Philip Roth’s Modest Phase

In the 1950s, when Philip Roth came of age and first began to publish, it was the fate of the writer to have to consider the fate of the individual, who was fated to do battle above all with institutions. Everywhere one looked they appeared to be looming over him — whether in the form of the welfare state, or various arms of the military that were still absorbing so many men into their ranks, or newly swelling corporate bureaucracies. Beneath them lay the booming institution of the family, including the Jewish family, which writers like Roth tended to figure as the ur-form of insult to the individuality of the individual, followed closely by the confines of the institution of marriage, while all were linked analogically to the repressive structures of decorum built into "respectable" literary forms. In this context, in a way that now seems inescapably dated, the goal could only be to take liberties of various kinds — above all, in Roth's case, in giving narrative voice to the agony of insatiable sexual greed. In what was arguably the last period in U.S. history when artistically ambitious novels seemed to matter to the wider world, that mattering coincided with an airing of the scandal of desire in the ethnic male individual as a rebuke to the repressive WASP order. A bit later, in works like Erica Jong's distinctly Rothian Fear of Flying (1973), it would do the same for the scandal of female desire, as the modernist insurgency in the direct representation of human sexuality begun earlier in the century looked to complete its now bestselling mission of airing the truth. But what happens when that individual, and with him that conception of authorship, gets old?

Of course, by the 1950s, the pathos of individuality had a very long history in the United States, central as it had been to the longstanding American mythology of self-reliance and the various European individualisms, liberal and romantic, from which it was derived. In the late 1950s, these antecedent individualisms were joined by yet another, a recent import from Europe called Existentialism. It would soon become all the rage, the vehicle of a surprising efflorescence of more or less mass cultural intellectualism whose afterlife can be detected even now. In the preface to the 1956 anthology that would do much to diffuse its intellectual presence throughout the campuses and cafes of the United States, Walter Kaufmann conceded that most of the living figures contained in the pages of Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre had already repudiated the label, but asserted that what brought them together nonetheless was a "perfervid individualism." "What we perceive" in thinkers like Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Sartre, he wrote, "is an unheard-of song of songs on individuality: not classical, not Biblical, and not at all romantic. No, individuality is not retouched, idealized or holy [in Existentialism]; it is wretched and revolting, and yet, for all its misery, the highest good."1

It would be wrong, surely, simply to assimilate the fiction of Philip Roth to the Existentialist philosophical tradition, which would need at a minimum to be coordinated with the equally popular intellectual psychoanalytic discourses with which it was tightly braided. And yet a wretched, revolting, and miserable individualism is not a bad description of the position taken in and by his work, certainly through the metafictions of the 1980s, when his project threatened to become trapped in an aridly narcissistic absurdist loop. Roth's project of rude truth-telling about the individual — in his case, the Jewish male individual — is not hard to connect to the many examples of the same in Kaufmann's anthology, while his dedication to Kafka, whose signature unrealism he crassly reanimated in the novella The Breast (1972), was patent and took many forms. But the language of Existentialism also characterizes a much later phase in Roth's career, one that he tended to align, however tendentiously, with the lateness of the career of the novel itself: "[T]he book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen, and it can't compete with the computer screen."2

As it happened, that much later phase marked the end of his career, leading up to and including his last published novel, Nemesis (2010), in which he plays his variation on Albert Camus' The Plague (1947). In the interim, the perfervid individualism of the original model had been turned inside out, the wretched metaphysical privilege of self-determination built into Sartrean notions of responsibility giving way to the depressively determining vagaries of history, materiality, and time. In this novel, a character's compulsion to hold himself individually responsible for carrying the poliovirus into his Newark community is itself the absurdity. In that eclipse of individual responsibility, another, arguably more basic, dimension of the intellectual project of Existentialism comes to the fore: its concern with the meaning or, perhaps, meaninglessness of life and of Existenz. For literature, according to Roth, the question of existential meaning would also be the question of its own mattering. Does the novel meaningfully intervene in the public sphere as a performance of self-liberation, or must its purposes be conceived otherwise? Around the same time that literary scholars, witnessing the devastation wrought on their profession by the 2008 financial crisis, began speaking of the need to adopt less fancifully heroic conceptions of their place in the world, Roth began to do the same for his own novelistic project.

