Writing Home: Domestic Space, Narrative Production, and the Homeland in Roth’s American Pastoral

Abstract

On 18, 2002, as part of Lannan Foundations literary awards ceremony, author and activist Arundhati Roy delivered a moving speech entitled Come September which addressed America's relationship global terrorism and our country's involvement in projects of political violence in decades leading up 9/11. Adopting a stance that clearly challenged narratives of America's political innocence, Roy suggested that 9/11 opened Americans' eyes political violence as a very real symptom of globalization. With her speech, she sought to share grief of history. To thin mists a little. To say citizens of America, in gentlest, most human way: 'Welcome World.' Whether they have become more savvy critics of global politics as a result of 9/11 is unclear, but, as Roy points out, event forced Americans consider country within a global community, a community with complex economic, religious, and social dimensions, each equally powerful and capable of producing violence. As a consequence of 9/11 and of this changing perception of America's position in a global community, debates on national security gained newfound urgency as Americans sought secure homeland--both materially and rhetorically--against threat of other. Underlying these impulses protect American is a deeply rooted attachment domestic space. From creation of sprawling Department of Homeland Security in November of 2002 increasingly heated debates over illegal immigration and tightening of borders, Americans--contrary Roy's hopes--have become even more exclusionary, opting define America as a only those who have a legitimate claim on it, whatever that might mean. Our attachment domestic space as predominant model for understanding homeland and front is not particularly surprising, as domestic space on its most basic level suggests stability and protection, two concepts integral nationhood. Less obvious is how domestic space is intertwined with narrative, and how political narratives produced by state embed themselves in our everyday lives. Considering metonymic relationship between the and the nation, it is worth examining how our negotiation of former bears upon our construction of latter. The anxieties over security that continue pervade American national consciousness in many ways emerge from processes of narrativization inherent in constructions of domestic space. Philip Roth's American Pastoral, published in 1997, offers a prescient critique of security, suggesting that rhetorical foundations of security state existed in latent forms well before attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon. Roth's novel describes a bourgeois fantasy of security and domesticity embodied in and articulated through trope of house, and its implicit commentary on home and demonstrates that, no matter how exhaustively we fortify our domestic spaces, political will always intervene and will often do so violently. (1) Narratives of political innocence and American exceptionalism, integral American notions of domesticity, both function as defense mechanisms housed in and protected by home and homeland. Although American Pastoral focuses on politics of Vietnam War era, novel's narrative structure, which situates Nathan Zuckerman, in 1995, as source of narrative invention, suggests that Roth is as much concerned with critiquing politics of nineties as he is politics of sixties. Through Zuckerman's narration, Roth implies that narrative violence--that is, attempts challenge expectations of conventional narrative by means of radical formal experiments--functions like an act of domestic terrorism: both seek dismantle a political infrastructure that sustains dominant discourses of power. …