A Response

Abstract

A Response Bryan Cheyette (bio) I am grateful to the editors of Philip Roth Studies for giving me the chance to respond to the review of Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2014), published in Fall 2016 by Professor Henry Schwarz. I realize that this is an unusual commission given that the book has been comprehensively reviewed elsewhere in literary, scholarly, Jewish, and postcolonial journals. The readers of Philip Roth Studies might understandably prefer another voice rather than the author’s and all of these alternative reviews are readily accessible. So why has the author been invited to respond to this particular review? A clue might well be the fact that Diasporas of the Mind contains a chapter on Philip Roth which is not considered by Professor Schwarz for the following reason: “I will limit my comments to discussion of postcolonial writers for readers of Philip Roth Studies, for whom presumably the Jewish writers are better known” (106). And there’s the rub. No discussion of the chapters on Primo Levi and Jean Améry, nor Philip Roth (not that I would want to call any of them “the Jewish writers”). There is nothing on Muriel Spark (a Catholic “Jewish writer”) whose chapter locates her work in colonized Africa. This, in turn, leads to a criticism that there is no mention of “feminism and gender” (108), which structures the Spark chapter. A lack of reading leads to a misreading which leads to a review. But that is not the main issue. By dividing the book into “Jewish” and “postcolonial,” which are intertwined throughout, the review fails to address the main point of Diasporas of the Mind, which is to explore the extent to which Jewish and postcolonial literatures and histories are in dialogue. Amusingly enough, the review is a perfect illustration of the “disciplinary thinking” highlighted in the book, which separates out histories and cultures into specialized areas. Readers of Philip Roth Studies need not read a new account of Roth as he is already “known”— a rather odd criterion for a scholarly journal. I was expecting some flak, from full-blooded Rothians, as the Roth chapter goes against the current whiggish orthodoxy that his work has steadily improved and culminates in the American Trilogy and subsequent twenty-first century novellas. The literary half of the book, in fact, pivots around the chapter as I trace the turn in Roth’s fiction from his diasporic middle period to his national late period and argue that this “national turn” restricts [End Page 119] Roth’s late novels and novellas. What interests me is the gap between Nathan Zuckerman’s diasporic sense of being separated from European history—“war, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges”—compared to his American “dwarf drama” (550–51), as he puts it in Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985). By the time of the American Trilogy this ironic gap is closed—as “war, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism” comes home to America—with, I contend, the fiction suffering as a result. A lack of engagement with Levi and Améry in the review means that the book is criticized for “not approach[ing] the psychological richness of Trauma Studies in dealing with the Holocaust nor other colonial tragedies” (108). My reading of these “Jewish writers,” however, is in critical dialogue with trauma studies and this discussion, in relation to Diasporas of the Mind, has recently been reprised in an on-line round-table: “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” with Stef Craps, Alan Gibbs, Sonya Andermahr, and Larissa Allwork (http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/905). Of more concern is my supposed take on Israel/Palestine, which bears no resemblance to anything in the book. Diasporas of the Mind is an account of different kinds of diasporas, and interpretations of diasporas, not least those of Philip Roth. For that reason the book does not aim to “reimagine a sense of Jewish nationhood that would not be overtly Zionist, racist and presumably anti-Palestinian” (105). Israel/Palestine is discussed in relation to the work of Hannah Arendt, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, Stuart Hall, and Edward...