Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 129lacunae, which include conceptual “gaps” in the consciousnesses
of the characters themselves (ventriloquized by the narrator), are
deliberately placed by Roth and serve to reflect some of the larger
repressive scars that run through the collective consciousness of
America itself. Therefore, because I argue that they are intentional
and constitute a conscious attempt on the part of the author to
evoke certain responses and thoughts, my approach is not entirely
“symptomatic.” That is to say that, unlike Macherey’s approach, I
do not seek to uncover ideas that are not consciously known by the
author himself. Rather, my argument borrows from some of the key
principles of Macherey’s framework but maintains that Roth in fact
deliberately elides certain concepts and ideas through provocative
adumbration—the “silences,” which exert a conspicuous presence in
the narrative. In this sense, I apply a modified version of Macherey’s
framework and my readings of the texts are therefore critical rather
than symptomatic.^10
As I explain, these silences also have a visible role in contributing
to the protagonists’ descent into social ruin and tragedy, thereby
forming their hamartias or “tragic f laws.” In so doing, Roth’s novels
adopt what could be identified as a “cosmopolitan” version of the
classical Greek tragic model. This is a version that—again, using
devices such as tragic silence—foregrounds some key principles that
underlie cosmopolitan thought. In particular, these involve a sub-
versive handling of fixed notions of identity (visible in The Human
Stain ) and a critique of the negative social effects of global free-mar-
ket capitalism ( American Pastoral ). But the tragic model is also used
to highlight the problems associated with excessive ideological fidel-
ity ( I Married a Communist ).
To begin, I first turn to The Human Stain and illustrate the man-
ner in which Roth undermines rigid conceptions of ethnicity or
what commonly used to be called “race.” Such a subversive handling
of ethnicity (which will be used in reference to a cultural, rather
than a genetic form of identification) can be detected in a num-
ber of the writer’s other works. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) fa mously
features the eponymous protagonist negotiating his identity as a
Jewish American through an iconoclastic confrontation with famil-
ial convention. Perhaps a more obvious example can be seen in the