Bardic Aspirations: Philip Roth's Epic of America

Abstract

This article focuses upon the Jewish experience of post-war optimism and ‘innocence’ in Philip Roth's American Pastoral trilogy. The epic sequence retrospectively depicts three lives, each in various ways enchanted and disappointed by the dream of a self-reliant American identity. Mediated from an indefinite moment in the present by Roth's alter-ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, the trilogy self-consciously addresses the role of the writer in the construction of a mythical national identity. The three novels of the sequence are presented as historical narratives. They uncover the processes whereby the memories of post-war America became, for better or worse, interlaced with the foundational myths of the United States. Their presiding themes are of disenchantment, and the slow collapse of myriad fictions of nation and race. Oscillating between expressions of escape from an entangled web of memories and explorations of the prerogatives of nostalgia, these works ultimately concern the epic process of unmaking the American ‘race’. Each subverts the phoney rhetoric of nation-building polemicists and myth-makers, yet acknowledges these myths as a formative component of their individual, national and literary identities. Like Joyce, Roth is presented as both fascinated with and repelled by the concept of the epicist as the founder of his people.