Athleticism and Masculinity in Roth's American Trilogy and <em>Exit Ghost</em>

Abstract

It is striking how central sport is throughout Roth's American Trilogy and Exit Ghost. While sport is glorified and at the same time parodied, however, it forcefully changes throughout the novels. At first, in American Pastoral, we meet the ultimate sports-hero, the Swede, who is admired by the implied narrator Nathan Zuckerman solely for his athleticism. In the following novels, I Married a Communist and Human Stain , the early pattern of Nathan's emotional attachment to athletic males is repeatedly explored with the same outcome. But in Zuckerman's last novel, Exit Ghost, we suddenly meet a desperate narrator who rejects all the athletic power he formally loved.Furthermore, sport not only exists as an almost continuous background within the Trilogy, but athleticism itself is also a marker for masculinity, and all the male main characters to whom Nathan attaches himself are athletic. In fact, for Nathan masculinity and athleticism are explained through each other: masculinity is athleticism and athleticism is masculinity. This axiom is perhaps most visible in American Pastoral, where the Swede embodies strength and masculinity not only for Nathan, but also for the whole Newark neighborhood. Yet at the same time that Nathan describes the Swede's masculinity through his athleticism, he also unravels much of the outer masculine facade of the Swede exactly through sport. In fact, the fall of the Swede and the tragedies Roth's strong male heroes experience throughout the Trilogy demonstrate that, contrary to the popular American trope of the invulnerable athlete, athlete-heroes are not immune to tragedy. Indeed, despite the fact that novels such as Malamud's Natural (1952) have challenged the ideal of the successful sports-hero, American culture still tends to equate athletic achievements with a successful life outside the sports arena. In fact, sport is so deeply entangled with the American idyll that the prototypical American is often a good athlete. Swede lives up to this idealized image until the very point in time when his daughter blows up the local post office and with it, a local doctor. Until this moment the Swede had reached three ideals of white middle class life in America: he is handsome and athletic, earns good money, and prizes his nuclear family. It is a form of this settled life that Roth repeatedly overturns in the Trilogy; thus Coleman's lie about his life, for example, aims at incorporating him into the white middle class dream in Human Stain. And Nathan himself, albeit Jewish and therefore, as he himself ponders, outside the athletic realm (cf. Pastoral 3), wants this idealized life as well. However, the idyllic lives of Roth's heroes are woefully annihilated, and it is the Swede's brother Jerry who vocalizes the counter-appraisal to the Swede's dreaming assessment of America: The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok (Pastoral 277). Jerry thus is the realistic, if cynical, voice in the family who does not succumb to the dream of the (athletic) American pastoral, although he does personify another American stereotype, according to which hard work inevitably leads to success.Yet although Nathan exposes the popular fallacy of the sports-hero through the Swede, he never loses his fascination for the manly athlete, nor does he relinquish the strong emotional connection that athleticism and masculinity represent for him, at least not until his life-long admiration for athleticism crumbles under the pressure of his failing body in Exit Ghost. In American Pastoral, therefore, Nathan revels innocently in nostalgic memories about the powerful Swede, who is the most American and thus the most revered of the Jewish boys in the neighborhood because he plays the big three American sports: baseball, football, and basketball. Every position the Swede holds on those teams is important; however, these positions also show a crucial fact: the Swede is not the thinker and decision maker of the game, but the receiver and the enforcer of strategies. …