Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 151and which involved, as Williams explains, “the clearance of wood-
lands, for timber, for fuel and for pasture, [... which] led to major
enclosures, the destruction of arable villages, and the rapid develop-
ment of new kinds of capitalist landlord.”^58 Indeed, a central point
in Williams’s thesis is that “capitalism, as a mode of production, is
the basic process of most of what we know as the history of country
and the city” and that this division (which the pastoral concept relies
upon) recurs in multiple contexts around the world.^59 For Williams,
then, pastoral literature occurs “at different times and in different
places [... and is] a connecting process, in what has to be seen as a
common history.”^60 This international quality of the pastoral phe-
nomenon is important to my reading of American Pastoral because
I argue that Roth’s novel also makes a point of exposing the inter-
national implications of Levov’s American pastoral dream. In this
sense, Roth’s American Pastoral constitutes a satire or parody of the
pastoral rather than an “appropriation” of the genre—it does not
advance (in the manner Gifford theorizes) an ecologically harmo-
nious relationship between humanity and the environment, or (in
the manner of Leo Marx) a more insightful and self-reflexive regard
for nature. Rather, it exposes and critiques the sociopolitical elisions
inherent in the concept. However, it bears reiterating that the nov-
el’s ideological “message” is not overtly stated, but is adumbrated
through techniques of narrative silence and lacunae. It is therefore
to the topic of the formal properties and procedures of the narrative
that the discussion now turns.
As in The Human Stain , American Pastoral is narrated through
the androcentric voice of Nathan Zuckerman, whose values and pre-
occupations often visibly distort the narrative’s fabric and determine
the plot’s ostensibly desired “meaning.” Such qualities of the homodi-
egetic narrative become clear when Zuckerman presumes to describe
characters and events in vivid detail while also acknowledging the
fact that he has had only limited contact with the people concerned.
So once again readers are subsequently faced with the hazardous
task of garnering an “understanding” of the protagonist through an
unreliable storyteller. What Zuckerman does know about Levov is
restricted to a romanticized childhood vision of a heroic young male
who was “famous” in his neighborhood for his athletic prowess, good