132 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
the Stoics’ and Sophists’ models of cosmopolitanism were inherently
flawed because they were articulated by scholars who kept slaves.^17
Nonetheless, it will be important to keep in mind that such differ-
ences exist and that the tragic models Roth employs in The Human
Stain , American Pastoral , and I Married a Communist therefore come
to represent, in keeping with his well-known style, both irreverent
deviations from and valuable appropriations of a revered literary
genre. Indeed, the irreverent tone that pervades—and to a certain
degree enriches—the tragic force of each text has been observed by
other critics. Elaine Safer, for example, argues that Roth’s tragedies
are infused with farce, and that the two elements act in a comple-
mentary fashion.^18 This observation is in tune with J. M. Coetzee’s
reading of Roth, who comments that his recent work exhibits “pathos
of a heart-wrenching kind [that is] saved from sentimentality by a
sharp humour.”^19 For Posnock, farce, irreverence, and what he sim-
ply labels “immaturity” serve a philosophical function in that they
remind the reader that any account of the events of peoples’ lives
will inevitably be “messy” and incompatible with any sanitized and
epistemologically consistent framework of interpretation.^20 This is
an aspect of Roth’s fiction that has particular force in the American
Trilogy; but once again, it is also a stylistic feature that reverberates
rather interestingly with the works of Phillips and Coetzee that were
discussed in this book’s previous chapters.
Echoing Posnock’s contention that Silk plays the quintessentially
American “game of appropriation,” Timothy Parrish argues that
Roth’s fiction exhibits a firm “aesthetic commitment to the fluid-
ity of the American (or ethnic) self.”^21 However, in 1950s America,
the era in which Silk spent his formative years, such cosmopolitan
values were inevitably stifled by the practical realities of a deeply seg-
regated society. Like the African American experience of slavery, the
Holocaust, and other world-scale acts of discriminatory violence,
the details and historical circumstances that attend segregation in
the United States reside in the realm of popular cultural knowledge.
To elaborate at length upon its processes and development therefore
seems unnecessary. But to gain an insight into the degree to which
the project and underlying ethos that segregation commanded in
the sociopolitical and cultural spheres of American society at the