Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

(Romina) #1

182 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


they each nonetheless appear to inveigh against the shortcomings
of attempting to “understand” or to “represent” individuals from
a single human perspective. To varying degrees, the novels employ
techniques that undercut the kind of epistemological certainty
that attends the act of storytelling itself—I note above what these
techniques are, particularly in the cases of The Human Stain and
American Pastoral , with Zuckerman conspicuously fabricating
details and events he could not possibly have known.
The deliberate use of ventriloquy and the uncertain, often bra-
zenly speculative narrative remind us, to borrow Zuckerman’s mem-
orable words, that “when it comes to illuminating someone [like
Levov] who knows? Who can know?” (p. 43). These overt statements
of epistemological doubt over interpreting the individual recur once
more in I Married a Communist , but with a degree of force and depth
not quite seen in the other novels. In the opening pages, Zuckerman
opines with philosophical deliberation that “your life story is in and
of itself something that you know very little about” (p. 15). This,
he seems to conclude at the novel’s close, is due to the fact that “it’s
not a static system. Because it’s alive. Because everything that lives
is in movement” (p. 318). Zuckerman thus re-evokes the recurring
idea that the act of rigidly following ideologies such as Ringold’s
(and indeed Levov’s) will inevitably present problems because it does
not allow for the fundamental complexities and messiness of human
life.
Again, these depictions of the human being as obscure or
“unknowable” resonate with some of the salient ideas of cosmopol-
itan thought, which, as I allude to in the introduction, stresses the
need for interpretive openness vis- à -vis subjects such as life, culture,
and the nature of humanity. Roth does, it should be stressed, provoke
the reader to draw connections between the characters’ behavior and
their peculiar historicomaterial circumstances. As observed above,
he does this by using an impressive array of literary techniques, such
as provocative silence, lacunae, and narrative juxtaposition (indeed
the oppositional nature of the texts themselves prompts us to draw
such connections).
Nonetheless, Roth simultaneously integrates images, themes, and
generic strategies that problematize the articulation of simplistic

Free download pdf