Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 163Comforting Vicky, who sympathizes with the rioters’ social and
political grievances, Levov bites his tongue when she criticizes the
presence of the heavily armed National Guardsmen stationed out-
side Newark Maid. He avoids telling her that he endorses the mili-
tant response to the riots and is thankful for the tanks the governor
deploys in the neighborhood, which “put a stop to what could have
been total disaster” (p. 162). Indeed, Levov surreptitiously discloses
the fact that he has a privileged relationship with the armed police
stationed near the factory, mentioning briefly that he “kept in touch
with [them] on a walkie-talkie” (p. 162). The degree of understate-
ment in this disclosure, both in terms of its discreet, unadvertised
diction, and its brevity, is of great significance. The muted utter-
ance reveals not only the important fact that there is a discrepancy
in access to and application of power in the form of repressive state
apparatuses, but also that this discrepancy in power seems entirely
natural and worthy of little comment or explanation from the pro-
tagonist. Of course, being a symbol of social inequality, Newark
Maid would be an obvious target for a disgruntled, socially deprived
mob. However, the degree of complicity and coordination that
Levov describes himself having with the police, revealed to us in so
aloof a manner, offers a stark illustration of the extent to which he
does not fully appreciate the latent violence that underlies his privi-
leged social position.
It seems appropriate here to reiterate that moments such as these
cannot be relied upon to provide detailed schematics of Levov’s
consciousness since, again, we are faced with the persistent pres-
ence of Zuckerman’s influence over the semantic contours of the
plot. So in this light it might be more accurate to say that Levov’s
understated disclosure of his proximity with the police is a literary
device, meiosis, used by Zuckerman to portray what he perceives
to be the “flaws” inherent in Levov’s character—that it is a deliber-
ate production of “tragic silence” that the hero bears on his road to
destruction. His failure to apprehend the social implications of his
state-enforced dominance and the consequences of its exploitative
constitution therefore present theatrical instances of the character’s
hamartia. What also bears underscoring here is that the underlying
“ethos” appealed to by dint of this hamartia, namely, that which is