This is the first half of an essay on a thematic obsession of Philip Roth's, the late novelist. If you work at a publication interested in seeing a full version (probably would be between 3000 and 4000 words), let me know @ trevor.cunnington@gmail.com
Existential Betrayal in the work of Philip Roth
On September 6, 2012, an open letter appeared in the The New Yorker from Philip Roth to Wikipedia, after Roth failed to get an article about his novel The Human Stain changed. Wikipedia decided Roth was not a credible source on his own novel in some grand gesture to Roland Barthes’ essay “Death of the Author.” The correction he so direly wanted to make, which he could have made himself had he registered to Wikipedia, was that the character of Coleman Silk was based not on the writer Anatole Broyard, with whom Roth was acquainted tenuously, but rather on Princeton professor of sociology Melvin Tumin, with whom Roth was close friends. Ironically enough, Roth declares that Wikipedia’s claim that Coleman Silk was based on Broyard was the result of “the babble of literary gossip,” the same social force that dooms Silk in The Human Stain. I bring this quibble up not to vex the already exhausted topic of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” or to rehash the truism that not everything is exactly as it appears especially on the internet, but rather to use it as an example of the central theme of Roth’s work: what I will henceforth call existential betrayal.
Before I continue, it behooves me to define and clarify a term I invented for the purposes of this essay. First, existential betrayal does not hold court with the philosophical school whose central tenet is “existence precedes essence,” which is another way of saying things were here long before ideas about those things, which are often considered a primary symptom of consciousness. It has nothing to do with this philosophical debate. I have simply used the adjectival form of existence. How do you betray existence, then? If you live in a democracy and accept democratic principles, you allow a fascist to become president. If you are a successful businessman who has achieved the American Dream, your daughter becomes a terrorist and blows up a post office. If you are a light-skinned African-American, you cut your family out of your life, and you live your life as a white person. Any Philip Roth fan will by now have recognized the central situations of three of his novels: The Plot Against America, American Pastoral, and The Human Stain, respectively.
Betrayal of the kind that Roth seems perversely interested in has a long literary history. Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, betraying their creator’s wishes. Cain murders Abel out of envy of the latter’s ability to please God with his meat offerings. Judas, one of Jesus’ beloved disciples, turns him over to the Romans who crucify him. Oedipus kills his father and unknowingly sleeps with his mother, breaking one of the most universal taboos, that of incest. Claudius kills his own brother and marries his wife, Hamlet’s mother. Macbeth kills Duncan after being rewarded for his bravery in battle.
African Americans on paper were given freedom; in life, they were hardly even given freedom with the introduction of Jim Crow Laws. Special Field Order 15, which offered the newly freed slaves 40 acres of land, and a mule to borrow from the Union army, was quickly overturned by President Andrew Jackson. The freed slaves had been promised the autonomy and independence inherent in land ownership. What they received was a tenuous, and sometimes outright dangerous, freedom from slavery, but not from the lynch mob, not from discriminatory housing and employment policies, not from police brutality. These betrayals, both fictional and real, are all very visceral, and their repercussions are felt to this day.
What, however, distinguishes a garden variety betrayal from an existential betrayal? An existential betrayal is one that violates a human universal. While the latter has been notoriously difficult to pin down, what with the seemingly endless variety of human culture across both time and space, there are still, postmodernists notwithstanding, a handful of human universals. Small group bonding, which we call the family, is a universal. Even feral children have bonded to a small group of a variety of animals: dogs, cats, and monkeys. Betraying this small group, without a doubt, is an existential betrayal, as it undermines all relationships and puts one’s very identity into question. That is what is so devastating in American Pastoral. That the protagonist, Seymour Levov, finds out his wife has been having an affair, that he himself had an affair with a woman who would, unbeknownst to him, eventually hide his daughter after she embarks on a bombing campaign in protest of American involvement in the Vietnam war, and worst of all that his daughter would so violently reject the American Dream that he has lionized and achieved leaves him unable to trust his own instincts and intuitions about people. His world has been annihilated by betrayal.
Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history after the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. And yet, things continued to happen, and as if that line of a certain front rippled across the earth, happenings were recorded and passed down. It occurs to me the person to make such a declaration knew about as much about history as a billiard ball knows about beer. In Roth, thankfully, history hasn’t ended for better or for worse. We can still sense class conflict in American Pastoral in the design of Levov’s office: glass walls in the middle of the plant so his line of sight could reach each corner. It was if he had torn a page out of Discipline and Punish, from the panopticon chapter, and spliced it with an earned and nuanced examination of workplace power and the give-take characterizations of elite liberals mixed with the resistant reading practices of the folks who dirtied their hands there. And of course, there is sexual indiscretion on both sides of the marriage equation. Should we wonder that people take their pleasures without much discretion in order to seize a measure of pleasure back from their work-invested lives?
His daughter, long after the bombing of her local post office, converts to Jainism, a religion characterized by such absolute kindness that you are not permitted to kill anything, including plants. Such an irony in a story about people hurt by such actions and being associated with those actions is not lost, especially since in her vision the reality of her country never lives up to the principles it proclaims to its people and to the world. These principles also get subverted to dramatic effect in The Plot Against America. That the “plot” is “against” America, a stealth Fascist insurgency spearheaded by a hugely popular aviator, a character type redolent of bravery and honour and other such longstanding virtues in our literary canon, is another existential betrayal. Lindbergh and his cronies in the alternate history format rush the presidency, he gets elected on his sheer recognizability, then he bans all other parties and undoes the especially virulent democracy of America in a short span of time. In a time where the American Presidency has been bumrushed by a reality star who is then impeached but he continues wielding near absolute power, such a narrative is certainly queasily familiar. “Never forget” takes on ominous undertones.
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