"Whither Roth Given Bailey"

Abstract

"Whither Roth Given Bailey"1 Benjamin Schreier (bio) As a prefatory disclaimer, I should cop to seeing no reason to use my space here as an opportunity—that is, under a pretense to Olympian expertise—to summarize Philip Roth's career, provide an overview or appraisal of his literary output, and/or reprise some set of defining events of (or gossipy revelations about) his life. I take it as axiomatic—minority view though it may be—that scholarly reviews should tread elsewhere for their primary labor than the ground of synoptic recapitulation. And anyway, Bailey's biography has been/will be enough written about that other commentators can take that tack. Suffice it to say that I like Roth's work and perhaps more to the point find that the stance or positionality his books relentlessly adopt to be intellectually and ethically significant enough to be worth talking about. Moreover—again, in the interest of apologia more than anything else—I find the tension and indeed difference between Roth's literary work and the public circulation of his persona to be far more critically productive than aesthetically restrictive or morally adjudicatory. So there's that. I have rarely put much professional stock in biography; I don't find it intellectually stimulating, and I don't find the genre an important tool for the kind of literary thinking and scholarship I pursue. To be sure, I like the anecdotes—my favorite line in Bailey's book may be Roth's response to Irving Howe's tepid, pompous praise of Goodbye, Columbus and its critique of Jewish provinciality: "I figure fuck Howe anyway…It isn't my fault people aren't eating as much chopped liver as they used to" (172)—but publicly celebrating delight in wacky historical affect does not a vital intellectual program make. More generally, I consider literary biography as overly susceptible to serving an imperial form of thinking about literature, or as being a technology for refusing the imaginative agencies of writing (that is, as primarily something other than historical record) in the interest of an historical account-keeping of authors and works, a means to pursue a thinking about literature that's organized, fundamentally, by a historicist fetishism—biography being, at least in part, a proxy for literary history, a way of securing the figure of the author as a means to anchor what a scholar might want to say about literary works in [End Page 677] the presumptive socio/ethno/cultural bedrock of "history" (if not through the agency of authorial intention, then often enough through the bio-fantasy of authorship more generally). In fact, this imperial form of representative thinking is fully on display in the dominant modes of Jewish studies intellectuality, especially in the field's attitude toward literature. Jewish studies is a relentlessly and unapologetically historicist enterprise—and it has tended to approach Roth, and Jewish American literature more generally, as an historiographic instrument, signifying the sociological narrative of "breakthrough," the emergence of Jews out of the immigrant ghetto and into the mainstream of American social and cultural life. Certainly at the outset, but arguably throughout his career (albeit in different ways), Philip Roth functioned as a "shibboleth" for American Jews, as Bailey quotes David Boroff from 1963 (conspicuously from the same symposium—held in Israel—in which Roth would famously declare he was not a Jewish writer, but rather a writer who was a Jew), who were "given a choice: Leon Uris or Philip Roth" (220). Philip Roth—or actually, more accurately, "Philip Roth"—offered a way for Jewish community avatars (or would-be avatars) to gauge their own identification with "the" Jewish community. If early on the balance of Jewish American prestige may have tipped more toward the Uris side of the ledger, as the breakthrough narrative became hegemonic, it was certainly Roth's liberated, canny, cosmopolitan recuperation of Jewish affect that would prove to be representationally dominant. As Jewish studies consolidated as an academic field in the Viet Nam era, it transformed these insiderist protocols of Jewish community self-regard into a multidisciplinary analysis of Jewish experience, sublating establishmentarian Jewish clannishness. Its historicist approach to literature could thereby leverage Roth...