loves the nineteenth-century realist writers, I was myself a bit surprised to be taken in by the various postmodern games that Roth plays in The Counterlife. I also realized that Roth is a postmodernist with a difference in that, for him, reality is neither a construction nor "real" enough. Subsequently, I located in an anthology edited by Malcolm Bradbury Roth's fine essay "Writing American Fiction" (1961), which argues this point with nuance, and it clarified my own thinking on the debates underpinning modernism and postmodernism. As part of my intellectual journey with Roth's fiction, I experienced a certain self-reflexive moment in March 2013. Attending the Roth@80 event in Newark, I participated in a symposium on "What we talk about when we talk about Philip Roth." Many of the American newspaper reporters who covered the event were curious to [End Page 91] know what drew me to the fiction of Roth in the first place and why I considered him at the time—as I do now—an important international novelist. That question really knocked me down. Giving me an opportunity to examine my own life, it helped me to assess where Roth fits into it. While I discovered Roth through Bellow, the fact remains that Roth's fiction has held a mirror to my own life experiences. Reading Roth's visceral and uncanny experiences of everyday life, I often find myself struggling against a normative cultural tradition much like his protagonists. If I'm fascinated by Bellow's take on life as a pilgrimage, I am more drawn to Roth's dramatization of the conflicts that assail the soul of the protagonist in his journey. In reading Roth, I have been able to understand my own conflicts as a Brahmin caught up in the riptides of modernity. Much like the Jewish tradition, the Brahmanical tradition privileges strict religious observances and a certain otherworldliness that eventually translates into insularity. Thus, my preoccupation with Roth's fiction has its genesis in a curious cultural story. While my connection with my tradition is coherent, it is no less characterized by ambivalence and irony much like Roth's stance towards his Jewish origins. In negotiating an identity in the interstices of a living tradition and an equally laudable modernity, I have learned to look for inspiration in Roth's novels that mine a Jewish male's identity negotiations in the New World. More than any other writer from the West or even from my own Indian literary traditions, Roth singularly speaks to me—often illuminating my beliefs...