Some groundwork for Philip Roth's modest phase was laid in the 1990s, in what was widely seen as a welcome turn on his part to larger preoccupations than the reflexive authorial self. Ross Posnock and others have described the novels of the 1990s on the model of Henry James's Major Phase — that is, as the culmination or even auto-monumentalization of a certain authorial mode.3 The works of Roth's major phase are not driven by the impulse toward performative rebellion from forms of historical institutional determination, or from the decorum of the constituted social order. Rather, they are written with all due respect to that order, however maddening it might be. Often enough, as in the depiction of unhinged sixties radicalism in American Pastoral (1997), they exhibit clear sympathy with the staid. While they fitfully share their immediate predecessors' interest in history, the novels of Roth's late "Nemeses" sequence represent something else again. Gone is the sublime excess of a work like Sabbath's Theater (1995), with its brilliantly sonorously slobbering pathos and grotesquerie; gone the capacious accounting for major swerves of social history in novels like I Married a Communist (1998). Gone, too, the complexly ironic web of identity crises that structure The Human Stain (2000). These qualities of largeness and reflexive American-ness had won the author a new and conclusive round of accolades, making him seem fit for live habitation (the third writer to receive this honor) in the handsome volumes of the Library of America.

But then Roth went small. In the four short novels now grouped under the name of the last of them, modesty of ambition becomes visible as an independent and fully functioning literary mode. A mode whose modesty, rather than simply a sign of waning creative energies, might be read in more positive or, better, positively negative, light.

We are dealing here with deliberately minor works, but works whose minority is excessively meaningful, touching, finally, on the absolute weakness — but at the same time, the absolute metaphysical relevance — of literature as such. Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and finally Nemesis (2010): as their thematically linked titles already repetitively imply, in these works it is the fate of the individual to be ordinary and to die, and this characterological "simplicity" is embodied in their abbreviated form. To be sure, this form varies to some degree, from the brisk third-person life-summary of Everyman to the ghostly first-person deployed in Indignation to the communally submerged first-person retrospective of Nemesis, and the protagonists of each novel follows a quite different trajectory to the grave. No claim can be made for the premeditation of the quartet as such. It is, as Roth's official groupings of novels have always been, a somewhat post-hoc construction, a way of giving retrospective shape to a writing process that moved, by his own account, from the conception and execution of one novel after another in an unbroken series spanning some fifty years. (It's not clear, for instance, that the short novels The Dying Animal (2001) and Exit Ghost (2007) couldn't be seen as members of the Nemesis group, except that they were already labeled as members of the Kepesh and Zuckerman novels respectively.) The very existence of the "Nemeses" novels as a bound unit, a quartet, is artificial, then, but I still want to insist that it is helpful in noticing and naming an actually existing minor mode.

Although Nemesis would finally give its name to the quartet, the operative principle of the grouping was discovered in the first, the novel Everyman, which takes its title from a medieval morality play, and asserts the aesthetic power of simplicity — minimalism, even — in a way mostly absent from the verbally maximalist career of Roth. The morality play is, crucially, a pre-novelistic form, without the novel's essential commitment to the expansive individuality of the individual; at the same time, it is crucially in sync with the non-aristocratic ordinariness of the novelistic individual. Everyman begins at the funeral of its protagonist, an advertising executive who has taken up painting in his retirement, and gives away the "message" or anti-message of the novel right away:

That was the end. No special point had been made. Did they all say what they had to say? No, they didn't, and of course they did. Up and down the state that day, there'd been five hundred funerals like his, routine, ordinary . . . no more or less interesting than the others. But then it's the commonness that's most wrenching, the registering once more of the fact of death that overwhelms everything.4

This is something like the thesis of the modest phase — which we can call a cliché or, more charitably, a meta-cliché. The event of death, the things that are said about death, and this novel about how life inevitably leads to death are coordinated as instances of the radically ordinary. The truths uttered here are not the scandalous ones aired in Portnoy's Complaint (1968), just ones we would normally rather not ponder. And yet note how it is not loss as such but commonness — the loss of individual distinction — that wrenches, as the human body, in death, finds itself reduced to its component material parts. In this we see the persistence, in negated form, of the rage for masculine individual distinction that animated the earlier novels, whose antagonists were merely institutions.

