Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

(Romina) #1

18 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


the Marxian concepts that attend the term’s more conventional use.
Focusing on three novels in his much-lauded American Trilogy,
The Human Stain (2000), American Pastoral (1997), and I Married
a Communist (1998), I argue that Philip Roth illustrates how some
major sociopolitical problems that run through the American
collective consciousness are fundamentally material in their con-
stitution. These problems, he appears to suggest, are at fault for
hindering the country’s achievement of its lofty cosmopolitan
ambitions: the inclusive egalitarian principles that are ingrained in
America’s culture. However, I hold that the ideological, political,
and social points the novels make are not overtly stated by the nar-
rators or characters, but are rather adumbrated through the multi-
ple deployment of what Pierre Macherey calls “eloquent silence.”^46
These silences are also intimately connected to the tragic end that
each of the novel’s protagonists meet and, as such, have come to
represent their hamartias (tragic flaws.) Of course, such a method
of literary interpretation might at first sound somewhat unreliable;
but by engaging in close readings of the texts, I argue that these lit-
erary techniques are indeed at play in at least three of Roth’s later
novels.
In The Human Stain, this silence takes the form of a protagonist
burdened by a secret which, if k nown, would have completely a ltered
the course of his life. Being of African American extraction, the pro-
tagonist’s decision to masquerade as a white Jewish man in segre-
gation-era America opens up a number of opportunities he would
otherwise have been denied. However, with the progression of civil
rights and the move toward a more inclusive and cosmopolitan soci-
ety, the raison d’ ê tre for changing his identity becomes all the more
ludicrous and, indeed, poignant. I contend that the anguish brought
by Coleman Silk’s silence provides the novel with an almost classical
tragic structure that compels the reader to meditate on the nature
and ramifications of the character’s hamartia. I argue that, bound
up in the anatomy of this tragic flaw, is a materialist critique of the
essentialist conceptions of ethnicity that underlie and exacerbate the
racial dissent that scars American social history.
The tragic form is even more pronounced in American Pastoral
and I Married a Communist , whose protagonists exhibit hamartias

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