American Pastoral: Philip Roth rages against the machine

In American Pastoral (1997), Philip Roth uses three major sections to tell the remembrance, the fall and the loss of the paradise-like life of Seymour "The Swede" Levov. I say paradise-like because the ultimate concern of this novel is to reveal that what its protagonist once enjoyed was never really a paradise, only a delusion of one. And Roth channels all his creative powers towards achieving this "eye-opening" end.

All that really lies at the bottom of this book, however are the embittered beliefs of its author—that man is an irrational animal, determined by social forces, whose defining trait is selfishness. Pretending things can be otherwise will can only lead to a bomb exploding in your backyard or a fork landing in your eyeball. This is how Roth envisions domestic America.

Roth's announcement comes as nothing new. Almost a century ago, Joseph Wood Krutch said that because society no longer believes in noble men, nobility no longer exists. Writing in The Modern Temper (1929), Krutch says, "We can no longer tell tales of the fall of noble men because we do not believe that noble men exist. The best that we can achieve is pathos and the most that we can do is to feel sorry for ourselves. Man has put off his royal robes and it is only in sceptered pomp that tragedy can come sweeping by." Though he was trying to identify new territory for modern tragic drama, Krutch offers some insight into the fiction of Roth.

As Krutch admits, literature loses its grandeur under this new outlook. If man has nothing greater in him than an animal, all his loss can achieve is pathos. American Pastoral adheres to this theory. In spite of all of Roth's thundering, which at times can be quite resounding, all one can feel for Levov is pathos. In other words, Sorry Swede. You were dealt this. So you can't help it. Good luck to you. Roth finds nothing more to admire in his hero than the best cultural conditioning of a dried out day. The novel awakens Swede to this fact and leaves him there, broken and boiling.

All this would be just fine, if such psychological critics did not insist that their assumptions be taken as absolute and universal. Mr. Krutch betrays such a perspective in his use of the first person plural voice. Simply put, he thinks he speaks for all. In spite of his claims, another view, albeit an unpopular one, still survives in literary criticism and among aspiring authors.

Writing more than a decade after Krutch, the great literary critic F.O. Matthiessen hints at it. Though his immediate topic concerns the history of allegory, Matthiessen concludes this long passage from American Renaissance (1941) by suggesting that literature occupies more territory than what many of its practitioners are currently treading:

Today we have felt an even greater necessity to be on guard against the abstractions of allegory. For after the ruminations of Tennyson, which allowed poetry to escape into mere idealization, it was imperative to get back to the poetry of sensation, of dramatic immediacy. This need called into being Eliot's work, as well as our revival of Donne and our increasing taste for Baudelaire. But in our satisfaction with the dramatic lyrics of these poets, there is the danger, as Eliot has already realized in his own later work, that in exalting the poetry of sensation, we may overlook that we are also prolonging the circumspection of poetry's scope which came in with Coleridge and Keats. With the romantic movement, poetry tended, in spite of Wordsworth's prefaces, to become divorced from "knowledge," which, with the drift of the nineteenth century, became more and more the special province of science. As a result we have lost living touch with the great poetry of contemplation; we have almost forgotten in our own practice that poetry can deal with epistemology, as Dante showed in his exposition of the soul in Purgatorio.

Perhaps I am overextending his meaning, but Matthiessen seems to believe that literature still possesses an untapped power, one that believes in a human soul—hence, one that can recover the lost nobility of the human race. What I would call its Image of God. It is a view that underlies the Western Literary Tradition, and contemporary novelists such as Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Mark Helprin seem—in their different ways—to be at least reconsidering, if not practicing it.

I wouldn't avoid Roth altogether; he is certainly one force to be reckoned with. But if you're looking for something more than 400+ pages of repressed anger, I'd recommend that you start somewhere else.