Back then it had been institutions that presumed to block "that sharp sense of individualization, of sublime singularity, that marks a fresh sexual encounter or love affair and that is the opposite of the deadening depersonalization of serious illness" (134). That cock-blocking institution still exists in the novel Indignation, but no real fault is laid at its door for the senseless death of its protagonist. In the modest phase, death represents a greater negation than any institution could. The Everyman realizes this one evening when, at what he knows should be the high point of his life, his nighttime summer walks along the beach with his lover begin simply to terrify him: "The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die" (30). In Philip Roth's modest phase the cosmic scale of night, the numerousness of heavenly bodies that might provide sublime inspiration, an occasion for Whitmanian self-expansion, can only be taken as the promise of negation: "Suddenly he was lost in nothing, in the sound of the two syllables 'nothing' no less than in the nothingness, lost and drifting, and the dread began to seep in" (103). The fear of flying is now more simply a fear of dying.5

The Everyman had "never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being" (31). In this, he is the ironically central figure of modest phase. The protagonist of The Humbling cuts a more eccentric, but finally conforming, figure: Simon Axler is a famous actor who experiences a sudden and complete loss of the ability to act. In taking a famous man down, humbling him, the novel references not the medieval morality play but the classical form of tragedy, in which the high and mighty are brought to ground. In Roth's Existentialist version, they are brought to ground for no reason at all. At first Simon Axler takes comfort in the tautologies of selfhood: "I'll always be unlike anyone else, Axler told himself, because I am who I am," but then finds himself slowly ground into the anonymity of pure contingency: "But it was all a fluke, Jerry, a fluke that a talent was given to me, a fluke that it was taken away. This life's a fluke from start to finish." Or again to his doctor: "Nothing has a good reason for happening . . . You lose, you gain — it's all caprice. The omnipotence of caprice. The likelihood of reversal. Yes, the unpredictable reversal and its power."6

It doesn't take much prodding to see in Simon Axler's problem the problem of the modern individual as such, paralyzed by the recognition of his own Sartrean "bad faith" as a social actor but unable to proceed "authentically" nonetheless. As it had for Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus," for Axler the question inevitably arises: why not commit suicide?

What was remarkable was the frequency with which suicide enters into drama, as though it were a formula fundamental to the drama, . . . a subject dramatists have been contemplating with awe since the fifth century B.C., beguiled by the human beings who are capable of generating emotions that can inspire this most extraordinary act. (39)

Having awoken to his own ordinariness, then, access to the "extraordinary" can now only be gained by the high drama of self-murder. And so, having been abandoned by the younger lover who briefly gives him hope that his heroic masculinity might still be recognized and validated, "the last of the best of the classical American stage actors" takes his own life (2). To read this novel as an allegory of the fate of the novelist-hero after the waning of his capacity to command attention is not hard, but its import exceeds the expression of self-pity it surely is.

What gives the modest phase its interest, finally, is not its depiction of the failure of the individual man, or the failure of individuality as such, compelling as these representations can be. It is rather the way it manages the relation of that individual failure to the failure and death of a certain historical conception of literature itself. The novels of the modest phase represent a complex response to this "death" — neither, as we have it in a work like Sabbath's Theater, a maximalist verbal resistance to the inevitability of death, nor a form of artistic suicide. Instead, as we can see in the bubbling up in them of pointedly traditional literary forms, we have something like a ritual literary classicism, a therapeutic practice of aesthetic moderation. Here, as distinct from the notionally open-ended ongoingness of the big novel, the genre above all others at war with the need to conclude, the shortness of the short novel enables the sensation of completed form; and enables, too, the therapeutic repetition of that form. There will not be one final comprehensive metaphysical response to death, no Moby-Dick or Infinite Jest. In Philip Roth's modest phase, ordinary individuals are offered as "classic" examples of that ordinariness and put through the paces of their disintegration. The traditional literary forms that hold them are no longer understood, as they were in Roth's youth, and in the youth of literary modernism itself, as forms of enclosure that need to be shattered in the search for an authentic expression of desire. Rather, they are offered as fragile, already-failing vehicles that can carry us, but only for a short while, through the encompassing onslaught of time.

That, I would say, is the lasting beauty and value offered to readers by the works of Philip Roth's modest phase, all the more powerful in their carefully calibrated muting of the outrageous energy of his youth. For their author, alas, even that would become insufficient reason to go on writing, although unlike Simon Axler, Roth did not kill himself. Rather, in 2012, he publicly announced his retirement as a novelist, declaring himself "finished with fiction. . . . I don't want to read it. I don't want to write it. And I don't even want to talk about it anymore."7 To which the only response can be: to each his own, in his own time. For many readers, for the time being, fiction still does what they need it to do, however modestly, and not only that. Other writers, different kinds of writers, may yet find the novel a viable vehicle for their ambitions, perhaps even for the scandalous insurgency of a newly recognized desire. It would be amazing if it turned out to be a collective and not an individual one.

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Mark McGurl is a professor of English at Stanford and author of The Program Era (2009).

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