Title: Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity
Abstract:Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, by Ross Posnock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 301 pp. $29.95. Professor Ross Posnock has written a very learned and stimulating critiqu...Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, by Ross Posnock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 301 pp. $29.95. Professor Ross Posnock has written a very learned and stimulating critique of Philip Roth's fiction. Unfortunately, some readers, especially in Britain, may find his title and subtitle misleading or even off-putting. By rude, Posnock does not mean coarse or obscene, as English use term; and he uses in a special sense, defined throughout book. Neither term is meant as a disparagement in any sense; on contrary, Posnock extols Roth's achievement, placing his fiction in a tradition that includes Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, Whitmans poetry, and Dostoevsky's novels. Surprisingly, even Henry James is of Roth's progenitors, but not in way many of us are used to recognizing. The James that Posnock refers to is author of The Portrait of a Lady, specifically to the andescapist imperative of immersion that Isabel Archer enacts (p. 12). The first epigraph to Posnock's book, from Emerson's essays, gives a good indication of this critic's approach:! ought to go upright and vital, and speak truth in all ways. The second epigraph, from Witold Gombrowicz, is rather more cryptic and alludes to Posnock's subtitle: If you are repelled by immaturity, it is because you are immature. Posnock's thesis holds that Roth rejects the renunciations required by adulthood (p. 4) in favor of an immaturity that is disrespectful of dogma, authority, bounded form-all that insulates from a more open, less censored engagement with moment (p. 11). The immaturity that Roth displays in his work isludic, seeking not to dominate but to enter turbulent flow of what Emerson calls counteraction' and Roth will call counterlife (p. 11). Although Posnock considers Roth's oeuvre one vast text, with each book necessarily read within and against larger whole (p. 21), as would be true of most serious writers, he does not attempt to study each text chronologically or in equal depth. Instead, he says he will work in a free spirit of appropriation. Well and good. His analyses of major novels he treats are both thorough and insightful and fully demonstrate validity of his thesis. Some of his linkages are especially fruitful; for example, his analyses of Goodbye, Columbus and American Pastoral to his discussion earlier in Chapter 3 of American Jewry. I was similarly struck by his discussion of Theodore Herd's dream and its relation to both The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. I am unaware of any other critic who has drawn on that particular connection. In his treatment of Sabbath's Theater, but also The Dying Animal, Posnock draws on Dostoevsky. He says: For Roth, Dostoevsky's embrace of chaos and caprice includes novelists affinity for his evil characters (p. 161). But this is not to claim that any of Roth's protagonist's are inherently evil; rather, that Dostoevsky is Roth's great predecessor in self-incrimination (p. …Read More
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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